Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy: Robert W. McChesney

Celebrants and skeptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet’s effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell. But according to Robert W. McChesney, arguments on both sides fail to address the relationship between economic power and the digital world.

McChesney’s award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy skewered the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect, McChesney returns to this provocative thesis in light of the advances of the digital age. He argues that the sharp decline in the enforcement of antitrust violations, the increase in patents on digital technology and proprietary systems and massive indirect subsidies and other policies have made the internet a place of numbing commercialism. A handful of monopolies now dominate the political economy, from Google, which garners a 97 percent share of the mobile search market, to Microsoft, whose operating system is used by over 90 percent of the world’s computers. Capitalism’s colonization of the Internet has spurred the collapse of credible journalism and made the Internet an unparalleled apparatus for government and corporate surveillance and a disturbingly antidemocratic force.

In Digital Disconnect, Robert McChesney offers a groundbreaking critique of the Internet, urging us to reclaim the democratizing potential of the digital revolution while we still can.

Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of several books on the media, including the award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy and Communication Revolution, and a co-editor (with Victor Pickard) of Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights. He lives in Champaign, Illinois.

• Item Weight : 1.29 pounds
• Hardcover : 320 pages
• ISBN-10 : 1595588671
• ISBN-13 : 978-1595588678
• Product Dimensions : 6.58 x 1.14 x 9.56 inches
• Publisher : The New Press; Illustrated Edition (March 5, 2013)

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Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (African Studies): Paul E. Lovejoy

This history of African slavery from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries examines how indigenous African slavery developed within an international context. Paul E. Lovejoy discusses the medieval Islamic slave trade and the Atlantic trade as well as the enslavement process and the marketing of slaves. He considers the impact of European abolition and assesses slavery’s role in African history.

The book corrects the accepted interpretation that African slavery was mild and resulted in the slaves’ assimilation. Instead, slaves were used extensively in production, although the exploitation methods and the relationships to world markets differed from those in the Americas. Nevertheless, slavery in Africa, like slavery in the Americas, developed from its position on the periphery of capitalist Europe.

This new edition revises all statistical material on the slave trade demography and incorporates recent research and an updated bibliography.

Review

“As with all good history, Transformations in Slavery makes us see the present in the new light it casts on the past. This clear narrative is charged with philosophical sophistication and enlivened by well-placed anecdote.”
Tony Voss, African Studies Quarterly

Book Description

A history of African slavery from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

About the Author

Paul E. Lovejoy is a Distinguished Research Professor at York University, Toronto and holds the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples and a member of the UNESCO ‘Slave Route’ Project. Lovejoy’s recent publications include Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade (2010) and Slavery, Islam and Diaspora (2009). He is the editor of the Harriet Tubman Series on the African Diaspora for Africa World Press. He has received several awards, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Stirling in 2007, the President’s Research Award of Merit from York University in 2009 and the Distinguished Africanist Award from the University of Texas, Austin in 2010.

• Item Weight : 1.23 pounds
• Paperback : 412 pages
• ISBN-10 : 0521176182
• ISBN-13 : 978-0521176187
• Product Dimensions : 6 x 0.93 x 9 inches
• Publisher : Cambridge University Press; 3rd Edition (January 26, 2012)