Jack Linchuan Qiu

Long celebrated as a paradise of high-tech neoliberal capitalism, digital media platforms have become geo-politicized in recent years. They have been increasingly subject to coercive state control, to forces of territorialization in a landscape defined by conflicts, where the power distribution in utilizing big data and algorithms in daily operations are vastly unequal. The Russian invasion of Ukraine provides a critical moment for media and communication research to broaden its horizons and shift its assumptions about platform studies from soft power to hard power, from globalist illusions to real-world politik, from uneven wealth distribution to shared security vulnerability, from the heartland of accumulation to the rimlands of trenches and chokepoints. In doing so, we need to revisit the notion of metis, or local knowledge, central to the analysis of digital platform geopolitics beyond conventional capital-nation-state frameworks, as can be observed in Ukraine.
Jack Linchuan Qiu is Professor and Research Director in the Department of Communications and New Media, the National University of Singapore. He has published more than 100 research articles and chapters and 10 books in English and Chinese including Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition (University of Illinois Press, 2016), World Factory in the Information Age (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2013), Working-Class Network Society (MIT Press, 2009), and co-authored book Mobile Communication and Society (MIT Press, 2005). He is recipient of the C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy, and an elected Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA).