Platform nations

This article introduces the concept of platform nations to capture an important recent shift in the way nations and nationalism operate in the public domain. If the rise of the internet initially led to a weakening of state control over public expressions of national belonging, the growing monopoly of platforms enables states to reassert control over national imagination, while also opening doors for other political and corporate actors to interfere in the process. This shift appears to be contributing, at least in some parts of the world, to a disciplining of national imagination online, partially reversing the trend to greater democratisation seen in the early stages of the internet.     

THE COUNTED TIME: TECHNICAL TEMPORALITIES AND THEIR CHALLENGES TO HISTORY

One of the main debates regarding historical representation within digital media concerns narrative, particularly the difficulty in articulating it. Digital technologies are usually presented as opposed to linear, written narratives, which is of consequence to historical writing. Despite the many merits of scholarly approaches that try to circumvent this difficulty, the lack of theoretical understanding of the categories implied in such discussions is noticeable. To counter this, this article addresses the relationship between time, technics, and narrative. I contend that the challenges of crafting narratives in digital media conceal a problem pertaining to the relationship between time and technics. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's work on narrative, Jimena Canales's studies of the history of science, Wolfgang Ernst's and Yuk Hui's discussions of technical temporality, and Bernard Stiegler's understanding of the relationship between time and technics, I argue that it is the temporality imbued in the workings of technical objects (such as computers) that renders them averse to narrative. In making this argument, I employ the notion of “counted time” (in contrast to Ricoeur's “narrative time”) to denote a temporal mode that, despite its intersections with social, human temporality, is alien to narrative.     

Regulatory Alchemy: How the Water Cycle Becomes Capital in the California Desert

A proposed project will take water from an aquifer in the California desert to the coast. Lacking final approvals more than 30 years after it started, the project remains a plan despite sizeable opposition. What is its secret? In this paper, I examine the imaginaries of the underground aquifer underneath the lands of Cadiz Inc, the project proponent. While local theories insist the company is at the centre of a Chinatown conspiracy, I argue that the company stays alive through regulatory alchemy, a term that reveals the magic at the heart of scientific and regulatory approval processes. I examine narratives of the aquifer in environmental compliance and financial reporting in order to reveal how regulatory processes become the conditions of profit-making, building on debates in critical legal geography and political ecology.     

The Making of a Regulatory Crisis: Restructuring New York City's Water Supply

Much practically orientated environmental research is marked by a polarity between functionalist abstraction and ahistorical normative discourse. This paper seeks to bridge the divide between theoretical and empirical research through a case study of New York City's water supply. Current processes of socio-economic restructuring are leading to negative environmental consequences obscured by a failure to extend analysis beyond limited temporal, spatial or sectoral scales. Insights from regulationist theory show that a combination of fiscal, political and other developments are bringing about a wide-ranging reformulation of existing patterns of environmental regulation and service provision in the city. The power of the state is being radically diminished in relation to the power of capital and a plethora of different interest groups. A relatively simple centralized model of environmental regulation is being transformed into a complex decentralized pattern involving the emergence of new approaches to urban governance. Further research is needed on the contradictions between capitalist accumulation and environmental regulation at different spatial scales in order to link New York's changing role within the global economy to the declining political legitimacy and fiscal capability of the state to play an extensive role in environmental management.     

Contested Regulatory Practice and the Implementation of Food Policy: Exploring the Local and National Interface

There is growing geographical interest in the nature of the 'real' regulation of the food system. The food 'scares' of the late 1980s in the UK encouraged new legislation relating to food hygiene and safety. Its local implementation created tensions which were exacerbated by the legislative consequences of the Single European Market. In response, national-level regulatory adjustments followed, which introduced new codes of practice and techniques of hazard analysis for implementation at the local level. The result was a consolidation of a system of food regulation that can be applied differentially across the 'tiers' of retailing. This paper explores the regulatory contentions of the early 1990s in the food policy arena and the nature of food regulation at the local level. It advances our understanding of the 'construction' of food quality and safety within the UK. Moreover, we argue that its depiction of the dialectical response between policy formulation and implementation confirms the need for local, as well as national level, exploration of the nature of the contemporary state.     

