An Alternative Internet: Radical Media, Politics and Creativity
... It has been argued before that digital technologies question the public sphere discourses generated by traditional media, foster self-organization and open participation, and have a counterhegemonic potential (Atton, 2004;Couldry & Curran, 2003). These online tools can generate social mobilizations beyond television's reach and enable citizens to influence decision-making and public policy (Bennett, 2012;Castells, 2012). ...
The growth of technology has made the Internet an essential tool in society. Scholars have argued that the Internet supports a more deliberative democracy. However, scholars have also raised concerns about the role of the Internet in political matters. While scholars agree that the Internet has facilitated broader public discussion, in many regards, its ‘virtual public sphere’ still mirrors existing social structures. Twitter has become a common social media platform for many South Africans. This has led to a virtual community of Twitter users engaged in real-time discourses primarily related to Black South Africans. Black Twitter in South Africa is used for social, political, and economic motivations. This study argues for the practice of Black Twitter as a digital counterpublic in South Africa. The aim is to spotlight how black people in South Africa have used Black Twitter as a digital counterpublic for the marginalized groups within South Africa. The research will investigate the potential challenges and opportunities associated with Black Twitter functioning as a digital counterpublic. Utilizing digital ethnography, the study gathered a dataset of tweets from Black Twitter in 2022, focusing on those addressing social, political, and economic issues. More than 700,000 tweets were identified under these specific thematic hashtags.
... As an internet-enabled media organization (Atton, 2004), PARI's primary media distribution method is the PARI platform. In addition, PARI shares its content on multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. ...
The media milieu in India is predominantly commercialized, with increasing concentration of media ownership and institutional political alliances. Nonetheless, there are media in India that operate within a framework distinct from the dominant media system. This paper presents a case study of one these media, the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a multi-media digital platform on rural India founded in 2014 by a veteran Indian journalist, P. Sainath. This paper examines how PARI’s ideological stance, organizational structure, content ownership, production, and distribution practices set it apart from corporate news organizations. In doing so, this study presents PARI as an alternative media that challenges the primarily capitalist values and practices of India’s dominant media. However, PARI also incorporates the institutionalized practices of legacy media, exhibiting hybridity in its organizational form, production, and distribution. The paper also highlights PARI’s limitations and challenges. The author concludes by discussing the need for alternative media to build bridges within and beyond the field of media, to be reflexive and adaptable in navigating its identity, and to respond to the dominant conceptions of journalism.
... Desde la corriente de los Cultural Studies, el británico Chris Atton es uno de los teóricos más relevantes de la investigación sobre medios alternativos en Europa. Inspirado por el estadounidense John Downing, el autor ha aportado una de las definiciones más afinadas y completas de "medios alternativos", a los que contempla, por un lado, en relación con el contexto socioculturalentendiéndolos como "prácticas"-y, por otro, de acuerdo a su carácter en tanto "textos" y contenidos (Atton, 2001(Atton, , 2004. Para el autor, la simple cuestión del contenido no es suficiente para definir este complejo universo, puesto que los medios alternativos son productores de cambio social, en especial por activar unas dinámicas de organización -horizontales y asamblearias-que amplían la participación ciudadana en comparación con las lógicas unidireccionales de los masivos. ...
Revista Chasqui No.146, de CIESPAL "Medios alternativos y principios educativos para un nuevo mundo", Monográfico coordinado por Paula Renés Arellano y Juan Fernando Muñoz Uribe.
... Consequently, new media are considered critical ones in the redefinition of the mediation of social phenomena and the ways people experience them in tandem with changing perceptions of time and space. 1 In the micro level, new media practices incorporate the weaving of creation, production, circulation, interpretation and narration processes mutually by the users, constituting thus a privileged terrain of the mediation aspect. Couldry (2008: 374) 1 For an overall discussion on the role of new media in experiencing temporality, spatiality and mobility see Tsatsou 2009. ...
