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 andits digital ecosystem can be seen as tools of emancipation, communication, andspreading knowledge or as means of control, fueled by capitalism, surveillance,and geopolitics.
 
The Digital Frontierinterrogates the world wide web and the digital ecosystem it has spawned toreveal how their conventions, protocols, standards, and algorithmic regulationsrepresent a novel form of global power. Sangeet Kumar shows the operation of thispower through the web's "infrastructures of control" visible at siteswhere the universalizing imperatives of the web run up against local values,norms, and cultures. These include how the idea of the "global commongood" is used as a ruse by digital oligopolies to expand their privateenclosures, how seemingly collaborative spaces can simultaneously beexclusionary as they regulate legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is beingredefined online along Eurocentric ideals, and how the web's political challengeis felt differentially by sovereign nation states.
 
In analyzing this new modality of cultural power in theglobal digital ecosystem, The Digital Frontier is an important read forscholars, activists, academics and students inspired by the utopian dream of atruly 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