Digital Media and Society: Transforming Economics, Politics and Social Practices

Citation

Lyn Gorman (2015), "Digital Media and Society: Transforming Economics, Politics and Social Practices", Online Information Review, Vol. 39 No. 3, pp. 438-439. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2015-0122

Interestingly, Andrew White has been based at the University of Nottingham’s China campus at Ningbo whilst writing this three-part book on the impact of digital media on politics, the economy and social practices. He notes that, living in China, he is in some ways “information-impoverished”, but he is ideally placed to provide insights into Chinese digital media use at points in this book.

Part 1 focuses on implications of developments in digital media for the sense of the public and the private in modern societies. White examines disturbing implications of Google’s massive digitisation project (c.32 million books) against the long-range historical backdrop of information gathering at the (Greek) library at Alexandria. He provides theoretical background, remedying what he sees as a flaw in Habermas’ work on the public sphere, by discussing, as well as mass media, memory institutions such as libraries, archives, museums and universities and their importance in constructing knowledge. He considers possible dangers in corporations holding scholarly information and the way in which digital media have “refashioned traditional methods of scholarly research”. Chapters follow on “the role of social media in altering how we think about individual identity”, the relationship between the public and private spheres and the extent to which traditional conceptions have been challenged. He argues for the continuing importance of the liberal democratic nation-state and the public as “still the most credible normative model for conceptualising political activity within it”.

Part 2, on the digital economy, covers the impact of digital media on both the global economy and national economic strategies. White presents concepts of post-industrialism and global economics through the work of theorists (Daniel Bell, David Harvey and Manuel Castells, among others); he looks at the “financialization of the world economy”, the growth of the creative industries and key features of “the new economy” (open source, connectivity, more transparency, lower barriers to entry). Observing that (particularly middle-class) salaries in developed/industrialised countries have probably stagnated, he looks at work in the digital economy and who makes money and considers the global financial crisis of 2012 (as well as earlier financial phenomena such as the dotcom crash of 1999-2000); he concludes with a critique of the four features of the new economy identified earlier.

Part 3 reflects on “the importance of the user in contemporary digital media research”. White summarises earlier theories of media use – instrumentalism, technological determination – and more sophisticated approaches to the interaction between media technologies and the social (e.g., Van Loon’s concepts of “enframing” and “binding-use”, Postman’s view that the acceptance of technologies circumscribes human agency). He includes sections on the effect of proliferating digital media on the practice of reading (informed by the work of Ong and McLuhan on “secondary orality”) and problems in reading hypertext; and he emphasises how difficult it is to theorise digital media use and goes on to focus on present practices in the final three chapters.

The first examines new social movements: “the Californian ideology”, growth of the Internet, popularising the ideas of the Zapatistas in the mid-1990s, anti-WTO protests at Seattle in 1999, the G20 protest in London in 2009 and the 2008 US presidential election, concluding with “tactical media and hacktivism” and “the multitude, G20 and Obama”. The second focuses on surveillance and the role of databases in contemporary society, including reviews of relevant theorists’ work (e.g., Foucault, Deleuze), surveillance in practice (by the state, bottom-up and corporate), with White providing both negative and positive perspectives. The third chapter has a different focus, the developing world, with theoretical context (sections on orientalism, cultural imperialism and the mass media) and practical consideration of the digital divide and global Internet governance. White emphasises the importance of use in analysing the digital divide. He concludes with examples of cultural imperialism in reverse, when developing countries export expertise, offering Kenya’s Ushahidi as “an example par excellence of how the innovative use of available technologies can go some way to overcoming the digital divide”.

The Epilogue highlights “the most distinctive ways in which digital media exert influence in the political, economic and social spheres”. Media use after the Boston marathon bombing in 2013 is the example. The book includes a list of abbreviations and acronyms, chapter notes, a 21-page bibliography and an index.

White’s book provides a compact examination of a rapidly evolving area, surveying a wealth of relevant literature in readable style, demonstrating effective “sign-posting” and summarising, relating theory to practice through interesting examples, including occasional glimpses of the author’s personal experience. Readers may wish for, and other authors may include, more on topics in this multifaceted field, for example online shopping, cybercrime, pornography; and some readers may seek more than a chapter on the developing world. Nonetheless, White’s work can be recommended to students and teachers and anyone with a serious interest in the development and influence of digital media in recent decades.