Bibliographic record
Abstract
A reticence to critically interrogate claims that digital media are 'democratizing' politics and societies is commonplace in many circles.So is their frequent conflation with organizing, activism and emancipation--and condescension towards those who question assumptions made about progressive social and political change facilitated by the 'new' media.Natalie Fenton, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, has written an important, engaging and timely book of great relevance to academic and activist audiences alike.In seven chapters, she suggests that '[c]laims for the extension and reinvention of activism through digital media need to be considered in the context of the material social and political world of inequality, injustice, corporate dominance and the financialization of everything."(19).And, as she reminds us, for all of the hype, Internet access and online (political) activity are marked by deep inequalities, across and within societies.Moreover, the digital realm is routinely subject to state censorship, filtering, mass surveillance, and the suppression of dissent.Digital, Political, Radical avoids simplistic, over-determined or totalizing politicaleconomic approaches to understanding digital media in an age of global capitalist imperialism.Rather, the book carefully reviews and critically engages with ideas and arguments arising from sociology, media and cultural studies, and social and political theory that are frequently cited in upbeat narratives about digital media and social change.For example, Fenton examines Habermasian perspectives on the public sphere and media institutions which depend on the notion of liberal democracy, and which, she contends are not up to the task of rethinking and strengthening radical politics.Likewise, she challenges Castells' optimistic (and influential) views on social movements, oppositional politics, networked communication and impact on actual political social change.Indeed, Fenton questions whether liberal pluralism, increased information and communicative freedom in the age of the Internet and social media contribute to building serious counter-power and transformative change to confront the power of capital, as many assume or imply.She discusses the problem of losing sight of social and political critiques when analyses and explanations start -and end -with technology.Her book highlights the importance of social, political and economic transformation, collective struggles and solidarity which go beyond -and indeed may be different from -the phenomenon of individuals' increased participation in communication and "a politics of visibility that relies on hashtags, 'Likes' and
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".