The Post-Socialist Internet

The Post-Socialist Internet PDF Author: Migle Bareikyte
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839459567
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
How is the Internet produced as an infrastructure in post-socialist Lithuania? Migle Bareikyte contributes to the growing field of STS and media studies with a distinct focus on Eastern Europe. She situates the Internet development in Lithuania's telecom industry with the exploration of its labor practices, geopolitical imaginaries, and critical negotiations from a bottom-up perspective. Bareikyte further explores how fieldwork-based research can foster new theorizations of media infrastructures. Finally, she argues for a situated investigation of new places and actors beyond the United States and Western Europe-such as post-socialist regions-in order to explore the diversity of media infrastructures.

The Post-Socialist Internet

The Post-Socialist Internet PDF Author: Migle Bareikyte
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839459567
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
How is the Internet produced as an infrastructure in post-socialist Lithuania? Migle Bareikyte contributes to the growing field of STS and media studies with a distinct focus on Eastern Europe. She situates the Internet development in Lithuania's telecom industry with the exploration of its labor practices, geopolitical imaginaries, and critical negotiations from a bottom-up perspective. Bareikyte further explores how fieldwork-based research can foster new theorizations of media infrastructures. Finally, she argues for a situated investigation of new places and actors beyond the United States and Western Europe-such as post-socialist regions-in order to explore the diversity of media infrastructures.

Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures (OPEN ACCESS)

Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures (OPEN ACCESS) PDF Author: Tauri Tuvikene
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351190334
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures critically elaborates on often forgotten, but some of the most essential, aspects of contemporary urban life, namely infrastructures, and links them to a discussion of post-socialist transformation. As the skeletons of cities, infrastructures capture the ways in which urban environments are assembled and urban lives unfold. Focusing on post-socialist cities, marked by neoliberalisation, polarisation and hybridity, this book offers new and enriching perspectives on urban infrastructures by centering on the often marginalised aspects of urban research—transport, green spaces, and water and heating provision. Featuring cases from West and East alike, the book covers examples from Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Germany, Russia, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Tajikistan, and India. It provides original insights into the infrastructural back end of post-socialist cities for scholars, planners and activists interested in urban geography, cultural and social anthropology, and urban studies.

Comparing Post-Socialist Media Systems

Comparing Post-Socialist Media Systems PDF Author: Zrinjka Peruško
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000177378
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This book explains divergent media system trajectories in the countries in southeast Europe, and challenges the presumption that the common socialist experience critically influences a common outcome in media development after democratic transformations, by showing different remote and proximate configuration of conditions that influence their contemporary shape. Applying an innovative longitudinal set-theoretical methodological approach, the book contributes to the theory of media systems with a novel theoretical framework for the comparative analysis of post-socialist media systems. This theory builds on the theory of historical institutionalism and the notion of critical junctures and path dependency in searching for an explanation for similarities or differences among media systems in the Eastern European region. Extending the understanding of media systems beyond a political journalism focus, this book is a valuable contribution to the literature on comparative media systems in the areas of media systems studies, political science, Southeast and Central European studies, post-socialist studies and communication studies.

Memory, Conflict and New Media

Memory, Conflict and New Media PDF Author: Ellen Rutten
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136186417
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This book examines the online memory wars in post-Soviet states – where political conflicts take the shape of heated debates about the recent past, and especially World War II and Soviet socialism. To this day, former socialist states face the challenge of constructing national identities, producing national memories, and relating to the Soviet legacy. Their pasts are principally intertwined: changing readings of history in one country generate fierce reactions in others. In this transnational memory war, digital media form a pivotal discursive space – one that provides speakers with radically new commemorative tools. Uniting contributions by leading scholars in the field, Memory, Conflict and New Media is the first book-length publication to analyse how new media serve as a site of political and national identity building in post-socialist states. The book also examines how the construction of online identity is irreversibly affected by thinking about the past in this geopolitical domain. By highlighting post-socialist memory’s digital mediations and digital memory’s transcultural scope, the volume succeeds in a twofold aim: to deepen and refine both (post-socialist) memory theory and digital-memory studies. This book will be of much interest to students of media studies, post-Soviet studies, Eastern European Politics, memory studies and International Relations in general.

