Performing Borders: Sustaining Culture and Identity, Challenging Global Organization

Communication technology has played a central role in the last two great socio-political uprisings in Iran’s history: The 1979 Revolution and 2009 Green Movement. By identifying three distinct elements of the communication process, this paper explores how the ability of the political opposition to communicate effectively contributed to the success or decline of these movements as one factor among a broader set of key factors. The first element is the ‘mainstream media’, which is professional, hierarchically structured and often funded by states, big corporations or major publicly funded organizations. ‘Alternative media’, in contrast, is amateur, has a participatory and horizontal working structure and often limited funding. The third, the ‘social network’, is a collection of actors who seek iterative and persisting exchanges among themselves based on common interests, beliefs, and other ties. This trinity constitutes what has been called the ‘matrix of communication’ in this paper.

This research explores development of discourses of information society and the claims which have been made as to transformative capacities of information and communication technologies (ICT) in particular. It explores experiences of groups affiliated to two women's centres in city of Salford, England. These centres, and associated groups, are situated within two economically disadvantaged areas which could be said to be peopled with the information poor. The research argues that the enthusiasm with which technology has often been placed before such communities has been inspired by debates which have largely taken place at a high level of abstraction and generalisation and have not been grounded and connected to needs of the residents of real world, physically based localities. The importance of locality, of situated knowledge, of networks built around trust and shared experience it suggests, have been largely disregarded and global, expert and disembodied community unconstrained by limits imposed by place have been perceived as the most significant relationships in contemporary western societies. This has distorted perceptions of more traditional and locally-based, face-to-face interaction which has been considered limiting, insular and in many ways as looking backward rather than forward. From these perceptions have arisen a terminology which places responsibility for success or failure on individual and community (the digital underclass) and which suggests that a need for experts and professionals to enlighten and educate certain groups (the information poor) in order that they can be enabled and empowered in new digital age. The research argues that this discourse, and the assumptions which lie behind it, have infused policy agendas around widening access to technology and informed many models which aim to introduce these technologies into such communities. The research concludes that there has been a disproportionate interest in technology and its powers to transform and a concomitant disregard of human potential and abilities which enable technology to work and the personal and social relationships which will facilitate its use.

As identified by Rod Rhodes governance discourse can encapsulate a wide range of individual and organisational practices from traditional modes of government to self organising networks such as those created by new social networking technologies. Rosabeth Kanter recently wrote on her blog that ‘global leaders are... running to catch up with the change triggered by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media’ (2010). This paper proposes that the advent and uptake of new social networking technologies poses a challenge to traditional modes of government to citizen communication. In particular the case of emergency management will be used as an illustrative example. These technologies create a geographically diffuse self organising network where by individuals can source information for themselves in real time through the use of social networking technologies. For example, Twitter is not only a network but a form of searchable broadcast media. Kanter argues that, ‘America in the 20th century was called a of organizations”. ... In the 21st century, America is rapidly becoming a society of networks, even within organizations. Maintenance of organizations as structures is less important than assembling resources to get results, even if the assemblage itself is loose and perishable’ (2009). Social networking technologies present an opportunity for new and more immediate modes of governance such as the crowd sourcing of information (e.g. the capture of damage in 7/7 through citizen images). These forms of self governance whilst arguably more democratic also present challenges for government control and coordination and for equality of access (e.g. technology inequalities). In this paper it will be argued that one useful way of conceptualising this challenge to traditional orthodoxies is the notion of assemblages as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and developed by De Landa (2006). Assemblages can be understood as weak networks of contacts and/or ideas which are incredibly resilient in the face of attempts to undermine their structure. In the context of social networking technologies it will be argued that this is due to multiple horizontal interconnections which are not dependent upon individual players but increase the ability of individual nodes within the network to yield influence (e.g. to be able to broadcast their information to a large audience in real time). Assemblages are products of emergent properties and therefore are inherently open to reconfiguration and adaptation making them both particularly useful and dangerous during the multiple phases of a crises event.

Our global interconnectedness has first been expressed in the transformation of business and entertainment, but it will have profound effects on all aspects of our lives, including education and health. Today's students are accustomed to supplying and consuming user-generated content, such as the videos of YouTube, and to using social networking applications, such as MySpace. This can be turned to their advantage in the development of work skills for the twenty-first century. Central among these skills will be the ability to work in teams that cross disciplinary, cultural, and geographic borders.

