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Humanitarian campaigns in social media
Abstract
Social media and social networking sites (SNS) in particular have become popular in current humanitarian campaigns. This article assesses the optimism surrounding the opportunities that SNS communication offers for humanitarian action and for the cultivation of cosmopolitan sensibilities. In order to evaluate the mediation of suffering and humanitarian causes through social media, I argue that we need to understand the architectures of social media and SNS in addition to analysing the content of the campaigns drawing on the literature on humanitarian communication. Focusing on the analysis of two humanitarian campaigns through social media, the phenomenally popular and controversial Kony 2012 campaign and WaterForward, the article observes that the architectures of SNS orientate action at a communitarian level which heightens their post-humanitarian style. However, an emerging new genre of reporting and commenting which is termed “polymedia events” can potentially extend beyond the limitations of SNS communication by opening up the space for reflexivity and dialogical imagination.
... The current paper examines this issue by applying visual framing to online humanitarian appeals. Humanitarian organisations are moving away from traditional media towards social media to spread messages about their causes (Madianou 2013). Social media platforms such as YouTube allow organisations to reach out to international audiences in a quick and direct manner. ...
... These concerns are even more important to consider as humanitarian communication gains visibility on new media platforms. Humanitarian organisations have gradually moved towards using social media as their main or sole advertising platform (Madianou 2013), making the online space an especially common place for people to be exposed to humanitarian appeals. Visual content on social media can hence contribute to the framing of humanitarian crises and the beneficiaries involved. ...
... It is the most prominent platform for online videos and is widely accessible to consumers (Gillespie 2010), making it a viable and growing space for organisations to post campaign videos for audiences across the globe. With humanitarian organisations increasingly utilising social media to spread messages about their causes (Madianou 2013), YouTube is a key platform for reaching out to audiences in an audio-visual format. Hence, we chose to analyse video campaigns run by international humanitarian organisations on YouTube. ...
The current study examines how distant outgroups are portrayed in humanitarian appeals on a popular social media platform, YouTube. Social media is a growing platform for humanitarian organisations to spread messages about crises, as they can reach a wide audience in a quick and costless manner. Drawing from theories of visual framing and intergroup relations, this study analyses how organisations frame the outgroup beneficiaries in their online donation appeals. A quantitative content analysis was conducted to explore online humanitarian donation appeals, with a focus on the visual content used to portray outgroup beneficiaries. The study sampled 187 videos from 10 prominent humanitarian organisations’ YouTube channels. Findings indicate that while humanitarian organisations have largely moved away from an explicit rhetoric of frail, dying, and suffering subjects, subtle notions of helplessness are still prevalent. The narrative that outgroup beneficiaries are passive sufferers can hence be detrimental to intergroup relations.
... Jonathan Ong (2009) has argued that media studies have witnessed 'a dramatic moralethical turn' during the past ten years. Ong cites the preoccupation with ethics and morality in the writings of Roger Silverstone (1999, 2007) from Ong himself (2015), Orgad and Seu (2014), Madianou (2013), Franks (2013), Frosh and Pinchevski (2009), Pantti (2009) and Dreher (2009Dreher ( , 2010 among others. Ong argues that the moral-ethical turn is 'a seismic shift' away from populist and relativist approaches in cultural studies, that have 'naively celebrated audiences' agency and resistance' (Ong, 2009: 450). ...
... from Ong himself (2015), Orgad and Seu (2014), Madianou (2013), Franks (2013), Frosh and Pinchevski (2009), Pantti (2009) and Dreher (2009Dreher ( , 2010 among others. Ong argues that the moral-ethical turn is 'a seismic shift' away from populist and relativist approaches in cultural studies, that have 'naively celebrated audiences' agency and resistance' (Ong, 2009: 450). ...
... The film campaigned to capture Joseph Kony, a Ugandan militia leader and indicted war criminal guerilla and to end recruitment of child soldiers in Uganda. The film was released online in March 2012 and it became the fastest spreading internet video accessed more that 100 million times within six days (Engelhardt and Jansz, 2014;Maasilta and Haavisto, 2014;Madianou, 2013). The Ice Bucket challenge aimed at raising awareness and donations for research of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) by challenging people to pour a bucket of ice and water over their heads, post a video of it on social media and challenge their friends to do the same. ...
The book investigates emerging forms of media solidarities in the digital era. The concept of solidarity has gained new due to globalization, individualization and the weakening of the welfare states that have made both the need and acts of solidarity more visible than before. With rich combination of social and political theory the book offers coherent understanding and definition of media solidarities with wide range of international case studies from news media to reality television; from social documentaries to social meidactivism. With particular focus on emotions and affect it offers nuanced view to understand and critically analyse the representation, participation and production of contemporary solidarities and their political implications.
... Although they partly confirm Chouliaraki's suggestion of an ironic spectator, they also found that the posthumanitarian narrative of the video "has been successful in creating a sense of personal moral responsibility" (von Engelhardt and Jansz 2014, 481). Madianou (2013) has also looked into strategies of humanitarian campaigns in social media. Although her work focused on the production site of postbroadcast media, she demonstrates the possibilities and affordances of social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter, in reaching out to an audience. ...
... The focus of von Engelhardt and Jansz's (2014) research as well as that of Madianou (2013) was mainly on the (post)humanitarian potential of online media. An important difference between focusing on humanitarian media rather than on news media is that a humanitarian message inherently appeals to people's morality due to their particular production context and specific objectives. ...
... Geographical and thereby physical space cannot be decreased in the case of mediated events, but social distance (see also Fujita et al. 2006;Huiberts and Joye 2015) could if people experience themselves living in a shared online community, namely, Facebook. It is possible for those who live far away to directly reach out to a distant audience without going through traditional gatekeepers such as professional journalists or traditional media (see also Madianou 2013). As all involved groups, the sufferer and the spectator, share the same online community and are able to directly communicate with one another, could this decrease the perceived distance between them? ...
In a postbroadcast society with both online and offline news media widely available, there are many ways for an audience to (actively) consume news about distant suffering. This focus group study looks into the combined use of broadcast media (television) and a postbroadcast platform (Facebook) for watching disaster news. It is considered that the interactive possibilities offered online to watch and experience the news, combined with watching news on television, could possibly help in fostering a closer relation between a Western audience and the distant suffering. Informed by concepts from social and moral psychology, the findings show not only that personal narratives on social media have the potential to incite a more personal connection between the audience and the distant sufferer but also that this potential was not to be overestimated.
... The reporting on international disasters both by humanitarian organizations (Chouliaraki 2010;Cottle & Nolan 2007;Franks, 2013;Nair 2012;Nikunen 2015;Madianou 2013;Pantti 2015) as well as news media (Cottle 2014;Ekström 2012;Hanusch 2012;Houston et al., 2012; Joye 2010) has been a point of heavy academic interest. ...
... Her conclusion is that social media on their own may not be reaching their full potential but she does suggest that 'polymedia' events, events that are covered by multiple media-platforms on broadcast and post-broadcast media, can 'potentially play a role in cultivating cosmopolitan sensibilities by inviting audiences to make sense of the decentralized narratives that unfold in the polymedia environment' (Madianou, 2013: 264). Research on humanitarian communication is often embedded in or deepened by what Chouliaraki (2013) has called 'the age of posthumanitarianism' (see also Brockington, 2014;Madianou, 2013;Scott, 2014bScott, , 2015 which refers to the 'marketization of humanitarian practice' (Chouliaraki, 2013 p. 6). It is a form of humanitarianism that is oriented to the Western spectator rather than to the distant victim. ...
... In addition, there is a strong post-humanitarian narrative visible, especially in later textual analyses which emphasize a narcissistic audience more interested in their own emotional responses than in the victims depicted by the media (cf. Chouliaraki, 2013;Madianou, 2013;Nikunen, 2015). Such a normative point of view may influence expectations about the way that the audience relates with distant suffering, especially when a cosmopolitan ideal is kept in mind. ...
... Vis and Goriunova (2015) found that as the image became viral, the terminology shifted from talking about migrants to talking about refugees; from talking about 'dead children' to talking about a named person, Aylan Kurdi; from talking about security to talking about policy change to allow for refugees to come in. The virality and the cross-media circulation of the photograph, which dominated social media, as reported by Vis and Goriunova (2015), but which also made it in the front page of dozens of mainstream newspapers across Europe, can be understood as part of a 'polymedia' event (Madianou, 2013). Madianou (2013) defines polymedia events as media-based events that trigger reactions across all media platforms. ...
... The virality and the cross-media circulation of the photograph, which dominated social media, as reported by Vis and Goriunova (2015), but which also made it in the front page of dozens of mainstream newspapers across Europe, can be understood as part of a 'polymedia' event (Madianou, 2013). Madianou (2013) defines polymedia events as media-based events that trigger reactions across all media platforms. Such events tend to be 'unplanned, transnational and decentralized in the sense that there is no shared official or central narrative; polymedia events are marked by parallel or clashing narratives' (Madianou, 2013: 261). ...
