The Geopolitics of Digital Media
paper session
Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting
(New Orleans, April 10-14, 2018)
Organizer: Paul C. Adams, Department of Geography and the Environment,
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
paul.adams@austin.utexas.edu
Digital media are reshaping geopolitics in complicated ways, from the
cooperation of Wikileaks with Russian hackers, to the colonization of
Facebook by Russian troll farms, to Donald Trump’s use of Twitter to
broadcast insulting nicknames, to alt-right news sites created by
Macedonian teenagers, to the efforts by repressive states to curtail
and control flows of digital information.
The intersections between geopolitics and digital media are most
evident when one observes flows of digital code that carry explicitly
geopolitical messages and imagery. However, data flows that are not
initially relevant to geopolitics also get drawn into geopolitical
processes through psychometric profiling and the targeting of
political messages as communications that would not have been
considered “political” are drawn into political processes such as
elections and referendums through the convergence of social media,
digital surveillance, and the proliferation of databases. These
processes operate within state borders but also cross borders in
slippery ways, blending mediatized politics with mediatized
geopolitics.
This paper session will bring together various perspectives on digital
media and geopolitics. Any paper is suitable that brings together
digital media and geopolitics, whether emphasizing popular
geopolitics, formal geopolitics, or practical geopolitics, and
regardless of the type of digital communication under consideration.
Anyone interested in participating should send an abstract conforming
to the requirements of the AAG (see http://annualmeeting.aag.org/) by
October 21 to Paul Adams (paul.adams@austin.utexas.edu)