Hybrid Media Events: The Charlie Hebdo Attacks and the Global Circulation of Terrorist Violence
... In the remaining part of this paper, I wish to argue for the relevance of studying digital religion as a public phenomenon in one particular context: within the structures of hybrid media. While hybrid as a concept has achieved, in recent years, considerable interest in media and communication studies (Chadwick, 2013;Hallin et al., 2021;Sumiala et al., 2018), it has also been addressed in the study of digital religion (Eschaibi & Hoover, 2023;Evolvi, 2017;Geertz et al., 2022;Hoover & Eschaibi, 2014). Here, I wish to provide a structureoriented approach to such hybrid media and argue how this approach could provide a valuable contribution to the study of digital religion in the future. ...
... While Chadwick's initial interest lies in studying transformations in political communication in a hybrid media system, his theory has been adapted to study a variety of communications fields in the present era, from journalism (Hallin et al., 2021) to religion (e.g. Postill & Epafras, 2018;Sumiala et al., 2018). ...
... Thus, communication in the hybrid media sphere takes place in the marketplace of attention (Webster, 2014) shaped by commodified communication. In these circumstances, audiences as actors are given an active role in creating and circulating content, but simultaneously their dependence on media platforms and their curated logics of algorithmic communication grows (see also Sumiala et al., 2018). ...
In this presidential address to the International Society for Media, Religion and Culture ( ismrc ) I argue for the relevance of studying digital religion as a public phenomenon in one particular context: within the structures of hybrid media . While hybrid as a concept has achieved, in recent years, considerable interest in media and communication studies, it has also been addressed in the study of digital religion. Here, I wish to provide a structure-oriented approach to such hybrid media and argue how this approach could provide a valuable contribution to the study of digital religion in the future.
... Instead of focusing on theoretical and empirical analyses of media events as ceremonial and ritual national occasions that stimulate a sense of belonging to a nation, as Dayan and Katz (1992) had, scholars in the critical tradition have focused more on the conflicting, global, and digital character of media events (Evans, 2018;Fox, 2018;Mortensen, 2015) and analysed them using a framework of terror, disaster, and war. These studies conceptualise media events as ritual disruptions of social cohesion and polarising performances of non-belonging in society (Liebes, 1998;Nossek, 2008;Sumiala et al., 2018;Valaskivi et al., 2019; see also Katz & Liebes, 2007). Others have questioned the usefulness of media event theory in the current era of fragmented, globalised, and digitised communication (see Frosh & Pinchevski, 2018;Rathnayake, 2021). ...
... We consider hybridity to be a kind of ontology of contemporary media events. For us, hybridity is a theoretical disposition that enables us to develop a nuanced understanding of the intensified sociality and related ambivalent dynamics of rituals of belonging in contemporary media events triggered by mediatised violence (Sumiala et al., 2018). Analysing the hybridity of contemporary media events is inherently complicated, as the idea of hybridity implies the existence of pure baseline forms before they become blended (Chadwick, 2013;Sumiala et al., 2018). ...
... For us, hybridity is a theoretical disposition that enables us to develop a nuanced understanding of the intensified sociality and related ambivalent dynamics of rituals of belonging in contemporary media events triggered by mediatised violence (Sumiala et al., 2018). Analysing the hybridity of contemporary media events is inherently complicated, as the idea of hybridity implies the existence of pure baseline forms before they become blended (Chadwick, 2013;Sumiala et al., 2018). In light of these challenges, one way of approaching the hybridity of contemporary media events is to see them, as Marwan Kraidy (2005: 13) does, as "contrapuntal" and "relational". ...
The updating of media event theory for the digital age has been underway for some time, and several researchers have pointed out that the complexity of the hybrid media environment poses a challenge when it comes to understanding how media events in the present digital context ritually create belonging. In this article, we examine violent media events as hybrid phenomena and discuss their ritual workings in the present digital media environment. We apply what we call the 5 A’s – actors, affordances, attention, affect, and acceleration – as key analytical tools to empirically study such events. We also develop the concept of hybridity in relation to media events by proposing three auxiliary A’s: assemblage, amplification, and accumulation. Building on our earlier work, we call for more analytical consideration of the ambivalences in the ritual constructions of belonging (and non-belonging) in such violent events. We use the Christchurch massacre of 2019 as a case study to illustrate these conceptual developments.
... Similarly, the role of professional journalistic media as a gatekeeper of public discourse has decreased. Hybridisation of the media environment changes how we perceive and analyse media events (Sumiala et al., 2018;Valaskivi et al., 2019) and understand the relationship of affectivity and media (Papacharissi, 2015). Combined, the transforming media formats and genres and the decrease of gatekeeping have contributed to increased content confusion and resulted in a difficulty of separating editorial content from advertisements or from made-up stories (Einstein, 2016). ...
... In recent years, hybridity has become one of the most widespread concepts in media and communication studies for discussing our contemporary media environment. The versatile uses of hybridity include intertwined development of practises and formats between social media and legacy media (Chadwick, 2013), convergence of producing and consuming media (Jenkins, 2006), globality of media circulation (Kraidy, 2005;Sumiala et al., 2018), co-agency of human and technological actors in the media environment (Latour et al., 1993;Sumiala et al., 2018) and even in new roles of platform companies as the gatekeepers for publicity (e.g. Bro and Wallberg, 2015;Nelimarkka et al., 2019). ...
... In recent years, hybridity has become one of the most widespread concepts in media and communication studies for discussing our contemporary media environment. The versatile uses of hybridity include intertwined development of practises and formats between social media and legacy media (Chadwick, 2013), convergence of producing and consuming media (Jenkins, 2006), globality of media circulation (Kraidy, 2005;Sumiala et al., 2018), co-agency of human and technological actors in the media environment (Latour et al., 1993;Sumiala et al., 2018) and even in new roles of platform companies as the gatekeepers for publicity (e.g. Bro and Wallberg, 2015;Nelimarkka et al., 2019). ...
We examine the position of five online-only ‘countermedia’ publications often publicly labelled as ‘fake media’ and use them to indicate how the ‘post-truth era’ takes place. Both academic and public discussions perceive countermedia as separate and distinct from the established, professionally produced journalist media outlets. We argue that the studied outlets are an integral part of the hybrid media environment. Our data show countermedia mainly remediate content initially published by professional Finnish media. We also suggest that media references are used strategically to explicate a relationship with mainstream media, as there are different ways of remediating the mainstream media content. This evidence contributes to the growing body of work criticising the usage of the ‘fake media’ concept and attempts to create a more nuanced understanding of countermedia’s role in its contexts. Furthermore, we suggest remediation as a lens may help scholars understand the integrated hybrid media environment.
... News media then try to satisfy this hunger by providing more news about the same issue (ibid). Discussions on hybrid media events (e.g., Sumiala et al. 2018) expand, firstly, on theorizations of the hybrid media system (Chadwick 2013) and, secondly, on the media event theory, and consider the complexity of the contemporary hybrid media environment in directing and expanding attention. The internet and the growth of social media have increased the complexity in understanding audience relevance for journalistic media that operate as a part of an intensified attention economy (Davenport and Beck 2001;Chadwick 2013) where human attention is increasingly harvested and resold to advertizers (Wu 2017, 6) and the accumulation of attention is dependent on the socio-technical environment intertwining the logics of the journalist media and social media (Chadwick 2013). ...
... In addition to attention, hybrid media events can be looked at from the perspective of four other A's: actors, affordances, affect and acceleration (Sumiala et al. 2018), which are also important dimensions for our discussion on the attention apparatus. The concept of affordance refers to the material and technological possibilities and constraints for the practices of managing attention. ...
... Here, the concept of affordance comes into play. Affordance refers to opportunities for action rather than the properties of the environment (Sumiala et al. 2018). Affordances are situated on the interface of the material and technological possibilities for human agency. ...
Acts of terrorist violence become repeatedly the focus of amplified
attention in Western media. These acts spur hybrid media events
where both news media and media users create and share
information and interpretations of the event. Large news
organizations play an integral role in attracting, steering and
regulating attention in hybrid media events of terrorist violence.