Recent years have seen a growing interest in the role of the media in relation to corruption. This interest, however, has particularly concerned legacy media, leaving the role played by social media in relation to corruption largely unexplored. This study attempts to understand how social media contributes to the public representation of corruption through an analysis of the actors who discuss it and the topics they introduce into the debate. Despite social media’s ability to diversify both the actors able to intervene in the public debate and the sub-topics being discussed, some aspects of it, such as the affordances of the platforms that fuel polarization, favor political instrumentalization of corruptive phenomena. By investigating how social media deals with corruption based on a content analysis of the posts and an analysis of the actors who intervene in the discussions, this study fills a gap in the literature.
This study aims to examine the interplay between political communication and discursive practices in the emerging new media landscape after the recent political reform in Ethiopia. The study employs interpretative textual analysis in qualitative research approach to analyze political communication texts posted by political party leaders and activists’ official pages through Critical Discourse Analysis. By using this method, the study critically examines the recent political developments with a specific focus on: EPRDF fragmentation, disintegration of TPLF from the central government, de-facto state formation, the integration of PP into political scene, inter-party political dialogues, and election scenarios among purposely selected ethno-nationalist and unionist political party leaders and activists’ official pages. The finding of the study reveals that political actors used social media as a political communication backchannel and a counter-hegemonic space to construct their political identities and ideologies. The result further shows ethnic identity has overwhelmingly become the source of power over pan-Ethiopian nationalism identity. The politics of ethnic belongingness is found to be an emerging political communication discourse in the study. Ethnic divisions and polarized political views have been recurrently propounded among political actor’s posts in their digital media. Accordingly, accommodative discursive strategies appear to be the dominant discursive strategies utilized by unionist political actors, while ethno-nationalists employ divisive rhetorical strategies in their political communication. In this continuum, polarized political views along with ethnic-based political formations put the issue of identity in a vexed condition and the existing Ethiopian politics in a state of interregnum.
In the last two decades, Zimbabwe has faced a series of intractable political and socio-economic crises, resulting in abject economic collapse, stratospheric levels of inflation and massive youth unemployment. The country’s youth have responded to these endless crises through creative artistic expression via music and satirical videos, which are often circulated on social media platforms. This cultural activism by Zimbabwean youth is indicative of the distinctive ways in which the intersections of media globalization and situated local conditions have animated new popular cultural forms by youth in Africa. This paper, harnesses Nancy Fraser’s (Fraser, N., 1990. Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text (25-26), 56–80) concept of alternative public spheres and Mikhail Bakhtin’s (Bakhtin, M., 1984. Rabelais and his world. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.) notion of the carnival to analyse young people’s satirical videos posted on social media as creative responses that are used to protest the lived realities of economically marginalized youths even as they articulate significant needs and aspirations of their own. The paper views and analyses social media as a platform that is used to criticise and lampoon post-colonial excesses by the ruling elite who wield political and economic power. Youth popular culture is explored as a platform on which urban youths have sought to highlight and to contest the politics of survival in contemporary Zimbabwe in some highly creative and innovative ways.
The Northern Irish Peace Process has coincided with the development of the Internet and social media as platforms of communication. Irish republicans, with a history of marginalisation from the political mainstream, have always developed keen instincts for exploiting countercultural spaces for communications purposes. From pamphlets and countercultural newspapers, republicans have used Samizdat-style publishing while suffering the effects of media bans and suppression by the British and Irish states. The age of the Internet would be no different: Sinn Féin harnessed the Internet to develop a far-reaching policy base and dissenting republicans, like those on the Blanket magazine, used the net to articulate critiques of Sinn Féin’s era-defining reforms of republican catechism. Other dissenting republican parties used the net as a space in which to articulate a new dogma of anti-corporatism in the midst of the chaos caused by the collapse of the short-lived neoliberal economic miracle, the Celtic Tiger. Dissident republicans also used the net to reiterate an historic, unreformed, physical force nationalism that had changed little since the early twentieth century. However, the net also became a counter-surveillance force which allowed citizen journalists to gather evidence against those dissidents and their murderous deviance.
