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This article explores how television dramas function as a cultural forum on the workplace power dynamics of US tech startups. Focusing on the limited series, Super Pumped and WeCrashed, which are about Uber and WeWork, the authors analyze how relations of race, class, and gender/sexuality emerge in these narrativized techworlds via several “figures,” including white male founders/CEOs or “millennial messiahs,” “female fixers” that range from executives to silent service providers, and the “corporate board.” These figures are important because they circulate across fictional and non-fictional contexts and become a means by which publics make sense of the power relations of tech startups. Even as these shows center on the trials and tribulations of egomaniacal, power-hungry CEOs, they raise crucial questions about corporate corruption, gender/racial discrimination, and labor exploitation in the tech workplace and challenge viewers to reckon with the unchecked power of the big US technology companies.

The first trials of hepatic artery infusion pump (HAIP) chemotherapy occurred in the 1990s. The high percentage of recurrent disease after curative resection of colon cancer and perioperative systemic chemotherapy has renewed.

When researchers invoke the term ‘last billion’ to refer to emerging ICT users, they often focus on network access as a ‘solution’ while neglecting important considerations such as local ownership ...

ObjectivePediatricians are well positioned to discuss early life obesity risk, but optimal methods of communication should account for parent preferences. To help inform communication strategies focused on early life obesity prevention, we employed human-centered design methodologies to identify parental perceptions, concerns, beliefs, and communication preferences about early life obesity risk.MethodsWe conducted a series of virtual human-centered design research sessions with 31 parents of infants ResultsParents welcomed a conversation about infant weight and obesity risk, but concerns about health were expressed in relation to the future. Tone, context, and collaboration emerged as important for obesity prevention discussions. Framing the conversation around healthy changes for the entire family to prevent adverse impacts of excess weight may be more effective than focusing on weight loss.ConclusionsOur human-centered design approach provides a model for developing and refining messages and materials aimed at increasing parent/provider communication about early life obesity prevention. Motivating families to engage in obesity prevention may require pediatricians and other health professionals to frame the conversation within the context of other developmental milestones, involve the entire family, and provide practical strategies for behavioral change.

This article explores the labor of contemporary digital privacy advocates and their myriad efforts to protect and preserve public interests during the era of Big Tech companies. It is based on qualitative interviews with professional staff, lawyers, and policy analysts at multiple major advocacy organizations in Washington, DC. We have employed a grounded theory approach to address four labor-related themes that consistently emerged across our interviews: coalition building, agenda formulation, the art of navigating public- and private-sector relationships, and balancing a domestic and global policy landscape. In the current policy landscape, there is an intensifying degree of advocacy–industry coordination taking place, in part because of US regulatory roll-backs under the Trump administration and a gridlocked Congress. As a result, advocacy organization staff members often rely on companies for information to do their assessment and agenda-setting work. They also apply pressure to these companies and force them to think about how their technologies and operations impact users and publics around the world; they mount legal challenges to various media and tech initiatives to ensure public interests are protected; and some end up working with or for these companies in ways that may impart and integrate the values of advocacy organizations within profit-driven organizations. This article explores the multiple dimensions of advocacy labor which itself is often excluded from media policy and industry analysis.

En partant de recherches feministes, cet article explore comment l’usage de drones militaires par les Etats-Unis a (re)organise la vie quotidienne de certaines regions en creant une nouvelle classe. Celle-ci est caracterisee par son statut de cible privilegiee des attaques et le fait qu’elle soit depossedee de ses droits les plus fondamentaux a travers des pratiques de « mediation verticale ». Dans cette perspective, l’article soutient qu’une etude critique des drones et de la guerre se doit d’inclure une reflexion sur les champs verticaux qui structurent, depuis les airs, la vie sur terre. Il s’agit notamment d’analyser les ressources physiques qui constituent les champs verticaux (essence, travail, terre, materiaux, reseaux, donnees, ciel et orbite) ainsi que les hierarchies que leur controle implique. Il est certes important de considerer la facon dont la guerre des drones est regie par des systemes qui relevent du controle a distance, de la simulation et du jeu. Mais il est tout aussi primordial de prendre en compte ses dimensions plus terrestres et incarnees ainsi que les paysages et les autotopographies ou s’inscrit l’usage des drones, et qui enregistrent leurs effets.

