Digital Humanism explores how Humanism can help us to critically understand how digital technologies shape society and humanity, providing an introduction to Humanism in the digital age.
In this exceptional study, Christian Fuchs discusses how the internet has transformed the lives of human beings and social relationships in contemporary society. By outlining a social theory of the internet and the information society, he demonstrates how the ecological, economic, political, and cultural systems of contemporary society have been transformed by new ICTs. Fuchs highlights how new forms of cooperation and competition are advanced and supported by the internet in subsystems of society and also discusses opportunities and risks of the information society.
Renowned Marxist scholar and critical media theorist Christian Fuchs provides a thorough, chapter-by-chapter introduction to Capital Volume 1 that assists readers in making sense of Karl Marx’s most important and groundbreaking work in the information age, exploring Marx’s key concepts through the lens of media and communication studies via contemporary phenomena like the Internet, digital labour, social media, the media industries, and digital class struggles. Through a range of international, current-day examples, Fuchs emphasises the continued importance of Marx and his work in a time when transnational media companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook play an increasingly important role in global capitalism. Discussion questions and exercises at the end of each chapter help readers to further apply Marx’s work to a modern-day context.
This volume presents a close reading of instances of Shakespearean quotations, allusions, imagery and rhetoric found in Karl Marx’s collected works and letters, which provides evidence that Shakespeare’s writings exerted a formative influence on Marx and the development of his work. Through a methodology of intertextual and interlingual close-reading, this study provides evidence of the extent to which Shakespeare influenced Marx and to which Marxism has Shakespearean roots. As a child, Marx was home-schooled in Ludwig von Westphalen’s little academy, as it were, which was Shakespeare- and literary-focused. The group included von Westphalen’s daughter, who later became Marx’s wife, Jenny. The influence of Shakespeare in Marx’s writings shows up as early as his school essays and love letters. He modelled his early journalism partly on ideas and rhetoric found in Shakespeare’s plays. Each turn in the development of Marx’s thought—from Romantic to Left Hegelian and then to Communist—is achieved in part through his use of literature, especially Shakespeare. Marx’s mature texts on history, politics and economics—including the famous first volume of Das Kapital—are laden with Shakespearean allusions and quotations. Marx's engagement with Shakespeare resulted in the development of a framework of characters and imagery he used to stand for and anchor the different concepts in his political critique. Marx’s prose style uses a conceit in which politics are depicted as performative. Later, the Marx family—Marx, Jenny and their children—was central in the late-19th-century revival of Shakespeare on the London stage, and in the growth of academic Shakespeare scholarship. Through providing evidence for a formative role of Shakespeare in the development of Marxism, the present study suggests a formative role for literature in the history of ideas.
This introductory text is a critical theory toolkit on how to how to make use of Karl Marx’s ideas in media, communication, and cultural studies. Karl Marx’s ideas remain of crucial relevance, and in this short, student-friendly book, leading expert Christian Fuchs introduces Marx to the reader by discussing 15 of his key concepts and showing how they matter for understanding the digital and communicative capitalism that shapes human life in twenty-first century society. Key concepts covered include: the dialectic, materialism, commodities, capital, capitalism, labour, surplus-value, the working class, alienation, means of communication, the general intellect, ideology, socialism, communism, and class struggles. Students taking courses in Media, Culture and Society; Communication Theory; Media Economics; Political Communication; and Cultural Studies will find Fuchs' concise introduction an essential guide to Marx.
This second volume of Christian Fuchs’ Media, Communication and Society book series outlines key concepts and contemporary debates in critical theory. The book explores the foundations of a Marxist-Humanist critical theory of society, clarifying and updating key concepts in critical theory – such as the dialectic, critique, alienation, class, capitalism, ideology, and racial capitalism. In doing so, the book engages with and further develops elements from the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, David Harvey, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, C.L.R. James, Adolph L. Reed Jr., and Cornel West. Written for a broad audience of students and scholars, this book is an essential guide for readers who are interested in how to think critically from perspectives such as media and communication studies, sociology, philosophy, political economy, and political science.
Never look at social media the same way again. Social media are an integral part of contemporary society. From news and politics to language and everyday life, they have changed the way we communicate, use information and understand the world. So we have to ask critical questions about social media. We have to dig deeper into issues of ownership, power, class and (in)justice. This book equips you with a critical understanding of the complexities and contradictions at the heart of social media’s relationship with society. The revised and expanded
Who was Jesus of Nazareth? Buried beneath two thousand years of theology and dogma lies a real historical person who founded a movement that evolved into the largest religion in the history of the world. But is it possible to know what he really said, did, and believed? This book applies the Marxist conception of history to the study of the historical Jesus. It focuses on class, material conditions, and textual analysis to extract the authentic sayings and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth. The implications are far-reaching for followers of Christ wishing to base their faith in reason and science. They also offer guidance and inspiration for modern activists and revolutionaries wishing to challenge the same unjust systems of power that Jesus faced in his own lifetime.
