All Gloom and Global Doom? Provocations on the Future of Global Media Theory

"All Roads Lead to Putin," reads the Global News headline (Mascaro and Jalonick 2019), in reference to what is seen as Russian weaponization of social media in national elections worldwide. There is much media frenzy about China's leadership in the new global order forged by the "fourth industrial revolution"—driven by the Internet of Things (IoTs), Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain, cloud computing, and data analytics (Kuo 2019). The Atlantic writes of a dark shift in our contemporary social life as we are lured into the "gladiatorial circus" of online sociometrics, trapped in a perpetual performance for a possible global audience (Haidt and Rose-Stockwell 2019). A new kind of psychological shallowness is posited as the global personal (dis)order.