Everyday Gaming and Digital Urban Worlds

This post was written by Carolyn Birdsall, Wouter van Gent, Thijs Jeursen as part of the GDC-funded project “Gaming the Global City: Imagining and Experiencing Digital Urban Worlds” Digital gaming has become an increasingly important everyday pastime and a leading global cultural industry, with revenues for games now far surpassing that of films. Both the production…

Details

Global boss, local workers? Investigating algorithmic imaginaries and practices of UberEats workers in Amsterdam, Milan and Buenos Aires

This post was written by Davide Beraldo, Letizia Chiappini and Giovanni Rossetti as part of the GDC-funded project “Global boss, local workers? How context influences food delivery riders’ relation to platforms (GLOBLOW)” The surreal staticity of semi-deserted streets interrupted by bicycles sporting a universally recognizable brand. In the context of lockdown and curfew measures, this has…

Details

Between digital democratization and securitization: Looking into the politics and aesthetics of digital authoritarianism and protest in the Global South

This post was written by Julienne Weegels, Yatun Sastramidjaja and Luisa Gonzalez Valencia as part of the GDC-funded project “P(R)OTESTAS: The politics and aesthetics of digital authoritarianism and protest in the Global South”   Although there are significant parallels to be found in digitally-mediated protests and digital authoritarianism across different regions in the Global South,…

Details

A Space for Arab Digital Cultures

This post was written by Tasniem Anwar and Nermin Elsherif as part of the GDC-funded project “Social Media after the Arab Uprisings”.  A decade of social media platforms A decade ago, contentious and fluid conceptions of social media platforms dominated the discussions after the first wave of the Arab uprisings that emerged in Tunisia, Egypt,…

Details

EdTech platforms as infrastructural blackholes

This post by Vanessa Richter is part of our series “Global Digital Cultures in times of COVID-19”, written by students of the research master Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Online schooling seems to be the best and most obvious solution to the current predicament of ongoing school lockdowns. However, the best solution for…

Details