This edited volume addresses current challenges, trends and transformations in global communication governance. Exploring changes in the actors, issues, values and contexts of media and communications, it investigates the crossroads that media policy is facing and offers visions for the future. A diverse range of scholars and expert practitioners discuss what regulatory reforms and governing mechanisms are required to advance democratic participation and fundamental rights in platform societies. Organized around five sections, the volume considers the geopolitics of emerging communication orders; the changing roles of actors and stakeholders; the challenge of embedding rights and values in regulatory arrangements; the intersection of technology and policy; and the need to rethink epistemologies and methodologies for researching this field. Contributions from different disciplines and cultural backgrounds include provocative think pieces and longer analyses. All chapters are grounded in historically-aware understandings of contemporary transformations, while anticipating dynamics of our communication futures.

This state-of-the-art Handbook provides unique insights into the governance practices and institutions shaping digitalized public spheres. Focusing on the power relations involved, it presents diverse approaches to key debates in media and communication governance, showcasing groundbreaking advances in the field. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

The first book dedicated specifically to research methods in the political economy of media and communication, it provides a methodological toolkit to investigate the functioning of media, technology, and cultural industries in their historical, institutional, structural, and systemic contexts. Featuring contributions from across the globe and a variety of methodological perspectives, this volume presents the state of the art in political economy of media and communication methods, articulating those methods with adjacent approaches, to study concentration of ownership and power, pluralism and diversity, regulation and public policies, governance, genderization, and sustainability. This collection charts the methodological innovations critical political economists are adopting to analyse a rapidly transforming digital media landscape, exploring ideology, narratives, socio-analysis and praxis in communication with ethnographic and participatory approaches, as well as designs for quantitative and qualitative methods of textual, discourse and content analysis, network analyses, which consider power relations affecting communication, including intersectional oppressions and the new developments taking place in artificial intelligence. An essential text for advanced undergraduates, postgraduate students, and researchers in the areas of media, cultural and communication studies, particularly those studying topics such as the political economy of media and/or communication, media and communication theory, and research methods.

At a time when the traditional media have been reshaped by digital technologies and audiences have fragmented, people are using mediated forms of communication to manage all aspects of their daily lives as well as for news and entertainment. The Media and Communications in Australia offers a systematic introduction to this dynamic field. Fully updated and expanded, this fifth edition outlines the key media industries – from print, sound and television to film, gaming and public relations – and explains how communications technologies have changed the ways in which they now operate. It offers an overview of the key approaches to the field, including a consideration of Indigenous communication, and features a ‘hot topics’ section with contributions on issues including diversity, misinformation, algorithms, COVID-19, web series and national security. With chapters from Australia’s leading researchers and teachers in the field, The Media and Communications in Australia remains the most comprehensive and reliable introduction to media and communications from an Australian perspective. It is an ideal student text and a key resource for teachers, lecturers, media practitioners and anyone interested in understanding these influential industries.

This Open Access volume provides an in-depth exploration of global policy and governance issues related to digital platform regulation. With an international ensemble of contributors, the volume has at its heard the question: what would actually be involved in digital platform regulation?. Once a specialised and niche field within internet and digital media studies, internet governance has in recent years moved to the forefront of policy debate. In the wake of scandals such as Cambridge Analytica and the global techlash against digital monopolies, platform studies are undergoing a critical turn, but there is a greater need to connect such analysis to questions of public policy. This volume does just that, through a rich array of chapters concretely exploring the operation and influence of digital platforms and their related policy concerns. A wide variety of digital communication platforms are explored, including social media, content portals, search engines and app stores. An important and timely work, Digital Platform Regulation provides valuable insights into new global platform-orientated policy reforms, supplying an important resource to researchers everywhere seeking to engage with policymakers in the debate about the power of digital platforms and how to address it. Terry Flew is Professor of Digital Communications and Culture at The University of Sydney. He is the author of 14 books, including Regulating Platforms (2021) and Understanding Global Media (2018). Fiona R. Martin is Associate Professor in Online and Convergent Media at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Mediating the Conversation (2022), co-author of Sharing News Online (2019) and co-author and editor of The Value of Public Service Media (2014).

This open-access volume argues that in a functioning democracy, citizens should be equally capable of making informed choices about matters of social importance. This includes citizens accessing all relevant information and knowledge necessary for informed will formation. In today's complex era of digital disruption, it is not enough to simply speak about communication or even digital rights. The starting point for this volume is the need for 'epistemic equality'. The contributors seek to showcase the history and diversity of current debates around communication and digital rights, as precursors for the need for epistemic rights; both as a theoretical concept and an empirically assessed benchmark. The book highlights scholarship via academic case studies from around the world to feature different issues and methodological approaches, as well as similarities in academic and policy challenges across the globe. The goal is to provide an overview of issues that depict challenges to epistemic rights, extract both academic and applied policy implications of different approaches, and end with a set of recommendations for advancing policy-relevant scholarship on epistemic rights. This volume is intended as the first holistic response to an urgent need to address epistemic rights of communication as a central public policy issue, as an academic analytical concept, as well as a central theme for informed public debate. This book is open-access, meaning you have free and unlimited access.

