"On the basis of the results of an ongoing research project on the activities of the Chinese media company StarTimes in Nigeria and Côte d' Ivoire, this paper analyses the fluid and fragmentary dimension of the engagements between Chinese media and African publics, while equally emphasizing the pow
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er dynamics that underlie them. Focusing on a variety of ethnographic sources, it argues for an approach to the study of Chinese media expansion in Africa able to take into account, simultaneously, the macro-political and macro-economic factors which condition the nature of China–Africa media interactions, the political intentions behind them (as, for example, the Chinese soft power policies and their translation into specific media contents), and the micro dimension of the practices and uses of the media made by the actors (producers and consumers of media) in the field." (Abstract)
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"This book frames digital sovereignty as a right to be claimed and a process constantly in the making, as a condition of the ability to critically partake in the digital transformation. Emphasizing a political and transformative significance of the term, this interdisciplinary publication gathers sc
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holars, activists, artists and human rights advocates who develop practices or provide spaces and structures to foster sophisticated means of digital involvement. Its aim is to identify diverse facets of what it means to be digitally sovereign, but also to critically discuss the viability of the term, especially in the light of modern-day crises and for the many future challenges yet to come. The positions assembled in this volume analyze new opportunities for social participation and policy making and recommend alternative technological and social practices utilized by various groups and collectives – both before and after COVID-19." (Introduction, page 13)
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"The euphoria that has accompanied the birth and expansion of the internet as a "liberation technology" is increasingly eclipsed by an explosion of vitriolic language on a global scale. Digital Hate: The Global Conjuncture of Extreme Speech provides the first distinctly global and interdisciplinary
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perspective on hateful language online. Moving beyond Euro-American allegations of 'fake news,' contributors draw attention to local idioms and practices and explore the profound implications for how community is imagined, enacted, and brutally enforced around the world. With a cross-cultural framework nuanced by ethnography and field-based research, the volume investigates a wide range of cases-from anti-immigrant memes targeted at Bolivians in Chile to trolls serving the ruling AK Party in Turkey - to ask how the potential of extreme speech to talk back to authorities has come under attack by diverse forms of digital hate cultures." (Publisher description)
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"China’s sophisticated filtering system, known as the Great Firewall (GFW), is the region’s biggest impediment to thefreedom of information. The GFW is built by the Chinese government and is continuously developed to serve theirpolitical interests. In this report, we introduce the design of GFWa
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tch, a large-scale longitudinal measurement plat-form that informs the public about how GFW censorship changes over time and its negative impact on the free flowof information." (Introduction)
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"In Chinese, the term wanghong refers to creators, social media entrepreneurs alternatively known as KOLs (key opinion leaders) and zhubo (showroom hosts), influencers and micro-celebrities. Wanghong also refers to an emerging media ecology in which these creators cultivate online communities for cu
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ltural and commercial value by harnessing Chinese social media platforms, like Weibo, WeChat, Douyu, Huya, Bilibili, Douyin, and Kuaishuo. Framed by the concepts of cultural, creative, and social industries, the book maps the development of wanghong policies and platforms, labor and management, content and culture, as they operate in contrast to its non-Chinese counterpart, social media entertainment, driven by platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitch. As evidenced by the backlash to TikTok, the threat of competition from global wanghong signals advancing platform nationalism." (Publisher description)
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"Media Culture in Nomadic Communities examines the ways that new technologies and ICT infrastructures have changed the communicative norms and patterns that regulate mobile and nomadic communities' engagement in local and international deliberative decision making. Each chapter examines a unique com
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municative event, such has how the Maasai of Tanzania have used online petitions to demand government action. How Mongolians in northern China have used micro blogs to record and debate land tenure. And how herding communities from around the world have supported the Lakota Sioux protests at Standing Rock. Through these case studies, Hahn argues that mobile and nomadic communities are creating and utilizing new communicative networks that are radically changing local, national, and international deliberations." (Publisher description)
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"This report analyses two Chinese state-linked networks seeking to influence discourse about Xinjiang across platforms including Twitter and YouTube. This activity targeted the Chinese-speaking diaspora as well as international audiences, sharing content in a variety of languages. Both networks atte
