No abstract

No abstract

Privacy regulations often necessitate a balance between safeguarding consumer privacy and preventing economic losses for firms that utilize consumer data. However, little empirical evidence exists on how such laws affect firm performance. This study aims to fill that gap by quantifying the impact of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on online usage behavior over time. We analyzed data from 6,286 websites across 24 industries, covering 10 months before and 18 months after the GDPR's enactment in 2018. Employing a generalized synthetic control estimator, we isolated the short-and long-term effects of the GDPR on user behavior. Our results show that the GDPR negatively affected online usage per website on average; specifically, weekly visits decreased by 4.88% in the first 3 months and 10.02% after 18 months post-enactment. At the 18-month mark, these declines translated into average revenue losses of about $7 million for e-commerce websites and nearly $2.5 million for ad-based websites.Nonetheless, the GDPR's impact varied across website size, industry, and user origin, with some large websites and industries benefiting from the regulation. Notably, the largest 10% of websites pre-GDPR suffered less, suggesting that the GDPR has increased market concentration.

This chapter presents an extension of the scope of fictional writings that have been previously considered under the aegis of late modernism and some dialogical qualification of the historicizing framework implied by that term. A key development in recent criticism and the historical study of modernism is the steady increase in the number, complexity, and specificity of narratives about modernism’s development. Moreover, a certain historiographic ‘constructivism’ has become necessary to account for and mediate between overlapping, complementary, and somewhat contradictory histories of modernist culture with different national, linguistic, temporal, gender, and ethnic boundaries. This chapter places new emphasis on the positive role of late modernism in bridging the literary changes of mid-century, and accordingly downplay the idea of a putative ‘postmodernism’ on the other shore of a late modernist ‘transition’. It argues that late modernism embodies a paradoxically enduring mode of progress-in-ending.

In Eimi, his poetic, typographically experimental prose memoir of a 1931 trip to the Soviet Union, E. E. Cummings measured his subjective ‘I-me’ against the collectivist values and bureaucratized realities of the only existing socialist society of his time. His book overlays an allegorical Dantean descent into inferno with detailed, diary-like treatment of Cummings's encounters with various Communist Party officials, Soviet cultural intellectuals, and American political fellow-travellers and tourists. Although later in his life, Cummings would increasingly embrace a simple, binary hostility to communism, at the moment of Eimi his position is more complex with respect to the questions of communism and anti-communism. His experimental prose technique allows him a powerfully reflexive autobiographical voice that plays freely between attraction to and repulsion from his experiences in the Soviet Union. Especially focusing on his relations to other Americans in the U.S.S.R., Cummings makes his primary object of critical scrutiny not so much the Soviet system itself, as the willingness of liberal American intellectuals to embrace and make apology for that system, which openly disdained their liberal values and portended their ultimate liquidation.