Abstract
The authors for this edited volume have collectively shaped and contributed to this collection of case studies providing a more inclusive understanding of communities in a contemporary digital world driven by technologies. Keeping in my mind the essence of understanding the changing dynamics of the digital world and journalism education, this book is an important text for students, scholars, and practitioners in the field of media and communication to consider how communities are created or destroyed through digital communication technologies.
The subtitle “Getting Voices Heard,” suggests that this book will propose approaches to mainstream socially, economically, and culturally suppressed, and marginalized communities. The reader starts off with Olson’s sharp-witted introduction, which revisits Walter Ong’s idea of community and his argument that how technologies actually disintegrate and isolate communities. In this text, the popular understanding that the potential of new age digital communication technologies to create and forge a sense of community is challenged and argued with tempting cases. The overwhelming claims of the Internet’s divisive and isolating nature closely echo Walter Ong’s words about the written word’s ability to divide and almost sound like history replicating itself.
The book also considers and highlights the very ephemeral nature of contemporary digital communities and the technologies that promote the integration of communities that are connected and disconnected through digital communication technologies. In Olson’s reference, the new age technologies have become a platform to marginalize and discount communities that are vulnerable in nature. But at the same time, these vulnerable communities have been using digital communication technologies to find a new sense of meaning and community to consolidate their own identities and originalities.
The case studies in this book engage with a wide range of methodological orientations and arguments to provide an all-encompassing understanding of communities in the digital world. The book is also quite organized and methodical in a sense that the chapters are well structured and curated when it comes to using appropriate methods, tools and approaches to explore authentic realities. Hence, it will serve as a model for writing methodological papers as well. Using survey data, the key ideas in the first couple of chapters seek to explore the dynamics of online interaction and communication and how people react to “fake news?”
In Chapter 3 and 4, responding to the online survey questionnaires, professional groups, such as women academics (explicitly, the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Commission on the Status of Women) and journalists (those who covered traumatic events). The data sets were rather smaller in size and particularly because, in Chapter 4, a few journalist respondents chose to give only demographic data. Contrasting to Chapter 4, the analysis and conclusion of Chapter 3 to some extent do not gel with the very idea of undeserving communities.
However, Chapter 5 seeks to discover the potential of digital communication technologies such as social media to amplify and consolidate local and Indigenous identities. In a sense, it gives a voice to the voiceless by providing a platform to express and opine. The other four chapters aim at examining how the marginalized and subaltern communities with particular reference to racial and ethnic minorities have used digital communication technologies to create their own frames of understanding and identity to challenge and question the dominant understandings and identities.
For this edited volume, scholars with various academic orientation and background have contributed, and the list includes Stine Eckert of Wayne State University, Jinx C. Broussard and Andrea L. Miller of Louisiana State University, Rebecca J. Tallent of University of Idaho, and Mary T. Rogus and Nerissa Young of Ohio University. It could be said that the efforts in the chapters aim at forwarding solid and interconnected approaches to understanding communities in the digital world. As the editors are co-authors on all of the chapters with primary authorship on one of the chapters, the industrious collaboration warranted that it should have widened the scope of the idea of underserved communities and the media that are being considered in the case studies. Alternative and community media could have been considered to give a different understanding about underserving communities and how their media are helping them in finding their own voice and sense of community and identity in the contemporary digital world.
“Underserved communities and digital discourse: Getting voices heard” is potentially a starting point to many upcoming works on understanding digital communities in the contemporary world. Setting aside the critical analysis, this book is designed in a way to serve scholars and professionals in the field of journalism and media studies with a variety of enticing arguments that will enrich their existing understanding of communities in the digital world. In general, the book is recommended for courses that seek to understand community, digital communication technologies, and social media. It also serves as a reference for scholars, students, researchers, activists who encourage better representation of underserved communities.
