The author aims at evaluating the activities on the Facebook profiles of three regional media editorials – namely the ‘TVP 3 Łódź’ TV channel, the ‘Radio Łódź’ radio channel, and the Express Ilustrowany daily – particularly in terms of including local and regional information in their posts. Another objective was to attempt to quantify and compare these activities. The used research method is the analysis of profile content on Facebook, and the study was conducted within the period of one (...) month. (shrink)

W ciągu 30 lat dokonała się głęboka przemiana w relacji między Internetem a aktywnością naukową. Nastąpiło przesunięcie funkcji Internetu, który przestał być jedynie instrumentem współpracy akademickiej, a stał się również narzędziem używanym przez media społecznościowe, zezwalające na maksymalną dyfuzję irracjonalizmu i starego faktualizmu. Aby zrozumieć tę przemianę, należy ponownie zbadać mechanizmy zbieżności opinii. Wynika ona z istnienia wspólnego świata, który ukazuje nam te same fakty i determinuje nieustanną rewizję przekonań każdej osoby. W tym procesie asymptotycznej zbieżności opinii nie (...) wymaga się żadnej komunikacji między jednostkami. Oczywiście, jeśli fakty znane przez jednych są komunikowane innym, konwergencja znacznie przyspiesza, i to tak bardzo, że wiedzę musimy ująć jako rezultat zbiorowej aktywności, w której wymiana informacji jest jednym z jej istotnych źródeł. Z jednej strony takie poznawcze współdziałanie wydaje się naturalne i łatwe do implementacji. Biorąc pod uwagę właściwości informacji, które przechowujemy, nawet jeśli je udostępniamy, to dzielenie się informacją przestaje być przedmiotem zwykłych trudności związanych ze współpracą. Z drugiej strony takie współdziałanie jest produktywne z samej natury: współpraca między kimś, kto zna φ, i kimś, kto wie, że φ implikuje ψ u obydwu jako mających wiedzę ψ, której żaden z nich nie posiadał przed wymianą informacji. Wczesny Internet pozwolił na ekstremalną intensywność tej informacyjnej współpracy. Obecnie mamy do czynienia z odmienną sytuacją. Poszczególne wyznaczniki rosnącej porowatości między naukowcami a opinią publiczną wzmocniły rolę wymiany. Nie jest to już wymiana informacji, lecz wymiana opinii. Stronniczość tkwiąca w naturze ludzkiej, a szczególnie potwierdzenie tej stronniczości, prowadzi do odwrócenia relacji między faktami a opiniami. Szukamy faktów potwierdzających podzielane przez nas opinie, wątpiąc w te, które ich nie określają, i tworzymy fakty do potwierdzenia tego, o czym jesteśmy przekonani. Dlatego przechodzimy od współdziałania do przynależności, dzieląc Internet na homogeniczne grupy wyznawców. (shrink)

The article aims at analyzing the case of Beppe Grillo and his Five Stars Movement in terms of social, cultural and linguistic phenomenon that – initially as a virtual party without a structured organization – seems to conquer both right-wing and left-wing Italian citizens notwithstanding generational and ideological differences. The success of grillini in the parliamentary election of 2018 as a consequence of Matteo Renzi’s constitutional referendum failure, represents a clear sign of the leadership crisis as well as the drifting (...) apart of the ruling class that ignored the problems of ordinary people for several years. The analysis is focused on both form and content: on the one hand, the artistic expression characteristic of Grillo, his gestures, mimicry and direct language plenty of verbal hyperboles, rhetorical figures, swearwords and blasphemous obscenities that build his uncompromising charisma, on the other modern technologies and social media that are used to communicate efficiently with the electorate, create an image of an open-minded politician keeping up with the outer world. All the aforementioned circumstances demonstrate an innovative approach based on political communication that devolves some level of decision-making power to the party supporters being active web users: bloggers and influencers at the same time. Such paradigm is followed by other representatives of the Italian political scene nowadays. (shrink)