This article develops a theoretical conceptualization of the news
organization as an attention apparatus. We argue that the
apparatus consists of two dimensions: First, three conditions
constrain the workings of the attention apparatus: perceived
audience expectations, professional conditions of journalism and
societal responsibilities of journalism. Secondly, there are three
temporal affordances through which attention is managed:
immediacy, liveness and interruption. We come to these
conclusions through empirical research on newsroom practices in
terrorism news production at the Finnish Broadcasting Company
(Yle). Our data consist of thematic interviews (N = 33) with Yle
journalists, producers and content managers as well as newsroom
observations (14 days) conducted at Yle News and Current Affairs
departments. The data is interpreted through a grounded theory
approach. The article highlights how the temporal affordances
enable reporting in hybrid media events but also clash with
established conditions of news reporting.
... The second version of the question sets is slightly different in focus, with the first set being essentially a synthesis of the two sets attached above. The second set of questions focuses more specifically on issues related to the methodology and empirical research of a hybrid media event Sumiala et al., 2018). This set discusses the relationship between newer and older forms of media in a hybrid environment (Sumiala et al. 2018;) during a disruptive event and its commemoration, the amount of empirical data a hybrid media environment generates, and the effects the hybrid media environment may have on publicity and its production. ...
... The second set of questions focuses more specifically on issues related to the methodology and empirical research of a hybrid media event Sumiala et al., 2018). This set discusses the relationship between newer and older forms of media in a hybrid environment (Sumiala et al. 2018;) during a disruptive event and its commemoration, the amount of empirical data a hybrid media environment generates, and the effects the hybrid media environment may have on publicity and its production. ...
... First, I address the concept of the public, which operates in my work sometimes in the background (Publication I) and sometimes in the foreground (Publication III), without ever quite being centre stage. I examine the notion of the public through two adjacent notions: the public sphere and the hybrid media environment Sumiala et al., 2018), in addition to discussing the concept in more general terms. Second, I discuss the notion of social media by first addressing the problems in defining the concept in a scientifically relevant way. ...
Download the thesis from: https://trepo.tuni.fi/handle/10024/123774
Set off by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and a subsequent tsunami, the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster was, in some ways, a series of simultaneously cascading events that appear to reflect several aspects descriptive of the early 21st century. The disaster resulted from multiple failings in a complex socio-technical system set in motion by an unexpectedly powerful natural phenomenon. As often during major disasters, the mediated coverage of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster was not just about what had happened and what was about to happen, but also about how the people involved in the events, either directly or vicariously, felt about what they experienced.
In this dissertation, I delve into the intersection of the hybrid media environment and mediated feeling by examining the role of affect in the coverage of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. I focus on how affects circulate and stick in the mediated narratives about Fukushima Daiichi in Finnish and international contexts, in both journalistic reporting and social media discussions.
The introductory part of the thesis addresses the contemporary conditions of the hybrid media environment from a theoretical and methodological perspective. The aim of this section is to combine the understanding of affect with the notion of the public in a hybrid media environment, in the particular case of media coverage on the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.
Presenting the results of case studies conducted between 2014 and 2016, the five publications included in this dissertation open diverse angles to affective dynamics of social media discussions and journalism. Through their versatile empirical settings, the articles contribute to the ongoing debate in media studies on how contemporary social media shape the public discourse. The articles illustrate how social media simultaneously act as platforms enabling various types of public expression and allow for private multi-billion-dollar corporations to create revenue through collecting and selling the data generated by their users. The articles also discuss how users shift between different actor roles in these settings, moving between being the audience, informed citizens and peers exercising their right to public speech.
Each of the case studies provides a distinct angle to the actors and platforms that constitute the hybrid media environment. In two articles (Publication I; Publication V), the focus centres on the popular social media applications Twitter and Facebook, the analysis illuminating how affect circulates and sticks to certain figures in the conversations, and how affect is structured around cultural conventions, such as ritualised commemoration. One article (Publication III) examines what role traditional mainstream news journalism and scientific expertise play in circulating affect. Two articles (Publication II; Publication IV) examine how people use a mainstream media’s online commenting platform to express opinions and emotions about the news coverage of Fukushima Daiichi yet discuss scientific expertise in the same context.
The articles about Facebook and online news commenting (Publication II; Publication IV; Publication V) shed light on the affective dynamics in online discussion and develop the notion of affective discipline as a conceptual tool to analyse how moods and tones develop in these discussions. The articles focusing on mainstream media (Publication III; Publication IV) also use this concept to examine how public affect and emotion are managed during crises.
The results of the presented case studies provide new insights into the role of traditional mainstream journalism and social media during a global, disruptive event. By focusing on the concepts of affect and affective discipline, the study not only provides an analysis of media discussions about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster that confirms previous results on the cultural circulation of affect, but also expands the knowledge on how journalistic practices and public discussion influence these processes. In addition, the work points to the affective labour done by journalists and members of the public alike when they engage in acts of affective discipline to manage the moods of public discussion. Through these mechanisms, the dissertation contributes to the theoretical and methodological discussion on how to study affect in mostly text-based media.
... Our approach to this enterprise draws on our continuing research on events in digital media worlds and ethnographic investigation of them (see e.g. Sumiala et al. 2016;Sumiala et al. 2018;Valaskivi et al. 2019). ...
... In this context, various actors including journalists, authorities, ordinary media users and, in some cases, perpetrators participate in the communicative construction of events on and outside the digital media. This communication is dispersed across both social media and online news media, creating a unique empirical context for the ethnographic study of such events (Chadwick 2013;Sumiala et al. 2018;Sumiala and Räisä 2020). Third, digital media ethnography can be understood as a method to study 'natively digital' data. ...
... Such following is rarely linear (Sumiala et al. 2018) but instead consists of circulating moves among multiple actors, platforms and messages (see also Latour 1999). To give one example, one team member followed the Strasbourg Christmas market shooting event on Twitter. ...
This article explores what digital media ethnography as a methodological approach can offer to the study of contiguous media events with an unexpected, violent and fluid nature. Emphasising the role of media events in the present organisation of social life, we as digital media anthropologists acknowledge the tendency in the current digital media environment to eventise and spectacularise social life. This development serves the power-related purposes of attention seeking and public recognition in the digital world. The article is structured as follows: first, we provide a brief outline of the field of digital media ethnography in relation to the study of media event; second, we identify what we claim are three key methodological dilemmas in applying digital media ethnography to the study of today’s digitally circulating media events (scale, mobility and agency) and reflect on them in the context of our methodological positioning; third, we conclude this article by considering some epistemological and ontological implications of this methodological endeavour in relation to what can be called the ‘meta-field’ and the related instability in current digital research.
... In discussion, we provide insights into the ritual work of news media, including the process of intensifying meanings and the related boundary work on 'us' and 'them' as well as the ways in which this boundary work contributes to the building of solidarities and/or disruptions and polarisations in terrorist news events, as ritualised in news media (cf. Liebes, 1998;Morse, 2017;Nossek and Berkowitz, 2006;Sumiala et al., 2018). The article concludes with an interpretation of the broader social implications of the ritual work and related naturalisation of 'friends' and 'foes' in news media and the larger society. ...
... Couldry et al., 2010;Mitu and Poulakidakos, 2016) and the original focus on national news media (TV) -as the central stage of national media events -has been critiqued for its narrowness and inability to grasp the global spread of terrorist violence and the related contested social imaginaries of 'us' and 'them' circulating in global communication media, both in terms of news and social media (see e.g. Sumiala et al., 2018;Sreberny, 2016). ...
... 'Beloved leader', it reads. 'I am afraid of dying in Germany.' (Dearden, 2016 [Independent, 22 December]) Through emotional language and symbolic expression, diverse news media in the UK, France, Germany and Sweden relate the Christmas market attack to similar past attacks, such as the truck attack in Nice, creating a warlike discourse (see also Sumiala et al., 2018). Key here is the horrification of the unwanted rupture: ...
