Academic journal publishing: Desiderata for the digital age

The consumption of academic journals has radically changed over the past decade, explains the author. While there has been an exponential rise in published scholarship, spiralling costs for commercial journals have caused cutbacks in subscriptions to academic journals by institutional libraries and raised calls for free online access to unpublished work that scholars have produced. The rise of the Internet has facilitated a concomitant growth in online scholarship. What, asks the author, are the promises on online scholarship?

Hypercapitalism: New media, language, and social perceptions of value

Every day trillions of dollars circulate the globe in a digital data space and new forms of property and ownership emerge. Massive corporate entities with a global reach are formed and disappear with breathtaking speed, making and breaking personal fortunes the size of which defy imagination. Fictitious commodities abound. The genomes of entire nations have become corporately owned. Relationships have become the overt basis of economic wealth and political power. Hypercapitalism explores the problems of understanding this emergent form of global political economic organization by focusing on the internal relations between language, new media networks, and social perceptions of value. Taking an historical approach informed by Marx, Phil Graham draws upon writings in political economy, media studies, sociolinguistics, anthropology, and critical social science to understand the development, roots, and trajectory of the global system in which every possible aspect of human existence, including imagined futures, has become a commodity form.