Genealogia jest tą nauką pomocniczą historii, która od pewnego już czasu obecna jest w cyberprzestrzeni. Deklasuje pod tym względem inne nauki pomocnicze historii, które pozostają daleko w tyle chociażby pod względem liczby wyświetleń w przeglądarce, będących efektem wyszukiwania stron internetowych. Stanowi to konsekwencję popularności badań genealogicznych, które w ostatnim czasie prowadzone są w znaczącej mierze nie przez naukowców, ale pasjonatów i genealogów-amatorów, którzy samodzielnie chcą zgłębiać historię swoich rodzin, a co za tym idzie – tworzyć rodzinne kompendia genealogiczne. O takim, (...) a nie innym ukierunkowaniu badań świadczą także różnego rodzaju poradniki, które w ostatnim czasie ukazały się na polskim rynku wydawniczym. Oferują one czytelnikowi zarówno omówienie tradycyjnych narzędzi wykorzystywanych w badaniach genealogicznych, jak i tych nowoczesnych, związanych z postępem technologicznym i przedstawianiem informacji w formie cyfrowej. W rezultacie w niemal każdej tego typu publikacji zamieszczony został rozdział poświęcony charakterystyce funkcjonujących w Internecie serwisów i baz danych, które stanowią nieocenioną pomoc w badaniach genealogicznych. Są nią także różnego rodzaju profile i grupy w mediach społecznościowych, które do tej pory pozostawały jednak niezauważone, tak przez naukowców, jak i popularyzatorów. Z tego też względu niniejszy artykuł poświęcony zostanie syntetycznemu omówieniu obecności genealogii w cyberprzestrzeni, zarówno w skali makro (duże serwisy i bazy internetowe), jak i mikro (niewielkie grupy w mediach społecznościowych). Celem artykułu jest bowiem ukazanie genealogii jako tej z nauk pomocniczych historii, która nie tylko odnalazła się w świecie cyfrowym, ale w nim zadomowiła i wciąż się rozwija. (shrink)

In this article, I engage with aesthetic experience as a central hermeneutic endeavour for theorising performing arts audiences in the Arab region. I argue that a critical engagement with Arab performing arts audiences’ aesthetic experiences necessitates both an archaeological manoeuver and a re-articulation of two keywords: ‘experience’ and ‘everyday’. The article advances, using evidence from research, that allowing the audiences of performing arts in the Arab region to speak may be a step towards democratising the triangular meaning making process among (...) the performer, the audience, and the art institution, and a means towards dislocating, if not liberating, the categories Arab culture, art, performance, and experience, from their teleological articulations. (shrink)

Theory of Mind (ToM), the cognitive capacity to attribute internal mental states to oneself and others, is a crucial component of social skills. Its formal study has become important, witness recent research on reasoning and information update by intelligent agents, and some proposals for its formal modelling have put forward settings based on Epistemic Logic (EL). Still, due to intrinsic idealisations, it is questionable whether EL can be used to model the high-order cognition of ‘real’ agents. This manuscript proposes a (...) framework that takes visibility, memory, perspective and communication as the main factors underpinning mental attributions. This is more in-line with findings in cognitive science and allows us to model well-known False-Belief Tasks that are typically used in testing people's ToM. We discuss some of the framework's technical features, arguing why it does justice to empirical observations. (shrink)

Always connect—that is the imperative of today’s media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself—those messages that state: “There will be no more messages”? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media and mediation on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of (...) communication is integral to communication itself—instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, _Excommunication_ pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today—mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway’s classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Charting a trajectory of examples from H. P. Lovecraft to Meister Eckhart, Thacker explores those instances when one communicates or connects with the inaccessible, dubbing such modes of mediation “haunted” or “weird” to underscore their inaccessibility. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. He posits a critical theory that celebrates heresy and that is distinct from those that now venerate Saint Paul. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, _Excommunication_ offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition. (shrink)