This article investigates the ritual work in terrorist news events, using the Berlin truck attack as a case in point. The article connects with the larger cluster of anthropologically inspired communication research on media events as public rituals in news media and applies digital media ethnography as its method. Fieldwork is conducted in 15 online news sites. The article identifies three key phases through which the ritual work was carried out: the rupture in the news event (ritualised as the strike), the liminal phase (ritualised as the manhunt) and the reconstitution of order following the attack (ritualised as the mourning). The article concludes with an interpretation of the broader social implications of the ritual work and related naturalisation of ‘friends’ and ‘foes’ and suggests that this type of ritual work contributes to a collective mythologisation of terrorism in news media and society at large.
... I found relevant information online. female,28,rural,media diary 15 March) From this perspective, audience engagement with COVID-19 briefings thus resembled what Vaccari, Chadwick, andO'Loughlin (2015, 1043) called a "hybrid media event," during which audience members were able to draw on "hybrid articulations and recombinations of media", taking advantage of "a more complex mix of affordances" (see also Sumiala et al. 2018). According to Vaccari, Chadwick, and O'Loughlin (2015), the multiple affordances of a hybrid media environment has the potential to blur and complicate the relationship between active and passive practices, enabling audiences to engage in a range of activities from a relatively passive reading of information about the live broadcast as it unfolds, to more active seeking of additional information (as in the case of the two examples quoted above) or commenting on the briefing on social media. ...
... The COVID-19 crisis evolved in a media environment in which the centrality of broadcasting has given way to a "hybrid media system" (Chadwick 2013) in which television, radio and print interact with digital platforms. In this context, the pandemic operated as a "hybrid media event" (Vaccari, Chadwick, and O'Loughlin 2015;Sumiala et al. 2018), with audiences combining television broadcasts with social media and news portals. ...
Existing research on media and the COVID-19 pandemic is largely based on quantitative data, focused on digital media, limited to single-country studies, and often West-centred. As such, it has limited capacity to provide a holistic account of the causes and consequences of audience engagement with COVID-19 news, or to consider the impact of systemic political and media factors. To compensate for that, we examine a large set of qualitative interviews and media diaries collected in four eastern European countries during the first wave of the pandemic. We show that changes in news consumption—including the resurgence of television and decline of print consumption—were not driven solely by audience demand for up-to-date information, but also by practical constrains of home-bound life in lockdown, and the introduction of live briefings. Our findings underscore disruption and uncertainty as key elements of audience experiences and highlight the markedly privatized and depoliticized nature of public debate in the early phase of the pandemic. We argue that the pandemic was an unpredictable, open-ended, and exhausting media event with high potential for divisiveness and polarization, especially in contexts marked by low levels of media freedom, declining democratic standards, and elite-led politicization of the crisis.
... In today's acute crisis events, such as terror attacks and disasters (Bruns & Hanusch, 2017), connected individuals represent electronic eyes and ears, reconfiguring the traditional relations of communicative power (Coombs, 2012;Cottle, 2014;Holmgreen, 2015;Sumiala et al., 2018;United Nations Foundation, 2011). Instead of the traditional news media that previously played a key role in the creation of modernity's shared worlds, much of the public sense of the world is now created on and through digital media platforms. ...
... Ritual research has been widely undertaken to consider the role of communicative action in acute crisis events (Morse, 2018;Rothenbuhler, 2010;Sumiala, 2013). It has helped to produce an understanding of the social functions of patterned, performative and symbolic forms of communication related to the cohesion and/or disruption of societies and communities in times of crisis (Grimes, 2011;Rothenbuhler, 2010;Sumiala et al., 2018;Sumiala & Tikka, 2011). However, the crisis communication of ordinary people has remained understudied from the viewpoint of ritualisation. ...
Digital connectivity enables ordinary people to participate in the social construction of crises. This article explores the crisis responses of common people through the prism of ritual communication in the case of the 2017 Stockholm terror attack. The ritual approach has helped to produce a nuanced understanding of the social functions of patterned and performative communication in crises and conflicts. However, the crisis communication of ordinary people has remained understudied from the viewpoint of ritualisation. Drawing from digital media ethnography and content analysis of a Twitter feed created around the hashtag #openstockholm, it is claimed that the ritualisation of crisis responses illustrates the active agency of ordinary people and contributes to ephemeral social cohesion.
... Starbird and Stamberger 2010) and studies of terrorism, specifically (cf. Sumiala et al. 2018;Eriksson Krutrök 2020). ...
Obtaining accurate information from social media during a crisis can be difficult, but should all information really be disseminated? Social media platforms actively filter out terrorist and violent extremist content (TVEC), but how are users themselves counteracting its spread? This paper aims to connect the research on media events with studies currently being conducted in information science and digital media research through a case study of tweets during the Vienna terror attack in late 2020. These tweets were manually coded in accordance with Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis. This study shows that during the 2020 Vienna attack, GIFs shared on Twitter served three functions: amplification, personalisation and ethical practice. The paper ends with a discussion on the ways cats may function as a countermeasure against the prevalence of TVEC on social media during terrorist attacks and the implications of such countermeasures.
... Like natural disasters, terrorist attacks are typically followed by large amounts of communication data (social networks and news media), which can hardly be analyzed without automated procedures. Sumiala et al. (2019), for instance, applied automated content analysis and social network analytics to Twitter data related to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris and found that events conveyed live on social media fostered stereotypical and immediate interpretations of the incidents (Sumiala et al. 2018). At the same time, these studies show that the complementary application of qualitative methods can be extremely helpful for providing context to and making sense of computational data analysis. ...
... Several examples can be found in response to terrorist attacks as a way of mourning and expressing solidarity and fear (see the example of the 2005 London bombing; Mitchell, 2006). The exchange can be a part of a hybrid media event (Huhtamäki et al., 2018, on the Charlie Hebdo attack) being broadcast and described on a variety of different platforms, including Twitter. A characteristic of hybrid media events is the sharing of affect, often addressed on Twitter as a ritualist way to manage emotions by bringing together a multitude of individual voices. ...
The fire that destroyed a large part of the world-famous Notre Dame Cathedral in France in April 2019 shocked the world. A lively expression of thoughts and feelings during and after the fire arose on Twitter. In this article, we will analyze the discourses about the Notre Dame fire on Twitter, with a specific focus on emoji, focusing on the thoughts and feelings emoji express and how they convey the meanings religious buildings have for people. Based on a dataset of almost 2 million tweets collected in the week following the incident, this paper leverages a variety of computational and qualitative methods to explore the topic from different angles. Temporal analysis and topic modelling show the dynamics of emoji usage, which drastically changes after a few days from expressing sorrow to expressing skepticism. Semantic analysis using the word2vec model reveals the implicit meaning of potentially ambiguous emoji characters.
... In our modern life, crises and the collective understanding of their meaning, reasons, depth and consequences are all formed via the media. In media society, crises and catastrophes become hybrid media events (Sumiala, Valaskivi, Tikka, & Huhtamäki, 2018) whose reasons and explanations are sought on different kinds of platforms and in different kinds of genres. ...
The article argues that the hybrid media environment contributes to contemporary epistemic contestations. Framing the argument with the historical and social scientific contexts of our present media landscape it discusses the logic governing the content confusion that permeates this landscape in relation to the construction of world views and social reality. Then, it examines the notion of an attention factory. By way of an example of how the attention factory works and how conspiracy theories are circulated, the QAnon phenomenon is presented. Finally, the article considers whether and how aspects of today’s media environment can be considered responsible or a contributory factor to the high public exposure and visibility of conspiracy theories. The article concludes with a brief discussion of some factors that are deterring the spread of conspiracy theories.
... We would also strongly encourage research that uses a mixed methods approach, particularly in the context of crisis and risk communication research because they can provide deep and systematic understanding of crisis-related phenomena. For instance, the digital ethnography approach by Sumiala et al. (2018Sumiala et al. ( , 2019 shows how automated classification of social media postings and qualitative analysis can mutually inform each other and generate a deep and systematic understanding of crisis-related text corpora. ...
This is the Editor's essay for Volume 5, Issue 1 of the Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research.
