Introduction

In 2018 Cambridge University Press published a three-volume series, Rethinking Society for the 21st Century, consisting of chapters submitted to the International Panel for Social Progress (IPSP) chaired by the Noble Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen. Chapter 13, ‘Media and Communications’ (Couldry et al, 2018) is a multi-authored text on the status of contemporary communications. It highlights key contemporary communication deficits – from the skewed ownership of media and information infrastructures to the various disparities in access to and the efficient distribution of media and information resources. Its recommendations relate to: the need to have effective access to communication infrastructures; the transparency and accountability of media and digital platforms;

We live in an era imprinted by the digital as the common language of productivity and reproductivity across multiple sectors, as central to our everyday lives as it is to advances in science, technology, humanities and the social sciences. The digital, however, is a conflicted entity. As the Stanford lawyer Lawrence Lessig (1999) has argued, the digital is essentially about the ‘copy’, meaning that potentially any digital text, application, format and product can be replicated often at zero cost. From economics, we learn that there are ‘rivalrous’ and ‘non-rivalrous’ resources, meaning that there are tangible products such as a packet of biscuits that are finite, the consumption of which exhausts the packet and the desire for more that can be satisfied by additional purchases, and intangible products such as the digital whose consumption does not in any way degrade their quality or exhaust their availability potentially to everybody who is connected. In this sense the digital product is very different from analogue products such as a video tape or a printed copy of a newspaper. As digital natives we are constantly sharing digital texts and images and yet ‘sharing’ is by no means an accepted norm in the neoliberal economic environments in which we live.