Until the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, cyberspace was a world of words, not images. Servers were filled with data files and text reports that could be retrieved, but only through a process too formidable for the casual user. Discussion groups, bulletin boards, and chat rooms teemed with conversations, manifestos, and diatribes capable of conveying a sense of place; yet they were soapboxes or salons, not posters, flyers, or newsreels. Now, however, the Web allows cyberspace to be a realm of imagery as much as ideas. Images of the former Yugoslavia have been made available on the World Wide Web in thick profusion. The political and cultural upheavals in Eastern Europe since the mid-1980s left spatial problems in their wake, struggles over the official state constitution and over authoritative definition of the country's physical place. We argue that analysis of communicative and spatial elements of the Internet provide a unique context for the definition and conveyance of place. In the Web is what Richard Daft and Robert Lengel have termed a rich medium, a tool capable of forging shared meaning in an equivocal environment (1986). STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION AND THE STUDY OF CYBERSPACE Interest of Anglo-American geographers in communication technologies dates from the early 1980s (Falk and Abler 1980; Abler and Falk 1981, 1985; Abler 1987). Recently, a significant body of research has documented how communication technologies transform societies, while also theorizing about how technology makes sociospatial change possible. Three perspectives of communications research inform our study. By far the bulk of work is from the perspective of changing economic geographies. This research examines telecommunications technology as part of corporate control and international finance, exploring the ways in which technology has facilitated changes in corporate control networks by allowing firms to relocate to dispersed locations for production while concentrating control in cities removed from actual production (Langdale 1985; Gillespie and Williams 1988; Warf 1989; Daniels 1991; Hepworth 1991; Driver and Gillespie 1993). These studies explore the effects of technology without capturing the potential for strategic variations in use of the technology. A second perspective taken by geographers in the study of communication technologies addresses sociospatial community formation. This perspective examines computer-mediated communication as it helps form social networks that serve various political and social purposes (Brunn, Jones, and Purcell 1994; Brunn and Purcell 1996; O'Lear 1996). Emphasis is on the communities created, with little consideration of how the technology and human agency combine to create new rules and resources for community maintenance. Without focusing solely on computer-mediated communication, a third perspective addresses how technologies produce space (Adams 1992; Berland 1992). This third perspective turns critical attention to the technology itself, addressing the epistemology and politics of space. How does communication technology enable the creation of space? What interests are represented in that space? Who has influence or control over the space? Theory emerging from this perspective asks about the tools that people are using and about how they mediate among technology, power relationships, and human agency. These three perspectives combine to emphasize different inquiries, which we use to understand a specific communication technology, the World Wide Web. The Web gives individual Internet users the ability to make information available to any other Internet user, without an intermediary to censor or structure the data in either content or form. In contrast to other communication technologies, such as e-mail, Usenet or listserv groups, or chat forums, the Web is, primarily, a tool of presentation. Web documents must conform to a particular programming language, hypertext markup language (HTML) - simple to learn and requiring no compiling program - which users employ to create high-quality graphic designs easily and quickly. …

Abstract The move from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 technologies marks contemporary human relations regardless of geography, culture, and politics. Nonetheless, the history and economics of this trend continues to mark similar divisions in people's overall material wellbeing, in both the actual and virtual worlds. The digital grid empowers online participation. New forms of social time and social space are developed to challenge the split between time and space–the “timeless time” and “space of flows” ( Castells, 2000 ). These are points of connection among people and simultaneously nods of disconnection among them. Nowadays, most disciplines engage their practitioners through social networking and virtual tools, but do these also allow students to challenge the statuesque. In order to initiate social and cultural change, the educators of the 21st century need to explore ways to democratize global identities beyond the use of weblogs, video-logs, and Facebook.

This paper follows the case of one city that has deliberately fashioned itself as a regional, indeed global, hub for the information age. Singapore has shaped itself into a global hub in what is often seen as a global information space that depends upon key. The state conceived of the island’s development through a vocabulary of networks and hubs in a space of global flows. This paper follows the Singapore government’s efforts to embrace the new possibilities of being a global hub while coping with the ramifications of changing social and spatial relationships at a range of scales from the local to the global. The paper focuses upon the initiative to create a so-called Intelligent Island and the SingaporeONE project to create a pervasive networked environment. These two linked initiatives aimed to allow Singaporeans to exploit digital technology but also reconfigured the relationship of Singapore to the outside world. The paper will examine the material and discursive consequences of these plans – suggesting that the rhetorical and discursive effects are probably as significant as many of the alleged benefits through information processing. These initiatives are set in the context of a range of other flows – of people and things – to raise issues about the city state as, on the one hand, a purposive actors shaping the environment and, on the other, being pushed by forces that destabilise the linkage of people and place upon which the state relied.

