13.1.1 Media as Infrastructures of Connection

Developments in media technologies over the past three decades have expanded massively the capacity of human beings and automated systems to create, use, disseminate, and store information and content of all types across time and space. This has happened through the emergence of the Internet, the digitization of previously analogue content, and the development of new platforms and devices. Changes have come so fast that it is easy to forget the much longer history of media’s role in the formation of modern societies, polities, and economies. In this chapter we seek to recognize that longer history, while also reflecting upon the dramatic nature of media’s transformations over the past three decades.

Media inherently involve the production, sharing, and interpretation of meanings, and so media processes are always contestable and open to further interpretation. Yet media remain at the same time infrastructure: networks of interdependencies that enable social, political, and economic action, but also encode both cultural and technological constraints. This double role of media, as both meaning and infrastructure (Boczkowski and Siles Reference Boczkowski, Siles and Gillespie2014; Sewell Reference Sewell2005), requires investigating both media cultures – what users and audiences do with the media, their “media-related practices” (Couldry Reference Couldry2012) – and media affordances: how media infrastructures shape the range of possible uses available to everyday users and audiences.

13.1.2 Media as Enablers of Increasing Cultural Complexity

Media infrastructures have acquired a particular complexity and reach in the past three decades due to the global but uneven spread of the Internet and social media platforms. Globalization has distributed flows of meaning more transnationally than before. Mundane exposure to media images and messages that flow from other parts of the world encourages people to become more reflexively open to the meanings produced in other places. This has generated unprecedented cross-border connection, dialogue, and solidarity.

However, the basic patterns underlying contemporary media flows have much earlier origins. From the birth of the press through the development of postal, telephone, radio, and television networks, media flows and infrastructures have been crucial to successive modern forms of citizenship, providing information about governments and markets, connecting national populations and economies, providing forums for citizen practice and underpinning national identity (Anderson Reference Anderson1983). Media flows and infrastructures have also played central roles in projects of political and economic domination, providing the information necessary to govern empires, manage enterprises, and control populations. But media’s spread across the world has been uneven, as Section 13.2 explains.

Despite increasing convergence of platforms for media delivery, proliferating media flows, and infrastructures have produced cultural complexity and increased the possibilities for cultural contestation, within and across national borders (Hannerz Reference Hannerz1992; Iwabuchi Reference Iwabuchi2002). Imagined communities, sustained by media, now proliferate involving, for example, marginalized people, diasporic communities, and political activists. Digital media have also enabled more people to become active producers and disseminators of images and meanings. This expanded productivity of meaning through media has itself become a practical precondition for new movements for social progress.

13.1.3 The Social Justice Issues Raised by Media and Communications

Through media, individuals and groups have more cultural resources with which to interpret and challenge cultural forms. Such access enriches the modalities of political action and protest, with consequences for social change and social progress (relevant SPI indicators are “Personal rights” and “Personal freedom and choice”).Footnote ⁴ The political struggles against slavery in the nineteenth century and for the civil rights of all ethnic groups in the late twentieth century were also cultural struggles that drew on contemporary media resources. But because media impact is always contestable, the consequences of media practice and media innovations for social progress cannot be determined at a general level. Media globalization has both engendered indifference and disparity of attention and promoted dialogue and solidarity. Media and communications’ contribution to social progress must always be considered at more specific levels.

Nonetheless, since connection is important to people’s possibilities of action, the uneven distribution of opportunities to access media and use them effectively is a dimension of social justice in its own right. Improved “access to information and communications technology,” including “universal affordable access to the Internet” by 2020, is rightly a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 9.c),Footnote ⁵ but it raises fundamental social justice issues too. First, media are a key resource that enables the “reality” of particular social and political territories to be framed one way rather than another; as a result, media, through their operations, can perpetrate specific “injustices [in] framing” (Fraser Reference Fraser2005: 79) the social world. Second, because media have the symbolic power to construct general realities, media institutions comprise a resource whose long-term distribution can be unjust. Some battles for social progress contest particular media representations; others challenge media institutions’ general control over symbolic power. In still other cases, media provide a forum for challenging injustices unconnected with media.

The relations between media, communications, and social progress are therefore inherently complex. Measures of social progress (such as the SPI) require considerable adjustment if they are to fully take account of media’s contribution to social progress: measures of technological access alone are insufficient. Nor (see Section 13.2) is there a common pattern to how media institutions “work” in societies across the world. Even so, media and communications have important potential to contribute to particular struggles for social justice.

13.1.4 Media, Communications, and the Longer Global Struggle for Media Reform

Now is not the first time that the implications of media flows and infrastructures for social progress have been considered on a global scale. Such questions were central to the MacBride Report prepared for UNESCO in 1980 (Many Voices, One World), which followed two decades of contested debate about “development.” The report proposed a New World Information and Communication Order (“NWICO”) and challenged the assumption that a global media infrastructure dominated by “the West” was good for democracy, social order and human rights. But the MacBride Report’s proposals were not implemented, and a recent attempt to revive their broad agenda (the World Summit on the Information Society in 2003) has also achieved only limited success.Footnote ⁶ The history of “media reform” on a global scale is an interrupted one (MacBride and Roach Reference MacBride, Roach and Barnouw1989), which we discuss more fully in Section 13.6. Meanwhile, the relations between media and capitalist accumulation (Jin Reference Jin2015; Schiller Reference Schiller1999) become ever more complex, and new market-based media infrastructures – for example, social media platforms and the vast infrastructures of data extraction on which they rely – pose increasingly urgent questions for social life and democratic practice.

13.2.1 Traditional Media and the Internet as Infrastructures of Connection

Policy discourses about media have been dominated by the histories of how “modern” media (newspapers, radio, television, film) developed in Western Europe and North America. While scholarship on the complex regional flows of media has challenged the dominance of Western history (Boyd-Barrett Reference Boyd-Barrett and Curran1977; Iwabuchi Reference Iwabuchi and Thussu2007; Schiller Reference Schiller1969; Sinclair and Jacka Reference Sinclair and Jacka1996), the same geographical skewing has been repeated in recent accounts of the rise of the Internet (Chan Reference Chan2013). We will argue against this simplified view.

No universal history of media is possible on a global scale. Today’s uneven global media landscape reflects many diverse histories: the contrasting reliance on public service versus commercial models of broadcasting in European and North American media systems; major linguistic and institutional diversity in Australasia and the Pacific; the contrasting roles played by state and market in India versus China; the super-fast growth of online connectivity in North-East Asian economies dominated by Chaebols (family-owned multinationals in South Korea); the contrasting legacies of colonialism in media development in Africa and Latin America; the distinctive role played by Gulf petro-monarchies in the Arab region’s media. There are many possible relations between media, state, market, and society, each shaped differently by geopolitical forces, which rule out a universal narrative of “media and social progress.” In what follows we present case studies from different regions to underscore not only media’s diversity at a national level, but also how variously media and communication systems intersect to generate resources for social progress. Further case studies are added in later sections (Sections 13.4 and 13.6).

13.2.2 Case Studies

13.2.3 Unevenness of Access

The stark differences in access to media between population sectors may have consequences for social progress. It is significant that basic levels of mobile phone subscriptions and internet access are included as items in the SPI, alongside concerns about state control of media registered in the press freedom index (compare SDG 9.c).

Effective media access depends on the interrelationship between media and other closely related factors: literacy, language, and education (SDG 4). This is the central lesson from the “digital divide” debate: that simple availability of technology is not sufficient for development or social progress. Empowerment of people through Media and Information Literacy is an important prerequisite for fostering equitable access to information and knowledge and promoting free, independent, and pluralistic media and information systems (UNESCO 2013). Adequate levels of media use require training and education, democratic participation, accessibility of formats and technology for people with disabilities and other distinctive needs, diverse content in appropriate languages, freedom of expression, and opportunities for community and citizen-produced media. The 2005 Tunis Agenda for The Information Society acknowledged these factors, and they have since been the focus of international efforts (WSIS 2005). The multifaceted nature of “access” is crucial to understanding media’s integral role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, and broader social progress (International Telecommunications Union 2016) (SPI “Access to information and communications”).

Globally, there has been progress on access to internet and mobile phones in the past 20 years (SPI “Access to information and communications”; “Mobile telephone subscriptions”). However, what such broad indicators of “access” mean on the ground is poorly understood: much depends on what kinds of media, internet, and mobile content people can affordably access. What media access do people need as the minimum for a “universal” service? Without closer attention to these questions, today’s push to ever-greater digital connectivity only risks deepening digital exclusion.

There are regions with highly uneven media access. Asia, for instance, includes countries such as South Korea and Japan, both pioneers in digital media, as well as emerging powerhouses (India, China). India has gone from fewer than 1 percent of individuals using the Internet (in 2000–2001) to 18 percent in 2014; China has moved from 1.78 percent in 2000 to 49.3 percent in 2014. Yet other Asian countries have poor media infrastructure, including Bangladesh (9.6 percent internet users) and Laos (14.26 percent) (International Telecommunications Union 2015). In Latin America, the mobile phone landscape is not homogenous, but the rapid spread of mobile phones is in part explained by the previous lack of landlines. In a number of countries, total figures for mobile phone subscriptions are high – for instance, Chile, Argentina, and México (International Telecommunications Union 2016). However, on closer inspection, there is a significant proportion of the population in these and other countries without adequate access to mobile communication – either through not owning a phone or through restricted use of services due to affordability (Donner Reference Donner2015).

Within countries, there are also striking disparities in access (SDG 9.c), especially in rural and remote areas, among different sociodemographics, cultural, ethnic, and racial groups, and groups with reduced or uncertain legal or citizenship status (for example migrants and internally displaced persons). Upon closer inspection, many cities with apparent “good infrastructure” display great differences between the media “have-less” and “have-mores.” Yet other countries have seen extraordinary large-scale growth. Among China’s 688 million internet users (2015), the vast majority (620 million) use social media applications such as Weibo and Tencent’s Wechat; around 90 percent of China’s internet-using population access the Internet through mobile phones, while internet use for online payments, access to online education and medical services, has become widespread among the middle classes.

We must, however, note the continuing lack of gender equity in access to and use of media. Significantly fewer women are connected to the Internet than men. In 24 of 29 European countries between 2008 and 2010, men outnumbered women users of the Internet. For the same time period in non-European countries, men outnumbered women users in 36 of 39 countries (comprising OECD and non-OECD countries). The “global internet user gender gap” widened from 11 percent in 2013 to 12 percent in 2016. In the poorest countries, the gap is large: 31 percent in the least developed countries. On a regional level, there is significant disparity in the gender gap: 23 percent in Africa compared to the Americas. In many countries, gender often intersects with other factors (e.g. location, age) to create even deeper inequalities. Only a few countries report higher internet use by women compared to men (International Telecommunications Union 2016).

Such figures give just a partial insight into a complex situation of inequality. Profound changes in media technologies are typically accompanied by promises to improve gender inequalities yet such technologies are often unaffordable for many groups of women, and gender is often neglected in design, education, and resource processes crucial to ensuring communication rights. The emergence of new technologies may generate new kinds of injustice and exclusion: misogyny and oppressive gender relations have taken disturbing forms on social media platforms. Such gendered aspects of media and ICTs significantly hinder social progress, as noted in the agenda laid out by UNESCO‘s Global Alliance on Gender and Media.

Media’s contribution to social progress cannot therefore be understood without grasping both the distribution and differentiation of media access, and how they shape possibilities for political and social agency.

13.2.4 Cultural Flows of Media Within Regions

Putting the complexities of media infrastructure to one side, media’s cultural forms and consequences also vary significantly from region to region. Western colonial powers such as the United Kingdom, France, and the United States dominated global information flows during and after the colonial period. Those media culture flows were unevenly shaped by the long-standing centrality of the United States, with which even the United Kingdom and France could not compete. Some Western countries (such as France) developed media regulation to contest US cultural dominance and foster “national culture.”

In a globalized world, however, more complex flows of media culture have evolved. Cultural globalization does not simply homogenize the world, but instead reorganizes the production of cultural diversity (Hannerz Reference Hannerz1996). By creatively localizing and indigenizing US cultural influences, some non-Western countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, Japan, South Korea, and India have achieved high levels of media production capacity, especially in the last two decades. The media outputs of those countries circulate transnationally and are favorably received within and beyond their regions, generating important counterflows to US dominance.

In Latin America, the predominant mainstream cultural flow is telenovelas, or “soap opera” TV drama series, which have been exported globally. Export formats have evolved from selling program series to selling only the show’s central idea or main character (Biltereyst and Meers Reference Biltereyst and Meers2000; La Pastina and Straubhaar Reference La Pastina and Straubhaar2005).Footnote ¹¹ Mexican, Brazilian, and Colombian television content has shifted what Latin Americans watch on their screens. If 1970s and 1980s generations grew up watching mainly US-produced imports, today’s Latin American audiences are exposed to the customs, lifestyles, and social fabric of Latin American communities themselves. And, although Latin American media content still privileges the visibility of upper class and predominantly White groups, some content does depict the experiences of working-class and non-White Latin Americans. Additionally, free trade agreements and the growing number of migrants from Latin American countries to North America have generated new North–South media content flows; since 1994, Spanish-language media has grown exponentially in the United States, and Univisión (owned by Hallmark) and Telemundo (owned by Sony) are the two main Spanish-language cable television networks. Univisión benefits from an agreement with Mexico’s Televisa, including a pipeline of Spanish-language content. Other lesser players in the global field of Spanish-language media include CNN, BBC, MTV, and Fox, with news and sports channels entirely in Spanish.Footnote ¹² But overall the unevenness of mainstream audiences’ daily media fare has not changed much since the mid-1990s: Latin American media include mostly Latin American and US content (music, films, TV), plus a trickle of Japanese anime and European media content (mainly BBC). Flows from other regions of the world (Africa, South and Southeast Asia) are still scarce.

