Category: political economy

Crowdfunding for culture: Origins of a new system or no alternative at all?

What follows from decisions to outsource modes of creation and funding to consumers? This is the question posed by a new open access book –CULTURAL CROWDFUNDING: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization that considers how platforms are used to organize cultural labour following a logic of suggestion rather than overt injunction.

Four key areas are considered: the history of crowdfunding as a system; whose interests crowdfunding may serve; the implications for digital labour and lastly crowdfunding’s interface with globalization and contemporary capitalism. The book concludes with an assessment of claims that crowdfunding can democratize culture.

CONTENTS
1. Introduction Vincent Rouzé 2. Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding: The Origins of a New System? Vincent Rouzé 3. Far from an Alternative: New Cultural Intermediaries Vincent Rouzé 4. Participatory Cultural Platforms and Labour Jacob Matthews and Vincent Rouzé 5. Globalization and the Logics of Capitalism Jacob Matthews, Stéphane Costantini and Alix Bénistant 6. General Conclusion Vincent Rouzé Index

EDITOR
Vincent Rouzé is Associate Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Paris 8 and a member of the Centre for Media, Technology and Internationalization Studies (Cemti). Contributors: Jacob Matthews, Stéphane Costantini, Alix Bénistant.

Published open access by the University of Westminster Press. Published 29 November 2019

This book is published in the Critical Digital and Social Media Studies Series

FORMAT
128 pages paperback 229 x 152mm
978-1-912656-38-7 £19.99

OPEN ACCESS
PDF, EPub and kindle versions available Free From uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site books: PDF 978-1-912656-39-4; ePub 978-1-912656-40-0 Kindle 978-1-912656-41-7: DOI:10.16997/book34

CDSMS series reaches 100,000 views/downloads.

The University of Westminster Press‘s flagship Critical Digital and Social Media Studies open access series just recently achieved a new land landmark: 100,000 views and downloads. These include both book chapters and full book downloads (impossible currently to wholly disaggregate) across its 11 titles published since October 2016.

We’d like to ascribe this to a particular date but the rise in figures is coming at us so thick and fast from different directions (many reporting only monthly, one six-monthly) the only certainty is that the actual number is higher, maybe even significantly so.

UWP would like to congratulate all its authors, editors, the editorial board its platform provider Ubiquity Press and especially series editor-in-chief Christian Fuchs of our own parent institution, the University of Westminster for a wonderful effort in helping us reach global audiences. We look forward to further landmarks in 2020 and onwards.

The rallying cry of ‘We should all be feminists’ (C. N. Adichie) is turning into ‘We should all be activists …’

as new reports emerge concerning male bias in AI … etc’
(from WPCC editorial).

As a new WPCC issue on Media Activism is published editors, Anastasia Denisova and Michaela O’Brien highlight the key issues for the issue in their editorial ‘From High Visibility to High Vulnerability: Feminist, Postcolonial and Anti-Gentrification Activism at Risk‘. What follows is an extract.

In times when hijacking of terms and stories happens on a daily basis, activism also means constant narrative recreation and damage control. Some scholars call the internet a patriarchal structure (Megarry, 2018) and there are voices that demand gender equality of the online space. The rallying cry of ‘We should all be feminists’ (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) is turning into ‘We should all be activists’ as new reports emerge concerning male bias in AI (Crawford, 2016; Adam, 2006; Leavy, 2018), sexist coding of digital voice assistants (West, Kraut and Ei Chew, 2019), the inherent inequality of AI-assisted recruitment processes (Dastin, 2018), and inequality of activism too. Female protesters and activists of colour face more challenges than others – due to the outbursts of toxic masculinity, racial abuse, cowardly anonymous online attacks and imbalance of visibility when it comes to hierarchy of influence. These issues are as virtual as they are real – and they need to be addressed to maintain liveable societies. As editors, we wanted to explore the possibilities for progressive activists around the world to use the media to resist the current rise of the extreme right along with disturbing and growing evidence of the techniques of fascism: populism, propaganda and fake news, hate speech and rise of hate crimes. We define ‘activism’ as ‘the widest range of attempts to effect [progressive] social or cultural change’ (Meikle, 2018: iii), while ‘the media’ includes a broad range of communication platforms, from traditional journalism to digital networks.

[The University of Westminster runs an MA Programme in MEDIA, CAMPAIGNING AND SOCIAL CHANGE].

Adam, A. (2006). Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine. London: Routledge.

Crawford, K. (2016). Artificial intelligence’s white guy problem. The New York Times, 25 June.

Dastin, J. (2018). Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women. Reuters.com, 10 October. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G (last accessed July 2019).

Megarry, J. (2018). Under the watchful eyes of men: Theorising the implications of male surveillance practices for feminist activism on social media. Feminist Media Studies, 18(6), 1070–1085. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1387584

Meikle, G. (Ed.) (2018). The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism. Abingdon: Routledge. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315475059

Leavy, S. (2018, May). Gender bias in artificial intelligence: The need for diversity and gender theory in machine learning. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Gender Equality in Software Engineering (pp. 14–16). New York: Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3195570.3195580.

West, M., Kraut, R., & Ei Chew, H. (2019). I’d blush if I could: Closing gender divides in digital skills through education. Paris: Equals Global Partnership/UNESCO.

WPPC release special collections on Journalism and Digital Challenge & …

Special collections on ‘Journalism and the Digital Challenge’, ‘Censorship and Propaganda’ and ’Television Studies’ have been released by WPCC. Freshly compiled the special collections bring together previously published material on these related general themes from all our previous issues that included relevant content.

Over a longer period many more additional collections will be added to improve access to our extensive list of articles and aid research searches for particular topics over time, enabling at ‘at-a-glance’ views of WPPC coverage of particular areas. Further special collections are due to appear in September 2019.

Most of WPCC’s journal publications appear in thematic special issues. Recent issues include Geography and Communications, Re-Evaluating China’s Global Media Expansion and Redesigning or Redefining Privacy.

Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture is an open access journal.

Digital and Social Media Studies Series reaches 10 titles with Bubbles and Machines.

UWP’s Critical Digital and Social Media Studies series edited by Christian Fuchs is proud to record the publication of its tenth title since its first in October 2016 with Bubbles and Machines: Gender, Information and Financial Crises by Micky Lee.

The author asks ‘Are financial crises embedded in IT? Can gender studies offer insights into financial reporting? Working with case histories of tulipmania, microcredit, Wall Street reporting and the role of ‘screens’, Bubbles and Machines argues that rather than calling financial crises human-made or inevitable they should be recognized as technological. The author asks ‘Are financial crises embedded in IT? Can gender studies offer insights into financial reporting?

All titles in the CDSMS series are published open access and are free to read in digital form, available to purchase in print online.

UWP 2019 catalogue out

Delighted to announce the arrival of UWP 2019 catalogue. Forty-six pages of books and journals. All UWP published titles are open access.

Following our first book title published in October 2016 Critical Theory of Communication by Christian Fuchs, we are now listing 44 with over 13 titles published or firmly scheduled in our flagship Critical and Digital Media Studies series.

There are books in Media Studies, Politics/Theory, our Law and the Senses series, Geography, History and Education. And some details of our published two journals Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture and Entertainment and Sports Law Journal.

You can download, then view the catalogue here.

uwestminsterpress.co.uk

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