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2015 10th Anniversary of MA Programme in Global Communication
cultural hubs riding on these platforms. Meme wars
became a common theme, and new platformed
content, driven by algorithms, and optimized for 20 years from then, in 2025, the idea of the global
personalized targeting made ‘big data’ the buzz has become contested. What was once an unknown,
word. The Internet of Things became a thing, and has now become the default. The global is not
suddenly everything was smart, from phones to something we aspire to; it is the condition that we
refrigerators, and sometimes people. live in. We have seen incredible “local” phenomena
scale and proliferate at unprecedented speed.
It was a shift that focused on scale, which replaced What started as a local protest in Syria, against
the idea and imagination of the global. Being the price of bread, quickly became the so called
global was inevitable, but the conditions which “Arab Spring”, showing the strength of online
underpinned the global structures started emerging mobilization that persists till this date. Student led
as critical. More than 100 garment workers died organizing which began with #OcupyWallstreet
in a fire in a garment factory in Bangladesh, had resonances around the world, as young people
exposing the dire nature of our global fashion fought to save their collective futures. A small
industries. A blast at the Foxconn factory revealed whisper network of complaints about gendered
the inhumane working hours of the workers making discrimination and abuse in Hollywood engulfed the
Apple products. Reporters broke the story of brutal world in #metoo conversations, which have shifted
working conditions in Amazon warehouses, marking the ways in which we understand our workspaces.
the beginning of a concentrated attention on global A racial justice campaign on #blacklivesmatter
labour infrastructures that support our digital spawned multiple solidarities, with people stepping
revolutions. The ways in which we understand the up to create equitable societies. The generation
domains of life, labour, language, and love, were defining COVID-19 pandemic which exposed the
to change dramatically and definitively. biological vulnerability of our connected worlds
as well as the misinformation virality of our digital
networks coalesced the idea that the global is not
only fiercely local but also unevenly distributed.

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