This third volume in Christian Fuchs’s Media, Communication and Society book series illuminates what it means to live in an age of digital capitalism, analysing its various aspects, and engaging with a variety of critical thinkers whose theories and approaches enable a critical understanding of digital capitalism for media and communication. Each chapter focuses on a particular dimension of digital capitalism or a critical theorist whose work helps us to illuminate how digital capitalism works. Subjects covered include: digital positivism; administrative big data analytics; the role and relations of patriarchy, slavery, and racism in the context of digital labour; digital alienation; the role of social media in the capitalist crisis; the relationship between imperialism and digital labour; alternatives such as trade unions and class struggles in the digital age; platform co-operatives; digital commons; and public service Internet platforms. It also considers specific examples, including the digital labour of Foxconn and Pegatron workers, software engineers at Google, and online freelancers, as well as considering the political economy of targeted-advertising-based Internet platforms such as Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Instagram. Digital Capitalism illuminates how a digital capitalist society’s economy, politics, and culture work and interact, making it essential reading for both students and researchers in media, culture, and communication studies, as well as related disciplines.
In his 2010 book What Is a Person?, Christian Smith argued that sociology had for too long neglected this fundamental question. Prevailing social theories, he wrote, do not adequately “capture our deep subjective experience as persons, crucial dimensions of the richness of our own lived lives, what thinkers in previous ages might have called our ‘souls’ or ‘hearts.’” Building on Smith’s previous work, To Flourish or Destruct examines the motivations intrinsic to this subjective experience: Why do people do what they do? How can we explain the activity that gives rise to all human social life and social structures? Smith argues that our actions stem from a motivation to realize what he calls natural human goods: ends that are, by nature, constitutionally good for all human beings. He goes on to explore the ways we can and do fail to realize these ends—a failure that can result in varying gradations of evil. Rooted in critical realism and informed by work in philosophy, psychology, and other fields, Smith’s ambitious book situates the idea of personhood at the center of our attempts to understand how we might shape good human lives and societies.
This book outlines and contributes to the foundations of Marxist-humanist communication theory. It analyses the role of communication in capitalist society. Engaging with the works of critical thinkers such as Erich Fromm, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Henri Lefebvre, Georg Lukács, Lucien Goldmann, Günther Anders, M. N. Roy, Angela Davis, C. L. R. James, Rosa Luxemburg, Eve Mitchell, and Cedric J. Robinson, the book provides readings of works that inform our understanding of how to critically theorise communication in society. The topics covered include the relationship of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy; communication and alienation; the base/superstructure-problem; the question of how one should best define communication; the political economy of communication; ideology critique; the connection of communication and struggles for alternatives. Written for a broad audience of students and scholars interested in contemporary critical theory, this book will be useful for courses in media and communication studies, cultural studies, Internet research, sociology, philosophy, political science, and economics. This is the first of five Communication and Society volumes, each one outlining a particular aspect of the foundations of a critical theory of communication in society.
This essential guide to the critical study of the media economy in society teaches students how to critically analyse the political economy of communication and the media. The book introduces a variety of methods and topics, including the political economy of communication in capitalism, the political economy of media concentration, the political economy of advertising, the political economy of global media and transnational media corporations, class relations and working conditions in the capitalist media and communication industry, the political economy of the Internet and digital media, the information society and digital capitalism, the public sphere, Public Service Media, the Public Service Internet, and the political economy of media management. This will be an ideal textbook for a variety of courses relating to media and communication, including Media Economics; Political Economy of Communication; Media, Culture, and Society; Critical Media and Communication Studies; Media Sociology; Media Management; and Media Business Studies.
The fully updated and revised third edition of this widely used text provides a comprehensive survey of leading perspectives in the field including an entirely new chapter on Realism by Jack Donnelly. The introduction explains the nature of theory and the reasons for studying international relations in a theoretically informed way. The nine chapters which follow--written by leading scholars in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand--provide thorough examinations of each of the major approaches currently prevailing in the discipline.
Henri Lefebvre’s was the major theorist of space and of the urban. This is the definitive book on Lefebvre. This book presents an encompassing, detailed and thorough overview and reconstruction of Lefebvre’s theory of space and of the urban. Henri Lefebvre belongs to the generation of the great French intellectuals and philosophers, together with his contemporaries Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre. His theory has experienced a remarkable revival over the last two decades, and is discussed and applied today in many disciplines in humanities and social sciences, particularly in urban studies, geography, urban sociology, urban anthropology, architecture and planning. Lefebvre, together with David Harvey, is one of the leading and most read theoreticians in these fields. This book explains in an accessible way the theoretical and epistemological context of this work in French philosophy and in the German dialectic (Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche), and reconstructs in detail the historical development of its different elements. It also gives an overview on the receptions of Lefebvre and discusses a wide range of applications of this theory in many research fields, such as urban and regional development, urbanization, urbanity, social space, and everyday life.