An estimated 4 billion people worldwide still lack reliable access to the Internet, with the majority concentrated in developing countries. It is within this context that a significant expansion of the satellite Internet industry is taking place, bringing grand visions of social and economic growth through connectivity. Previously dismissed as a limited technology due to high operating costs and latency, as well as the failure of early ventures like Teledesic, satellite Internet has re-emerged in recent years as a viable alternative to the time and energy-intensive practice of laying thousands of miles of fiber optic cable. Utilizing innovative non-synchronous orbit constellations of small, mass-produced satellites that lower production costs and improve latency to better compete with broadband, new Silicon Valley–related companies such as OneWeb, SpaceX, and O3b have promised cheap, high-speed Internet access throughout the world. Drawing upon industry research, site visits, and interviews with technical specialists, development experts, and other actors, this article briefly explores the history of satellite Internet services, analyzes the promises of emerging satellite Internet companies, and argues that without serious commitments from governments and the private sector to follow through on this rhetoric, satellite Internet technology could fail to reach the communities that need it most.

In this interview, Lisa Parks shares her reflections on a range of questions that remain central to her research, including what television is at the present moment and might become in the future; how satellites could be treated as part of an integrated history of media; the compartmentalizations of academia; research on surveillance, and the relationship between surveillance and capitalism; the invisibility and materiality of infrastructure, and the significance of field-based research practices; the entanglement of scholarship and social engagement; the emerging Silicon Valley satellite industry, vertical mediation and political resistance; and the urgency of environmental media studies.

Nipple-sparing mastectomy (NSM) is a surgical option to improve patient satisfaction with aesthetic outcome. It can be utilized to decrease body image disturbance by preserving the woman’s skin and areolar complex. Data for cancer treatment and risk reduction in NSM shows the procedure is oncologically safe. Nipple-sparing mastectomy preserves the nipple to improve cosmetic appearance. Patient satisfaction is higher for NSM compared with traditional mastectomy. PubMed and Cochrane databases were searched from January 1, 2013, to December 22, 2019. The following search terms and keywords were used: nipple-sparing mastectomy, microvascular breast reconstruction, breast cancer, and nipple necrosis. Studies published in scientific journals that reported objective results (specific outcomes of skin flap and nipple-areola complex necrosis) were included. Nipple-sparing mastectomy should be discussed as a surgical option for women who meet the selection criteria to assist with psychological benefits related to body image. Research comparing levels of distress and body image disturbances in women undergoing NSM with traditional mastectomy would be helpful in addressing the psychological care of these women. Ongoing data collection needs to continue to validate that NSM is safe from a surgical and an oncologic standpoint.

Google publicists have suggested the Crisis in Darfur is an example of the Google Earth software’s “success at tangibly impacting what is happening on the ground.” Yet whether or not Google Earth’s interface, along with a medley of other media representations of the conflict, have impacted events on the ground or led to coherent policies of humanitarian intervention remains open to debate. This article draws upon critical approaches from media studies—namely discourse analysis—to analyze several aspects of the Google Earth/USHMM Crisis in Darfur project. While this project was no doubt developed with the noble intention of generating international awareness about widespread violence that has recently occurred in the Darfur region, it is important to evaluate how representations of global conflicts are changing with uses of new information technologies and whether such representations can actually achieve their desired impacts or effects. The article begins with a discussion of the Crisis in Darfur project’s history, proceeds to analyze some of the press coverage of the project and then moves to a critique of the layer using four categories of analysis: (1) the shifting role of satellite image; (2) the temporality of the interface; (3) the practice of conflict branding; and (4) the practice of “information intervention.” Throughout the article, I explore how the presentation of Darfur-related materials through Google Earth reproduces problematic Western tropes of African tragedy and misses an opportunity to generate public literacy around satellite images. I also consider how humanitarianism is intertwined with digital and disaster capitalism, and suggest that this instance of “information intervention” makes patently clear that high visual capital alone cannot resolve global conflicts.

