Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn
Abstract
“An outstanding intervention in contemporary debates about the emancipatory potential of the new media landscape. While “power to the people” may be the rallying cry in an age of blogging, Web 2.0 interactivity, and reality TV, Turner cautions against confusing the “demotic” with democracy…Ordinary People and the Media is required reading for students and scholars navigating the shifting terrain of media and cultural studies.” — Serra Tinic, University of Alberta, Canada The ‘demotic turn’ is a term coined by Graeme Turner to describe the increasing visibility of the ‘ordinary person’ in the media today. In this dynamic and insightful book he explores the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of the ‘everyday’ individual's willingness to turn themselves into media content through: Celebrity culture; Reality TV; DIY websites; Talk radio; User-generated materials online. Analyzing the pervasiveness of celebrity culture, this book further develops the idea of the demotic turn as a means of examining the common elements in a range of ‘hot spots’ within media and cultural studies today. Refuting the proposition that the demotic turn necessarily carries with it a democratizing politics, this book examines its political and cultural function in media production and consumption across many fields – including print and electronic news, current affairs journalism, and citizen and online journalism. It examines these fields in order to outline a structural shift in what the western media has been doing lately, and to suggest that these media activities represent something much more fundamental than contemporary media fashion.
... Ordinary people have always been of interest to news media but have generally become more visible in the past few decades, both in entertainment media and in the news (Eronen 2015;Palmer 2018;Schmieder 2015;Turner 2010). The use of amateur material and ordinary people as sources in news media has increased, and this includes amateur photos and videos Mortensen 2016;Mäenpää 2014;Näsi 2015;Pantti and Sirén 2015;Schmieder 2015). ...
... The term ordinary people can be an ambiguous concept. In the context of this study, ordinary people are understood as people who are not part of an elite or celebrity group, nor hold any public position where media exposure is expected (Eronen 2015;Turner 2010). Ordinary people become news sources as witnesses, experts, heroes, community representatives, and so on (Palmer 2018). ...
... The use of ordinary people as sources has increased in recent years (Näsi 2015;Pantti and Sirén 2015;Schmieder 2015). Stories about ordinary people have always been of interest to news reporters, for instance, as a way of illustrating or giving a face to a current trend or major event, or as a method of explaining something complex through the use of personal examples (Eronen 2015;Schmieder 2015;Turner 2010). Social media have also become an important source in stories of a more mundane character (Farhi 2009;Hermida et al. 2012;Paulussen and Harder 2014;Singer et al. 2011). ...
Ordinary people have always been of interest to journalists, and social media has become a common place to find material for new stories. This paper presents a quantitative content analysis of Norwegian news articles that are based on social media posts published by ordinary people. The analysis focuses on the topics of the news stories, sources, headlines, lead paragraphs, use of amateur photos, and what news criteria they fulfill. The news articles generated covered a wide variety of topics but were mostly soft news. Social issues, culture, and politics were the largest categories. They were episodic in form and replicated much of the content from the original social media post together with an interview with the person who posted it. There was little use of other sources or follow-up stories. Most of the photos used were amateur photos. The journalistic processing of the material is at a minimum. Compared with Norwegian news in general, the sources in the material were slightly more female and of a wider age range, and they were picked up by journalists because of popularity cues on social media. For journalists, this poses an opportunity and a challenge to develop the stories into something more than mere snapshots of society. For the individuals involved it poses an opportunity to reach a larger audience, but also the challenge of context collapse when the audience shifts from their contacts on social media to the general news audience.
... Enquanto os criadores desse tipo de programa frequentemente destacam seu papel democratizador capaz de promover visibilidade midiática para pessoas comuns (TURNER, 2009), pesquisadores do assunto também apontam seu uso como regulador de gosto, comportamento e até corporal. Brenda ...
... O último pressupõe implicitamente que uma pessoa ou grupo de pessoas representará outro conjunto de pessoas. A popularização, no século XX, dos meios de comunicação de massa, como a televisão, o rádio e o cinema, tem suscitado muitas discussões sobre a questão da representação midiática, especialmente sobre a representação de pessoas comuns (TURNER, 2009). Em outro trabalho (CAMPANELLA, 2022), mostrei como a mídia é vista como um local-chave nas lutas contemporâneas por reconhecimento, especialmente quando se trata de disputas em torno da representação midiática positiva de grupos minoritários e desprivilegiados. ...
Resumo O presente artigo reflete sobre transformações de longo prazo em regimes de visibilidade no ocidente e a crescente necessidade de o indivíduo ser reconhecido no contexto das mídias sociais. Argumenta-se que os desafios enfrentados por pessoas que buscam ser visíveis e reconhecidas nas plataformas de mídia social atualizam dilemas constituintes da subjetividade moderna, assim como introduzem novos elementos ligados ao processo de datificação e aprofundamento do neoliberalismo nas relações sociais. Essas transformações são exploradas por meio do: i) exame de obras que investigam manuais de comportamento e regulação de sentimento publicados nos últimos séculos; ii) da análise de vídeos e tutoriais contemporâneos direcionados a influenciadores digitais e pessoas comuns que buscam ganhar proeminência em mídias sociais.
... Common people, or ordinary people, are in this paper understood as individuals who do not have a public role, and are neither part of a media profession nor hold any specific merit or position where public visibility is expected (Eronen, 2015;Turner, 2010). Facebook is the social media of choice in this study because it is the most popular social media in Norway; 82% of the general population in Norway are using Facebook regularly, and while the younger generations often are more eager users of social media, Facebook is also popular among the older age groups; 75% of over 60 have a Facebook profile (Ipsos, 2017). ...
