Shanthi Kalathil, Taylor C. Boas: Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule (2003)

As the Internet diffuses across the globe, many have come to believe that the technology poses an insurmountable threat to authoritarian rule. Grounded in the Internet’s early libertarian culture and predicated on anecdotes pulled from diverse political climates, this conventional wisdom has informed the views of policy makers, business leaders, and media pundits alike. Yet few studies have sought to systematically analyze the exact ways in which Internet use may lay the basis for political change.

In Open Networks, Closed Regimes, the authors take a comprehensive look at how a broad range of societal and political actors in eight authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries employ the Internet. Based on methodical assessment of evidence from these cases—China, Cuba, Singapore, Vietnam, Burma, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt—the study contends that the Internet is not necessarily a threat to authoritarian regimes.

Publisher Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC, 2003
Global Policy Books series
ISBN 0870031945, 9780870031946
217 pages

publisher
google books

PDF

Oskar Negt, Alexander Kluge: Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (1972–)

“The ‘public sphere’ is widely debated in contemporary literary and cultural studies circles in the United States. The topic’s significance underscores the pressing problem of the location of these contemporary debates: Is the ‘public sphere’ a single authoritative and universal space in which the various positions in these debates compete for recognition, or does it consist of multiple local spaces spread over diverse collectivities? The term ‘public’ has emerged with new urgency in different disciplines and contexts history, cinema and television studies, art criticism, feminist, gay and lesbian, postcolonial, and subaltern perspectives, and is proliferating in titles of books, articles, and college courses. Public Sphere and Experience opens the discussion of the material conditions of experience into an arena that had previously figured only as an abstract term: the media of mass and consumer culture, in particular the so-called new media.”

Originally published as Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit, 1972, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt

Translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff
Foreword by Miriam Hansen
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1993
Theory and History of Literature series, 85
ISBN 0816620318, 9780816620319
305 pages

PDF (7 MB)

Adbusters, 90-99 (2010-2012)

“Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Adbusters is a not-for-profit, reader-supported, 120,000-circulation magazine concerned about the erosion of physical and cultural environments by commercial forces. Our work has been embraced by organizations like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, has been featured in hundreds of alternative and mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television and radio shows around the world.

Adbusters offers incisive philosophical articles as well as activist commentary from around the world addressing issues ranging from genetically modified foods to media concentration. In addition, our annual social marketing campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and Digital Detox Week have made us an important activist networking group.

Ultimately, though, Adbusters is an ecological magazine, dedicated to examining the relationship between human beings and their physical and mental environment. We want a world in which the economy and ecology resonate in balance. We try to coax people from spectator to participant in this quest. We want folks to get mad about corporate disinformation, injustices in the global economy, and any industry that pollutes our physical or mental commons.” (source)

Publisher Adbusters, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
ISSN: 0847-9097

publisher

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