Archive for June 2021

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[Commlist] New Book: The Digital Frontier

Tue Jun 01 11:31:58 GMT 2021





New Book: *The Digital Frontier *
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*Book Title:* /The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web /

*Publisher:* Indiana University Press

https://iupress.org/9780253056498/the-digital-frontier/ <https://iupress.org/9780253056498/the-digital-frontier/>

*Date of Publication:* May 25, 2021

*Book Description *

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/The Digital Frontier/ interrogates the world wide web and the digital ecosystem it has spawned from a critical, global and postcolonial lens to reveal how their conventions, protocols and standards, represent an emergent form of cultural power. In analyzing the evolving avatar of this global media technology, the book shows its assertion through the web’s “infrastructures of control” visible at sites where the universalizing imperatives of the web run up against local values, norms, and cultures. These include how the idea of the “global common good” is used as a ruse by digital oligopolies to expand their private enclosures, how seemingly collaborative spaces can simultaneously be exclusionary as they regulate legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is being redefined online along Eurocentric ideals, and how the web’s political challenge is felt differentially by sovereign nation states.


In analyzing the modality of cultural power manifesting as control on the web, /The Digital Frontier/ is an important read for scholars, activists, lay-readers and students inspired by the utopian dream of a truly representative global digital network.

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*Table of Contents *

1.Infrastructures of Control

2.Frontier

3.Knowledge

4.Selfhood

5.Sovereignty

6.Conclusion

*Book Endorsements*

“Finally, here is a truly global perspective on digital media technologies. Sangeet Kumar’s /The Digital Frontier/ offers a much needed comprehensive analysis of technological infrastructures that undergird the cultural architecture of the Web while making sense of the geopolitical contests played out over these technologies. Kumar’s work is original and inspiring: an eye-opener for students and scholars of the internet.”

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*José van Dijck*, Professor of media and digital society at Utrecht University and author of /The Culture of Connectivity/ and /The Platform Society/

"Sangeet Kumar takes us beyond the lazily Americanist vision of most internet studies. With a deep imagination for fresh critiques and a savvy eye for compelling case studies, he reveals the vexed entanglements of freedom and control on the web from the geopolitical vantage point of the global south."

*John Durham Peters*, Professor of English, Film and Media Studies at Yale University and author of /The Marvelous Clouds/ and/ Promiscuous Knowledge./

*About the author *

Sangeet Kumar is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and the Director of International Studies at Denison University. His research examines the global dimensions of digital platforms through critical lenses such as asymmetries of power, sovereignty, post-coloniality and user agency. He is the author of /The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web/, and numerous articles in journals including /Information, Communication and Society, //Internet Policy Review,/ /International Journal of Communication, Popular Communication, and Global Media and //Communication./ Prior to his academic career he was a journalist for a daily based out of New Delhi, India.

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