... Ordinary people have often been used in news media to illustrate a current trend or as witnesses of a major event, but also in stories about everyday life, and often journalists now find these stories via social media, and usergenerated content is used more often than before (Eronen, 2015;Hermida et al., 2012;Karlsson et al., 2015;Ma¨enpa¨a¨, 2014;Paulussen & Harder, 2014;Schmieder, 2015;Turner, 2010). How do news workers decide which social media posts to turn into news stories? ...
Social media posts made by ordinary people are in most cases only viewed by a small number of friends and contacts. But some posts get thousands of likes, comments, and shares, a phenomenon often dubbed as going viral. This paper provides a content analysis of viral Facebook posts published by common people in Norway, and of the news coverage they received. The social media posts that go viral in Norway deal with a variety of topics, like health care, elderly care, bullying, traffic safety, unemployment, animal welfare, school, and education. Some of the viral posts were open job applications, and some were creative expressions. Many of the posts address political issues, and becomes part of the public debate. The posts are personal in their mode of address, often with an emotional appeal for civic engagement. They resemble the letters to the editor, though they bypass the editor and go directly to online self-publication, and in this way, moving parts of the public debate from the newspapers to social media. Most of the viral posts got news coverage, which in most cases focused more on the popularity cues and the virality of the post, and less on the topic the post addressed.
... Based on the discussion in the preceding section, it should be clear how and why firstperson testimony offers an ideal empirical focus for investigating the negotiation of vulnerability as a moral condition through the news, which I have reconceptualized as the mediated construction of victimhood. Journalistic texts which narratively foreground first-person testimony in their (re)construction of crime events draw on a specific epistemology of news storytelling that has been variously described (by its critics) as "demotic" (Turner, 2001(Turner, , 2009a and (in more celebratory and/or ambivalent accounts) as "ordinary voice" (Chouliaraki, 2010) 32 . While political elites and institutional experts have been centred historically as 'primary definers' in the production of news narratives about crime and its management (see Hall et al., 2013), ordinary voice reconfigures the concept of expertise so that individual lifeworld experiences-claims to have seen things, lived things, felt things 'first hand'-are positioned as authoritative forms of evidence about crime 'realities'. ...
... As Chouliaraki (2010) recognition. This is especially so within current affairs as a specific sub-genre of televisual reporting, which multiple authors have identified as particularly demotic in the Australian context (see Bonner & McKay, 2007;Turner, 2005Turner, , 2009a. ...
This thesis makes an empirically grounded attempt to rethink the problem of ‘criminalization’— what it is, how it works, and the kinds of political work it performs—from the perspective of media culture. Informed by an abolitionist ethic, it explores the role played by news media in building, maintaining, and potentially transforming, the justificatory basis for different forms of security practice. More specifically, it investigates how journalistic representations of crime events work to negotiate, in and through public culture, the imaginative conditions of possibility for policing, incarceration, punitive deportation, and other strategies of so-called ‘crime control’. Its major theoretical contributions are a radically expanded understanding of what it means to culturally ‘criminalize’, as well as the ‘mediated security imaginary’ as a new critical heuristic for understanding the relationship between ways of communicating (in)security, on the one hand, and way of acting upon it, on the other. Together, these two contributions open new horizons (both scholarly and practical) for the cultural resistance of criminalization as an endemic, yet ultimately arbitrary, logic of contemporary social and political life. Empirically, these contributions unfold through a close analysis of one specific case of mediated criminalization: the construction of ‘African gang crime’ in and through the Australian press. Since beginning to arrive in Australia in significant numbers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, members of Australia’s Black African diaspora have been subject to persistent negative media attention, with news narratives focussing on perceived issues of juvenile delinquency and gang activity. The analysis approaches news media representations of ‘African gang crime’ events (both print and televisual) as sites of vulnerability politics, where different and sometimes conflictual accounts of social vulnerability struggle for public recognition. Deploying an ‘analytics of mediation’ (Chouliaraki, 2010) which combines granular multi-modal text analysis with the critical analysis of discourse (CDA), the thesis explicates how criminalization operates as a mediated politics of vulnerability across three key dimensions: first, through the negotiation of vulnerability as a political condition, or its constructed sense of “realness”; second, through the negotiation of vulnerability as a moral condition, or its constructed sense of “wrongness”; and finally, through the positioning of vulnerability as a practical epistemology of justification, or as a justificatory basis for different kinds of social practice. As the practices we have historically called criminal justice experience a moment of radical normative instability, this thesis argues that the mediation of criminality will have a critical role to play in determining its longer political legacy. To the wealth of political economy critiques of policing and prisons, the thesis accentuates ‘imaginability’ as an important critical horizon for our efforts to transform the practices through which we pursue safety and justice, and practices of mediated representation as crucial to how this horizon might be remade. Amid heated debates about the status of ‘the victim’ in contemporary political life, it also deploys a critique of mediated (in)security to consider the wider historical significance of a particular, premediated formation of white victimhood that expresses itself in a subjunctive mood: a victimcould, wherein it is the very possibility of injury (rather than the fact or the likelihood) that subverts the promises of whiteness in contemporary Australian life to position its subjects as ‘wronged’.