According to the 2020 docudrama, The Social Dilemma, our very addiction to “social media” has, today, become encapsulated in the tensions between its facilitation as a mode of interpersonal communication and as an insidious conduit for machine learning, surveillance capitalism and manipulation. Amidst a variety of interviewees – many of whom are former employees of social media companies – the documentary finishes on a unanimous conclusion: something must change. By using the docudrama as a pertinent example of our (...) “social media malaise,” and while remaining aware of the problems and unethical practices encompassing international digital/social media companies, this paper will argue that we continually refrain from the very question(ing) that would call these companies to account: what does the algorithm desire? In approaching this question, this article will draw from Lacan’s ‘hysterical’ position in accordance with Robert Pfaller’s notion of interpassivity. Together, these concepts will be used to provide a psychoanalytic account of how our subjectivization in social media renders an unconscious endorsement that both frames our awareness of the dilemmas encompassing social media, while also positing an inherent limitation that may offer a possible path out of its impeding affects. This subjective ambivalence – delegated yet reluctantly disavowed – offers an opportunity to realign discussions on the lost object of desire (objet a) and its reproduction in social media algorithms. In so doing, the case will be made that an account of interpassivity can help lay bare the hysterical significance underscoring our digital subjectivization. (shrink)

It is commonly agreed that so-called echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, associated with social media, are detrimental to liberal democracies. Drawing on John Rawls’s political liberalism, we offer a novel explanation of why social media platforms amplifying echo chambers and epistemic bubbles are likely contributing to the violation of the democratic norms connected to the ideal of public reason. These norms are clarified with reference to the method of (full) reflective equilibrium, which we argue should be cultivated as (...) a civic virtue in the context of political justification. The paper demonstrates how epistemic bubbles and echo chambers are likely to be detrimental to the disposition to follow the method of reflective equilibrium in the political context. Based on this diagnosis the paper highlights the need for interventions that help cultivate reflective equilibrium as a civic virtue and the need for corresponding interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

In the last chapter of In the beginning was the deed: realism and moralism in political argument, Williams raised the question of truthfulness in politics and warned that the media, particularly, television, and the market of communication in general, work in ways contrary to truthfulness -understood as the combination of the virtues of sincerity and accuracy. In this paper we would like to carry on Williams’ line of thinking in connection with the impact of the new social media (...) platforms on politics. Where Williams focused on television, we will consider the impact of the internet public sphere. After reviewing how the digital social media encourages motivated reasoning in general, we propose to focus on two main phenomena derived from it: the rise of conspiracy theories and the moralization of politics. Conspiracy theories epitomize the risk of self-deception Williams was concerned to signal. On the other hand, the process of moralization of politics triggers sectarianism and hate for the “others”, the outgroup. Both phenomena are not exclusive of the internet sphere, but both are boosted by it, and entail a lack of interest in truth and truthfulness, and in this way they threaten the value of truth for democracy. (shrink)

In the days of global warming and BSE, science is increasingly a public issue. This book provides a theoretical framework which allows us to understand why and how scientists address the general public. The author develops the argument that turning to the public is not simply a response to inaccurate reporting by journalists or to public curiosity, nor a wish to gain recognition and additional funding. Rather, it is a tactic to which the scientific community are pushed by certain "internal" (...) crisis situations. Bucchi examines three cases of scientists turning to the public: the cold fusion case, the COBE/Big Bang issue and Louis Pasteur's public demonstration of the anthrax vaccine, a historical case of "public science." Finally, Bucchi presents his unique model of communications between science and the public, carried out through the media. This is a thoughtful and wide-ranging treatment of complex contemporary issues, touching upon the history and sociology of science, communication and media studies. Bucchi's theories on scientific communication in the media are a valuable contribution to the current debate on this subject. (shrink)