Connected feminists: foregrounding the interpersonal in connective action

New social movement theories have been developed to address the organisational structures of activism in the age of digital platforms, but have tended to focus on structural questions rather than interpersonal dynamics. This paper engages with Bennett and Segerberg’s theory of connective action but uses a feminist lens to foreground the interpersonal dynamics between digitally equipped activists to develop a uniquely feminist account of connective action. It draws on Jo Freeman’s ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ to illustrate how informal organisation pervades new forms of connective action and continues to hamper the feminist movement. However, it also introduces and identifies the ‘feminist manager’ as an attempt to address the problematic practices of structurelessness and informality, and paves the way for consciously recognising the organisational structures required to advance the movement beyond consciousness-raising initiatives.     

Talking to others: analysing tourists’ communications on cultural heritage experiences

In the area of cultural heritage, tourists’ experiences emphasise not only the moment and its personal nature but also socio-cultural traits. These experiences when expressed (social communications) are an important gateway to knowledge about tourists’ sense-making processes. This paper reports on the mediation between tourists and heritage sites via comments on a digital platform (TripAdvisor) about two Spanish tourist destinations with opposing characteristics and four heritage sites, which are analysed. The methodology used seeks to transcend the individual and anecdotal aspects of tourists’ comments. Indeed, the results obtained show the relevance of the humanisation and the discursive weight of heritage contexts in emotional/personal stories. Tendencies observed in non-regulated contexts confirm the role of a complex negotiation at cultural heritage sites and highlight the need to explore possible exchanges of sense in tourists’ encounters with such sites.     

Tea Party imitators? The campaign against the carbon tax,the media and a new uncivil politics

The Gillard government's decision to reverse an election promise to not introduce a carbon tax prompted protest rallies around Australia during 2011–12. Beneath the hyperbole of critics who dismissed these protests as imitating US Tea Party extremism lies an intriguing possibility: that these are each examples of a new form of right-wing political expression enabled by structural changes in the media. This article considers the nature of the anti-carbon tax ‘people's revolt’ and its resemblance to the Tea Party. Both are a hybrid mix of top-down control and bottom-up grassroots populism whose emergence ‘outrage media’ facilitated. In a manner that echoes the support Fox News gave Tea Partiers, talkback radio in Sydney appears to have played a particular role shaping the identity, agenda and uncivil tone of the campaign against the carbon tax.

吉拉德政府决定背弃不征碳税的竞选承诺,在2011-12年引发了全澳大利亚的抗议示威。批评者将示威斥为对美国茶党极端主义的模仿。批评者夸张言辞的背后却是一种有趣的可能：此乃媒体结构变化所造成的、右翼政治表达的新形式。本文思考了反碳税“人民反叛”的性质,以及它与茶党的相似性。二者都是自上而下控制与自下而上草根民粹的混合,“愤怒的媒体”有利于它们的出现。就像狐狸新闻声援茶党那样,悉尼的对讲电台似乎在塑造反碳税运动的身份、议题以及粗暴的口吻方面发挥了特殊的作用。     

Policy Networks in Complex Governance Subsystems: Observing and Comparing Hyperlink,Media, and Partnership Networks

Methods for observing policy networks have not kept up with the development of new network analytic techniques required to understand governance in complex settings. We compare three unobtrusive methods for observing policy networks based on hyperlinks between policy actor web sites, on media reports, and on public policy partnerships. Observations of one complex local water policy arena with all three methods provide a comparison of the general as well as actor‐specific network characteristics in the three observed networks. The core network of actors observed by all methods has similar network level statistics, highly correlated relationships measured by Quadratic Assignment Procedures models, and the same significant network microstructures as measured by Exponential Random Graph Models. The full networks including actors observed by any method also exhibit similar actor‐level characteristics, although the correlations across networks are stronger for bridging capital measures than for bonding capital measures, and each method has different apparent biases. Once biases are accounted for, similarities suggest that these methods may provide useful proxies for each other and for other relationships that are more difficult or impossible to measure, particularly when combined to offset each method's biases. If so, they can extend the range of policy networks observable with limited resources across space and time.