... Additionally, the large-scale event -despite being reconfgured due to the COVID-19 pandemic -continues to be attractive in terms of soft power due to its appeal to, and function as, entertainment: that is, as an experience that engages or captivates individuals through sensory stimulation to invoke emotional responses (Moss 2009). In today's 'entertainment age' (Turner 2010), large-scale events of all kinds remain popular given individuals' and groups' constant search for mediated gratifcation that can elicit desired emotions. Most impactful, without doubt, are the grand events that both ofer entertainment and demonstrate virtuosity; soft power can be wielded most successfully when individuals and groups not only enjoy out-of-the-ordinary, large scale events but are also impressed by them and their organizers. ...
The Olympic Games, the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, the Sapporo Snow Festival: large-scale events like these have long been capturing the world’s attention. Due to their attractiveness and popularity, they have regularly been used to enhance the soft power of various actors. Although the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily halted most of these important events, it did not permanently dampen global enthusiasm for them. This chapter examines large-scale events in terms of soft power. It makes a twofold argument: first, that the events’ soft power is anchored in virtuosity - that is, proficiency or skill (Chitty 2017) - and, second, that the events continue to remain attractive for wielding soft power due to their spectacular nature and appeal to, and function as, entertainment. This attractiveness endures despite the COVID-19 pandemic having changed the dynamics of many large-scale events, shifting them into fully- or partly-digital formats. To substantiate this argument, the chapter uses the 2020 Dubai Expo (held from 2021 to 2022) as its case study. The Expo offers a robust way of understanding the virtuosity at the heart of a large-scale event’s soft power, as well as its appeal as spectacular entertainment, in both non-digital and digital formats. From an analysis of key event communication collateral, the chapter offers a novel framework for understanding the central elements of the virtuosity underpinning the soft power of large-scale events in a pandemic and post-pandemic era.
... The "demotic turn" and the performance of ordinariness (Turner, 2009) in its different disguises are a mode of self-presentation for today's elite, from royals to business elite or politicians. 8 M. Trump has never performed a "down to earth" persona, did not give any interviews for Slovenian media and has, through her lawyers, prohibited any commercial use of her name and branding connected with her name or person. ...
This book examines the highly ambivalent implications and effects of anti-elitism. It draws on this theme as a cross-cutting entry point to provide transdisciplinary analysis of current conjunctures and their contradictions, drawing on examples from popular culture and media, politics, fashion, labour and spatial arrangements.
Using the toolboxes of media and discourse analysis, hegemony theory, ethnography, critical social psychology and cultural studies more broadly, the book surveys and theorizes the forms, the implications and the ambiguities and limits of anti-elitist formations in different parts of the world. Anti-elitist sentiments colour the contemporary political conjuncture as much as they shape pop cultural and media trends. Populists, right-wing authoritarian ones and others, direct their anger at cultural, political and, sometimes, economic elites while supporting other elites and creating new ones. At the same time, "elitist" knowledge and expertise, decision-making power and taste regimes are being questioned in societal transformations that are discussed much more positively under headlines such as participation or democratization.
The book brings together a group of international, interdisciplinary case studies in order to better understand the ways in which the battle cry "against the elites" shapes current conjunctures and possible future politics, focusing on themes such as nationalist political discourse in India, Austria, the UK and Hungary, labour struggles and anti-oligarchy rhetoric in Russia, tax-avoiding elites and fiscal imaginaries, working-class agency, Melania Trump as a celebrity narrative in Slovenia, aesthetic codes of the Alt-Right, football hooliganism in Germany, "hipster hate" in German political discourse or the politics of expertise and anti-elite iconography in high fashion internationally. The book is intended for undergraduates, postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers.
... YouTubers capitalise on producing their own media content in a rich and convergent media environment (Jenkins, 2006). They are considered ordinary individuals who utilise media channels in visibilising their most intimate and personal lives in and through the media, which Turner (2009) conceptualises as the "demotic turn." Those who amass a significant viewership are considered "micro-celebrities" (Senft, 2018) who use digital communication technologies to enable interactions as well as generate and sustain popularity. ...
Social media platforms have been pivotal in redefining the conduct of contemporary society. Amid the proliferation of a range of new and ubiquitous online platforms, YouTube, a video-based platform, remains a key driver in the democratisation of creative, playful, vernacular, intimate, as well as political expressions. As a critical node of contemporary communication and digital cultures, its steady uptake and appropriation in a social media-savvy nation such as the Philippines requires a critical examination of its role in the continued reconstruction of identities, communities, and broader social institutions. This book closely analyses the diverse content and practices of amateur Filipino YouTubers, exposing and problematising the dynamics of brokering the contested aspirational logics of beauty and selfhood, interracial relationships, world-class labour, and progressive governance in a digital sphere. Ultimately, Philippine Digital Cultures: Brokerage Dynamics on YouTube offers a fresh, compelling, and nuanced account of YouTube as an important site for the mediation of culture, economy, and politics in Philippine postcolonial modernity amid rapid economic globalisation and digitalisation.
... YouTubers capitalise on producing their own media content in a rich and convergent media environment (Jenkins, 2006). They are considered ordinary individuals who utilise media channels in visibilising their most intimate and personal lives in and through the media, which Turner (2009) conceptualises as the "demotic turn." Those who amass a significant viewership are considered "micro-celebrities" (Senft, 2018) who use digital communication technologies to enable interactions as well as generate and sustain popularity. ...
