Beyond WikiLeaks


Book Description

The 2010 release of US embassy diplomatic cables put WikiLeaks into the international spotlight. Revelations by the leaks sparked intense debate within international diplomacy, journalism and society. This book reflects on the implications of WikiLeaks across politics and media, and on the results of leak journalism and transparency activism.




WikiLeaks


Book Description

It was the biggest leak in history. WikiLeaks infuriated the world's greatest superpower, embarrassed the British royal family and helped cause a revolution in Africa. The man behind it was Julian Assange, one of the strangest figures ever to become a worldwide celebrity. Was he an internet messiah or a cyber-terrorist? Information freedom fighter or sex criminal? The debate would echo around the globe as US politicians called for his assassination. Award-winning Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding have been at the centre of a unique publishing drama that involved the release of some 250,000 secret diplomatic cables and classified files from the Afghan and Iraq wars. At one point the platinum-haired hacker was hiding from the CIA in David Leigh's London house. Now, together with the paper's investigative reporting team, Leigh and Harding reveal the startling inside story of the man and the leak.




WikiLeaks


Book Description

WikiLeaks is the most challenging journalistic phenomenon to have emerged in the digital era. It has provoked anger and enthusiasm in equal measure, from across the political and journalistic spectrum. WikiLeaks poses a series of questions to the status quo in politics, journalism and to the ways we understand political communication. It has compromised the foreign policy operations of the most powerful state in the world, broken stories comparable to great historic scoops like the Pentagon Papers, and caused the mighty international news organizations to collaborate with this tiny editorial outfit. Yet it may also be on the verge of extinction. This is the first book to examine WikiLeaks fully and critically and its place in the contemporary news environment. The authors combine inside knowledge with the latest media research and analysis to argue that the significance of Wikileaks is that it is part of the shift in the nature of news to a network system that is contestable and unstable. Welcome to Wiki World and a new age of uncertainty.




Beyond This Horizon


Book Description

Utopia has been achieved. For centuries, disease, hunger, poverty and war have been things found only in the histories. And applied genetics has given men and women the bodies of athletes and a lifespan of over a century. They should all have been very happy.... But Hamilton Felix is bored. And he is the culmination of a star line; each of his last thirty ancestors chosen for superior genes. Hamilton is, as far as genetics can produce one, the ultimate man. And this ultimate man can see no reason why the human race should survive, and has no intention of continuing the pointless comedy. However, Hamilton's life is about to become less boring. A secret cabal of revolutionaries who find utopia not just boring, but desperately in need of leaders who know just What Needs to be Done, are planning to revolt and put themselves in charge. Knowing of Hamilton's disenchantment with the modern world, they have recruited him to join their Glorious Revolution. Big mistake! The revolutionaries are about to find out that recruiting a superman is definitely not a good idea.... With an all new afterword by Tony Daniel. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).




Radical transparency and digital democracy


Book Description

This book tells the story of radical transparency in a datafied world. The analysis, grounded from past examples of novel forms of mediation, unearths radical change over time, from a trickle of paper-based leaks to the modern digital torrent.




Beyond Prime Time Activism


Book Description

In this accessible introduction to communication activism, organizer Karen Jeffreys and sociologist Charlotte Ryan draw on more than two decades of ongoing collaboration, using the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless (RICH) as a case study. The book examines a community with shared values, decision-making, and conflict resolution procedures, tracking its organizing strategy and matched communication plan. The authors first describe a communication campaign during the welfare reform battles (1990–1995) in which they began to practice communication activism. In ongoing work with two organizations over the next two decades, they distil a model of communication activism that draws directly from vibrant traditions of empowerment communication in U.S. social movements and movements from the Global South. Beyond Prime Time Activism provides students and researchers with an invaluable look at contemporary activism practices and with practical tools tried and tested in two decades of social movement engagement. This book is ideal for anyone participating in social change movements or studying how they navigate communication and media inequalities.




The Transparency Fix


Book Description

Is the government too secret or not secret enough? Why is there simultaneously too much government secrecy and a seemingly endless procession of government leaks? The Transparency Fix asserts that we incorrectly assume that government information can be controlled. The same impulse that drives transparency movements also drives secrecy advocates. They all hold the mistaken belief that government information can either be released or kept secure on command. The Transparency Fix argues for a reformation in our assumptions about secrecy and transparency. The world did not end because Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden released classified information. But nor was there a significant political change. "Transparency" has become a buzzword, while secrecy is anathema. Using a variety of real-life examples to examine how government information actually flows, Mark Fenster describes how the legal regime's tenuous control over state information belies both the promise and peril of transparency. He challenges us to confront the implausibility of controlling government information and shows us how the contemporary obsession surrounding transparency and secrecy cannot radically change a state that is defined by so much more than information.




The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, 3 Volume Set


Book Description

The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society offers critical assessments of theoretical and applied research on digitally-mediated communication, a central area of study in the 21st century. Unique for its emphasis on digital media and communication and for its use of business and management perspectives, in addition to cultural, developmental, political and sociological perspectives Entries are written by scholars and some practitioners from around the world, with exceptional depth and international scope of coverage in five themes: Social Media, Commercial Applications, Online Gaming, Law and Policy, and Information and Communicative Technology for Development Features leading research in the fields of Media and Communication Studies, Internet Studies, Journalism Studies, Law and Policy Studies, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, and many more Organized in an accessible A-Z format with over 150 entries on key topics ranging from 2,000 to 10,000 words Part of The Wiley Blackwell-ICA International Encyclopedias of Communication series, published in conjunction with the International Communication Association. Online version available at www.wileyicaencyclopedia.com




Journalism, Power and Investigation


Book Description

Journalism, Power and Investigation presents a contemporary, trans-national analysis of investigative journalism. Beginning with a detailed introduction that examines the relationship between this form of public communication and normative conceptions of democracy, the book offers a selection of spirited contributions to current debates concerning the place, function, and political impact of investigative work. The 14 chapters, produced by practising journalists, academics, and activists, cover a range of topics, with examples drawn from the global struggle to produce reliable, in-depth accounts of public events. The collection brings together a range of significant investigations from across the world. These include an assignment conducted in the dangerous sectarian environment of Iraq, close engagement with Spain’s Memory Movement, and an account of the work of radical charity Global Witness. Other chapters examine the relationship between journalists and state/corporate power, the troubled political legacy of WikiLeaks, the legal constraints on investigative journalism in the UK, and the bold international agenda of the investigative collective The Ferret. This material is accompanied by other analytical pieces on events in Bermuda, Brazil, and Egypt. Investigative journalism is a form of reportage that has long provided a benchmark for in-depth, critical interventions. Using numerous case studies, Journalism, Power and Investigation gives students and researchers an insight into the principles and methods that animate this global search for truth and justice.




Cultures of Transparency


Book Description

This volume addresses the major questions surrounding a concept that has become ubiquitous in the media and in civil society as well as in political and economic discourses in recent years, and which is demanded with increasing frequency: transparency. How can society deal with increasing and often diverging demands and expectations of transparency? What role can different political and civil society actors play in processes of producing, or preventing, transparency? Where are the limits of transparency and how are these boundaries negotiated? What is the relationship of transparency to processes of social change, as well as systems of social surveillance and control? Engaging with transparency as an interrelated product of law, politics, economics and culture, this interdisciplinary volume explores the ambiguities and contradictions, as well as the social and political dilemmas, that the age of transparency has unleashed. As such it will appeal to researchers across the social sciences and humanities with interests in politics, history, sociology, civil society, citizenship, public policy, criminology and law.