... Terrorist incidents are hybrid media events that are disruptive in nature and invariably play out on social media in real time (Vaccari et al., 2015). Twitter in particular intensifies communication about these events, amplifying their "hybrid reality" (Sumiala et al., 2016(Sumiala et al., , 2018. The microblogging site is ideally suited for breaking news stories and sharing information during crisis events (Murthy, 2013). ...
Twitter hashtags allow citizens to share vital information and make sense of acute crisis events such as terrorist attacks. They also enable those watching from afar to express their sympathy and solidarity with the victims. Perhaps the most well known of these has been #PorteOuverte (translated into English as “Open Door”), first used during the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris before re-emerging during subsequent atrocities in Brussels (March 2016) and Nice (July 2016). The hashtag was originally created by journalist Sylvain Lapoix in order to connect those in Paris looking for somewhere to stay with those able to offer them refuge, before reaching an international audience courtesy of its amplification by public figures and citizens based overseas. This article adds to this emergent literature by analyzing the networked gatekeeping dynamics of #PorteOuverte during the Paris terror attacks. It does so by reviewing the literature on Twitter hashtags and acute crisis events, exploring how Twitter was used during the Paris terror attacks, and presenting the results of a Social Network Analysis (SNA) of 399,256 #PorteOuverte tweets posted as the attacks unfolded on 13 November 2015. Results indicate that professional journalists were key broadcasters during four identified peaks within #PorteOuverte, helping to promote the informational hashtag and connect those directly affected. However, citizens and bloggers played an increasingly important gatekeeping function in the aftermath of events such as the Bataclan siege in Paris.
... For example, after the Charlie Hebdo 2015 shooting in Paris, #JesuisCharlie became the most popular Twitter hashtag worldwide. Driven by the momentum generated by the broad base of Twitter users in France, it reached 6,500 mentions per minute at its peak (Sumiala et al., 2018). The French public's confidence in Twitter as a primary means of mass communication was also demonstrated by the hashtag #porteouverte (https://twitter.com/hashtag/ ...
... For example, after the Charlie Hebdo 2015 shooting in Paris, #JesuisCharlie became the most popular Twitter hashtag worldwide. Driven by the momentum generated by the broad base of Twitter users in France, it reached 6,500 mentions per minute at its peak (Sumiala et al., 2018). The French public's confidence in Twitter as a primary means of mass communication was also demonstrated by the hashtag #porteouverte (https://twitter.com/hashtag/ ...
Social media is emerging as the primary source of contemporary news. Its ubiquity advances the possibility of new factors, in addition to classical agenda-setting ones like emotional arousal and self-interest, colouring the ‘need for orientation’ relevance and elevating its topical significance. This study finds that social media news fulfils the need for orientation by creating a false high uncertainty resulting from agenda setting effects and driven by salient issues appearing on Twitter public agenda.
... JS/KV: Based on your later work La terreur spectacle: Terrorisme et télévision (Dayan 2006) on violence and terror in the media, how would you analyze the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015 in Paris? We ask based on our own work on this case study (Sumiala et al., 2018). 1 DD: My recent work discusses the actual construction and narrative reconstruction of events in terms of news dramaturgies. Such dramaturgies are both interpretive elucidations and forms of action endowed with the performative power of defining situations. ...
In this interview, Professor Daniel Dayan provides a philosophical and theoretical reflection on the development of media event theory and its influence in media and communication studies since 1990s. He reveals the main theoretical premises and inspirations behind the theory and provides a thoughtful reflection of the historical situation in which the theory was developed. The latter part of the interview observes the present day terrorist violence in the framework of media event theory.
Based on a review of research published over the past decade on media, piety, and religious identity, this chapter argues that secularization does not manifest uniformly in the media but, rather, that it is a multidimensional condition. It identifies two distinct dimensions of secularization in the media: media content that illustrates the weakening of religious identities, and content that illustrates individuals' agency to determine their religious identities. The chapter describes how different approaches to the study of religion and spirituality have opened up understanding of their role in communication and media. Secularization theory constitutes a prominent lens through which researchers today understand the cultural place of religion and, by extension, piety and religious identity. Social media can reinforce religious orthodoxy while mimicking the organizing processes of socially progressive collective action. Digital media facilitate the development and dissemination of unorthodox religious identities, expressions, and spaces, including ones that intentionally position themselves outside of religious institutions.
The chapter begins with a brief history of the representation of death in communication media asking how and for what purpose death is represented in news media beginning with early newspapers, the visual representation of death in photography, television, and finally the Internet and social media. It turns to Carey's ritual view of communication and investigates death representation in different media from the perspective of symbolic and religiously and spiritually inspired communication. The chapter considers the emerging research field of digital death pointing out some questions for current scholarly thinking about how the digital representation of death in hybrid media may challenge existing philosophical, sociological, and theological categories of life and death. New vernacular acts of mediated ritual engagement with death have evolved and expanded as ordinary media users have gained the capacity to create and share such acts through social media.
This article analyzes algorithm awareness as a process—a series of activities intended to reach a goal over time. It examines how a group of Costa Ricans understood, felt about, and related to TikTok and its algorithms as they began using the app for the first time. Data come from diary entries completed by 43 participants about their use of TikTok over a month and seven focus groups with these diarists. The article discusses five activities through which users expressed developing forms of awareness of TikToks’ algorithms and enacted various rhythms in the experience of the app: managing expectations about what TikTok is and how it works; “training” the app; experiencing a sense of algorithmic personalization; dealing with oscillations in the pertinence of recommendations; and showing various forms of rejection of TikTok. The article then considers some implications of bringing time to the fore in the study of algorithm awareness.
What began as the 1972 Munich Olympic Games quickly became a global media event, a live broadcast of a deadly terrorist attack that changed the future of modern terrorism. Broadcast to an audience of over 900 million, the event was a game changer that changed the relationships within the triangle terrorism-media-public. The ‘new’ terrorism, following the Munich massacre, has adapted the new rules of the game, the rules of media-oriented actions. Media-oriented terrorism is the use of pre-planned attacks that are wittingly designed to get media attention and coverage and consequently to reach the general public and decision makers. This article presents two powerful concepts in communication and terrorism paradigm that emerged from this tragic event: the notion of The Theatre of Terror and the notion of Coercive Media Events. Finally, it examines post-Munich trends and especially how terrorists’ migration to social media and online platforms has preserved and refined their lessons from the Munich attack.
In March 2019, the first ever act of terrorist violence in New Zealand was live-streamed on social media, making many social media users unwitting witnesses to the massacre on their devices. The Christchurch mosque attacks revealed a particular digital and emotional vulnerability embedded in the digital media infrastructure. The last words of the first victim soon transmorphed into #hellobrother that, as a digital artefact, participated in shaping the emotional landscape. Combining real-time digital media ethnography on Twitter with data science and computational tools, this multi-method study has two aims: first and foremost, to develop and apply new methodology for the study of unexpected, mediated events as they unfold in real time; second, to explore post-death digital artefacts through the concept of digital afterlife that we approach through two complementary perspectives, data afterlife (the technological) and data as afterlife (the emotional). Adopting a relational perspective, we further develop the concept, and highlight the constitutive role of data in the emotional dimension of digital afterlife arising from its capacity to enter affective arrangements. The methodological contributions include development of a conceptual and technological framework for conducting data science as ethnography and the introduction of Tweetboard, a novel artefact for investigating digital afterlife.
In this article, we investigate the challenge of hybrid media events of terrorist violence for journalism and analyse how news organizations manage epistemic modes in such events. Epistemic modes refer to different ways of knowing, which are managed by newsrooms through journalistic and editorial practices. We draw from an empirical study of terrorism-related news production in the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle). Our data consist of thematic interviews ( N = 33) with Yle journalists, producers, and content managers and newsroom observations (14 days) conducted at Yle. The study investigates the data through a grounded theory approach with the aim of creating a theoretical understanding of knowledge production in hybrid media events. The results are drawn from a qualitative content analysis and close reading of the interview data, with the other data sets informing the core analysis. The article identifies seven epistemic modes of relevance to news production in hybrid media events: not-knowing, description, rumoring, witnessing, emotion, analysing and perpetrating. The modes are analysed in relation to three dimensions of crisis reporting: immediate sense-making, ritualizing and transformation back to normalcy. The article finds that although particular epistemic modes are typical to certain dimensions of reporting hybrid, disruptive media events, both the modes and the dimensions also are also merged and intermixed. This condition together with growing amounts of problematic epistemic modes of rumoring, emotion and perpetrating challenge journalists’ epistemic authority in reporting hybrid media events involving terrorist violence.