The principal aim of this paper is to contest the neoliberal discourse of the World Class University (WCU). The first section provides an understanding of the concept of the WCU within the context of a global competitive model of the knowledge economy and contrasts it with the social-democratic model based on open science and education that also provides links between new modes of openness, academic publishing and the world journal architecture. The paper makes the case for ‘knowledge socialism’ that accurately depicts the greater communitarian moment of the sharing and participative academic economy based on peer-to-peer production, social innovation and collective intelligence. It instantiates the notion of knowledge as a global public good. Profound changes in the nature of technology has enabled a kind of ‘digital socialism’ which is clearly evident in the shift in political economy of academic publishing based Open Access, cOAlition S, and ‘Plan S’ (mandated in 2020) established by national research funding organisations in Europe with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC). The social democratic alternative to neoliberalism and the WCU is a form of the sharing academic economy known as ‘knowledge socialism’. Universities need to share knowledge in the search for effective responses to pressing world problems of fragile global ecologies and the growing significance of technological unemployment. This is a model that proceeds from a very different set of economic and moral assumptions than the neoliberal knowledge economy and the WCU.
Cho explores the other side of glocalizing American sports in South Korea from an ethnographic assessment of Korean Major League Baseball fans’ activities in their online community. Along with a short history of the Korean MLB fandom on the internet in the late 1990s, Chapter 4 elucidates how Korean MLB fans utilize the internet space to construct their identities and build a community culture. The exploration of the fans’ participation online demonstrates that fans’ activities do not replace traditional or offline identities but instead contribute to constructing multiple senses of self. Cho argues that these alternative ways of managing their fan identities make them a singular global sports fandom, which is very cosmopolitan and transnational but still local and national at the same time.
Based on research on the development of streaming solutions across media forms and industries, this article traces the dynamics and dimensions of the notion of streaming. It theorizes streaming as an evolving concept, and argues against strict, set and limited definitions such as those suggested by Lotz and Herbert et al. A short substantive and industrial history of streaming is provided, recognizing its many manifestations and variations. Five key dimensions are identified, and trends and traits within each of them discussed: (1) professional versus user-generated streaming, (2) legal versus piracy streaming, (3) on-demand versus live streaming, (4) streaming on dedicated versus multi-feature platforms, and (5) niche versus general-audience streaming. The article concludes by pointing out how streaming is a concept that metaphorically unites media research across industries, practices, and media forms, encouraging more comparative research.
In this article, we analyse the evolution of electoral information flows in Spain in the digital environment. Three post-electoral surveys (2008, 2011 and 2015) among internet users (N = 4,312) and a series of focus groups enable us to analyse the process of expansion of the Digital Public Sphere (DPS) in Spain. We show that, instead of disintermediation, new intermediations of the electoral information flows appear. The candidacies no longer monopolize the electoral communication; rather, they share spaces in the DPS with personal contacts and civic-social organizations. We observe that, for the first time, in the 2015 elections, the influence exercised by the digital media – particularly social media – exceeded the information received directly from people they know, print media and radio. However, television remained the most influential media during the elections. We note that the use of the DPS in electoral campaigns is increasingly hybrid and dialogical. We find that, in the Spanish case, these changes are linked to the emergence of the 15M movement, which encouraged the emergence of internet-based civil organizations. The traditional political players continue to occupy a very significant role as a source of electoral information, but they share space with this new type of civil organization and with the extensive network of digital contacts. Changes in the Spanish DPS between 2008 and 2015 evidence a greater diversity in information sources and more citizens play an increasingly active role in the creation, modification and dissemination of political content.
This article proposes a new appraisal of Brazil’s alternative media. By investing in the concept of the periphery, this study draws on past literature, semistructured interviews, and data collected from across the country (n = 50) to propose a repertoire analysis of media producers’ views of the country’s popular notion of the periphery. Evidence shows that they have shown nuanced views of the periphery as a site of purpose, pluralism, and authorship. Despite crisis and turmoil, this study presents some paths that could help reorientate the priorities of alternative media research toward a closer consideration of the periphery as entity that appears much more in line with local realities and expectations than previous international debates.