Growth and Change in Post-socialist Cities of Central Europe

Growth and Change in Post-socialist Cities of Central Europe PDF Author: Waldemar Cudny
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000514668
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
This book presents multidimensional socio-economic transformations taking place in the post-socialist cities located in selected countries of the Central European region. The analysis includes case studies from the Eastern part of Germany (Chemnitz, Leipzig), Poland (Łódź, Kielce, Katowice conurbation, and peripheral urban centres from Eastern Poland), Slovakia (Bratislava, Nitra), the Czech Republic (Olomouc, Brno), and from Hungary (Pécs). The analysed urban areas have undergone far-reaching political and socio-economic changes in the last 30 years. These changes began with the collapse of communism and the centrally planned economy system in the region of Central Europe. The beginning of this period, often referred to as post-socialist transformation, dates back to 1989. The consequence of the aforementioned political processes was the multifaceted socio-economic and demographic changes that significantly affected urban areas in Central Europe. This book presents an attempt to summarize the main long-term processes of changes taking place in these urban areas and to identify contemporary and future trends in their socio-economic development. The book will be valuable to undergraduate and postgraduate students in human geography, urban studies, economy, and city marketing, especially with an interest in Central Europe.

Cultural Landscapes of Post-Socialist Cities

Cultural Landscapes of Post-Socialist Cities PDF Author: Mariusz Czepczynski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317156404
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The cultural landscapes of Central European cities reflect over half a century of socialism and are marked by the Marxists' vision of a utopian landscape. Architecture, urban planning and the visual arts were considered to be powerful means of expressing the 'people's power'. However, since the velvet revolutions of 1989, this urban scenery has been radically transformed by new forces and trends, infused by the free market, democracy and liberalization. This has led to 'landscape cleansing' and 'recycling', as these former communist nations used new architectural, functional and social forms to transform their urbanscapes, their meanings and uses. Comparing case studies from different post-socialist cities, this book examines the culturally conditional variations between local powers and structures despite the similarities in the general processes and systems. It considers the contemporary cultural landscapes of these post-socialist cities as a dynamic fusion of the old communist forms and new free-market meanings, features and democratic practices, of global influences and local icons. The book assesses whether these urbanscapes clearly reflect the social, cultural and political conditions and aspirations of these transitional countries and so a critical analysis of them provides important insights.

How Not to Network a Nation

How Not to Network a Nation PDF Author: Benjamin Peters
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262034182
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.

Post-Socialist Political Graffiti in the Balkans and Central Europe

Post-Socialist Political Graffiti in the Balkans and Central Europe PDF Author: Mitja Velikonja
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000702251
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
This theoretically and empirically grounded book uses case studies of political graffiti in the post-socialist Balkans and Central Europe to explore the use of graffiti as a subversive political media. Despite the increasing global digitisation, graffiti remains widespread and popular, providing with a few words or images a vivid visual indication of cultural conditions, social dynamics and power structures in a society, and provoking a variety of reactions. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, as well as detailed interdisciplinary analyses of "patriotic," extreme-right, soccer-fan, nostalgic, and chauvinist graffiti and street art, it looks at why and by whom graffiti is used as political media and to/against whom it is directed. The book theorises discussions of political graffiti and street art to show different methodological approaches from four perspectives: context, author, the work itself, and audience. It will be of interest to the growing body of literature focussing on (sub)cultural studies in the contemporary Balkans, transitology, visual cultural studies, art theory, anthropology, sociology, and studies of radical politics.

The Informal Post-Socialist Economy

The Informal Post-Socialist Economy PDF Author: Jeremy Morris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135009295
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
From smugglers to entrepreneurs, blue-collar workers and taxi drivers, this book deals with the multitude of characters engaged in informal economic practices in the former socialist regions. Going beyond a conception of informality as opposed to the formal sector, its authors demonstrate the fluid nature of informal transactions straddling the crossroads between illegal, illicit, socially acceptable and symbolically meaningful practices. Their argument is informed by a wide range of case studies, from Central Europe to the Baltics and Central Asia, each of which is constructed around a single informant. Each chapter narrates the story of a composite person or household that was carefully selected or constructed by an author with long-standing ethnographic research experience in the given field site. Wide in geographical, empirical and theoretical scope, the book uses ethnographic narrative accounts of everyday life to make links between ‘ordinary’ meanings of informality. Challenging reductively economistic perspectives on cross-border trading, undeclared work and other informal activities, the authors illustrate the wide variety of interpretive meanings that people ascribe to such practices. Alongside ‘getting by’ and ‘getting ahead’ in recently marketised societies, these meanings relate to sociality, kinship-ties and solidarity, along with more surprising ‘political’ and moral reasonings.

Post-communist Nostalgia

Post-communist Nostalgia PDF Author: Maria Todorova
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857456431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people's lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scholars from multiple disciplines explore the various fascinating aspects of this nostalgic turn by analyzing the impact of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender differences, and political orientation. They argue persuasively that this nostalgia should not be seen as a wish to restore the past, as it has otherwise been understood, but instead it should be recognized as part of a more complex healing process and an attempt to come to terms both with the communist era as well as the new inequalities of the post-communist era.