In recent years, the terrorist network Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has generated what might be referred to as a ‘spectacle of fear’ through strategic dissemination of execution videos and other graphic material. In response, social media users, activists and others circulate ‘counter-spectacles’, attempting to circumvent Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s spectacle of fear. An important case in point is the global hacking network Anonymous declaring ‘war’ against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, including a global call for a ‘Troll ISIS Day’. This article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the spectacle of fear generated by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and the counter-spectacle created through Anonymous’ trolling practices and explores empirically how Anonymous uses humor to combat fear through the memes produced on ‘Troll ISIS Day’. Bottom-up, cultural forms such as memes are increasingly woven into strategies for countering the fear associated with terrorism, and they represent the potential for humor to generate public engagement. However, as these memetic counter-spectacles draw on the incongruent humor characteristic of meme culture, they both contest and adopt strategies of fear, pointing to ethical challenges inherent in the counter-spectacle.
The traditional government-military-public relationship to the public driver's relationship is moving to the government and military. Conflicts are increasingly asymmetrical, networked, urbanized and open to the global publicities because of internet global connections and especially global access to the social media. The public-driven network-based global possibility to online communication means threats and the nature of conflict to become “hybrid.” “Hybrid warfare” challenges the standard way of waging military operations. Military and security organizations have to combat new technologies of their adversaries. This article sets out to discuss the phenomena of hybrid warfare in contemporary rhizomatic society and a hybrid media environment. Furthermore, this research considers how reflexive control functions can provide a historical perspective to ahistorical accounts of hybrid warfare and thus help us to better understand the contemporary challenges and threats of hybrid warfare, particularly coming from Russia.
The past decade has seen an intense mobilization of grief and remembrance on social media linked to the injunction to inscribe, share, and curate life and death in the here-and-now. This article navigates the heterogeneity of these practices, using the term hyper-mourning to point both to the conditioning of mourning by the affordances of hyper-connectivity and to debates around these emerging forms of mourning as being emotionally hyperbolic and ‘inauthentic’ reactions to death events. Based on the discussion of select examples, I sketch out a typology of hyper-mourning, depending on the different story positions of teller, co-teller, or witness from which such performances are produced. As I argue, these different performances become typically associated with particular modes of affective positioning made available to the recipients of these shared stories—namely positions of proximity or distance to the death event and the dead, the networked recipient(s), and the emotional self. This typology proposes a small stories approach to hyper-mourning practices, which are organized around the mobilization of grief and remembrance for connecting networked audiences around identities, affect, and moral values dis/alignments. The article contributes to the interdisciplinary study of digital cultures of memory, affect, and identities.
The traditional government-military-public relationship to the public driver's relationship is moving to the government and military. Conflicts are increasingly asymmetrical, networked, urbanized and open to the global publicities because of internet global connections and especially global access to the social media. The public-driven network-based global possibility to online communication means threats and the nature of conflict to become “hybrid.” “Hybrid warfare” challenges the standard way of waging military operations. Military and security organizations have to combat new technologies of their adversaries. This article sets out to discuss the phenomena of hybrid warfare in contemporary rhizomatic society and a hybrid media environment. Furthermore, this research considers how reflexive control functions can provide a historical perspective to ahistorical accounts of hybrid warfare and thus help us to better understand the contemporary challenges and threats of hybrid warfare, particularly coming from Russia.
Joulun alla 2017 Helsingin Sanomat (HS) julkaisi vuodettuihin salaisiin asiakirjoihin pohjautuneen jutun Puolustusvoimien Viestikoekeskuksen harjoittamasta tiedustelusta. Laura Halmisen ja Tuomo Pietiläisen kirjoittama juttu nostatti kiihkeän keskustelun julkisuudessa. Se keräsi satoja kommentteja Helsingin Sanomien verkkolehdessä ja oli muutaman päivän ajan Suomen keskustelluin aihe Twitterissä. Tässä artikkelissa analysoidaan uutiskommenteista ja sosiaalisesta mediasta kerättyä aineistoa. Sisällön erittelystä käy ilmi, että HS sai verkossa enimmäkseen kylmää kyytiä. Enemmistö kommentoijista kritisoi lehteä jutun julkaisemisesta. Jyrkimpien kannanottojen mukaan toimittajat vaaransivat kansallisen turvallisuuden ja syyllistyivät maanpetokseen. Huomattavan harva kantaa ottaneista asettui julkisesti puolustamaan tietojen julkaisemista. Artikkelia varten tehdyssä diskurssianalyysissä kannanottojen erot palautuvat yhtäältä yhteiskunnallisiin puhuja-asemiin politiikan verkostoissa sekä toisaalta erilaisiin käsityksiin turvallisuuden ja yksilönvapauksien asemasta demokratiassa. Tietovuotoa koskevan keskustelun analyysi antaa vihjeitä siitä, miten valtion ja median suhteet rakentuvat hybridin mediajärjestelmän oloissa.
This article traces a hybrid media event that unfolded in Russia in January 2018. Started on YouTube as a homoerotic music video, the so-called Satisfaction Challenge turned into a meme with hundreds of participants, millions of followers, and national media coverage. Using digital ethnography, we examine the interaction of Russian officials, publics, and media throughout this multi-sited, multi-actor, and multi-voiced event. In so doing, we pose questions about the relationship between hybrid media and political regimes, particularly, the interplay between traditional and digital media as it plays out in the realm of social contention in Russia.
In this article, the authors examine the intensification of liveness and its effects in the Charlie Hebdo attacks that took place in Paris in January 2015. In their investigation they first re-visit the existing theoretical literature on media, event and time, and discuss in particular the relationship between media events and the idea of liveness. They then move on to the empirical analysis of the Charlie Hebdo attacks and demonstrate the aspects of intensified liveness in the circulation of selected tweets. The analysis is based on a multi-method approach developed for the empirical study of hybrid media events. In conclusion, the authors argue that the liveness, experienced and carried out simultaneously on multiple platforms, favours stereotypical and immediate interpretations when it comes to making sense of the incidents unfolding before the eyes of global audiences. In this condition, incidents are interpreted ‘en direct’, but within the framework of older mnemonic schemes and mythologization of certain positions (e.g. victims, villains, heroes) in the narrative. This condition, they claim, further accelerates the conflict between the different participants that took part in the event.
This chapter discusses the temporal aspects of the Fukushima disaster in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Following the live press conferences of the Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, we trace the temporal trajectory of the development of #edano_nero (‘Get some sleep, Edano!’), a Twitter hashtag that was developed by viewers of the press conferences on their second screens. The reading of live press conferences suggests that a disruptive media event can involve strong emotional dynamics and that it can include somewhat surprising registers. Our empirical findings indicate that in the traumatic situation of an ongoing disaster, social media feeds can serve not only as outlets for feelings, but also as platforms for collective emotion formation that form trajectories in time.
This chapter studies temporal aspects of the Fukushima disaster from the perspective of remembering. This chapter demonstrates how the meanings, interpretations and uses of media events change and develop through time, as narratives and counter-narratives vary and shift. We demonstrate how temporal affordances are dependent on technological affordances and interpretations of a disruptive media event. This chapter contains a social network analysis (SNA) of commemorative tweets from 2016 demonstrating that public actors, such as media operators and NGOs like Greenpeace, gain the most retweets and thus the most visibility. This chapter ends with a qualitative analysis of Greenpeace International tweets 2011–2016 that demonstrate how temporal and technological affordances change the mode of tweeting.
