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Michael Andreas: “Open” and “Free”
“Open” and “Free”
(p. 135 – 150)

Michael Andreas

“Open” and “Free”
On Two Programs of Social Media

PDF, 16 pages

  • social movements
  • social networks

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English

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English

Michael Andreas

is a visiting Junior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation (MECS). 2008-2014 he worked as a research fellow and docent at the Institute for Media Studies, Ruhr University Bochum. He publishes and teaches in the fields of media history, film studies, postcolonial studies and visual culture.

Other texts by Michael Andreas for DIAPHANES
Inge Baxmann (ed.), Timon Beyes (ed.), ...: Social Media—New Masses

Mass gatherings and the positive or negative phantasms of the masses instigate various discourses and practices of social control, communication, and community formation. Yet the masses are not what they once were. In light of the algorithmic analysis of mass data, the diagnosis of dispersed public spheres in the age of digital media, and new conceptions of the masses such as swarms, flash mobs, and multitudes, the emergence, functions, and effects of today’s digital masses need to be examined and discussed anew. They provide us, moreover, with an opportunity to reevaluate the cultural and medial historiography of the masses. The present volume outlines the contours of this new field of research and brings together a collection of studies that analyze the differences between the new and former masses, their distinct media-technical conditions, and the political consequences of current mass phenomena.

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