Age Of Digital Capitalism Research Articles

Comparative digital protest cultures in South Africa and Tamil Nadu: #feesmustfall, #Jallikattu, and Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) - a case of surveillance and diasporic potential

This paper explores three protest movements differing in scale and scope in two regions in the world. #feesmustfall (2015-2016) was a social media movement in South Africa to protest against prohibitive hikes in university fees. #Jallikattu (2017) was a social media movement in Tamil Nadu (India) to lift a ban imposed by the Supreme Court of India against an ancient cultural sport with bulls. Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) is a South African social media movement to raise issues related to shack dwellers. While there is literature focusing on these movements individually (Bosch 2016, Kalaiyarasan 2017, Mdlalose 2014), a comparative approach offers some alternate insights into how state power manifests in the age of digital capitalism. Habermas (1987, 1989) theorised the transformation of the public sphere and key to understanding how these publics contest existing power structures is his explication of authentic communicative action. Using Fuchs’s (2016) and Zuboff’s (2019) analyses of social media activism, we examine police brutality and surveillance in these three movements. The classical model of diaspora (Harutyunyan 2012) is introduced to show how it manifests in two of the protest movements, and contemporary notions of diaspora (Grossman 2019: 1265) are explored to see what they could offer to diverse protest cultures.

Totally Administered Heteronomy: Adorno on Work, Leisure, and Politics in the Age of Digital Capitalism

This paper aims to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Adorno’s thought for business ethicists working in the critical tradition by showing how his critique of modern social life anticipated, and offers continuing illumination of, recent technological transformations of capitalism. It develops and extrapolates Adorno’s thought regarding three central spheres of modern society, which have seen radical changes in light of recent technological developments: work, in which employee monitoring has become ever more sophisticated and intrusive; leisure consumption, in which the algorithmic developments of the culture industry have paved the way for entertainment products to dominate us; and political discourse, in which social media has exacerbated the anti-democratic tendencies Adorno warned of in the mid-twentieth century. We conclude by presenting, as a rejoinder to these developments, the contours of an Adornian ethics of resistance to the reification and dehumanisation of such developments.

Ibn Khaldûn and the Political Economy of Communication in the Age of Digital Capitalism

Ibn Khaldûn (1332–1406) was a philosopher, historian and sociologist. This paper asks: What elements of the Political Economy of Communication are there in Ibn Khaldûn’s work and how do they matter in digital capitalism? It presents relevant passages from Khaldûn’s main work Muqaddimah and points out parallels between the Muqaddimah and works in Political Economy, especially Karl Marx’s approach of the Critique of Political Economy. The comparison of Khaldûn to Marx is not an arbitrary choice. Several scholars have pointed out parallels between the two’s works with respect to general Political Economy. It, therefore, makes sense to, also, compare Khaldûn and Marx in the context of the Political Economy of Communication. The paper analyses the relevance of Khaldûn’s ideas in digital capitalism. Khaldûn’s works are situated in the context of media and communication theory, digital automation, Facebook, Google, labour in informational and digital capitalism, Amazon, the tabloid press, fake news and post-truth culture. The analysis shows that Khaldûn’s Muqaddimah is an early work in Political Economy that can and should inform our contemporary critical analysis of communication in society, communication in capitalism and class society, ideology and digital capitalism. What connects Marx and Khaldûn is that they were critical scholars who although living at different times in different parts of the world saw the importance of the analysis of class and communication. Their works can and should inform the Political Economy of Communication and the analysis of digital capitalism.

Multilingualism and AI: The Regimentation of Language in the Age of Digital Capitalism

This article examines the effects of commercial digital language technologies on the regimentation of language. Language technologies based on the exploitation of large data sets—from machine translation and automatic text generation to digital voice assistants—are a particular form of human-made sign practice in which traditional language norms interact with the affordances of digital devices and the capitalist interests of those who design them. Such sociotechnological practices construct language hierarchies within the realm of commercially based language technology and can shape both dominant discourses about language in society and epistemologies of language in linguistics. The article focuses on interrelationships between digital language technology and metasemiotic interpretations of language that pertain to multilingualism, language variation, and language prestige. It examines languages as discursive constructs and reviews the role of media technology in shaping language ideology, showing that writing and print have had a crucial impact on modern language concepts. It draws on expert discourse and qualitative interviews with programmers and users and examines ideological effects of digital language technology and the potential epistemological reconfigurations of concepts of language that may emerge as a result.

