"In this article we depart from studies on empowerment and its intersections with the informal economy and market women in the Global South and promises of the mobile phone in so-called developing regions. Conducting an explorative study among market women in Kampala, the aim is to examine what role
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s (if any) the mobile phone plays for them in terms of empowerment. Our findings resonate with studies from other parts of the world, suggesting that while pivotal for their business endeavors, mobile phone practices are also embedded in patriarchal structures. By discussing how these market women navigate the tensions between using the phone for their business and in relations to their partners, the article contributes a more nuanced and context-specific understanding of mobile phone practices and the empowerment of market women. We conclude the article by suggesting a situated approach to the study of empowerment." (Abstract)
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"Following the Arab Spring, the use of social media has become instrumental in organising activist movements and spreading political dissent in the Middle East. New online behaviours have transformed traditional communication channels, enabling young people of all backgrounds to feel politically emp
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owered. But now that spring has turned to winter, what are the long-term implications of internet activism in the region? Social Media in the Arab World provides a unique insight into the role of online communications as a force for change in the Gulf States. Featuring examples as diverse as neo-patrimonial politics in Saudi Arabia and the ways an online presence affects the status of women in Kuwait, the chapters examine shifts in the political, social and religious identities of citizens as a result of increased digital activism. With contributions from a variety of inter-disciplinary experts, this wide-ranging study examines the consequences of changing power dynamics brought about by popular social media." (Publisher description)
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"The first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of nine anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world, including Brazil, Chile, China, England, India, Italy, Trinidad and Turkey. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the re
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sults of the research and exploring the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences." (Back cover)
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"We propose a new user-Centric imagery of the WWW that foregrounds local usage and its shaping forces, in contrast to existing imageries that prioritize Internet infrastructure. We construct ethnological maps of WWW usage through a network analysis of shared global traffic between 1000 most popular
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websites at 3 time points and develop granular measures for exploring global participation in online communication. Our results reveal the significant growth and thickening of online regional cultures associated with the global South. We draw attention to how local cultural identity, affirmative state intervention and economic contexts shape regional cultures on the global WWW." (Abstract)
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"This book presents an ethnographic study of social media in Mardin, a medium-sized town located in the Kurdish region of Turkey. The town is inhabited mainly by Sunni Muslim Arabs and Kurds, and has been transformed in recent years by urbanisation, neoliberalism and political events. Elisabetta Cos
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ta uses her 15 months of ethnographic research to explain why public facing social media is more conservative than offline life. Yet, at the same time, social media has opened up unprecedented possibilities for private communications between genders and in relationships among young people. Costa reveals new worlds of intimacy, love and romance. She also discovers that, when viewed from the perspective of people's everyday lives, political participation on social media looks very different to how it is portrayed in studies of political postings separated from their original complex, and highly socialised, context." (Publisher description)
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"This volume captures the domestication of mobile communication technologies by families in Asia, and its implications for family interactions and relationships. It showcases research on families across a spectrum of socio-economic profiles, from both rural and urban areas, offering insights on chil
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dren, adolescents, adults, and the elderly. While mobile communication diffuses through Asia at a blistering pace, families in the region are also experiencing significant changes in light of unprecedented economic growth, globalisation, urbanisation and demographic shifts. Asia is therefore at the crossroads of technological transformation and social change. This book analyses the interactions of these two contemporaneous trends from the perspective of the family, covering a range of family types including nuclear, multi-generational, transnational, and multi-local, spanning the continuum from the media-rich to the media have-less." (Publisher description)
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"This book analyzes extensive data on the world’s rapidly changing and growing access to, use and geographies of information and communications technologies. It studies not only the spatial differences in technology usage worldwide, but also examines digital differences in the major world nations
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of China, India, the United States and Japan at the state and provincial levels. At the global level, factors such as education, innovation, judicial independence and investment are important to explaining differences in the adoption and use of technology. The country studies corroborate consistent determinants for technology usage for education, urban location, economic prosperity, and infrastructure, but also reveal unique determinants, such as social capital in the United States and India, exports in China and working age population and patents in Japan. Spatial patterns are revealed that indicate clusters of high and low technology use for various nations around the world, the countries of Africa and for individual states/provinces within nations. Based on theory, novel findings and phenomena that have remained largely unreported, the book considers the future of the worldwide digital divides, the policy role of governments and the challenges of leadership." (Publisher description)
