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As markets for networked digital transmissions became increasingly lucrative, and as new technologies have been gradually substituting in for traditional mass-media channels such as radio and television, the copyright issues involved began to become pressing. Perhaps the most important milestone in the development of communication rights in recent years was the conclusion of the 1996 WIPO Treaties and the exclusive communication and “making-available” rights they introduced. This chapter discusses the shift from traditional broadcasting media and other forms of analog communications to digital communication and the legal change it brought with it.

This epilogue returns to the question of how studying the impact of digital information and communication on contemporary news journalism brings into focus a parallel legacy of digital mediation and digital thinking in anthropology. It first explores the concept of “digital reason” through Sigmund Freud, examining how digital thinking has seeped into the foundations of epistemic activity in anthropology and the human sciences; indeed in discovering the ways that it has informed entire theoretical paradigms and analytical styles without disclosing its true intuitive basis. It then turns to the mechanization of computation in the early twentieth-century which led to the information theory. The theory paved the way for a new phase in the industrialization of computation and communication. The chapter concludes with a discussion of when the first signs of digital reason become visible in anthropological knowledge and how this eventually led to the study of the informatics preconscious.

This chapter works towards creating a general portrait of the state of news journalism today. Following Raymond Williams's analysis of the historical transformation of forms of electronic mediation, it offers five reflections on how news journalism has been impacted both by the development and institutionalization of digital communication and information technology, and by the intensified legitimation of late and neoliberal worldviews in the past quarter century. It discusses in particular how the rebalancing of the radial and lateral potentialities of electronic communication with the institutionalization of the Internet and the popularization of mobile telephony has massively impacted and destabilized the mid-twentieth-century regime of news journalism.

This introductory chapter discusses how digitalization transformed photojournalism. Digitalization refers to the way many domains of social life, including journalism and military operations, are “restructured around digital communication and media infrastructures.” Photojournalism was transformed not only by digital cameras, online distribution, and the digitization of analog archives, but also by the significant institutional and cultural changes that digitalization enabled. Another manifestation of digitalization was the change in the very nature of the “photojournalism community.” Amateur digital images such as the Abu Ghraib photos and cell-phone pictures of the 2005 London bombings, rather than the work of professional photojournalists, were the key images that shaped public opinion. Moreover, images in the press, from photographs to cartoons, were not just illustrative of current events but often also newsworthy themselves or even factors in causing events, thereby playing a critical and highly controversial part in political and military action.

This introductory chapter briefly examines the practices, institutions, and implications of newsmaking at a time that is equally imprinted by the hegemony of neoliberal politics and worldviews brought about by the diverse institutionalization of digital communications technology. News journalists of today are engaged in the process of redefining their senses of agency, expertise, and authority given the new ecology of forces. The chapter suggests that digital news is an interlinked constellation of differently scaled nodes (organizations) that interact via variously sized and speeded channels to connect a galaxy of newsmakers and news users. It concludes with a discussion of the methods used in the book's study and an explanation of why Germany was chosen as the center of study.

This chapter assesses the current social innovation moment, looking at the potential impact of digital communications tools on organizing. Digital communications tools help build weak ties, decentralize communication and engagement, help communicate norms (both good and bad), strengthen the ability of the members of a network to coordinate their efforts, offer new modes of engagement, increase and amplify network effects, and facilitate effective crowdsourcing. In theory at least, one can see that these digital tools, and the capacities they create, likely can enhance the ability to create social capital and solve collective action problems. The chapter then analyzes the West Virginia teachers' strike of 2018, examining it in light of the capacities that new tools—like the Internet, social media, and mobile technologies—offer for building and strengthening movements. The West Virginia teachers found social media an efficient tool for organizing rallies, protests, and other activities throughout the state. Thus, one of the greatest strengths of digital tools seems to be their capacity to assist their users to coordinate action.

As the labor market continues to evolve, how will deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) people adapt to changes in the workplace and take advantage of new employment opportunities, careers, and entrepreneurship? Although much is known about DHH individuals’ employment, job/career satisfaction, and the related financial benefits of increased education, there is also the DHH dilemma of being educated and employed, but limited in career growth. What factors influence educational attainment, employment, career growth, and entrepreneurship? More important, workplace communication must go beyond access considerations to DHH individuals’ personal responsibility and initiative to adapt communicatively with coworkers, management, and different customer or client target audiences. In the 21st-century work reality, there are a number of current drivers for DHH entrepreneurship, but also a DHH disconnect between entrepreneurial desire and reality. Will the continued expansion of digital business, technologies, and online marketing provide DHH people increased job opportunities? All these topics are examined.