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mpted to shape international perceptions about Xinjiang, among other themes. Despite evidence to the contrary, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) denies committing human rights abuses in the region and has mounted multifaceted and multiplatform information campaigns to deny accusations of forced labour, mass detention, surveillance, sterilisation, cultural erasure and alleged genocide in the region. Those efforts have included using Western social media platforms to both push back against and undermine media reports, research and Uyghurs’ testimony about Xinjiang, as well as to promote alternative narratives. In the datasets we examined, inauthentic and potentially automated accounts using a variety of image and video content shared content aimed at rebutting the evidence of human rights violations against the Uyghur population. Likewise, content was shared using fake Uyghur accounts and other shell accounts promoting video ‘testimonials’ from Uyghurs talking about their happy lives in China." (Introduction)
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"This book places television in Africa in the digital context. It addresses the onslaught of multimedia platforms, digital migration and implication of this technology for society. The discussions in the chapters contained in this book encompass a wide range of issues such as digital disruption of t
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elevision news, internet television and video on demand platforms, adaptations, digital migration, business strategies and management approaches, PBS, consumption patterns, scheduling and programming, evangelical television, and many others." (Publisher description)
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"Due to the relative lack of media comparison studies within Asian contexts, theoretical frameworks based in Western societies have been applied to knowledge production in the global South. Using a ‘most different’ design, this study compares the dimensions of media systems reflected in two Chin
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ese and two Korean newspapers in their initial coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Content analysis showed statistically significant differences in distribution of sources, topics and valence, usage of frame types, and actors including domestic government and foreign entities held responsible between the two groups of media. Based on political implications of crisis on Chinese and Korean news content, we mainly discuss political instrumentalization and parallelism in the media in an Asian context. Finally, we open up the dimensions of media system from an Asian perspective and address the need for future research." (Abstract)
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"This collection investigates and critiques the dynamism of children's lives online with contributions fielding both global and hyper-local issues, and bridging the wide spectrum of connected media created for and by children. From education to children's rights to cyberbullying and youth in challen
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ging circumstances, the interdisciplinary approach ensures a careful, nuanced, multi-dimensional exploration of children's relationships with digital media. Featuring a highly international range of case studies, perspectives, and socio-cultural contexts, The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children is the perfect reference tool for students and researchers of media and communication, family and technology studies, psychology, education, anthropology, and sociology, as well as interested teachers, policy makers, and parents." (Publisher description)
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"The book brings together scholars from Western and Eastern Europe, North America, Latin America, and Asia, reporting findings based on data collected from democratic, transitional, and non-democratic contexts to produce thematic chapters that address how journalistic cultures vary around the globe,
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specifically in relation to challenges that journalists face in performing their journalistic roles. The study measures, compares, and analyzes the materialization of the interventionist, the watchdog, the loyal-facilitator, the service, the infotainment, and the civic roles in more than 30,000 print news stories from 18 countries. It also draws from hundreds of surveys with journalists to explain the link between ideals and practices, and the conditions that shape this divide." (Publisher description)
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"The Chinese digital technology giants, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT), dominate over their competitors in China across platforms that include e-commerce, digital entertainment, e-finance and artificial intelligence (AI). To understand BAT’s corporate power and their strategic role working with
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the government – in this case, their involvement in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – this paper unveils the capabilities of these three oligopolies and discusses their international expansion in relation to the BRI. The BRI is being constructed on two layers, the physical and digital infrastructure, and the BAT are contributing to the latter. This paper examines the interrelations between BAT and the state through case studies, observing the tensions and potential contradictions arising from the reliance of the Chinese state on the BAT to build digital infrastructure, while the BAT seek to minimize direct state regulation for their datadriven business models." (Abstract)
