In the post-colonial era, tribal peoples are particularly vulnerable to new technologies and industrialization, which threaten their cultures, homelands and ways of living. However, there is a surprising exception to this trend in the form of social media. This book explores how tribal and indigenous peoples across the globe are using social media such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp in fresh and inventive ways unique to their values and lifestyles. These platforms help tribal peoples to communicate across boundaries and barriers as never before, and are helping to strengthen communal identity and development in the global age.
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.
In the post-colonial era, tribal peoples are particularly vulnerable to new technologies and industrialization, which threaten their cultures, homelands and ways of living. However, there is a surprising exception to this trend in the form of social media. This book explores how tribal and indigenous peoples across the globe are using social media such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp in fresh and inventive ways unique to their values and lifestyles. These platforms help tribal peoples to communicate across boundaries and barriers as never before, and are helping to strengthen communal identity and development in the global age.
The recent proliferation of social networks has led to a societal shift – from a tribal mentality to that of Facebook – and has served to connect people from around the world with common cultural, religious, political and economic characteristics in an unprecedented manner and with astonishing speed. When such vast numbers of individuals congregate via social networks, societies that were once imaginary become real — the virtual worlds they inhabit expand and instill in their ‘citizens’ a shared desire to establish and enforce their common interests. This study charts the impact of this phenomenon in order to explore and analyze the potential outcomes of the accelerated development of social networks. Their economic potential in general is discussed, as are their implications for the future of traditional media forms, both as sources of news and key platforms for shaping public opinion. It also explores the use of social networks by terrorists and organized criminal gangs – a trend which has not only led to the development of new forms of criminal activity, but also to the ‘globalization’ of crime – and examines the potential for new forms of ‘virtual’ conflict to arise, with the Internet as the battlefield, social networks as the weapons, and states and citizens as the combatants. In the area of domestic security, the study proposes that defense and intelligence agencies will depend on social networks to wage, and defend against various forms of information warfare, as well as to monitor the movements and communications of individuals under surveillance. A major focus of the study is the growing ability of protestors and advocates of political change in countries with repressive regimes to create significant ‘virtual’ political pressure through social networks, obtaining and disseminating information without censorship in a new ‘information democracy.’ It is this role of social networks in the political and social make-up of nations that defines the importance of this study; particularly in view of the fact that social networks have recently become a vital variable in socio-economic mobility across the globe, and in the Arab world in particular.
Marketing and consumer research has traditionally conceptualized consumers as individuals- who exercise choice in the marketplace as individuals not as a class or a group. However an important new perspective is now emerging that rejects the individualistic view and focuses on the reality that human life is essentially social, and that who we are is an inherently social phenomenon. It is the tribus, the many little groups we belong to, that are fundamental to our experience of life. Tribal Marketing shows that it is not individual consumption of products that defines our lives but rather that this activity actually facilitates meaningful social relationships. The social ‘links’ (social relationships) are more important than the things (brands etc.) The aim of this book is therefore to offer a systematic overview of the area that has been defined as “cultures of consumption”- consumption microcultures, brand cultures, brand tribes, and brand communities. It is though these that students of marketing and marketing practitioners can begin to genuinely understand the real drivers of consumer behaviour. It will be essential to everyone who needs to understand the new paradigm in consumer research, brand management and communications management.
From MySpace.com to Nigerian e-mail scams, sixteen competitively selected essays inquire into the causes and consequences of the "tribes" that are facilitated by the Internet.