This article focuses on the discourses in support of refugees as developed in Greece by local grassroots groups. The article theorises the public debate of the refugee issue as taking place in a hybrid media system, in which elites and policy makers, mainstream media, large non-governmental organisations and smaller solidarity groups as well as everyday people participate in unequal ways in constructing this debate and its parameters. In focusing on the solidarity discourses emerging from the grassroots, this article hopes to show how these groups seek to re-politicise the question of refugees, directly countering the (post)humanitarian and charity discourses of non-governmental organisations as well as the racist and security frames found in the mass media and policy discourses. In focusing on Greece, this article shows how two crises, the refugee and austerity crises – both symptoms of an underlying deep structural crisis of capitalism – may be dealt with in ways that overcome dilemmas of belongingness and otherness. In empirically supporting such arguments, the article posits the issue of solidarity to refugees as a research question: what kinds of solidarity do refugee support groups in Greece mobilise? This is addressed through focusing on the Facebook pages of 12 local solidarity initiatives. The analysis concludes that their alternative discourse is not based on spectacle and pity, nor on irony, but on togetherness and solidarity. This solidarity takes three forms, human, social and class solidarity, all feeding into the creation of a political project revolving around ideas of autonomy and self-organisation, freedom, equality and justice.
... For advocacy groups attempting to influence media discourse, the changing news ecology provided both opportunities and challenges (Madianou, 2013). New information communication technology tools -in particular those of the read-write Web 2.0 -provided unique opportunities to engage audiences and explore digital protest repertoires (Garrett, 2006). ...
... New information communication technology tools -in particular those of the read-write Web 2.0 -provided unique opportunities to engage audiences and explore digital protest repertoires (Garrett, 2006). For instance, new capabilities included the use of user-generated content to engage audiences beyond mainstream media (Hänska-Ahy and Shapour, 2013), online petitions to rapidly demonstrate support for causes (Strange, 2011), crowd-sourcing to raise funds and expand human resource capacity (Madianou, 2013), and 'hacktivist' approaches, such as distributed denial of service attacks (Sauter, 2014). ...
In 1996, highly active antiretrovirals (ARVs) were released to the public, radically altering the health prospects of people living with HIV and AIDS. In the two decades since, ARVs have become the subject of intense political debate and social justice mobilization. In particular, ARV intellectual property patent protections have become a high-profile trade and diplomacy issue, while major philanthropic organizations have entered the fray to support large-scale treatment programs. This article maps 21 years of HIV/AIDS medicines coverage in mainstream newspapers to illustrate these developments and contestations. It demonstrates two main processes: first, where civil society mobilization successfully promoted ARVs onto the media and policy agenda, and second, where issue fragmentation and a changing political and media context saw ARVs dramatically exit the news coverage, despite the continuing catastrophic scale of the global HIV/AIDS medicines crisis.
... As a burgeoning genre of reporting and commentary, social media and social networking sites (SNS) have become central to modern humanitarianism, enabling bidirectional communication between agencies and their audiences (Madianou, 2013). Authors have assessed the opportunities of SNS communication for humanitarian action, including the mediation of suffering. ...
This article examines the intersection of humour and humanitarianism in engaging Northern audiences with global Southern poverty issues. It analyses witty social media campaigns that critique humanitarian practices and Africa’s representation, notably What’s Up Africa (WUA) on YouTube, Radi‐Aid on YouTube, Humanitarians of Tinder on Tumblr and Barbie Savior on Instagram. Using ‘contraflow’, it shows how humour and positionality shape reception. WUA’s Black African‐centric comedy, particualrly, highlights the often‐underexplored role of race in development discourse, challenging the White institutional core of humanitarianism. These insights reveal power dynamics and invite further academic inquiry into the transformative potential of comedic humanitarian critique.
... This approach becomes more favourable in the third world sector impacted by technology exposed in all over the world. Also, public highly been educated on the humanitarian issues through social media (Madianou, 2013) and trust could be developed from this interaction (Saxton & Wang, 2014). Informal approach to disseminate information to funder is fragile without any written documentation prepared, however, trust still can be developed with close interaction between NGO and funder. ...
The informal approach and non-governmental organization (NGO) becomes synonym words nowadays due to the information disseminated by this organization aligns with the growing of technology in connecting people all over the world through social network. Informal approach such as face to face interaction and communication through virtual between individual or group of people enables to attract the heart of funder in transferring fund to the NGO. Formal approach is a well-known approach in disseminating information to the third party, however, for this third world sector, the informal approach becomes more popular and trust has been developed in this style of communication. Thus, this study proposed to investigate the practices use by the NGO in disseminating information to its funder and to understand the chosen practices by the NGO in raising fund. Qualitative research method will be applied in realizing this study. Data will be collected by using semi-structured interview with NGO’s employees, funders, and beneficiaries. Also, this study will be conducting observation on the event managed by this NGO and documentary analysis on the written documentation will be scrutinized. The underlying theory for this study is social capital theory whereby this theory portrays the elements of norms, information, and trust among related parties involved. The finding of this study will discover the connection between three elements from the theory with fund transferred by funders. Abstrak Pendekatan informal dan organisasi bukan kerajaan (NGO) menjadi sinonim kata-kata pada masa kini disebabkan oleh maklumat yang disebarkan oleh organisasi ini sejajar dengan peningkatan teknologi dalam menghubungkan orang-orang di seluruh dunia melalui rangkaian sosial. Pendekatan yang tidak formal seperti interaksi bersemuka dan komunikasi melalui alam maya antara individu atau kumpulan orang membolehkan untuk menarik hati dana untuk memindahkan dana kepada NGO. Pendekatan formal adalah pendekatan yang terbaik dalam menyebarkan maklumat kepada pihak ketiga, lantaran, untuk sektor dunia ketiga ini, pendekatan informal menjadi lebih popular dan kepercayaan telah dikembangkan dalam gaya komunikasi ini. Oleh itu, kajian ini mencadangkan untuk mendalami amalan yang digunakan oleh NGO dalam menyebarkan maklumat kepada penanggung dana dan memahami amalan yang dipilih oleh NGO dalam meningkatkan dana. Kaedah penyelidikan kualitatif akan digunakan untuk merealisasikan kajian ini. Data akan dikumpulkan dengan menggunakan kaedah wawancara separa berstruktur dengan pekerja NGO, pembiaya, dan penerima manfaat. Selain itu, kajian ini akan menjalankan pemerhatian terhadap acara yang diuruskan oleh NGO ini dan analisis dokumentari mengenai dokumentasi bertulis akan diteliti. Teori asas untuk kajian ini adalah teori modal sosial yakni teori ini menggambarkan unsur-unsur norma, maklumat, dan kepercayaan di antara pihak-pihak yang terlibat. Penemuan kajian ini akan menemui hubungan antara tiga elemen dari teori dengan dana yang dipindahkan oleh dana.
... Thus, many self-employed photojournalists utilize social media to promote their work and build their own audiences (Good and Lowe 2020: 66;Hadland et al. 2015: 43). Similarly, for example, non-governmental organizations use social media to communicate their aims to wider audiences and bypass journalistic media in targeting relevant stakeholders (Madianou 2013;Powers 2018: 10). Reaching wide audiences is not easy, however, and individuals and organizations in social media compete for the same attention as media organizations. ...
This article aims to pull together some of the recent trajectories that have affected the work of photojournalism professionals. It is argued that the hybrid media environment is yet another turning point of the revolutionary changes caused by the digitalization during the past three decades. Since the late 1980s the digitalization has enabled photojournalism much more than the transition of photo editing and cameras from analogue to digital technology. Digitalization has, for example, facilitated the work in numerous ways and enabled images to travel in multiple speed in comparison to analogue times. During the recent years, traditional media organizations have witnessed diminishing revenues of and cut downs of photography departments worldwide. Most of the news photographers of today are self-employed, and despite the growing importance of the visuals in society, they need to expand their reach from journalism to other fields such as commercial photography, public relations, corporate communications, artistic projects and NGO work to earn a living. This leads to blurring of boundaries between journalism and other fields and to diffusion of professional values and ethics.
... Future research should consider direct measurements about specific projects; for example, publicity efforts from the hosting organizations on social media platforms. Social media campaigns could function as a more proactive communication strategy to increase issue salience and to solicit more contributions (Madianou, 2013). Finally, QCA only allows limited variables in the analysis due to the complex relationships it may unpack. ...
Crowdsourcing social innovation refers to utilization of crowdsourcing to solve social issues. It faces two organizational communication challenges to attract contributions: the public’s short attention span and concerns about a project’s feasibility. Guided by configurational thinking, we combine agenda setting theory and signaling theory to explore how combinations of four factors—media coverage, project duration, number of partners, and cross-sectoral partnership—can complement or substitute for one another to explain high and low crowd contributions solicited. With 53 cases from Openideo.com, we employ a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify two pathways to high contributions and two pathways resulting in low contributions. Implications on how organizations may design their crowdsourcing projects to attract more contributions are provided.