Social media platforms have been pivotal in redefining the conduct of contemporary society. Amid the proliferation of a range of new and ubiquitous online platforms, YouTube, a video-based platform, remains a key driver in the democratisation of creative, playful, vernacular, intimate, as well as political expressions. As a critical node of contemporary communication and digital cultures, its steady uptake and appropriation in a social media-savvy nation such as the Philippines requires a critical examination of its role in the continued reconstruction of identities, communities, and broader social institutions. This book closely analyses the diverse content and practices of amateur Filipino YouTubers, exposing and problematising the dynamics of brokering the contested aspirational logics of beauty and selfhood, interracial relationships, world-class labour, and progressive governance in a digital sphere. Ultimately, Philippine Digital Cultures: Brokerage Dynamics on YouTube offers a fresh, compelling, and nuanced account of YouTube as an important site for the mediation of culture, economy, and politics in Philippine postcolonial modernity amid rapid economic globalisation and digitalisation.
... The protocols of interview comprising open-ended questions were developed after reviewing the literature on HRM practices and employer branding (Randstadt, 2013; Tanwar and Prasad, 2016;Kucherov and Zavyalova, 2012;App et al., 2012) and its usage in telecommunication settings (Zahoor et al., 2015;Keino, et al., 2017;Khalid and Tariq, 2015). Interview questions were included under the supervision of telecommunication professionals that have not participated in the study and duly adjusted after taking the expert's opinion (Turner, 2010;Ahmad et al., 2020). ...
In today’s competitive market, firms have hurdles in attracting and
retaining a qualified workforce. Therefore, EB strategy serves as a means of
communicating workplace features and how the firm differentiates itself as an
employer from other businesses to acquire a competitive advantage. As a result,
there is a need to investigate the phenomenon of internal and external employer
branding, as well as how HRM practices influence it. Themes regarding
internal and external employer branding were discovered using an exploratory
method through NVivo-11 software. This study adds to the discussion about the
use of HRM techniques to help a company for becoming a ‘brand’, particularly
in industries where both the product and the brand have a high symbolic value,
such as the telecommunications industry. According to the findings of this
study, organisations should carefully construct their HRM strategies so that
they may become a brand that will help them recruit and retain exceptional
people.
... In each of the platformed scenarios described above, we have observed the clear reintroduction of the delineation between social media users and social media content creators. The phenomenon that scholars had previously observed as holistic social media users that incorporated those who create content and those who use that content (Bruns, 2008;Manovich, 2001), including audiences (Hartley et al., 2013), has seen the demotic turn (Turner, 2010) take yet another shift in its evolutionary cycle. We are now observing an emerging moment in the development of cultural production and distribution from a new era of online content creators who are notably proficient in attracting large audiences to their diverse repertoire of content production, including news media. ...
YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Vimeo, Twitter, and so on, have their own logics, dynamics and different audiences. This book analyses how the users of these social networks, especially those of YouTube and Instagram, become content prescribers, opinion leaders and, by extension, people of influence.
What influence capacity do they have? Why are intimate or personal aspects shared with unknown people? Who are the big beneficiaries? How much is vanity and how much altruism? What business is behind these social networks? What dangers do they contain? What volume of business can we estimate they generate? How are they transforming cultural industries? What legislation is applied? How does the legislation affect these communications when they are sponsored? Is the privacy of users violated with the data obtained? Who is the owner of the content? Are they to blame for “fake news”? In this changing, challenging and intriguing environment, The Dynamics of Influencer Marketing discusses all of these questions and more.
Considering this complexity from different perspectives: technological, economic, sociological, psychological and legal, the book combines the visions of several experts from the academic world and provides a structured framework with a wide approach to understand the new era of influencing, including the dark sides of it. It will be of direct interest to marketing scholars and researchers while also relevant to many other areas affected by the phenomenon of social media influence.
... During the fieldwork of this study in the 1990s, women were broadcasting and monetizing their craft via webcams. Microcelebrities are ordinary celebrities (Turner 2010) famous to only a niche audience and are reciprocal in their interactions with viewers. Sammis, Lincoln, and Pomponi (2016) defined influencer marketing as "the art and science of engaging people who are influential online to share brand messaging with their audiences in the form of sponsored content" (7). ...
Influencer marketing has steadily grown in the past decade as a strategy utilized by digital marketers for spreading brand messages with the help of social media influencers (SMIs). The main objective of this study is to review the academic literature related to influencer marketing between 2011 and 2019 with the help of both bibliometric analysis and content analysis. This review uses the Bibliometrix R-tool and the BiblioShiny app for data analysis and scientific mapping. This review presents a background of how influencer marketing research has evolved and examines the performance analysis based on sources, authors, documents, countries, and keywords. In addition, different knowledge structures were examined and interpreted to determine the most influential aspects of the literature. The trends observed in this research area from the content analysis and bibliometric analysis in terms of the significant methods, theories, emergent topics, thematic evolution, models, variables, industry focus, platforms used, leading research streams, data sources, and context of studies are the focus of the Discussion section. Finally, based on the findings of this analysis, future research directions are recommended to offer the potential to advance research on influencer marketing and SMIs.
... In each of the platformed scenarios described above, we have observed the clear reintroduction of the delineation between social media users and social media content creators. The phenomenon that scholars had previously observed as holistic social media users that incorporated those who create content and those who use that content (Bruns, 2008;Manovich, 2001), including audiences (Hartley et al., 2013), has seen the demotic turn (Turner, 2010) take yet another shift in its evolutionary cycle. We are now observing an emerging moment in the development of cultural production and distribution from a new era of online content creators who are notably proficient in attracting large audiences to their diverse repertoire of content production, including news media. ...