The question of how other consciousnesses appear via media has forced us to re-think the classical phenomenological accounts of sociality. However, as the phenomenological account of empathy is very much centred around the perception of the other’s living body, it has faced challenges in discussing the empathic experience in media-based contexts, where we cannot perceive the other’s body, but something else, such as a screen or a text. In this article, I provide the concept for describing the perceived (...) object in media-based empathy: a living textual body, based on Edith Stein’s concept of Wortleib (a living word body) referring to words as “living,” as bearers of meaning in her early work On the Problem of Empathy [Zum Problem der Einfühlung]. I divide the term Wortleib in two different cases—the empathic and non-empathic object—and thereby argue that, while the object of media-based empathic experience cannot be the other’s body, it is an empathic Wortleib, a communicative empathic object. While Stein herself discussed media-based empathy merely in paper media, I demonstrate the unique usefulness of these concepts in analysing any media-based communication and thus the timeliness of her work in this respect. (shrink)

Social media platforms have become crucial channels for radical right populist leaders to broadcast anti-immigrant views. These politicians employ various rhetorical appeals, such as pathos (emotional language), logos (logical arguments), and ethos (speaker credibility), to sway public opinion. This study considers the anti-immigrant rhetoric of prominent European populist radical right leaders across X, Instagram, and Facebook, analysing the prevalence of these rhetorical strategies across different platforms. From the perspective of mediatization theory, politicians can adjust their messages to fit with (...) the design and formats of various social media platforms. Party leaders often resort to emotional appeals on X, with its limited space for communication, as well as on Facebook, where emotional interaction buttons and discussion features can encourage emotional rhetoric as well. Logical appeals (logos) are common on platforms such as Facebook and X, which offer options to easily share information in the form of texts and links. Additionally, ethos, associated with speaker’s credibility, is common in posts on platforms that facilitate closer engagement with the party leaders’ constituents, such as Facebook and Instagram. These findings underscore the importance of considering platform design when shaping political communication strategies. (shrink)

A central debate in the ethics of deception concerns the moral comparison among the three media through which deception is executed: lying, falsely implicating, or nonlinguistic deception. The two prominent views are that lying is morally worse or that the choice of medium is morally insignificant. This article refutes both and argues for a new position. The article first presents a theory on the moral significance of the medium of deception as such: it argues that the medium of communication (...) affects the reliability of beliefs formed through it, which amounts to gradations in the warrant of truth of different media. Breach of lower warrant of truth is a lesser breach of trust; it therefore deserves lighter condemnation. Consequently, the article shows that, morally speaking, lying is either worse than or equal to falsely implicating and that there is no a priori gradation between nonlinguistic deception and the two linguistic media. (shrink)

This study examines the influence of some suspected sources of bias on perceptions of public sector corruption. These sources include dependence on two types of media as information sources about corruption: traditional and social media, positive perception of public employees, and social identification with public employees. Data were collected through a face-to-face survey of the general public in South Korea. The sample comprised 472 respondents evenly dispersed across the country. Through regression analysis, we found that dependence on traditional (...) media—but not social media—significantly increased the perceived level of corruption. However, positive perceptions of and social identification with public employees were negatively associated with it, showing that these factors may skew respondents' perceptions of corruption. The results have implications for practitioners and researchers who design, implement, or evaluate anti-corruption policies, suggesting the need for caution when making use of survey results. (shrink)

ABSTRACT While populism is commonly considered antagonistic to democratic liberalism, recent research demonstrates how populist rhetoric may highjack traditional liberal discourses and opportunistically refashion them against the plight of minorities. Drawing on the concept of media populism, this research investigates how notions of ‘democracy’ and ‘equality’ were contested in debates on racism in New Zealand regional newspaper, The Taranaki Daily News, and further deployed to promote a populist agenda, against the representation of the Indigenous minority, Māori, in the local (...) government. The analysis of letters to the Editor shows the prevalence of anti-Māori sentiment, articulated through such populist rhetoric as ‘majority’, ‘whole community’ and ‘togetherness’; while the appeal for Māori representation was framed as ‘special treatment’, ‘positive discrimination’, ‘separatism’ and ‘reverse racism’. Hence, by endorsing the populist discourse, media provide their audiences with the moral affinity to support racist and anti-minority policies; ultimately producing the political phenomenon of media populism. (shrink)