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"Actualmente, México se compone en mayor medida de una población joven. Esto implica un beneficio considerable para el desarrollo económico del país; no obstante, la evolución hacia una sociedad encabezada por adultos mayores presenta un futuro lleno de desafíos, no solo económicos, sino publ
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icitarios, al considerar que un número importante de organizaciones enfocan sus esfuerzos publicitarios hacia sectores en edad productiva." (Página 2)
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"Entre hybridation et réinvention, les pratiques communicationnelles liées à la téléphonie mobile offrent des perspectives de recherche stimulantes. Pour les opérateurs de téléphonie, il s’ouvre un réel champ, où d’observation en expérimentation, se créent de nouvelles offres. Au-del
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à des chiffres inespérés, on voit se dessiner des pratiques inattendues : Happy Snapping, crowd-funding, m-commerce, mobile learning. On peut aussi évoquer les usages de la téléphonie mobile dans les pratiques religieuses – avec des « maraboutages » à distance –, dans la lutte contre les fraudes électorales, et dans la mobilisation sociale, notamment lors des manifestations à caractère politique. Les articles rassemblés dans cet ouvrage interrogent la contribution réelle de la téléphonie mobile au développement économique et social des popu-lations, ses modes d’appropriation, les formes de socialisation qu’elle induit et les innovations qui la caractérisent ou qu’elle suscite. La technologie n’étant pas neutre, il s’agit de penser les modalités de son intégration et ses conséquences sur le système social." (Dos de couverture)
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"This study takes it upon itself to present a general overview of the development of online media and social media in Albania, focusing particularly on how professional media outlets use social media. The empirical research focused on monitoring the most widely used social media in Albania, such as
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Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Instagram and the blogosphere, as well as the six leading online media in Albania, namely top-channel.tv, balkanweb.com, shekulli.com.al, panorama.com.al, albeu.com, and shqiptarja.com. The monitoring covers a one-year period extending from August 2014 to August 2015." (Page 3)
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"This book considers how Moroccan-Dutch youth, mostly born in the Netherlands, navigate digital spaces to articulate their politicized identities in a time when claims over the failure of multiculturalism, anti-immigration sentiments and Islamophobia sweep across Europe. Digital Passages: Migrant Yo
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uth 2.0 addresses not only to how these mostly second-generation migrant youth navigate across digital spaces, but also considers the digitization of key identity-formation processes, such as coming of age, rites of passage and the negotiation of offline/online gender, diaspora, religious and youth cultural expectations." (Introduction, page 14)
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"Women on average are 14% less likely to own a mobile phone than men, which translates into 200 million fewer women than men owning mobile phones. Women in South Asia are 38% less likely to own a phone than men, highlighting that the gender gap in mobile phone ownership is wider in certain parts of
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the world. Even when women own mobile phones, there is a significant gender gap in mobile phone usage, which prevents them from reaping the full benefits of mobile phone ownership. Women report using phones less frequently and intensively than men, especially for more sophisticated services such as mobile internet. In most countries, fewer women than men who own phones report using messaging and data services beyond voice. Cost remains the greatest barrier overall to owning and using a mobile phone, particularly for women, who often have less financial independence than men." (Executive summary)
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"Especially notable in the 2015 study is that most people access the internet on their phones rather than by laptop or desktop computers. That’s true in every country in our sample, except Egypt, where an ailing economy has slowed the adoption of new technologies common elsewhere in the region and
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most dramatically in the Gulf states of UAE and Qatar. In a few short years, people now spend more time on the internet than any other media, including the all-powerful television and radio (the most popular medium worldwide). The gap between the internet and other media grew from 2013 to 2015. Another dramatic change since 2013 is that the internet application WhatsApp has soared in use as some 93% of those in the study send direct messages to 84% who use e-mail, which is clearly losing ground." (Introduction)
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"Seit 1998 untersucht der Medienpädagogische Forschungsverbund Südwest (mpfs) mit der Studienreihe »Jugend, Information, (Multi-)Media«, der JIM-Studie, kontinuierlich das Medienverhalten der 12- bis 19-Jährigen in Deutschland. Die jährlich im Frühsommer durchgeführte Studie bildet mit einer
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Stichprobengröße von ca. 1.200 Befragten ein repräsentatives Abbild des Medienumgangs Jugendlicher in Deutschland. Durch die Kontinuität der Studienreihe konnten wichtige Entwicklungen der letzten 15 Jahre dokumentiert werden. Zentrale Erkenntnisse zum Medienwandel, aber auch zur Konstanz der Nutzungsmuster von Jugendlichen wurden in dem Sonderband »15 Jahre JIM-Studie« publiziert. Aktuell zeigt die dynamische Entwicklung der Verbreitung von Smartphones und der mobilen Internetnutzung, dass sich die Mediennutzung von Jugendlichen durch technische Neuerungen und neue Angebote ständig im Wandel befindet, auf der anderen Seite aber auch von hoher Stabilität gekennzeichnet ist." (Seite 7)
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"Der Artikel beschreibt, wie Jugendliche in Deutschland mit Smartphone, Apps und Social-Media-Plattformen umgehen und inwiefern dies Chancen und Risiken bei der Bewältigung ihrer Entwicklungsaufgaben mit sich bringt." (Seite 12)