1,721,011 research outputs found
Ethics of Media: an introduction
No full textEvents such as the phone-hacking scandal, Wikileaks and the Mohammed cartoons controversy have placed ethics of media at the centre of current debates. Media are not only centralised institutions, but also technologies and means through which we sustain relationships with each other. We live with and in media, and this book sketches and critiques the normative contours of our intensely mediated worlds. What are the 'ethics' of media? What forms would we expect them to take? Do digital media create new ethical dilemmas and what is our responsibility as spectators/witnesses? Bringing together philosophers and media scholars and drawing on a range of contemporary case studies, the book highlights the diversity of competing answers to the question, 'is there an ethics of media?
Doing Family at a Distance: Transnational Family Practices in Polymedia Environments
No full textThis chapter explores a specific type of relationship—that between parents and children who live apart from each other. The proliferation of communication platforms has contributed to the transformation of the experience of parenting and intimacy at a distance. Communication technologies allow transnational families to come together through sets of mediated practices. This chapter reports on long-term ethnography with UK-based Filipino migrants and their children who remain in the Philippines. Participant observation including online environments (Hine 2015; Pink et al. 2016) has been critical for understanding the intimacy and complex emotions involved in family relationships, especially in the context of separation. Multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) has also been vital for understanding the transnational nature of family dynamics. The chapter relates some of the key findings of this research (which are reported extensively elsewhere: Madianou 2012, 2014, 2016; Madianou and Miller 2012) to the particular approach followed. The ethnography on which this chapter is based has also provided the foundation for developing a new theory of polymedia and the chapter will conclude by reflecting on the role of ethnography for theory building
Nonhuman humanitarianism: when ‘AI for good’ can be harmful
Get PDFArtificial intelligence (AI) applications have been introduced in humanitarian operations in order to help with the significant challenges the sector is facing. This article focuses on chatbots which have been proposed as an efficient method to improve communication with, and accountability to affected communities. Chatbots, together with other humanitarian AI applications such as biometrics, satellite imaging, predictive modelling and data visualisations, are often understood as part of the wider phenomenon of ‘AI for social good’. The article develops a decolonial critique of humanitarianism and critical algorithm studies which focuses on the power asymmetries underpinning both humanitarianism and AI. The article asks whether chatbots, as exemplars of ‘AI for good’, reproduce inequalities in the global context. Drawing on a mixed methods study that includes interviews with seven groups of stakeholders, the analysis observes that humanitarian chatbots do not fulfil claims such as ‘intelligence’. Yet AI applications still have powerful consequences. Apart from the risks associated with misinformation and data safeguarding, chatbots reduce communication to its barest instrumental forms which creates disconnects between affected communities and aid agencies. This disconnect is compounded by the extraction of value from data and experimentation with untested technologies. By reflecting the values of their designers and by asserting Eurocentric values in their programmed interactions, chatbots reproduce the coloniality of power. The article concludes that ‘AI for good’ is an ‘enchantment of technology’ that reworks the colonial legacies of humanitarianism whilst also occluding the power dynamics at play
The elusive public of television news
No full textIn today's thoroughly mass-mediated world, audiences and publics are, of course, composed of the same people. Yet social science traditionally treats them quite differently. Indeed, it is commonplace to define audiences in opposition to the public: in both popular and elite discourses, audiences are denigrated as trivial, passive, individualised, while publics are valued as active, critically engaged and politically significant. This volume rejects this view and asks instead when and how the activities of audiences overlap with, or contribute to those of publics, and vice versa. It locates the analysis in relation to as fast-changing media environment, which in turn poses theoretical, empirical and policy questions, which are explored in a European context. The chapters each examine one of a series of intriguing empirical cases to explore these intersections - the television talk show, the minority ethnic news audience, children's use of the internet at home, audiences for live and public events - both high and popular culture, the rapid adoption of the mobile phone, and so forth.
It argues not only that publics are increasingly mediated, moving ever closer to audiences, but also that audiences are increasingly diffused and diverse, not to be contained within the private sphere: hence they must be examined together
Living with News: Ethnography and news consumption
No full textThe Routledge Companion to News and Journalism presents an authoritative, comprehensive assessment of diverse forms of news media reporting – past, present and future.
Including 60 chapters, written by an outstanding team of internationally respected authors, the Companion provides scholars and students with a reliable, historically informed guide to news media and journalism studies.
The Companion has the following features:
•It is organised to address a series of themes pertinent to the on-going theoretical and methodological development of news and journalism studies around the globe.
•The focus encompasses news institutions, production processes, texts, and audiences.
•Individual chapters are problem-led, seeking to address ‘real world’ concerns that cast light on an important dimension of news and journalism – and show why it matters.
•Entries draw on a range of academic disciplines to explore pertinent topics, particularly around the role of journalism in democracy, such as citizenship, power and public trust.
•Discussion revolves primarily around academic research conducted in the UK and the US, with further contributions from other national contexts - thereby allowing international comparisons to be made
CONTESTING TECHNOCOLONIALISM? THE 'ORDINARY TRANSCRIPTS' OF EVERYDAY RESISTANCE
No full textThis paper investigates the extent to which marginalized communities contest practices of datafication and technological experimentation which are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the aid sector. Drawing on seven years of research in the humanitarian and development sectors, the paper explores forms of resistance to digital aid practices. The paper is divided into two parts. The first section observes how datafication and digital innovation in the aid sector rework the colonial genealogies of humanitarianism and digital technology. I then theorize resistance in situations of asymmetrical power. The second section discusses empirical examples of everyday contestation. Drawing on Scott’s notion of the ‘hidden transcripts’ (1985), the paper develops the term ‘ordinary transcripts’ to illustrate the modest critique of digital power through everyday life practices such as non-participation and the oppositional appropriation of digital aid projects. Listening to the ‘ordinary transcripts’ of everyday resistance is also partly a methodological argument as it is only through ethnographic encounters that these small acts of contestation can be noticed. The paper concludes that the arguments about digital power and the persistence of colonial legacies do not preclude the acknowledgement of human agency. However, the ordinary transcripts of everyday resistance do not equal decolonization which requires a radical restructuring of power relations. Still, ordinary resistance needs to be recognized for it may contain the seeds of future decolonial struggle
Technocolonialism
No full textDigital innovation and data practices are increasingly central to the humanitarian response to recent refugee and migration crises. In this chapter, I introduce the concept of technocolonialism to capture how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial relationships of dependency. Technocolonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that data and digital innovation play in entrenching power asymmetries between refugees and aid agencies and, ultimately, inequalities in the global context. This occurs through a number of interconnected processes: by extracting value from refugee data and innovation practices for the benefit of various stakeholders; by materializing discrimination associated with colonialism; by contributing to the production of social orders that entrench the ‘coloniality of power’ and by justifying some of these practices under the context of ‘emergencies’. By reproducing the power asymmetries of humanitarianism, data and innovation practices become constitutive of humanitarian crises themselves
Reproducing colonial legacies: technocolonialism in humanitarian biometric practices
No full textSubmission to 2020 Thematic Report, ‘Race, Borders and Digital Technologies’, to the UN General Assembly by E. Tendayi Achiume, UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance
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