... It is thus often not so much a creative alteration of the profile picture, but rather the placing of one's profile picture into a frame, literally inserting the self into the event. interviewees' experiences of togetherness and their social positioning in the eventspheres (see Madianou, 2013;Milan, 2015b). For instance, for Shevan (28), who describes himself as an LGBT+ activist (and LGBT+ refugee, as mentioned in Section 4.3.2), ...
Liveness is a key concern in media studies, yet has been mostly theorized as a phenomenon related to broadcasting and is understudied for the Internet and social media. This study is an appeal for preserving liveness as a concept that continuously evolves as new media technologies emerge. The thesis challenges media theory’s conceptualization of liveness as mediated presence to an unfolding reality that exists in and of itself. It asserts that this is not only an outdated understanding, but one that impedes comprehending what “truly being there live” means. Empirical observations and analysis reveal the constructive role live media practices play in realizing live instances. Live instances, this study suggests, are realized when event-joiners align their physical event environment and the various mediated contexts in which they are continuously involved as users of smartphones, social media, TV, and direct messaging apps. It is through their live media practices that they constitute their sense of “being there live” as “being now here together,” in relation to distant times, places, and others. By investigating how live instances are situated in both physical and mediated contexts, this study contributes to and shows valuable directions for future academic research. It also offers tools that can be used for innovating the design of future media and cultural events.
... For example, scholars have derived critical information from UGC for social science research, such as flu trends prediction, crime detection, and social sensing and economics [28]- [32]. Other works have focused on applications of UGC in the field of natural disasters, such as disaster reduction, emergency response, and humanitarian aid [33]- [38]. The geographic information is commonly associated with most instances of UGC and remotely sensed data. ...
This study presents a new scheme to extract impervious surface area from synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) images exploiting auxiliary user-generated content (UGC). The presented scheme includes the automatic generation of training samples based on the combination of UGC and SAR data, and SAR data pre-processing, leading to impervious surface area classification through a clustering-based one-class support vector machine approach. Two areas, namely, the cities of Beijing and Taipei, have been analyzed using the Sentinel-1 SAR data to test and validate the proposed methodology. Experimental results show that the presented scheme improves the automatic selection of impervious surface training samples. Moreover, this scheme achieves a comparable classification performance to traditional methods without requiring time-consuming training point manual extraction. Results in this study will help to promote the application of UGC for urban remote sensing data interpretation.
... Indeed, the first emergence of the 'mass media' was seen by many as leading towards the creation of a 'global village' (McLuhan 1964), inspiring a mutual sense of belonging that goes beyond the national (Skrbis and Woodward 2013) invoking 'a moral sensibility or concern for remote strangers from different continents, cultures and societies' (Hoijer 2004: 514). The arrival of a new media environment provides an intriguing potential for cross-national communication, grass-roots activism and polymedia 'events' to (re)connect the world (Madianou 2013), bringing identification and a sense of responsibility for distant others (e.g. Silverstone 2007), by normalizing difference (Nava 2007: 13), creating a global 'civil society' (Kaldor 2003), through journalists embedding cosmopolitanism within professional values (e.g. ...
How can a cosmopolitan message about refugees be communicated in an international political context characterized by growing hostility to outsiders at the national level? This article provides a detailed analysis of a specific World Refugee Day campaign based on extensive access to internal data from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and interviews with key informants alongside case studies of the campaign in two European countries: the United Kingdom (UK) and Bulgaria. While internal UNHCR assessment suggested successful meeting of pre-set targets, a series of issues around the implementation of message framing and the potential for this to generate action are identified. The article applies ideas about the communication of distant suffering to explore how World Refugee Day campaigns operate as interventions into global public discourse. The analysis of the campaign framing finds that it maximized space for solidaristic understanding of the refugee issue and reflexivity. However, the article argues that the communication of these ideas is impacted by the practical and organizational challenges (and opportunities) of developing a professional communication strategy in the context of a rapidly changing media and political environment.
... Discourse encompasses textual acts in the broadest sense and as inherently connected to power (following Chouliaraki 2006, andVestergaard 2008; see also Chouliaraki & Vestergaard forthcoming). The discourse dimension in our framework enables researchers to pay attention to aspects of civic engagement such as campaigns and interactions in social media platforms (Madianou 2013), while also acknowledging their constitutive and performative power which stresses ethics. From this vantage point, discourses condition our understanding of the world, and thus importantly also our possibilities to act in that world. ...
... Much research has also been done in this direction with the recent focus on social media and cosmopolitanism in the aspect of social activism. For instance, Madianou's (2013) work aims to examine humanitarian campaigns in social media, and Sobré-Denton's (2016) study emphasizes the role of social media in shaping virtual cosmopolitanism and facilitating social justice movements. Some scholars have turned to the smaller scope, focusing on the aspect of literacies and learning. ...
This dissertation lies at the intersection of social sciences and humanities. It aims to examine digital rhetoric of cosmopolitanism of people from a marginalized culture as situated in the context of a transnational experience. I view that this rhetoric encompasses digital practices of cosmopolitanism or cosmopolitan repertoire, a set of skills or strategies used in communication via social media in everyday life. I also argue that this rhetoric is connected to other elements in its broader social and cultural networks. To illustrate these ideas, a case study of Thai students at Michigan Technological University in the United States is conducted to investigate their digital practices as they engage with the Other on social media. The final goal of the study is to identify the strategies of digital practices that might be used to negotiate or resist power embedded in the digital environment. To reach this goal, this study proposes using the interdisciplinary approach as the methodology. The methodological framework of this project is designed by consolidating various perspectives from new cosmopolitanism and digital rhetoric with a postmodernist lens as a background. The highlight of this framework is an application of the cosmopolitan ontological framework and the ecological perspective to study digital practices on social media in the context of participants. Within this framework, several qualitative methods are employed for data collection and analysis, namely interviews, participant observations, online observations, and rhetorical analysis. Overall, digital technologies like social media play an important role in establishing and maintaining relationships with people from other cultures. In this context, participants perform their cosmopolitanism in various types of cosmopolitan relationships by relying on a number of digital practices. These practices can be synthesized to form a cosmopolitan repertoire comprising digital literacy skills, multimodal communication skills, language skills, critical thinking skills, rhetoric, and ethics. The rhetorical analysis reveals that participants’ digital practices of cosmopolitanism are influenced by power embedded in some perceived factors in their ecological boundaries. Participants also rest on cosmopolitan repertoire in their negotiation of power. In its contributions, apart from some theoretical and pedagogical implications, this project also helps to shape the idea of digital rhetoric of cosmopolitanism by proposing a definition and a model to explain its ontological dimension. These contributions can lead to more understanding of digital rhetoric of cosmopolitanism and call for further study in this scholarship in the future.
... This chapter provides a framework for understanding how the use of social media intersects with the practice of human rights advocacy at NGOs. This framework is not to deny the disruptive possibility of human rights advocacy conducted over social media, but rather to ground related techno-optimism in the broad and complex terrain that influences this potential (Youmans and York, 2012;Madianou, 2013). Social media liberates advocacy by disrupting its traditional pathway to visibility -at least, this is the largely untested idea that has fueled a spate of experimentation and innovation among those practicing human rights (Thrall, Stecula and Sweet, 2014). ...
Pre-print version of: McPherson, E. 2017 ‘Social Media and Human Rights Advocacy’ in Tumber, H. and Waisbord, S. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights. London, UK: Routledge, pp. 279–88. The rise of social media has seen its concomitant celebration as a ‘liberation technology,’ namely a technology that supports social, political, and economic freedoms (Diamond, 2010). This chapter provides a framework for understanding how the use of social media intersects with the practice of human rights advocacy at NGOs. This framework is not to deny the disruptive possibility of human rights advocacy conducted over social media, but rather to ground related techno-optimism in the broad and complex terrain that influences this potential (Youmans and York, 2012; Madianou, 2013). This chapter begins by arguing that the view that social media liberates advocacy by creating new pathways to visibility rests on an incomplete conception of visibility, one which focuses on the production of communication and overlooks the corresponding transmission and reception of that communication necessary for visibility to take place (Hindman, 2010). The visibility of human rights advocacy can be understood as depending on the logics of the social media field, the target audience fields, and the political field(s) across and within which human rights communication takes place. This chapter overviews this field theory approach to communication before outlining in broad strokes what we know about each of these logics. Equally important, however, is what we don’t know. For different reasons, each of these logics is somewhat inscrutable – that of the social media field because of its novelty, mutability, and proprietary secrecy; those of target audience fields because social media advocacy effects are both hard to isolate and under-researched; and those of political fields because surveillance tactics are often covert. All of this inscrutability creates risk, and risk, as we shall see, is anathema to visibility. One of the benefits of the field approach is its concern with inequality (Bourdieu, 1993). As an actor’s ability to mitigate risk corresponds to his or her resources, it may be that – instead of being a leveler – social media advocacy is exacerbating inequalities of visibility within the human rights field (Beck, 1992; Mejias, 2012; Thrall, Stecula and Sweet, 2014). The chapter concludes by sketching a research agenda for the use of social media in human rights work.
