Casio introduced the world’s first mass-produced digital watches; the Japanese multinational company was founded in 1947. It expanded from calculator production to watch production. Moreover, the vision of Casio is to be on the frontiers of addressing environmental issues. Some of Casio’s competitors include but are not limited to Swatch, Seiko, Timex and Armitron. The company stands for a combination of heritage and innovation, representing the culture behind their Vintage Collection.
Casio’s new Vintage Collection targets a younger audience by recycling old designs under the “vintage” trend. They aim to retain a customer base that value nostalgia, affordability and simplicity.
With these values in mind, the branded content film focused on the notion of time and its vitality for relationships. It focused on a young couple trying to make their long-distance relationship work but being in different time zones impedes them from connecting. At the end of the film, the couple manages to connect virtually for their anniversary meal with the help of the Casio watch.
The film could be showcased on the company’s platform or other third-party platforms such as TV or social media. This campaign could be successful for Valentine’s Day as it has a heartwarming tone on romantic relationships. Conveniently, it relates to the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, where many people have been affected by self-isolation and quarantine. There is an emphasis on the hopeful feeling of togetherness and how time is precious, which audience members can easily relate to. The film conveys the values of affordability and simplicity by focusing on a young couple and a simple lifestyle. In addition, the values of heritage and innovation are also communicated by placing a nostalgic watch design to a younger generation. The campaign moves the brand forward by linking the product to a problem that many young adults face in the twenty-first century.
The revolution in Sudan united Sudanese people of every age group, political orientation, and gender. All eyes were on Sudan as the world watched the oppressed citizens topple one of the longest-ruling dictators in history. During these turbulent times, the diaspora community united and created a digital platform called “Sudan NextGen”, a prefigurative prototype of an open-source platform. The platform is open to any individual keen to contribute to Sudan’s development, be it experts, international organizations, or the community leaders in Sudan. Home – Sudan NextGen.
The platform’s objective is to transform Sudan using the Big Fast Results methodology (BFR). The platform unites experts of all sectors, both inside and outside Sudan. It is also democratically owned and managed by its members, and employs horizontal governance. There are non-hierarchical and non-coercive relationships between the members.
The platform has an advocacy arm that works with international organizations to address pressing issues that the communities in Sudan face. Similarly, it has a cultural team composed of an army of popular influencers that work on the platform’s visibility. Sudan NextGen Platform Overview (English) – YouTube
The renowned scholar David Bollier emphasized that commons are social systems developed to meet shared needs; in Sudan’s case, the shared need is enabling Sudan to become a leading digital economy. SudanNextGen aims to manage digital data and digital infrastructure to accelerate the development of Sudan. The platform has a mechanism to resolve conflicts and ensure overall member consensus through voting and polling. The generated profits or funds collected go into the management of the forum. These characteristics resemble that of a commons-based media source. Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons.
In the previous year, Sudan NextGen launched multiple projects in coordination with the transitional government and civil society. It also showcased the performance of the projects across international key performance indicators. In a similar mechanism, it tracked the performance of all the ministries in Sudan.
The platform worked on short-term strategic goals, including stabilizing the economy, ensuring social development, and fighting corruption, to name a few. Also, the forum has an e-Learning space for young leaders in Sudan to learn digital skills and secure tech jobs. SudanNextGen is taking one of the first steps in creating jobs for the youth in Sudan, re-conceptualizing data, and visualizing how it can play a role in developing a democratic and equitable system.
Towards A Commons-Centric Sudan:
Today’s focus is on the digital commons of knowledge, software, and design because they are the ”new commons”- Benkler.
Today’s leaders realize the importance of digital platforms to the modern economy and the transformative potential it holds. The creation of SudanNextGen is a significant milestone SudanNextGen fits the criteria of a peer-to-peer model, Introduced by Bauwen as it puts civil society at the heart of the democratic process of value creation and distribution. Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto.
Members of SudanNextGen can collaborate as peers and as a result, it guides other social structures to create a shared platform. For instance, Locale, which aims to unite Sudanese artists to empower the Sudanese identity and preserve the Sudanese culture. Locale (@locale_sd) • Instagram photos and videos
Following an interview I had with Sally Atta, the founder of SudanNextGen, she highlighted that the platform’s progress came to a standstill amid the military coup in Sudan. The founder and CEO of the platform emphasized that the transition towards a commons-centric Sudan highly relies on political and economic stability. This reasserts the view of the scholar David Boller’s that commoning requires a functioning democracy and a change in the character of politics.
