Power and Space in Electronic Communications

Second author with Phil Steinberg, Florida State University. Submitted May 2009.

Achmed the Dead Terrorist and Humor in Popular Geopolitics

31 January 2009, with Melissa Brown and Mahmut Gokmen

The critical geopolitics literature has engaged popular culture and media in many forms, usually focused on mass media or elite-produced niche media. The issue of humor as a form of popular culture with geopolitical content has been explored only recently by geographers. This paper utilizes disposition theory, with its emphasis on social context, to link humor and geopolitical analyses of humor. The analysis of two Jeff Dunham comedy skits centering on the character Achmed the Dead Terrorist demonstrates the utility of disposition theory as a construct to situate humor in the context of its original production and as a fluid, global phenomenon that is shared through various social networks via the Internet.

Key Words: critical geopolitics, disposition theory, humor, popular culture, popular geopolitics. 

The Military in the Noosphere

Published in Information, Communication and Society, 2005

Websites are often used by governments to articulate particular views on international affairs, and even to lobby for a particular position. Using work by Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1999), Castells (2001) and Chadwick (2001) as a theoretical framework for understanding the importance that cyberspace holds for governments and states, the author analyzes the efforts of the Slovenian Ministry of Defense (MoD) to adopt the Internet to communicate with publics it defined as important. Through this website, the MoD literally served as a combatant in the noosphere, while displaying tendencies that Chadwick argues serves particular purposes in maintaining domestic political legitimacy. The analysis is based on a socio-semiotic approach (Hodge & Kress 1988) dependent on a well-developed understanding of the context within which signs and symbols exist. The paper outlines the role of the military in Slovenia, incorporates interview data with public relations staff in and then links these to a descriptive analysis of website content. The paper concludes that it is important for non-hegemonic states to actively contest cyberspace images in the noosphere, if only to serve the domestic public the state needs for legitimacy. Further directions in comparative work are proposed.

Keywords: noosphere; geopolitics; semiotics; ICTs; Slovenia; representations of space

Credit Unions on the Financial Landscape: Geographical Strategies of Expansion and Service

The Industrial Geographer, with Sharon Cobb, 2004

Recent legislative efforts to protect credit unions against unfavorable legislation reflect the growing importance of credit unions in the U.S. financial services sector. Efforts to address new technologies, combined with deregulation in financial services, have led changes in the field of membership rules governing how credit unions are chartered and how
they may grow. These regulations have clear geographic implications for defining communities and for offering financial services and education to particular segments of the population. This paper briefly reviews the history of credit unions, then examines the Credit Union Membership Access Act of 1998 (CUMAA) and the National Credit Union Administration's (NCUA) interpretation and implementation. A
case study of two Florida locales is used to analyze the changes in credit union charters and their expansion in the rapidly changing market. The results point to the possibility that credit union expansion as currently legislated may be an effective way to insure access to financial services.

Keywords:credit union, financial services, community, fields of membership, regulation

Information technologies and representational spaces at the outposts of the global political economy: redrawing the Balkan image of Slovenia

Information, Communication and Society, 2001 - Co-Authored with Janet Kodras

Drawing upon insights from Deibert's (1997) reconstituted medium theory and critical geopolitics literature, this article examines Slovenia'sefforts at crafting an image of itself via the Internet for specific strategic goals such as EU and NATO accession, the promotion of tourism and the attraction of foreign direct investment. Through an examination of both the material and discursive practices undertaken by the Slovenian government, we demonstrate the difficulty inherent in challenging tropes that hegemonic powers disseminate through various media in order to craft the geopolitical world they operate in. Slovenia's websites represent an important form of resistance to hegemonic visions of space, visions that have excluded Slovenia's accession to certain power structures. The government uses the Internet to construct a discourse refuting assertions of unreadiness to accede to these institutions, a form of online lobbying that attempts to redraw the image of Slovenia in the minds of a global public. We conclude this examination not by making grand pronouncements about the efficacy of these efforts, but by demonstrating that these images are part and parcel of the efforts to disassociate Slovenia from the negative connotations of the Balkan moniker.The fact that these efforts incorporate the Internet, when linked to material practices and policies, raises questions about the possibilities of such resistance via new communication technologies.
Keywords: Medium Theory; Critical Geopolitics; Place Promotion; Slovenia; Geopolitical Discourse; Balkan

The Slovenian State on the Internet

Open Society Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1999.

The development of the Internet has allowed for many claims about the future of democracy and governance. At one extreme, there are those who see the end of the state coming in the globalized world we inhabit. Others will point to computer technology and invoke the images of 1984, George Orwell’s futuristic look at a state employing communications technology for control.
In this paper, I argue that the Internet is usable by the state as well as individuals and groups to serve its purposes. These efforts will be studied from the framework of the creation of space, particularly concepts of representations of space and representational spaces. The Internet facilitates the creation of images of place that are strategically used to influence perceptions of place.
In the case study, I examine Slovenia’s government websites to demonstrate that a state does have a need to control information, to project images that are aimed to induce activities like tourism, investment, diplomacy, and establish an unequivocal state identity. The government sites demonstrate that through the use of symbols, propaganda cartography, carefully worded text, and other iconography, representations of space and representational spaces are created that support the goals of the Slovenian state, which are placed in the context of the country’s position in the system of global capitalism.

Politics and Media Richness in World Wide Web Representations of the Former Yugoslavia

Second author with Michele Jackson

Media-Richness theory is applied to World Wide Web sites to demonstrate how Web-page designers are using hypertext markup language to shape conceptions of place and to provide competing visions of the events that have transpired in the former Yugoslavia. We argue that Web sites vary in their interactivity, strategically, to reduce equivocality surrounding conceptions of space and territory. Media-richness theory as applied here allows the development of a heuristic to understand how Web pages communicate information about geographical entities and to help shape perceptions of place.
Keywords: media-richness theory, place representation, Serbian Krajina, World Wide Web, Yugoslavia