Communication studies
Mistrust Issues
How Technology Discourses Quantify, Extract and Legitimize Inequalities
Discussing the political understandings of trust and mistrust in the context of data, AI and technology at large, this book defines a process of trustification used by governments, corporations, researchers and the media to legitimise exploitation and the increasing of inequalities.
Platform Politics
Corporate Power, Grassroots Movements and the Sharing Economy
This book charts the rise and fall of the ‘sharing economy’, the controversial lobbying tactics used by the central companies and the backlash seen so far. It offers key policy recommendations and presents state-of-the-art knowledge around the past, present and future of the platform economy.
Mundania
How and Where Technologies Are Made Ordinary
Emerging technologies eventually disappear into the atmosphere of everyday life – they become ordinary and enmeshed in ignored infrastructures and patterns of behaviour. This is how Mundania takes form.
Based on original research, this book uses the concept of mundania to better understand our relationship with technology.
Just Here for the Comments
Lurking as Digital Literacy Practice
This book challenges the conventional perspective of what ‘counts’ as participatory online culture. Presenting ‘lurking’ on social media newsfeeds as a communication and literacy practice that resists dominant power structures, it offers an innovative approach to digital qualitative methods.
The Creative Citizen Unbound
How Social Media and DIY Culture Contribute to Democracy, Communities and the Creative Economy
The creative citizen unbound explores the potential of civically-minded creative individuals in the era of social media and in the context of an expanding creative economy. Contributors examine creative citizenship's contribution to civic life and to social capital and its economic and cultural definitions of value.
Controversial Encounters in the Age of Algorithms
How Digital Technologies are Stifling Public Debate and What to Do About It
This book explores how digital technologies shape our opinions and interactions, often in ways that limit our exposure to diverse perspectives and therefore can fuel polarization. Drawing on the ancient art of controversy, (arguing all sides of a case) it offers a way to revive public debate as a source of trust and legitimacy in our society.
Human Perception and Digital Information Technologies
Animation, the Body, and Affect
This ground-breaking collection explores the ways in which digital information technologies form and influence human perception and experience. Defying technological determinism, it takes on board discursive perspectives from humanities, bringing digital media, affect and body studies into conversation with one another.
Making Information Matter
Understanding Surveillance and Making a Difference
This book advances a new view of information and surveillance practices, as well as their related agencies, politics, and powers. Drawing on case studies, the author crafts a new methodology of studying information life cycles which will help us navigate information regimes today.
Games in the Platform Economy
Steam's Tangled Markets
This book examines the evolution of digital platform economies through the lens of online gaming with a unique economic sociology perspective.
Paying particular attention to Valve’s ‘Steam’ platform, the book examines the architecture of this online videogame marketplace and the way it enables new markets and economic transactions.
The Life of a Number
Measurement, Meaning and the Media
Drawing on case studies, this book examines how politicians, academics and journalists gave meaning to data during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lawson sheds light on the distinct nature of the pandemic that led to the increased politicization of data and how it permanently changed the way we view health and society more broadly.
Democracy and the Public Sphere
From Dystopia Back to Utopia
Exploring the creative and destructive ways individuals and groups make use of new digital and social media in democratic societies across the world, this book presents a much-needed critical theory of the public sphere as we enter the new digital age.
Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory
Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past
Social media platforms hold vast amounts of data about our lives. Content from the past is increasingly being presented in the form of ‘memories’. Critically exploring this new form of memory making, this unique book asks how social media are beginning to change the way we remember.