From September 2005 to June 2006 a team of thirteen scholars at the The University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication explored how new and maturing networking technologies are transforming the way in which we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us.

This site documents the process and the results.

digital democracy

about digital democracy

Digital democracy here refers to the use of digital communication technologies to enhance the democratic process by, among other things, making the process more accessible, increasing and enhancing citizen participation in public policy decision making, and increasing government transparency and accountability.

Saskia Sassen: Networks, Power, and Democracy

Saskia Sassen spoke to the Networked Publics Group at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California on March 23, 2006.

Professor Saskia Sassen is in the Department of Sociology and The Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. She is also a Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics.

Saskia Sassen’s research and writing focuses on globalization (including social, economic and political dimensions), immigration, global cities (including cities and terrorism), the new networked technologies, and changes within the liberal state that result from current transnational conditions. In her research she has focused on the unexpected and the counterintuitive as a way to cut through established “truths.” Her three major books have each sought to demolish a key established “truth.” Thus in her first book, The Mobility of Labor and Capital (Cambridge University Press 1988), she showed how foreign investment in less developed countries can actually raise the likelihood of emigration; this went against established notions that such investment would retain potential emigrants.

In her second book The Global City (Princeton University Press 1991; 2nd ed 2002) she showed how the global economy far from being placeless, has and needs very specific territorial insertions, and that this need is sharpest in the case of highly globalized and electronic sectors such as finance; this went against established notions at the time that the global economy transcended territory and its associated regulatory umbrellas. In her most recent book, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2006), she shows that the foundational transformations afoot today take place largely inside core and thick national environments; this allows her to explain that some of the changes inside liberal states, most evident in the USA but also increasingly in other countries, are not distortions or anomalies, but are the result of these foundational transformations inside the state apparatus. She shows how this foundational transformation hence consists not only of globalizing dynamics but also of denationalizing dynamics: we are seeing the formation of multiple often highly specialized assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights that were once ensconced in national framings. Today these assemblages traverse global and national settings, thereby denationalizing what was historically constructed as national.

 

lecture video: 

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Submitted by admin on November 22, 2008 - 7:41pm

Democratic Deliberation and Mobilization on the Internet

Click Read More for the Politics Essay from the upcoming Networked Publics book and... leave your comments!

Submitted by kvarnelis on June 19, 2006 - 2:50pm

Cyber-urban activism


My article entitled "Cyber-Urban Activism and Political Change in Indonesia" has just been published in Re:Activism issue of the Eastbound. Eastbound, a peer reviewed journal published in print and online, aims to create an international platform for Western and Eastern European researchers engaged in the multidisciplinary field of media and cultural studies. It features articles, reviews and interviews dealing with social and political implications of the rise of entertainment media and mediated popular culture, the appearance of global media players, and the spread of new forms of politics and information technologies.

The Re:Activism issue is actually a selection of papers followed up from Re:Activism conference held last year in Budapest.

My own article deals with the politics of space and spatiality of politics by looking at the interaction between cyberactivism and urban activism and how cyber-networks are extended to social networks in urban setting.

If you're interested to download my article or the whole issue, just go online. All articles are published under creative-commons license.

Submitted by mlim on April 14, 2006 - 2:16pm

surveillance and centralization

I've posted some news at my research blog about how the US government is using the highly centralized nature of world telecommunications for eavesdropping. Read more here.

Submitted by kvarnelis on December 26, 2005 - 7:48pm

Cyberactivism in Southeast Asia - Merlyna Lim's project description

During my residency at the Annenberg Center for Communication (ACC) I wish to do comparative research on the Internet and political networks of dissent.

Made in California: Internet censorship in Mynamar

The New York Times carries an an article on how repressive regimes such as the military-run state of Myanmar use off-the-shelf technology from Sunnyvale, California based Fortinet to filter out dissenting Internet content.

Made in California: Internet censorship in Mynamar

Submitted by kvarnelis on October 13, 2005 - 5:14pm

More or Less Democracy in the Internet Age?

In the mid-1990s, the growth of the Internet revitalized the democratic imagination. Within a few years, however, theorists and advocates of digital democracy exhibited a tendency to view civic volunteers, amateur participants, and populist majorities as uninformed, impulsive, and materialistic. Even progressive promoters of digital democracy demonstrated distrust for the demos.

Submitted by mkann on October 6, 2005 - 8:26pm

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