This article considers the remediation of Hindi cinema’s filmi culture in the citational practices of digital media. Foregrounding a case study of the lip-sync video on platforms such as Dubsmash and TikTok, it traces the formation of an expanded archive of Hindi cinema, one which reveals this cinema as less a canon of films than a repertoire of gestures, expressions and style offered up for use to a non-traditional cinephiliac public. The article argues, however, that such an archival view of a historical filmi culture is possible only because of the recession of a filmi culture organised around the sign of cinema to one organised around the sociality of platforms. Among other things, it attributes this shift to the passing of the masala film. The article then pays particular attention to this form as an assemblage of detachable parts primed for circulation. It finally addresses the emergence of a new industrial reflexivity in response to the currency of filmi style in an age of platforms.
The aim of this article is to map the contested intersections of influencer culture and left/progressive politics within the current conjuncture. Furthermore, drawing on a combination of Gramscian and Foucaultian insights, the article considers the implications of these intersections for how we theorise the relationship between neoliberalism and left politics. In so doing, my argument is threefold. First, I suggest that social media influencers and influencer activists have turned to various forms of left politics as a means of establishing a distinctive personal brand, and heightening their social media clout. Second, I suggest that these developments have been met with something of a backlash among some left commentators, wary of the superficiality – and privileging of self-promotion over solidarity – that influencer activism entails, in keeping with a broader disaffection with what some consider to be the excessively individualistic flavour of contemporary forms of online ‘identity politics’. Third, I note that left critics of influencer activism often posit a distinction between ‘proper’ – that is, materialist, solidaristic – left politics, on one hand, and superficial, individualistic influencer activism, on the other. But, drawing on a conception of neoliberalism inspired by Foucault’s 1979 lectures, I suggest that, in a neoliberal digital capitalist context, this distinction becomes hard to sustain. This argument has two further implications. First, it becomes very difficult to extricate oneself from the imperatives of neoliberal digital culture, even if one is politically opposed to neoliberalism; and, second, the figure of the social media influencer, far from being exceptional or anomalous, is merely a more overt or extreme manifestation of logics that are already endemic in contemporary cultural and political life.
Abstract:
The present article studies, influential academic people in Iran and indicate that the position of influencers in the academic environment has also found its place. To conduct this study, we first investigate the concept of fame culture and then review on the relationship between university and influencer culture. The next step is to study the typology of academic influencers in Iran through literature review, as well as the study of several professor’s Instagram pages. In general, three general types have been identified.
The first category is traditional celebrities, who mostly have a small presence on social networks. The second category is professors-influencers, i.e. those who were born within social networks and whose presence, activity and reputation in the virtual world is greater than the outside world. The third group has a hybrid identity and has an enrich experience in terms of age, but they are not related to the first group.
In other words, they are on the border between the first and the second type, but they have a little bit of their former reputation in the world outside of cyberspace, and they have also created a new position for themselves in social networks. In the comparison between these three types of academics, the major distinctions of academic celebrities as emerging figures will be explained. The professors-influencers are born and live in social networks, they owe their fame to these networks, they establish a more horizontal relationship with their audience, they address a more general population, they are well aware of the strength of weak ties. And finally, they appear in the role of new intellectual leaders in the society.
Victoria Wood was a comedienne from Lancashire, in the north-west of England, who had a highly successful career on British television from the late 1970s until her death in 2016. Her writing and performances, and the performances she drew from a regular ensemble of actors, were rooted in the voices, dialect and culture of the working-class from the heavily industrialised area around Manchester famous for its cotton mills and female workforce. However, Wood’s work was not a straightforward representation of an ‘authentic’ world, it was bricolage and interpretation and original. Her own viewpoint as author was located in a late twentieth-century England, from where she could see historic representations of ‘Northerners’ in cinema and on television but also the new, de-industrialised North whose inhabitants were as influenced by consumption and media culture as the rest of the nation. She knew and drew with relish on the comic heritage of her own region but her work was mostly set in the now, a dialogue with contemporary media images of success and womanhood and class. It is remarkable how much creative control she came to have and how many varied works she produced for television in the mass-audience era, to which she brought a new and important northern voice.
This research examines the social construction of political leadership by social media followers of two Croatian politicians, president Zoran Milanović, and the mayor of Sinj, Miro Bulj, within the context of celebrity politics and populism. Through the interaction between theory and analysis, we integrate elements that construct leadership into what we distinguish as vertical (extraordinary) and horizontal (ordinary) dimensions, adding populism as an element of both dimensions. This analysis is grounded in the qualitative content analysis of 20 interviews with the two politicians’ Facebook followers, empirically showing that neither one of the elements is dominating the construction of leadership, putting the focus on the importance of the balance between the dimensions of verticality and horizontality, with modesty allowing for the mediation between the extraordinary and the ordinary. Equally important is the followers position that a perfect balance between verticality and horizontality (and a perfect leader) cannot be achieved. In short, leadership is shown to be paradoxical but not contradictory, as it is an always imperfect reconciliation of the horizontal and vertical dimensions.
Media populism is where popular media and mediated politics intersect. Mediated political appeals are made only to those deemed belonging to the political community; no purpose is served appealing to those not belonging since by definition they are the social “problem” against whom the community is rhetorically mobilized. Media populism fuses leftwing or rightwing political themes/sentiments with popular media formats that claim to hear “the people's voice,” though only by elites ventriloquizing the voice of “the people.”