The impact of globalization on African media has also shifted the flows and contraflows of media content and capital. After the long dominance of ex-colonial powers, many countries have recently developed media production capacities. A prominent example is the growth of the Nigerian film industry “Nollywood,” which exports to a global audience (Krings and Onookome Reference Krings and Onookome2013; Larkin Reference Larkin2008). It has become the third largest global producer of feature films, next to Hollywood (United States) and Bollywood (India), relying increasingly on coproduction and distribution with the Ghanaian film industry. Also notable are the growing African and global footprint of the South African media giant Naspers, and significant foreign investment in African media firms, especially from China (Xinhua news agency, China Central Television: see Section 13.2.1).

In Asia, India, Hong Kong, and Japan have developed local film and TV industries and their outputs have circulated within the region for many years. However, circulation outside the region has jumped sharply in the last two decades. The global diffusion of Bollywood films has become much more prominent (Kavoori and Punathambekar Reference Kavoori and Punathambekar2008; Gopal and Moorti Reference Gopal and Moorti2008). In East Asia, cultural products such as manga, animation, video games, and TV dramas produced in Japan have generated a regional and global media culture since the 1990s (Iwabuchi Reference Iwabuchi2002). Even more notable is the so-called “Korean Wave” (or Halryu, a term first coined by Chinese reporters in 1999), whereby Korean cultural products such as films, television dramas, fashion, and popular music (K-pop) have penetrated other Asian markets (Chua and Iwabuchi Reference Chua and Iwabuchi2008; Kim Reference Kim2013), Europe, and Latin America. The Korean Wave offers an intriguing example of how national cultural policy can be used as a form of soft power, bolstering local production capacity and promoting the export of media culture by “creative industries.” South Korea’s interventionist cultural policies position the Korean cultural industry as a “sub-empire” of the Hollywood system in Asia. The “Korean Wave” thus signifies the Korean culture industry’s ambiguous position as both a counterflow against the Hollywood system and a subflow co-opted by Hollywood.

This complexity characterizes counterflows in other regions too. The more counterflows to American media culture advance, the more market-driven governance encompasses them. Even though relatively independent from the cultural dominance of the “Hollywood empire,” the rise of media culture flows in non-Western regions has given rise to new intraregional asymmetries. American media culture maintains a pivotal presence, yet in a way that goes beyond a straightforward understanding of American cultural hegemony. Hollywood itself has striven to incorporate capital, talent, and narratives from many parts of the world and develop outsourcing of postproduction labor on a global scale (Miller et al. Reference Miller, Govil, McMurria, Maxwell and Wang2004). The rise of non-Western media cultures forms part of a market-driven recentralization in which diverse players across the world collaborate to penetrate transnational markets, engendering a new kind of governance via marketing, coproduction, distribution, and copyright monopoly. Section 13.3 will discuss the emergence of global governance infrastructures for the regulation of information and data.

This is not to underestimate the newly emerging landscape of media globalization. Together with the progress of digital communication technologies, the acceleration of human mobilities from and among non-Western regions (by migrants, expatriates, students) has complicated the cross-border circulation and consumption of media cultures. Meanwhile cultural counterflows between diverse regions and countries cultivate cross-border exchange and dialogue, with important implications for social progress. Regional circulation of diverse media cultures has enabled new kinds of cross-border connection, mutual understanding, and self-reflexivity by people about their own society and culture. The mutual consumption of media cultures, for example of entertainment genres popular with women audiences such as soap operas, has enabled mutual understanding of societies and cultures, for example in regions such as East Asia. However, as it is predominantly market-oriented forces that have advanced cross-border media circulation, it is the commercially and ideologically dominant elements of each country’s media culture that tend to travel, under-representing marginalized voices (Iwabuchi Reference Iwabuchi2002, Reference Iwabuchi2015). Crucial questions thus remain: whose voices and concerns are excluded, what perceptions of self–other relationships are typically promoted, and which issues are under-represented, as the marketization of media culture flows advances? Section 13.5 considers the ambivalent consequences for practices of global citizenship that such media connections may foster.

13.2.5 Digital Disruptions and Transformations (Technological, Geo-Political)

Even before 2005, the global media landscape was highly uneven, and its implications for social progress correspondingly complex. Some key developments since the middle of the century’s first decade (when Facebook, the world’s current most successful social media platform, was launched) have increased this complexity considerably. Of course there is not today “one” Internet – much of the Internet is inaccessible in language to large sections of the world’s population – but some key patterns are clear.

The key technological development has been the shift from so-called “web 1.0” – a system of media infrastructure based on discrete websites, connected by hypertext links, with access obtained from desktop or laptop computers – to “web 2.0” characterized by increasing use of interactive online platforms, in particular social media platforms. Today, both platforms and websites are increasingly accessed from phones and other mobile devices, and the applications (or “apps”) embedded within them. This change from a “read only” to a “read/write” interface has intensified internet use and its embedding in daily life, heightening institutional attention to how audiences can be reached online and stimulating the rise of a vast commercial infrastructure of online data collection and data processing. This shift in media as “infrastructure” has involved also a significant cultural shift, as patterns of use have changed (a shift in media as “meaning”). This double shift has multiple consequences.

First, the increasing dependence in daily life on a complex, distributed online infrastructure for mediating daily life changes the power dynamics within the media industries, leading to the increased importance of the telecommunications industries that provide infrastructures of connection (Wi-Fi and broadband networks). Market convergence means that telecommunications providers have the power of control “in the last instance” over the communication systems on which all content distribution depends (Bolin Reference Bolin2011). Consider the vast scale of some new media infrastructure companies: Google‘s annual revenue in 2015 was 74.5 billion USD, Facebook‘s 17.9 billion USD, and Amazon’s 107 billion USD.Footnote ¹³

But the global balance is no longer one of simple US dominance. By the end of 2014, of the top 10 internet companies in the world, 6 are US and 4 are Chinese. Indeed, the growing power of China’s internet market, with its distinctive Chinese platforms (Sina’s Weibo, Tencent’s Wechat) is such that Shi (Reference Shi2015) has argued that cyberspace now has two camps, GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple) and BATJ (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Jingdong). As a result, “the material foundation for US–China co-governance of the Internet is in shape” (Shi Reference Shi2015). This observation was made at the 2015 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit at which the Chinese state’s effort promoted its goal of shaping the future of global internet governance, a strategy with profound implications not only for China, but also for global communication politics.

Second, such developing power concentrations have implications for evermore sectors of everyday life from government to health (SDG 3). Take also education (SDG 4): concerns are developing regarding school learning materials increasingly provided not by the state but by commercial media companies such as Apple and Google through initiatives such as Apple Education and Google for Education. Weaker welfare and public service systems are creating opportunities for market advances in areas such as education that were not previously much commercially exploited (Forsman Reference Forsman2014; Selwyn Reference Selwyn2014).

Third, none of these developments would be possible without a huge double development in media’s “infrastructures of connection”: the vast infrastructure of data collection and processing that drives the activities of search engines and all sorts of digital platforms and, underpinning them, the default infrastructure of “cloud computing” (Mosco Reference Mosco2014) that provides the capacity necessary for such data collection and processing, and for the general expansion of computer-based information processing in everyday life (for example, the “Internet of Things”). Both developments expand what we mean by “media” and create new challenges for governance (see Section 13.3).

At the same time, deep inequalities of access remain, as noted in Section 13.2.2. The African continent, for example, remains characterized by widespread poverty, huge socioeconomic inequalities, and highly differentiated patterns of media access and use, with the central parts of the continent most deprived (Porter and Stern Reference Porter, Stern and Green2015: 17, 50). Such inequalities have important implications for citizens’ ability to participate in any mediated public sphere (see Sections 13.4 and 13.5).

We cannot therefore say that the “whole world” is being transformed by media at the same time and in the same way. Yet the overall direction of these large-scale transformations is changing how we think about media’s potential contribution to social progress.

13.3.1 The Evolving Relations Between Media Infrastructures and Government Regulation of Information Flows

Governments worldwide have expressed interests in regulating media infrastructures. In some cases, such interests take the form of laws directly prescribing the conditions of information access and exchange or the technical capabilities of media infrastructures. In others, legal incentives for the takedown of certain kinds of information produce regulatory effects.

Legal regimes in many countries protect freedom of expression, but all governments prohibit the publication and exchange of certain types of information. Additionally, “[m]any democracies now deploy national-level filtering systems through which all ISPs (or in some cases most major ones) are compelled to block designated lists of websites to address public concerns about … illegal activities conducted on the Internet” (MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2012: 95). Typical subjects of legal prohibitions include child pornography, speech offering material assistance to terrorists, speech that infringes intellectual property rights, and speech ruled to be defamatory. Additionally, some countries prohibit the dissemination of hate speech, and many set limits on the collection, dissemination, and processing of personal information, although data protection regimes vary considerably from country to country. There are good reasons for all these prohibitions, but each involves governments in decisions about what is or is not prohibited, and therefore raises the possibility of overbroad interpretation leading to censorship of other, nominally protected expression. Such decisions necessarily have implications for the quality of social life and the possibilities for social progress.

In some situations, legal rules incentivize media infrastructure companies to create notice-and-takedown mechanisms for removal of prohibited information. To create an additional, more consistent set of incentives for removal, many countries have enacted legislation that provides safe harbor from copyright infringement liability if procedures are followed for removal of unauthorized copyright-protected materials from publicly available websites and/or exclusion of such materials from search results. The first copyright safe harbor legislation was enacted by the United States as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.Footnote ¹⁴ Similar provisions have been enacted in many other countries, often following inclusion of such obligations in bilateral or multilateral free trade agreements negotiated by the United States (Fink and Reichenmiller Reference Fink, Reichenmiller and Newfarmer2006; see also Valdes and McCann Reference Valdes and McCann2014). More recently, European legal instruments regarding privacy and data protection have been interpreted to afford enforceable rights to deindexing and erasure of information made available online.Footnote ¹⁵ Those rulings have prompted some online information providers, including most notably Google, to develop notice-and-takedown mechanisms patterned after the copyright model (Powles and Chaparro Reference Powles and Chaparro2015). Such legal structures play important roles in shaping the “rules of the game” regarding information flow in daily life.

Meanwhile, governments in some regions have invested heavily in the development of technologies for regulating citizens’ informational activities more directly and on highly granular levels. South Korea, for example, for several years enforced a “real-name system” for internet access that prevented anonymous expression online. In 2012, the Constitutional Court of Korea struck down the real-name requirements, ruling that they violated internet users’ freedom of speech.Footnote ¹⁶ Automated content filtering of information supplied via media infrastructures is pervasive. Such filtering is often justified by asserted needs that parallel the reasons offered for direct speech prohibitions (e.g. protection against pornography, copyright infringement, and/or defamation and harassment); in operation, however, it also seeks to police and deny access to content for political reasons (MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2012).

On another level, not just governments but corporations (from Europe, North America, and Asia) are heavily involved in the building of media infrastructures, for example through the export of technologies to the Global South. Such infrastructures often include built-in capacities for censorship and surveillance. Chinese companies export technologies similar to those developed to Communist Party specifications for domestic use (MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2012). When the Zimbabwean government jammed shortwave broadcasts in the run-up to the 2005 elections, it was believed to have done so by using jamming equipment provided by China (Wu Reference Wu2012). But North American and European companies such as Cisco also export information technologies built to customer specification to enable informational control, and global platform companies have acceded to demands for censorship to gain access to local markets (Stirland Reference Stirland2008; Wu Reference Wu2012).

13.3.2 The Shift From Formal to Informal Governance and the Rise of New Global/Transnational Governance Institutions

Direct government mandates, prohibitions, and procurements are the most obvious mechanisms through which media infrastructures are governed, but other mechanisms are equally important. The emergence of a networked information economy and the globalization of mediated information flows have catalyzed two significant shifts in the nature and quality of governance. The first is a shift away from formal government regulation toward informal and often highly corporatized governance mechanisms. The second is a shift away from state-based governance (and global governance institutions organized around state membership) toward transnational governance institutions more directly responsive to the asserted needs of private entities, often also corporations, that are those institutions’ “stakeholders.” Both trends, if they continue unabated, may result in a serious imbalance inconsistent with SDG 16, which calls for the building of “effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.”

Particularly in the Global North but also the Global South, the information networks and communication protocols that underlie media infrastructures are designed and operated by private, corporate entities. Direct technical authority over networks and protocols gives those entities an authority that is inherently regulatory. Global platform companies such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, each of which occupies a dominant market position globally, enjoy correspondingly stronger and more pervasive regulatory power.

The regulatory effects of technology take a variety of forms and produce a variety of effects, some beneficial and others less so. For example, security measures designed to prevent unauthorized access to networks, servers, and accounts protect private, personal information, and important corporate and government information from prying eyes and malicious actors. Flawed or poorly implemented security measures can introduce vulnerabilities into the network, exposing individuals to identity theft, surveillance, censorship, and political persecution. Likewise, flawed or poorly implemented security measures can expose corporations, governments, and key power and communications infrastructures to espionage and cyberattack. But technical protections applied to media infrastructures and content flows can also have direct impacts on important aspects of social life: for example, affecting the information access necessary for education, self-development, cultural participation, informed voting, and open and democratic government (Citron Reference Citron2008; Cohen Reference Cohen2012). Governance processes in relation to media infrastructures are therefore much more than a “technical” concern.

There are other examples of how media governance affects social life. Many platform companies (e.g. Google/YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) employ filtering algorithms to remove or de-list content that infringes copyright and related rights. Such automated mechanisms for content removal tend to be over-inclusive, removing both material that is clearly infringing and material that would be covered by the various limitations and exceptions to copyright (Quilter and Urban Reference Quilter and Urban2005; see also United Nations 2011).