Many observers doubt the capacity of digital media to change the political game. The rise of a transnational activism that is aimed beyond states and directly at corporations, trade and development regimes offers a fruitful area for understanding how communication practices can help create a new politics. The Internet is implicated in the new global activism far beyond merely reducing the costs of communication, or transcending the geographical and temporal barriers associated with other communication media. Various uses of the Internet and digital media facilitate the loosely structured networks, the weak identity ties, and the patterns of issue and demonstration organizing that define a new global protest politics. Analysis of various cases shows how digital network configurations can facilitate: permanent campaigns; the growth of broad networks despite relatively weak social identity and ideology ties; transformation of individual member organizations and whole networks; and the capacity to communicate...

Modern identity is valuable, multi-functional and complex. Today we typically manage multiple versions of self, made visible in digital trails distributed widely across offline and online spaces. Yet, technology-mediated identity leads us into crisis. Enduring accessibility to greater and growing personal details online, alongside increases in both computing power and data linkage techniques, fuel fears of identity exploitation. Will it be stolen? Who controls it? Are others aggregating or analysing our identities to infer new data about us without our knowledge or consent? New challenges present themselves globally around these fears, as manifested by concerns over massive online data breaches and automated identification technologies, which also highlight the conundrum faced by governments about how to safeguard individuals' interests on the Web while striking a fair balance with wider public interests. This paper reflects upon some of these problems as part of the inter-disciplinary, transatlantic ‘SuperIdentity’ project investigating links between cyber and real-world identifiers. To meet the crisis, we explore the relationship between identity and digitisation from the perspective of policy and law. We conclude that traditional models of identity protection need supplementing with new ways of thinking, including pioneering ‘technical-legal’ initiatives that are sensitive to the different risks that threaten our digital identity integrity. Only by re-conceiving identity dynamically to appreciate the increasing capabilities for connectivity between different aspects of our identity across the cyber and the physical domains, will policy and law be able to keep up with and address the challenges that lie ahead in our progressively networked world.

Whilst some authors have portrayed the Internet as a powerful tool for business and political institutions, others have highlighted the potential of this technology for those vying to constrain or counter-balance the power of organizations, through e-collectivism and on-line action. What appears to be emerging is a contested space that has the potential to simultaneously enhance the power of organizations, whilst also acting as an enabling technology for the empowerment of grass-root networks. In this struggle, organizations are fighting for the retention of “old economy” positions, as well as the development of “new economy” power-bases. In realizing these positions, organizations and institutions are strategizing and manoeuvering in order to shape on-line networks and communications. For example, the on-line activities of individuals can be contained through various technological means, such as surveillance, and the structuring of the virtual world through the use of portals and “walled gardens”. However, loose groupings of individuals are also strategizing to ensure there is a liberation of their communication paths and practices, and to maintain the potential for mobilization within and across traditional boundaries. In this article, the unique nature and potential of the Internet are evaluated, and the struggle over this contested virtual space is explored.

Mobile communication has become a common phenomenon in most parts of the world. There are indeed more mobile subscriptions than there are people who use the internet. For many people outside of the metropolitan areas of Europe and North America, this is literally their first use of electronically mediated interaction. This preface to the special issue of New Media & Society examines mobile communication in a global context. Through an overview of eight articles situated in the global south, we describe how mobile communication sheds light upon notions of information, appropriation and development and how it is challenging, and in many cases changing, notions of gender. While the mobile phone reshapes development and micro dynamics of gendered interactions, it is not necessarily a revolutionary tool. Existing power structures may be rearranged, but they are nonetheless quite stable. The analysis of mobile communication in the global south helps us to understand the rise of innovative practices around information and communication technologies and, in turn, enables us to develop theory to understand these emergent empirical realities.

It has become trite to observe that the Internet is allowing communities to spring up across distances that previously prohibited the timely sharing of experiences and strategies of advocacy. New communication technologies may aid the practice of frame alignment that social movements have always engaged in, but they may also highlight the dilemma between local and global forms of action. For example, food scandals continue to provoke varied and sustained public outcry, but are solutions to food provision problems conceived similarly at the local and the global level? Under the assumption that message makers use new media to perform and represent ideological sympathy explicitly, this paper looks at organizations facilitating the consumption of local food, compares their linking practices with those of organizations that actively oppose globalized agriculture, and describes the way local/global distinctions are implied, or performed, on the World Wide Web. It identifies a disparity between global rhetoric a...