This discourse analytical study tackles the rise of Neo-Salafism in the digital age. It constitutes an exploration of the discursive technics, strategies and practices employed by the new generation of Salafī preachers on social media. It strives to unveil the various discursive methods of indoctrination pursued by Salafi-influencers and the ends such strategies tend to serve. It involves an exploration of linguistic and contextual activities and seeks to identify explicit and implicit messages incorporated into the discourse of those young preachers. The main hypothesis upon which this study rests is that young preachers of Neo-Salafism resort to modified discursive technics that correspond to the age of digitalization and social media activism for the sake of ensuring a resounding impact among their addressees. These recipients represent a social incubator to the extremist Salafī ideology and a potential pool for a new wave of radicalization among the Muslim youth worldwide. A multi-dimensional methodological framework is employed to tackle the topic raised by this study. The data analyzed within the framework of this study consist of speeches and instructional communications by young Salafī preachers published through different social media platforms. Salafi-influencers seem to have developed a discourse characterized by certain manipulative strategies to communicate particular ideological messages and to indoctrinate recipients.
This book offers a new framework for understanding content creation and distribution across automated media platforms – a new mediatisation process. The book draws on three years of empirical and theoretical research to carefully identify and describe a number of unseen digital infrastructures that contribute to predictive media (algorithmic platforms) within the media production process: digital intermediation. The empirical field data is drawn from several international sites, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, London, Amsterdam, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Sydney and Cartagena. By highlighting the automated content production and distribution process, the book responds to a number of regulatory debates emerging around the societal impact of platformisation. Digital Intermediation: Towards transparent digital infrastructure describes and highlights the importance of key developments that help shape the production and distribution of content, including micro-platformization and digital first personalities. The book explains how digital agencies and multichannel networks use platforms strategically to increase exposure for the talent they manage, while providing inside access to the processes and requirements of developers who create algorithms for platforms. The findings in this book provide key recommendations for policy makers working within digital media platforms based on the everyday operation of content production and consumption within automated media environments. Finally, this book highlights user agency as a strategy for consumers who seek information on automated social media content distribution platforms.
Bir bebek en hızlı gelişim sürecini dünyaya geldiği ilk yıllar içerisinde gerçekleştirmektedir. Yaşanılan bu süreçte en büyük sorumluluk ebeveynlere düşmektedir. Geçmişte kalabalık aileler bir arada yaşadıkları için çocuk yetiştirme konusunda bireyler birbirlerinin deneyimlerinden yararlanıyorlarken günümüzde ise bireyler teknolojinin gelişmesi ile birlikte hayatın diğer alanlarında olduğu gibi ebeveynlik rolleri ile ilgili ihtiyaçlarda da sosyal medyadan faydalanmaktadır. Sosyal medyanın başında bloglar gelmektedir. Blogları kullananlar içerisinde annelik hakkındaki deneyimlerini paylaşan ve kabul ettikleri doğru bilgileri annelere aktaran bir anne kitlesi yer almaktadır. Sosyal medyada aktif bir şekilde yer alan bu anneler çocukların eğitimine dair oyun, sağlıklı beslenmeleri ile çocukların içerisinde bulunduğu döneme göre farklı etkinlikler bulunmaktadır. Bunun yanı sıra kullandıkları ürünlerin markalarını ve gün içerisinde çocukları ile birlikte geçirdikleri vakitleri fotoğraf çekerek hesaplarında paylaşmaktadırlar. Araştırmanın amacı dijital ebeveynlik kapsamımda blogger annelik davranışlarının ortaya çıkarılmasıdır. Bu kapsamda araştırmanın temel sorusu: “Dijital ebeveynlik çerçevesinde blogger annelerinin pazarlama davranışları nelerdir” şeklinde belirlenmiştir. Araştırma sorusunun cevaplanabilmesi için nitel araştırma yöntemi betimsel içerik analizi kullanılmıştır. Araştırma bulgularında blogger annelerin, çocukların gelişimine ve sağlıklı yetişmelerine yönelik önerilerde bulunduğu belirlenmiştir. Blogger annelerin ürün tanıtımı, özendirme ve pazarlama konularında önemli roller oynadıkları ve satınalma algısının oluşturulması açısından etkili oldukları tespit edilmiştir.
This article presents an exploratory qualitative study that investigated a group of Chinese school teachers' imaginaries of intellectuals and self-perceived experiences of being an intellectual. The study was informed by the perspectives of critical pedagogy, that is, to transform technician-like teachers to organic, transformative, or society-involved intellectuals with an activist vision and emancipatory commitment. The findings were generated from textual analysis of in-depth interviews. Chinese teachers tended to distance teaching from their imagined intellectual work, which was deemed value-free and prestigious. Additionally, they rarely regarded themselves as critically engaged agents committed to challenging the oppressive structure in education. Their unreflexive acceptance of the intellectual-teacher divide and their depoliticised stance have largely been shaped by the instrumental approach of education, the pleasure-driven cultural industry, and the unique ideological landscape in China.
This chapter examines how different types of talk in news invoke particular forms of power and engagement. One section looks at the performance of the news presenter as the embodiment of institutional, legitimised authority. This finds that even conventionally scripted news talk now includes key elements of informalisation and emotionality, even while retaining the power-laden discourses of the sanctified news text. A second section looks at the management of public talk on a news and current affairs public phone-in, where it is again revealed that public talk is guided to accentuate the qualities of authenticity and expressed lived experience. Here, though, it is argued that forms of talk associated with the accountability interview are used in managing and limiting public talk. Overall, the chapter argues for a more flexible analysis that accommodates the tactical and fluid ways in which forms of talk are deployed in news, while suggesting that forms of institutional power remain in dominance.