This handbook maps and analyzes cross-sector (public–corporate–social–community–faith) governance theories, models, and practices as they are evolving in a digital world. It studies human, cultural, societal, institutional interactions and challenges in a digitally enabled world, especially in the context of post-crisis resilience and agility. Every global crisis forces societies and nations to realign while addressing deeper structural and cultural issues in governance. The Covid-19 pandemic has necessitated swift local-to-global governance responses for timely digital innovations for health crisis interventions, economic recovery, and societal equity. While every nation-state is developing global pandemic responses in a digitally enabled world, the deeper crisis of human, institutional, and societal governance deficit is also evident. This handbook documents digital governance innovations that enhance stakeholder engagement and inclusion for resilient, accountable, and effective governance across sectors. This volume reflects on a range of theoretical frameworks adapted for understanding global and digital governance. It looks at international governance collaborations; corporate governance reform; education governance innovations; public sector and urban governance; health system governance, sustainability, and environmental governance; community and faith-based governance; and digital, cultural, and creativity governance. This book is unique, as it presents important work on post Covid-19 digital and democratic governance and brings together holistic—interdisciplinary and intersectoral— perspectives from the Global North and Global South, engaging the leading scholars, practitioners, businesses, and civil society. It will be of interest to multi-sector institutions and global audiences: governments, corporates, social sector institutions, digital entrepreneurs, students and researchers, academic professionals, policy-makers, public and private sector institutional leaders, and organizational and entrepreneurial innovators interested in the field of governance.

Since the rise of the smartphone, apps have become entrenched in billions of users' daily lives. Accessible across phones and tablets, watches and wearables, connected cars, sensors, and cities, they are an inescapable feature of our current culture. In this book, Gerard Goggin provides a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the development of apps as a digital media technology. Covering the technological, social, cultural, and policy dynamics of apps, Goggin ultimately considers what a post-app world might look like. He argues that apps represent a pivowtal moment in the development of digital media, acting as a hinge between the visions and realities of the “mobile,” “cyber,” and “online” societies envisaged since the late 1980s and the imaginaries and materialities of the digital societies that emerged from 2010. Apps offer frames, construct tools, and constitute “small worlds” for users to reorient themselves in digital media settings. This fascinating book will reframe the conversation about the software that underwrites our digital worlds. It is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as for anyone interested in this ubiquitous technology.

The governance of global communications is consolidating as a field where innovative political practices of multi-actor collaboration are being experimented. Within this broad political landscape, the Internet governance domain is emerging as one of the most relevant areas where institutional and non-institutional actors are converging in order to reform collectively governance mechanisms that will determine the future developments of the Internet technology. This book adopts a network approach to study the progressive and collective construction of a new discourse on Internet governance fostered by the realization of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, a new "space for multi-stakeholder policy-dialogue" (WSIS Tunis Agenda 2005, art. 72). Looking both at how semantic and social connections are created in the online and the offline discursive spaces, this book seeks to provide insights on how principles of democratic collaboration between institutional and non-institutional actors are translated into actual political dynamics; on how the global political agenda on the governance of the Internet comes to be shaped thanks to the provision of heterogeneous and sometimes opposite thematic inputs; and, finally, on how the roles of States, intergovernmental bodies, civil society entities in participatory supra-national politics are progressively being (re)defined. Starting form the Internet governance case study, this books aims at providing an alternative approach to the study of supra-national politics as well as of global communication governance processes: one that considers simultaneously contents and processes of political dynamics and examines how immaterial resources, such as information and communication, become a new field for multi-actor politics experiments, conflicts and network construction.

Digital communication as it is practiced in Africa today is at a crossroad. This edited collection takes that crossroad as its starting point, as it both examines the complicated present and looks to the uncertain future of African communication systems. Contributing authors explore how western digital communication systems have proliferated in the African communication landscape, and argue that rich and long-cherished African forms of communal, in-person communication have been increasingly abandoned in favor of assimilation to western digital norms. As a result, future generations of Africans born on the continent and abroad may never recognize and appreciate African systems of communications. Acknowledging that globalized digital communication systems are here to stay, the volume contends that in order to comprehend the past, present, and future of African communications, scholars need to decolonize their approach to teaching and consuming mediated and in-person communications on the African continent and abroad.