EDITOR’S NOTE:
Big Internet
(not the little one)
DIGITAL ISSUE 1How do media systems and platforms shape our relationship to work, play, and each other?
As we experience transformations in digital life (from Web 3.0 and generative AIs to presidential candidates hijacking meme currencies), we dedicate this block of coverage to what’s happening on the net, in our pockets, and in real life. We’ll explore our fickle and fruitful digital relations while maintaining a critical yet generous perspective. We'll keep an eye out for experiments reconfiguring the web—while reflecting on what we’ve been doing and how we got here.
BIG INTERNET (not the little one), and its examination of how we disentangle corporate tech from everyday life, situates itself within three areas of focus: the solidarity economy, queer socialityand Black media. With this in mind, we invite you to think through the following with us:
Media Censorship: Beyond manufacturing consent, how is censorship operating through privately-owned schema? How do we reckon with state-mediated media enterprises and with legibility online?
Troubling the Narrative: How are we being led astray? What new narrative formats are coming to the fore? Is ‘narrative’ too slippery to manage on attention-diffracting media platforms? How are image-sharing sites, generative AIs, and other technologies easing our communication and storytelling with each other–or distancing us from reality?
Action on the Web: Many new organizational methods and structures that operate through, on, or via online media–Signal chats and open-source software that allow for coded, asynchronous coordination and planning, new media sites that spread just propaganda, incitements to action that propagate in ways never before seen. What are the new possibilities that these methods open up for us?
Digital Economies: Beyond (and inclusive of) gig economies, how are digital means reshaping our economic/social relations? From crowdfunding for causes to time banking websites to the prolonged collapse of news media and its supplantation by aggregators (and the instantiation of writer- and artist-owned media cooperatives), how are we re-reckoning with our means?
Yours via disembodied pixels and photons,
The Editors