Reorienting Digital Media Studies: Global and Comparative Perspectives

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Proposal

Abstract

In their edited volume Internationalizing Internet Studies: Beyond Anglophone Paradigms, Goggin and McLelland (2009) argued that the Internet cannot be understood as a ‘single phenomenon’ or emerging out of a ‘simple history’. The Internet, as a number of scholars have come to recognize, is better understood as a “mosaic of online regional cultures” that associate in complex and contingent ways with physical places. However, research on the internet and other digital media in the Global South has so far been concentrated in the often instrumentalist, intervention-driven subfield of ICT4D. This has precluded us from examining other uses of digital technology, such as leisure (cf. Arora 2012), or technologies that are not the result of development interventions. Furthermore, it has prevented us from a closer comparative analysis of uses of digital media across and within the Global North and South. This roundtable seeks to illuminate geographical regions that despite having among the fastest growing digital diffusion among non-western locations globally, do not feature centrally in accounts of digital media culture(s).


In many ways, the Global South has been at the forefront of important recent process of social, technological and political change. For example, inequalities have become more equally distributed across the globe. Political protests and declining levels of trust of citizens in government have become more widespread. The mobile internet and corporate social platforms are increasingly conditioning Internet use. Migration flows have intensified in most regions of the world. While these changes are beginning to impact the Global North, it could be argued that they were initiated in the Global South. Apart from comparisons across space and place, the field of digital media studies is increasingly reflecting on the question of time, with a growing caution about the ‘newness’ of digital media. Instead, scholars are beginning to emphasise the continuities between analogue and digital media, to situate digital media within a longer history of analogue media, and to highlight the similarities between audiences and users.


Against this background, this roundtable will explore the current state and future of comparative, interdisciplinary research in digital media studies across Latin America, South Asia, Southern Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. Furthermore, it examines the intersections of digital media studies with other fields such as media history, memory studies, technology and innovation studies, industry, production and labour research, postcolonial and diaspora studies, political communication and urban studies.

Sub Unit

• Popular Communication

Cosponsor

• Global Communication and Social Change

Chair

• Wendy Willems, London School of Economics and Political Science

Individual Presentations

• Provoking or Undergoing Change?: Digital Transformation and the Rise of the Social Media Internet - Wendy Willems, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Hacking Digital Universalism - Technological Futures and Networked Time at the Periphery - Anita Chan, U of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign

• Memory, Migration, and the Digital-Analogue Shift - Emily Keightley, Loughborough U

• The Photoshop State: Image Manipulation, Visual Culture, and Electoral Politics in Digital India - Sriram Mohan, U of Michigan

• Race, Migration and Epistemologies of the Digital - Madhavi Mallapragada, U of Texas at Austin

• When Was India Digital? Towards a History of Networked Publics - Aswin Punathambekar, U of Michigan, Ann Arbor