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Virtualpolitik
An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes
Elizabeth Losh
 Table of Contents and Sample Chapters
Today government agencies not only have official Web sites but also sponsor moderated chats, blogs, digital video clips, online tutorials, videogames, and virtual tours of national landmarks. Sophisticated online marketing campaigns target citizens with messages from the government—even as officials make news with digital gaffes involving embarrassing e-mails, instant messages, and videos. In Virtualpolitik, Elizabeth Losh closely examines the government's digital rhetoric in such cases and its dual role as media-maker and regulator. Looking beyond the usual focus on interfaces, operations, and procedures, Losh analyzes the ideologies revealed in government's digital discourse, its anxieties about new online practices, and what happens when officially sanctioned material is parodied, remixed, or recontextualized by users.
Losh reports on a video game that panicked the House Intelligence Committee, pedagogic and therapeutic digital products aimed at American soldiers, government Web sites in the weeks and months following 9/11, PowerPoint presentations by government officials and gadflies, e-mail as a channel for whistleblowing, digital satire of surveillance practices, national digital libraries, and computer-based training for health professionals.
Losh concludes that the government's virtualpolitik—its digital realpolitik aimed at preserving its own power—is focused on regulation, casting as criminal such common online activities as file sharing, videogame play, and social networking. This policy approach, she warns, indefinitely postpones building effective institutions for electronic governance, ignores constituents' need to shape electronic identities to suit their personal politics, and misses an opportunity to learn how citizens can have meaningful interaction with the virtual manifestations of the state.
About the Author
Elizabeth Losh is Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches courses on digital rhetoric and public communication.
| "In Virtualpolitik Elizabeth Losh achieves a long awaited upgrade of rhetoric in the digital age. Losh analyzes under-explored 9/11 material such as politicians' websites, the making of digital libraries, government PowerPoint presentations, and military-funded training videos. Virtualpolitik successfully opens up a yet unknown field of study beyond the well-known art and design examples. Her case studies illustrate that state institutions have so far failed to communicate effectively and continue to restrict the interactive potential of new media: a call to arms for civic rhetoric to counter new school propaganda style."
—Geert Lovink, Media Theorist and Net Critic
"With incisive scrutiny and careful skepticism, Losh adds a new and crucial arrow to the digital rhetorician's quiver. Governmental uses of digital media reveal official positions on digital and real life alike, positions frequently characterized by blunder, oversight, and delusion. We often hear individuals, businesses, and organizations tout the ways digital media like blogs, videogames, and online video can change culture for the better. Virtualpolitik is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the impediments to such a future."
—Ian Bogost, Associate Professor, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, The Georgia Institute of Technology, author of Persuasive Games
"From the rare perspective of a digital rhetorician, Virtualpolitik intelligently links game and internet studies, copyright law, and education to explore political discourse. Anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the role of social media in the political struggles of the past decade should read this book."
—Trebor Scholz, New School University
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