From bulletins to bullets to blogs and beyond: The Karen’s ongoing communication war

Geff Green focuses on the communication approaches taken by the Karen communities displaced from Burma and who live in diaspora. Apparent control and empowerment provided by new technologies may be illusive. When using media for warfare or perhaps for more innocuous public relations purposes, activists may actually create ‘ammunition’ for opponents. Targeted attacks on specific communities or ‘audiences’ have a high impact by reifying discourse in a devastating way by connecting to lived experience in the victim

Smart, social, flexible and fun: Escaping the flatlands of virtual learning environments

© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. This paper describes the development of intelligent, social, flexible and game-based pedagogic approaches and their applications in Virtual Learning Environment based Education. Applications of computer science technologies and techniques can enable, facilitate and change educational approaches, allowing scalable approaches that can address both individual student needs whilst managing large – sometimes-massive - cohort sizes. The benefits of these information systems include supporting the wide range of contexts met in education, in terms of individual needs and specific subject and curriculum requirements. Technologies and approaches that are considered range from the representation of knowledge and the use of intelligent systems, the use of social computing, through to the enabling opportunities of ubicomp and the practical application of game mechanics (gamification). This paper concludes with practical illustrations in the context of undergraduate computer science didactics

Digital Prometheus: WikiLeaks, the State–Network Dichotomy, and the Antinomies of Academic Reason

This article analyzes two major threads of academic discussions on the WikiLeaks phenomenon and its influence on international and communication studies, which cause a refuelling and reframing of both the questions and the solutions offered by academics and practitioners in these fields. The research examines a sample of the academic literature produced in 2010–2012, in order to trace how WikiLeaks reframed age-old academic debates: In international relations and politics, the major debate is between transparency and secrecy/security. In media and communication studies the major debate is openness versus control. Perspectives are further divided, not only by discipline but also ideologically by the author’s position on the state–network dichotomy. In turn, different academic disciplines can be themselves mapped in terms of their relative closeness to the statist or network side of the controversy

Platform Ideologies: Ideological production in digital intermediation platforms and structural effectivity in the “sharing economy”

[First paragraph] An integrated theoretical framework for ideological production analysis is developed here to examine whether platform actors contribute to legitimizing, or competing effectively with capitalism as a mode of production. Digital intermediation platforms operate out of varieties of capitalism across vast-ranging national institutional frameworks, state-labor relations, reregulations, privatizations, cross-class relations, and diverse political systems (Hancké, Rhodes, and Thatcher 2009; a phenomenon dubbed “platform capitalism” by Srnicek, 2017). The digital economy seems to dance to the rhythm of two predatory forms of capitalist expansion: what Harman (2010) calls “zombie capitalism” and Graham (2006) calls “hypercapitalism” (see Karatzogianni and Matthews, 2017). Connecting cognitive frames, social relations and organisational factors can elaborate on how the crisis of accumulation and hypercapitalist expansion affects socio-economic structures within the context of digital intermediation platforms

Intercultural Conflict and Dialogue in the Transnational Digital Public Sphere: Findings from the MIG@NET Research Project (2010-2013)

The MIG@NET European FP7 research teams spanned eight countries examining gender, migration and digital networks (http://​www.​mignetproject.​eu/​). Here the researchers outline the key findings covering migrant hybrid (online and offline) activities in three European countries: Greece, Cyprus and the UK. This European multicase study provides insights into the general sociocultural dynamics behind the formation of transnational digital networks because they reveal the most urgent societal problems European countries must face in the early twenty-first century: racism, migration, ethnonationalist ideologies and European citizenship