Contested Sovereignties: States, Media Platforms, Peoples, and the Regulation of Media Content and Big Data in the Networked Society

This article examines the legal and normative foundations of media content regulation in the borderless networked society. We explore the extent to which internet undertakings should be subject to state regulation, in light of Canada’s ongoing debates and legislative reform. We bring a cross-disciplinary perspective (from the subject fields of law; communications studies, in particular McLuhan’s now classic probes; international relations; and technology studies) to enable both policy and language analysis. We apply the concept of sovereignty to states (national cultural and digital sovereignty), media platforms (transnational sovereignty), and citizens (autonomy and personal data sovereignty) to examine the competing dynamics and interests that need to be considered and mediated. While there is growing awareness of the tensions between state and transnational media platform powers, the relationship between media content regulation and the collection of viewers’ personal data is relatively less explored. We analyse how future media content regulation needs to fully account for personal data extraction practices by transnational platforms and other media content undertakings. We posit national cultural sovereignty—a constant unfinished process and framework connecting the local to the global—as the enduring force and justification of media content regulation in Canada. The exercise of state sovereignty may be applied not so much to secure strict territorial borders and centralized power over citizens but to act as a mediating power to promote and protect citizens’ individual and collective interests, locally and globally

Mommy Blogging and Deliberative Dialogical Ethics: Being in the Ethical Moment

This article argues that while some mommy bloggers follow ethical practices in protecting the privacy of those they write about, others have given little thought to such self-regulation, leaving room and need for the dialogical blog-based forum proposed by the authors. Since mommy blogging takes family as its subject (and often family members who are dependent minors), confidentiality and privacy issues are particularly sensitive. Apart from an early effort to codify guidelines published on the BlogHer website, there has been little blog-based or scholarly discussion of ethical blogging practices. Several examples of prominent mommy bloggers who disclose sensitive information about others without apparent privacy concerns for purposes of entertaining or informing their audience are documented. To conclude, the authors propose opening their blog—Mommy Bloglines: Ta[l]king Care—as a forum for interactive community discussion of evolving practices, with a goal of identifying some shared values amidst diversity

Review of \u3ci\u3eChallenging Territory: The Writing of Margaret Laurence\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Christian Riegel

I approached this book with the hope that my past interest in reading, teaching, and writing about Margaret Laurence, coupled with my current interests in rhetoric and composition, would enable me to respond to new critical perspectives. The Introduction to the volume encouraged this hope by profiling articles with familiar themes embedded in a postmodern context of open-minded pluralism. Yet in explaining the volume\u27s purpose, editor Christian Riegel tends to over-emphasize novelty at the expense of continuity, describing essays that go beyond revisionist readings to stake out critical territory, charting critical space never before traced (xvii). Much of his claim rests on the volume\u27s inclusion of essays that deal with Laurence\u27s early political writing and her African fictionsmaterial that has received scant critical attention. Yet of the collection\u27s twelve articles, only five address this work while the remaining seven deal with the Manawaka fiction, thereby creating an imbalance that reinscribes our sense that the Canadian-based fiction dominates the oeuvre. Elsewhere, Riegel affiliates the volume with a spirit of postmodernist pluralism and provisionalism, reminding us that these essays offer ways of mapping the terrirory that do not necessarily invalidate other ways of charting the conceptual space (xvii) and that we must tread carefully in our attempts at finding explanations for the things we encounter in the world (xvi). Yet his overview of the individual articles features modernist judgements, such as when, for example, he suggests that Beckman-Long\u27s article offers a way for The Stone Angel to be fully understood (xviii) or comments that Foster Stovel shows that these texts should not be read separately, as they often are (xx). Despite protest to the contrary, the territory he describes is still one where full understanding can be achieved and shared, and where some readings are better than others. Within the individual articles, references to previous Laurence criticism are frequently relegated to endnotes, a presentational strategy supporting Riegel\u27s claim that the volume is staking new ground. Yet in cases where writers rely excessively on endnoted citation and commentary, it is not always clear how their text connects to earlier critical work. For example, in Angelika Maeser Lemieux\u27s The Scots Presbyterian Legacy, the text is punctuated by a number of notes that cite and summarize sources dealing with Laurence and religion, yet how the arguments in the current article are grounded in or corrective of earlier critical work often remains unexamined. Maeser Lemieux\u27s essay does survey the history of Calvinist thought in detail and, like other good articles in the collection, builds a strong reading by working with sources beyond the canon of Laurence criticism. In The Stone Angel as Feminine Confessional Novel, Brenda Beckman-Long makes a powerful case for understanding the novel\u27s confessional structure by building from both genre criticism and Gerard Genette\u27s narrative theory. The final paragraphs that attempt to describe the feminine character of confessional are somewhat disappointing, however, culminating as they do in the debatable assertion that Hagar achieves self-acceptance as an autonomous woman (64). Later in the volume, Nora Foster Stovel draws a more convincing conclusion connecting Laurence\u27s protagonists with love rather than independence, noting that the emphasis is, as always, on the importance of love in the sense of compassion, as each of her solipsistic protagonists develops from claustrophobia to community (120)

Mothers and Teen Daughters: Make Room for the Internet

When the internet steals our daughters, mothers turn cyborg