Theme 5: Power, ethics, and global perspectives

This theme addresses normative and geopolitical questions. It examines digital cultural politics, globalization and inequality, and sociocultural/political impacts, and moves toward an intercultural digital ethics–with implications for platform governance, equity-centred design, and conditions for safe, meaningful participation.

Our 2004 review (Macfadyen et al.) documented a sharply polarized discourse on the cultural and societal effects of digital technologies. Here, power refers to infrastructural and platform control over visibility and access; ethics to distributive, procedural, and epistemic justice in design and use; and global to cross-border diffusion, localisation, linguistic justice, and data sovereignty. Commentators alternated between utopian and dystopian framings: technologies appeared at once universalizing yet non-totalizing, liberating yet dominating, empowering yet fragmenting. Optimists anticipated new forms of democracy and collective intelligence; critics warned that entrepreneurial logics (sometimes referred to as platform/market logics) and existing social and economic inequalities would simply be reproduced online. Concerns included cultural homogenization, the dominance of English as a carrier of a particular culture, and the ways that access and design choices structure participation and visibility.

Debate also centred on globalization. For some, the internet promised social, cultural, and political change–enabling “regional public spheres.” Others stressed the complexity of digitally mediated globalization and the risks of cultural destabilization.

A parallel strand raised ethical questions: access and equity (the persistent digital divide), intellectual property and the appropriation of cultural knowledge–especially from Indigenous communities–and the need for legal frameworks to protect cultural heritage.

In short, by 2004 the field recognized deep tensions and unresolved ethical risks in the global diffusion of digital technologies. The sections that follow ask: How have these debates evolved, and what does recent scholarship add?