Ingrid Volkmer

The Global Network Society and the Global Public Sphere

Ingrid Volkmer outlines the new ‘flow’ of political information that enables us to become informed about issues of global, regional as well as local relevance. The new media infrastructure allows an eyewitness view of events taking place in worldwide locations. These global processes, in which information and knowledge, political values, ethics, aesthetics and lifestyles are exchanged, are becoming increasingly autonomous from nation-state contexts and are beginning to shape a politically relevant ‘global’ public sphere. The author discusses parameters of this new political space.

Does cloud computing have a silver lining

Despite the language of immateriality and weightlessness, network communications have a significant materiality and weight when considered from the standpoint of production, consumption and recycling. In this paper, we concentrate on the energy signatures of the server industry on which internet communications depend, with special consideration of Google server farms. The move towards thin clients and cloud computing raises the stakes for the server farm business, and makes it more urgent to confront the finite environment in which information circulates. We assess recent and near-future growth in server traffic, and suggest that business models and regulatory systems have yet to recognise the challenges they pose.

Shifting the Politics of Memory: Mnemonic Trajectories in a Global Public Terrain

Conceptual debates about memory in the context of new transnational public sphere structures remain on the periphery of journalism research. Despite paradigmatic shifts toward the broader frameworks of information, digital or ‘network’ society, which increasingly situate national journalism in an enlarged spectrum of continuous viral flows across transnational public discourses, the role of collective memory as a discourse sphere within such a space is under researched. Given the increasing complexity of social media structures and the ontological centrality of public community, public memory could constitute an important layer of journalism within such an enlarged networked space. However, journalism research rarely incorporates spheres of memory and, as Zelizer remarked, is more concerned with the ‘here-and-now’ than the ‘there-and-then’ (Zelizer, 2008: 80).

Risk Journalism between Transnational Politics and Climate Change

This book introduces a new methodology to assess the way in which journalists today operate within a new sphere of communicative ‘public’ interdependence across global digital communities by focusing on climate change debates.

Risk Journalism—In Contexts of Trans-societal Interdependence

The term ‘climate change’ refers to a variation in the earth’s temperature, and global climate policy aims to negotiate the urgent need to restrict the process of planetary warming. While climate change can be caused by natural processes such as solar radiation, mountain building or continental drifts, the term mostly refers to ‘anthropogenic climate change’, caused by human industrial activities which are drastically changing all types of natural environmental patterns.

The Construction of Cosmopolitanized News of Climate Change at the Micro-scale: Representation, Production and Communication

The previous chapter constructed the ‘macro-scale’ of cosmopolitan spheres of climate change communication across three parameter: arenas, actors and communicative spaces. In this chapter, we take this discussion further by examining the ‘micro-scale’. The term ‘micro-scale’ focuses specifically on the ‘logic’ of producing local news in the ‘loco-digital’ arena. In contrast to traditional approaches that distinguish between ‘digital’ and ‘non-digital’, this approach incorporates the reflexivity of digital engagement and local perceptions and identifies the loco-digital arena as a localized, yet transnationally connected discursive sphere.

Towards Cosmopolitan Relational ‘Scales’ of Actoral Interconnectivity

The previous chapter addressed the dimensions of climate change as a globalized risk (Beck in World at risk, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2009), and it is argued that a globalized perspective requires a transnational methodological framework for assessing the new dimensions of interdependent risk journalism.

Pakistan, a Glocalized Context for Global Media Climate Change Research

Diverting from the traditional dichotomy of national versus transnational media, from a focus on the nation state towards actoral connectivity across societies and from a methodological research dichotomy of ‘linear’ vs networked media (e.g. Cottle in Environmental conflict and the media. Peter Lang, Oxford, pp. 13–28, 2013), this study concentrates on a less investigated South Asian country, Pakistan. Pakistan—even though being a low-income country and being continuously challenged by all kind of crises—cannot ‘only’ be reduced to these economical or conflict strata but we need to begin to assess developing regions in a new perspective.

Cosmopolitan Relational Loops of Interconnectivity

Climate change can no longer be considered as just an ‘issue’ but it is today an increasingly politicized globally interdependent crisis. Within this spectrum, climate change journalism—or, we argue, ‘risk journalism’—has new responsibilities to communicate the interdependence of globalized crisis dimensions within a world community.

Cosmopolitanized Scales of Climate Change Communication: Arenas, Actors and Communicative Spaces

As discussed in Chapter 2, climate change is a globalized ‘risk’ (Beck in The risk society: Towards a new modernity. Sage, London and Thousand Oaks, CA, 1992) as it is caused by globalized interconnectivity—an outcome of industrialization and reflexive modernization (Beck 2003). However, research in social sciences and media and communication (Smith and Lindenfeld in Environmental Communication 8:179–196, 2014; Schafer and Schlichting Environmental Communication 8:142–160, 2014) conceptualizes this globalized risk—its production, construction, communication, conflicting claims, policy measures, adaptation and mitigation plans—mainly within national frameworks. Research that develops insights into new formations of ‘interconnectivity’ that shape discourses around the globalized risk of climate change is rare.