This undergraduate research involved a Thematic Analysis of three vlogs each from three YouTube celebrity vloggers to explore how these individuals attempt to create and maintain audience interest. This is of interest to study because the demotic turn of celebrity culture (more ‘ordinary’ individuals gaining celebrity status) means YouTube celebrity vloggers, unlike traditional achieved status celebrities, maintain success through their personalities rather than achieved talents or hobbies such as sports, singing or dancing. This research found YouTube celebrities created and maintained interest through flaming, reference to taboo topics (both of which transgressed social norms) and adventurous content. Overall, there was an overarching theme of rebellious self-presentation which maintains interest because it engenders community and reduces social distance which has problematic consequences for child audiences who could imitate such behaviours which may be considered age-inappropriate or even immoral.
Social media corporations have become fixtures of daily life to the extent they are regularly compared to states in size and scope. These corporations and their platforms have become the dominant stakeholders of cyberspace, operating as state‐like cyber actors, or net states. Previous approaches have limited the net state to the online, framing their populations and agendas separate to the material reality of their everyday operations, overlooking the tangible overlap between sovereignty and cyberspace. In this article, we examine whether net states can be co‐opted into the apparatus of state in a manner comparable to client states. We examine the case of WeChat, the Chinese multipurpose messaging and social media app developed by Tencent in its operation as a client net state of the People's Republic of China. The interactions between these actors are mapped using a methodological framework incorporating actor‐network theory to demonstrate the existence of client net states, and how they may be deployed to expand a state's influence and cyber sovereignty beyond its physical borders.
As a contentious issue affecting the character, boundaries and future of social order, migration represents a recurrent source of moral panic. While analysts have considered conventional outlets’ role in triggering collective alarm, less is known about social media’s effects on migration’s construction as a social problem. Working with an original dataset of tweets from the 2019 Canadian election, a period of heightened concern and outcry for significant portions of the electorate, this paper employs content analytic methods to assess migration’s online demonization and interrogate the patterns of framing, participation and engagement brought within the issue’s orbit. Alongside documenting significant disquiet and antipathy, its findings suggest that Twitter is transforming panic production and facilitating forms of reaction involving mass-participation and collaboration; interference from automated ‘bots’ and considerable dispute, dissent and negotiation. Based on these results, the sensitizing concept of platformed panics is proposed to capture how social media’s technical affordances, design and appropriation align to promote moral panics that are networked, algorithmic and contested.
Demokratien-so schreibt der französische Philosoph Claude Lefort-haben eine »leere Mitte«, also gerade kein symbolisches oder tatsächliches Zentrum, in dem alles zusammenläuft und das alles repräsentiert. Für den Stand einer Demokratie ist die Öffentlichkeitgibt ein Gradmesser. Heute ist der öffentliche Raum allerd-ings ein unsicheres Terrain. Der Schweizer Fotograf Jules Spinatsch lotet mit seiner »semi-automatischen Do-kumentation« die Orte der Macht aus. Er nutzt die Momente des Zufalls und des Kontrollverlustes, um die herrschenden Blickregime zu durchkreuzen. Die Relation von Sichtbarkeit und Unsichtbarkeit, von An-und Abwesenheit führt den Künstler zur Frage nach der Un / Verfügbarkeit des öffentlichen Raums. Dort, wo Überwachungskameras, Algorithmen und Bots massenhaft Bilder produzieren zeigt er den öffentlichen Raum als Realraum. Seine Panoramen beinhalten kontinuierliche Räume, kein Abschnitt wird ausge-lassen, wenn die Kamera ihr Prgramm abspult. Dennoch zeigen die aus Tausenden Einzelbildern zusammengesetzten Bilder eine Diskontinuität, die zeitlich strukturiert ist. Zwischen den Einzelbildern entsteht ein »disruptiver, offener Raum«, der mit der totalisierenden Perspektive bricht. Spinatschs arbeitet mit einem politisch produktiven Begriff von Unsichtbarkeit, der von der Inkommensu-rabilität von Teil und Ganzem getragen wird.
The two-decade-long US occupation of Afghanistan, following the September 11, 2001 attacks, finally ending with the withdrawal of the US forces on August 31, 2021. The ensuing political, social and economic chaos for Afghanistan continues to reverberate throughout Pakistan as well. Several journalists have lost their lives while covering ‘combating operations’ against terrorist organizations. The missions of secret agencies, target killings, insurgencies created by Taliban militants in the north, Baloch separatists’ movements in the south, and ‘disrupted law and order’ are some of the great threats faced by the media professionals while rending their professional assignments. By and large, Pakistan’s mainstream print and electronic media have covered the government’s National Action Plan to mount an ongoing anti-terrorist offensive with a positive tone. Extensive research has been carried out with regards to the image of Pakistan in the realm of terrorism in its national media.
TikTok is a popular platform allowing users to view and make short videos. The platform's embeddedness among youth cultures is key to TikTok’s commercial success, to attract and sustain a diverse array of international users. The discourse around children and social media especially TikTok is laced with technopanics, as is the case in India. Although sparse, literature shows children in India want to explore social media but parental mediation usually follows a restrictive style. Using a qualitative approach and multimodal methods, we unpack how children (10–18 years) in a large Indian metropolitan city use TikTok for self-presentation and creative expression while navigating restrictive parental mediation. This article helps gain in-depth understanding of children’s TikTok cultures in India by foregrounding their voices and contributes to larger scholarship on youth digital cultures by focusing on their: (a) vernacular cultures on TikTok, (b) deliberations on safety and wellbeing, and (c) negotiations regarding agency and resistance.