On The Mismatch Between The Form and Content of Modern Science in The Era of Digital Capitalism

Importance. The text is devoted to presenting the author's vision of the solution to a topical problem for modern social sciences – the representation of the dialectics of being of "transformed" forms based on the mismatch of form and content of science in the era of digital capitalism. Objectives. The research purpose is to investigate and systematize the main aspects of the theory of "transformed" forms in relation to science in the epoch of digital capitalism development which is based on the dissonance of form and content. Methods. The presented research is based on the cognitive potential of the dialectical method, the method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete, supplemented by some elements of the formational approach, which allowed to qualitatively determine and fix the systemic features and contradictions between the form and content of the modern sphere of science, as applied to the phase of being of digital capitalism.Results. The system of arguments that the contradictions between the form and content of the modern science sphere are nothing but a dialectical contradiction between the real and "transformed" form is given in the paper. In addition, the notions of "transformed" form and the "age of digital capitalism" are specified in relation to the stated subject of research. The main forms of "transformations" in the system of economic relations, as applied to the period of digital capitalism, are shown. Conclusions and Importance. The conclusion of the presented research systematizes the main results in relation to the solution of the stated goal, which in the future may become the scientific and methodological basis for subsequent research work on the evolution of complex weakly structured quasiobjects and macrosystems.

Mental health in universities in an age of digital capitalism: The United Kingdom as exemplary case

Student mental health and wellbeing is a focus of great attention and concern. While research is increasingly investigating institutional factors that might affect mental health and wellbeing, university infrastructures and frameworks themselves are rarely considered. This Short Communication takes the United Kingdom as an exemplary case to outline the implementation and intensified use of digital technologies, infrastructures, and data, as well as the expansion of new relationships between universities and other (often corporate) entities. We outline the need for greater scrutiny and deliberation concerning: (i) gaps in evidence and evaluation; (ii) uncertainty regarding how systematically students are being consulted; and (iii) broader implications of these new markets and data uses. These approaches are influencing conceptualisations of student mental health and wellbeing, and affecting which actors and which tools are measuring and intervening in students’ mental health. Many ethical, political and clinical issues are raised by such approaches: they deserve greater critical attention from all in mental health.

Media Education in the Digital Age: An Interview with David Buckingham

This interview retraces and broadens some of the key concepts that Professor David Buckingham highlighted during his lecture Media and cultural education in the age of digital capitalism that he gave at the conference DAMS. Ieri, Oggi e Domani (April 22-24th, 2021) organized within the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the Drama, Art and Music Studies program (DAMS) at the University of Bologna. David Buckingham is an internationally recognized leading expert on children's and young people's interactions with electronic media, and on media literacy education. He was the founder and director of the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media and has been a consultant for UNESCO, the United Nations, Unicef, the European Commission, Ofcom, and the UK government for several years.

Platform NHS: Reconfiguring a Public Service in the Age of Digital Capitalism

The platform is emerging as a key organizational form and operational logic of contemporary capitalism, intimately tied to financialization and assetization. However, discussions to date have focused on platforms and platformization in the context of the private, corporate, and technology sectors. In this paper, we develop an analysis of how platformization operates in the context of public policy. Using the UK’s National Health Service as a case study, we explore how platformization is altering the form and function of the state. The platformization of the NHS has its roots in the UK government’s strategic interest in the development of the bioeconomy. This led to the creation of a research infrastructure within the health service. Subsequently, the NHS has leveraged various assets into a range of data- and technology-focused initiatives. We argue that platformization has been a major form of neoliberalization within the NHS. The paper concludes with a discussion of what an analysis of public platformization can teach us about ongoing transformations of the state.

Making translations, translating Making

Shared spaces dedicated to digital fabrication such as Fablabs and Makerspaces, together with co-working spaces and start-ups incubators, are said to contribute to the sociospatial reconfiguration of work in digital urban economies characterised by sharing practices and self-organization. However, part of the academic literature on the topic partially reproduces the representations of Makers provided by the mainstream discourse developed by tech-gurus and consultants, which understand them as entrepreneurial innovators. Moreover, when Making is analysed as a new form of work, its spatial dimensions are identified either in the city or in the organisation in which Makers gather, considering both as bounded containers. To offer a more nuanced conceptualisation of Makers’ work and arguing that Making as a new, heterogeneous form of value production entails different spatialities, the paper claims for analyses that start from a practical, relational, and more-than-human understanding of what Makers do. Drawing on a recent post-structuralist strand in economic geography and mobilising an Actor-Network sensibility, the article claims for an approach to the study of Makers and Fablabs as economic phenomena that goes beyond understanding them as part of a new urban infrastructure of workplaces targeting self-organised, entrepreneurial, yet collaborative individuals in the age of digital capitalism. Through the ethnographic study of a community of Makers that gather around the main Fablab of the post-industrial Italian city Turin, the paper shows how heterogeneous actor-networks translate Making as a form of value production in multiple and contingent ways, in which the distinction between production and reproduction is variously challenged.