Hypocrisy in corporate social responsibility has attracted increasing attention from scholars. Under the context of the digital era, we examine whether and how social media pressure affects the typical corporate hypocrisy of ESG greenwashing. Using a dataset of A-share listed firms in China from 2011 to 2021, we find that negative sentiment from stock message boards induces firms to engage in ESG greenwashing. Our results are confirmed by an array of robustness tests and additional tests. In addition, the impact (...) of social media pressure is more pronounced in firms with lower market value and poorer reputation. The channel tests show that social media pressure induces ESG greenwashing by exacerbating managerial myopia. Finally, we further find that the shareholding of institutional investors, high-quality audit and local environmental regulation can alleviate this negative impact. Overall, our study demonstrates the mechanism underlying social media pressure on ESG greenwashing and provides practical suggestions for improving the construction of the ESG system. (shrink)

The desire to experience emotions is widely considered to be a key motivation for media use, especially for the use of media entertainment. But what exactly do people seek when they seek emotions? What kinds of gratifications do they obtain from the experience of emotions during media use? An overview of research on emotional gratifications shows that emotions can be gratifying in multiple ways – ranging from simple hedonistic gratifications to more complex gratifications such as feeling competent (...) or morally good. An integrative framework is outlined that aims at a more systematic understanding of emotional gratifications and their influence on selective media use. We suggest that different aspects of an emotion's gratification potential are appraised simultaneously, and integrated into a holistic appraisal outcome that can be conceptualized as ‘meta-emotion’. Meta-emotions guide the recipient's intuitive decision to accept, or reject a media offer's invitation to experience emotions. (shrink)

Faced with a minimally participatory democracy, a variety of populists have sought to revitalize popular political participation by strengthening local community mobilizations. Others have called for reliance on frequent referenda. Assessing the limits of these proposals requires theoretical attention to two key issues. The first is the growing importance of very large scale patterns of societal integration which depend on indirect social relationships achieved through communications media, markets and bureaucracies. This split of system world from lifeworld, in Habermas's terms, (...) poses a challenge to democratic theories which assume that the lessons of local social life and political participation are directly translatable into the necessary knowledge for state level (let alone international) activity. Secondly, changes in patterns of community formation and communications media have transformed the basis for democracy. In particular, socio-spatial segmentation by life-style choice, market position and other factors limits direct relationships increasingly to similar individuals. Mass media become increasingly predominant sources of information about people different from oneself, and indirect social relationships form the structural basis for the social integration of most politics. The present paper revised and adapts Habermas's conceptualization of system world and lifeworld in order to address the transformation of patterns of societal integration. This forms the basis for a critical analysis of the implications of changing community form and especially communications media for populist political proposals. (shrink)

Most analyses of whistleblowing are concerned with the whistleblower as an actor or with the act of whistleblowing itself. However, as soon as the whistleblower enters the public arena, a social dynamic emerges of interdependent actors with different responsibilities and different interests.Such a dynamic demands a more comprehensive approach in which the motives of the different actors in the public debate are taken into account.This approach is developed here using an exemplary case of whistleblowing that took place in a Dutch (...) research institute.The intensive media attention damaged both the institute and the whistleblower.In retrospect this could have been avoided.In our analysis we give extra attention to the motives involved and to the inevitability of media logic.In order to avoid unnecessary damage we recommend guidelines to the three basic actors:the whistleblower, the organization and the media. (shrink)