Despite growing scholarly interest in fan audiovisual translation, how fan translators exploit fictional content for online protests of real-world issues has not been thoroughly explored in the literature. This article examines the fan-driven metamorphosis of the US sitcom The Big Bang Theory in the Chinese online space, focusing on the fan-remix “Meeting Sheldon”, produced by the China-based fandubbing group Y Show Club amidst online protests against the original show’s official ban in China. Y Show Club paired audiovisual clips from the original series with newly dubbed tracks and subtitles in Mandarin and English. In doing so, they combined new content and the original sitcom characters at the intersection between fiction and reality to reimagine the present and future within the state apparatus of political enchantments.
The ‘Goodes saga’ in Australian Football transformed Adam Goodes’ persona as a dutiful son of the sport into a polarising celebrity, most infamously through an encounter with a female teenage fan. In this article, we argue that the ‘Goodes saga’ exposed the contested nature of Indigenous celebrity stemming from settler anxieties about the unruly child and Indigenous statesman. Goodes transformed from a sports star, a dutiful ‘son’ of the sport to the national celebrity of a political statesman – a position of adulthood that might be described as characteristic of Eldership. Goodes’ self-manufactured celebrity persona, based in his concept of Indigeneity as ‘having a foot in both worlds’, was enacted through his mission to incorporate Indigenous cultural practices into the sport and wider settler-Australian culture. These actions were persistently disparaged through recourses to Euro-centric concept of the child and childhood as a state of innocence. We prompt readers to consider why the settler-public and its national institutions like the Australian Football League are so invested with surrounding Indigenous stars with a discourse of childhood. Why might the AFL and settler society more broadly consider the possibility that Aboriginal men might ascend to adulthood such a terrifying proposition?
This chapter approaches human communicators as influencers and traces a line from mid-twentieth century studies of ‘opinion leaders’ right up to present-day social media influencers. It begins by examining the early work of Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, which suggested that opinion leaders act as intermediaries between media and their audiences (what became known as the two-step flow theory). It then explores the workings of celebrity influence and how celebrity itself has transformed over time. In particular, it describes how the emergence of reality television ushered in a new phase of celebrity marked by the increasing visibility of ‘ordinary’ people. Chapter 6 concludes by examining recent research on social media influencers and highlights a number of factors that putatively explain why such individuals are influential.
This article addresses how the Chinese short video-sharing platform TikTok, a key actor of global platform economy and its disconnect or subsequent ban influenced and changed ideas of creativity in India. Through qualitative interviews and content analysis of TikTok videos (available on YouTube), YouTube interviews of content creators and newspaper articles of the app ban, this paper suggests that TikTok, as a ‘memetic text’ and a site of ‘vernacular creativity’, encourages both ‘everyday acts of resistance’ and professionalism/entrepreneurial citizenship. While the app ban signposts digital ‘imitation’ publics’ transition from ‘low’ to ‘high’ technology environments, the values of professionalism and entrepreneurship remain constant. The paper shows the tension between professionalism/entrepreneurship and the ‘everyday acts of resistance’ to state-led technocratic vision. It argues against the disconnect between democratisation and ‘demoticisation’ of technology.
This chapter traces the development of the global digital storytelling movement from its origins in California to its adoption by the BBC in the UK and its subsequent dispersal around the world. It identifies the foundational practices, uneven development and diffusion, and emergent practices internationally.
Political discussions are important to a democratic society, and the media can play a significant role in generating political discussions by providing mediated public forums. Based upon these premises, this study conceptualizes talk radio listening as an 'opinion activity'. It examines the relationship between talk radio listening and various forms of opinion expressions and political discussions in Hong Kong. Analysis of a survey (N =800) shows that talk radio listeners are more opinionated about public affairs. They discuss public affairs more frequently with their acquaintances. They are also more willing to express minority opinions, more active in political participation, and more positive towards the value of political debates in the society at large. Some of these relationships, however, are conditioned by the consonance between the audience's pre-existing political attitudes and the contents of the radio talk shows. The implications of the findings are discussed.
Digital Storytelling and Co-creative CaveatsDigital Storytelling around the World: An Online Survey
This paper presents early results from an ARC-funded research project on the content, audience and influence of Australian talkback radio. Drawing upon the analysis of data from a survey of three talkback programs — John Laws and Neil Mitchell from the commercial sector and Australia Talks Back from the ABC — the paper focuses upon two aspects: the topics canvassed and the participation of the callers. Although very preliminary, the results of this survey narrow down the kinds of questions we need to ask as we move towards more sophisticated analysis of this media format.
The rise of user-led content creation and distribution, or produsage, is by now well recognised. User-produced content is providing a well-needed corrective to industrial journalism; user-produced creative work has become a regular component of the standard media diet for many users; and user-led distribution of content through file-sharing networks is now an important means of accessing content, and is cautiously being explored as a means of distribution by mainstream media producers. Such phenomena are beginning to affect the television industry. On the one hand, the user-led distribution of television programming now enables producers to bypass traditional distribution channels altogether; on the other, traditional television channels are already anticipating such moves through an increase in live content and event television. There is also a contrary movement of user-produced material further into the mainstream of the mediasphere. This article outlines a number of the operational models now available to players in the television industry: enlisting file-sharers in the direct distribution of TV shows to audiences; moving further towards a focus on live event television; and embracing user creativity in pursuit of produsage-based television models. It examines these options against a context of continuing convergence and change in the content industries.