In this concluding chapter, we revisit the beginnings of our book and discuss the main findings of our project. The case studies presented herein are a unique combination of wide-ranging data from different sources, the innovative use of computational and qualitative methods and ambitious theoretical cross-pollination. This multifaceted approach has allowed us to address the hybrid logics of the circulation of meanings and emotions in the contemporary media environment over time. Moreover, our enquiries have made visible how mediated communication and affect are used by societies to maintain the status quo after traumatic, disruptive events. The findings provide new insight into disruptive events in the global hybrid media environment and into the way they are influenced by the factors of time, space and emotion.
This chapter presents the background for the book. Our point of departure is a distinction between occurrences (contingent things that take place in the world) and events (discursive constructions that make sense of occurrences). This chapter opens the central trajectories that come together in our attempt to explain how the triple disaster on 11 March 2011 in Japan was made sense of. This chapter suggests that the meanings, affects and articulations are linked to four intersecting discussions, looking at the event (1) as a dramatic example of processing cultural trauma, (2) as a disruptive global media event that unfolds in (3) a new kind of hybrid media environment, and that carries with it the exceptional political and cultural tensions related to (4) nuclear politics.
This chapter looks at the Fukushima disaster as a media event from a spatial perspective by raising the question of how social media activity constructs social distance, and in so doing conditions the dynamics of public discourse. By applying co-retweeted network analysis of retweeting in Japan during three consecutive years, the chapter shows how the ambient sense of community in Twitter feeds about Fukushima moved from an early ‘disaster utopia’ to a more acute political polarization that in the context of national nuclear politics is articulated as a core theme. Polarization of discussions in the aftermath of Fukushima, the general political landscape and the increasingly strategic use of social media lead to a mediated social geography where it is difficult for science and journalism to play a constructive role.
This chapter examines the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster through circulation of affect in a hybrid media environment. Using the news coverage of potassium iodide tablet buying sprees in the Northern Hemisphere in March 2011 as its case study, this chapter examines how affect sticks and circulates in the news coverage, as areas outside Japan anticipated and speculated about the possible nuclear fallout from Fukushima Daiichi. The chapter introduces the notion of affective discipline and uses it to illustrate how distinct cultural tropes are used to manage circulation of affect during a crisis. Moreover, this chapter suggests that acts of affective discipline render visible the dual role of the public in crisis reporting: represented as panicky but addressed as rational.
This study explores how British and American newspapers covered the 2015 terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo. British newspapers prioritize free speech and the protection of marginalized groups compared with American ones, but both countries differentiate Muslims from radical terrorists. Attention to news media coverage of the attack is positively related to public approval of publishing the cartoons, supporting press freedom. Implications for free speech debate over Charlie Hebdo are discussed.
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.
Using mediatization as the key concept, this article presents a theory of the influence media exert on society and culture. After reviewing existing discussions of mediatization by Krotz (2007), Schulz (2004), Thompson (1995), and others, an institutional approach to the mediatization process is suggested. Mediatization is to be considered a double-sided process of high modernity in which the media on the one hand emerge as an independent institution with a logic of its own that other social institutions have to accommodate to. On the other hand, media simultaneously become an integrated part of other institutions like politics, work, family, and religion as more and more of these institutional activities are performed through both interactive and mass media. The logic of the media refers to the institutional and technological modus operandi of the media, including the ways in which media distribute material and symbolic resources and make use of formal and informal rules.
Nation branding is a contemporary, transnationally circulating practice, the most recent feature of imagined nation-making in the global history of nations. While earlier imaginations of nationhood rooted their ideas and philosophy in core political concepts, such as citizenship, national sovereignty and democracy, the social imaginary of nation branding takes its theory and practices from marketing. The paradox of nation branding is that it is a method of distinction adopted by nations because other nations have done it. As a practice, nation branding is thus a circulating fashion of governance, a performance necessary for modern nations to adopt to maintain their status as competitive states in the global economic competition. The paper compares the nation-branding strategy documents of Finland and Sweden (2005–2013). The strategies of the two countries bear a remarkable resemblance to one another. Some of the similarities can be explained by their close cultural proximity. Nevertheless, comparison exemplifies how the global fashion of nation branding becomes a localized performance which requires the pretence that the process is unique within each nation. In other words, the imagined community of the nation and the legitimacy of branding are sustained through the belief that while everybody else is also branding their nation, ‘our’ brand is uniquely authentic.
World Television: From Global to Local, a new assessment of the interdependence of television across cultures and nations brings together the most current research and theories on the subject. By examining recent developments in the world system of television as well as several theories of culture, industry, genre, and audience, author Joseph D. Straubhaar offers new insights into the topic. He argues that television is being simultaneously globalized, regionalized, nationalized, and even localized, with audiences engaging it at multiple levels of identity and interest; therefore the book looks at all these levels of operation.Key FeaturesDraws upon both international communication and cultural studies perspectives: Presents a new model is presented that attempts to move beyond the current controversies about imperialism and globalization.Looks at historical patterns: Historical patterns across cultures and countries help compare where television has been and where it is going.Takes a contemporary focus: Uses of technology, flows and patterns of program development, genres of television, the interaction of producers and audiences, and patterns of audience choice among emerging alternatives are examined. Explores how the audience for these evolving forms of television is structured: The effects of these forces or patterns of television have on both cultural formations and individual identities are identified.Intended AudienceThis is an excellent text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in Globalizatiion and Culture, Global Media, Television Studies, Television Criticism, and International Media.
Nation branding is a rapidly developing practice for promoting images of a nation-state for tourists or investors, sometimes with the secondary goal to foster nation building. It has also attracted a fair amount of scholarly attention. Analyses have focused on various themes, including national identity and neoliberal approaches to nation building. Given that the practice of nation branding presupposes the orchestration of mediated
campaigns, surprisingly few studies have specifically focused on the role of the media.
This article argues that a focus on the media (as technologies and organizations) can shed light on the dynamics of nation branding. The article reviews previous research, then presents a specific case of nation branding in Ukraine. This case study reveals the different types of media involved and how this involvement may have varied consequences for the analysis of branding campaigns.
On December 10, 2011, the first tweet was sent out from the @Sweden Twitter account, a nation-branding project financed by the Swedish government through the Swedish Institute and VisitSweden. Trumpeted by the media both in Sweden and internationally as an exercise in “transparent” and “democratic” nation-branding via the use of Twitter, the @Sweden account is “given” to a new Swede every week, and, supposedly, these curators are given free rein to tweet what they like, when they like. The use of a popular communication channel by the Swedish government—in this case, Twitter—provides an illuminating example of the carefully planned and managed promotion and nation-branding of Sweden, presented under the guise of a “transparent” and “democratic” selection and editorial processes. The @Sweden project will be addressed in light of “liberation technology” (Diamond, 201011.
Diamond , L. 2010. Liberation technology. Journal of Democracy, 21(3): 69–83. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) and “technology discourse” (Fisher, 201012.
Fisher , E. 2010. Contemporary technology discourse and the legitimation of capitalism. European Journal of Social Theory, 13: 229–252. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) perspectives, within which a correlation between access to, and use of, technology and proactive change is postulated. These theoretical perspectives are particularly valuable when heeding Kaneva's (201119.
Kaneva , N. 2011. Nation branding: Toward an agenda for critical research. International Journal of Communication, 5: 117–141. [Web of Science ®]View all references) call for a more critical, communications-based understanding of nation-branding.
The aim of this paper is to make a meta-theoretical contribution to conceptions of how power and governance operate in contemporary policy-making. Most approaches to governance generally brush aside the actual mechanics of how influence is wielded and social change effected. To fill this gap we argue that society is managed increasingly through epistemic governance, which works on actors' perceptions of the world and its current challenges. Our point is that regardless of which actors we assume to be influential in affecting public policies, they operate by utilizing a limited number of strategies, in broad paradigmatic as well as in focused practical dimensions. The epistemic work actors are engaged in focuses on three aspects of the social world: (1) ontology of the environment, (2) actor identifications, and (3) norms and ideals, or constructions of what the world is, who we are, and what is good or desirable. As such, we suggest ways to move beyond more or less structuralist explanations of sources and forms of power to reveal the strategies of power at play in attempts to influence policy change in the contemporary world.
