Benjamin Birkinbine is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Advertising, Multimedia Journalism and Public Relations (AMP) at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. In 2022, he was selected as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar for which he lived and conducted research in Brazil. He also serves as Co-Chair of the Political Economy Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno.
His research focuses on the political economy of communication, with a specific focus on free and open source software and the digital commons. He is the author of Incorporating the Digital Commons (University of Westminster Press, 2020) and co-editor of Global Media Giants (Routledge, 2017), and his research has been published in Media, Culture & Society, the International Journal of Communication, The Political Economy of Communication, and the Journal of Peer Production among others.
Incorporating the Digital Commons
The concept of ‘the commons’ has been used as a framework to understand resources shared by a community rather than a private entity, and it has also inspired social movements working against the enclosure of public goods and resources. One such resource is free (libre) and open source software (FLOSS). FLOSS emerged as an alternative to proprietary software in the 1980s. However, both the products and production processes of FLOSS have become incorporated into capitalist production. For example, Red Hat, Inc. is a publicly traded company whose business model relies entirely on free software, and IBM, Intel, Cisco, Samsung, Google are some of the largest contributors to Linux, the open-source operating system. This book explores the ways in which FLOSS has been incorporated into digital capitalism. Just as the commons have been used as a motivational frame for radical social movements, it has also served the interests of free-marketeers, corporate libertarians, and states to expand their reach by dragging the shared resources of social life onto digital platforms so they can be integrated into global capitalism.
The book concludes by asserting the need for a critical political economic understanding of the commons that foregrounds (digital) labor, class struggle, and uneven power distribution within the digital commons as well as between FLOSS communities and their corporate sponsors.
Incorporating the Digital Commons is published under a Creative Commons license and is freely available via open access from University of Westminster Press.
Global Media Giants
Global Media Giants takes an in-depth look at how media corporate power works globally, regionally, and nationally, investigating the ways in which the largest and most powerful media corporations in the world wield power. Case studies examine not only some of the largest media corporations (News Corp., The Microsoft Corporation) in terms of revenues, but also media corporations that hold considerable power within national, regional, or geo-linguistic contexts (Televisa, The Bertelsmann Group, Sony Corporation). Each chapter approaches a different company through the lens of economy, politics, and culture, giving students and scholars a thoughtful and data-driven guide with which to interrogate contemporary media industry power.
“A brilliant conception, masterfully executed. The editors have given us a path-breaking survey of capitalist power over world communications – conglomerate by conglomerate, region by region, and product by product, from TV program ratings to smartphone apps.” — Dan Schiller, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“This authoritative and encyclopaedic volume provides a rich, systematic, and comprehensive analysis of one of the most devastating and significant developments of our century, the universal domination of culture, information, and communications by ever more powerful private corporations.” — Peter Golding, Northumbria University
“This is without doubt the essential guide to the communication companies that define today’s media-saturated world.” — Vincent Mosco, author of To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World
“This systematic global overview of the most powerful media corporations shows the present-day inequalities of global capitalism through the lenses of converging media and information services, revealing both the dominating forces and the on-going resistances.” — Helena Sousa, University of Minho, Portugal