Free Software The Internet And Global Communities Of Resistance

This book explores software's pivotal role as the code that powers computers, mobile devices, the Internet, and social media. Creating conditions for the ongoing development and use of software, including the Internet as a communications infrastructure, is one of the most compelling issues of our time. Free software is based upon open source code, developed in peer communities as well as corporate settings, challenging the dominance of proprietary software firms and promoting the digital commons. Drawing upon key cases and interviews with free software proponents based in Europe, Brazil and the U.S., the book explores pathways toward creating the digital commons and examines contemporary political struggles over free software, privacy and civil liberties on the Internet that are vital for the commons' continued development.

The concept of ‘the commons’ has been used as a framework to understand resources shared by a community rather than a private entity, and it has also inspired social movements working against the enclosure of public goods and resources. One such resource is free (libre) and open source software (FLOSS). FLOSS emerged as an alternative to proprietary software in the 1980s. However, both the products and production processes of FLOSS have become incorporated into capitalist production. For example, Red Hat, Inc. is a large publicly traded company whose business model relies entirely on free software, and IBM, Intel, Cisco, Samsung, Google are some of the largest contributors to Linux, the open-source operating system. This book explores the ways in which FLOSS has been incorporated into digital capitalism. Just as the commons have been used as a motivational frame for radical social movements, it has also served the interests of free-marketeers, corporate libertarians, and states to expand their reach by dragging the shared resources of social life onto digital platforms so they can be integrated into the global capitalist system. The book concludes by asserting the need for a critical political economic understanding of the commons that foregrounds (digital) labour, class struggle, and uneven power distribution within the digital commons as well as between FLOSS communities and their corporate sponsors.

As the world faces extreme economic, environmental and political crises, this bold and accessible Advanced Introduction argues for a future-facing approach to the creative economy and creative innovation. The book analyses contemporary and historical arts and culture whilst assessing historical shifts from national to global cultures; analogue to digital technologies; and individualist to systems thinking.

This book takes the interface – or rather to interface, a process rather than a discrete object or location – as a concept emblematic of our contemporary embodied relationship with technological artefacts. The fundamental question addressed by this book is: How can we understand what it means to perceive or act upon the world as a body–artefact assemblage? Black works to clarify the role of artefacts of all kinds in human perception and action, then considers the ways in which new digital technologies can expand and transform this capacity to change our mode of engagement with our environment. Throughout, the discussion is grounded in specific technologies – some already familiar and some still in development (e.g. new virtual reality and brain–machine interface technologies, natural user interfaces, etc.). In order to develop a detailed, generalizable theory of how we interface with technology, Black assembles an analytical toolkit from a number of different disciplines, including media theory, ethology, clinical psychology, cultural theory, philosophy, science and technology studies, cultural history, aesthetics and neuroscience.

This book applies digital methods of analysis to the study of the impact of digital technologies on the social and political spheres of women in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. These countries have been early embracers of digital technologies in the Middle East, and are therefore useful cases to examine the region’s use of digital media. Bernardi discusses what can be called the silent revolutions of these women online. By combining Software Studies, Feminist Qur’anic Revisionism, Actor Network Theory and digital methods research and analysis, the book explores how ‘women’s issues’ in Egypt and Saudi Arabia arise, transform and manifest themselves in the digital sphere, both in English and in Arabic.

Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture offers a comprehensive account of our contemporary media environment—digital culture and audiences in particular—by drawing on psychoanalysis and media studies frameworks. It provides an introduction to the psychoanalytic affect theories of Sigmund Freud and Didier Anzieu and applies them theoretically and methodologically in a number of case studies. Johanssen argues that digital media fundamentally shape our subjectivities on affective and unconscious levels, and he critically analyses phenomena such as television viewing, Twitter use, affective labour on social media, and data-mining. How does watching television involve the body? Why are we so drawn to reality television? Why do we share certain things on social media and not others? How are bodies represented on social media? How do big data and data mining influence our identities? Can algorithms help us make better decisions? These questions amongst others are addressed in the chapters of this wide-ranging book. Johanssen shows in a number of case studies how a psychoanalytic angle can bring new insights to audience studies and digital media research more generally. From audience research with viewers of the reality television show Embarrassing Bodies and how they unconsciously used it to work through feelings about their own bodies, to a critical engagement with Hardt and Negri's notion of affective labour and how individuals with bodily differences used social media for their own affective-digital labour, the book suggests that an understanding of affect based on Freud and Anzieu is helpful when thinking about media use. The monograph also discusses the perverse implications of algorithms, big data and data mining for subjectivities. In drawing on empirical data and examples throughout, Johanssen presents a compelling analysis of our contemporary media environment.

Digital Media, Sharing and Everyday Life provides nuanced accounts of the processes of sharing in digital culture and the complexities that arise in them. The book explores definitions of sharing, and the roles that our digital devices and the platforms we use play in these practices. Drawing upon practice theory to outline a theoretical framework of sharing practice, the book emphasizes the need for a coherent and consistent framework of sharing in digital culture and explains what this framework might look like. With insightful descriptions, the book draws out the relationship of sharing to privacy and control, the labored strategies and boundaries of reciprocation, and our relationships with the technologies which mediate sharing practices. The volume is an essential read for researchers, postgraduate and undergraduate students in Media and Communication, New Media, Sociology, Internet Studies, and Cultural Studies.

This book offers critical perspectives on the digital ‘iconic’, exploring how the notion of the iconic is re-appropriated and re-made online, and the consequences for humanity and society. Examining cross-cultural case studies of iconic images in digital spaces, the author offers original and critical analyses, theories and perspectives on the notion of the ‘iconic’, and on its movement, re-appropriation and meaning making on digital platforms. A carefully curated selection of case studies illustrates topics such as phantom memory; martyrdom; denigration and pornographic recoding; digital games as simulacra; and memes as ‘artification’. Situating the notion of the iconic firmly within contemporary cultures, the author takes a thematic approach to investigate the iconic as an unstable and unfinished phenomenon online as it travels through platforms temporally and spatially. The book will be an important resource for academics and students in the areas of media and communications, digital culture, cultural studies, visual communication, visual culture, journalism studies and digital humanities.