... It has been theorized that online social media such as Facebook can enable a more cosmopolitan or global environment which could bring the suffering closer to home. Madianou (2013) evaluated the potential of humanitarian campaigns to effectively work via social network sites but points toward a communitarian, rather than cosmopolitan online social environment. Scott (2015a) too cautioned for too optimistic views about social network sites of other online possibilities to enhance a more cosmopolitan environment. ...
A growing number of scholars have empirically engaged with audience reactions toward mediated distant suffering, albeit mainly on a small, qualitative scale. By conducting quantitative research, this study contributes to the knowledge about people's reactions toward distant suffering on a greater scale, representative of a Western audience. Following a critical realist approach, a survey was developed and several independent constructs were found by doing an exploratory factor analysis which represents people's engagement with distant suffering. We also found four clusters based on a k-means cluster analysis that portrays typical ways of responding to distant suffering. These clusters have been controlled for people's background, indicators of age, gender, education and people's donation behavior, media use, and news interests.
... 10 However, work on the architecture of social networking sites that address humanitarian campaigns has previously neglected to address who the architects are and the implicit ideology of their design. 11 I apply these fundamental questions to the social networking site Facebook as the starting point of this chapter. ...
... Det er denne fremskaffelsen av medlidenhet som produserer narsissismen blant vestlige, og hun hevder således at medlidenhet må kombineres med refleksjon over hvorfor denne lidelsen av "den andre" er viktig og hva vi kan gjøre med det (2006, s. 13). En kosmopolitisme er derfor en form for demokratisering av ansvar, i den forstand at omsorg for andre blir en større del av menneskers hverdag (Madianou, 2012). Det er nødvendig å se på hvordan frivillighet og deltakelse i uformelle kontekster, i hverdagslivet, kan drive frem en kosmopolitisk solidaritet ved å bygge opp følelser av samhørighet og kollektivt ansvar (Pantti, 2015). ...
full thesis: https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/handle/11250/2412167
... While the social media campaign expands to various sites and contexts through participants' profiles and commentaries, the book offers a more fixed view of the same theme. The concurrent publicity of the campaign on various platforms and media outlets provided the campaign with a polymedia (Madianou, 2013) dimension: The stories are discussed and debated on various platforms, with transnational and decentralized dimensions, and expand beyond bounded publics. ...
This article examines the social media campaign “Once I was a refugee” by former refugees as a response to the increasingly hostile political climate in Finland against refugees. With selfie activism, the campaign expanded the “space of appearance” and introduced new voice and visuality to the public debate. The case depicts politics of claiming citizenship and social value through self-presentation to counter views of refugees as economic burden, noncitizens, and surplus humanity. The empirical material is based on analysis of the Facebook and Twitter campaign and interviews with the participants. It is argued that selfie activism may occasionally, through new voice and visibility, expand the space of appearance and contribute to the rise of affective or counter-publics that can come together and make use of digital media for political action. However, the case also reveals how difficult it is to speak from a refugee position without being drawn into the discourse of deservingness.
... That introductory sign is echoed by the advice that a CNN presenter gives before showing a part of it; it describes the intensity of human suffering represented in the almost 5 minute-long video: "Fair warning this is not an act, it is graphic and it is real!" and then she shows only a fragment of that all too realistic reconstruction of the gruesome procedure inflicted upon a hundred prisoners. 22 This other example of a web-based campaign puts into perspective Madianou's (2013) critical remarks about two videos, one of which is Kony 2012, in which "suffering is surprisingly under-represented" (258). The causal link proposed by the critic between not showing enough suffering and the criticized "communitarian narcissism" of those who watched and/or participated in IC's campaign seems rather tenuous. ...
Is it possible or plausible to represent horror and evil persuasively or authentically in these internet-multi-distributed times? And how can we account for a vast, belligerent reaction of public opinion when the representation of horror or evil is watched by an unprecedented, massive amount of people in North America and elsewhere in the YouTube realm? The unparalleled audience success of an unusually lengthy audiovisual narrative uploaded on YouTube whose subject matter is the quest for justice in East Africa was as remarkable as the diverse audience response of dismay, hope, joy and anger it elicited. The reaction was expressed in traditional print media (e.g. a special issue of The New York Times), in countless blogs and in YouTube – through assorted video-responses and written remarks, many of which were so disparaging that this function was disabled for the Kony 2012 video on YouTube. To try to account for the outpour of supportive viewers and of an increasingly negative response, I analyse its visual rhetoric and also some the critical remarks it triggered. The main strategy of the video consists in what I have described elsewhere as the “index appeal” of popular factuality programming (reality shows, docudramas, talk shows and documentaries), namely, the prevalence of allegedly involuntary signs aimed at producing intense emotions in viewers. Peirce’s semiotic theory of indexicality – as well as of iconic and of symbolic signs – is central to my analytical approach, as well as his critique of dualism. I also revisit a 1948 paper of two seminal figures in the pantheon of communication theory, P. Lazarsfeld and R. Merton. Their functionalist analysis of media effects posits a peculiar “narcotizing dysfunction” to account for the apathy produced in the audience despite the increasing intake of media information by the population. This paradoxical media effect posited by early functionalism, I think, is akin to what is harshly criticized over sixty years later about the significant impact produced by the Kony 2012 video on its vast public. Through the case study of a visual media narrative that gathered an audience as large as a populous nation in less than a week, and an equally impressive array of biting critical views in both traditional and new media, the article aims to account for its remarkable success and its ulterior proclaimed failure as a humanitarian campaign in the streets. I will do so by revisiting the early functionalist critique of mass media effects within the analytical framework of the action of indexical-iconic signs in the age of YouTube.
... Moreover, a new genre of reporting is emerging, polymedia events, understood as events that start in the media and unfold in other media platforms. Such events are transnational in nature, and are large in scale and audience reach (Madianou and Miller 2013;Madianou 2013). ...
One of the most controversial topics in the Romanian media over the past few years is the country’s image. Soon after the fall of communism in 1989, this issue became part of the public debate about the international perception of Romanian people, about the ways in which Romania is depicted in the international press, or about the country’s position in the process of Europeanization. The theme of Romanians migrating to other countries is also connected to the debate on nation branding, in relation to the ways in which the migrants’ actions influence the country image – a key element of the ”symbolic capital” of the nation (Beciu 2012).
In fact, the topic of labor migration to the EU (“the new diaspora”) is constantly approached by the media, sometimes involving intense mediatisation, depending on social and political contexts such as the freedom of movement to work in the EU. A special case is that of Romanian people migrating to the UK, a theme which generated debates in both the British and the Romanian media.
In this context, this chapter focuses on analyzing the role of Romanian journalists in the problematization of Romania’s country image and migration issues. Why did the journalists started to initiate media campaigns as a response to the ‘anti-immigration’ discourses from the British tabloid press? Do they fight against the stereotypes about Romanians employed in the British newspapers? How do the journalists refer to Romania’s national image?
... In media studies, cosmopolitanism has predominately been understood as a moral will to act upon injustices and suffering in the less privileged areas of the globe -a willingness that can potentially be triggered by various mediated appeals (Chouliaraki 2013;Joye 2009;Madianou 2013;Scott 2013). While this body of research addresses a topical issue -the moral force of the media in the age of globalisation -it stops short of considering cosmopolitanism as included in, and affected by, processes sustaining power relations between groups, or classes, within a society. ...
Various media allow people to build transnational networks, learn about the world and meet people from other cultures. In other words, media may allow one to cultivate cosmopolitan capital, defined here as a distinct form of embodied cultural capital. However, far from everyone is identifying this potential. Analyses of a national survey and in-depth interviews, conducted in Sweden, disclose a tendency among those in possession of cultural capital to recognise and exploit cosmopolitan capital in their media practices. Those who are dispossessed of cultural capital are significantly less liable to approach media in this way. Relying on various media practices in order to reshape one’s cultural capital exemplifies what Bourdieu called a reconversion strategy. As social fields undergo globalisation, media offer opportunities for the privileged to remain privileged – to change in order to conserve.
... The capacity of photography to summon forth moral publics is thereby called into question, with other scholars, such as Hariman and Lucaites (2016), contending that its 'radical plurality' is too often contained within aesthetically appropriate moralisation strategies (see also Hesford, 2011;Madianou, 2012). Orgad's (2015) research suggests the 'contemporary market-driven, competitive, mediated environment, and the immense pressure on and scrutiny of NGOs internally' and externally, impels them to 'stress in their communications reassurance, comfort, and sustenance rather than disruption of the existing social order'. ...