There is a blurred line between labour and leisure in the creative industry. According to the Cambridge dictionary, labour is “practical work that involves hard physical effort”, as such creative work isn’t regarded as “labour”, on the contrary, it involves a great deal of hard physical and mental effort.
When the influencing trend took the digital world by storm, I was among many that aspired to experience accidental entrepreneurship. During the process of attempting to fulfil this aspiration, I carried out a lot of physical and mental labour on Instagram. Including but not limited to projecting a specific persona online, working on self-branding 24/7 offline and online, fashion branding, and curating visual content.
Am I Helping The Rich Get Richer?
“If you’re not paying for a product, chances are that you’re the product”
– Tim O’Reilly.
Some believe that platforms like Instagram and Twitter are free, but media scholars like Cohen are telling us otherwise. The role that contents creators play has shifted dramatically; they now provide platforms with personalized information that is sold to the highest bidder. The renowned scholar Smyth highlighted the crucial role that audiences play in helping capitalists accumulate more wealth and widen the already existing inequality gaps. Cohen described the web as a virtual gold mine built on the attention model, a model that depends on a large group of people watching the same thing at the same time. The Power disparities emerge when users have no control over the information that is collected and processed online. That provides marketers with unprecedented precision to study users’ behaviour and improve marketing techniques without asking for users’ consent.
These big platforms collect data about users and sell it to third parties to perform personalized targeting, this intrusive process is taking place at a very fast rate due to the uberization of the economy. The data provided to Instagram helps the platform provide us with tailored advertising, you might have noticed items following you around the web. This isn’t a coincidence; it’s a process that Cohen described as personalized targeting. The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture.
In our contemporary world, communicative capitalism is underway. On one hand, content producers provide large amounts of data and immaterial labour, and on the other hand, platform capitalists employ extensive commodification to generate tremendous amounts of profits and tap into unreachable markets. This seesaw model encapsulates what Cohen describes as “double commodification.” The role of users has shifted from consumers to prosumers. The generation of profit is centred around monetization, commodification, and the exploitation of online data. Systematic surveillance of our communication is at the heart of the profit-generating activity, as it reveals consumption patterns and collects users’ information and creates a reformed type of cybernetic commodity. Cohen explained that nowadays the cybernetic commodity is produced from the details users input when they sign up for social media accounts, he pointed that platforms like Instagram inform users that they collect this data in their terms of use and privacy, however, he mentioned that the legal jargon is too complex for the users to understand. The valorization of surveillance puts more predictive power in the hands of corporate giants. Data mining tactics have recently evolved to monitor in real-time and predict future behaviour; this intense monitoring and dataveillance provide advertisers instant feedback needed to market the right products to the right audience.
Co-Creation or Exploitation?
In today’s gig economy, despite workers creating demand and surplus value they continue to face heightened job insecurity. Undoubtedly, creating content is enjoyable but there is a clear imbalance of benefits and increased invasion of privacy. Cohen believes that the relentless drive of marketers to commodify users data will most likely lead to the development of new techniques that will challenge the boundaries that we thought were the limits on invading users privacy.
In the information age, everyday seems to resemble an episode of black mirror, platforms like Instagram have become digital pacifiers, and they play a crucial role in constructing our world’s perspective. As an east African woman, my explore page on Instagram is tailored to display automated ads of east African women, there is deep-seated human psychology in that choice of display and subliminal cues that are meant to make me believe that the internet is a diverse space and that women like myself are represented. However, a series of events prompted me to critically interrogate Instagram.
Are You Sure You Would Like to Follow Khalid AlBaih?
As an Afro-Arab you start engaging in politics before you can pronounce your name, on social platforms I follow political activists and political figures and news organizations. Recently I noticed that I haven’t seen any updates about the evacuation of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, an issue I have been following religiously, I checked the accounts that I follow, just to find out that I no longer follow them, when I attempted to re-follow one of the accounts, I received a pop-up notification stating “are sure you would like to follow Khalid Albaih.”
Khalid Albaih is a Sudanese political cartoonist that posts about Palestine on a regular basis, @Khalidalbaih (@khalidalbaih) • Instagram photos and videos when I looked further into it, I realized that I wasn’t alone; most of his followers complained about the same odd situation, even the talented political cartoonist himself complained about the lack engagement of his followers with his content.
