New Technologies Of Communication Research Articles

Digital Government as Exponential Organization: New Technologies of Communication

The article explores the exponential transformation of the digital government. Exponential organizations are the common model of management that characterized by the use of the informatized environment, third-party resources and digital platforms to scale processes and create new markets. The digital government is a complex of institutions for structuring social relations and conflicts in a network environment. The coupling of exponential organization and digital government models is realized through the focus on technologies of communication that allow the exchange and integration of surrounding knowledge into the system of management. The article presents the typology of technologies of communication with external and internal communities depending on the type of environment (internal/external) and options of access (inclusive/exclusive). The typology systematizes technologies of communication and demonstrates its capabilities for solving various tasks, including involving new agents in the field of public policy, organizing access to institutions, creating/extracting value, reducing the cost of information exchange between management structures. Technologies of communication allow the government to move to the policy of identifying and interacting with the diversity of the environment. The effects of the introduction of these technologies are evaluated on the example of Estonia. In conclusion, it is possible to consider the digital government as the exponential organization due to the information connectivity of the system, but it is difficult to unambiguously conclude the explosive growth of the value creation/extraction due to the functioning of the state as a non-equilibrium adaptive system.

Identity Construction, Social Media, and Ifugao Rice Terraces Conservation of Indigenous People's Youth Through Appreciative Inquiry

Recognizing the important contribution of the indigenous people's (IP) youth towards the sustainable development and conservation of the internationally recognized Ifugao rice terraces (IRT) of the Philippines, the University of the Philippines Open University implemented a youth capacity building and exchange program among IP youth from Hungduan, Kiangan, Banaue and Mayaoyao rice terraces in the Ifugao province. The study conducted focus group discussions that included identity construction with physical co-presence and utilization of new communication technologies (NCTs) through the strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results of an appreciative inquiry approach (SOAR). Beliefs, ethnicity and values were three key identity construction factors. Need, talent, passion, and conscience were also included among the dimensions of identity construction. These findings were subsequently used in the design and construction of training course modules customized for IP youth from the IRT using the blended-mode of learning and practical activities such as video logs and memes in NCTs.

Social movement 2.0: integrating and assessing scholarship on social media and movement

ABSTRACTWith over five years of hindsight following historic protests around the world, we review scholarship published on “Social Movement 2.0” (SM2.0)—our shorthand for the convergence of Web 2.0 platforms and protest, movements, or other resistance activities. Initially, we review 97 articles as offering disparate assumptions concerning social movement, agency, and the relationship between humans and new communication technologies (NCTs). We suggest SM2.0 scholarship could benefit from following debates in social movement rhetoric and media ecology. Particularly, building upon rhetoricians’ critiques of traditional movement theory, we encourage scholars to amplify the constitutive meanings and identities created through NCTs in protest (rather than rely upon functional paradigms). Building upon media ecology scholarship, we critique SM2.0 analysis that leverages technological determinism or isolationism to address media’s power in social change. We feature instead scholarship that unpacks the relationship between media and the unique contexts in which protestors build networks of resistance. We call for greater complexity in scholarship at the intersections of movement and media.

Political Participation and New Technologies of Communication in Spain

The consolidation of the Internet as not only a media outlet, but also a multifunctional platform, has put into question the traditional relationship between media and political participation. The latest political developments in Spain, such as the 15-M movement or the success of Podemos, show that new technologies increase the options for new and fresh ways of political activism. This study provides a diagnosis of the role played by new technologies of communication, particularly the Internet, in political activism in Spain. The results show a noteworthy dissemination of the Internet as a political information source, as well as a platform to participate in politics. In addition, the analysis suggests that online participation is a phenomenon more popular among young people, with high studies and located on the ideological left. This profile is similar to that of citizens who support the new political forces like Podemos and the different citizens’ movements which are demanding a reconfiguration of the democratic system in Spain.

Digital Words of Wisdom? Milia (AppleTree), An Online Platform for Digital Storytelling

Abstract This paper introduces Milia (AppleTree), an open online platform for social interactive digital storytelling, which has been developed by the Laboratory of New Technologies in Communication, Education and the Mass Media, with the support of the University Research Institute of Applied Communication (URIAC) of the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies of the University of Athens. The Milia platform aims to support the representation, presentation and collaborative creation of any sort of stories in digital format. Applications of the platform can be found in storytelling per se, in education, in publishing and, more generally, in the creation and publication of collaborative digital works. The first part of the paper is focused on a state of the art review for digital storytelling platforms and discussion of some major challenges that these platforms are attempting to face. This review is followed by a second part, which discusses the technical features and functional capabilities of the Milia platform in detail, and a third part, which reports on applications of the platform that have already been realized and digital stories that are already available online. The paper is concluded with a discussion of limitations and directions of future work for the Milia platform.

