Download Free Digitally Enabled Social Change Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Digitally Enabled Social Change and write the review.

An investigation into how specific Web technologies can change the dynamics of organizing and participating in political and social protest. Much attention has been paid in recent years to the emergence of “Internet activism,” but scholars and pundits disagree about whether online political activity is different in kind from more traditional forms of activism. Does the global reach and blazing speed of the Internet affect the essential character or dynamics of online political protest? In Digitally Enabled Social Change, Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport examine key characteristics of web activism and investigate their impacts on organizing and participation. Earl and Kimport argue that the web offers two key affordances relevant to activism: sharply reduced costs for creating, organizing, and participating in protest; and the decreased need for activists to be physically together in order to act together. Drawing on evidence from samples of online petitions, boycotts, and letter-writing and e-mailing campaigns, Earl and Kimport show that the more these affordances are leveraged, the more transformative the changes to organizing and participating in protest.
Technology, Activism, and Social Justice in a Digital Age offers a close look at both the present nature and future prospects for social change. In particular, the text explores the cutting edge of technology and social change, while discussing developments in social media, civic technology, and leaderless organizations -- as well as more traditional approaches to social change. It effectively assembles a rich variety of perspectives to the issue of technology and social change; the featured authors are academics and practitioners (representing both new voices and experienced researchers) who share a common devotion to a future that is just, fair, and supportive of human potential. They come from the fields of social work, public administration, journalism, law, philanthropy, urban affairs, planning, and education, and their work builds upon 30-plus years of research. The authors' efforts to examine changing nature of social change organizations and the issues they face will help readers reflect upon modern advocacy, social change, and the potential to utilize technology in making a difference.
Digital, Political, Radical is a siren call to the field of media and communications and the study of social and political movements. We must put the politics of transformation at the very heart of our analyses to meet the global challenges of gross inequality and ever-more impoverished democracies. Fenton makes an impassioned plea for re-invigorating critical research on digital media such that it can be explanatory, practical and normative. She dares us to be politically emboldened. She urges us to seek out an emancipatory politics that aims to deepen our democratic horizons. To ask: how can we do democracy better? What are the conditions required to live together well? Then, what is the role of the media and how can we reclaim media, power and politics for progressive ends? Journeying through a range of protest and political movements, Fenton debunks myths of digital media along the way and points us in the direction of newly emergent politics of the Left. Digital, Political, Radical contributes to political debate on contemporary (re)configurations of radical progressive politics through a consideration of how we experience (counter) politics in the digital age and how this may influence our being political.
How small-scale drones, satellites, kites, and balloons are used by social movements for the greater good. Drones are famous for doing bad things: weaponized, they implement remote-control war; used for surveillance, they threaten civil liberties and violate privacy. In The Good Drone, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick examines a different range of uses: the deployment of drones for the greater good. Choi-Fitzpatrick analyzes the way small-scale drones--as well as satellites, kites, and balloons--are used for a great many things, including documenting human rights abuses, estimating demonstration crowd size, supporting anti-poaching advocacy, and advancing climate change research. In fact, he finds, small drones are used disproportionately for good; nonviolent prosocial uses predominate.
"The media has recently been abuzz with cases of citizens around the world using digital technologies to push for social and political change: from the use of Twitter to amplify protests in Iran and Moldova to the thousands of American non-profits creating Facebook accounts in the hopes of luring supporters. These stories have been published, discussed, extolled, and derided, but have not yet been viewed holistically as a new field of human endeavor. We call this field "digital activism" and its dynamics, practices, misconceptions, and possible futures are presented together for the first time in this book."--Pub. desc.
This book efficiently contributes to our understanding of the interplay between data, technology and communicative practice on the one hand, and democratic participation on the other. It addresses the emergence of proactive data activism, a new sociotechnical phenomenon in the field of action that arises as a reaction to massive datafication, and makes affirmative use of data for advocacy and social change. By blending empirical observation and in-depth qualitative interviews, Gutiérrez brings to the fore a debate about the social uses of the data infrastructure and examines precisely how people employ it, in combination with other technologies, to collaborate and act for social change.
This book examines the causes of a growing wave of digital activism across developing countries, arguing that it is driven by social change, rather than technological advancement alone. Beginning with an investigation into the modernization of ‘middle-income countries’ and its ramifications for political culture, the book examines large-scale social media protest during political controversies in Indonesia. The book connects empirical evidence to classic theories of value change and political behaviour. It departs from a narrow ‘digital divide’ framing whereby Internet access produces Internet activism. It introduces the concepts of ‘digital self-expression’ and of ‘middle-class struggles’ to capture the value-stratified nature of political engagement in the online sphere. Drawing on a blend of ‘big-data’ text analyses, representative opinion research, and socioeconomic household analyses, a rich picture of the determinants of digital activism emerges. This truly cross-disciplinary book will appeal particularly to students and scholars in Political Science, Sociology, International Development, and Communication, but also to anyone eager to learn about political activism, social transformation, and new media from a global perspective.
The internet has fundamentally transformed society in the past 25 years, yet existing theories of mass or interpersonal communication do not work well in understanding a digital world. Nor has this understanding been helped by disciplinary specialization and a continual focus on the latest innovations. Ralph Schroeder takes a longer-term view, synthesizing perspectives and findings from various social science disciplines in four countries: the United States, Sweden, India and China. His comparison highlights, among other observations, that smartphones are in many respects more important than PC-based internet uses. Social Theory after the Internet focuses on everyday uses and effects of the internet, including information seeking and big data, and explains how the internet has gone beyond traditional media in, for example, enabling Donald Trump and Narendra Modi to come to power. Schroeder puts forward a sophisticated theory of the role of the internet, and how both technological and social forces shape its significance. He provides a sweeping and penetrating study, theoretically ambitious and at the same time always empirically grounded.The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media and society, the internet and politics, and the social implications of big data.
Now in paperback for the first time, Social Movements and their Technologies explores the interplay between social movements and their 'liberated technologies'. It analyzes the rise of low-power radio stations and radical internet projects ('emancipatory communication practices') as a political subject, focusing on the sociological and cultural processes at play. It provides an overview of the relationship between social movements and technology, and investigates what is behind the communication infrastructure that made possible the main protest events of the past fifteen years. In doing so, Stefania Milan illustrates how contemporary social movements organize in order to create autonomous alternatives to communication systems and networks, and how they contribute to change the way people communicate in daily life, as well as try to change communication policy from the grassroots. She situates these efforts in a historical context in order to show the origins of contemporary communication activism, and its linkages to media reform campaigns and policy advocacy.
In chapters examining a broad range of issues—including sexuality, politics, education, race, gender relations, the environment and social protest movements—Digitized Lives argues that making sense of digitized culture means looking past the glossy surface of techno gear to ask deeper questions about how we can utilize technology to create a more socially, politically and economically just world. This second edition includes important updates on mobile and social media, examining how new platforms and devices have altered how we interact with digital technologies in an allegedly ‘post-truth’ era. A companion website (culturalpolitics.net/index/digital_cultures) includes links to online articles and useful websites, as well as a bibliography of offline resources, and more.