News media helps shape the discourse around natural resource issues, especially rapidly emerging developments such as those taking place in the Arctic. Whilst the relationship between media and audience is complex, news media contributes towards setting the tone and expectations for the burgeoning number of stakeholders engaging with the Arctic, especially in the case of Greenland. This study undertakes a thematic analysis of English-language news media coverage surrounding natural resource development in Greenland to explore how the (...) issue is framed. Five media frames are identified: an emerging resource frontier; the warming Arctic; high-risk activity; geopolitical Greenland; and vulnerable traditional societies. An overarching frame is present within the coverage, one which depicts Greenland as ‘a climate change frontier’, facing ‘uncertainties in the face of rapid change’. Media portrayals of a close-knit relationship between a warming climate and a rush for natural resources in Greenland could be problematic for several reasons, namely the disparity between actual resource development taking place and an overemphasis on increased economic development following increased warming. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper examines self-inscription, a mode of census enumeration that emerged during the nineteenth century. Starting in the 1840s, a number of European states introduced self-inscription as an auxiliary means to facilitate the work of enumerators. However, a decisive shift occurred when Prussian census statisticians implemented self-inscription via individual “Zählkarten”—or “counting cards”—in 1871. The paper argues that scientific ideals of accuracy and precision prevalent in the sciences at the time motivated Prussian census officials to initiate self-inscription as an at-home scenario (...) unmediated by enumerators, in which the census form alone was to yield truthful information from the respondents. By illuminating the bureaucratic means for implementing scientific ideals and practices in gathering personal census data, the paper offers an in-depth analysis of the media, technologies, and manpower that census takers deployed to reveal the epistemic—as well as social and political—impact of being “true to form.”. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how some of the information and communication practices of the Tech Media and specifically of Facebook, constitute media corruption. The paper will examine what the professional role of Facebook is regarding its information/communication practices and then demonstrate that Facebook is essentially a media company and not merely a “platform,” therefore liable to the same normative responsibilities as other media companies. Design/methodology/approach Applying the dual obligation information theory, a (...) normative information and communication theory that applies generally to all media companies that disseminate and share information, the paper demonstrates that Facebook’s role of mediating and curating the information of its users places upon it a normative editing responsibility, to ensure both the preventive detection and corrective editing of fake news, as well as other forms of misinformation disseminated on its platform. Finally, applying a philosophical model of media corruption the paper will demonstrate that Facebook’s role in the Cambridge Analytica case was not only unethical but moreover, constituted media corruption. Findings The paper concludes that Facebook’s media corruption illustrated in the Cambridge Analytica case is not a one-off case but the result of a systemic and inherent conflict of interest between its business model of selling users’ information to advertisers and its normative media role rendering the conflict of interest between those two roles conducive to media corruption. Originality/value The paper's originality is twofold. It demonstrates that Facebook is a media company normatively accountable on the basis of an original theory the DOIT and moreover, on the basis of an original media corruption theory its actions in the Cambridge Analytica case constituted media corruption. (shrink)

The paper explores the role of the media in influencing public opinion from an inferential-pragmatic perspective. It presents preliminary results of the study focused on representation of Russia in Western newspapers. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995,2001; van Dijk 2009) and media linguistics (Fowler 1991, Richardson 2007, among others) the study centres around the linguistic means of construing ambiguity/uncertainty, viewed as a strategy of persuasion. We mostly focus on the semantics of certain groups of words and other (...) textual features such as indefinite pronouns, epistemic modality, passive voice, present perfect tense, interrogative headlines and some other tools used in media texts to construe ambiguity which, in its turn, arguably aims at influencing public opinion. We also look at presupposition, information structure, evaluation and transitivity. Though we have limited our study to the English language sources (The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, news websites of the BBC, Reuters, Express, Politico and Fox News, among others), we are not suggesting that linguistic ambiguity is a feature of Western, rather than Russian, or other languages' media. (shrink)

Günther Anders was a philosopher concerned with the political and social implications of power, both as expressed in the media and its tendency to elide the citizenry and thus the very possibility of democracy and the political implications of our participation in our own subjugation in the image of modern social media beginning with radio and television. Anders was particularly concerned with two bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II, and he was just as (...) concerned with the so-called ‘peaceful’ uses of nuclear power, what he named our apocalypse-blindness and the urgency of violence. To make this case I draw on Baudrillard on ‘speech without response’ and Gadamer on conversation. (shrink)

By looking back to the early days of network building within the Internet, Clemens Apprich looks at how those pioneer projects have shaped new forms of media and social practices, and critically engages with current discourses about the weal and woe of the Internet.