Professional communicators produce a diverse range of global Indigenous media while balancing professional journalistic conventions such as ‘objectivity’ against community and organizational responsibilities. Despite their work being tarred as biased, soft or preaching to the converted, Indigenous media producers argue that their work counterbalances biased mainstream media coverage that hampers Indigenous public sphere participation and denigrates Indigenous communities and individuals. Through interviews with 42 Indigenous media producers from Australia, Canada, Finland, Sweden and New Zealand, this study investigates their journalistic processes and attitudes to professional norms such as objectivity, source choices and news values. The article interrogates how Indigenous media producers navigate the tensions between their professional obligations and community responsibilities. It argues Indigenous media producers apply a modified version of objectivity to produce fact-driven content that promotes Indigenous perspectives, prioritizes Indigenous voices and serves the needs of their communities.
In contrast to recent waves of ad hoc social-media-fueled protest, Brazil’s leftist social movements consider new media unreliable, supplementary, and dominated by hegemonic actors. Owing to a shift in power relations online, these virtual spaces pose an approximation to their capitalist adversaries, a degree of institutionalization, and a breach of traditional trenches of resistance, leading anticapitalist movements to restrict their use of new media. Their wariness counters resurgent cyberoptimism that regards the Internet as a politically neutral or autonomous space favored by marginalized and alternative political actors.
Em contraste com a onda recente de protestos impulsionados pelas redes sociais, os movimentos sociais de esquerda no Brasil consideram a nova mídia inconfiável, subserviente e dominada por atores hegemônicos. Devido a mudanças nas relações de poder na Internet, esses espaços virtuais apresentam-se como forma de aproximação de seus adversários capitalistas, um grau de institucionalização e um rompimento com as trincheiras tradicionais de resistência. Consequetemente, os movimentos anticapitalistas restringem e vigiam o uso da nova midia. Essa percepção oferece um contraponto ao otimismo cibernético ressurgente, o qual enxerga a Internet como espaço autônomo, politicamente neutro e preferido por atores políticos marginalizados e alternativos.
This paper explores the structural constraints of contemporary approaches to media literacy in the face of increased partisanship, tribalism, and distrust. In the midst of a renewed call for media literacy initiatives that respond to the increasing levels of distrust in both legacy and grassroots media, this paper argues that media literacy interventions must be re-imagined as intentionally civic. A new set of emerging norms of digital culture further put into question the relevance of long-standing approaches to media literacy pedagogy and practice. This essay puts forward a new set of constructs that position media literacy initiatives to ‘produce and reproduce the sense of being in the world with others toward common good’ (Gordon, E., and P. Mihailidis. 2016. “Introduction.” In Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice, edited by E. Gordon and P. Mihailidis. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2). These constructs – agency, caring, critical consciousness, persistence, and emancipation – reframe media literacy as relevant to the social, political, and technological realities of contemporary life.
In policy terms, community media are known as the “third sector” of the media. The description reflects the historical expectation that community media can fulfill a need not met by the commercial and public service broadcasters. A defining element of this “need” has been the means to production for nonprofessionals, particularly groups not represented in the mainstream media. The historical construction of community media reveals production to be a guiding principle; both a means and an end in itself. This chapter examines the various rationales underpinning community media production, including empowerment, media diversity, and the independent producer movement. Using case studies from youth media, the chapter critiques producer-centric models of community media. In the contemporary media environment, production alone cannot meet the social needs that community media were established to address. Instead, I propose a rationale that combines both production and consumption ethics.
In an era of “social media” technologies, instrumental goals such as networking, organizing, and information-sharing hold great sway over the study of activist culture. Researchers often conceptualize activists' media use as participation in message production and dissemination, while overlooking practices related to reception and interpretation – that is, activists as audiences. In this chapter I propose that the moments in which activists engage with media as listeners, readers, and viewers are just as interesting to scholarship as those in which people create and/or share media relevant to activism. By shifting some emphasis from the transmission mode of activists' media use to the ritual or symbolic dimension, we can better understand how media habits help sustain activist identities and a sense of belonging, which serves as a precursor to participation. I also assert the importance of low-tech media, face-to-face communication, and offline participation among such audiences, whose members aim to connect mediated activities with real-world ones, and identify some social limitations in technological activism. The chapter concludes by suggesting avenues for future study that explore why activists choose to receive certain messages and how ritual contributes to people getting and staying involved with activist communities.
