Fast Capitalism
The Center under Professor Ben Agger’s direction established the successful and well-known entirely online journal, FAST CAPITALISM. Since its inception, the journal has been co-edited by Agger and Timothy W. Luke, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech in 2005. Over the past ten years, the journal has published 16 issues with one or two coming out every year. Two issues have been republished, with further editing and additional material, as successful print books. Today, the journal is edited by Luke and co-edited by David Arditi, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UTA.
Aims and Scope:
Fast Capitalism is an academic journal with a political intent. We publish reviewed scholarship and essays about the impact of rapid information and communication technologies on self, society and culture in the 21st century. We do not pretend an absolute objectivity; the work we publish is written from the vantages of viewpoint. Our authors examine how heretofore distinct social institutions, such as work and family, education and entertainment, have blurred to the point of near identity in an accelerated, post-Fordist stage of capitalism. This makes it difficult for people to shield themselves from subordination and surveillance. The working day has expanded; there is little down time anymore. People can ‘office’ anywhere, using laptops and cells to stay in touch. But these invasive technologies that tether us to capital and control can also help us resist these tendencies.
People use the Internet as a public sphere in which they express and enlighten themselves and organize others; women, especially, manage their families and nurture children from the job site and on the road, perhaps even ‘familizing’ traditionally patriarchal and bureaucratic work relations; information technologies afford connection, mitigate isolation, and even make way for social movements. We are convinced that the best way to study an accelerated media culture and its various political economies and existential meanings is dialectically, with nuance, avoiding sheer condemnation and ebullient celebration. We seek to shape these new technologies and social structures in democratic ways.