In addition, many platform companies employ predictive algorithms to determine what information to display to their users. In networked digital media and particularly for mobile applications, access to information is comprehensively mediated by such algorithms, which process data collected from users, often in combination with data purchased from other information collectors and aggregators, and rely on what is known or inferred about users to generate correlations and predictions (Bolin Reference Bolin2011; Turow Reference Turow2011). National security services engage in similar data collection and process, often sharing the results with one another and helping each other circumvent the restrictions that might apply to data collection and processing conducted within territorial boundaries (Privacy International 2013). Like the filtering algorithms used for content monitoring, the predictive algorithms used in commercial contexts are maintained as proprietary trade secrets, while their counterparts on the intelligence side are maintained as state secrets. In both cases, secrecy frustrates efforts to document and understand the effects of such filtering processes on the flow of daily life and on everyday freedoms (Cohen Reference Cohen2012; Pasquale Reference Pasquale2015).

The relationships between governments and the corporate entities that exercise alternative forms of governance over media infrastructures are complex and often contested. For governments seeking greater regulatory authority over media infrastructures, the control exercised by corporate entities presents an obvious target for regulatory intervention (Birnhack and Elkin-Koren Reference Birnhack and Elkin-Koren2006; MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2012; United Nations 2011). In China, for example, the coordination between state and private governance is relatively tight, fueled by close ties between the state/communist party and IT conglomerates.

In North America and Europe, by contrast, the interplay of state and private governance mechanisms is more complicated. There are powerful pressures to comply with government demands for access to information for law enforcement and national security purposes, as the Snowden revelations showed. In the wake of those revelations, however, some companies, including most notably Apple, have redesigned their products and services to offer users greater privacy for their communications with each other (though, as we discuss in Section 13.3.3, they have continued to collect other data streams for predictive targeting) and have more aggressively resisted government demands for access (Powles and Chaparro Reference Powles and Chaparro2016; Yadron Reference Yadron2016).

Outside the law enforcement context, dynamics tend to be somewhat different, and reflect a greater perceived alignment of state and private interests. For example, US companies that engage in collection and processing of personal information often count government entities among their customers (Hoofnagle Reference Hoofnagle2004), and have looked to the US government to protect their economic interests in relation to claims for stronger privacy and data protection regulation. European information companies, for their part, value cross-border trade but also look to the European Union for protection against US-based rivals. With regard to private economic rights in information, copyright safe harbour legislation effectively positions corporate information businesses as the regulators of first resort. So far, however, efforts to impose in law parallel takedown obligations on payment providers and domain name system registrars have not succeeded.

The second shift described in this section – from state-based to transnational governance – involves two types of transnational governance institutions: trade dispute resolution bodies and technical standards bodies, in both of which the relative regulatory influence of corporations is growing. The global trade system has become a key mechanism through which both nation-states and powerful corporate actors pursue their interests in regulating media infrastructures and controlling information flows. Many completed global, regional, and bilateral trade agreements – and many others currently under negotiation – contain key provisions dealing with recognition and enforcement of intellectual property rights and with flows of data and information services across borders (Calabrese and Briziarelli Reference Calabrese, Briziarelli, Mansell and Raboy2011; Freedman Reference Freedman2003). Although trade agreements typically contain provisions exempting protections for public health, environmental protection, and privacy rights from designation as nontariff barriers,Footnote ¹⁷ the extent of those exemptions is unclear and their scope contested (Public Citizen 2015a). Arbitral proceedings alleging violations of trade agreements therefore may work at cross purposes with efforts by domestic legislatures and courts and international human rights tribunals to set appropriate limits on right-holder control of information and on the collection, processing, and use of personal information to sort and categorize individuals and communities.

Meanwhile, technical standards bodies have attained increasing prominence and power. Networked digital communications operate via information transfer protocols. Such protocols determine the resources to which individuals and communities have access and, depending on their design, may enable particular types of surveillance or afford bottlenecks at which state or corporate regulatory authority can be brought to bear (DeNardis Reference DeNardis2014; MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2012). Those protocols are the responsibility of an interlocking network of global standards bodies, including the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). These bodies have different charges and varying degrees of connection to more traditional governance institutions.

For example, the ITU, which oversees standardization and implementation of a variety of protocols for telecommunication, broadcasting, and data transfer, is overseen by the United Nations and representation is state-based, whereas the ICANN, which oversees the Internet naming and addressing protocols and maintains a dispute resolution system for resolving trademark-related domain name disputes, is a standalone corporate body chartered under the laws of California, with policies set by an elected board of directors.

In these multiple ways, the ability of national governments, and indirectly national civil societies, to influence the workings of media in everyday life (through governance structures) has been challenged by the cross-cutting ability of corporate interests to impose governance through other means. In considering the potential implications of media for social progress we need therefore to take into account this underlying shift in regulatory power.

13.3.3 The Ambiguous Implications of Media-Based Governance for Social Progress

For citizens, networked digital media infrastructures may lower the costs of access to knowledge and enable new forms of participation in social, cultural, and economic life (see Section 13.5). At the same time, however, citizens’ access to many important informational and cultural resources is subject to control by neo-authoritarian states and by information intermediaries of various sorts, including internet access providers, search engines, mobile applications developers, and designers of proprietary media ecosystems. Such control often materially affects the level and quality of access. The implications for social progress are clearest when particular materials are blocked or removed, but mediated access also produces a range of other effects, which may or may not be consistent with SDG 9 concerning the construction of “resilient infrastructures” and the promotion of “inclusive and sustainable industrialization.”

The increasingly global regime for intellectual property protection both incentivizes worldwide distribution of informational and cultural resources and creates additional barriers for those seeking access to such resources. As already suggested in Section 13.2.5, licensing requirements for access to educational, professional, and technical materials can be onerous and the need to pay recurring fees for continued access to digitalized resources (rather than, for example, purchasing hard copies to which one may enjoy permanent access) disproportionately burdens public institutions and lower-resourced communities. In the Global South, the costs of access to copyrighted materials can render access infeasible even for educational institutions and libraries (Chon Reference Chon2007; Okediji Reference Okediji2004, Reference Okediji2006). In addition, a 1967 Berne Convention protocol governing translation rights is not widely used because its protections are difficult for developing countries to invoke. Among other things, the protocol requires that a compulsory licensing system be fully implemented in domestic law and does not make adequate provision for minority languages.Footnote ¹⁸ The Global South has adopted a variety of ad hoc solutions, but the lack of a clear framework often stymies efforts to make informational and cultural works available to global audiences that are linguistically and culturally diverse (Cerda Silva Reference Cerda Silva2012).

In many parts of the world and for large parts of the population, everyday life routinely involves online access to a wide variety of purveyors of news, information, and popular culture, as well as search engines, social networking platforms, and other content aggregators that seek to help users find, organize, and make sense of it all. Access to these resources may be offered at no financial cost to users on an advertiser-supported basis, but often such access has a price, in the form of the automated collection of information about personal reading, viewing, and listening habits (Hoofnagle and Whittington Reference Hoofnagle and Whittington2014). Such information can be used both to target advertising and to suggest content more likely to appeal to each user.

Such predictive targeting of information access has a number of troubling economic and political implications. Algorithms for predictive targeting based on data about personal habits and preferences necessarily enable the identification of population segments sorted by, for example, race/nationality, cultural background, religious affiliation, socioeconomic status, and political preferences. Commercially, targeting based on such indicators raises the prospect of invidious discrimination in the distribution of goods and services, in decisions about employment and credit, and in myriad other ways (Barocas and Selbst Reference Barocas and Selbst2016; Robinson and Yu Reference Robinson and Yu2014). The ability to conduct relatively granular price discrimination over those goods and services, in ways that deprive ordinary individuals of choice and corresponding marketplace leverage, sits in tension with free-market ideologies and raises profound distributive justice questions (Cohen Reference Cohen2015).

Turning to politics, micro-targeting of media content and political appeals that align with (inferences about) recipients’ preexisting inclinations creates the prospect of an “echo chamber” or “filter bubble” effect, through which preexisting inclinations become reinforced and public opinion about political and cultural issues becomes correspondingly polarized (Pariser Reference Pariser2011; Sunstein Reference Sunstein2009).Footnote ¹⁹ Individuals themselves can come to rely on filtering processes to simplify the information environment and reduce information overload (Andrejevic Reference Andrejevic2013). In an era in which descriptions of policy problems increasingly are subject to expert mediation – as with climate change or the global financial crisis – the filter bubble effect can work to entrench beliefs in ways that are highly resistant to scientific challenge or debunking (Andrejevic Reference Andrejevic2013: 12–18, 42–61, 113–132). This can undermine efforts to mobilize popular and political support for action toward social progress on various fronts (environmental sustainability, financial accountability, and so on).

A final set of ambiguities concerns the newly prominent transnational governance institutions described in Section 13.3.2. Governance of media infrastructures and information flows via trade and technical standards bodies provides harmonization that many argue is essential in an increasingly interconnected world. But the new transnational governance institutions are accountable neither to national governments nor to traditional international governance institutions, and many lack robust democratic traditions of their own. Participation in such institutions may be perceived as offering opportunities for powerful national and/or commercial interests to avoid roadblocks interposed by domestic regulation, by the international human rights framework, and by civil society groups (Benvenisti Reference Benvenisti2015). Within the global trade system, both negotiation and dispute resolution processes are highly responsive to corporate interests yet much less responsive to other interests. Trade dispute resolution panels convened by the World Trade Organization have, to date, ruled against states asserting protective regulation in all but one of the cases in which domestic protective regulations have been challenged (Public Citizen 2015a). In recent rounds of negotiation over high-profile multilateral agreements such as the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, trade associations representing corporate interests have enjoyed privileged access to country-level negotiators and working drafts, while civil society groups and interested members of the public have been allowed only brief glimpses of later-stage documents, and only on condition of confidentiality.Footnote ²⁰ Technical standards bodies, meanwhile, are only gradually coming to terms with their own role as governance bodies (DeNardis Reference DeNardis2009, Reference DeNardis2014; MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2012: 203–219).

The result is a landscape of everyday media consumption configured by forces that are increasingly in tension with shared flows of information and open, inclusive development. The multiple overlapping processes for governing media’s underlying infrastructures are ever more secretive and resistant to civil society influence. This is the complex starting point for thinking about two important potential contributions of media and communications to social progress: the role of journalism in the production of public knowledge (Section 13.4) and the role of networked communications in enabling new forms of citizenship (Section 13.5).

13.4.1 Public Knowledge for Democracy and Social Progress

Digital media infrastructures create new opportunities for the dissemination of public knowledge. Although the decline in civic participation in established democratic societies has been widely lamented (Putnam Reference Putnam2000), other observers (Dahlgren Reference Dahlgren2009; Lewis, Inthorn, and Wahl-Jorgensen Reference Lewis, Inthorn and Wahl-Jorgensen2005) have pointed to the growth of new communities online and the growth in quantity and diversity in communication platforms outside of the traditional news media, where citizens can exchange information and participate in political debate. Additionally, whereas public knowledge traditionally was disseminated through news and information in the press, radio, and television, social networking platforms are becoming a major news source for citizens. A recent survey conducted in the United States found that 44 percent of respondents get their daily news from social media (IPSP Reference Boyd2017). The question of citizenship is complex, and cannot be dealt with at length here: we note, however, that large parts of the world’s population live without citizenship, and citizenship in a nation-state does not protect citizens from rights-affecting actions controlled by institutions outside of the nation-state.

Early research on public knowledge overemphasized news distribution and correspondingly undervalued other sources of information, such as popular culture and entertainment (Corner Reference Corner, Curran and Gurevitch1991). Both sources of information can contribute to the formation of public knowledge and to social progress, as can be appreciated when we consider the political and cultural aspects of citizenship. Where political citizenship deals with issues related to the formal rights (and duties) of citizens, and is most often mediated by traditional categories of news about current affairs and politics, cultural citizenship deals with questions of recognition, identity, and the cultural rights (and duties) of citizens, and is mediated by various sorts of information that circulate in the cultural public sphere.

The distinction between political and cultural citizenship may become more blurred when the convergence of entertainment media and political citizenship is taken seriously (Hermes Reference Hermes2005; Van Zoonen Reference Van Zoonen2005; Williams and Delli Carpini Reference Williams and Delli Carpini2011). The rise of bots and algorithmic management of information introduces additional distortions of public deliberation (Tambini Reference Tambini2017). But none of this potential to create public knowledge matters if media content produced by an elite “professional” class of journalists does not resonate with audiences’ everyday lived experience. Today various factors point in that direction, both in forms of propaganda and destabilizing communicative practices and in problems within systems of education, where much of the socializing of citizens take place (SPI “Access to basic knowledge”).

In this section we outline, first, the special roles that journalism plays in public knowledge, and so why journalism is important for democracy and social progress. We will then give examples of the various “soft” and “hard” threats that we identify as detrimental to public knowledge, including both changes in business models, news reception, and new forms of “information management,” and, more directly, various physical threats against news production, and journalists in conflict areas and unstable democracies. Third, we will point to areas where there are opportunities for countering this negative picture, for example the rise of citizen journalism and alternative media. We end this section with a double case study of organized attempts to construct alternative journalistic narratives in Latin America and the Middle East.