This article examines the diverse factors shaping the involvement of non-governmental organisation (NGO) with humanitarian photography, paying particular attention to co-operative relationships with photojournalists intended to facilitate the generation of visual coverage of crises otherwise marginalised, or ignored altogether, in mainstream news media. The analysis is primarily based on a case study drawing upon 26 semi-structured interviews with NGO personnel (International Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement, Oxfam and Save the Children) and photojournalists conducted over 2014–2016, securing original insights into the epistemic terms upon which NGOs have sought to produce, frame and distribute imagery from recurrently disregarded crisis zones. In this way, the article pinpoints how the uses of digital imagery being negotiated by NGOs elucidate the changing, stratified geopolitics of visibility demarcating the visual boundaries of newsworthiness.
... Of course, low-cost/risk repertoires have their limitations. Social media campaigns such as KONY2012 are arguably geared more towards kick- starting a wider debate than achieving activism goals on their own (Madianou, 2013). E-petitions, on the other hand, generally work best when targeting an achievable goal and have a particular audience in mind. ...
There is a strong need to understand the changing dynamics of contemporary youth participation: how they engage, what repertoires are considered efficacious, and their motivations to get involved. This book uses the 2010/11 UK student protests against fees and cuts as a case study for analysing some of the key paths and barriers to political participation today. These paths and barriers – which include an individual's family socialisation, network positioning, and group identification (and dis-identification) – help us explain why some people convert their political sympathies and interests into action, and why others do not. Drawing on an original survey dataset of students, the book shows how and why students responded in the way that they did, whether by occupying buildings, joining marches, signing petitions, or not participating at all. Considering this in the context of other student movements across the globe, the book's combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, and its theoretical contribution provide a more holistic picture of student protest than is found in existing publications on activism. " A fascinating and important book which makes a number of very significant contributions to our understanding of student politics. Hensby offers a rigorous analysis and discussion of data gathered through extensive and thorough empirical work. A must-read for anybody working in this area. " – Nick Crossley, Professor, Sociology and Mitchell Centre for Social Network Analysis, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester " This well-researched, engaging and readable account of the 2010-11 student protests in Britain is an important addition to social movement literature. Hensby highlights the varied pathways to participation but also analyses why people opt not to get involved even though they are sympathetic to the cause. It is theoretically and empirically rich and will appeal to academics and activists alike. " – Hugo Gorringe, Senior Lecturer, Sociology, Edinburgh University " Student activism has a long, rich history. Hensby's excellent book places the 2010/11 UK student movement against increased fees and austerity within this cultural history. His engaging use of student surveys and interview data shows that pathways to activism are enhanced in the digital age. Costs of activism remain high but, importantly, supportive non-participants are also a core group in mobilisation success. " – Ariadne Vromen, Professor, University of Sydney " Hensby's Participation and Non-Participation is a terrific addition to the present literature on protest movements, student activism, and modern British society and culture. Carefully researched, convincingly presented, and written with great clarity and authority, it provides an intelligent assessment of the forces that inspire student civic engagement. This is a book for scholars and students alike. " – Michael Holm, Lecturer of Social Sciences, Boston University 30% off with code FEB1730
This paper engages theoretical principles from critical human geography, media and communication studies, and development literature to present a research trajectory that unpacks the influence of digital platforms in representing and mediating distant suffering. Critiques of aid and development communication have long focused on concerns around the representation of the Global South as an ‘Othered’ space; powerful and deeply problematic geographical imaginaries become embedded within contemporary dominant discourses of aid and development. As significant sources of aid and development imaginaries, how civil society has mediated distant suffering has been subject to much critique. However, the rapid transition towards engagement with digital platforms necessitates an extension of critical considerations about representation and mediation. For example: what impact do digital platforms, their knowledge politics and representational capabilities have on imaginaries of distant suffering? Digital platforms (such as websites and other social media platforms) are situated within and constituted by (and through) a ‘digital knowledge politics’. These platforms and their mediations still exist within broader social practices and processes, and therefore remain entrenched within the power relations between Global North and Global South. This poses significant questions regarding the role digital platforms (and their representational capabilities) play in producing and mediating representations of distant strangers and their places. Moreover, further gaps within existing research emerge regarding how digital platforms can inform how (and indeed if) the public respond to such discourses. Through identifying key interdisciplinary intersections between critical human geographies and media and communication studies, this paper considers research trajectories that extend critical examinations of the role that digital platforms play in producing and representing aid and development imaginaries.
What are audiences supposed to feel in relation to the reporting of global crises? How are they supposed to act in response to it? These are the ethical questions posed by the media coverage of crises addressed in this chapter. These questions are underlined by two normative assumptions. The first has to do with the assumption that cosmopolitan empathy is the outcome of news of disasters. The second has to do with the expectation of a global public that will act to alleviate the suffering witnessed. The chapter argues that these assumptions are interlinked but not necessarily overlapping. After considering the ethical questions posed by the reporting of contemporary global crises, the chapter reflects on future directions of research on the audiences of cross-border journalism.
In recent years, cause-related marketing (CRM) campaigns have been increasing, due mainly to the awareness of companies and NGOs regarding social problems and the use of digital social networks as communication tools. In this context, the main objective for this case is to analyze the CRM campaigns carried out on Facebook by Menudos Corazones Foundation (Little Hearts Foundation, in English) in collaboration with the companies Ikea, Citroën, and Cortefiel to find out the importance that both, the Foundation and the companies, attach to those CRM campaigns. For this, content analysis, from a qualitative and quantitative approach, and data mining techniques have been used. The results show that both companies and Menudos Corazones do not take advantage of Facebook’s potential as a communication tool. There must be a connection between online and offline activities since those with the most significant impact require the public’s participation. Celebrities can also be a resource that increases the impact of campaigns.
This paper provides insights into Islamic Humanitarianism in Malaysia with the aim of analyzing the impact of Global Peace Mission Malaysia (GPM) as Islamic Humanitarian actor in providing diverse forms of aid. By using qualitative approaches of journal articles and official reports from media and websites, this paper therefore is aimed to address the first theme of this conference. It begins with definitions of Islamic Humanitarian concept with focus on the three types of humanitarian approaches in the form charity which comprises of zakat, sadaqah and waqf. Then, if offers a brief overview in regards of Malaysia and Islamic humanitarianism and how it has been progressing since the time of first's Prime Minister until the Pakatan Harapan forms a new government of Malaysia recently. Finally, the paper turns to focus on the role of GPM partnering in new initiative work, leading international commission, and leading in impactful and sustainable projects, providing humanitarian aid training to volunteer and advising government. The four criterions (4 criterions) described the visibility of GPM in providing humanitarian assistance for the needy countries that has made GPM a leading Islamic Humanitarian NGO from Malaysia was is further discussed and defined. This paper concluded that the notion of Islam and the Ummah spirit are the driving force of the cause and funds and leadership are the continuous challenges in humanitarianism.
Social media platforms have been vested with hope for their potential to enable ‘ordinary citizens’ to make their judgments public and contribute to pluralized discussions about organizations and their perceived legitimacy (Etter et al. in Bus Soc 57(1):60–97, 2018). This raises questions about how ordinary citizens make judgements and voice them in online spaces. This paper addresses these questions by examining how Western citizens ascribe responsibility and action in relation to corporate misconduct. Empirically, it focuses on modern slavery and analyses online debates in Denmark on child slavery in the cocoa industry. Conceptually, it introduces the notion of cosmopolitanism as a general disposition of care and responsibility towards distant others, conceived as a prerequisite for the critical evaluation of corporate (ir)responsibility in the Global South. The analysis of online debates shows that citizens debate child slavery in terms of individual consumer responsibility rather than corporate responsibility. Corporations are not considered potential agents of change. As a consequence, online citizen debates did not reflect a legitimacy crisis for the cocoa industry, as debates over responsibility were overwhelmingly concerned with the agency of the Western individual, the individual agency of the speakers themselves. Participants in debates understood their agency strictly as consumer agency.
The proliferation of Web 2.0 platforms that aim to facilitate social action, often connected to international development or environmental sustainability, has contributed to the ongoing popularisation of development. In this article, I argue that it has resulted in the digitally-enabled constitution of everyday humanitarians, who are everyday people supportive of poverty alleviation. Kiva.org, a US-based online microlending platform that invites everyday humanitarians to make US$25 loans to Kiva entrepreneurs around the world, is a prime site to study these processes. I show how Kiva cultivates supporters through the mediated production of affective investments, which are financial, social and emotional commitments to distant others. This happens through the design of an affective architecture which in turn generates financial and spatial mediations. While these result in microloans and attendant sentiments of affinity, they also lead to financial clicktivism and connections that obscures the asymmetries and riskscapes resulting from Kiva’s microlending work.
