"The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism is a wide-ranging collection of 42 original and authoritative essays by leading contributors from a variety of academic disciplines. Introducing and exploring central debates about the diverse relationships between both media and protest, and communicat
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ion and social change, the book offers readers a reliable and informed guide to understanding how media and activism influence one another. The expert contributors examine the tactics and strategies of protest movements, and how activists organize themselves and each other; they investigate the dilemmas of media coverage and the creation of alternative media spaces and platforms; and they emphasize the importance of creativity and art in social change. Bringing together case studies and contributors from six continents, the collection is organized around themes that address past, present and future developments from around the world." (Publisher description)
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"Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible.
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Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences and life chances but our very democracies. Expert international contributors consider political questions about data and the ways it provokes subjects to govern themselves by making rights claims. Concerned with the things (infrastructures of servers, devices, and cables) and language (code, programming, and algorithms) that make up cyberspace, this book demonstrates that without understanding these conditions of possibility it is impossible to intervene in or to shape data politics." (Publisher description)
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"What can replace the corporate walled gardens such as Facebook and Twitter? Our answer to this question is a firm and open one: a federation of organized networks, sustainable cells that operate as secret societies. Many have already identified social networks as a conspiratorial neoliberal inventi
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on that, in the end, only benefits the global elite. Think of the vampire data mining economies made possible with all your searches, status updates, likes, etc. The algorithmic modulation of networks generates patterns of data that hold economic value for social media corporations and finance capital. These extraction machines produce a subject Maurizio Lazzarato calls “indebted man.” Exodus for the multitudes, it would seem, is a futile proposition. Nearly twenty years into the 21st century we can conclude that global elites are not threatened by temporary uprisings and will only be questioned by an offensive counter-power that is capable of learning and incorporating its own trial-and-error experiments of daily struggles into the social body. But wait a minute, how does this intersect with the technological condition? Digital networks have been discredited for their short-lived character that merely reproduce the hegemonic fragmentation of desperate subjects. No matter how legitimate such structural proposals are, they often end up in a retromania of social imagination." (Introduction, pages 3-4)
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"Eager to assist, organize, and structure our lifestream logistics, new corporate actors offer communicative freedoms based on commercial user-as-product philosophies of expression. But we now design our own interfaces to face our others, our algorithmic others. Our collective reflection on nature a
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s machinic assemblage has yielded functional foods and the financialization of agriculture. But networked selves already develop other ecologies, reclaiming social machines as technologies of the common, unearthing the conflicts covered in disaster-driven environmentalities whose horizon is delimited by energy security and resource efficiency. Both helped and hindered by the ontological resonances of the common, these ecologies remain fragile, not yet structured by a politics of rights, animated by an interest in the autonomy of things. As nature continues to seep across the curriculum, research and education struggle to keep track of the corrosion of their institutional frameworks. Powered by a cartographic vision unconstrained by the statist political imagination, the study of supply chains has already become a paradigmatic form of transdisciplinarity, moving across the boundaries of life and labor, tracking every speck of dust on the scratch-free screens of our mobile economies as a reminder of the complexities of mutual constitution. The question of depletion is the question of the institution, of what it means when subjects and objects join in a refusal of roles in the great games of reification. No accident, perhaps, that philosophies of play are back, not quite a renaissance of aesthetic experience, but an affirmation of the openness of objective and subjective constitution. Of these and other knowledges so created, there can no longer be an encyclopedia; a glossary, perhaps. This is its initial iteration, its entries conjoined by a logic of connotation and constellation." (Page 5)
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