Recent scholarship has focused on a variety of digitally manifested threats to democratic institutions. Yet it is important not to lose sight of the democratizing potential of digital media and technology, which have also provided crucial platforms for different groups of people. Given digital platforms’ increasing importance and influence, this research field considers how civil society is mobilized through and against digital technologies.
Hector Beltran presents the phenomena of hacking and the hackathon. It also addresses issues of access and equity in how racialized, gendered, classed, or other marginalized social groups can undertake hacking or how they are treated within hacking spaces.
Allissa Richardson complicates our understanding of Black mobile journalism as a great equalizer — pushing us to consider also what we lose when we lean too heavily on video testimony as a liberatory tool amid an era of growing surveillance capitalism.
