[Commlist] New Book: The Digital Frontier

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.”

**

*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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