The multiple cases of dissent and revolution emerged in the Mediterranean area (Egypt, Tunisia, Libya), the collapse of political consensus (Italy, Greece) and all the protests that have received media attention since the late of 2010 have shown the key-role of social media in a new, bottom-up, culture of political participation. These movements that aggregate millions of people are born spontaneously. They reflect the expansion of narrow networks of everyday-life (friends, family, colleagues) triggered to express their conditions to a broader audience. The social media represent the first resource to give them voice, to create a real reactivation that was not possible with passive media like television and press. Moving from the experiences of some Mediterranean cases this paper will explore the experimental experience to design bottom-up and self-managed frameworks to help local communities to adopt social media as multi-level channel to defense (and to discover) their rights and to reactivate many peers as possible of their territorial network. The paper will define the differences between a social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, a blog, a streaming system, etc.) and an operative framework, based on the mashup of different practices oriented to the needs of the communities. It will define the best practices to re-activate the sense of citizenship by the meaning of social networking for a public, shared debate: the principal hub of convergence between the peer-to-peer analysis of problems, the territory it covers and other national and international realities connected by a virtual (online) sphere of public attention.

It is a common assumption that digital technologies have helped turn political engagement into a more decentralized process. Examples often cited include the 2011 global wave of political protests; the actions of the hacktivist group Anonymous; or the free culture movement born to promote the freedom to distribute content online. Examples more remote in the history of digital technologies include the anti-globalization movement (emerged in the late eighties) and the emancipatory struggles of minorities like the indigenous Zapatistas in Mexico - in both cases, the protests attained global visibility through the use of email distribution lists and alternative media sites like Indymedia. What all these examples have in common is that the actors involved used digital technologies to coordinate their actions, and targeted online networks with their messages to reach larger audiences and involve more participants. Internet technologies allowed protesters to organize in a decentralized way, that is, without a central authority processing local information or overseeing strategies from above. This form of organization creates more flexible forms of collective action and it has radically changed the way in which grassroots politics operate. This paper explains why by examining the network mechanisms that are involved in this new form of organization.

This article explores the potential for the formation of collective action in Vietnam. Referring to land and labour protests, bauxite mining, anti-China demonstrations, as well as the revision of the 1992 Constitution, the article examines the social movement repertoires diverse groups have adopted to reach their objectives. Drawing on social movement theory and communication power, this contribution shows that apart from access to the technology, citizens’ opportunities to participate in digital networks as well as access to the default communication network of the state are necessary prerequisites in order to attain public attention and possibly to achieve social change. Moreover, this article shows that existing power differentials in Vietnam are reproduced in digital space. It concludes that for different collective behaviours to result in a social movement, it is essential to “switch” and to connect the different networks. For the moment, the call to protect Vietnam's sovereignty offers common ground for collective action.

As work regimes become global, social communication increasingly occurs across locations far apart. In the absence of a common national, ethnic, or organizational culture across continents, what makes communication possible among social worlds technologically integrated in real time? Taking India’s global call centers as the focus of analysis, this article attempts to solve the riddle of communication by showing how transnational business practices rely on the transmutation of cultural communication into global communication through the processes of neutralization and mimesis. Neutralization refers to attempts at pruning unwanted cultural particulars, whereas mimesis refers to simulating desired cultural elements.

This paper examines the discourses around emerging Internet connectivity solutions for rural and resource-constrained populations in the developing world. It draws primarily on interviews undertaken with 26 experts within the Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICTD) field, as well as on institutional explanatory and publicity materials put forward by several industry actors. We identify a sustained disconnect between different conceptions of how technology alters or bridges space---spatial imaginaries. Institutions use narratives that assume technologies eradicate or collapse distance, and thus drive transformative socioeconomic change. By contrast, expert accounts underscore the socially embedded nature of technologically mediated relations and non-infrastructural barriers to connectivity. The paper draws attention to the ways that these spatial ideas are used to justify the development of new infrastructures to extend Internet access in the developing world. The paper identifies a need for continued attention to spatial imaginaries in ICTD, not only as a guiding frame for critical research, but also as a means to improve collaboration between research and industrial practice.

