Vortex of the Web. Potentials of the online environment

This volume compiles international contributions that explore the potential risks and chances coming along with the wide-scale migration of society into digital space. Suggesting a shift of paradigm from Spiral of Silence to Nexus of Noise, the opening chapter provides an overview on systematic approaches and mechanisms of manipulation – ranging from populist political players to Cambridge Analytica. After a discussion of the the juxtaposition effects of social media use on social environments, the efficient instrumentalization of Twitter by Turkish politicans in the course of the US-decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is being analyzed. Following a case study of Instagram, Black Lives Matter and racism is a research about the impact of online pornography on the academic performance of university students. Another chapter is pointing out the potential of online tools for the successful relaunch of shadow brands. The closing section of the book deals with the role of social media on the opinion formation about the Euromaidan movement during the Ukrainian revolution and offers a comparative study touching on Russian and Western depictions of political documentaries in the 2000s

Data Privacy & National Security: A Rubik’s Cube of Challenges and Opportunities That Are Inextricably Linked

Traditionally, issues relating to information privacy have been viewed in a set of distinct, and not always helpful, stovepipes—or, as my former government colleagues often said, tongue-in-cheek, in other contexts—separate “cylinders of excellence.” Thanks to the convergence of technologies and information, the once-separate realms of personal data privacy, consumer protection, and national security are increasingly interconnected. As Congress and national policymakers consider proposals for federal data privacy legislation, regulation of social media platforms, and how to prevent abuses of foreign intelligence and homeland security powers, they should be examining each of these challenges in light of the others, actively looking for synergies and overlap in the protections they may be considering for protection of personal data, individual privacy, and civil liberties.

Political Campaigns in an Internet Era

[extract] Communications technologies have evolved dramatically over the centuries. Before Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, people communicated primarily through oral or hand-written means; processes that were slow and not conducive to mass communication. The Gutenberg printing press enabled printers to create multiple copies of documents, and led to the widespread dissemination of ideas and information. Ultimately, the press contributed to dramatic societal transformations, including the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Protestant Reformation. After Gutenberg’s invention, communications technologies remained relatively stagnant for many centuries until electricity was harnessed in the nineteenth century. Electricity had an equally profound impact on communication because it made it possible for information to move much more quickly than people could move, and led to an explosion of new technologies, including the telegraph, radio, television, and eventually satellite communications and the internet.Despite revolutionary advances in speech technologies, mass communication was tightly controlled for centuries. Throughout history, governments have tried to restrict or control communication through tactics such as the imposition of prior restraints, including content licensing, as well as through criminal prosecutions for seditious libel, Even when the government was not censoring or repressing speech, not uncommonly private individuals exercised control over the means of communication. Since most speech technologies were expensive to own and operate, not everyone could own or operate the means of communication. Even Benjamin Franklin, who was famous as a printer, among other things, struggled for a long time to acquire the means to purchase a printing press. Because of their cost, most communication technologies (including the printing press, telegraph, radio, television and satellites) were owned by a small number of rich people who controlled access to those technologies. As a result, advances in speech technology did not necessarily make it possible for ordinary people to engage in mass communication. Media moguls could favor the stories and political positions that they preferred

Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory

With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these "pandemic media" reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media’s adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements toward an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come

Legitimation of hate and political violence through memetic images: the Bolsonaro campaign

The federal elections were held in Brazil in 2018. The ballot resulted in a victory for the far-right candidate, Jair Messias Bolsonaro. The question that arose after the victory of the far-right was: How could this have happened? One of the instruments that undoubtedly contributed to this unexpected victory was a peculiar aspect of his political campaign: memetic communication. Through the use of memes in the social media (above all WhatsApp), Bolsonaro’s project transformed these violent discourses against political opponents, feminism, racialised persons and poverty into a series of discourses legitimised through humour and irony. It was a simplification through the memes affecting the static system of cognitive and metaphorical frameworks. During the pre-election period in 2018, we carried out digital ethnographic research in the WhatsApp groups of supporters of Bolsonaro’s project (“Bolsonarism”). In this period, we collected a sample of 132 memes belonging to WhatsApp groups composed of up to 256 members, who did not know each other and were geographically dispersed. The analysis we carried out demonstrates the trivialisation and legitimisation of violence against political opponents and other social groups. Much of this legitimisation was camouflaged under the mask of supposed humour and irony, which in reality was insulting, prejudicial and dehumanising

Bans, Borders, and Sovereignty: Judicial Review of Immigration Law in the Trump Administration

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review