Em direcção ao museu ubíquo: uma realidade ou ainda uma utopia?

In the present article, written as part of the doctoral researchthat I am conducting is intended to analyze the impact of newtechnologies of communication and information in the change ofthe communication paradigm of museum institutions, toprioritize one ubiquitous, participatory, and relevant museology. Keywords:Museology, social media participation, digital collections,communication

@hannah_arendt: An Arendtian Critique of Online Social Networks

New technologies in communications and networking have shaped the way political movements can be mobilised and coordinated in important ways. Recent uprisings have shown dramatically how a people can communicate its cause effectively beyond borders, through online social networking channels and mobile phone technologies. Hannah Arendt, as an eminent scholar of power and politics in the modern era, offers a relevant lens with which to theoretically examine the implications and uses of online social networks and their impact on politics as praxis. This article creates an account of how Arendt might have evaluated virtual social networks in the context of their potency to create power, spaces and possibilities for political action. With an Arendtian lens the article examines whether these virtual means of ‘shared appearances’ facilitate or frustrate efforts in the formation of political power and the creation of new beginnings. Based on a contemporary reading of her writings, the article concludes that Arendt’s own assessment of online social networks, as spheres for political action, would likely have been very critical.

Participatory culture in an emerging information ecosystem: Lessons from Ushahidi

The activities surrounding new communication technologies (NCTs), more than the technology itself, have introduced new perspectives in the field of media studies, especially with the intensification of audience participation. This participation is imbued with the potential to challenge dominant voices and national myths, alter the representation and meaning of symbols and vocabulary, and redefine politico-social structures into which the luminal rituals of the national have been interwoven, for the sole purpose of fostering national cohesion. But it is the universal nature of NCTs that has significantly imbued local cultures with a global consciousness, thus altering the previous global flow of information. By using Ushahidi – open source software for information gathering and interactive mapping, which started as a blog in Kenya and is now used across the globe – the study demonstrates NCTs’ efficacy in engendering multiplicity of alternative voices which do not necessarily flow from the global North.

Nowcasting: The Promise of New Technologies of Communication, Modeling, and Observation

Nowcasting combines a description of the current state of the atmosphere and a short-term forecast of how the atmosphere will evolve during the next several hours. A convergence of technical developments has set the stage for a major jump in nowcasting capabilities and the ability to apply those advances to important societal needs. New communications technologies, including broadband Internet, wireless communication, social media, and smartphones, have made the distribution and application of real-time weather information possible nearly anywhere. Rapid increases in the quantity and quality of surface, aircraft, and remote-sensing data now provide a real-time description of atmospheric conditions from the global to regional scales. Improved modeling and data assimilation offer the potential to more effectively apply mesoscale observations and to produce highresolution analyses and forecasts. Finally, improvements in communication, computation, and control have provided society with the ability to effecti...

Anthropology and the New Technologies of Communication

This article is a set of reflections on how a modern linguistic ideology of communication produces a fundamental misrecognition of the formation of the modern liberal subject as a naturally communicating subject. I explore the complex features of this misrecognition as a legacy of Cold War procedures of knowledge production about communication and technology to suggest that ethnographies of new technologies of communication unwittingly proliferate presumptions about the ontological integrity of the human prior to communication and prior to the advent of technologies of communication. This dilemma offers an alternative point of departure for the study of new technologies of communication in pursuit of a renewed, critical investigation into the circulation of modern cultural forms of intelligibility.