Engels@200: Friedrich Engels and Digital Capitalism. How Relevant Are Engels’s Works 200 Years After His Birth?

This paper takes Friedrich Engels 200th birthday on 28 November 2020 as occasion to ask: How relevant are Friedrich Engels’s works in the age of digital capitalism? It shows that Engels class-struggle oriented theory can and should inform 21st century social science and digital social research.
 Based on a reading of Engels’s works, the article discusses how to think of scientific socialism as critical social science today, presents a critique of computational social science as digital positivism, engages with foundations of digital labour analysis, the analysis of the international division of digital labour, updates Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England in the age of digital capitalism, analyses the role of trade unions and digital class struggles in digital age, analyses the social murder of workers in the COVID-19 crisis, engages with platform co-operatives, digital commons projects and public service Internet platforms are concrete digital utopias that point beyond digital capital(ism). Engels’s analysis is updated for critically analysing the digital conditions of the working class today, including the digital labour of hardware assemblers at Foxconn and Pegatron, the digital labour aristocracy of software engineers at Google, online freelance workers, platform workers at capitalist platform corporations such as Uber, Deliveroo, Fiverr, Upwork, or Freelancer, and the digital labour of Facebook users. Engels’s 200th birthday reminds us of the class character of digital capitalism and that we need critical digital social science as a new form of scientific socialism.

Engels@200: Friedrich Engels in the Age of Digital Capitalism. Introduction.

This piece is the introduction to the special issue “Engels@200: Friedrich Engels in the Age of Digital Capitalism” that the journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique published on the occasion of Friedrich Engels’s 200th birthday on 28 November 2020.
 The introduction introduces Engels’s life and works and gives an overview of the special issue’s contributions.

Engels@200: Friedrich Engels in the Age of Digital Capitalism. (Full Issue in One PDF)

The journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique’s special issue “Engels@200: Friedrich Engels in the Age of Digital Capitalism” was published on the occasion of Engels’s 200th anniversary. It consists of eleven articles that outline the relevance of Engels’s works and thought for the critical analysis of digital capitalism and show the relevance of Engels in the 21st century. In an episode of the tripleC podcast that accompanies the special issue, Christian Fuchs introduces the relvance of Engels for the critical analysis of digital capitalism: https://www.podbean.com/eu/pb-gizhy-f336e9

The Political Economy of Working-Class Social Media Commerce: Digital Capitalism and the Engelsian Concept of Working-Class “Property”

Social Media platforms, from being simply a mode of communication, have, recently, evolved into digital “marketplaces”, which have been facilitating the exchange of commodities within the working-class. In addition to the digitalisation of the medium of exchange value creation, which gives the worker a certain amount of regulated autonomy, this has also reinvigorated the debate about owning property and its utilisation for credit and profit generation by the working-class. The term, ‘Property’ in the paper, is not restricted to only real estate property but encompasses everything which has the potential to generate an exchange value for its owner. The paper generalises Engels’s ideas about property owned by the workers from two of his major works, “The Housing Question” and “The Condition of the Working-Class in England” and uses the same to analyse the political economy and growing popularity of social media- based commerce among the working-class. Through data collected from the university town of Dunedin in Aotearoa New Zealand, a town with an extensive and established system of social media-based commerce, the paper puts forward the relevance of the Engelsian critique of the idea of uplifting the working-class simply by giving them control over the possession of property, in the age of digital capitalism. In doing so, the present paper talks about how digital capitalism utilises social media and its associated platforms for commercial exchange to keep the cycle of accumulation in the capitalist social system intact by further exploiting the working-class.

