The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web (Framing the Global) - Hardcover

Kumar, Sangeet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253056470 ISBN 13: 9780253056474

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2021

Synopsis

The global web and its digital ecosystem can be seen as tools of emancipation, communication, and spreading knowledge or as means of control, fueled by capitalism, surveillance, and geopolitics.

The Digital Frontier interrogates the world wide web and the digital ecosystem it has spawned to reveal how their conventions, protocols, standards, and algorithmic regulations represent a novel form of global power. Sangeet Kumar shows the operation of this power through the web's "infrastructures of control" visible at sites where the universalizing imperatives of the web run up against local values, norms, and cultures. These include how the idea of the "global common good" is used as a ruse by digital oligopolies to expand their private enclosures, how seemingly collaborative spaces can simultaneously be exclusionary as they regulate legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is being redefined online along Eurocentric ideals, and how the web's political challenge is felt differentially by sovereign nation states.

In analyzing this new modality of cultural power in the global digital ecosystem, The Digital Frontier is an important read for scholars, activists, academics and students inspired by the utopian dream of a truly representative global digital network.

About this title

About the Author

Sangeet Kumar is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Communication Department at Denison University where he teaches and conducts research in the global dimensions of digital media platforms and culture. He also serves as the Director of the International Studies program at Denison. Prior to his academic career he briefly worked as a journalist with a leading Indian daily in New Delhi, India.

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253056470
• ISBN 13: 9780253056474
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 276