Background: Pregnant women with substance use disorder (SUD) are a vulnerable population that often contends with stigma, socioeconomic inequity, and mental health issues. The Community-based Addiction Reduction (CARE) Program connects pregnant and postpartum women with SUD in Central Indiana with addiction recovery coaches (ARCs) and attachment theory therapists, who provide linkage to community resources and mental health support. However, recruitment and retention of participants continue to be challenging. The goals of this research are to identify barriers and facilitators to recruitment/retention and to translate findings into patient engagement materials. Methods: ARCs are women with family or personal experience with SUD, and serve as proxies for patient perspectives. Qualitative data from nine semi-structured interviews conducted with ARCs and their supervisors were clustered thematically to identify barriers and facilitators to recruitment/retention. Rapid prototyping, a methodology within human-centered design (HCD), was then employed to iteratively develop deliverables, incorporating several rounds of critique from ARCs, weekly case conferences, and discussions with clinician-investigators and designers. Results: Facilitators to recruitment/retention included: (1) ability to personally relate to ARCs and (2) ARC advocacy when navigating community and health system resources. Barriers to recruitment/retention included: (1) distrust (associated with participants’ histories of adverse childhood events and other trauma); (2) overwhelming number of interactions with various agencies (DCS, clinics, counseling, etc.); (3) fluctuating phone access, (4) intensive enrollment process, and (5) overall program visibility. The following deliverables were designed: (1) introduction videos of ARCs (2) brief videos of patient advocacy stories told by ARCs, (3) personalized cards paired with existing gift card incentives, and (4) journal for self-reflection and self-motivation. Potential Impact: Qualitative findings underscore the importance of patient-centeredness in engagement with CARE participants, who are often overwhelmed and wary of others. HCD approaches within multidisciplinary teams can be leveraged to enhance program uptake and delivery within underserved populations.

[Final published version available on: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/17427665211038530] Brazilians have adopted WhatsApp as a national media and communication infrastructure over the past several years, although it is controlled by its private U.S.-based owner, Facebook. To contribute to critical analysis of WhatsApp usage in Brazil, this article explores the diverse, contentious, and influential roles the app played in the country during disruptions to its use from 2015 to 2018. Using content analysis the article critically engages with user-generated memes and news media coverage responding to these disruptions. Brazilians self-reflexively questioned the app’s role in their everyday lives and country, reassessing what it means to rely on a national infrastructure owned by an unaccountable global media conglomerate. This situation compels scholars to engage further with the nationalization and localization of U.S.-owned platforms and to assess their political, economic and cultural impacts, given their connection to the rise of far-right populism in Brazil and elsewhere.

Longtime FQ Editorial Board member and 2018 MacArthur Fellow Lisa Parks charts the shift in critical focus from the potential of social media platforms to unite people around progressive causes to the need for “content moderation,” the practice of cleaning up digital pollution. Parks centers her analysis on The Cleaners (2018), Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block's provocative documentary that delves into the lives and worlds of commercial content moderators at an unnamed company in the Philippines. The film's account of these digital-labor conditions prompts Parks' critical reflection on a series of issues: the delegation of U.S. media regulation to globally outsourced workers, the problematic trope of “cleaning,” the business of historical sanitization, and the black-boxing of infrastructural information.

This article explores how social media users in Turkey conceptualize and navigate free speech challenges in the wake of recent government crackdowns on media institutions. The study is based on qualitative interviews with 40 social media users in Istanbul, including people from LGBTQ, feminist, Kurdish, journalist, activist, and academic communities, who have been on the front lines of free speech struggles in Turkey. Informants' comments converged around a theme of transmit-trap dynamics, which emphasizes user experiences in the context of “networked authoritarianism,” and speaks to the ways Turkish social media users find themselves simultaneously empowered by and targeted within social media platforms.

This article describes the complex media environment of urban Zambia based on qualitative interviews with 42 active ICT and social media users in Lusaka. After a contextual discussion of media censorship and Internet freedom, the article draws upon interview data to delineate four circumvention practices: (1) platform jumping; (2) anonymity; (3) self-censorship; and (4) negotiation of legal challenges. Rather than approach circumvention as a set of techniques disseminated from the information capitals of the world to those in the “global south,” this study approaches it as a set of cultural practices that emerges within particular sociohistorical conditions and platforms of communication.

During the past decade, digital distribution has brought about major changes in the ways that states regulate, corporations profit from, and people consume media content in places around the world. These technological and industrial shifts have also catalyzed an important area of inquiry in media studies, leading to investigations of ‘connected viewing’ defined by Holt and Sanson as a ‘broader ecosystem in which digital distribution is rendered possible and new forms of user engagement take shape’. Most scholarly research on connected viewing has focused on postindustrial contexts in North America, Europe, and East Asia. Few have considered these practices in developing contexts such as rural sub-Saharan Africa, where energy infrastructure is underdeveloped and media devices are scarce. Adopting a user-centered approach, this article situates the concept of connected viewing in rural Zambia and explores how remote communities with very limited resources access and produce media content across various platforms. The research is based upon 6 weeks of fieldwork in Macha, Zambia, in 2012 and 2013. It begins with a descriptions of the ways people energize media devices in Macha and proceeds to a discussion of three exemplary connected viewing scenarios: (1) the daisy-chaining of satellite TV services, (2) the streaming of YouTube videos, and (3) the production and distribution of local music video. Far from a model of ‘video on demand’ typical in most postindustrial settings, Machan distribution practices generate more occasional, collective, and limited experiences of television that are scaled to local capacities, enabled by an amalgam of technologies, and frequently interrupted by power outages and network failures. Despite this, underserved rural Zambian audiences are pushing connected viewing practices forward in ways that the region’s telecom and media companies are not by innovating cross-platform tactics for (re)distributing audiovisual content in conditions of energy, bandwidth, and economic scarcity.