This chapter focuses on discourses and counter-discourses in the specific context of Romanians migrating to the United Kingdom. The analysis reveals the role of Romanian and British journalists in the problematization of migration, taking into account two different contexts: the freedom of movement for Romanian and Bulgarian citizens to work inside the United Kingdom, starting with January 1, 2014 and the British referendum in June 23, 2016. In doing so, the corpus covers five interactive mass-media campaigns on Romanian migration - Don’t Come to Britain! (The Guardian, January 2013), Why Don’t You Come Over? (Gândul, January 2013), Let’s Change the Story! (Gândul, January 2014), The Truth about Romanians Migrating to the UK (Adevărul, March 2014) and Romanians Adopt Remainians (Gândul, June 2016) and 100 news articles around the campaigns. Methodologically, the analysis is based on qualitative research methods, combining multimodal analysis (Iedema, 2003; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) with critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 1993; van Leeuwen, 2008) and dispositif analysis (Charaudeau, 2005; Lochard, 2005, 2006; Soulages, 2007). Generally, the analysis proves that Romanian journalists have overcome their role as professionals (they no longer adopt a traditional role), by involving the citizens in the public debate on migration, and, more extensively, on the country image problem.
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Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection affects men and women, yet HPV vaccination and media campaigns in Ireland to date have targeted girls only. The principle of herd immunity in which the vaccination of females extends protection to males does not include men who have sex with men (MSM), while MSM are at higher risk of developing HPV-related diseases than males in the general population. The current dissertation explores the role herd immunity has played in the HPV vaccination programme in Ireland and why the existing HPV information campaign did not target MSM. In addition, an analysis of the role of social media in providing information about HPV and the HPV vaccine to the public is provided. Frame-works of health communications are examined and applied to findings resulting from inter-views with health service representatives and MSM to determine how social media shaped perceptions among MSM regarding HPV and the HPV vaccine, and how social media can be used to effectively promote the HPV vaccine to MSM.
The current dissertation finds that because the exclusive focus of herd immunity has been on the vaccination of girls, the prevention of cervical cancer and the associated media campaigns, men have not developed a perception of susceptibility to HPV or an awareness of the risk of HPV-related diseases. Because health services in Ireland deploy separate communication strategies for girls and the general public on the one hand and MSM on the other and cannot promote HPV vaccine availability for MSM in the absence of a budget to deliver the vaccine, no MSM HPV media campaign was put in place. Social media provided a significant platform for high-profile news stories, which shaped the perceptions of MSM regarding HPV and the HPV vaccine. Privacy and anonymity are important affordances in communications directed to LGBTQ people. Social media platforms that provide these affordances should be included in a social media mix that ensures the effective promotion of the HPV vaccine to MSM.
Human rights organisations are facing hard times, and Amnesty International is playing an active role to set new communication strategies. Research has shown that communication is an essential instrument to establish new policies, engage new audience segments and face destructive narratives. Communication is the result of internal and external factors, and it represents the identity of an organisation or company. It aims to deliver a message but also to create a connection with readers or donators. This thesis shall analyse the communication strategy adopted by Amnesty International, the purposes and implications that it has on the organisation. Moreover, this thesis shall investigate how digital technologies affected campaigning and advocacy. The research asks: how internal and external factors did affect the work of Amnesty and its goals? How did they shape the forms of communication, and what is its role in facing new challenges and antagonists? How did change the process of campaigns and advocacy? The applied methodology includes the definition of the main concepts (NGOs and advocacy networks), the analysis of human rights discourse, the comparison between two accountability reports, the analysis of the communications strategy manifesto and interviews to members of the Italian Section. This research demonstrates that the combination of different know-how, expertise and the application of creative processes are an efficient way for human rights organisations to face new challenges and crisis. On this basis, it is recommended for human rights organisations not only to adopt new communication approaches but also to implement a multidisciplinary attitude. Further research is needed to identify other factors that could strengthen this strategy.
Kirjassa käsitellään pakolaisuutta mediassa. Teoksen tapaukset käsittelevät muun muassa sosiaalisen median, dokumenttielokuvien, romaanien ja uutisjournalismin kautta sitä, kuinka media muokkaa tunteita osaksi tiettyjä moraalisia käsityksiä. Kirja on myös osa humanitarismin, hyväntekeväisyyden ja solidaarisuuden tutkimusta.
Tutkimukseen perustuva kirja osoittaa mediakeskustelun sudenkuopat, toistuvat ongelmat ja eettiset haasteet. Se tarjoaa myös esimerkkejä uudentyyppisistä ja rakentavista tavoista käsitellä pakolaisuutta mediassa.
Climate change is an issue of concern throughout the world and has been at the forefront of
public, scientific and political debate in recent years. Recognizing the devastating impacts of
global warming, the United Nations Paris Climate Agreement has put together a number of
initiatives to address the challenges of climate change. However, the level of awareness and
understanding of climate change issues among stakeholders is still very low. One of the major
reasons for this is the absence of effective climate change communication.
Strategic communication is vital to educate audiences worldwide and promote public
participation in addressing climate change. Outreach tactics should seek to engage audiences
that already support the climate movement. This study explores potentially engaging messages
and content to influence climate action among millennials. The study further aims to prove the
effectiveness of communicating across multiple social media channels while incorporating
interactive media that provokes dialogue that will increase the likelihood of stakeholder action.
Recently, Indonesian Muslim women successfully convened the world’s first congress of women Muslim scholars (KUPI). This is only one segment of the story of Indonesian Muslim women. There are many narratives regarding Indonesian Muslim women and their diverse agenda. This article focuses on what has been brought by KUPI into a broader discussion of Islam in Indonesia. Drawing on intermittent offline research predominantly conducted in Jakarta and online research from 2017 to 2018, this article argues that KUPI, with its symbolic preferences, has strengthened the voices of civil Islam in Indonesia. KUPI has productively generated global attention due to its progressive emphasis that women can be ulama. However, there are other women’s voices of Islam and gender that are robust, particularly due to their rigorous use of information and communication technology. At the same time, this might be seen as promoting conservatism. Within the local context, this ideological position that is contrary to KUPI has gained more traction. Additionally, this article argues that progressive and conservative Indonesian Muslim women feature not only in the democratic pluralism of religious expression in the Indonesian offline and online spheres but also in the ongoing intricate interplay between Islam, civil society and gender equality.
This article takes stock of the insights and approaches advanced by the last 15 years of critical research in humanitarian communication and distant suffering while arguing for a new agenda for ethnography. Ethnography lays bare the messy and fertile terrains of human experience and disrupts idealized figures of witness and sufferer, aid worker and aid recipient, event and the everyday. Bringing into dialogue the anthropology of aid literature and media and cultural studies, this article proposes three important shifts for future research: (1) a focus on processes rather than principles in production studies of humanitarian communication, (2) a focus on ethics arising from everyday life rather than from events of distant suffering, and (3) and a focus on the lifeworlds of the poor and vulnerable rather than those of witnesses.
What futures can be envisioned for audiences and users of emerging media technologies, and how can audience analysis respond to the challenges of the future, in exploration of uncertainties yet to unfold? This chapter introduces CEDAR—Consortium on Emerging Directions in Audience Research—a team of audience researchers from 14 countries across Europe, funded (2015–2018) by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, which came together to conduct a foresight analysis exercise on developing current trends and future scenarios for audiences and audience research in the year 2030. The chapter positions this work in the context of longer and shorter histories of interest in audiences and locates the network’s critical, agenda, trans-media framework in the context of the rise of datafication and technological intrusions in the context of emerging technologies and the internet of things.
This article examines the phenomenon of ‘digital humanitarianism’ that originates in and is practiced by the international community, and has found particular impetus through the ways in which it has engaged African people, places, and issues. Digital humanitarianism presents new technological approaches to ameliorate humanitarian work but I argue that there has emerged a ‘Digital Savior Complex’ which not only transforms complex crises into quotidian cyber realities but also furthers existing colonial hierarchies between the savior and the saved. The article argues that the Save Darfur movement was, in fact, the first example of the Digital Savior Complex in action. However, the unfair representations it tends to foreground have not gone unnoticed by a particularly influential Africa-centric digital media. I draw attention to the attempts to push back at the Digital Savior Complex by using the example of Kony 2012, a case that proved to be an effective unmasking of the modes of digital solidarity that were hitherto unchecked. This enabled an epistemic and discursive shift in the conversation about the misrepresentation of Africa and Africans, and insisted on corrective, resistant and decolonized approaches to depict and reflect upon events on the continent.