The greater interconnectivity and interdependence unleashed by globalization are not creating a more harmonious, cosmopolitan humanity. On the contrary, the more global the world becomes, the more insistent particular differences, especially of the nationalist kind, are being articulated around the world, often leading to tension and conflict. This seeming paradox cannot be reconciled through simple mantras of ‘unity in diversity’. Rhetorical references to ‘a single humanity’ to overcome structurally entrenched divisions (as institutionalized in the world system of nation-states) are not sufficient for the attainment of greater pan-human solidarity. In response to this predicament this paper argues for a cosmopolitan perspective, in which a humanistic universalism should not be seen as a static moral ideal, but as a social and political horizon that must be worked towards, but probably never achieved, through a painstaking and continuing process of cosmopolitanization against the grain of powerful modes of particularist closure.
This article assesses the cultural policies of ‘New Labour’, the UK Labour government of 1997–2010. It takes neo-liberalism as its starting point, asking to what extent Labour’s cultural policies can be validly and usefully characterised as neo-liberal. It explores this issue across three dimensions: corporate sponsorship and cuts in public subsidy; the running of public sector cultural institutions as though they were private businesses; and a shift in prevailing rationales for cultural policy, away from cultural justifications, and towards economic and social goals. Neo-liberalism is shown to be a significant but rather crude tool for evaluating and explaining New Labour’s cultural policies. At worse, it falsely implies that New Labour did not differ from Conservative approaches to cultural policy, downplays the effect of sociocultural factors on policy-making, and fails to differentiate varying periods and directions of policy. It does, however, usefully draw attention to the public policy environment in which Labour operated, in particular the damaging effects of focusing, to an excessive degree, on economic conceptions of the good in a way that does not recognise the limitations of markets as a way of organising production, circulation and consumption.
This work aims to introduce the reader to Pierre Bourdieu's theory of fields, to evaluate it critically and, through case studies, to test its implementation in the analysis of new objects. While the use of Bourdieu's concept of the habitus has given rise to countless discussions, the literature strangely remains more silent on the theory of fields, although it lies at the heart of his work. A series published by Editions du Seuil, started and initially edited by Bourdieu, includes a number of monographs that apply the theory of fields;r some journals have devoted whole issues to explicitly mobilizing the theory in order to study specific areas, and a growing number of works make use of it. However, critical discussions that seek to give an account of this theory both in general terms and in particular areas remain rare. The aim of this work is to fill that gap. One of the hypotheses put forward in this book is that the theory of fields constitutes an adequate tool for explaining and understanding the social world but that its use must be rigorously circumscribed and correspond to certain methodological principles.
Notions of social change are often divided into local versus international. But what actually happens at the national level—where policies are ultimately made and implemented—when policy-making is interdependent worldwide? How do policy-makers take into account the prior choices of other countries? Far more research is needed on the process of interdependent decision-making in the world polity.
National Policy-Making: domestication of global trends offers a unique set of hybrid cases that straddle these disciplinary and conceptual divides. The volume brings together well-researched case studies of policy-making from across the world that speak to practical issues but also challenge current theories of global influence in local policies. Distancing itself from approaches that conceive narrowly of policy transfer as a "one-way street" from powerful nations to weaker ones, this book argues instead for an understanding of national decision-making processes that emphasize cross-national comparisons and domestic field battles around the introduction of worldwide models.
The case studies in this collection show how national policies appear to be synchronized globally yet are developed with distinct "national" flavors. Presenting new theoretical ideas and empirical cases, this book is aimed globally at scholars of political science, international relations, comparative public policy, and sociology.
In this article I will present and discuss the Swedish virtual embassy as a new example of nation branding. By exploring the development of the Swedish embassy in Second Life, activities arranged by and involving the virtual embassy as well as the surrounding discourse of international mainstream media and people engaged in the development of Second Life, I will analyse the significance of the virtual environment in this virtual nation-branding project. I argue that the most important achievement of the Swedish virtual embassy was reached through the connection with the virtual environment in the coverage of traditional international mass media and that the key dimension, although not the only one, of the virtual world in branding Sweden was to serve as a fresh and influential brand signifier within the marketing project.
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
Usually, a country brand is not focused, resulting in unsuccessful place branding. It is possible to successfully raise your national identity to the level of an attractive brand. Building a country brand is an investment, with strong positive returns. This book will guide you along the path to building a successful brand.
Re-Inventing the Media provides a highly original re-thinking of media studies for the contemporary post-broadcast, post-analogue, and post-mass media era. While media and cultural studies has made much of the changes to the media landscape that have come from digital technologies, these constitute only part of the transformations that have taken place in what amounts of a reinvention of the media over the last two decades. Graeme Turner takes on the task of re-thinking how media studies approaches the whole of the contemporary media-scape by focusing on three large, cross-platform, and transnational themes: the decline of the mass media paradigm, the ongoing restructuring of the relations between the media and the state, and the structural and social consequences of celebrity culture. By addressing the fact that the reinvention of the media is not simply a matter of globalising markets or the take-up of technological change, Turner is able to explore the more fundamental movements and widespread trends that have significantly influenced the character of what the contemporary media have become, how it is structured, and how it is used. Re-Inventing the Media is a must-read for both students and scholars of media, culture and communication studies.
It is argued that a central feature of all communication, and mass communication in particular, is a process of mediation involving organizing and interpretive schema embedded in specific formats. This mediation process may be conceptualized as a general social form that is used to direct and inform social activity and cultural phenomena. Individual action and meaning in everyday life weaves in and out of these organizing and interpretive schema. Building on symbolic interaction theory, so-called media effects are recast as cultural phenomena or content that derive meaning through symbolic references in the formal (format) properties of specific media.
The Synchronization of National Policies shows how it is possible that there is remarkable uniformity in the policies that the nation-states adopt, although there is no world government. Mainstream research attributes such global governance to the influence of leading countries, to functional requirements created by capitalism and technological development, or to international organizations. This book argues that to understand how national policies are synchronized we need to realize that the global population forms a single global tribe of moderns, divided into some 200 clans called nations. While previous research on the world culture of moderns has focused on the diffusion of ideas, this book concentrates on the active role of local actors, who introduce global models and domesticate them to nation-states. In national policymaking, actors justify new policies by international comparisons, by the successes and failures of models adopted in other countries, and by building and appealing to the authority of international organizations. Consequently, national policies are synchronized with each other. Yet, because of the way such domestication of global trends takes place, citizens retain and reproduce the understanding that they follow a sovereign national trajectory. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, world culture theory, globalization, international relations, and political science.
This volume provides, collectively, a multi-layered analysis of the emerging East Asian media culture, using the Korean TV drama as its analytic vehicle.
Brands are everywhere. Branding is central to political campaigns and political protest movements; the alchemy of social media and self-branding creates overnight celebrities; the self-proclaimed "greening" of institutions and merchant goods is nearly universal. But while the practice of branding is typically understood as a tool of marketing, a method of attaching social meaning to a commodity as a way to make it more personally resonant with consumers, Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that in the contemporary era, brands are about culture as much as they are about economics. That, in fact, we live in a brand culture. Authentic™ maintains that branding has extended beyond a business model to become both reliant on, and reflective of, our most basic social and cultural relations. Further, these types of brand relationships have become cultural contexts for everyday living, individual identity, and personal relationships-what Banet-Weiser refers to as "brand cultures." Distinct brand cultures, that at times overlap and compete with each other, are taken up in each chapter: the normalization of a feminized "self-brand" in social media, the brand culture of street art in urban spaces, religious brand cultures such as "New Age Spirituality" and "Prosperity Christianity,"and the culture of green branding and "shopping for change." In a culture where graffiti artists loan their visions to both subway walls and department stores, buying a cup of "fair-trade" coffee is a political statement, and religion is mass-marketed on t-shirts, Banet-Weiser questions the distinction between what we understand as the "authentic" and branding practices. But brand cultures are also contradictory and potentially rife with unexpected possibilities, leading Authentic™ to articulate a politics of ambivalence, creating a lens through which we can see potential political possibilities within the new consumerism.