13.4.2 The Special Functions of Journalism and Journalistic Practice

Journalism is still associated, especially in the established democracies of the Global North, with the institutions and practices of democracy (Fenton Reference Fenton and Fenton2010: 3). There are many examples, both historical and current, of how journalism has contributed to public knowledge for social progress (SDG 16). These include, for example, the antislavery campaigns that benefited from press assistance with the formation of abolitionist organizations (King and Haveman Reference King and Haveman2008), samizdat publications in the former Soviet Union (Feldbrugge Reference Feldbrugge1975), information about environmental disasters such as the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident that was spread not only by mainstream journalists but also by citizens on blogging and social media platforms (Friedman Reference Friedman2011), or the role of the underground press in the struggle against apartheid (Switzer and Adhikari Reference Switzer and Adhikari2000). For these reasons the contribution of journalism to public knowledge remains an important reference point in the broader context of global social progress.

The emergence of digital media infrastructures has had profound implications for traditional conceptions of news and journalism. These include a proliferation of the channels through which journalism is produced and consumed, and a blurring of the lines between news and entertainment through the rise of formats such as the “mockumentary,” “docudrama,” and satirical news. The participatory potential of digital technologies, aided by the widespread accessibility of technologies such as the mobile phone, has challenged previous claims by professional journalists to exclusivity in the purveying of news. Additionally, the business models for journalism have undergone a fundamental transformation in recent years, even as new opportunities have arisen for the creation of public knowledge and citizen participation in the construction of knowledge and public debate.

Against the background of rapid change, however, the expectation that news journalism will contribute to public knowledge, the monitoring of power, and the facilitation of public debate remains an ideal against which communication practices continue to be measured. The mere fact that information is publicly disseminated and available does not automatically result in an informed public. Additionally, in the context of changing frameworks of reception, citizens’ ability to orientate themselves in today’s increasingly complex media landscape, drawing perhaps on the skills provided by education, are ever more important.

13.4.3 Threats to Public Knowledge 1: System Pressures

The digitization and marketization of media (discussed in Section 13.2) have affected the institutional conditions for journalistic production. New economic conditions have led the news industries into a downward spiral where it has become ever more difficult to charge for content. In a recent survey conducted by the IPSP in the United States, 57 percent of respondents do not like to pay for news, and believe news should be freely accessible to all (IPSP Reference Boyd2017). Shrinking readership makes advertisers abandon print media to the benefit of online search and social networking.

The old business models of journalism are collapsing, and news producers have had to rethink their relation to audiences, leading in turn to changes in journalistic practice. New forms of “click-bait journalism,” robot journalism, and algorithmically steered news production are increasingly common. These follow different logics from traditional journalism, and in their most extreme forms may produce echo chambers or filter bubbles (see Section 13.3) that in the long run fragment public debate and the public sphere more generally. The automated search for audiences through data processing also may further marginalize those audiences who are already on the margins of the public sphere. In countries where access to the digital public sphere mirrors huge social and economic equalities – for instance South Africa, India, China, and Brazil – these new practices could exacerbate such inequalities.

The reorganization of media production into large-scale media corporations with interests also in non-journalistic media production has meant that even financially successful journalistic and public knowledge operations cannot always reinvest their profits into news production, but instead have their profits reinvested in other activities. This lack of economic control makes it difficult to sustain long-term strategies of news production. While there has always been a tension between editorial and management teams within news organizations, large-scale media corporations shift economic decision-making farther away from news production environments, resulting in managerial decisions that direct journalistic practice from the outside.

There are also regulative threats to independent news media production, for example the noncommercial and license fee funded public service media. In Europe, the traditional freedom of public service broadcasters to choose their policy orientations has come under attack by newly powerful private broadcasters (SPI “Press freedom”). One result is the public value test instigated by the European Commission, which emerged from private broadcasters’ intense lobbying efforts in relation to the European Commission (Donders and Moe Reference Donders and Moe2011).

While online (including mobile) media have created new platforms for social agency and public participation, both in the creation of “user-generated content” (UGC) for mainstream media and in providing outlets for alternative news and views, the Internet has also become a space where reactionary views, racist representations, and hate speech can thrive. Social media like Facebook and Twitter contribute to the proliferation of this kind of communication. Misunderstandings of complex matters and online “lynch mobs” illustrate the volatility of networked digital media environments and offer testimony to the limits of social media for public debate. On a more fundamental level, well-meaning educational initiatives to foster “digital literacy” might produce relativistic approaches to scientific and social truths (Boyd Reference Boyd2017), and the journalistic ideals of balance of opinion might privilege a blurring of the distinction between facts and opinions, and where “truth” becomes more of an affective mood.

13.4.4 Threats to Public Knowledge 2: Coercive Force

Meanwhile, journalists can face harder forms of threat, whether through legal frameworks (press freedom or its opposite) or informal threats (through damage to journalists’ physical and psychological security): these threats may exist separately or in combination.

In many parts of the world, growing political instability has affected journalism‘s ability to fulfil its broader public knowledge goals because of direct threats to press freedom (see SPI “Press Freedom”). For example, in some parts of Eastern Europe, political polarization has arisen as some post-Soviet states have sought closer ties with the EU. The Ukraine–Russia conflict is one, widely reported, outgrowth of this polarization, but the phenomenon is also visible in other post-Soviet countries (Richter Reference Richter2015). Information warfare is on the rise, not only in the region itself, but also in international news media (for example, via TV channels such as Russia Today and Ukraine Today [Miazhevich Reference Miazhevich2014]). Initiatives for disinformation and propaganda/counterpropaganda, including so-called “troll-factories” maintained in Russia (and elsewhere),Footnote ²¹ make efforts to enhance public knowledge increasingly difficult. The sheer amount of seemingly contradictory information circulating puts high pressure on audiences’ critical abilities (the much discussed phenomenon of “fake news“). A recent example of this from the Ukraine–Russia conflict is the overload of contradictory information that surrounded the shooting down of Malaysian flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, and the sharply divergent accounts that circulated on the Internet both before and after the Dutch Safety Board published their report of the crash.Footnote ²² Similar dynamics have emerged in the Middle East, leading to an increasingly polarized and propaganda-dominated public sphere (see Section 13.4.6).

In many African countries also, journalism for public knowledge remains an ideal rather than a practical reality. In the Windhoek Declaration on Promoting an Independent and Pluralistic African Press (UNESCO 1991), African journalists invoked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a motivation for the promotion of press freedom. At the same time, however, African resistance to colonialism and rejection of cultural imperialism engendered an insistence on “African values” in journalism, couched in the discourse of development but often implying uncritical and loyalist media support of postcolonial states. An example of an appeal to “African values” is Francis Kasoma’s (Reference Kasoma1994, Reference Kasoma1996) notion of “Afriethics,” which rejects Western normative frameworks and counterposes an African value system that privileges communalism and an orientation towards the family and clan over individualism. Appeals to “African values” have often been criticized for their tendency to essentialize African culture and identity, without acknowledging the interpenetration of African and Western values in a globalized context (Banda Reference Banda2009; Skjerdal Reference Skjerdal2012). Additionally, such appeals have served to justify repression of media freedom in many African countries (see Bourgault Reference Bourgault1995; Karikari Reference Karikari, Barratt and Berger2007).

Lastly, against the background of political instability, propaganda wars, and state repression, violence against journalists has also increased. Some examples include: Egypt clamping down on journalists, activists, and civil society; the consolidation of electoral autocracy and temporary closure of digital platforms in Turkey; and repressive measures from verbal threats to physical assaults and imprisonment in various African countries. In Poland, a new legal regime has circumscribed the freedom for journalists, making critical and investigative journalism more difficult and precarious.Footnote ²³

13.4.5 Opportunities for Public Knowledge: New Forms of Journalism and Citizens’ Media

Meanwhile, digital media infrastructures have enabled the growth of new forms of citizen-created media for the production of public knowledge. In many African contexts where legacy media like newspapers and radio stations are owned and controlled by the state, digital media platforms have served as alternative outlets for the dissemination of news, political debate, and critique (Paterson Reference Paterson2013). In Zimbabwe, Facebook has provided users with more freedom to engage in political satire and offer alternative accounts of political developments (Mare Reference Mare, Patrut and Patrut2014). The widespread penetration and use of mobile media in Africa have also provided users with a tool to engage more actively with mainstream news agendas. An example of this was the mobile phone footage of police brutality against a Mozambican immigrant, Mido Macia, in Daveyton, South Africa. The footage of police dragging Macia, cuffed to a police vehicle, was captured by a bystander and sent to the tabloid the Daily Sun, who posted the video online and reported on it. The video went viral and made headlines internationally after Macia died in police custody, and led to the arrest and conviction of the police officers. This integration of citizen journalism, legacy media (especially tabloids), and online platforms such as Youtube or Facebook, has provided journalists and news consumers with new ways of creating public knowledge and serving the public interest.

In South Korea, citizen journalists have used digital networks for producing alternative civic discourses and for mobilizing enormous rallies of citizens to speak out on socially sensitive issues. More recently, social media have given rise to new alternative media such as Newstapa (“Rebuilding Investigative Journalism”) launched in January 2012. Due to the government’s control over public broadcasting, some former employees of the major TV networks and other small-sized production team members have come together to produce an investigative news program about social issues. Newstapa uses a variety of online outlets such as its own webpage views, YouTube clips, and podcast episodes, and the younger generations download and watch its weekly episodes using their smartphones. Social media also play a key role in spreading the news program’s schedule and in enabling public fundraising to support production. Newstapa has gained a reputation as an influential news provider and as illustrating how, through regular practices of collaboration, citizens can build alternative paradigms of social justice against mainstream media and power elites.

Meanwhile, during the political turmoil and violence following the ousting of former President Yanukovich in Ukraine, faculty and students from the Mohyla School of Journalism in Kyiv created StopFake (stopfake.org), an organization aimed at debunking Russian propaganda and the distorted news produced by troll-factories. Another civic initiative formed during the political turmoil was The Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, which is a platform for information management that arranges press briefings with representatives of the Ukrainian military and government (Bolin, Jordan, and Ståhlberg Reference Bolin, Jordan, Ståhlberg and Pantti2016).

There are therefore many overlapping factors shaping media’s possible contribution to public knowledge in different parts of the world today. In the next part of this section, we offer a double case study from Latin America and the Middle East that considers the possibilities of building new infrastructures for journalism that can offer alternative voices to counter perceived dominant narratives.

13.4.6 Double Case Study: TeleSUR and Al-Jazeera: Alternative Voices in Global News

The Venezuelan channel TeleSUR and the Qatari channel Al-Jazeera are often hailed as models of media with global reach that have challenged the North Atlantic domination of global news flows and reference points. These two channels have much in common: they were both made possible by the large political ambitions of their founders; both faced indifference or hostility in the world’s power centers; and both evolved from single channels into multiplatform networks. This section explores what can be learned from their contrasting achievements.

13.5.1 Relations Between Media and Spaces of Citizenship

Today’s new density of global communication not only enables continuous interaction across world regions, but also is beginning to shape new spheres of civic communication on every scale. Communication interfaces (from WhatsApp to WeChat) offer a new architecture of civic discourse that is no longer merely national or international: the resulting spaces where citizens interact are shaped not by the media spheres of particular territories but by individuals’ choices of what to follow online. Furthermore, these networked spheres of civil communication are no longer accessible only in the Global North but engage citizens – with internet access – from all types of societies, including so-called failed states. Through this, media become involved in opening up new spaces of citizenship (SDG 16.7).

Although citizenship is national and the boundedness of state territory continues, communication is shaping a new form of civic identity, which is increasingly embedded in a globalized digital space. Rather than globalization operating outside and against the national, “the nation is the site of globalization” (Sassen Reference Sassen, Held and McGrew2007: 80, emphasis added). Today this merging of national and global takes different shapes in different societies. Even secluded states such as North Korea and failed states such as Syria, Somalia, and Afghanistan have their own modes of nation-based globalization. However, the point is particularly important in relation to public civic communication where national and global public spheres merge, and public deliberations, legitimacy, and accountability no longer develop solely through national debates. Rather, in contexts of climate change, governments are held accountable based on broader global discourses.

As with the history of media (Section 13.2), these developments are still mainly considered from the perspective of nations in the Global North, with narratives often not looking beyond Western communications theory and research (Farivar Reference Farivar2011). Similarly, accounts of diaspora’s use of media often ignore political connectivity between expatriates of the Global South that link back to civic discourse in their countries of origin. The roles of nongovernmental actors in failed states and civic communications in post-conflict resolution constitute other examples of new forms of connection between citizens across borders. Citizens of the Global South such as forced migrants are communicating outside national media territories (Witteborn Reference Witteborn2015). Networks of activism, deliberation, and mobilization, not possible in the past, are emerging whereby media provide new infrastructures of citizenship as part of what the MacBride report called the “many voices” of “one world.”

Section 13.2 discussed the historical dominance of communication flows from the Global North, linked to colonial communication infrastructures and extended by satellite communication infrastructures emerging in the 1970s for the delivery of broadcasting content and, since the 1990s, for individual media reception. For most of the twentieth century, the globalized “stretching” of human interactions through media – the “intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (Giddens Reference Giddens1990: 64) – was, in its framing, dominated by news channels from the Global North, such as BBC, CNN, and Deutsche Welle, with few opportunities to contest it.

This situation has changed significantly since the second half of the 1990s due to three interrelated processes: the emergence of digital satellite platforms enabling the delivery of no longer just a few but hundreds of channels, the reduction of uplink costs for broadcasters, and the availability of cheap direct-to-home rooftop dishes. Furthermore, and most importantly, new regional media players have challenged the monopoly of political “breaking news” in times of world conflict. Such news is often delivered “live” worldwide and has influenced national foreign policy imperatives in various countries (Robinson Reference Robinson2005; Volkmer Reference Volkmer1999), contesting the framing of world events by media corporations from the Global North (see also Section 13.4.6). Whereas CNN produced the only narrative of the first Gulf War (1990–1991) for a world audience, now there are hundreds of satellite news channels from the wider Arabic region, from Sudan, Pakistan, Tanzania, and at least 50 channels dedicated to news from India, South Korea, China, Mexico, and Brazil. In addition, some region-wide news channels, such as Channel News Asia and Africa 24, are available in several languages and target neighboring regions.