Reimagining Adult Education as World Building offers a new way of thinking about adult education by re-envisaging how adult education works. It explores how the process of world building, or the invention of a new world or a set of concepts, can be translated into actual and feasible action when turning towards complex, real-life problems. Cultivating contexts where adult educators can become change agents, who recognize that the individual and community are intricately entangled, demands that educators grow new capacities, make new tools, develop thicker networks, and cultivate intentional links amongst each other to foster ecologies of transformation. This book shows how educators can create an ecology or environment for transformative thinking where students can learn to collaborate and use world building tools to create new responses to current issues. It begins by explaining the philosophical underpinnings of world building and the tools that translate pragmatic imagination into scaffolds for individual and collective capacity building. It also illustrates how the worldbuilding protocol makes a difference in adult learning and how this pedagogical tool introduces the ecological approach to adult education. Each chapter explores a practical case study, showing how learners have applied worldbuilding tools to complex challenges. Showing how to apply the world building protocol in a classroom setting, this edited collection will be valuable to Adult Education scholars, researchers, practitioners, and learning facilitators.
Own your screw ups, get inspired and create the life you want. Sick of chasing the perfect relationship, career or bank balance? Tired of feeling like you’re never quite ‘enough’? You’re not alone. And it’s time to do something about it. Smart Girls Screw Up Too, is THE no-nonsense guide for a generation of women who secretly muse about what might be possible in their careers, health and relationships but don’t know where to start or are too afraid to. When a clusterf**k of screw ups found author Bella Zanesco burnt out, depressed and with a broken soul, she knew something – perhaps everything – had to change. But what? Her first ports of call were the usual Band-Aids: Tinder, work and shopping. But soon, she realised those weren’t going to work. If she wanted to fix this thing, she was going to need to take extreme measures. And so she began the journey that would transform her from ‘Sad Girl’ to ‘Smart Girl’; a journey that meant taking up all the things that she’d been told were good for her but she had always been too afraid, too ‘busy’, or too lazy to try. Cue everything from green juices to setting boundaries to quitting her job to culling her friends. Delivered with no-holds-barred honesty, humour and compassion, Smart Girls Screw Up Too brings together: the latest research into gut science, neuroscience and epigenetics; ancient tribal wisdom; interviews with global game changers; and insights from the author’s own two-year study of over 2000 women. Paired with a Personal Life Audit, you will get immediate clarity about where to start when seeking purpose, vitality and love. And, together with Bella – the wise but ass-kicking bestie you wish you’d known earlier – you’ll embark on a series of simple daily challenges that will not only get you to the root causes of why you think, feel and behave as you do, but see you making changes that stick. No matter what your starting point, you are capable of creating the life you want NOW.
As the title indicates, this book highlights the shifting and emergent features that represent life online, specifically in and around the territory of e-learning. Cybercultures in themselves are complex conglomerations of ideas, philosophies, concepts, and theories, some of which are fiercely contradictory. As a construct, "cyberculture" is a result of sustained attempts by diverse groups of people to make sense of multifarious activities, linguistic codes, and practices in complicated and ever-changing settings. It is an impossibly convoluted field. Any valid understanding of cyberculture can only be gained from living within it, and as Bell suggests, it is "made up of people, machines and stories in everyday life." Although this book contains a mix of perspectives, as the chapters progress, readers should detect some common threads. Technology-mediated activities are featured throughout, each evoking its particular cultural nuances and, as Derrick de Kerckhove (1997) has eloquently argued, technology acts as the skin of culture. All the authors are passionate about their subjects, every one engages critically with his or her topics, and each is fully committed to the belief that e-learning is a vitally important component in the future of education. All of the authors believe that digital learning environments will contribute massively to the success of the information society we now inhabit. Each is intent on exploration of the touchstone of "any time, any place" learning where temporal and spatial contexts cease to become barriers to learning, and where the boundaries are blurring between the formal and informal. This book is divided into four sections. In Part I, which has been titled "Digital Subcultures," we begin an exploration of “culture” and attempt to locate the learner within a number of digital subcultures that have arisen around new and emerging technologies such as mobile and handheld devices, collaborative online spaces, and podcasting. The chapters in this section represent attempts by the authors to demonstrate that there are many subdivisions present on the Web, and that online learners cannot and should not be represented as one vast amorphous mass of "Internet" users.