At that moment I realized that Instagram is altering the narrative by controlling my feed and feeds of millions of others. Instagram strategically optimized specific content on my feed like skincare adverts, whilst simultaneously censoring some of the users I followed like Khalid Albaih.
The Rationale Behind Instagram’s Suggestions:
Instagram deploys the same tactics used to reinforce racism in earlier times, artificial intelligence and algorithms are the reformed tools to maintain social order in the digital world. Through seamlessly integrating ads whilst censoring users like Khalid Albaih. The esteemed scholar Safiya Noble mentioned that Artificial Intelligence enables platforms to make users complicit in the suffering of other users categorized as “racially inferior”.
The Dark Side of Algorithms: Could Instagram be Racist?
Instagram algorithms are fallible human creations embedding bias, they are powered by commercial and political interests that exacerbate the social, political, and historical significance of racist representations.
Palestinians live in digital apartheid, as algorithms replicate inequalities in the race. Safiya Noble describes in her book “Algorithms of Oppression” that algorithms drive certain results to the top, promoting racism to safeguard the platform’s own political interests.Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.
Another characteristic of platform capitalism is that the explore algorithm on Instagram is curated to promote commercial content and suppress political issues. Nowadays Instagram suppresses political content to safeguard political relations with specific countries. How Instagram became the politicians’ playground | Instagram | The Guardian
Human right watch activist calls on the immediate regulation of these platforms that are acting as de facto governments. There are destressing implications about Instagram’s digital inequality, as it outlaws human rights and deepens the global economic divide. Unless collective action is taken algorithm bias will continue to mask the relationship between capitalism and racism. Live Q&A: Coded Bias.
“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns. Why should we let them have ideas” – Joseph Stalin
The Sudanese people have long fought against a deeply entrenched political system. During the rule of El Bashir, confiscation of newspapers, violent raiding of newsrooms and termination of journalist’s licenses were only some of the repressive measures taken by the government on a daily basis. Sudan | RSF. As it’s widely known, every system’s objective is to prevail and survive, and the objective of the ruling power was to control circulated information and depoliticize a subjugated population. Sudan is a government-dominated and mixed economy. Sudan Politics, government, and taxation, Information about Politics, government, and taxation in Sudan (nationsencyclopedia.com)
In this economic system, the private sector is allowed some freedom to operate, but under close government surveillance and control. However, how much control should be undertaken by the government?
The media landscape in Sudan has been severely affected by the socio-economic instability in the country. Sudan witnessed a series of six attempted and five successful military coup d’états throughout its brief post-independence history. https://www.theafflatus.org/post/sudan-military-coup
The media landscape in Sudan has dominant monopolistic features that pertain to the country’s political state. The repercussions of the repressive policies limit freedom of the press and leave no room for perfect competition. Media in Sudan – Chronicle Fanack.com.
The dictatorships in Sudan resulted in complete control over economic resources and full government control of both television and radio, which are the main media outlets. Sudan is underdeveloped technologically with a centralized use of social media. The regime’s reach is not just limited to the public sector, but it extends to the private sector. The supporters of the regime own the private media outlets. As a result, it ensures the coherence of the messages tailored by the regime and the production of state propaganda. Sudan – Media Landscapes
The Changing Media Landscape
The country’s quest for Democracy from 1956 is still ongoing; Sudan had two short-lived democratic governments. The dominant military regime implements all necessary measures to censor and control the media and, most importantly, freedom of expression. According to Reporters Without Borders, Sudan is one of the world’s most hostile terrains for journalists. A recent example would be raiding of the house of Jazeera’s Khartoum bureau chief in lieu of the coup d’état. Sudan protests: Six killed as Al Jazeera bureau chief is arrested – CNN . The National Intelligence and Security Services recently reformed to General Intelligence Services is the main security force operating under Bashir’s rule. The general intelligence services have put in place a ruthless system of predation that many journalists have fallen prey to.
