An information society is a society or subculture where the usage, creation, distribution, manipulation and integration of information is a significant activity. Its main drivers are information and communication technologies, which have resulted in rapid growth of a variety of forms of information. Proponents of this theory posit that these technologies are impacting most important forms of social organization, including education, economy, health, government, warfare, and levels of democracy. The people who are able to partake in this form of society are sometimes called either computer users or even digital citizens, defined by K. Mossberger as “Those who use the Internet regularly and effectively”. This is one of many dozen internet terms that have been identified to suggest that humans are entering a new and different phase of society.
Postmodernity is the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity. Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century – in the 1980s or early 1990s – and that it was replaced by postmodernity, and still others would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity. The idea of the postmodern condition is sometimes characterized as a culture stripped of its capacity to function in any linear or autonomous state like regressive isolationism, as opposed to the progressive mind state of modernism.
The Frankfurt School is a school of thought in sociology and critical philosophy. It is associated with the Institute for Social Research founded at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1923. Formed during the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the first generation of the Frankfurt School was composed of intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the socio-economic systems of the 1930s: namely, capitalism, fascism, and communism. Significant figures associated with the school include Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas.
Alternative media are media sources that differ from established or dominant types of media in terms of their content, production, or distribution. Sometimes the term independent media is used as a synonym, indicating independence from large media corporations, but generally independent media is used to describe a different meaning around freedom of the press and independence from government control. Alternative media does not refer to a specific format and may be inclusive of print, audio, film/video, online/digital and street art, among others. Some examples include the counter-culture zines of the 1960s, ethnic and indigenous media such as the First People's television network in Canada, and more recently online open publishing journalism sites such as Indymedia.
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, and social transformation. Marxism originates with the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive "Marxist theory". Marxism has had a profound effect in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts.
General intellect, according to Karl Marx in the Grundrisse, is capable of becoming a structural force of production. The concept designates a combination of technological expertise and social intellect, or general social knowledge. The "general intellect" passage in the Fragment on machines, says that, while the development of machinery led to the oppression of workers under capitalism, it also offers a prospect for future liberation.
Andrew Feenberg is an American philosopher. He holds the Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His main interests are philosophy of technology, continental philosophy, critique of technology and science and technology studies.
Peter Goodwin is a British academic who is a Principal Research Fellow of the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) at the University of Westminster.
Frank Webster is a British sociologist. His critical writing on the "information society" has been translated into many languages, widely discussed and criticized. In Theories of the Information Society, he examined six analytically separable conceptions of the information society, arguing that all are suspect, so much so that the idea of an information society cannot be easily sustained.
Cyber-utopianism, web-utopianism, digital utopianism, or utopian internet is a subcategory of technological utopianism and the belief that online communication helps bring about a more decentralized, democratic, and libertarian society. The desired values may also be privacy and anonymity, freedom of expression, access to culture and information or also socialist ideals leading to digital socialism.
A critical theory is any approach to humanities and social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge or dismantle power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions than from individuals. Some hold it to be an ideology, others argue that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical theory finds applications in various fields of study, including psychoanalysis, film theory, literary theory, cultural studies, history, communication theory, philosophy, and feminist theory.
Digital labor or digital labour represents an emergent form of labor characterized by the production of value through interaction with information and communication technologies such as digital platforms or artificial intelligence. Examples of digital labor include on-demand platforms, micro-working, and user-generated data for digital platforms such as social media. Digital labor describes work that encompasses a variety of online tasks. If a country has the structure to maintain a digital economy, digital labor can generate income for individuals without the limitations of physical barriers.
Historical materialism is Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx located historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods.
Dal Yong Jin is a media studies scholar. He is Distinguished SFU Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada where his research explores digital platforms, digital games, media history, political economy of communication, globalization and trans-nationalization, the Korean Wave, and science journalism. He has published more than 30 books and penned more than 200 journal articles, book chapters, and book reviews. Jin has delivered numerous keynote speeches, conference presentations, invited lectures, and media interviews on subjects such as digital platforms, video games, globalization, transnational culture, and the Korean Wave. Based on his academic performance, he was awarded the Outstanding Scholar Award from the Korean American Communication Association at the KACA 40th Anniversary Conference in 2018, while receiving the Outstanding Research Award from the Deputy Prime Ministry and Minister of the Education of South Korea. He was also awarded ICA Fellow, which is primarily a recognition of distinguished scholarly contributions at the International Communication Association Conference held in Paris in 2022. Jin has been interviewed by international media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, Elle, New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, The Guardian, The Vancouver Sun, Chicago Tribune, The Telegraph, Wired, LA Times, and China Daily as one of the world’s leading scholars on Korean pop culture and these subject matters.
The Political Economy of Communications is a branch of communication studies or media studies which studies the power relations that shape the communication of information from the mass media to its public. PEC analyzes the power relations between the mass media system, information and communications technologies (ICTs) and the wider socioeconomic structure in which these operate, with a focus on understanding the historical and current state of technological developments. PEC has proliferated in the 2000s with the modernization of technology. The advancement of media has created conversation about the effects of colonialism and PEC.
tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique is a biannual peer-reviewed open access academic journal covering communication studies, media studies, sociology of technology/communication/media/culture, critical digital sociology, information science/studies and political economy of media/communication/culture/Internet from the perspective of critical theory. tripleC is an open access journal focused on the critical study of capitalism and communication. It was established in 2003 as tripleC: Cognition, Communication, Cooperation. Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, obtaining its current name in 2013. It is published in the United Kingdom as not-for-profit project The editors-in-chief are Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval. The journal uses the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND licence for its content.
Tony D. Sampson is a British academic author who writes about philosophies of affect, digital media cultures and labour, marketing power, design/brand thinking, social and immersive user experiences and neurocultures. He is best known for his widely cited and debated academic publications on virality, network contagion and neuroculture. This work is influenced by the 19th century French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde and concerns contemporary analyses of viral phenomena and affective and emotional contagion on the Internet. In 2017 Sampson published The Assemblage Brain, a book about the culture of the affective brain explored through digital media, the neurosciences, business (marketing), cybernetics and political power. His most recent publication, A Sleepwalker's Guide to Social Media (2020), explores the power dynamic of a post-Cambridge Analytica social media environment wherein the marketing logic of virality/growth helps to inflame contagions of race hate, posing a threat to democracy.
Nick Dyer-Witheford is an author, and associate professor at the University of Western Ontario in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies. His area of study primarily focuses on the rise of technology and the internet, as well as their continuous impact on modern society. He has written six books, along with seventeen other publications.
An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital is a book by German Marxist scholar Michael Heinrich examining the three volumes of Karl Marx's major economic work Capital. Published in German in 2004, the book is structured as a shortened account of Marx's analysis of capitalism, and is written from the standpoint of the Neue Marx-Lektüre school of thought, criticising both Marxist and bourgeois readings of Marx. The book was first published in Germany by Schmetterling Verlag and became one of the most popular introductions to Capital in the country. It was the first of Heinrich's works to be translated into English, with a 2012 edition by Monthly Review Press.
"The stack" is a term used in science and technology studies, the philosophy of technology and media studies to describe the multiple interconnected layers that computation depends on at a planetary scale. The term was introduced by Benjamin H. Bratton in a 2014 essay and expanded upon in his 2016 book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, and has been adapted, critiqued and expanded upon by numerous other scholars.
