DIGITAL DILEMMAS P: Power, Resistance, And The Internet
Author(s): M.I. FRANKLIN (Author)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: 16 Jan. 2014
Edition: 1st
Language: English
Print length: 286 pages
ISBN-10: 0199982708
ISBN-13: 9780199982707
Book Description
Digital Dilemmas is a groundbreaking ethnographic, mixed method approach to understanding dynamics of power and resistance as they are played out around the future of the internet. M. I. Franklin looks at the way that publics, governments, and multilateral institutions are being redefined and reinvented in digital settings that are ubiquitous and yet controlled by a relative few. Franklin does this through three original and wide-ranging case studies that get at the way that computer-mediated power relations play out “on the ground” through a mixture of overlapping online and offline activity, at personal, community, and transnational levels. Case studies include online activities around homelessness and street papers in the U.S. and around the world, digital and human rights activism carried out though the United Nations, and the ongoing battle between proprietary and free and open source software proponents. The result is a thought-provoking and seminal work on the way that the new paradigms of power and resistance forged online reshape localized and traditional power structures offline.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Digital Dilemmas addresses an important current field of media studies. Its principal strength and originality lies in its ability to bridge social, technological and cultural approaches to the internet and to new media generally, in a space in which major studies are typically one-dimensional. Franklin’s strong and broad-ranging grounding in social theory is evident in her clear explication of the paradox dilemma of a globally distributed technology which is, at the same time, controlled by a small number of hardware and software interests. ― Arjun Appadurai, New York University
Who ‘owns’ the internet? Are ‘we’ getting the internet ‘we’ deserve? M.I. Franklin’s new work critically analyzes how the internet developed over the past decades through the concepts of nation-state, publics/public spheres and governmentality. A thought-provoking book, Digital Dilemmas tackles a number of poignant questions arising from tensions between the internet’s co-habitants. ―
Jose van Dijck, University of Amsterdam
Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork, scholarship and activism, and spanning an impressive range of sites (from courtroom to homeless refuge and UN policy forum), M.I. Franklin’s exciting new book offers a red thread towards a sharper understanding of the entangled challenges and normative choices of the internet age. Franklin, through her careful unpicking of the complexities, gets us to a place where we start to grasp ‘another way’ of thinking about the internet, and we are all in her debt. ―
Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science
Carefully and methodically, Digital Dilemmas unravels the mythologies of the internet to provide a persuasive sense of the power struggles, dominations, and resistances that inform the internet’s many meanings for people’s lives from the homeless on the streets to the gilded halls of the United Nations. ―
J.P. Singh, George Mason University
Book Description
A thought-provoking and seminal work on the way that the new paradigms of power and resistance forged online reshape localized and traditional power structures offline
About the Author
M.I Franklin is Professor of Global Media and Politics and Director of the Global Media and Transnational Communications MA Program at the University of London
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