The Roadmap To Media Democracy: Shifting Power From The Few To The Many
Radio Dabanga in Sudan is at the forefront of promoting the democratization of Media, as it aims to make the rule of many possible. Home | Radio Dabanga (dabangasudan.org)
This directly taps into the concept of the democratization of the media introduced by McChesney. The concept of Democracy is relatively new in Sudan, as it was subject to 30 years of censorship and kleptocracy. However, Dabanga is among the very few independent media organizations that have stood their ground since its foundation in 2008. The outlet used to cover atrocities in Darfur and report war crimes, and as its funds increased, it expanded its coverage to the whole of Sudan with an aim to serve the entire population. The organization has a non-profit component and is independent, and it only accepts funding that safeguards its editorial independence. Dabanga’s financial freedom from the Sudanese government and its institutions allows the organization the freedom to produce content that reflects its core values. It depends heavily on grants from different international & governmental bodies, which satisfies McChesney’s definition of democratization of media. It’s governed by the executive board and the supervisory board. Both are involved in decision-making regarding the kind of content it produces, which frees it from political and commercial influence and allows it to produce content that reflects its core values.
Living in the era of social justice, we are constantly being bombarded by female- empowerment messages in social media campaigns, ads, and pop music. However, let’s not be too quick to categorize this as a “win” for the female community; in today’s post, I will be looking into the concept of popular feminism that has gained a lot of traction in the 20th century. Before I jump to dissect the term let’s investigate the political and economic sphere that permits for the circulation of such ideologies. In today’s neoliberal capitalist world, the notion of entrepreneurialism, individualism, resilience, consumerism, and meritocracy are heavily promoted. These notions have been deeply rooted in our generation; it’s very evident as studies revealed a surge in the percentage of entrepreneurialism in 2021 11 Entrepreneur Statistics, Facts, And Trends in 2021 (markinblog.com) These notions serve as the playbook for success in today’s capitalist society. They emphasize the responsibility of females to make a success of themselves. The heavy circulation of these messages in media texts is defined as “popular feminism”. In our economy of visibility, media platforms are congested with feminist manifestos. Big corporate companies believe that their products can provide all the answers to the issues facing women. Is it ever okay to use Feminism as a marketing ploy? – nichemarket
“You’re More Beautiful Than You Think”- Dove.
dove
Dove is notoriously known for its spine-tingling ads about body positivity. A campaign that has gained virality on the internet is Dove you’re more beautiful than you think. This ad has an emotional appeal that directly taps into the idea that confidence highly depends on appearance. The Dove advert claims that happiness and success will follow if women become more confident. Dove promotes the concept of real beauty and the solution that Dove envisages for females is that with the right Dove product, you will find real beauty. The explicit message is that if females start being more confident, they will be empowered. This ideology is rooted in neoliberalism as it places the burden on women to reform sexist beauty standards imposed by a patriarchal society, giving them the choice to either remain stagnant or slay.
Moreover, Dove published an article titled Five tips to feeling beautifully confident, “Your 5 tips for beauty confidence – Dovfive“, which is a shortcut manual for women to gain confidence overnight instantly. It included stepping out of our comfort zone by wearing daring outfits and replacing clothes that didn’t fit. However, what is evident is that Dove’s five-step manual is meant to promote empowered female consumers rather than empowered women.
Femvertising: A Profitable Marketing Tactic for Dove
Dove is one of the many brands manufactured by Unilever, ironically it is the same multinational company that manufactures Fair and Lovely which raised questions about inclusivity and diversity. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53178088,It may seem like Dove is taking a feminist stance and is determined to contribute to social change, however, it’s in Dove’s commercial interest to encourage women to reconcile their relationship with beauty, as it happens to increase their annual profits. Dove, along with many companies entertain these neoliberal notions that investing in one’s human capital is an individual priority and responsibility. This applies to gaining the necessary confidence to become better economic subjects, significant others, and mothers. As Sarah Banet-Weiser explained their commercial interest, doesn’t lie in addressing the society that instils insecurities in women, or the patriarchal structures in place as that poses too much of a commercial risk.Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. This is the reason the packaging of Dove products contradicts their campaigns and downscales the feminist movement to hashtags.
Hey there! My name is Faye I joined LCC with the appetite to innovate; I wanted to join a university that would cultivate my creative potential and present me with limitless opportunities. LCC ticked all the boxes for me. I am currently pursuing an MA in Media, Communication & Critical. I am finding the course quite joyful its definitely thought-provoking, and I really enjoy that. So far this course surpassed my expectations, and I cant wait to see what else it has in store for me. At the very first, I was very skeptical about the blended learning layout of the course; I thought It would limit my learning experience, only to find out that it’s very efficient and practical, so yes, I guess you never know until you try things out.