Historically, zines have been an alternative outlet for niche topics, or writers and writing, that are ignored by mainstream media. Zines are significant because they offer the opportunity for connection, community, and networking between those interested in these diverse topics. The developments in digital technology have enabled zines to extend into the online sphere: this increased access has resulted in increased participation (by readers and writers). This paper will focus on (digital) zines that are created by people of colour (POC). In recent years, there has been much discussion and media coverage about the lack of diversity in cultural output, and various campaigns, to promote diverse writing have followed. Through a case study of the POC Zines Project—a community-building project that promotes zines by POC—this paper will look at how creators of zines are experimenting with digital formats and social platforms, and will consider what mainstream publishers can learn from this. As Radway (in: Anouk (ed) From codex to hypertext. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 2012) outlines “zine-ing is a social phenomenon, a form of social action driven by desires for new forms of sociability and new ways of being in the world” (p. 140): this paper will highlight the important of social collaboration and production on opening up the creative process and offering a response to the under-represented in traditional publishing.
This chapter sets the scene by situating the four media projects under study within a framework of El Salvador’s mainstream and alternative media ecologies, contextualized by the country’s political, social, economic, and technological realities. This chapter also develops the theoretical framework necessary for understanding the role of technology in alternative media and social change, introducing the idea that El Salvador’s realities, including limited Internet access in this digital era, require a hybridized, or mestizaje (Martín Barbero 1993), approach to the understanding of alternative media. This chapter provides an overview of what other scholarly research shows about alternative media and its relationship to activism, participation, and technology.
Populism continues to gain traction in politics but there has been relatively little research on how it plays out on the Internet. The special issue at hand aims at narrowing this gap of research by focusing on the close relation between populism and online communication. This introduction presents an integrative definition of populism, as well as a theoretical analysis of the interplay between populist communication logic and online opportunity structures. The individual contributions discuss how populist actors may benefit from the Internet. They analyze how political leaders and extreme parties use populist online communication. The authors also shed light on how populist movements may relate to various political parties. They finally demonstrate which groups of social media users are more susceptible to populism than others and what effects populist online communication may have on citizens. We hope that this special issue will contribute to the discussion on what is arguably one of the largest political challenges currently faced by a series of nations around the globe.
Der Beitrag analysiert und diskutiert die Entwicklung sowie vor allem aktuelle Erkenntnisse und Perspektiven der Fanforschung aus kulturtheoretischer Sicht. Zunächst wird das Verhältnis von Fankultur und akademischer Kultur betrachtet. Es wird untersucht, welche Bedeutung der eigenen Involviertheit in das zu untersuchende Fantum von Wissenschaftlern und Wissenschaftlerinnen zugeschrieben wird. Dann wird die digitale Transformation der Fankulturen seit den 1990er Jahren näher betrachtet. Schließlich wird gefragt, ob die kreativen und widerspenstigen Aneignungspraktiken von Fans auch im 21. Jahrhundert Formen des Widerstandes und der Rebellion darstellen können.
This article analyses digital activism comparatively in relation to three Post-Soviet regions: Russian/anti-Russian in Crimea and online political deliberation in Belarus, in juxtaposition to Estonia's digital governance approach. The authors show that in civil societies in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, cultural forms of digital activism, such as internet memes, thrive and produce and reproduce effective forms of political deliberation. In contrast to Estonia, in authoritarian regimes actual massive mobilization and protest is forbidden, or is severely punished with activists imprisoned, persecuted or murdered by the state. This is consistent with use of cultural forms of digital activism in countries where protest is illegal and political deliberation is restricted in government-controlled or oligarchic media. Humorous political commentary might be tolerated online to avoid mobilization and decompress dissent and resistance, yet remaining strictly within censorship and surveillance apparatuses. The authors' research affirms the potential of internet memes in addressing apolitical crowds, infiltrating casual conversations and providing symbolic manifestation to resistant debates. Yet, the virtuality of the protest undermines its consistency and impact on offline political deliberation. Without knowing each other beyond social media, the participants are unlikely to form robust organisational structures and mobilise for activism offline.