This sixth volume in Christian Fuchs' Media, Communication and Society series draws on radical Humanist theory to address questions around the digital public sphere and the challenges and opportunities for digital democracy today. The book discusses topics such as digital democracy, the digital public sphere, digital alienation, sustainability in digital democracy, journalism and democracy, public service media, the public service Internet, and democratic communications. Fuchs argues for the creation of a public service Internet run by public serviceMedia that consists of platforms such as a public service YouTube and Club 2.0, a renewed digital democracy and digital public sphere version of the legendary debate programme formats Club 2 and After Dark. Overall, the book presents foundations and analyses of digital democracy that are interesting for both students and researchers in media studies, cultural studies, communication studies, political science, sociology, Internet research, information science, as well as related disciplines.
How is labour changing in the age of computers, the Internet, and "social media" such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter? In Digital Labour and Karl Marx, Christian Fuchs attempts to answer that question, crafting a systematic critical theorisation of labour as performed in the capitalist ICT industry. Relying on a range of global case studies--from unpaid social media prosumers or Chinese hardware assemblers at Foxconn to miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo--Fuchs sheds light on the labour costs of digital media, examining the way ICT corporations exploit human labour and the impact of this exploitation on the lives, bodies, and minds of workers.
Understanding social media requires us to engage with the individual and collective meanings that diverse stakeholders and participants give to platforms. It also requires us to analyse how social media companies try to make profits, how and which labour creates this profit, who creates social media ideologies, and the conditions under which such ideologies emerge. In short, understanding social media means coming to grips with the relationship between culture and the economy. In this thorough study, Christian Fuchs, one of the leading analysts of the Internet and social media, delves deeply into the subject by applying the approach of cultural materialism to social media, offering readers theoretical concepts, contemporary examples, and proposed opportunities for political intervention. Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media is the ultimate resource for anyone who wants to understand culture and the economy in an era populated by social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google in the West and Weibo, Renren, and Baidu in the East. Updating the analysis of thinkers such as Raymond Williams, Karl Marx, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, and Dallas W. Smythe for the 21st century, Fuchs presents a version of Marxist cultural theory and cultural materialism that allows us to critically understand social media’s influence on culture and the economy.
Communicating COVID-19 analyses the changes of everyday communication in the COVID-19 crisis. Exploring how misinformation has spread online throughout the pandemic, the impact of changes on society and the way we communicate, and the effect this has had on the spread of misinformation.
The fully updated and redesigned tenth edition of The Rough Guide to Berlin - now in full colour throughout - is the definitive guide to this extraordinary city, with its fascinating historical sights, world-class museums, cutting-edge galleries and architecture and pulsating nightlife. Read expert background on everything from the enduring Reichstag to Eastern Berlin's cultural scene, and find comprehensive information on Berlin's history, politics and traditions. The introduction will help you choose where to go and what to see, inspired by dozens of stunning photos. Author Picks highlight special places, while the Things Not To Miss section runs through all the must-sees.Navigation through the book and on the ground is aided by clear colour maps with every chapter. Each one is keyed with all the accommodation, eating and drinking options, nightlife venues and shops that are reviewed in detail in our Listings chapters. You'll also find practical advice on a greatly expanded selection of day-trips from the city into Brandenburg: including Potsdam and Park Sanssouci, Sachsenhausen and the Spreewald. With critical listings of the best places to eat, drink, sleep and party for all budgets, this guide gets under the skin of this dynamic city. Whether you have time to browse detailed chapters, or need fast-fix 'Top 5 boxes' that pick out the highlights you won't want to miss, The Rough Guide to Berlin won't let you down! Now available in ePub format.
Around the globe, contemporary protest movements are contesting the oligarchic appropriation of natural resources, public services, and shared networks of knowledge and communication. These struggles raise the same fundamental demand and rest on the same irreducible principle: the common. In this exhaustive account, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval show how the common has become the defining principle of alternative political movements in the 21st century. In societies deeply shaped by neoliberal rationality, the common is increasingly invoked as the operative concept of practical struggles creating new forms of democratic governance. In a feat of analytic clarity, Dardot and Laval dissect and synthesize a vast repository on the concept of the commons, from the fields of philosophy, political theory, economics, legal theory, history, theology, and sociology. Instead of conceptualizing the common as an essence of man or as inherent in nature, the thread developed by Dardot and Laval traces the active lives of human beings: only a practical activity of commoning can decide what will be shared in common and what rules will govern the common's citizen-subjects. This re-articulation of the common calls for nothing less than the institutional transformation of society by society: it calls for a revolution.
