Full Description
Challenges to Silicon Valley's dominant role in conjuring and patenting the world's technological futures are arising around the world. As digital media technologies emerge from new, globally dispersed locations, a multipolar order of communication innovation seems to be in the making. Yet recovering our ability to imagine futures otherwise requires negotiating conditions—economic, geopolitical, sociocultural, and ecological—rather than reproducing them under the pretext of breaking with the present. The essays in this volume examine research on such conditions critically and comparatively in a variety of geographies. Paying due attention to China's rise as an innovative platform society and AI powerhouse, this book addresses the broader question of a shifting world order and trends that are shaped by China's influence but that extend beyond its borders. Looking at multipolar communication innovation through various critical lenses, our technological futures simultaneously appear to be old, new, and uncertain, while the infrastructures and platforms underpinning communication innovation both affiliate communities and set them apart.
Contents
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: New, Old, and Uncertain Futures Analyzing Chinese Platform Power: Infrastructure, Finance, and Geopolitics, Lianrui Jia and David Nieborg Neoliberal Business-as-Usual or Post-Surveillance Capitalism with European Characteristics? The EU's General Data Protection Regulation in a Multipolar Internet, Angela Daly The Global versus the National: Creativity in Turkey's Game Industry, Serra Sezgin and Mutlu Binark Making, New Shanzhai, and Countercultural Values: Ethnographies of Contemporary, Innovative, and Entrepreneurial Digital Fabrication Communities in Shenzhen, China, Daniel H. Mutibwa and Bingqing Xia Platformization of the Unlikely Creative Class: Kuaishou and Chinese Digital Cultural Production, Jian Lin and Jeroen de Kloet Technology Translations between China and Ghana: The Case of Low-End Phone Design, Miao Lu The Necropolitics of Innovation: Sensing Death in the Mediterranean Sea, Monika Halkort Conclusion: Futures in the Plural, Jack Linchuan Qiu Contributors