The resulting digital ecology for civic participation has two additional key characteristics. The first is the increasingly complex flow of media and information organized not just by media organizations, but by citizens’ own efforts to upload or recirculate what interests them. It is a transnational public space, which enables a new density of communication between citizens. The results of such dense peer-to-peer civic communication may include attempts to influence individuals through hate speech (Phillips Reference Phillips2015), fake news and “bots” (see IPSP Chapter 10; IPSP Chapter 13 Toolkit “Knowledge as Commons” Column 2). At the same time, new forms of “reflective interdependence” (Volkmer Reference Volkmer2014) may emerge whereby, through the sharing of reference points across borders, citizens acquire a new basis for shared political debate or activism on topics ranging from climate change, human rights violations, and crisis communication to political campaigns such as the “Occupy” movement. Under these new conditions, civic engagement no longer occurs in one “place,” but across a network of places.

Although only a minority of the population is engaged in these new global networks, “their contribution to democracy cannot be underestimated” (Frere and Kiyindou Reference Frere, Kiyindou, Fred, Wisdom and Fackson2009: 77, 79). In many countries, state monopolies on the inflow of foreign news are no longer possible. For example, it can be argued that African governments have “hardly any grip on the choices of the Internet user-consumer, who can freely choose the information that is interesting or useful and decide to join a particular ‘virtual community’” (Frere and Kiyindou Reference Frere, Kiyindou, Fred, Wisdom and Fackson2009: 78). This flexibility in the resources available through online media, including information and deliberation accessed across borders (Bohman Reference Bohman2007), potentially changes citizens’ horizons of civic engagement.

13.5.2 New Forms of Communicative Citizenship: The Case of Global Youth

As an example of these emerging trends, young citizens in many countries are engaging with each other in unprecedented ways, in peer-to-peer interaction within and across borders. In order to assess the implications of these new digital ecologies for civic identity, we need to consider the interaction between local and global media practices and information flows.

The density of these interactions is revealed in an international comparative study on “Global Youth and Media, Notions of Cosmopolitanism in the Global Public Space” (discussed in Volkmer Reference Volkmer2014). The study included more than 6,000 young people aged 14–17 in nine countries on five continents. The study asked how they use media, how they construct globalization, and perceive civic identity. The distinctive uses of local, national, and global media by particular generations have been little researched. While national television is the general population’s preferred medium for political news, young people find news in parallel ways through Google news, MSN, and Yahoo. Across all society types, this younger generation mixes local and global information flows in a distinctive way that entitles them to the label of “in-betweeners.” As a result, they consider themselves between skepticism and trust, between a realistic appreciation of global risks (indeed a strong sense of world insecurity) and the need for leadership. When asked if they feel that the world today has become more insecure since their parents were young, 80 percent agree. Yet more than half consider international political events more important than national and so seem to live out their citizenship on two connected scales, national and global. They distrust politicians and engage in global political spheres characterized by global themes such as “environment,” “human rights,” and “economy, wealth, and poverty.”

A Mexican sociologist describes in the context of Central America the implications of such an engagement for local citizenship: “the protest movements with a global reach, and the presence of leadership of young people in them, bring to mind the emergence of a new political cosmopolitanism among youth. Its native land is the world, and its strength lies in its (seeming) absence of structure, its intermittence and the multiple nodes in which its utopia is anchored” (Reguillo Reference Reguillo, Tufte and Enghel2009: 34). In this analysis Central America’s young generation is both “disconnected and unequal” and “well situated, connected, and globalized” and increasingly engaged in national and transnational youth publics (Reguillo Reference Reguillo, Tufte and Enghel2009: 23). Other regions provide further evidence of youth agency converging around local networks of publicity in Cairo (Arvizu Reference Arvizu2009: 387), Tanzania (Tufte and Enghel Reference Tufte, Enghel, Tufte and Enghel2009), and Chile (Munoz-Navarro Reference Munoz-Navarro, Tufte and Enghel2009). In Kenya and other parts of the Global South, media provide platforms for youth to interact and participate in political debates worldwide, leading one analyst to comment that, for the Kenyan diaspora, social media is an “integral aspect [of] Kenya’s social and political dynamics” (Mukhongo Reference Mukhongo2014: 325).

However, the implications of these emerging forms of public engagement in regional media cultures require more attention. For example, in Central Asia, urban youth are drawing increasingly on global sources of information and so “are increasingly judging the worldviews and behaviours of parents, teachers, political elites and other traditional authority figures against that global context … they are suddenly able to compare themselves with anyone, anywhere” (Ibold Reference Ibold2010: 532). As anticipated by Joshua Meyrowitz three decades ago (Meyrowitz Reference Meyrowitz1985), but now on a global, not national, scale, media flows can work to challenge knowledge barriers and destabilize relations between generations, so forging new bases for civic identity and action.

13.5.3 Case Study: Connectivity and Social Progress in a Chinese Heritage Village

The world’s rural population is at its largest ever today, even though the world’s urban population is (slightly) larger. An understanding of rural connectivity and its relation to social progress is therefore indispensable. Located in the mountainous interior region of China’s coastal Zhejiang Province, Heyang has a population of 3,670 and more than 1,100 years of history. It is a quintessential embodiment of China’s agrarian civilization. Its well-preserved Ming-Qing era traditional architecture earned it a place in 2013 in the Chinese State Council’s list of key sites of national cultural relics. However, this is also a modernized and globalized village: with part of its economy integrated into global circuits of production and more than half of its labor force now working outside the village (most of whom only return briefly to reunite with family during festival periods).

Village communications also cut across the traditional and the modern. The oral tradition remains strong: the village’s Senior Center and popular street corners serve as sites of information and gossip exchange. Public announcements are posted at centrally located information boards and walls at different village corners. However, the village’s lineage book, started more than 600 years ago by a Ming-Dynasty official from the village, issued its sixteenth edition in December 2016 with a grand ceremony. The book contains biographies of notable individuals and registers the names of all male descendants (female descendants were first recorded in its fifteenth edition, compiled in 1995).

Wired radio and communal film projection were the most popular forms of mediated communication and entertainment during the 1970s and early 1980s. Along with village assemblies, these low-tech forms of communication played pivotal roles in Mao-era political mobilization and cultural integration. Their embeddedness in communal life was instrumental to their success in linking villagers to the outside world and sustaining village cohesion. Starting, however, from the late 1980s, information reception and entertainment have become privatized and personalized. As villagers are exposed to wider and more diverse media flows, many feel more isolated from each other. Social stratification and income polarization, following the dismantling of the collective economy, have engendered a further sense of social dislocation and community disintegration.

The 1990s saw the village’s further leap into the digital age: automated direct dial telephone started in 1990; cable television and analogue mobile telephony arrived in 1994 and by 1997, digital mobile telephony. Today, Heyang is among the 150,000 Chinese villages with broadband access (in 2015 China’s State Council promised a 98 percent village broadband access rate by 2020). While desktop computers are rare, telephones, especially mobile phones, are widely used, but only the young and economically better-off have smartphones to connect themselves to the Internet.

In between lies a wide spectrum of communication patterns and circuits of connectivity that have made Heyang a small-scale model of China’s highly stratified society. Square dancers in the village, for example, have used their smartphones to download videos of the latest dancing styles, in this way imagining themselves as part of a larger national dance community. A small minority, like their urban middle-class counterparts, engage in online stock trade. Wechat, the most popular Chinese social media platform, is popular among village elites, the young, and the economically well-off. One member of the Village Council has more than a dozen Wechat friend circles, with relatives, businessmen originally from the village, government officials, and students of Heyang’s culture. However, with inclusion also comes exclusion: such Wechat friend circles are limited to this member’s own professional and interpersonal networks, and so exclude the majority of villagers. Moreover, her Wechat communications are mostly externally directed, aiming at promoting Heyang as a tourist site, rather than at fellow villagers. Meanwhile, with the higher cost of a digital cable subscription, some poorer villagers have given up on cable television service altogether to opt for satellite television, which only requires the one-time purchasing cost of a satellite receiving dish. But such satellite television services do not include local municipal and county television channels. Consequently, these households end up with no access to local television news.

As a result, many local residents, especially those in the lower social strata, complain about their lack of communication with village leaders, lack of effective participation in village affairs, and a general sense of powerlessness in shaping the village’s future. Caught in a complex web of local governance, land appropriation, village renovation, and tourist development, villagers resort to protests and blockages of village construction projects to communicate their demands and frustrations. In one case, in an attempt to make their voices heard, some residents refused to allow a CCTV crew to film their residential courtyard for the 2015 Spring Festival Gala; others have tried to derail the village’s lineage book compilation project. A few villagers have also expressed a desire for the return of a village wired radio system and Mao-era face-to-face meetings of the village community as a whole.

But China’s “great digital leap forward” has not created upwardly mobile opportunities for all. X. Zhu, a 24-year-old Heyang village youth, grew up in a well-off family with postsecondary education, but did not live to see a future in Heyang. He arranged his own suicide through the Internet in early 2010. Another 24-year-old netizen came all the way from Yunan Province in southwestern China to commit suicide together with Zhu. Theirs is one of the saddest stories of digital connectivity in the Network Age.

13.5.4 Networked Communications Among East Asian Precarious Workers

Networked communications offer opportunities in many countries for new forms of political and social connection, which may be especially important in spreading public knowledge where public broadcasting systems are under threat (see Section 13.4). But this opportunity may occur in the context of social conditions, particularly labor markets, where ICTs are intensifying the deterioration of working conditions and sustaining new structures of precarious labor (SDG 8.8). The resulting balance for social progress may therefore be highly ambiguous, and Northeast Asia offers an important example of these tensions.

The mobile phone has become deeply entangled with the precarious labor culture in Northeast Asia. Mobile communication technology has intersected with the emergence of increasingly insecure working conditions, particularly those of young Northeast Asian workers, who are situated within the “institutionalized precariousness” of a dual economy made up of a large reserve army “with no employment prospects, no future, [and] no plans” (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1998: 30f.), alongside a small privileged minority of secure workers with a regular wage. A “mobile precariat” (precarious workers who use mobile phones to sustain their living within an always-on-call working culture)Footnote ²⁴ suffers from chronically insecure job positions as temporary staff or contract workers: they are trapped at the bottom of the pay scale, yet at the same time remain connected through media to the workplace (Qiu Reference Qiu2009). This mobile precariat is disadvantaged not only through the labor exploitation they endure, but also when it comes to seeking remedies for these injustices (see Seo and Kim Reference Seo and Kim2009; Shaviro Reference Shaviro2002 for important studies).

Employers’ attitudes vary to mobile phone use among their precarious workers. Whereas in Japan and Taiwan, workers must leave their phones behind, beyond their reach, when they start work, in South Korea, where the conditions for workers are extremely insecure with the second longest working hours among OECD countries (2,124 hours/year as of 2014),Footnote ²⁵ mobile phones are allowed at work. However, in all countries, possessing a mobile phone renders precarious workers vulnerable to a wider culture of surveillance. Many employers monitor their workers’ lives outside of formal working hours by using mobile instant messaging services (KakaoTalk in Korea; WeChat in China; Line in Japan and Taiwan). Transgressing the normal boundaries of work, employers use phones to issue orders to their precarious workers on matters such as cleanliness, service management, and the employee code of conduct.

The outcomes are, however, unstable. In South Korea, young precarious workers have attempted to stir public opinion against unjust business practices, by posting images and chat messages on social media platforms. They, in turn, have been disciplined through remote monitoring on live surveillance mobile apps and mobile instant messaging. In Japan, there have been on- and offline protests against “black companies,” notorious for exploiting precarious workers, with workers using the Internet and social media to disclose their unfair treatment in the workplace and share it with others. Given the collapse of the public broadcasting system in Japan, online citizen journalism and alternative journalism have also offered platforms for building alternative understandings of social justice in the workplace that go beyond the agendas of mainstream media.

In summary, Northeast Asia offers a clear example of how the mobile phone as an infrastructure of connection has become a new technique for regulating labor in an always-on-call culture, yet continues to offer opportunities for movements for social justice and social progress.

13.6.1 The Longer History of Democratizing Media

The expansion of media infrastructures into ever wider areas of life through digital platforms has generated new types of media activism (Milan Reference Milan, Hemer and Tufte2016). Across the Global South and the Global North, today’s media activists fight struggles on diverse fronts. However, popular attempts to shape media infrastructures into more democratic and inclusive social institutions did not begin with the media activists of the twenty-first century.

Just as media infrastructures have developed differently in each nation and region of the world (see Section 13.2), so efforts to reshape and reform the media are varied. Before the consolidation of the advertising-supported commercial press, radical working-class publications in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada emerged to challenge the dominant press order (Hackett and Zhao Reference Hackett and Zhao1998). With the rise of electronic communication, US media activists in the 1920s and 1930s demanded public ownership of the telegraph and noncommercial radio (McChesney Reference McChesney1993; Stein Reference Stein, Stein, Kidd and Rodríguez2009). In Russia and China, communist and nationalist revolutionaries established alternative media systems as part of their attempts to seek social progress through anticapitalistic and nationalistic struggles; the resulting media structures, however, degenerated into ossified state-controlled systems. Nevertheless, antiestablishment communication forms (underground tabloids and samizdat in Russia; the big-character posters on China’s Democracy Wall) testified to the radical democratic communication impulse of these post-revolutionary societies.

