In his writings from the post-war period, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan contended that it is through the “electronics that we have discovered that we live in a global village.”1 With electronics, he argues, “any marginal area can become center, and marginal experiences can be had at any center.”2 But how can we expand––and also complicate––the collective understanding of the socioeconomic potentials of satellite technologies designed to provide educational experiences for those who have historically been at the margins of information access?
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Published on September 9th, 2020Written by Abid Adonis Figure 1. European Union flag. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons) In the last four years, “digital sovereignty” has turned into a new prominent talking point between the European Union (EU) policy makers. The EU has been unprecedentedly vocal about the importance of international […]
Published on August 14th, 2020A letter signed by more than 350 media and communication scholars to TV Network CEOs, as well as commissioners with the Federal Communications Commission, was covered in Los Angeles Times and The Hill. The letter was started by professors Anna Everett (UC Santa Barbara) and Lisa […]
Published on August 13th, 2020Lisa Parks and Rachel Thompson published a peer-reviewed article, “The Slow Shutdown: Information and Internet Regulation in Tanzania From 2010 to 2018 and Impacts on Online Content Creators” in the International Journal of Communication in August 2020. An abstract is provided below and the full pdf is available […]
Published on August 5th, 2020Written by Stéphane Couture The notion of sovereignty as it is applied to the digital has been increasingly used in recent years. The notion of “data sovereignty” in particular was almost nonexistent before 2011 while it is now part of academic and public discourse. The dominant […]
Published on July 2nd, 2020Written by Daniel Carter Download the zine Cable TV Infrastructures: A Glossary of Illegal Access here. Figure 1. Sketch based on photo posted to reddit.com/cablefail. Source: Cable TV infrastructures: A glossary of illegal access I started thinking about creating the attached zine, Cable TV Infrastructures: A […]
Published on July 1st, 2020Written by Lianrui Jia The coronavirus has toppled any kind of normalcy that we are used to. It also laid bare the failures of our digital technologies. Tech companies are scrambling to make statements on changes in the operating system that enables contact tracing technologies, while […]
Published on July 1st, 2020Written by Casey Lynch I arrived in Barcelona in 2016 with the intention of studying the city’s world-famous “smart city” program. Since at least 2011, the municipal government had worked to establish a global reputation for itself as a premier smart city, forming partnerships with Cisco, […]
Published on June 23rd, 2020Written by Stanislav Budnitsky On a cloudy afternoon in June 2017, I landed in Estonia’s capital Tallinn to attend the tenth annual European Dialogue on Internet Governance. As I made my way through the airport, I passed large advertisements depicting Estonia as “Positively Surprising” and identifying […]