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Where is censorship in the age of digital technology?

Not long ago it would have been an absurd idea to purchase a television, CD or MP3 or DVD player, computer software, or game console with the intention of limiting its capabilities. However, as Raiford Guins demonstrates in Edited Clean Version, today’s media technology is marketed and sold for what it does not contain and what it will not deliver.

Whether people want to play games and download music, engage in social networking and professional collaboration, or view pornography and incite terror, the Internet provides myriad opportunities for people who share common interests to find each other. The contributors to this book argue that these self-selected online groups are best understood as tribes, with many of the same ramifications, both positive and negative, that tribalism has in the non-cyber world.

In Electronic Tribes, the authors of sixteen competitively selected essays provide an up-to-the-minute look at the social uses and occasional abuses of online communication in the new media era. They explore many current Internet subcultures, including MySpace.com, craftster.org, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, music downloading, white supremacist and other counterculture groups, and Nigerian e-mail scams. Their research raises compelling questions and some remarkable answers about the real-life social consequences of participating in electronic tribes. Collectively, the contributors to this book capture a profound shift in the way people connect, as communities formed by geographical proximity are giving way to communities—both online and offline—formed around ideas.

Essential reading on a hard-to-study but dominant communication tool, encrypted messaging apps—WhatsApp, Signal, and their kin—showing their promise and dangers.

Pundits have long pointed to social media’s power to catalyze or end political movements—and to strengthen or weaken democracies. But this power is shifting from social media platforms (such as Facebook and YouTube) to lesser-studied encrypted messaging apps (such as WhatsApp and Signal). This urgent book explains how these technologies work and how they differ from their predecessors, outlining their strengths and vulnerabilities at a crucial stage in their evolution.

While many Facebook users have at least heard of propaganda and the algorithms used to filter and highlight content on that platform, they are more likely to trust messaging apps as sources of authentic and secure information. Paired with a growing distrust of traditional media, more people are joining large groups on these apps and using them as news sources, even when those groups include relative strangers. This makes these apps particularly vulnerable to political propaganda—and even government espionage.

Security studies scholar Inga Kristina Trauthig and propaganda scholar Samuel Woolley consider both the role of these apps in spreading disinformation and as tools for maintaining free speech and civic discourse in the face of censorship. The same closed nature that makes these apps seem trustworthy has made them particularly difficult to research. And so this qualitative study draws on some 180 interviews with propagandists, activists, influence campaigners, and other users in fourteen countries. The book’s findings and the authors’ recommendations are crucial for understanding the future of online communication and safeguarding democratic speech.

Though contributors write from a variety of methodological positions and address themselves to a range of archives, they share the primary conviction that the impact of Web 2.0 on literary practice is far-reaching, far from self-evident, and far more variegated and unpredictable than easy summations of social media’s influence suggest. Expressive Networks asks after poetry’s present and future by examining what poems themselves express about the social make-up of networked platforms.

Edited by Matthew Kilbane with contributions from Cameron Awkward-Rich, Micah Bateman, Andrew Campana, Sumita Chakraborty, Scott Challener, C.R. Grimmer, Tess McNulty, Michael Nardone, Seth Perlow, Anna Preus, Susanna Sacks, Carly Schnitzler, Melanie Walsh, and Samuel Caleb Wee.