This article exploits the synergy of critical discourse studies and Corpus Linguistics to study the pervasive representation of Islam and Muslims in an approximate 670,000-word corpus of US news media stories published between 2001 and 2015. Following collocation and concordance analysis of the most frequent topics or categories which revolve around the representation of Islam and Muslims in US news stories, the Discourse-Historical Approach to critical discourse analysis was adopted to investigate how the discursive strategies of nomination and predication (...) are used in US news media stories. The findings indicated that, in general, Islam and Muslims are associated with violence, religious radicalism, and Islamic extremist militants. Finally, the article discusses the discursive themes resulting from the analysis of personal pronouns as well as the educational implications of the findings for social studies and multicultural education. (shrink)

"My aim in this paper is to develop an ontology of media operations that is rooted in Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation. I position this media operative ontology in contrast to Bernhard Siegert’s understanding of operative ontology as a cultural technique. Drawing on Wolfgang Ernst, Henri Atlan, and Michel Serres, I argue that Siegert’s position compromises the extra-cultural operationality of technical media, and of techniques more generally, in its bid to redirect media theory from its Kittlerian (...) trajectory. With his theory of information as reception of environmental singularity by a metastable receiver, Simondon provides a mechanism for theorizing how extra-cultural operationality of technical media informs the production of culture and the distinctions upon which it rests, without compromising the alterity of technics. Mein Ziel in diesem Beitrag ist es, eine Ontologie von Medienoperationen zu entwickeln, die auf Gilbert Simondons Theorie der Individuation fußt. Auf der Grundlage von Wolfgang Ernst, Henri Atlan und Michel Serres behaupte ich, dass Siegerts Versuch, die Medientheorie von ihrer Kittlerschen Linie abzulenken, den Stellenwert der außerkulturellen Operationalität technischer Medien und der Techniken im Allgemeinen herabspielt. Mit seiner Theorie der Information als Empfang von umweltlicher Singularität durch einen metastabilen Empfänger bietet Simondon dagegen einen Mechanismus, dank dem theoretisch durchdacht werden kann, wie die außerkulturelle Operationalität der technischen Medien die Kulturproduktion und die Unterscheidungen, auf denen sie beruht, prägt, ohne die Andersheit der Technik zu reduzieren. ". (shrink)

The unfolding of the panorama of images of US prisoner abuse of Iraqis and the quest to pin responsibility on the soldiers and higher US military and political authorities is one of the most intense media spectacles of contemporary journalism. Evoking universal disgust and repugnance, the images of young American soldiers humiliating Iraqis circulated with satellite-driven speed through broadcasting channels, the Internet, and print media and may stand as some of the most influential images of all time.

The 2003 Iraq war was a major global media event constructed very differently by varying broadcasting networks in different parts of the world. While the U.S. networks framed the event as "Operation Iraqi Freedom" (the Pentagon concept) or "War in Iraq," the Canadian CBC used the logo "War on Iraq," and various Arab networks presented it as an "invasion" and "occupation." In this study, I provide critique of the U.S. broadcasting network construction of the war that I interpret as (...) providing a conduit for Bush administration and Pentagon propaganda. (shrink)

Moreover, presidential politics -- on the level of campaigns and governing -- have also exhibited a growing politics of image and spectacle. In our media-saturated society, politicians become celebrities who fine-tune their image through daily photo ops, spin out their message of the day and, like celebrities, employ image management firms to make sure their performance is playing well with the public.

All the utopian talk of information superhighways and the great media societies of the future helps to mask the fact that contemporary capitalist societies are in a situation of seemingly permanent crisis with increased human suffering due to deteriorating social conditions. In the United States, more than 34 million people live below the poverty level; over 3 million are homeless; over ten million are out of work; and millions lack basic health insurance and guaranteed medical care (Hoffman 1987).