In the 1960s and 1970s, civil rights movements in the United States and Canada responded to poor media coverage of their struggles for social justice by demanding more access to the mainstream media, and developing their own media (Stein Reference Stein, Stein, Kidd and Rodríguez2009). The battle around cable television regulation in these countries was one of the most salient victories of media reform movements, as cable companies are now mandated to establish community and educational channels free of charge (Halleck Reference Halleck2001) (SPI “Access to basic knowledge”). In Latin America, in response to the brutal dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, grassroots groups developed their own underground communication networks in a long battle to pressure states to democratize the media (Rodríguez and Murphy Reference Rodríguez and Murphy1997). Meanwhile, in several European countries, pirate radio was the precursor of later struggles for media regulation that guarantees space for public and community media (Jankowski, Prehn, and Stappers Reference Jankowski, Prehn and Stappers1992).

In 1976, in one of the earliest global efforts to democratize the media, Amadou Mathar M’Bow, Director of UNESCO, appointed a commission of 16 experts to examine global communication problems. The commission’s final report, known as the MacBride Report, described shocking information inequalities between First and Third World countries (UNESCO 1980). The report documented high levels of media concentration in a few transnational media corporations mostly located in rich, industrialized countries. Such concentration had many damaging consequences including highly unequal information flows between rich and poor countries; a lack of diversity among the voices and sources of information and communication; and a flow of media content from the North to the South that threatened the latter’s local cultures. The MacBride Report argued that a New World Information and Communication Order was urgently necessary.

Efforts towards a NWICO, including recommendations for national communication policies, reduced media concentration, more South-to-South communication channels, and a mass media code of ethics, embroiled UNESCO in a high-profile dispute with the United States, who interpreted the report’s recommendations as a threat to “freedom of the press,” defined within the liberal framework as freedom from government control. In 2003, the Communication Rights for the Information Society Campaign (CRIS) emerged as a new moment of global media reform. The CRIS Campaign, which still continues, encompasses four pillars of communication rights: the right to participate in the public sphere; the right to knowledge; civil rights in communication; and cultural rights in communication (Siochrú Reference Siochrú2005).

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have been marked by UNESCO‘s efforts to protect journalists and defend freedom of expression. The UN Human Rights Council’s “Resolution on the Safety of Journalists” (Reference Abraham2016) is welcome, but does not yet extend to Russia and China. In 2015, Member States endorsed the concept of “internet universality” which includes four principles for internet governance: human rights, openness, accessibility, and multistakeholder participation (UNESCO 2015).

Looking back over the past four decades, international governmental organizations and media activists have broadened their platforms and struggles to include communications as an important dimension of social progress. As Laura Stein notes: “communication policy activism spans the gamut from representational concerns with the end products of communication to the deep-seated political, economic, regulatory, and infrastructural issues that shape the larger cultural environment” (Stein Reference Stein, Stein, Kidd and Rodríguez2009: 2–3). At stake in this continued battle is a foundational change in the governance of media and communications infrastructures no less profound than that called for urban governance in Chapter 5. We turn for the rest of this section to specific struggles that target the underlying communications infrastructure of the digital age and its increasingly complex needs for governance.

13.6.2 Transparency and Accountability of Media Infrastructures and Mediated Data Flows

The last decade has seen the emergence of increasing global concern about the transparency and accountability of media infrastructures and the data flows that they carry (SDG 9; SPI “Access to information and communications”). In some cases, those concerns have prompted popular protests and engendered new forms and sites of resistance. One important category of concern about transparency and accountability relates to the conditions of access to information online. Populations worldwide have begun to pay attention to the effects of private agreements for preferential treatment that, behind the scenes, structure the universe of information they see (IPSP Reference Boyd2017).

Initially, struggles over preferential treatment took the form of efforts to secure formal enactment of the principle of “network neutrality.” Proponents of network neutrality argued that internet access providers should treat all content, sites, and services equally without discriminating among different sources, services, or providers, while internet access providers sought greater leeway to experiment with differential quality of service. For the most part, countries around the world have resolved this debate in favor of network neutrality, although European regulations create a preferential exemption for certain specialized, high-bandwidth services.Footnote ²⁶ Since there is no reason to believe that unregulated markets by themselves will preserve anything like network neutrality, this issue is likely to remain important for media’s positive contribution to public knowledge.

Formal regulatory adoption of network neutrality mandates, however, has not resolved disputes about preferential access, but has simply shifted the terrain. Worldwide, regulatory implementation of network non-discrimination mandates has often been followed by so-called “zero-rating” initiatives. Zero-rating refers to an arrangement by which an internet access provider or mobile services provider agrees to exempt a particular content service from the data caps otherwise imposed on its users. Such agreements may be made in return for flat payments or in return for access to data about the behavior of users as they use the zero-rated service. Zero-rating agreements tend to drive traffic toward exempted data services, to the advantage of those providing them, so indirectly challenging the net neutrality principle.

A second important category of transparency and accountability issues relates to targeted removal of online information. Such removal may be mandated or initiated by an information intermediary (for example, a platform company). It may also involve the threatened (or feared) assertion of intellectual property rights, a request for removal, or de-indexing in connection with rights afforded under data protection regulation, enforcement of privately defined acceptable-content policies, or direct state censorship. Because the failure to remove some types of information can itself raise justice issues, targeted removal may sometimes be appropriate. Very often, however, such content filtering mechanisms remain secretive and unaccountable. Concerns about secret and unaccountable content filtering have sparked protests around the world, resulting in a new model of activism that takes digital media simultaneously as a site and target of protest activity. Such activity has achieved political gains, but arguably also accelerated the shift toward corporatized governance (described in Section 13.3.2).

In the United States, a protest movement that originated domestically and then spread globally defeated proposed legislation that tried to impose content filtering obligations on domain name registrars and payment providers (Herman Reference Herman2013). Subsequently, however, major US payment providers have acceded to a set of voluntary “best practices” that involves them more actively in private intellectual property enforcement (Bridy Reference Bridy2015). In Australia, a popular protest movement opposed a government proposal that would have required internet service providers to perform mandatory content filtering; the government eventually withdrew the proposal after political opposition proved firm, and after the major Australian ISPs voluntarily agreed to block 1,400 sites previously identified as child pornography purveyors.Footnote ²⁷ In China, where state involvement in filtering and suppression of dissident or otherwise disfavored expression is more direct, protest movements have taken correspondingly more indirect forms that involve the use of seemingly innocuous code words to discuss forbidden topics (Link and Xiao Reference Link and Xiao2013).

Anticensorship and “internet freedom” activists have developed new, crowd-sourced methods of discovering and documenting content removal efforts and actions, producing websites such as chillingeffects.org, a US-based site that catalogues copyright takedown notices, and onlinecensorship.org, a project by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that catalogues content removals by social media sites. Some global platform companies, such as Twitter and Google, have begun to disseminate information about various types of targeted removals (e.g. Google’s “transparency report”), although they have been much less forthcoming about their own acceptable-content protocols.

A final set of concerns about transparency and accountability relates to processes of automated, algorithmically processed mediation and filtering. Many dominant market providers – Google and Baidu in search, Facebook in social networking, Twitter in microblogging – use predictive algorithms to structure the universe of information that users see, and network neutrality mandates do not address those practices. Such algorithms operate invisibly to create displays to users that are tailored to what is known or inferred about that user. To individual users, however, the displays may appear universal and neutral. As we noted in Section 13.3, there are important, unresolved issues concerning the accountability of such automated filtering.

13.6.3 New Concentrations of Power Via Media Infrastructures and Mediated Data Flows

The new concentrations of power exerted via media infrastructures and mediated data flows have themselves generated rising levels of concern, prompting activism by civil society groups and sometimes more widespread protests and struggles (SDG 9).

One important cluster of issues involves proprietary claims to information networks and resources. Even as digital media activists and civil society groups have pushed for greater legal freedom to store, share, and modify content online, law enforcement authorities around the world have pushed to make outlaws of individuals and businesses who facilitate file-sharing. Enforcement has proceeded both via highly publicized litigation and by off-the-record efforts to seize or block access to internet domains (McCourt and Burkart Reference McCourt and Burkart2003; Palmer and Warren Reference Palmer and Warren2013; see also Bridy Reference Bridy2015). In addition, as discussed in Section 13.3.2, both nation-states and powerful corporate actors have sought enhanced intellectual property protection through trade agreements. In Europe, popular opposition to the prospect of stepped-up intellectual property enforcement defeated ratification of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which had been negotiated with the United States, Japan, and other countries. However, many provisions for enhanced enforcement have appeared in a different agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (which was signed in 2016 but has not entered into force) (Public Citizen 2015b). Less is known about another agreement, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, now under negotiation between the United States and Europe.

Another set of issues relating to power exerted through today’s fast-changing media infrastructures involves the surveillance conducted by powerful third parties, such as nation-states (IPSP Reference Boyd2017). In the wake of the revelations by Edward Snowden about the extent of the US National Security Administration’s surveillance of global electronic communications, both ordinary citizens and governments worldwide protested NSA’s lawless and seemingly unconstrained behavior. The Snowden revelations, however, also showed that national security services in multiple jurisdictions – including some of those now protesting most loudly – cooperated with the NSA and with each other, helping to form a network for evading existing domestic procedures for oversight (Privacy International 2013).Footnote ²⁸

Resistance to those efforts has taken varied forms. Some experts in computer security have formed ventures to develop and market secure “black phones” and online tools, while others have helped activists and civil society groups to explore, understand, and expose the full range of lawful and unlawful government surveillance activity.Footnote ²⁹ As described in Section 13.3, some large information companies also have actively resisted the expansion of government surveillance. One country, Iceland, has resolved to develop comprehensive legislation establishing itself as a safe harbor for whistleblowers and investigative journalists.Footnote ³⁰

Civil society organizations and, more recently, frustrated legislators, have put sustained pressure on trade negotiators to make treaty processes more transparent and democratically accountable.Footnote ³¹ New political movements and parties have formed around platforms for access to information and free culture (Beyer Reference Beyer2014), and the free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) movement has worked to foster the development and adoption of open systems that may be freely used and adapted (Coleman Reference Coleman2013; Gamalielsson and Lundell Reference Gamalielsson and Lundell.2014).

A third cluster of struggles involves efforts by privacy activists and researchers to mobilize civil society groups and the public against commercial information power. This struggle needs to be understood within a wider diagnosis of contemporary media infrastructures’ central role in the emergence of a new form of surveillance capitalism, whereby populations worldwide comprise a source of raw materials for new practices of surplus extraction (Cohen Reference Cohen2015; Zuboff Reference Zuboff2015).

Disputes over these questions are as widely varied as the contexts and population groups involved. In the United States and Europe, commercial surveillance practices have engendered legal struggles over behavioral credit monitoring, drawing attention to the role of predictive profiling in the high-risk lending practices that contributed to the global financial crisis of 2008 (Pasquale Reference Pasquale2015). Meanwhile, in an effort to enlist users themselves in both frustrating and exposing the practices of surveillance capitalism, teams of researchers have worked to design new privacy tools, such as ad blockers and tracker visualization tools (Eaglehardt and Narayanan Reference Eaglehardt and Narayanan2016; Kennedy Reference Kennedy2016).

In the Global South, struggles over the spread of surveillance capitalism have involved challenges to public–private partnerships for the delivery of services. In India, debates concerning the possible uses of a new national identification number have proved sharply divisive. In 2015, the Indian government launched the Digital India Initiative, which is based on the use of the Aadhar Unique Identity (UID) scheme for biometric authentication of recipients of government benefits and services. The Aadhar scheme, which is the world’s largest biometrics-based database initiative, was developed by corporate technology partners, and critics charge that too little is known about its capabilities and potential future uses (see also the India case study in Section 13.6.4).Footnote ³² In sub-Saharan Africa, questions have been raised about the undisclosed uses of data collected via privately funded mobile telephony and banking initiatives (Hosein and Nyst Reference Hosein and Nyst2013; Taylor Reference Taylor, Hildebrandt and van den Burg2016a; Taylor and Broeders Reference Taylor and Broeders2015).

More generally, in the international development context, attention to data protection questions has highlighted how routine practices of data collection and sharing can put local populations at risk (Taylor Reference Taylor, Taylor, van der Sloot and Floridi2016b) (SPI “Private rights”). There is a deep, if rarely noticed, continuity between these recent debates about control of networked information flows and the struggles of indigenous peoples against broadcasters for many decades. For example, Australia’s Aboriginal communities have developed protocols that regulate how media makers – both individual media producers and media industries – can proceed on Aboriginal lands and among Aboriginal communities (Janke Reference Janke1999; West Reference West2014). Any individual producer or media industry intending to operate among Aboriginal communities must gain clearances from Aboriginal custodians before capturing, disseminating, reproducing, or archiving data about the land or the people. By defining a framework of respect, integrity, authenticity, and consultation with Aboriginal authorities and custodians, Aboriginal protocols have sought to ensure media accountability. Far from seeing such protocols as part of a “local culture” that unhelpfully resists “progress” (compare IPSP Chapter 15), we need to look to them as precursors of the fundamental changes needed in the governance of data flows. But no such protocols have yet been developed to govern data flows in the wider development context.

13.6.4 Case Study: Civil Society Activism in India: Facebook Free BasicsFootnote ³³

Recent events in India offer an example of the ability of civil society activism to challenge the power of global digital platforms. We will focus here particularly on Facebook’s proposed introduction of its “Free Basics” platform for internet access, but will situate the struggle over Free Basics in the broader context of other disputes over information rights in India in recent years.

Facebook’s Free Basics platform is a joint private–public partnership ostensibly committed to expanding internet access for first-time users of the Internet in select countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, launched the initiative in 2013 (originally branded as Internet.org) in partnership with Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Opera Software, Nokia, and Qualcomm. It was based on an “app” that enables smartphone users limited, free access to certain sites and services on the Internet, and that is designed to function on less robust 2G networks, potentially encouraging users to subscribe to mobile access packages (Hemple Reference Hemple2016).

