Is There a Global Digital Culture?

Contributors debate this question in this Special Issue co-published with CARGC Press. Authors initially presented this research at the second Biennial Symposium of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in April 2016.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the question “Is there a global culture?” fueled heated debates as intellectual opponents grappled with the social, political, economic and cultural consequences of globalization. Guest-edited by Marwan M. Kraidy, this Special Section by global communication scholars revisits the discussion on global culture in light of the digital revolution. The articles that follow do not pretend to provide a comprehensive answer to the existence or lack thereof of a global digital culture. Rather, they consider this question as an intellectual provocation to revisit how the universal relates to the particular, the global to the local, the digital to the material. Questions guiding these articles include:

How do networks transmute individual autonomy and the sovereignty of the body?  How is digital culture fomenting disjuncture across the globe in dissident, marginal, or rogue formations?

To what extent have boundaries between public and private, visible and invisible, shifted in the digital era?

How is the digital affecting the ways people work and play, how they experience and judge beauty, and how they protest?

Most fundamentally, does digitization herald a new chapter in how we understand ourselves?

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on September 30, 2017.  Please Ctrl+Click on the article titles below for direct linking to the papers of interest.

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Convergence and Disjuncture in Global Digital Culture ― An Introduction
Marwan M. Kraidy, University of Pennsylvania

The Cultures of Anonymity and Violence in the Mexican Blogosphere
Hector Amaya, University of Virginia

Uploading the News After Coming Down From the Mountain: The FARC’s Experiment with Online Television in Cuba, 2012–2016
Alexander L. Fattal, Pennsylvania State University

Video Games and the Asymmetry of Global Cultural Flows: The Game Industry and Game Culture in Iran and the Czech Republic
Vit Šisler, Jaroslav Švelch, Josef Šlerka, Charles University

Digital Platform as a Double-Edged Sword: How to Interpret Cultural Flows in the Platform Era
Dal Yong Jin, Simon Fraser University

Poor Images, Ad-Hoc Archives, Artists’ Rights: The Scrappy Beauties of Handmade Digital Culture
Laura U. Marks, Simon Fraser University

The Lurker and the Politics of Knowledge in Data Culture
Olga Goriunova, Royal Holloway University of London

Digital Labor Studies Go Global: Toward a Digital Decolonial Turn
Antonio Casilli, Telecom Paris-Tech
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Larry Gross
Editor

 Arlene Luck
 Managing Editor

 Marwan M. Kraidy
Guest Editor