Full Description
Bringing together leading scholars from media studies and digital sociology, this edited volume provides a comprehensive introduction to digital media metaphors, unpacking their power and limitations.
Digital technologies have reshaped our way of life. To grasp their dynamics and implications, people often rely on metaphors to provide a shared frame of reference. Scholars, journalists, tech companies, and policymakers alike speak of digital clouds, bubbles, frontiers, platforms, trolls, and rabbit holes. Some of these metaphors distort the workings of the digital realm and neglect key consequences. This collection, structured in three parts, explores metaphors across digital infrastructures, content, and users. Within these parts, each chapter examines a specific metaphor that has become near-ubiquitous in public debate. Doing so, the book engages not only with the technological, but also the social, political, and environmental implications of digital technologies and relations.
This unique collection will interest students and scholars of digital media and the broader fields of media and communication studies, sociology, and science and technology studies.
Contents
1. Introduction: Why Digital Media Metaphors Matter Part I: Infrastructure 2. Cloud Computing: Infrastructure's Alibi 3. Platform: A Tapestry of Meanings and Metaphors 4. Frontier: Drifting Towards the Digital Commons 5. Digital Town Square: From Participatory Culture to Free Speech Absolutism Part II: Content 6. Filter Bubble: The Dumbest Metaphor on the Internet? 7. Data as the New Oil: Extractivist Data Metaphors 8. Rabbit Hole: Creating the Concept of Algorithmic Radicalization 9. Information Warfare: The Blurred Boundaries of the Digital Trenches Part III: Users 10. Toxic: Critiquing an Infectious Error 11. Digital Native: The Myth of the Tech-Savvy Youth 12. Troll: The Problem with Digital Tricksters and Monsters