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"China's 'Great Firewall' has evolved into the most sophisticated system of online censorship in the world. As the Chinese internet grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent quashed, and attempts to organise outside the official Communist Party are quickly stamped out. Update
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d throughout and available in paperback for the first time, The Great Firewall of China draws on James Griffiths' unprecedented access to the Great Firewall and the politicians, tech leaders, dissidents and hackers whose lives revolve around it. New chapters cover the suppression of information about the first outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, disinformation campaigns in response to the exposure of the persecution of Uyghur communities in Xinjiang and the crackdown against the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong." (Publisher description)
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"This report sets out a new methodology for assessing cyber power, and then applies it to 15 states: Four members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance – the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia; Three cyber-capable allies of the Five Eyes states – France, Israel and Japan; F
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our countries viewed by the Five Eyes and their allies as cyber threats – China, Russia, Iran and North Korea; Four states at earlier stages in their cyber-power development – India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. The methodology is broad and principally qualitative, assessing each state’s capabilities in seven different categories. The cyber ecosystem of each state is analysed, including how it intersects with international security, economic competition and military affairs. On that basis the 15 states are divided into three tiers: Tier One is for states with world-leading strengths across all the categories in the methodology, Tier Two is for those with world-leading strengths in some of the categories, and Tier Three is for those with strengths or potential strengths in some of the categories but significant weaknesses in others. The conclusion is that only one state currently merits inclusion in Tier One. Seven are placed in Tier Two, and seven in Tier Three." (Back cover)
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"There is a heated debate about the social-sustainability implications of infrastructure. We engage this debate by delving into China’s Digital Silk Road (DSR), an important component of China’s infrastructure-centric Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Optimists and pessimists have offered strong v
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iews about the DSR’s social-sustainability implications. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of analytical tools and in-depth studies which can be used to judge their competing arguments. In this article, we address these problems in two ways. First, we advance an original scheme for operationalizing social sustainability. Second, we use our framework to systematically analyze the DSR’s social-sustainability effects in Ethiopia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and Hungary. Our research indicates that much of the positive and negative commentary about the DSR’s social-sustainability implications is problematic. None of our cases show significant year-to-year changes in political or quality-of-life social-sustainability benchmarks. Indeed, our analysis indicates that analysts must pay close attention to the political and economic context to understand the social-sustainability patterns associated with DSR infrastructure. Finally, it suggests that the social-sustainability implications of DSR infrastructure are dependent on its scale and nature. These findings have ramifications for broader debates about the socioeconomic impact of infrastructure." (Abstract)
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"Vietnamese nationalism has a strong undercurrent of anti-China sentiments, and Vietnam’s leaders have regularly tapped into such sentiments to shore up their legitimacy and boost Vietnamese nationalism. Over the last decade, the helter-skelter growth of social media has bred new popular actors in
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Vietnamese cybersphere, who are deeply nationalistic but who pursue entirely different political and social agendas. In sum, they give rise to a new nationalistic narrative, one that paints the Vietnam Communist Party as being often too meek and subservient to China, and calls for drastic reforms to the political system—regime change not excluded—to deal with Chinese threats. An examination of prominent cases of online Vietnamese nationalism shows that anti-China sentiments have been a recurrent theme and a consistent trigger. The online nationalistic movements have been mostly instigated by popular figures, with state actors playing a facilitating role in stoking and harnessing them for their own ends. Manifestations of online nationalism, especially those centred on anti-China and sovereignty issues, may hold serious consequences, including violence and deadly riots. In some instances, online nationalistic campaigns both galvanize and dissipate relatively quickly once state and popular actors have somehow managed to achieve their aims. The growing salience of online Vietnamese nationalism has posed serious challenges and dilemmas for the regime. The authorities have had to encourage nationalistic patriotism without letting Sinophobia spiral out of control or turn against the regime." (Executive summary)
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