This fifth volume in Christian Fuchs’s Media, Communication and Society series presents foundations and applications of digital ethics based on critical theory. It applies a critical approach to ethics within the realm of digital technology. Based on the notions of alienation, communication (in)justice, media (in)justice, and digital (in)justice, it analyses ethics in the context of digital labour and the surveillance-industrial complex; social media research ethics; privacy on Facebook; participation, co-operation, and sustainability in the information society; the digital commons; the digital public sphere; and digital democracy. The book consists of three parts. Part I presents some of the philosophical foundations of critical, humanist digital ethics. Part II applies these foundations to concrete digital ethics case studies. Part III presents broad conclusions about how to advance the digital commons, the digital public sphere, and digital democracy, which is the ultimate goal of digital ethics. This book is essential reading for both students and researchers in media, culture, communication studies, and related disciplines.
When sociology emerged as a discipline in the late nineteenth century, the problem of crowds constituted one of its key concerns. It was argued that crowds shook the foundations of society and led individuals into all sorts of irrational behaviour. Yet crowds were not just something to be fought in the street, they also formed a battleground over how sociology should be demarcated from related disciplines, most notably psychology. In The Politics of Crowds, Christian Borch traces sociological debates on crowds and masses from the birth of sociology until today, with a particular focus on the developments in France, Germany and the USA. The book is a refreshing alternative history of sociology and modern society, observed through society's other, the crowd. Borch shows that the problem of crowds is not just of historical interest: even today the politics of sociology is intertwined with the politics of crowds.
The train appears a little dark in color and mysterious. Its boxcars have titles like spray-painted graffiti on its walls, with their doors half open with a dark, mysterious interior. As you are now stuck in traffic and look into one of the slightly open doors of one of the boxcar's dark portions, a familiar face emerges from the shadows. Unfamiliar sights and sounds begin to occur around you. The train continues to very slowly move forward. From another boxcar, you hear a prophetic voice calling your name from the darkness. You look, but no one is there. Like a slow-moving train, author Raymond Christian presents a number of stories to his readers. Each story passes on the tracks and allows the reader a peek inside the car. In each car lies wisdom and truth. Readers can use this book a resource for Bible studies, small groups, and even simply as entertainment. Read Raymond Christian's The Storyteller for a deeper look into your faith and the power of the story.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1859. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.
C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain chronicles the life and work of the Trinidadian intellectual and writer C. L. R. James during his first extended stay in Britain, from 1932 to 1938. It reveals the radicalizing effect of this critical period on James's intellectual and political trajectory. During this time, James turned from liberal humanism to revolutionary socialism. Rejecting the "imperial Britishness" he had absorbed growing up in a crown colony in the British West Indies, he became a leading anticolonial activist and Pan-Africanist thinker. Christian Høgsbjerg reconstructs the circumstances and milieus in which James wrote works including his magisterial study The Black Jacobins. First published in 1938, James's examination of the dynamics of anticolonial revolution in Haiti continues to influence scholarship on Atlantic slavery and abolition. Høgsbjerg contends that during the Depression C. L. R. James advanced public understanding of the African diaspora and emerged as one of the most significant and creative revolutionary Marxists in Britain.
The Dominican Republic has posted impressive economic growth rates over the past thirty years. Despite this, the generation of new, good jobs has been remarkably weak. How have ordinary and poor Dominicans worked and lived in the shadow of the country's conspicuous growth rates? This book considers this question through an ethnographic exploration of the popular economy in the Dominican capital. Focusing on the city's precarious small businesses, including furniture manufacturers, food stalls, street-corner stores, and savings and credit cooperatives, Krohn-Hansen shows how people make a living, tackle market shifts, and the factors that characterize their relationship to the state and pervasive corruption. Empirically grounded, this book examines the condition of the urban masses in Santo Domingo, offering an original and captivating contribution to the scholarship on popular economic practices, urban changes, and today's Latin America and the Caribbean. This will be essential reading for scholars and policy makers.
In this book, Christian W. Chun examines the ways in which identities, discourses, and topographies of both capitalist and anti-capitalist imaginaries and realities are embodied in the everyday practices of people. A World without Capitalism? is a sociolinguistic ethnography that explores the heretofore limited research in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics on the discursive and materialized representations and enactments of capitalism. Engaging across disciplinary fields, including applied linguistics, ethnography, political economy, philosophy, and cultural studies, Chun investigates in ethnographic detail how capitalism does and does not pervade people’s everyday experiences. This book aims to further contribute to a much-needed understanding of how discourses operate in the co-constructions of capitalist and anti-capitalist imaginaries and instantiated realities and practices as narrated, lived, and embodied by people and material artifacts. This book is vital reading for students and researchers working in the fields of applied linguistics, discourse analysis, and cultural studies, as well as those interested in understanding capitalism and questioning how to live beyond it.
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