Dina Matar, Chair, Centre for Global Media and Communication The story of the popularity of the audio chatroom app. Clubhouse, in the Middle East seems to follow a well-trodden route – the platform is launched in the region and elsewhere; the app is quickly taken up by users eager to talk about anything- from what to wear in Zoom calls to discussions of taboo topics, such as honour killings in
Big Tech are now the most powerful publishers of our time, and Netflix should be viewed with the same skepticism as Facebook and Google. By Nadine Sayegh, MA Media and the Middle East (2015-16), Centre for Global Media and Communication With the giant firm Netflix making an informal call for content in the Arab world and wider region, it is an opportune moment to address the social, cultural and political
On 10 July 2020, the Iranian Judiciary announced that three men, namely Amirhossein Moradi, Saeed Tamjidi and Mohamad Rajabi, who were arrested in anti-regime protests in November 2019, were to be imminently executed as they had been denied appeal. Within three days of the announcement, the Persian hashtag #اعدام_نکنید (“Don’t_Execute”) started appearing on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. By 14 July, the hashtag was trending globally on Twitter with many inside
By Hossam Fazalla and Dounia Mahlouly Nine years after the toppling of Hosny Mubarak, the 91-year-old ousted Egyptian president passed away. The news was met with emotional confusion and mixed feelings by Egyptians. It is the death of the man whose face was in every Egyptian classroom, who was considered a war hero, and yet, it is also the death of the dictator who ruled for 30 years, and whose hands
Environmental philosopher Timothy Morton criticises what he calls a “beautiful soul syndrome” sometimes still prevalent in Academia. By this he refers to a kind of critical attitude that tries to look at the world from the safety of detachment, without getting one’s hands dirty, without compromising one’s own ideological purity. He writes that a truly theoretical approach is not allowed to sit smugly outside the area it is examining. It must mix thoroughly
“Knowledge is a practical assemblage, a ‘mechanism’ of statements and visibilities.” — Deleuze People often ask why I bother learning the algorithms and technologies that drive today’s AI innovations – I am a digital anthropologist after all and not a hard-baked computer scientist. Should I just not focus on the bread-and-butter of qualitative research – thick description, deep contextual knowledge of cultures, in-depth understanding of the nuances of language –
Emma Jacobs explores competing discourses of identity on two Jewish websites. Emma did a module on Transnational Communities and Diasporic media in 2018/19 academic year. Image credit: “Birthright Israel: Bus 423” by HRYMX is licensed under CC BY 2.0 As a genre of travel, Birthright Israel—a free ten-day trip to Israel for Jewish young adults, funded by the Israeli government, Zionist organizations, and private donors—sits at a strange point of
I am glad to announce the publication of a Special Issue on Global Digital Cultures and Extreme Speech published in the International Journal of Communication. This is the outcome of a five-year collaboration with colleagues across the world committed to advancing a more comparative perspective to ongoing debates on online hate speech and violent online political extremism — and most notably collaboration with Professor Sahana Udupa at the Digital Dignity Project, at LMU
For somebody who has been following digital politics globally for more than a decade now, it is sometimes uncanny how hateful, violent and misleading communication – or at least the public and political controversies and moral panics around them – now dominates the global political landscape. Digital media, it seems, is imagined in mostly terms of the dangers it poses: violent extremist propaganda run amok; democratic processes corrupted by disinformation
As a part of the course work at the Centre for Global Media and Communication, we encourage students to explore old academic debates in new and creative ways. For instance, in the Global Digital Cultures MA degree that I convene, this option has been built into the digital assignments that students engage with throughout the year. Such assignments allow the students both a breather from more rigid classical form of academic