The transnational capitalist class (TCC) as a theoretical concept and an empirical reality has its origins in theories of capitalist globalization developed since the 1960s. Traditional Marxist theories of the international bourgeoisie tend to be conceptualized in state-centrist terms and to focus mainly on business leaders, usually big capitalists, and their corporations in rich and powerful countries exploiting capitalists, workers and peasants in poor countries. The transnational corporation (TNC), in contrast, transcends national class structures and, for some researchers, includes groups whose members do not directly own the means of production but, nevertheless, directly serve the interests of global capitalism.
This book aims to change the way we think about religion by putting emotion back onto the agenda. It challenges a tendency to over-emphasise rational aspects of religion, and rehabilitates its embodied, visceral, and affective dimensions. Against the view that religious emotion is a purely private matter, it offers a new framework which shows how religious emotions arise in the varied interactions between human agents and religious communities, human agents and objects of devotion, and communities and sacred symbols. It presents parallels and contrasts between religious emotions in European and American history, in other cultures, and in contemporary western societies. By taking emotions seriously, this book sheds new light on the power of religion to shape fundamental human orientations and motivations: hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, loves and hatreds.
In academic and popular discourse, the power of media in current globalised and "postdemocratic" societies is often discussed with the notion of "mediatisation." It suggests, for example, that media institutions are increasingly infl uential because they dictate the way issues are framed for public discussion. Consequently, other institutional actors (in politics, science, religion) have had to internalise a "media logic" in order to sustain their power and legitimate their actions. Recent studies of mediatisation largely ignore Jürgen Habermas' early use of the term "mediatization" in order to analyse the relationship between system imperatives and lifeworlds. While at fi rst this use may seem distant to recent concerns, a return to Habermas can enhance the theorising of mediatisation and media power in two ways. First, by underscoring the importance of a system-theoretic vocabulary it helps to unpack the notion of "media logic" and narrow down the specifi c power resource of the media (i.e. what is the "medium" of the media). Second, by articulating a fundamental criticism of system-theoretic vocabulary it opens a normative perspective for an evaluation of the media's democratic function (i.e. the "quality" of mediatisation). This essay highlights, elaborates and illustrates each of these potential contributions by looking at journalism research in general and drawing on a recent empirical study on the mediatisation of political decisionmaking in Finland.
This book explores the development, content, and impact of world culture. Combining several of the most fruitful theoretical perspectives on world culture, including the world polity approach and globalization theory, the book gives a historical treatment of the development of world culture and assesses the complex impact of world culture on people, organizations, and societies. This is a provocative, synthetic, and grounded interpretation of world culture that is essential for any student or scholar of globalization and world affairs. Traces world culture back from the mid-19th century to the present day Includes numerous illustrations of key issues and empirical research Written in lively, accessible language for the student and general scholar.
What does it mean to watch two-hour long news programmes every evening? Why are some people 'addicted' to the news while others prefer to switch off? Television is an indispensable part of the fabric of modern life and this book investigates a facet of this process: its impact on the ways that we experience the political entity of the nation and our national and transnational identities. Drawing on anthropological, social and media theory and grounded on a two-year original ethnography of television news viewing in Athens, the book offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective in understanding the media/identity relationship. Starting from a perspective that examines identities as lived and as performed, the book follows the circulation of discourses about the nation and belonging and contrasts the articulation of identities at a local level with the discourses about the nation in the national television channels. The book asks: whether, and in what ways does television influence identity discourses and practices? When do people contest the official discourses about the nation and when do they rely on them? Do the media play a role in relation to inclusion and exclusion from public life, particularly in the case of minorities? The book presents a compelling account of the contradictory and ambivalent nature of national and transnational identities while developing a nuanced approach to media power. It is argued that although the media do not shape identities in a causal way, they do contribute in creating common communicative spaces which often catalyse feelings of belonging or exclusion. The book claims a place in the emerging sub-field of media anthropology and represents the new generation of audience research that places media consumption in the wider social, economic and political context.
Nation Branding: Concepts, Issues, Practice is a comprehensive and exciting text that demonstrates why nations are embracing the principles of brand management. It clearly explains how the concepts and techniques of branding can be adapted to the context of nations- as opposed to the more usual context of products, services, or companies. Concepts grounded in the brand management literature such as brand identity, brand image, brand positioning, and brand equity, are transposed to the domain of nation branding and supported by country case insights that provide vivid illustrations of nation branding in practice. Nation branding is a means by which more and more nations are attempting to compete on the global stage. Current practice in nation branding is examined and future horizons traced. The book provides: The first overview of its kind on nation branding A blend of academic theory and real world practice in an accessible, readable fashion A clear and detailed adaptation of existing brand theory to the emerging domain of nation branding An original conceptual framework and models for nation branding A rich range of international examples and over 20 contributions by leading experts from around the world Country case insights on nation branding strategies currently being utilized by nations such as Japan, Egypt, Brazil, Switzerland, Iceland, and Russia Clearly and coherently structured, the book is an essential introduction to nation branding for both students and policymakers and will be an essential text for those interested in this fast growing area.
This book examines the concept of new public diplomacy against empirical data derived from three country case studies, in order to offer a systematic assessment of policy and practice in the early 21st century.
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We live in an age where the media is intensely global and profoundly changed by digitalization. Not only do many media events have audiences who access them online, but additionally digital media flows are generating new ways in which media events can emerge. In times of increasingly differentiated media technologies and fragmented media landscapes, the ‘eventization’ of the media is increasingly important for the marketing and everyday appreciation of popular media texts.
The events covered include Celebrity Big Brother, 9/11, the Iraq war and World Youth Day 2005 to give readers an understanding of the major debates in this increasingly high-profile area of media and cultural research.
In this introductory article for the special section on circulation, we examine the concept of circulation from theoretical and methodological perspectives. By drawing on media and social theory, we argue for the relevance of circulation in theorizing current on-the-move social dynamics. Three particular perspectives are introduced in this exercise: non-linearity, action and materiality. As a methodological tool, circulation refers to the tracking and tracing of social actions. In this article, we examine in particular the creation and maintenance of social imaginaries. Our context of analysis is contemporary highly media-saturated society. A case study on media circulation of the 2011 death of Apple CEO Steve Jobs illustrates our theoretical and methodological reflection.
This revised edition, first published in 1977, contains a new introductory section by Tibor Scitovsky. It sets out to analyze the inherent defects of the market economy as an instrument of human improvement. Since publication, it is believed to have been very influential in the ecological movement and hence is considered to be relevant today. The book tries to give an economist's answer to three questions: Why has economic development become and remained so compelling a goal even though it gives disappointing results? Why has modern society become so concerned with distributional processes when the great majority of people can raise their living standards through increased production? Why has the 20th century seen a universal predominant trend toward collective provision and state regulation in economic areas at a time when individual freedom of action is widely extolled and is given unprecedented reign in non-economic areas? The book suggests that the current impasse on a number of key issues in the political economy of advanced nations is attributable, in part, to an outmoded perspective on the nature, and therefore, the promise of economic growth. The critique has some important implications for policy and opens up a range of policy issues. -after Author
This paper explores the use of three different forms of valuation and measurement by or on behalf of brands and branded organizations: financial brand valuation; brand equity measurement; and internal social or environmental evaluations. These systems, it is argued, are sites at which possible relationships between economic and other values are explored, and at which understandings of what is valuable emerge in tandem with the means for acknowledging and measuring it. By tracing the contexts and workings of these systems the paper shows how they allow aspects of the social world, including relationships and affects, to be partially absorbed into the brand as values. We argue that in an environment in which ‘value’ is imagined to be diffuse but omnipresent, the proliferation of valuation systems evidences both a requirement for new forms of measurement (capable of capturing multiple forms of value) and a search for novel ways of linking measurement and valuation. The paper concludes with an exploration of how these new ways of linking measurement and valuation may allow economic agency to be recognized and distributed.