Megan Boler (ed.): Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (2008)

In an age of proliferating media and news sources, who has the power to define reality? When the dominant media declared the existence of WMDs in Iraq, did that make it a fact? Today, the “social web” (sometimes known as Web 2.0, groupware, or the participatory Web)—epitomized by blogs, viral videos, and YouTube—creates new pathways for truths to emerge and makes possible new tactics for media activism. In Digital Media and Democracy, leading scholars in media and communication studies, media activists, journalists, and artists explore the contradiction at the heart of the relationship between truth and power today: the fact that the radical democratization of knowledge and multiplication of sources and voices made possible by digital media coexists with the blatant falsification of information by political and corporate powers.

The book maps a new digital media landscape that features citizen journalism, The Daily Show, blogging, and alternative media. The contributors discuss broad questions of media and politics, offer nuanced analyses of change in journalism, and undertake detailed examinations of the use of Web-based media in shaping political and social movements. The chapters include not only essays by noted media scholars but also interviews with such journalists and media activists as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Media Matters host Robert McChesney, and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera.

Publisher MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262026422, 9780262026420
464 pages

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Google books

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Dale F. Eickelman, Jon W. Anderson (eds.): New Media in the Muslim World. The Emerging Public Sphere, 2nd ed. (2003)

This second edition of a widely acclaimed collection of essays reports on how new media—fax machines, satellite television, and the Internet—and the new uses of older media—cassettes, pulp fiction, the cinema, the telephone, and the press—shape belief, authority, and community in the Muslim world. The chapters in this work, including new chapters dealing specifically with events after September 11, 2001, concern Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, the Arabian Peninsula, and Muslim communities in the United States and elsewhere. The extent to which today’s new media have transcended local and state frontiers and have reshaped understandings of gender, authority, social justice, identities, and politics in Muslim societies emerges from this timely and provocative book.

Publisher Indiana University Press, 2003
Indiana series in Middle East studies
Edition 2
ISBN 0253216052, 9780253216052
213 pages

publisher
google books

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Mary Joyce (ed.): Digital Activism Decoded. The New Mechanics of Change (2010)

The media have 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 nonprofits creating Facebook accounts in the hopes of luring supporters.

These stories have been published, discussed, extolled, and derided, but the underlying mechanics of the practice of digital activism are little understood. This new field, its dynamics, practices, misconceptions, and possible futures are presented together for the first time in Digital Activism Decoded.

Topics include:
* how to think about digital activism
* the digital activism environment: infrastructure, social, political, and economic factors
* digital activism practices: two research perspectives and the danger of destructive activism
* digital activism’s value: balancing optimism and pessimism
* building the future of digital activism

Publisher: International Debate Education Association, New York, June 2010
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License BY-NC 3.0 US.
ISBN 978-1-932716-60-3
228 pages

Video from the book launch and discussion
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google books

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