Suchergebnisse

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPR Korea) suffered considerable upland deforestation during the 1990s, yet its consequences remain relatively unknown. This paper examines this deforestation and resulting land-use change patterns by analysis of Landsat satellite images from 1979, 1992, 2001 and 2006 in Suan County, Hwanghae Province, DPR Korea. Results show that there has been significant closed canopy forest loss and a dramatic expansion of agricultural land during this period. Most forestlands were converted to farmland during 1992 and 2001. Food shortages, along with fuelwood and timber extraction, are considered to be the main drivers of deforestation. Landscape analysis also showed that closed canopy forests have been severely fragmented and degraded. These research findings make a contribution to an insufficient body of literature on environmental issues in DPR Korea and helps to establish a baseline for monitoring land-use and land-cover changes in the country.

As World Economic Forum's definition of personal data as 'the new "oil" – a valuable resource of the 21st century' shows, large-scale data processing is increasingly considered the defining feature of contemporary economy and society. Commercial and governmental discourse on data frequently argues its benefits, and so legitimates its continuous and large-scale extraction and processing as the starting point for developments in specific industries, and potentially as the basis for societies as a whole. Against the background of the General Data Protection Regulation, this article unravels how general discourse on data covers over the social practices enabling collection of data, through the analysis of high-profile business reports and case studies of health and education sectors. We show how conceptualisation of data as having a natural basis in the everyday world protects data collection from ethical questioning while endorsing the use and free flow of data within corporate control, at the expense of its potentially negative impacts on personal autonomy and human freedom.

Abstract
This essay addresses the moral nature of corporate social media platforms through the lenses of Axel Honneth's concept of justice, according to which relations of mutual recognition must be institutionalized into spheres of social freedom to claim a just society. This perspective allows us to observe how platforms configure a symmetrically inverted form of ethical sphere, in which users are led to formulate non-autonomous desires that can only be realized socially. We characterize this as social unfreedom. A just platform ought to be the one in which rights and self-legislation capabilities enable users to have a stake in governing how these digital spaces can be designed to foster the practical realization of users' autonomous aims, the essay argues.

Despite Castells' argument about the transformative potential of digital communication technologies for developing the networks of individuals and bringing about social and political changes, critical scholars have continued to raise vigilance against the potentially detrimental consequences of such technologies in social domains. One such issue relates to their impact on (collective) identity-making. Taking as a case study the live streaming of 2016–17 candlelight and Taegukgi rallies in South Korea, this article addresses how a digital communication technology can go further than simply permitting a large-scale mobilization and can reconfigure the meaning of participation in social movements, contributing to the emergence of what we term 'polemical identity'. We argue that this polemical identity diverges from a more hopeful perspective found in Castells' account, developing instead through the new semantics of participation that result in, and are triggered by, various practices of Otherizing. This includes searching for, and claiming, one's own 'truth' as a means of bonding with the likeminded. In this process, we illuminate how the relationship between (collective) identity, digital communication technologies, social contexts and institutional power has become more complicated.