9 articles in this issue
Fredrik Stiernstedt, Anne Kaun
Prisons are a recurring topic and backdrop in the popular culture of the Global North. They often serve as spectacular environments that seem far removed from most people’s everyday lives. This article develops the notion of the prison media complex and d... see more
Nathan Schneider
Critics have been converging around the logic of colonialism to describe the Internet economy. If we are serious about the laden language of the colonial, we should be ready to learn from struggles against pre-digital empires and colonial regimes. Althoug... see more
Jamie Ranger
Jamie Ranger reviews Jacob Johanssen’s Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture – Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data. The book offers a comprehensive account of our contemporary media environment – digital culture and audiences in particular – by drawin... see more
Ian Moll
The hegemonic construal of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ portrays rapid technological developments as a bold, new industrial revolution. Since there is sparse evidence of any such revolution across the totality of social, political, cultural and econ... see more
Piara Govender, Stella Medvedyuk, Dennis Raphael
Literature now exists on how the media reports on health inequalities. One compelling concept as to the sources and impacts of health inequalities is “social murder” as articulated by Friedrich Engels in his 1845 volume, The Condition of the Working ... see more
Holger Pötzsch, Kerem Schamberger
In this article, we investigate labour struggles under the condition of digital capitalism. The main research question we address is: How do German unions evaluate and respond to the rapidly accelerating digitalisation of economy and work? Based on a seri... see more
Prinola Govenden
Critical political economy of the media investigates how changes in the array of forces that exercise control of media institutions liberate or limit the public sphere. South Africa’s political economy of transition from apartheid to democracy was notably... see more
Tony Kelso, Zeynep Altinay
Typically, consumer advertising is designed to promote or build brand identity for goods or services. Yet when a major crisis disrupts the everyday flow of life, advertisers often pivot from directly pitching their brands to conveying messages that somewh... see more
Jamie Ranger reviews Lee Artz’s 2022 book ‘Spectacle and Diversity: Transnational Media and Global Power’.