From the Indian government’s perspective, Free Basics represented an opportunity to expand its digital footprint into the daily lives of Indian citizens, by integrating Free Basics within its flagship Digital India initiative (discussed in Section 13.6.2). The Indian PM Narendra Modi’s attempts to use social media including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and other platforms for political purposes are well known (Pal, Chandra, and Vydiswaran Reference Pal, Chandra and Vydiswaran2016). In September 2015, he met Mark Zuckerberg in Silicon Valley, California (Mukherjee Reference Mukherjee2015). For Facebook, signing India to Free Basics would have given Facebook unrivalled access to the members of its second largest market (125 million users). The deal was celebrated on Facebook with both Modi’s and Zuckerberg’s profile pictures wrapped in the green, orange, and white of the Indian flag, leading millions of users to update their profiles with the tri-color.

Civil society activists, however, viewed Free Basics as an attempt by a commercial vendor to tether users to its product and monopolize the terms of access to the wider Internet, so compromising the tenets of network neutrality (discussed in Section 13.6.2). While civil society groups in India had previously advocated specific reforms such as banning software patents and support for free and open source software (FOSS), a new “Save the Internet” campaign mobilized millions of users to petition the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to uphold the broad principle of network neutrality. Facebook was completely caught off guard by the extent of the mobilization of Indian civil society in India against Free Basics.

In February 2016, the TRAI acted to uphold the principle of network neutrality. TRAI’s regulation, titled “Prohibition of Discriminatory Tariffs for Data Services Regulation” provides that “no service provider shall offer or charge discriminatory tariffs for data services on the basis of content.” TRAI’s response was surprising given its previous support for industry interests over those of civil society (Abraham Reference Abraham2016). Additionally, while trade bodies such as the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) supported “differential pricing,” others such as the National Association for Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) opposed it.

This episode, which illustrates both the potential for cozy, mutually beneficial relationships between global platform companies and nation-state governments and the ability of civil society to challenge such relationships, needs to be put in the broader context of grassroots struggle for information rights in India in recent years (SPI “Access to information and communications”). Campaigns spearheaded by individuals such as Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey and organizations such as the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information led to the Indian government enacting the Right to Information Act in 2005. Such campaigns, along with a variety of social movements for information rights, created a broader recognition of the need for knowledge of entitlements and rights, facilitated access to information, and transparency and accountability in the disbursement of public funds.

This broad Right to Information movement laid the foundations for the subsequent struggles not only against Facebook‘s Free Basics initiative but also against the Aadhar Unique Identity (UID) scheme (discussed in Section 13.6.3). A number of the organizations that contested Free Basics also contest the Aadhar initiative. They have consistently highlighted shortfalls in the collection of biometric data, the security, and authentication issues that surround a centralized database on citizens, the potential for misuse of private information and for mass surveillance of citizens, and the absence of privacy laws. While the government has defended the scheme as a means to combat benefit fraud and protect national security, critics highlighted successfully the threat to basic freedoms from this expansion of the digital infrastructure.

13.6.5 Normative Implications of Media Infrastructures and Mediated Data Flows

The developments discussed in this section raise three broad sets of normative implications: for autonomy, economic justice, and political self-determination.

First and most basically, new and unaccountable concentrations of power exerted via media infrastructures and mediated data flows have implications for individual autonomy. As media infrastructures become more pervasive in everyday life, they increasingly mediate the human experience of the self, the other, and the world. As they connect individuals and communities, they also structure the universe of information and personalize informational exposure. The dynamics of continual, feedback-driven personalization invest information intermediaries with enormous power over processes of individual self-determination, which in a less intensively mediated world have been much more open textured and amenable to serendipity (Cohen Reference Cohen2012). Since individual autonomy is a necessary element of any form of social progress, it is essential to consider the implications of such large-scale media-based developments for the ongoing goal of social progress.

Second, as described in Section 13.3.3, the emergence of new economic models based on surveillance, social sorting, and predictive profiling has implications for economic justice (SDG 9). The necessary frameworks for protective regulation against such forms of data extraction are incompletely developed and unevenly implemented. Moreover, as privacy activists and civil society organizations worldwide have worked to raise public awareness of surveillance and its threats to privacy, they have struggled against an antiregulatory discourse that aims to defeat protective regulation by linking surveillance tightly with a generalized innovation imperative (Cohen Reference Cohen and Barney2016).

Finally, commercial and government practices of surveillance, social sorting, and predictive profiling have profound implications for political self-determination. The basic possibilities for political self-determination are important not just for political processes themselves, but also for wider processes of human development, richly understood (Sen Reference Sen1999). Yet there is mounting evidence that predictive algorithms can be used to alter user behavior, in ways that implicate values of democratic self-governance and the rule of law. Facebook has publicly acknowledged conducting experiments on how personalization of the content in newsfeeds can affect users’ moods and other experiments reminding users to go to the polls and vote (Grimmelmann Reference Grimmelmann2015). There is no guarantee that future experiments would be disclosed, nor is Facebook subject to ethical guidelines similar to those that constrain human-subject experimentation in other contexts. Google’s chief economist similarly has characterized Google’s user base as subjects for experimentation (Varian Reference Varian2014).

The prospect that large information intermediaries may enjoy wholly unaccountable power to manipulate the flows of social and public knowledge is alarming. More generally, the continuous, immanent, and highly granular regulatory processes by which such privately controlled intermediaries exert power via media infrastructures (and the new discourse of human development through the exploitation of “big data” that helps legitimate such power) exist in tension with broadly shared commitments to due process and the rule of law (Hildebrandt Reference Hildebrandt2015).

We end this section with an important case where the broad social justice issues raised by the governance of media and communications infrastructures entered the political domain: the civil-society based NETmundial initiative that emerged in Brazil in the wake of the Snowden revelations.

13.6.6 Case Study: Brazil’s Marco Civil on Internet GovernanceFootnote ³⁴

After the Snowden scandal of 2013 revealed mass electronic surveillance and espionage by US intelligence agencies, diverse global initiatives to defend the freedom of the Internet emerged from civil society. At the time of writing, the most progressive regulatory framework for the Internet is Marco Civil da Internet (Civil Rights Framework for the Internet), an initiative developed jointly by Brazil’s civil society and the former government of Dilma Rousseff. Unlike authoritarian states who show greater concern over the implications of the Internet for regime stability than for freedom, and unlike liberal democracies in North America and Europe – who fear increased state control and often defer to private, corporatized governance of media infrastructures – Brazil supports universal free internet, while being also critical of the international governance structures that guide it (Trinkunas and Wallace Reference Trinkunas and Wallace2015: 2). The Marco Civil is an exemplar of alternative ways of thinking about internet governance and its relation to wider social justice, without claiming that, by itself, a regulatory framework can create a different type of internet infrastructure, let alone address all the issues of power to which any communications infrastructure gives rise.

The Marco Civil sought to rethink what freedom and citizenship mean when it comes to the Internet. Adopted on April 23, 2014, the Civil Rights Framework is intended as a prototype for Internet regulation globally. The Marco Civil emerged from NETmundial, a conference convened by Brazil’s national internet steering committee and organized as a multi-stakeholder dialogue between government, industry, and civil society. The framework that became the Marco Civil was developed through a series of online and offline deliberations that invited Brazilian citizens to shape a legal framework for internet regulation. It is significant not only as an initiative born from civil society in dialogue with government and private sectors, but also as a proposal emerging from the Global South, framed by social movements committed to the idea of communication rights. The Marco Civil has the potential to act as a balance to the global power of the United States on internet governance issues.

The Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet advances the commitment to respect for civil rights as an important component of internet regulation and governance. Recognizing the vulnerability of users, the Marco Civil emphasizes the Internet’s social goals, protects the rights of internet users, and proposes the adoption of open source technologies that allow free access to information, knowledge, and culture. In the eyes of civil society activists (Gutiérrez Reference Gutiérrez2014), the most important achievements of Brazil’s Marco Civil include protection of freedom and privacy, open governance, universal inclusion, cultural diversity, and network neutrality.

The Marco Civil considers access to the Internet fundamental to democracy, as it is essential for participation in political life and cultural production, and part of the right to education and freedom of expression. It therefore advocates reducing inequalities in access to digital technologies and promotes the development of competencies to use digital platforms effectively. It proposes universal internet service with controlled rates and sufficient connection speed and also promotes education on the rights of consumers, ethical consumerism, and protection against misleading advertising and deceptive business methods (Compare SPI “Access to basic knowledge”).

The Marco Civil stipulates that, while internet providers are free to compete, they are also responsible for guaranteeing freedom of speech, freedom of access to information, net neutrality, and protection of privacy. The Marco Civil forbids any type of discrimination based on disability, sexual orientation, or political or religious affiliations. It also provides for the protection of users’ data and reputation and the right to the free development of personality,Footnote ³⁵ and guarantees the right to access information and the right to rectification (SPI “Access to information and communications”). The Marco Civil states that citizens should be encouraged to move from being mere consumers of information, knowledge, and culture to becoming content creators. The framework calls for the development of appropriate digital tools to facilitate the creation of information, knowledge, and culture by citizens and states that the Internet should promote the production and circulation of such local content. Not surprisingly therefore movements that defend the freedom of knowledge strongly support this new code, to which Brazil’s free software community was a principal contributor (Gutiérrez Reference Gutiérrez2014). As initially proposed, the Marco Civil also mandated that all information and content about Brazil should be archived in Brazil, but that restriction was removed following lobbying by transnational internet corporations. Ultimately, the Marco Civil provided that all Brazilian internet content or content about Brazil is considered “Brazilian” and can be the object of observation. The Marco Civil eliminates criminal copyright penalties for content usage by citizens. However, it recognizes civil copyright laws that limit access to digital content and hinder collaborative creation, in tension with the goal of an entirely free digital culture.

The Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet mandates network neutrality (discussed in Section 13.6.2), and prohibits discriminatory action against any type of content or user, either by changing the speed of transmission or restricting content. Network neutrality ensures that all data travels at the same speed and without any restrictions based on the nature of the content or the nature of the user. Brazil’s Marco Civil forbids blocking, monitoring, filtering, or analyzing content for commercial, political, moral, religious, or ideological reasons. The principle of network neutrality is here affirmed as essential to a collaborative and democratic digital culture.

The Brazilian Civil Rights Framework proposes a model of governance through multi-stakeholder, transparent, collaborative, and democratic mechanisms. The creators of the Marco Civil hoped to inspire activists and civil society organizations in other countries to demand similar laws (Gutierrez Reference Gutiérrez2014), proposing “a global Internet that promotes freedom, inclusion, and diversity” (Trinkunas and Wallace Reference Trinkunas and Wallace2015: 37). The code’s provisions were in many cases opposed by global platform companies and sometimes defeated. It remains too early to determine the long-term influence of the model proposed, but its significance as an alternative to standard models of governance remains.

13.7.1 Appropriating the Digital

Individuals and communities around the world have learned to appropriate media, especially digital communications infrastructures. The most notable late twentieth-century case of appropriating media for social justice was provided by the Zapatistas in Mexico.

In 1994, just as Mexico was preparing to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) (Zapatista Army of National Liberation), an indigenous guerrilla organization, abruptly came to national attention by seizing towns in the region of Chiapas and demanding land, work, food, housing, education, independence, freedom, justice, and peace for Mexico’s indigenous communities. The Mexican government attempted to annihilate the EZLN before news of the group reached the global public sphere but did not succeed. The EZLN’s resistance has been analyzed from many perspectives, but in this chapter its importance lies not in its general repertoire of activism, but more as an exemplar of how, in the late twentieth century, media and culture came to be appropriated in new ways by social justice movements.

Using diverse media technologies and strategies, the Zapatistas activated a communication network that linked Mexican indigenous communities with social justice activists worldwide. In terms of media technology, Zapatista videos recorded on VHS tapes were carried out of the Lacandon jungle to the nearest urban centers and then on to Mexico City, where US activists picked them up and took them to Austin, Texas to be digitized and uploaded on computer listservs; meanwhile Zapatista audio recordings and texts were translated into multiple languages and disseminated via then-emerging digital platforms. In terms of cultural message, Subcomandante Marcos, the main spokesperson of the Zapatistas at the time, used these practical means to issue statements that framed the local struggles of marginalized Mexican indigenous communities as aligned with other social justice and identity struggles in the Global North and Global South (Rodríguez, Kidd, and Stein Reference Rodríguez, Kidd and Stein2010), proposing himself as standing in for “every untolerated, oppressed, exploited minority that is … now beginning to speak” (Subcomandante Marcos 1994).

Through their distinctive use of communications (both technological and cultural) the Zapatistas served to link social justice collectives and individuals worldwide into a wave of international solidarity in the global public sphere, alerting the Mexican government and its army that the whole world was monitoring human rights abuses against indigenous communities in southern Mexico (Pianta and Marchetti Reference Pianta, Marchetti and della Porta2007). Social justice activists in many countries worldwide came to adopt Zapatista language, goals, and communication strategies. “Zapatismo” came for many to represent a new type of social justice activism, based less on formal institutional structures and more on “participation and deliberation, collective autonomy, and decentralized power structures” (Ferron Reference Ferron2012: 157). Marcos’ specific manifesto for the “construction of a world where many worlds fit” (EZLN 1996) became exemplary for linking social justice to questions of culture (voice and diversity in public spheres) and questions of media (the need for inclusive media infrastructures).