Background Hepatic artery infusion pump (HAIP) use in chemotherapy started in the 1960s as a way to treat liver metastases that were not amendable to locoregional therapy or surgical resection. Because of complications and limited survival benefit, the use of HAIPs fell out of favor. A resurgence has occurred in the use of these pumps, but limited information is available in the literature guiding nursing care of these patients. Objectives The purpose of this study was to review the literature regarding the use, procedures, and nursing care of patients with HAIPs. Methods A systematic literature review was conducted to obtain a comprehensive range of publications. Findings Database searching resulted in 511 titles and abstracts. After eliminating duplicates and nonrelevant titles, 65 remained and were read in full. Of these, 20 were excluded because they did not fit the inclusion criteria.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of signal traffic in the contemporary era of media globalization—an era characterized by contradictory global mediascapes and multiple media infrastructures. Signal traffic refers to the movement of electronic media across various parts of the planet. Today, broadcasting, cable, satellite, Internet, and mobile telephone systems are used simultaneously, and sometimes in coordinated ways, to route signal traffic to and from sites around the world. The content and form of contemporary media—whether television programs or online games—are shaped in relation to the properties and locations of these distribution systems. As a suggestive concept, then, signal traffic demarcates a critical shift away from the analysis of screened content alone and toward an understanding of how content moves through the world and how this movement affects content's form.

This chapter describes a particular rural configuration of Internet infrastructure in Zambia. It shows that access in this location is contingent on water resources, which not only generate hydroelectricity for the Zambian power grid but are also necessary for prospective Internet users' everyday survival in the community of Macha. Understanding the materialization of Internet infrastructure in rural Zambia works to destabilize dominant discourses that posit ICT (information and communication technology) diffusion and adoption in rural Africa as a straightforward path to “modernization,” “development,” and “global integration,” and instead points to local political, economic, and cultural challenges to the Internet's globalization. The chapter then foregrounds the struggles and contestations that are part of infrastructure development; the energy and biopower that infrastructures rely on; the relationality of water, transportation, and information systems; and the alternate ways that people imagine, use, or respond to infrastructure.

This article engages with three different modes of Earth observation—historical network maps, Google Earth interfaces, and fieldwork—to develop the concept of “signal territories” and elucidate a critical approach for studying U.S. broadcast infrastructure. This approach: 1) highlights physical infrastructures—technological hardware and processes in dispersed geographic locations—as important sites for historical and critical analysis in media and communication studies; 2) explores multiple modes of infrastructure representation—ranging from cartography to phenomenology, from hand-drawn maps to digital interfaces, from circuit diagrams to site visits; and 3) foregrounds the biotechnical aspects and resource requirements of broadcast infrastructures, probing their dynamic operations and complex materialisms. Engaging with what Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller call a “materialist ecology” of media, the article explores what is at stake in understanding media infrastructures from up close and afar. Cet article examine trois manieres differentes d’observer la Terre (les cartes de reseau historiques, les interfaces Google Earth et les enquetes sur le terrain) dans le but de developper le concept de « territoires delimites par un signal » et d’elucider une approche critique pour etudier l’infrastructure de la radiodiffusion americaine. Cette approche : 1) souligne les infrastructures physiques (les materiels et processus technologiques dans des lieux geographiques disperses) comme etant des sites importants pour l’analyse historique et critique en etudes des medias et de la communication; 2) explore plusieurs sortes de representation des infrastructures—de la cartographie a la phenomenologie, des cartes geographiques dessinees a la main aux interfaces numeriques, de schemas de circuits aux visites sur place; et 3) met en avant les aspects biotechniques et les besoins en ressources des infrastructures de radiodiffusion, examinant leurs operations dynamiques et leurs materialismes complexes. Cet article a recours a ce que Richard Maxwell et Toby Miller appellent une « ecologie materialiste » des medias afin d’explorer ce qui est en jeu dans la comprehension a petite et a grande echelle des infrastructures mediatiques.