This chapter develops a set of findings around audiences’ small-scale acts of engagement with media content made available through digital media technologies. We identify and discuss three articulations of these small acts: (1) one click engagement, (2) commenting and debating and (3) small stories. In contrasting them with more collaborative and convergent productive practices, we further conceptualise these engagements in relation to two main dimensions: effort and intentionality. Lastly, we suggest a conceptualisation of the outcome of these acts which we have labelled interruption. Content flows can be challenged, if not transformed, due to the volume of small acts, which is realised by the producing audiences as well as by mainstream media. Profound changes in the way information is produced and distributed are fuelled by small acts of engagement, and these trends are likely to continue into the futures this book speaks about.
The year 2030 seems to be beckoning a fair amount of prospection and critical speculation, with regard to the roles of ICTs in governance, public policy in a variety of sectors, and its interfaces with digital futures, with the arrival of Big Data. In the context of a book located theoretically within the long tradition of audience studies, we report in this chapter, from the unique third step of our foresight analysis—a horizon scanning exercise on the future of audiences in the year 2030, anticipating the ubiquity of connected technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT), amidst interfaces governed by algorithms, and the rise of datafication and its myriad consequences. Tracing a set of future scenarios along the dimensions of diverging responses to the IoT on the one hand, and the changing nature of institution-individual relationships on the other, we follow a set of 16 drivers of societal change, as audiences, users, and those who analyze them move towards 2030. We conclude, by drawing attention to media and data literacies as fundamentally crucial for audience agency in the futures we envisage.
In the age of ubiquitous technologies, algorithmic agents pervade all aspects of our (online) lives. A growing number of connected digital devices track our activities and store our data on digital platforms or in the Cloud (Van Dijck, 2014; Porcaro, 2016). They give us recommendations for songs and movies, filter news or rank search results based on our past experiences (Bodo et al., 2017). This chapter focuses on the co-option of audiences’ digital production and data, as seen through the lens of stakeholders. Based on 15 interviews conducted with stakeholders from eight European countries, we show how this heterogenous community, consisting of players with different stakes, sees and evaluates the processes of co-option of audiences by digital platform owners, for their own purposes. The results highlight the dialectical nature of co-option and the sometimes conflicted relationship between commercial players and creative audiences, and show how this relationship is managed from both sides.
A conventional wisdom in media studies is that "when it bleeds it leads". The media love violence and from the newsroom perspective, negative news is good news. Violent death often makes it to the headlines, and mass violent death events often become media events that receive immediate continuous attention worldwide. However, reporting violent death is not only about sending information, but also about the maintenance of society. News about violent death functions as media rituals which elicit grief and inform a sense of care and belonging. Accordingly, this book takes a broader sociological and anthropological approach to considering the role of death and the media in organising social life in a global age. Based on literature on solidarity and social cohesion, death rituals, media rituals, and journalism studies, this book examines whether and how the performance of the media at the occurrence of mass violent death events informs solidarity and interconnectedness on a cosmopolitan level.
The book develops the analytics of grievability as an analytical framework that unpacks the ways in which news about death constructs grievable death and articulates relational ties between spectators and sufferers. The book employs the analytics of grievability in a comparative manner and analyses the coverage of three different case studies (terror attack, war and natural disaster) by two transnational news networks (BBC World News and Al-Jazeera English). This comparative analysis showcases the centrality of news media in selectively cultivating a sense of cosmopolitan solidarity in a global age.
This paper puts forward the new analytical framework of ‘Digitally Mediated Iconoclasm’ (DMI) to analyse and interpret iconoclastic acts that are experienced through the propaganda (videos, social media, photographs, and other media) that the actor perpetrating the destruction makes available in global information networks for its consumption, duplication, and distribution. DMI captures three stages of the destruction (before, during and after the event) as both evidence of that destruction and as a perdurable digital archive. To demonstrate the relevance of DMI, we focus on an analysis of the videos and photographs depicting heritage destruction at pre-monotheistic sites targeted by the Islamic State (IS), such as Palmyra in Syria, the Mosul Cultural Museum, Nineveh and Nimrud in Iraq. The analysis focuses on the three stages that DMI comprises, showing the different photographic and audio-visual production techniques that the IS uses to enhance the tension that is built up leading to the destruction of cultural heritage while allocating material and human resources to produce digital propaganda. This analysis demonstrates how the analytical framework of DMI can be used to advance important work in heritage and media studies.
The act of witnessing connects audiences with distant suffering. But what happens when bearing witness becomes severely restricted? External parties, including the mainstream news media, are constrained from accessing Australia’s offshore immigration detention centres. The effect is that people seeking asylum are hidden from the public and excluded from national debates. Some detainees have adopted social media as a platform to communicate their stories of flight, and their experiences of immigration detention, to a wider audience. This article examines the ways in which social media, and particularly Facebook, has facilitated what we call self-represented witnessing. We analyse two public Facebook pages to assess how detainees use such social media networks to document their experiences, and we observe the interaction between detainees, other social media users and mainstream media. Significantly, these social media networks enable detained asylum seekers to conduct an unmediated form of self-represented witnessing that exposes human rights abuses and documents justice claims.
This article reflects on the significance of cosmopolitan socialities and intimacies following disasters, and the opportunities and risks they offer for restorative and reparative action for survivors and their communities. Reporting in particular on the experiences of LGBTQ Filipinos in post-Haiyan Tacloban, I discuss how the presence of foreign aid workers in everyday social spaces provided opportunities for queer identity expression and social attachments. I argue that cosmopolitan socialities, including new connections initiated via mobile dating platforms, were embraced by LGBTQs for their potential to share and repurpose wounds after rupture, especially in a conservative small-town context where LGBTQ identities have been historically repressed. This article attends to the opportunities and risks of queer cosmopolitanism as an uneven experience between middle-class and low-income LGBTQs.
In this article, the author argues that if researchers wish to move toward a “global village” with cosmopolitan values, then they need to examine critically the discourses and practices by which global information flows invite the individual spectator to be a public actor in the contexts of her or his everyday life. In the light of empirical analysis, the author presents a hierarchical typology of news stories on distant suffering that consists of adventure, emergency, and ecstatic news, and she examines the two broad ethical norms that inform these types of news: communitarianism and cosmopolitanism. The possibility for cosmopolitanism, the author concludes, lies importantly (but not exclusively) in the ways in which television tells the stories of suffering, inviting audiences to care for and act on conditions of human existence that go beyond their own communities of belonging.
Using a simplified psychology of perception and some additional assumptions, a system of twelve factors describing events is presented that together are used as a definition of 'newsworthiness'. Three basic hypotheses are presented: the additivity hypothesis that the more factors an event satisfies, the higher the probability that it becomes news; the complementarity hypothesis that the factors will tend to exclude each other since if one factor is present it is less necessary for the other factors to be present for the event to become news; and the exclusion hypothesis that events that satisfy none or very few factors will not become news. This theory is then tested on the news presented in four different Norwegian newspapers from the Congo and Cuba crises of July 1960 and the Cyprus crisis of March-April 1964, and the data are in the majority of cases found to be consistent with the theory. A dozen additional hypotheses are then deduced from the theory and their social implications are discussed. Finally, some tentative policy impli cations are formulated.
Social media technologies collapse multiple audiences into single contexts, making it difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversation. This paper investigates how content producers navigate 'imagined audiences' on Twitter. We talked to participants with different types of followings to understand their techniques, including targeting multiple audiences, concealing subjects, and maintaining authenticity. For some, the techniques of audience management resemble those of 'micro-celebrity' and personal branding, representing strategic self-commodification. Our model of the networked audience assumes a many-to-many communication through which individuals conceptualize an imagined audience evoked through their tweets.
In this article, I engage with humanitarian celebrity as a communicative structure that historically articulates various discourses of solidarity. Specifically, I approach this communicative structure as a theater of pity that, by circulating images and stories about suffering, proposes dispositions of emotion and action to the West. Whereas, I argue, the traditional critique of celebrity humanitarianism challenges celebrity as spectacle that produces inauthentic aspirational discourse, my analysis of two key “moments” of celebrity humanitarianism as theater—Hepburn's late-80s and Jolie's contemporary “moment”—demonstrates there is significant variation in celebrity claims to authenticity, each bearing distinct implications as to the dispositions of altruism it proposes to the West. Even though, compared to Hepburn's old-style “Good Samaritanism,” Jolie's generous entrepreneurialism steps up celebrity impact in relief and development donations, I contend that the contemporary, “confessional” discourse of humanitarian theatricality prioritizes the “authentic” emotions of the celebrity and our own connectivity towards her, thereby encouraging a narcissistic disposition of voyeuristic altruism rather than commitment to the humanitarian cause.
Abstract Social network,sites,(SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic,and,industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach.,This special theme section of the,Journal,of Computer-Mediated,Communicationbrings ,together scholarship on these emergent phenomena.,In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles,in this special section and conclude with considerations for future,research.
