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

Publisher
Google books

PDF (updated on 2014-8-29)

Michel Foucault: Fearless Speech (2001–) [EN, TR]

“Comprised of six lectures delivered, in English, by Michel Foucault while teaching at Berkeley in the Fall of 1983, Fearless Speech was edited by Joseph Pearson and published in 2001. Reviewed by the author, it is the last book Foucault wrote before his death in 1984 and can be read as his last testament. Here, he positions the philosopher as the only person able to confront power with the truth, a stance that boldly sums up Foucault’s project as a philosopher.

Still unpublished in France, Fearless Speech concludes the genealogy of truth that Foucault pursued throughout his life, starting with his investigations in Madness and Civilization, into the question of power and its technology. The expression “fearless speech” is a rough translation of the Greek parrhesia, which designates those who take a risk to tell the truth; the citizen who has the moral qualities required to speak the truth, even if it differs from what the majority of people believe and faces danger for speaking it.

‘Parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth through frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.'”

Edited by Joseph Pearson
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2001
Foreign Agents series
ISBN 1584350113, 9781584350118
183 pages

Publisher

Fearless Speech (English, 2001, no OCR; updated on 2012-12-30)
Doğruyu Söylemek (Turkish, trans. Kerem Eksen, 2005/2012, added on 2014-5-19, via)

Robert Hassan: Empires of Speed. Time and the Acceleration of Politics and Society (2009)

The beginning of the 21st century is witnessing the emergence of a social, political and technological revolution in networked computing. We now live in a networked society, but it functions and develops at such an accelerating rate that it becomes increasingly difficult to adequately understand the nature of this radical society. Empires of Speed is the first book to analyse the far-reaching transformations of speed-filled everyday life. In a compelling study Hassan shows that we are leaving behind a modern world based upon the time of the clock, and are entering a new and volatile phase where an accelerating ‘network time’ poses fundamental economic and political challenges in our postmodern world, challenges we barely comprehend and are thus woefully unprepared for.

Publisher BRILL, 2009
Volume 4 of Supplements to The study of time
ISBN 9004175903, 9789004175907
Length 254 pages

publisher
google books

PDF