Globalization, both as a term and as a phenomenon has spawned a corpus of writing and debates. One thing scholars agree, however, is that the world is much more interconnected than ever. Despite international borders and associated institutional or infrastructural boundaries - of law, culture, etc. - people are forging connections across time and space. In the wake of this the dispersed diasporas are becoming transnational communities, these communities are said to build social fields which span nations and distances. What are these fields and does the construction of these fields in any way add to the sense of community? If communities no longer share the territorial space of received notions such as nations and if they are on the move, as much as the cultural aspects that surround them, then how do they share a common sense of identity consciousness? These and related questions are the main focus of this paper. The paper further explores possible elements that help forge a sense of identity. One such possibility, in the age of globalization, is simultaneous consumptions of images, events and things - a field of consumption, creating a shared sentiment. The paper explores this connection between consumption and identity. It also examines the methodological implication of studying communities across nations.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of transactional forms of the digital across the Asian region by addressing the platforms and infrastructures that shape the digital experience. Contributors argue that each and every encounter mediated by the digital carries with it a functional exchange, but at the same time each transaction also implies an exchange based on social relationships for the digital age. In capturing the digital revolution through case studies of economic, informational, and social exchanges from across the larger Asian region, the book offers a richly contextualized and comparative account of the pervasive nature of the digital as both a medium for action and a medium of record.

Focusing on power relationships in the context of Cross-Border Journalistic Investigations (CBIJ) this study takes into account a critical approach of the emerging field. The thesis differs from other accounts on CBIJ, be it from practitioners or academics. Although studies in global media have examined new frameworks and developments, as well as emerging new practices in global investigative journalism in a digitally networked society, this has usually come from a positivist view of strengthening democracy, with an added techno-euphoria. This research presents an analysis of the power relationships in CBIJ as well as its challenges in the global context. Going beyond the usual positive tech-determinist approach the thesis explores how journalistic practices in this field are shaped in two different CBIJ networks when their two major CBIJ projects overlap, through the study of data generated by participatory observation, autoethnography and archival research. The analysis is giving a special attention to both technology communication infrastructures and non-profit funding models and is showing power inequalities and limitations of CBIJ networks as well as implications of contemporary platform investigative journalism and their unintended consequences. As such, this study is providing the insight of an Eastern-European journalist, a long-time practitioner and CBIJ network facilitator, so the analytic focus on the backstages of managing access control in two major cross-border investigations enables another contribution. This thesis finds that CBIJ has been building up based on a (white male) elitist identity for investigative journalists, first in the US in the ’70s and then in Europe and beyond in the context of Post-Cold War globalisation. To add credibility to this identity, scientific techniques have been replicated in what was called 'precision journalism ' which later became data journalism and now has been used in the mega-leaks CBIJ projects. Such data-sets have been building up to such an extent that they create the authoritative source many journalists would like to have access to (i.e. Panama Papers or Football Leaks data). While shifting CBIJ to rely heavy on big data-sets (leaks) and expensive software and computing power (to process data and to share information securely across borders), statistical techniques do not reveal main stories and most of the data work is done by engineers to index and clean data and make it available for the easiest search operations possible (type and click). Because of this dependency, this research shows that today CBIJ networks incur high costs which, in the case of the largest CBIJ organisations, are not paid by media partners of such organisations but are subsidised by media assistance or philanthropy, both governmental and private. This double capture in the technology and non-profit realms gives an unusual strong leverage to the few financial donors and platforms owners, without any accountability, on influencing the CBIJ field at a global level. Contrary to the public claim, this thesis finds that investigative platforms can act as amplifying agents of national commercial (and non-profit) competitive interests at an international network level. Furthermore, journalists accepted as members of a given investigative platform work for free in the platform realm; such network technological infrastructures and the hosted data-sets are not co-owned (in some cases not even co-managed) by all participants in the network. Without decentralised technology design and without governance documents, such platform are totalitarian governance systems (surveillance and control build in) putting access control for collaborations in the hand of a few people. Thus modern CBIJ systems re-create the past pain points of commercial news industry, creating even less gatekeepers than before. I conclude that CBIJ network centralization of socio-tech access control, bankrolled by philanthropy, are building more walls and barriers contrary to current claims and past configurations. As such, the current combination of data journalism, network structures, non-profit and commercial models, and the contemporary 'precariat' indicates that cross-border investigative networks are in the data feudalism realm. Combined with the standardising of the field to be platform ready, CBIJ becomes also ready for its own colonisations. This research makes an original contribution to existing literature, especially in the global media studies, more specifically in journalism studies with a focus on collaborative journalistic practices from a political economy angle. Last but not least, I hope this thesis contributes to the de-Westernizing process of journalism studies.