This article offers a trajectory of humanitarian communication, which suggests a clear, though not linear, move from emotion-oriented to post-emotional styles of appealing. Drawing on empirical examples, the article demonstrates that the humanitarian sensibility that arises out of these emerging styles breaks with pity and privileges a short-term and low-intensity form of agency, which is no longer inspired by an intellectual agenda but momentarily engages us in practices of playful consumerism. Whereas this move to the post-emotional should be seen as a reaction to a much-criticized articulation between politics and humanitarianism, which relied on ‘universal’ morality and grand emotion, it is also a response to the intensely mediatized global market in which humanitarian agencies operate today. The article concludes by reflecting on the political and ethical ambivalence at the heart of this new style of humanitarian communication, which offers both the tentative promise of new practices of altruism and the threat of cultural narcissism.
This book is about the relationship between the spectators in countries of the west, and the distant sufferer on the television screen; the sufferer in Somalia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, but also from New York and Washington DC. How do we relate to television images of the distant sufferer? The question touches on the ethical role of the media in public life today. They address the issue of whether the media can cultivate a disposition of care for and engagement with the far away other; whether television can create a global public with a sense of social responsibililty towards the distant sufferer.
Emotions shape the landscape of our mental and social lives. Like geological upheavals in a landscape, they mark our lives as uneven, uncertain and prone to reversal. Are they simply, as some have claimed, animal energies or impulses with no connection to our thoughts? Or are they rather suffused with intelligence and discernment, and thus a source of deep awareness and understanding? In this compelling book, Martha C. Nussbaum presents a powerful argument for treating emotions not as alien forces but as highly discriminating responses to what is of value and importance. She explores and illuminates the structure of a wide range of emotions, in particular compassion and love, showing that there can be no adequate ethical theory without an adequate theory of the emotions. This involves understanding their cultural sources, their history in infancy and childhood, and their sometimes unpredictable and disorderly operations in our daily lives.
Distant Suffering, first published in 1999, examines the moral and political implications for a spectator of the distant suffering of others as presented through the media. What are the morally acceptable responses to the sight of suffering on television, for example, when the viewer cannot act directly to affect the circumstances in which the suffering takes place? Luc Boltanski argues that spectators can actively involve themselves and others by speaking about what they have seen and how they were affected by it. Developing ideas in Adam Smith's moral theory, he examines three rhetorical 'topics' available for the expression of the spectator's response to suffering: the topics of denunciation and of sentiment and the aesthetic topic. The book concludes with a discussion of a 'crisis of pity' in relation to modern forms of humanitarianism. A possible way out of this crisis is suggested which involves an emphasis and focus on present suffering.
This thesis explores the moral implications of watching suffering on the media.
In particular, it addresses the question of how audiences construct their moral
agency vis-à-vis the suffering of distant others they witness through television
news.
Theoretically, the thesis takes as a point of departure the concept of mediation
as media practices. Based on an underlying assumption of moral agency as
discursively constructed and articulated, I have drawn an analytical framework
which employs the discursive practices of media witnessing and media
remembering to explore the ways audiences talk about distant suffering and
position themselves in relation to it. The thesis is empirically grounded in the
context of Greece and based on focus group discussions with members of the
Greek audience.
The empirical analysis indicates that viewers engage with distant suffering in a multiplicity of ways that are not exhausted in feelings of empathy or compassion and their diametric opposites of apathy and compassion fatigue. These forms of engagement are filtered through both the nature and extent of media reports of suffering, and discourses about power and politics entrenched within the national culture. In this context, the analysis demonstrates that viewers position themselves as witnesses vis-à-vis news reports of distant suffering in four different modes, which are described as “affective”, “ecstatic”, “politicised” and “detached” witnessing. The exploration of the practice of media remembering illustrates the construction of a moral hierarchy in the way viewers remember distant suffering, where some events are constructed as banal and others become landmarks in audience memory. Finally, the viewers’ positioning as public actors with regard to media stories of human pain is shown to be, on the one hand, conditional upon the media staging of humanitarian appeals, and, on the other hand, embedded within and limited by frameworks of understanding civic participation in public life.
The thesis contributes to a growing body of literature on the mediation of distant suffering. It especially addresses the largely neglected empirical question of audience engagement with media stories of human pain, offering
both empirical evidence and an analytical framework for the study of this engagement.
How do parents and children care for each other when they are separated because of migration? The way in which transnational families maintain long-distance relationships has been revolutionised by the emergence of new media such as email, instant messaging, social networking sites, webcam and texting. A migrant mother can now call and text her left-behind children several times a day, peruse social networking sites and leave the webcam for 12 hours achieving a sense of co-presence.
Introduction 1. Emotion in social life and social theory 2. Emotion and rationality 3. Class and resentment 4. Action and confidence 5. Conformity and shame 6. Rights, resentment, and vengefulness 7. Fear and change Epilogue.
This study traces the rhythms of news storytelling on Twitter via the #egypt hashtag. Using computational discourse analysis, we examine news values and the form of news exhibited in #egypt from January 25 to February 25, 2011, pre- and post-resignation of Hosni Mubarak. Results point to a hybridity of old and newer news values, with emphasis on the drama of instantaneity, the crowdsourcing of elites, solidarity, and ambience. The resulting stream of news combines news, opinion, and emotion to the point where discerning one from the other is difficult and doing so misses the point. We offer a theory of affective news to explain the distinctive character of content produced by networked publics in times of political crisis.
Based on a survey of participants in Egypt's Tahrir Square protests, we demonstrate that social media in general, and Facebook in particular, provided new sources of information the regime could not easily control and were crucial in shaping how citizens made individual decisions about participating in protests, the logistics of protest, and the likelihood of success. We demonstrate that people learned about the protests primarily through interpersonal communication using Facebook, phone contact, or face-to-face conversation. Controlling for other factors, social media use greatly increased the odds that a respondent attended protests on the first day. Half of those surveyed produced and disseminated visuals from the demonstrations, mainly through Facebook.
This study provided a comparative analysis of three social network sites, the open-to-all Facebook, the professionally oriented LinkedIn and the exclusive, members-only ASmallWorld.The analysis focused on the underlying structure or architecture of these sites, on the premise that it may set the tone for particular types of interaction.Through this comparative examination, four themes emerged, highlighting the private/public balance present in each social networking site, styles of self-presentation in spaces privately public and publicly private, cultivation of taste performances as a mode of sociocultural identification and organization and the formation of tight or loose social settings. Facebook emerged as the architectural equivalent of a glasshouse, with a publicly open structure, looser behavioral norms and an abundance of tools that members use to leave cues for each other. LinkedIn and ASmallWorld produced tighter spaces, which were consistent with the taste ethos of each network and offered less room for spontaneous interaction and network generation.
This article explores what it means to be represented and how the nature of representation might change in an age of networks. Citizens' perceptions of political connection and disconnection are examined on the basis of quantitative and qualitative surveys. A typology of political connection is presented and then expanded on the basis of the discussion of four potentially democratizing characteristics of digital information and communication technologies.
The instrumentalist principles are applied to fundamental social theory. The concept of the public is more general than that of the state, which is the public politically organized, with suitable officials; the public itself is individuals in relations, the latter being so complex and mobile in existing publics that the whole social fabric is amorphous and inarticulate. Law, associated with the state, is the total of the conditions established for making the results of interaction somewhat predictable. The "eclipse of the public" is effectively described, with a tracing of the historical causes underlying it in the rise of democracy and associated technology. The conditions for the emergence of the public and the formation of a genuine community are found chiefly in the free communication of knowledge of every sort. The most hopeful method for such emergence is, concisely, the practical recognition of the interdependence of individual and social aspects of existence, plus free experimental inquiry. Tendencies in a forward direction are noted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
News in the Digital Age
- Fenton
- Natalie
Fenton, Natalie. 2010. ''News in the Digital Age.'' In The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism, edited by Stuart Allan, 557Á67. London: Routledge.
Audiences and Publics
- Livingstone
- Sonia
Livingstone, Sonia, ed. 2005. Audiences and Publics. Bristol: Intellect Press.
After Kony, Could a Viral Video Change the World? ” The Observer
- John Naughton
Naughton, John. 2012. ''After Kony, Could a Viral Video Change the World?'' The Observer, March 10. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/10/kony-viral-video-change-world.
Upheavals of Thought
- Nussbaum
- Martha
Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. Upheavals of Thought. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
The Mediation of Suffering: Classed Moralities of Media Audiences in the Philippines
- Jonathan C Ong
Ong, Jonathan C. 2011. ''The Mediation of Suffering: Classed Moralities of Media Audiences in the Philippines.'' PhD thesis, University of Cambridge.
Comparative Analysis of Facebook, LinkedIn and AsmallWorldAffective News and Networked Publics: The Rhythms of News Storytelling on #Egypt The Economist. 2012. ''One Thousand Points of 'Like': Social Media and Fundraising
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- Zizi
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