Amanda Taub (ed.): Beyond Kony2012: Atrocity, Awareness, & Activism in the Internet Age (2012)

This book is for those who know a little about Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, and want to know more.

Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 has become the most viral video ever. Concerned citizens around the world, from middle school students to celebrities like Oprah and Justin Bieber, watched the film and shared it with their friends. It has now been viewed more than 87 million times.

That success was soon met by a critical backlash. Critics nearly as varied as the campaign’s supporters pointed out that Invisible Children was offering an oversimplified, even misleading narrative. They faulted the campaign for failing to provide a context for the LRA conflict, and pointed out that the video portrayed Africans as either helpless victims, or heartless killers.

This book is both a collection of that criticism, and a constructive response to it. The authors each wrote a short essay offering information that they felt was missing from the video, or explaining how they thought the campaign could be improved.

The first several chapters provide historical and political context. Adam Branch, Daniel Kalinaki, and Ayesha Nibbe explain the roots of the conflict, and how it has persisted for so many years. Alex Little and Patrick Wegner discuss various attempts to end the conflict through peace negotiations, ICC arrest warrants, and military operations, and why they have not been successful.

Later chapters consider the ethics and effectiveness of awareness campaigns like Kony 2012. Glenna Gordon and Jina Moore draw on their experiences as journalists to critique the video’s portrayal of Africa and the people who live there. Rebecca Hamilton, Laura Seay, Kate Cronin-Furman, and Amanda Taub examine the weakness of “awareness” advocacy. Alanna Shaikh explains the ethical dangers of bad aid work. Teddy Ruge offers a different view of Africa, as a place of dynamic innovation instead of violence and helplessness. And youth activist Sam Menefee-Libey describes his frustration with the tone and substance of the campaign meant to target his generation.

With contributions by Adam Branch, Daniel Kalinaki, Ayesha Nibbe, Alex Little, Patrick Wegner, Jina Moore, Glenna Gordon, Rebecca Hamilton, Laura Seay, Alanna Shaikh, Kate Cronin-Furman and Amanda Taub, TMS Ruge, Sam Menefee-Libey

Self-published on Leanpub, April 2012
159 pages

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International Review of Information Ethics, No 15: Ethics of Sharing (2011)

“In information ethics though ‘sharing’ has been discussed so far only implicitly in terms of privacy, intellectual property, secrecy, security and freedom of speech. But not only that libraries have been at least challenged by search engines but also recent developments of a second order like the encyclopedia project Wikipedia, the emergence of social networks like facebook or disclosure platforms like WikiLeaks have shown that there is a need to go beyond the scientific habits and legal standards of sharing knowledge and distributing information to understand and govern the communicative space and exchange of information made possible by the internet and its respective platforms.

So, has sharing of information a special virtue in the information society? How are choices of sharing or withholding of information justified? Is sharing subversive of the new global information regime, or an integral aspect of it?

This issue brings together contributions towards an ethics of sharing that embed the new technological potentialities linking them to their actual social impact. In our understanding, information ethics “deals with ethical questions in the field of digital production and reproduction of phenomena and processes such as the exchange, combination and use of information.” So, the task of developing an ethics of sharing is both descriptive – helping us to understand the contemporary complexities of the ethics of exchanging information as it emerges from using digital technologies across a global range of social and cultural contexts – as well as normative – helping us to address blind-spots and clarifying possible ethical frameworks to address unresolved issues regarding these practices.” (from Editorial)

Contributions by Andreas Wittel, Mayo Fuster Morell, Marie-Luisa Frick and Andreas Oberprantacher, Vito Campanelli, Clemens Apprich, Michel Bauwens, Alessandro Delfanti

Edited by Felix Stalder and Wolfgang Sützl
Published by International Center for Information Ethics, September 2011
ISSN: 1614-1687

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Michael J. Thompson (ed.): Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics (2011)

Georg Lukács stands as a towering figure in the areas of critical theory, literary criticism, aesthetics, ethical theory and the philosophy of Marxism and German Idealism. Yet, despite his influence throughout the twentieth century, his contributions to the humanities and theoretical social sciences are marked by neglect. What has been lost is a crucial thinker in the tradition of critical theory, but also, by extension, a crucial set of ideas that can be used to shed new light on the major problems of contemporary society.

This book reconsiders Lukács’ intellectual contributions in the light of recent intellectual developments in political theory, aesthetics, ethical theory, and social and cultural theory. An international team of contributors contend that Lukács’ ideas and theoretical contributions have much to offer the theoretical paucity of the present. Ultimately the book reintegrates Lukács as a central thinker, not only in the tradition of critical theory, but also as a major theorist and critic of modernity, of capitalism, and of new trends in political theory, cultural criticism and legal theory.

Publisher Continuum, 2011
ISBN 1441108769, 9781441108760
253 pages

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