Spectacle and the Staging of Power in Brazilian Neo-Pentecostalism

New technologies of communication and a reconfigured global, political, and economic system at the turn of the twenty-first century undoubtedly alter the conditions and contexts in which religions have traditionally operated. In Brazil, urbanization, the retrenchment of the state, and the consolidation of a society of mass consumption are also part of this changing landscape, as are the social exclusion and violence that have intensified and accompanied this process. Secularization, including that of the Brazilian state, proceeds unabated, and the ranks of those without swell with every decade. More than the issue of its relevance to modern life, however, religion in contemporary Brazil contends with the problem of communication in a thoroughly media-dominated society. Over the past two decades, television in Brazil has emerged as an innovative arena for religious entrepreneurship and, in the slow erosion of Roman Catholicism as the dominant faith, is helping redefine the role and significance of religion in the public realm. This article foregrounds the drama and discourse of exorcism in Brazilian Pentecostal churches against the changing landscape of religious institutions and globalized social transformations. Along with the rise of religious broadcasting, exorcism, a thriving practice in many of the newer Pentecostal Christian denominations that preach a gospel of prosperity promising instant wealth and health, has gained importance in many churches. As spectacle and visible display, exorcism links ideas about self-transformation and empowerment with the universe of popular religious discourse. At the same time, the staging of power through this proselytic medium draws on and reworks a set of images that grounds Christian selfhood in the enactment of material and territorial connections of the church to the Holy Land. Exorcism is part of a broader project of evoking the universal transhistorical and deterritorialized power of Christian dominion in terms that speak directly to local cultural

Henry James and Theodora Bosanquet: On the typewriter, In the Cage, at the Ouija board

Through a reading of James' novella about a telegraph office, In the Cage,I show that James externalizes the possibility of intimate knowledgeof another person through the commercially and materially mediatedtransactions of the telegram. The erotics of the story, in which a young,working-class telegraphist constructs a relationship with an upper-classcustomer through her picture-perfect knowledge of his telegraphing habits,depend on a melding of commercial and sexual transactions which coalescearound the new forms of access to knowledge of others provided by newcommunication technologies and the workers who run them. These eroticsof the technological storehouse are also detectable in James' relationshipswith his secretaries to whom he dictated his work at the end of his life.I compare the mediated intimacy of In the Cage to the extensive automaticwritings of James' final secretary Theodora Bosanquet, a dedicatedpsychical researcher, who, after James' death, spent a great deal of timechannelling him as well as other literary figures. Specifically new forms ofcommercialization of intimacy, with precursors that encompass bothprostitution and paying mediums for seances, begin to gather force withthe revolution in communication technology at the end of the nineteenthcentury creating a new figure, the (primarily female) information worker,whose access to others' minds results in anxieties about the permeableboundaries of individual knowledge.

Internet as System and Environment in Cyberspace: Preliminary Ideas from an Ongoing Research

The paper discusses the applicability of a pair of concepts - System/Environment - to Internet and Cyberspace. A central point in the discussion is that the pair System/Environment should not be viewed as static analytical poles, but rather as dynamic and interchangeable elements, so that Internet can be conceived both as System and/or Environment, depending on the type of phenomenon one is observing. As a counterpoint to this proposition, the recurrent and “common-sense” notion of Internet as a new medium is presented and criticized. The article also discusses and puts under critical scrutiny the role usually assigned to Internet as a change catalyst or accelerator and the implicit or explicit acceptance of an evolutionary new step in social organization represented by the generalization of New Technologies of Communication. The paper is part of an ongoing research on Digital Cities and Local Networks and proposes some initial steps towards the construction of a model of interpretation based on systems analysis adapted to the particularities of Internet and Cyberspace. The research is anchored on observations of Digital Cities and Local Networks projects at Internet, with special attention to the Aveiro Digital City Project (Portugal).

Internet as System and Environment in Cyberspace: Preliminary Ideas from an Ongoing Research

The paper discusses the applicability of a pair of concepts - System/Environment - to Internet and Cyberspace. A central point in the discussion is that the pair System/Environment should not be viewed as static analytical poles, but rather as dynamic and interchangeable elements, so that Internet can be conceived both as System and/or Environment, depending on the type of phenomenon one is observing. As a counterpoint to this proposition, the recurrent and “common-sense” notion of Internet as a new medium is presented and criticized. The article also discusses and puts under critical scrutiny the role usually assigned to Internet as a change catalyst or accelerator and the implicit or explicit acceptance of an evolutionary new step in social organization represented by the generalization of New Technologies of Communication. The paper is part of an ongoing research on Digital Cities and Local Networks and proposes some initial steps towards the construction of a model of interpretation based on systems analysis adapted to the particularities of Internet and Cyberspace. The research is anchored on observations of Digital Cities and Local Networks projects at Internet, with special attention to the Aveiro Digital City Project (Portugal).