Full Description
Digital technologies from the Internet and social media to artificial intelligence and robotics are reshaping the world. They offer joy, participation, and higher productivity, but they have also brought disruption, alienation, control, oppression, and exacerbated inequalities. This volume explores this ongoing transformation and its social implications between domination and participation. Outcomes at any given time are not taken as predetermined but as results of the decisions by a range of diverse social actors who compete, cooperate, or conflict with one another and can draw on differential access to resources within shifting political-legal frameworks and structural contexts. Scholars of communication, media studies, sociology, political ecology, employment and labor relations, science and technology come together to examine the social shaping of digital futures across different world regions and domains.
Contributing to these fields, the volume highlights the merits of interdisciplinary research and transnational perspectives to illuminate the intricate complexity in which digital technologies are shaped by and are shaping social relations of power between domination and participation. The authors present critical case studies that make timely progress toward a deeper understanding of these new dynamics and toward broadening the horizon for imagining preferable democratic future alternatives.
This volume is sponsored by the International Sociological Association Research Committees on Futures Research (ISARC07), ProFutur, Denkwerk für Antizipative Demokratie, and Initiative for Transnational Futures (ITF).
Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction - Communicating Change: Civic Innovation and Social Movements; Markus S. Schulz
PART I. CIVIC INNOVATION
Chapter 2. Crisis Response, Civic Innovation, and Digital Media: Learning from the 2017 Earthquake in Mexico City; Ligia Tavera Fenollosa
Chapter 3. Citizen Participation and Online Environments After a Crisis of Democracy: Lessons from Iceland; Magdalena Karolak
Part II. DIGITAL FEMINISM
Chapter 4. French Digital Feminism: An Oppositional Praxis within the Dominant Public Space; Marine Gauss
Chapter 5. Digital Self-Disclosure in Neoliberal Times: Problematising Feminist Consciousness-Raising on Social Media; Amy Mowle
Part III. CONNECTING FOR CHANGE
Chapter 6. From Ideologists to Programmers: Activists' Roles in Contemporary South Korean Social Movements; DooHyeong Lee
Chapter 7. Critical Agency and Creative Imagination: Snapshots of the Future among Youth Networks of Activism in Italy; Lidia Lo Schiavo and Paola Rebughini
Chapter 8. Communicating Across Borders: Unlikely Alliances and Poetic Visions; Markus S. Schulz