This chapter explores how convergent new media technologies can connect cultural heritage institutions to new audiences through community cocreation programs using a framework called “Digital Cultural Communication.” It argues that this connection requires not only the provision of convergent technology infrastructure, but also that cultural heritage institutions take into account the audience’s familiarity with new literacies, along with supply and demand within the target cultural sector. To establish this framework successfully, the chapter looks at how cultural heritage institutions can seek to expand curatorial missions from exhibitions of collections to the remediation of cultural narratives and experiences.

The Chattering Mind is less a history of ideas than a book in search of a usable past. It is at once a genealogy of learned discourse on the practice of everyday talk, and, at its furthest reaches, an effort to reclaim this genealogy as an important conceptual foundation for ongoing discussions of collective life in the digital age. In service to this argument, this introductory chapter distinguishes the high-modern practice of everyday talk from the early-modern art of conversation, defining former as unwitting, habitual, involuntary, automated, recursive, and machinelike. But these are not its only characteristics.As Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan were all careful to insist, everyday talk also paves the way for alternate, more resolved ways of speaking, thinking, and being with others. Contrary to popular interpretations of their work, all three of these renowned social theorists were convinced and committed to showing that there is more to everyday talk than alienation, inauthenticity, and the corruption of modern selves. Indeed, for Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan, everyday talk was the proving ground, not the killing field, of genuine subjectivity. And so it remains today, this introductory chapter suggests.

In the early Internet, art history crossed the path of media history and both disciplines conveyed characteristics of each other. Net (based) art did not regain the utopian potential of art, but its social, aesthetic and conceptual approach referenced the future role of digital communication. This chapter documents and examines the role of the art network THE THING in early digital communication and art practice and how it anticipated the future potential to communicate, distribute, and produce. Including the theory and practice that informed the founding of THE THING, as well as an interview with THE THING founder, Wolfgang Staehle, and a concluding timeline of THE THING's history, this chapter also emphasizes how THE THING was both playful and far ahead of its time.

This chapter considers expressions of prejudice that persist in the movement. The virtual ekklesia has allowed people to create enclaves based on highly idiosyncratic interests, such as the End Times, because the Internet allows them to locate each other without reference to geographic location. As a result, digital communication technologies enable them to create virtual communities that foster beliefs that more diverse communities would reject. However, when a group of believers can express intolerance without facing resistance, prejudices can persist. If radical certainty fuels those views with a self-sealing ideology, people may cling to them even when doing so does them harm. They risk being harmed if they retain these beliefs at the cost of alienating themselves from the values that support mainstream discourse.

This chapter reports on the design and implementation of cross-disciplinary research methods for investigating technology adoption in later life as well as family and life course dynamics. Drawing on a mixed methods, action research project on technology and social connectedness, facilitated by a team of sociologists and human–computer interaction (HCI) researchers, it examines the use of a digital communication technology to study social isolation and loneliness in later life. The chapter first provides an overview of the deployment and feasibility design of the study, the deployment stages and procedures, data analysis and participants before discussing the lessons learned. It concludes with an assessment of the challenges and opportunities of cross-disciplinary and mixed-method research to study technologies, families, and the life course. One of the ways that cross-disciplinary mixed methods approaches can enhance family and life course studies is by capturing the immediacy of life transitions.

Within the context of a rapidly changing educational landscape, this chapter addresses issues around the teaching of the history of English to non-traditional students via online and multimedia platforms. It uses as a case study the video series “The History of English in Ten Minutes”—a ten-part animation series broadcast via YouTube and iTunesU—as a means of examining how pedagogical approaches which use new media resources can actively engage large, often non-traditional student audiences. The chapter reviews the design, production, and dissemination of these teaching materials and the implications of their reception and uptake for contemporary pedagogical approaches to the history of English.

This chapter highlights the populist strains in the 2008 campaigns and connects them to the nation's long history of politics “for the people.” When “Joe the Plumber” heckled Obama in Toledo, when Clinton hoisted a brew at a bar in Indiana, when Palin proudly introduced herself to the nation as a “hockey mom,” they were participating in a tradition of populist electoral appeals that can be traced back to the Whig Party's “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign of 1840. Though populist campaigning took a digital turn in 2008 with the emergence of campaigning via interactive digital communications technologies, this chapter concludes that, as in the past, the populist rhetoric of the 2008 campaigns often had very little to do with policies that promoted the greatest good for the greatest number.