Andrew Culp and Cultural Studies Association’s New Media and Digital Cultures Working Group Co-Chair Claudia Skinner take a look into Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake’s new book Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement: In Search of the Opt-Out Button, published by University of Westminster Press (2022). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Tero Karppi.
Keyword: digital media
Review of The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom by Jessa Lingel (University of California Press)
What could we discover about the forces shaping the internet, and what could we learn about how to fight back against those forces if we committed to the metaphor of gentrification? In The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom, Jessa Lingel shows that gentrification can be a useful lens through which to expose how power and class play out in online space. In a moment of increasing techno-skepticism, The Gentrification of the Internet offers a starting point for action, grounded in the reality of urban gentrification activism with proven results.
Review of Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures by André Brock, Jr. (New York University Press)
In Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, interdisciplinary scholar André Brock, Jr. offers a timely and powerful examination of Blackness in the digital age. The book centers Black technology use from Black perspectives and investigates the online distribution of Black discourses. In six exploratory chapters, Brock reconceptualizes Black technoculture in a way that corrects deficit models of Black digital practice.