Several years after the appearance of the political upheavals that have shaken the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region to its roots, the extent to which new information and communication technologies, particularly the Internet, have played an influential role in the unfolding or at least the mediation of these events still remains a hotly debated issue in academia and beyond. While technology-centered views have been rightly debunked, very little has been done so far to provide alternative interpretations of the role of these new communication tools in the development and unfolding of what has been dubbed the “Arab Spring.” This chapter argues that interpreting the role of technology in the political and social transformations engulfing the region can only be done by embracing new theoretical paradigms, hitherto little explored in the context of the MENA region, such as new social movement theory and agonistic politics.
This article presents and discusses results from a study of radical left-wing activism online carried out by the Swedish Media Council, a report that suggested that the Internet (i.e. the web, web 2.0, and social media) is not a prioritized arena for propaganda and recruitment for the radical left in Sweden. The purpose of this article is to re-evaluate some of these findings and add to the discussion on online activity and connectivity in political communication online, as well as to problematize simplified notions of radicalization and recruitment to pro-violent groups. Based on a hermeneutic inquiry regarding modes of communication, representations of political visions, and community, the article shows how the sites and groups studied favor one-way communication before interactivity, that political visions are limited to short-term goals in the immediate future, and that they give very little information about their activist activities to recruit supporters.
The article analyzes the phenomenon of crowdfunding from the perspective of its democratizing influence on the music market. Crowdfunding enables artists to finance the release of their records, which theoretically allows them to enter the music market without the intermediation of traditional record labels. By using empirical data, the article shows that the democratizing influence of crowdfunding is limited. This results partially from the difficulties of dealing with promotional activities traditionally conducted by record labels. In other words, neither crowdfunding platforms nor contributors have the power, connections, or know-how of traditional record labels.
This article examines current appropriations of social media by activists of the radical left in Greece and Sweden. Previous research has shown that the discourse concerning social media’s empowering potential is embedded in commercial values that contradict the value systems of many activists who engage in struggles against the current economic system. We employ the notion of détournement, which describes how social movements turn something aside from its normal course or purpose. Based on interviews and online ethnographic observations, we seek to understand how and with what consequences social media facilitate and limit collective action. The article enhances our understanding of activists’ social media use by turning our attention to the sociotechnical impact of social media on collective action initiated by leftist groups as well as the relationship between ideological loyalties and the political economy of corporate social media.
How do we talk about the environment? Does this communication reveal and construct meaning? Is the environment expressed and foregrounded in the new landscape of digital media?
The Environment in the Age of the Internet is an interdisciplinary collection that draws together research and answers from media and communication studies, social sciences, modern history, and folklore studies. Edited by Heike Graf, its focus is on the communicative approaches taken by different groups to ecological issues, shedding light on how these groups tell their distinctive stories of "the environment". This book draws on case studies from around the world and focuses on activists of radically different kinds: protestors against pulp mills in South America, resistance to mining in the Sámi region of Sweden, the struggles of indigenous peoples from the Arctic to the Amazon, gardening bloggers in northern Europe, and neo-Nazi environmentalists in Germany. Each case is examined in relation to its multifaceted media coverage, mainstream and digital, professional and amateur.
Stories are told within a context; examining the "what" and "how" of these environmental stories demonstrates how contexts determine communication, and how communication raises and shapes awareness. These issues have never been more urgent, this work never more timely. The Environment in the Age of the Internet is essential reading for everyone interested in how humans relate to their environment in the digital age.
How do we talk about the environment? Does this communication reveal and construct meaning? Is the environment expressed and foregrounded in the new landscape of digital media?