Towards a critical theory of communication as renewal and update of Marxist humanism in the age of digital capitalism

AbstractThis paper's task is to outline some foundations of a critical, Marxist‐humanist theory of communication in the age of digital capitalism. It theorises the role of communication in society, communication and alienation, communication in social struggles, social struggles for democratic communication, the contradictions of digital capitalism, and struggles for digital socialist humanism.Marxist humanism is a counter‐narrative, counter‐theory, and counter‐politics to neoliberalism, new authoritarianism, and postmodernism. A critical theory of communication can should draw on this intellectual tradition. Communication and work stand in a dialectical relationship. Communication mediates, organises and is the process of the production of sociality and therefore of the reproduction of society. Society and communication are in class and capitalist societies shaped by the antagonism between instrumental and co‐operative reason. Authoritarianism and humanism are two basic, antagonistic modes of organisation of society and communication. Instrumental reason creates and universalises alienation.Digital capitalism is a dimension of contemporary society where digital technologies such as the computer, the Internet, the mobile phone, tablets, robots, and AI‐driven (“smart”) technologies mediate the accumulation of capital, influence, and reputation. A Marxist‐humanist theory of communication aims to inform struggles for a good, commons‐based, public Internet in a good, commons‐based society that has a vivid, democratic public sphere.

Epilogue: Rethinking digital literacy: Media education in the age of digital capitalism

Advocates of digital education have increasingly recognized the need for young people to acquire digital media literacy. However, this idea is often seen in instrumental terms, and is rarely implemented in any coherent or comprehensive way. This paper suggests that we need to move beyond a binary view of digital media as offering risks and opportunities for young people, and the narrow ideas of digital skills and internet safety to which it gives rise. The article propose that we should take a broader and more critical approach to the rise of ‘digital capitalism’, and to the ubiquity of digital media in everyday life. In this sense, the paper argue that the well-established conceptual framework and pedagogical strategies of media education can and should be extended to meet the new challenges posed by digital and social media.This article presents some reflections as an epigraph of the special issue "Digital learning: distraction or default for the future", whose final result has allowed us to group a set of critical research and analysis on the inclusion of digital technologies in educational contexts. The points of view presented in this epigraph is also developed in more detail in the book "The Media Education Manifesto" (Buckingham, 2019).

History and Class Consciousness 2.0: Georg Lukács in the age of digital capitalism and big data

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the relevance of Georg Lukács’ 1923 book History and Class Consciousness in the context of digital capitalism. It does so by analysing how Lukács’ concepts of the dialectic of subject and object, ideology, reification, reified consciousness matter today in the context of big data and digital capitalism. The essay shows that History and Class Consciousness’ critique of reification, ideology, and reified consciousness remains highly topical in the age of digital capitalism and big data. Lukács’ analysis allows us to critically analyse how social media, big data, and various other Internet technologies are used as tools of reification. At the same time, Lukács reminds us that only human praxis can establish alternatives.

Review of Christian Fuchs (2019). Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism

Title of paper: Review of Christian Fuchs (2019). Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism

Lying in an age of digital capitalism

Now may be a very good time to be liar. In public, lies appear to be exposed almost as a matter of course, but liars rarely seem to face any consequences; hidden from view, authors of material on m...

Gazing at “Fetishes” 2.0: Using the Spectacle Concept to Understand Consumer Cultures in the Age of Digital Capitalism

This paper argues that Debord’s La Société du Spectacle was a syncretism of contemporary US criticism of the consumer society and the power of the image and of the Marxist tradition. First it elucidates the notion of commodity fetishism for Marx and Debord’s détournement of it. It then establishes the connection between the history of consumer cultures, in terms of their visual dimension, with that of production systems. Then Debord’s development of the notion of spectacle is analyzed as a typical critique of Fordism. Finally, the paper addresses the relevance of the concept of spectacle in the post-Fordist digital era.

Book Review: Knowledge in the Age of Digital Capitalism: An Introduction to Cognitive Materialism by Mariano Zukerfeld

Rainer E. Zimmermann reviews Mariano Zukerfeld's Knowledge in the Age of Digital Capitalism. An Introduction to Cognitive Materialism, University of Westminster Press, London, 2017, 272 pp., paperback and open access, gratis e-book. There are several aspects of innovative thoughts in this text as to recent developments, in particular concerning the manifold occasions of more or less hidden layers of exploitation originating in the use of digital technology, and mainly based on un-remunerated activities. All this speaks very much in favour of reading this book; only minor objections have to be made that should not prevent a profitable reading.