Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Dr Benjamin YH Loh (Taylor’s University, Malaysia).
Malaysia’s digital public sphere has been largely dominated by cybertroopers, paid political actors seeking to influence public opinion on politics through the use of digital astroturfing, account sockpuppetry and disinformation. However, in recent years the efficacy of these campaigns is starting to wane due to reduced funding and shifts in social media practices and behaviours. The latter is driven by TikTok whose algorithm prioritises more organic and authentic activities, which in turn limit the influence of political actors. As such, I will discuss the platform features of Tik Tok and why it poses a threat to the political establishment in many countries that relies on the use of cybertroopers and troll farms, and what this means for the future of the digital public sphere.
Benjamin Yew Hoong Loh is a senior lecturer at the School of Media and Communication, the Director of the Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions Impact Lab at Taylor’s University and a Visiting Fellow at the ISEAS Yusof-Ishak Institute. He is a media scholar who employs digital ethnography in studying emergent cultures and issues affecting the digital public sphere. His published works include co-edited books “Sabah from the Ground: The 2020 Elections and the Politics of Survival” (ISEAS/SIRD 2021) with Bridget Welsh and Vilashini Somiah, and “New Media in the Margins: Lived Realities and Experiences from the Malaysian Peripheries” (Palgrave 2023) with James Chin.
Join us to celebrate the publication of two recent books from CAMRI researchers, taking different perspectives on transformations in popular music and work amid the unfolding digital and economic crises of the late 2000s and 2010s.
Paul Rekret’s Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis (Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2024) examines expressions of economic crisis and transformation in popular music, in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crash. From online streaming and the extension of the working day to gentrification, unemployment and the emergence of trap rap, from ecological crisis and field recording to automation and trends in dance music: Take This Hammer shows how song-form has both reflected developments in contemporary capitalism while also intimating a horizon beyond it.
Toby Bennett’s Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry: Remaking the Major Record Label from the Inside Out (Bloomsbury 2024) is an ethnographic study of organisational transformation inside the music industry’s largest global firms, as they regained stability after a turbulent period of ‘digital disruption’. Centring not on artists and the most powerful decision-makers but on everyday experiences of work and back-office corporate employees, the book tells a different story of contemporary digital music – one more sensitive to the complex intersections that texture the conduct of work and organizational life.
With introduction and commentary from Aasiya Lodhi and Sally Anne Gross.