The Environment in the Age of the Internet is an interdisciplinary collection that draws together research and answers from media and communication studies, social sciences, modern history, and folklore studies. Edited by Heike Graf, its focus is on the communicative approaches taken by different groups to ecological issues, shedding light on how these groups tell their distinctive stories of "the environment". This book draws on case studies from around the world and focuses on activists of radically different kinds: protestors against pulp mills in South America, resistance to mining in the Sámi region of Sweden, the struggles of indigenous peoples from the Arctic to the Amazon, gardening bloggers in northern Europe, and neo-Nazi environmentalists in Germany. Each case is examined in relation to its multifaceted media coverage, mainstream and digital, professional and amateur.
Stories are told within a context; examining the "what" and "how" of these environmental stories demonstrates how contexts determine communication, and how communication raises and shapes awareness. These issues have never been more urgent, this work never more timely. The Environment in the Age of the Internet is essential reading for everyone interested in how humans relate to their environment in the digital age.
Under Communist rule in mainland China, there has been a reemergence of independent societies or resistance, in spite of institutional repression. The unofficial magazines provide a narrative of how the civil society began from the underground publications and expanded into other forms of resistance (such as underground labor trade unions and family churches) and other activities defending human rights (such as petitions, protests, and strikes).
In this chapter, I reflect on the priming of participation in protest events through networked communication on various digital platforms including social media. I ask the question of the extent to which such prefiguration of participation occurs and look at some of the ways in which it does in the context of two contrasting environmental protests.KeywordsCollective ActionSocial MovementSocial Networking SiteActivist OrganisationCollective IdentityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This study examines the process of how an athlete is constructed as a national celebrity in South Korea through media discourses both online and offline. To this end, the paper explores the media discourses around Park Tae-Hwan, a South Korean swimmer and superstar, and suggests three distinct and related dimensions that have constructed him as a national celebrity. These three dimensions are a new generation, a national and regional celebrity and a fallen (national) angel. The analysis of the discourses on Park demonstrates both the inseparable relationship between the media and sport celebrity and the complex, contradictory roles of sport celebrity vis-à-vis national, regional and global sensibilities in South Korea. Ultimately, the construction of Park as national celebrity reveals a key structure of feeling in South Korea in which nationalist sentiment, regional rivalry and global desire not only converge but also compete against each other.
This chapter focuses on what some in our digital media era have termed “the Long Tail” of media; in other words, small-scale media projects, typically operating on low to no budget. Until the beginning of the 2000s, nano-media projects – most often small scale, often ephemeral, almost always underfunded or entirely unfunded – were basically under the radar of conventional media research, outside of Latin America. That scenario has changed quite noticeably, with the publication of more and more research studies in this area. It is appropriate to try now to clear the conceptual ground, given the considerable number of terms for nano-media which are also out there. Probably the commonest term is “alternative” media, though from one perspective it is a completely vapid designation, since everything is alternative to something.
The media landscape and its societal significance is in rapid transition; likewise basic features of democracy are changing. In this article we pursue these two strands in order to sketch the background to a need for a new research agenda, as well as to arrive at proposals regarding the directions that such research can take. In regard to democracy our emphasis is on the dimension of participation, while the developments in the media we capture with the term mediatisation, which signals not only the ubiquity of media but also the processes by which society increasingly adapts itself to media logics. The first section takes up political engagement and situates it within the changing character of democracy. The second section is focused on the media and dynamics of mediatisation, underscoring their significance for democratic participation. In the third section we provide the foundations for a research agenda on mediatisation and democratic participation.
Most alternative media research has examined media content and the production process, largely ignoring another important component: the audiences of alternative media. To narrow this gap, this study investigates audience participation in one alternative media outlet: community radio. Case studies were conducted on 2 U.S. community radio stations through participatory ethnography, in-depth interviews, and a listener survey. Results suggest that community radio continues to be relevant in this digital era. While people lose faith in mainstream media and become increasingly suspicious of online content, they still consider community radio the most trustworthy. The study also demonstrates the limitations of audience participation in community radio, and the difficulties this medium faces in adopting new technologies and adapting to this digital world.