The influence of this exemplar was shown in December 1999 by the actions of a wide coalition of protesters who met in Seattle to disrupt a World Trade Organization (WTO) summit. Because the Seattle protests originated a series of demonstrations against the dominant model of neoliberal globalization, the movement is sometimes labelled the “anti-globalization movement,” but they refused that label, as they were not opposed to globalization, but to specific economic models that spread inequity worldwide. Learning from the EZLN, this movement insisted on producing their own media rather than allowing mainstream media to shape the narrative about their actions. The Seattle protest organizers set up the first Independent Media Center (Indymedia), and enabled protesters to produce and edit their own coverage of the protests by uploading to Indymedia’s web page, which, in turn, incorporated Open Publishing software made available by media activist Matthew Arnison from Sydney’s Community Activist Technology group (Arnison Reference Arnison2001; Kidd Reference Kidd, Yuen, Burton Rose and Katsiaficas2004). This model was replicated during the first decade of the twenty-first century in hundreds of cities worldwide under the motto “Don’t hate the media, be the media.”

Even in a world of corporate-owned digital platforms, these visions from the Lacandon jungle and Seattle still resonate through alternative models of how social justice activists can appropriate and redesign media technologies to meet their distinctive information and communication needs (Rodríguez Reference Rodríguez2001, Reference Rodríguez, Pickard and Yangin press).

13.7.2 Affordances and Constraints: From the Mobile Phone to Social Media and Beyond

If the circumstances of the Zapatistas’ innovations were exceptional, broader changes in access to media technologies have been important too. With the introduction of prepaid accounts, low-cost handsets and relatively easy connectivity, mobile phone usage has spread across all social groups, including poor and marginalized populations. Despite stark inequalities in access, use, literacy, and resources (Donner Reference Donner2015; Qiu Reference Qiu2014), much social innovation and activism with mobile phones has emerged, enabling collective action of all sorts, whether progressive or not. At the same time, the migration of activism to new digital platforms has encountered new constraints. We must always remember that the very same communication resources that benefit movements for social justice and social progress are also benefiting the movements that oppose them, including forces of right-wing extremism and authoritarian populism. Before discussing activism in more detail, it is important to note also that the affordances of mobile technologies and social networking platforms enable new kinds of everyday solidarity in contexts outside of politics. The use of mobile phones, the Internet, and social media has been important among migrants and their dispersed family, cultural, and political networks (Fortunati, Pertierra, and Vincent Reference Fortunati, Pertierra and Vincent2012). Filipino workers and other domestic workers (generally women) who spend years away from their families and communities use mobile phones and social media to maintain bonds and connection with friends and families (Madianou and Miller Reference Madianou and Miller2012). Chinese migrants who leave rural areas to find work in cities (Chu et al. Reference Chu, Fortunati, Law and Yang2012) also rely on mobile phones to create a new “modern” identity, spanning urban and rural settings (Wallis Reference Wallis2013). Outside the context of migration, diverse communities use mobile phones to redraw the boundaries between the private and personal and create “intimate publics” (Hjorth, King, and Kataoka Reference Hjorth, King and Kataoka2014), for example to mourn or grieve (Cann Reference Cann2014; Cuminsky and Hjorth Reference Cuminskey and Hjorth2016). In the wake of the earthquake and tsunami disaster of March 11, 2011 social media and mobile phones provided new channels for citizens to witness solidarity and contribute to disaster responses in Japan (Hjorth and Kim Reference Hjorth and Kim2011).

One of the earliest places where uses of social media and mobile phones entered politics was Africa, where mobiles have been used for sharing information on health (SDG 3), “witnessing” human rights violations (through the incorporation of cameras into mobile phones), and citizen journalism, including election monitoring (Ekine Reference Ekine2010). An instructive case is Ushahidi (meaning “testimony” in Swahili), a mobile-based platform developed to share information and create maps to report on postelection violence in Kenya in 2008. In the South African elections of 2009, political groups and their supporters used different kinds of mobile software, combining instant messaging and chat functions to enhance communication (SDG 10). Labor struggles in Africa have also adopted the Internet and especially the mobile phone, alongside traditional media, for purposes of mobilization, coordination, and solidarity, for example the Marikana mine workers in South Africa (Walton Reference Walton, Goggin and Hjorth2014) and the El-Mahalla textile workers in Egypt. Section 13.5.4 discussed parallel developments in Northeast Asia.

Another important affordance of ICTs for social justice struggles is the ease with which they enable textual and multimedia commentary, protest, and dissent (SDG 16). Building on the early history of dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) from the late 1980s to late 1990s (Goggin and McLelland Reference Goggin and McLelland2016), the growth of the World Wide Web in the 1990s saw the emergence of blogs as a flexible and powerful architecture of connection and commentary (Bruns and Jacobs Reference Bruns and Jacobs2006). In many countries, blogs enabled writers and activists, audiences and publics to engage and connect. Although this first attracted attention in the United States, it quickly became influential among social movements elsewhere, for example in the Middle East, especially Egypt (el-Nawaway and Khamis Reference El-Nawaway and Khamis2015) and Iran (Sreberny and Khiabany Reference Sreberny and Khiabany2010). Blogs provide a way for religious, cultural, political, and linguistic communities to connect across territorial boundaries around religion (the various Muslim blogospheres: Russell and Echchaibi Reference Russell and Echchaibi2009), gender rights (Guta and Karolak Reference Guta and Karolak2015), health issues, and diasporic and sexual identities.

But the implications of information and communications technologies for achieving social justice and democracy are often ambiguous for several reasons. First, patterns of access and use remain very unequal. An example from the early 2000s comes from two post-Apartheid South African social movements, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF): although they used websites and email to disseminate information, they needed to limit their mobile phone use to communications within their organizations. The use more recently of smartphones to communicate election messaging does not necessarily transform the public sphere overall or citizens’ opportunities within it (Walton and Donner Reference Walton, Donner and Katz2009). The use of different media for different functions may channel politics and related activity into particular elite domains (policy discussion by experts, for instance), rather than broadly based public spheres in which wider populations can participate (Wasserman Reference Wasserman2007).

Second, debate continues about the role of social media platforms in creating new forms of solidarity and transnational mobilization. Facebook has been associated with various social and political movements, especially the “Arab Spring” uprisings of 2011, as well as the recent “Women’s March” – a worldwide protest held in January 2017 to protect legislation and policies regarding human rights and environmental issues. Meanwhile, Twitter – relatively simple in its design, and without the cross-media integration of Facebook – has nonetheless helped incubate various initiatives based on “hashtag publics” (Weller et al. Reference Weller, Bruns, Burgess, Mahrt and Puschmann2013), for example around Iran’s 2009 election (Mottahedeh Reference Mottahedeh2015), #BlackLivesMatter in the United States, and the #RhodesMustFall protests in South Africa.

At the same time, however, the infrastructure of social media and digital platforms remains tightly controlled by their corporate owners and managers (Andrejevic Reference Andrejevic2013), rather than by activists. Technological affordances that are key to solidarity – for example the hashtag function in Twitter – can be changed overnight by the parent corporation without consultation or participation of users. It remains very difficult for users or activists to have systematic input into the design and governance of commercial social media platforms (Mansell Reference Mansell2012). Social movements and social justice activists have learned that the potential of digital platforms to enhance their communication capabilities goes hand in hand with increased surveillance of their actions (Treré Reference Treré, Dencik and Leistert2015). Finally, it is important to remember that the very same communication resources that benefit movements for social justice and social progress are also benefiting the movements that oppose them. We need therefore in reviewing the potential of new media technologies to acknowledge both affordances and constraints, and how they interact in specific contexts.

13.7.3 One Planet, Many Struggles, Many Media

Contemporary protest movements tend to draw on an “enlarged media ecology” (Qiu Reference Qiu2008) of old and new media, where traditional communication channels are mixed with new digital tools of activism. A variety of media ecologies have proved important in the context of different struggles for social justice across the world.

The interplay among traditional and digital media reached new heights as the Arab uprisings of 2010 and 2011 spawned a vibrant scene of dissident media and culture. The rise of political stand-up comedy was a hallmark of the uprising: in Bahrain, Syria, and Tunisia digital videos bore witness to atrocities, mocked dictators, and showcased a variety of animation, dance, theatre, and song. The media of artists and activists, often produced and disseminated under extremely risky conditions, is an important form of “creative insurgency” (Kraidy Reference Kraidy2016). Meanwhile, media-based activism for gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls is also growing worldwide. Through creative media strategies, advocacy groups have from the 1990s onwards made remarkable progress in the realm of gender equality from universal suffrage for women to rights for sexual minorities.

As another example, in the struggle against ISIS, activists have been running clandestine festivals of short films, shot on mobile phones, thereby defying local political censorship and moral prohibitions. The group “Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently” has documented the atrocities of daily life under the Islamic State, propagating these on social media and connecting with mainstream journalists worldwide.

As these examples also illustrate, care is needed to contextualize the role of digital platforms in social movements. Digital technologies and social media platforms rarely drive political actions and protest in themselves. Social movements’ communication strategies may involve not only digital technologies but also a wide range of non-digital media. In the 2013–2016 Gezi Square protests in Turkey, solidarity was built through a mix of media that combined photocopied zines and street performance with content shared via social media platforms (Saybaşılı Reference Saybaşılı and Downey2014).

A significant new direction in media activism is as a space for political agency outside the sectarianism that dominates mainstream media and politics in polarized societies. In Lebanon, activists have mobilized around issues of environmental justice and the provision of utilities; the 2015 “You Stink” Movement, which used digital media to mobilize activism about inadequate removal services for municipal waste, was a key example of this trend.

Anticorruption campaigning has also harnessed diverse media capabilities. The most dramatic example of using the Internet as an infrastructure of connection to challenge not just corruption, but state and corporate power more generally, is the work of the activist group Anonymous with its “denial of service” and other attacks (Coleman Reference Coleman2014) and the whistleblower platform WikiLeaks (Brevini, Hintz, and McCurdy Reference Brevini, Hintz and McCurdy2013). One of the largest civil society campaigns in recent years is the 2011 Indian anticorruption movement triggered by Anna Hazare’s hunger strike in New Delhi.

In conclusion, all social justice and social progress initiatives depend on complex media ecologies that offer resources while simultaneously imposing risks and constraints. Activist individuals and communities, not technologies, drive social progress, by meeting the specific communication and information needs of each social justice context.

13.7.4 Creative Affordances: The Case of Disability Movements

An excellent case study of the role that the new affordances of digital media technology can play is disability. According to the landmark WHO 2011 World Report on Disability, more than 1 billion people in the world experience disability (15 percent of the world’s population), of whom 110–190 million experience very significant disabilities (SDG 3).

Disability involves a wide range of impairment types from sensory disabilities to cognitive disabilities and psychosocial conditions. Prevalence of disability is growing due to population ageing and global increase in chronic health conditions. Disability is highly correlated with disadvantage but not “all people with disabilities are equally disadvantaged” (WHO 2011).

A roadmap for putting disability at the heart of the vision for social progress was proposed in 2006 by the UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The CRPD has many provisions, which involve communication and technology rights, since media is pivotal for achieving human rights in relation to disability. People with disabilities generally experience inferior access to and affordability of media infrastructures, technologies, content, and participation, especially in the Global South. At the same time, disability becomes a paradigm case for rethinking both media and media’s potential contribution to social progress. Disability is a key part of wider understandings of cultural and media diversity, but is of particular interest because of disability struggles’ strong focus on digital technologies and their affordances.

Since the 1970s, the role of media in communicating negative attitudes, stereotypes, and myths about disability has been critiqued, commencing with the role of advertising in “charity” discourses of disability and a push towards affirmative images of disability. Although still very much in the minority, people with disabilities appear as characters of TV shows, increasingly reported in news, or, on occasion, as media workers, broadcasters, journalists, and celebrities themselves. However there remains a hierarchy of what is newsworthy, entertaining, and shareable, even in digital platforms. Mainstream media industries generally lag behind in offering work opportunities to people with disabilities (SDG 8). Disability still occupies a marginal place on media professionals’ agendas.

However, in various countries, people with disabilities and their allies are using digital platforms in distinctive ways: for example, US Deaf protests in the Gaudallet “Deaf President” campaign; the use of video, photography, and social media by Bolivian disability activists in March 2016 to demand better social support (Goggin Reference Goggin, McCosker, Vivienne and Johns2016); and British disability movement protests from 2012 against welfare cuts, using blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Through social media, blogs, and websites a wide variety of disability publics have emerged. People with disabilities have also developed their own disability media: dedicated blogs (Ouch! established by BBC in the UK), disability comedy chatshow news genres (The Last Leg, Channel 4 in Britain), disability web-based programs (Gimpgirl), and crowd-funding platforms used to fund investigative journalism or entertainment.

Issues of accessibility to media infrastructures, as well as the potential affordances of these platforms, are particularly salient for people with disabilities, for example, captioning on TV and radio for the print handicapped. Despite their long histories, disability media such as Braille formats and sign language communication are still given little recognition in wider society, although there have been concerted international efforts on some aspects of digital technology (accessible computers and software, web accessibility, mobile phone accessibility, “apps” for people with disabilities).

Yet even in areas with the most concentrated effort, such as web accessibility, the situation remains inequitable: most government websites across the world have low levels of accessibility compliance, despite “digital first” government service, welfare, and e-government policies. The implementation of the CRPD requires widespread accessibility, especially across design of digital technologies, but national legislatures and media corporations have been slow to act.

The lack of social progress on disability and media is a central issue for wider social progress. It constrains the possibilities for social and cultural participation of people with disabilities (SPI “Health and wellness”). Yet disability has much to teach us about how communication occurs across the world’s population: communication among, with, and by people with disabilities foregrounds issues of voice (Couldry Reference Couldry2010) and listening (MacNamara Reference MacNamara2015): people with disabilities need access to public spheres where we can all listen not least governments, corporations, civil society, and a wide range of other organizations and agents (Goggin Reference Goggin2009). Without that the much-vaunted promises of new digital technologies are hollow.