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Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Prologue -- 1. The Leisure Divide -- 2. Deviant by Design -- 3. Media Bandits -- 4. The Virtuous Poor -- 5. Slumdog Inspiration -- 6. The Poverty Laboratory -- 7. Privacy, Paucity, and Profit -- 8. Forbidden Love -- Epilogue -- Notes -- References -- Acknowledgments -- Index

"There is much excitement about Web 2.0 as an unprecedented, novel, community-building space for experiencing, producing, and consuming leisure, particularly through social network sites. What is needed is a perspective that is invested in neither a utopian or dystopian posture but sees historical continuity to this cyberleisure geography. This book investigates the digital public sphere by drawing parallels to another leisure space that shares its rhetoric of being open, democratic, and free for all: the urban park. It makes the case that the history and politics of public parks as an urban commons provides fresh insight into contemporary debates on corporatization, democratization and privatization of the digital commons. This book takes the reader on a metaphorical journey through multiple forms of public parks such as Protest Parks, Walled Gardens, Corporate Parks, Fantasy Parks, and Global Parks, addressing issues such as virtual activism, online privacy/surveillance, digital labor, branding, and globalization of digital networks. Ranging from the 19th century British factory garden to Tokyo Disneyland, this book offers numerous spatial metaphors to bring to life aspects of new media spaces. Readers looking for an interdisciplinary, historical and spatial approach to staid Web 2.0 discourses will undoubtedly benefit from this text"--

The West is suffering from 'pessimism paralysis' – a despair towards the digital. This stands against the contagion of hope towards new technologies among young people, most of whom live in the Global South and have fast come online due to increasingly cheap mobile phones and data plans. The digital, despite the risks of surveillance and control, offers these young people with the possibility of a little more freedom to find pleasure, leisure, and spaces for self-actualization. While fears and concerns around new technology are legitimate, they become critically meaningful when they fairly account for the full spectrum of human sentiment driven by diverse lived experiences. Pessimism is a privilege for those who can afford to live with despair. It is our moral imperative to hope as this collective belief can be harnessed to align the digital with global social flourishing.

This paper asks the question whether current data regulations designed to curb digital surveillance are enabling for Global South activists seeking to create systemic social change in today's data-driven societies. This text proposes five measures to answer this question and devise a decolonial pathway to improve the human condition, namely: a) Recognize the long legacy of distrust of the law among activists; b) Channel our energies more on local governance and less on (trans)national regulation; c) Shift focus from the individual to the collective rights approach; d) Attend to motivations for publicity over privacy; e) Re-frame activism from grand movements to everyday creative insurgencies. This paper starts with the premise that laws and regulations have deep political interests often rooted in neocolonial ideologies and are not necessarily designed and executed for the protection of all citizens. Laws may evoke different meanings among the world's marginalized communities, far from the sacrosanct position they hold among many in the West. This work argues for a decolonial approach—to go beyond the data-centric and individual consent framework to genuinely understand the complex relationship between surveillance, privacy, activism, and law at the peripheries in the Global South and to foster dignity for all.

This article draws parallels between the use of public leisure spaces in the city, such as parks and squares, and the use of certain forms of digital networks. Similarities between these two sorts of social contexts are worth considering, particularly their political dimension. This effort places the current conversation about social media as sites of political mobilization into dialogue with the historical analysis of public parks as spaces that, in a similar fashion, were designed for leisure and consumption but was appropriated as sites of resistance. It brings together the literature on urban parks as centers of democracy and the literature on new media spaces as portals of cyber-protest, extending the spatial history of digital politics.