This article discusses participatory media from a critical disability perspective. It discusses the relative absence of explicit discussion and research on disability in the literatures on community, citizen and alternative media. By contrast, disability has emerged as an important element of participatory cultures and digital technologies. To explore disability participatory cultures, the article offers analysis of case studies, including disability blogs, ABC's Ramp Up website and crowd-funding platforms (such as Kickstarter).
Understanding the Liberal State Corporate Media, Hegemony, and Counter-Hegemony Maintaining Order: A Tale of Two Rebellions Producing Alternative Spaces The Liberal Paradox: Media Freedom as Constraint Conclusion Note References
This chapter reviews the literature on public interest media advocacy and activism. In so doing, it organizes the literature according to the three primary theoretical perspectives on social movements—framing processes, political opportunities, and mobilizing structures, to reflect the increased tendency in recent years for scholars to conceptualize public interest media advocacy and activism as a social movement. As this review indicates, public interest media advocacy and activism encompasses a movement that has employed a number of distinct, though overlapping, frames. It comprises a movement with political opportunities that are strongly tied to technological developments and to the conceptualization of policy problems within the policy-making sector. It constitutes a movement that, from a structural standpoint, has both emerged from—and can potentially serve the interests of—a wide range of other social movements, including civil rights and democratization movements, the consumer movement, and the anti-globalization movement. This review considers the implications of these and other characteristics of public interest media advocacy and activism as a social movement in an effort to develop strategic recommendations for the movement as well as recommendations for future research.
Communication on social media preceding coordinated street demonstrations is assayed for evidence of practice-based informal civic learning about conventional politics and mainstream media. This is done to offset a mounting interest in activist self-organization and self-reflexivity with a scrutiny of networked communication as a civic literacy event. The article proposes that skepticism and criticality directed at media and political institutions provide fertile justification for their challenge, thereby rendering intertextual informal learning an expedient to collective action.
This article analyses the rise and development of alternative Internet radio in Hong Kong in the past decade in tandem with the changing status of press freedom and contentious politics in the city. The article illustrates that alternative Internet radio first emerged a decade ago as the self-defence of the civil society against political encroachments on the media. Cognisant of the political potential of alternative Internet radio, pro-democracy radical political parties and social activists have subsequently appropriated this new medium to facilitate and engage in contentious politics. In the face of tightening political control of mainstream media in recent years, alternative Internet radio has become a “safe haven” for the exited rebel voices. Despite the considerable political significance of alternative Internet radio (and alternative Internet media in general) at this moment, its prospect remains uncertain due to potential regulatory control and increasing political pressures on Internet media in the future.
Is contemporary media ecology an ecology that offers unprecedented freedom for producing participators, the “prod-users,” or could it also be understood as an ecology in which various forms of user participation are in fact conditioned, or manufactured, by professional producers? Considering the increasing research attention paid to various notions of user participation, these questions become important. This article critically discusses the theorising of mediated participation by illustrating and analysing ways in which users’ participatory practices in fact can be both conditioned and formatted by producers making strategic use of participatory opportunities. By drawing on an ethnographically inspired case study of a web company, Moderskeppet, this analysis reveals how the actual possibilities for participation thoroughly are conditioned by producers. The paper also analyses strategies and techniques applied by the producers to create a sense of participation among users.
This essay argues for the historical significance of a viral video and its memes within mediated struggles for Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender equality. Informed by affect, sound, and media studies, I argue that Chris Crocker’s “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!” helped form empathy for these populations. Through a close reading of the video, historical contextualization, and examining responses, I describe how his user-generated video, spread widely across various media, can be appreciated as one component in changing social attitudes. To accomplish this, I viewed and transcribed LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!, examined comments, parodies, and other reactions, reviewed media coverage of Crocker at the time and since, and consulted historiographies, trend analyses, and other material on Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender equality struggles in the 21st century.
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