This study examines how different forms of media use predict attitudes toward the development of facial recognition technology (FRT) and applications of it by law enforcement to identify criminal suspects, identify potential terrorists, and monitor public protests. The theoretical framework builds on theories of cultivation and genre-specific viewing to develop hypotheses and research questions. The analyses draw on original data from two nationally representative surveys of the U.S. public conducted in 2020, amid a series of controversies and protests about (...) policing and racial justice. The results demonstrate that overall television viewing and crime media viewing predicted support for multiple uses of FRT, while Fox News viewing predicted support for using FRT to monitor protests. The findings advance our understanding of public opinion toward the technology and its implications for policing, protests, and social justice. (shrink)

This article examines the legitimization process of the public health preventive measures implemented in many Western countries following the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Through concepts such as governmentality, disciplinarization and security mechanisms proposed by Foucault, we trace some of the basic principles and implications of the relationship between biopower and medicine, as well as the media dissemination of an official narrative on scientific truth. These reflections are complemented by the contributions of Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Lyotard reflects on the relationship (...) between science and a “performative game”, whose own staging is the core of its criteria of truth. Baudrillard shows the relevance of a “hyperreality” in which the signs presented by the media take precedence over the experience of the subjects. We argue that a mediatized version of science, defined through a strong disciplinarization of knowledge and the censorship of dissident voices, played a key role in the establishment of consensus and the legitimization of policies that granted extraordinary power to governments and transnational elites. Although the work of Foucault in this demonstration is essential, the contributions of Lyotard and Baudrillard provide additional elements to understand a fundamental problem: the public acceptance of “truth” as an instrument of governmentality on a global scale. (shrink)

A great deal of recent academic writing claims—but, more often, assumes—that the American news media have a predominantly conservative bias, slanting and shaping their coverage in ways that favor right‐wing foreign, economic, cultural, and social policies. Two major books pioneered this position and have gone largely uncriticized, despite their immense influence. A detailed examination of Herbert Gans's Deciding What's News and Ben Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly shows, however, that they fall far short of proving their claims about (...) class='Hi'>media bias. The logic of many of their arguments is highly problematic, but especially glaring is the almost complete lack of solid evidence in either book as to the purportedly conservative nature of media content. (shrink)

In the article we discuss the meaning of the body in its material dimension in relation to its transformation in the current context, which is determined by the multi-layered convergence of biopolitics (Foucault 1978–79), necropolitics (Mbembe 2003), digital psychopolitics (Han 2014), and gore capitalism (Valencia 2010). It is an inquire of the ways in which the contemporary body becomes a form of mass media for certain populations who choose to consent to the mandate of making themselves entrepreneurs of their (...) own bodies within the livestream regime (Valencia 2016, 2018). The author analyzes a variety of representations of femininity taking physical form g-locally in bodies, which—in an effort to comply with capitalist mandates and with binary choreographies of gender and sexuality—become businesses themselves. (shrink)

This article considers the expropriation, description, and cultivation of land as a central problem for media history and political ecology. Recent work in the history and theory of media has posited the cultivation of land as a primordial cultural technique or a material operation that underlies signification. Such work stops short, however, of considering that operation—which begins with the drawing of lines on the ground—as a form of labor and hence a dimension of political economy comparable to Rousseau’s (...) account of the origin of property. John Bellamy Foster has shown how Marx’s early development of a neo-Epicurean materialism led, when informed by mid-nineteenth-century scientific agriculture, to what Foster calls Marx’s theory of “metabolic rift,” the disruption of the metabolic interchange between nature and society mediated by human labor. This article returns to the unfinished business of critical theory that rejoins the critique of culture with the critique of nature, by showing how a mediapolitics of land governs the dialectical processes described by eco-Marxists like Foster. Specifically, the article considers the material production of land for both agriculture and industry, informed by scientific agriculture and with plantation slavery as a limit case, through the work of Henry Charles Carey. Rethinking the political economy of land in this way extends the cultural materialism predominant in media history and theory into a more fully historical materialism adequate to an ecological situation in which all that may once have been solid has truly melted, or burned, into air. (shrink)

Features and relevant services of online social media have been attracting users during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous studies have shown that college students tend to use social media more frequently than other groups. However, in being affected by social media overload, the social media use behaviors of many college students have been out of their control in terms of their capabilities or cognition. Based on the stressor–strain–outcome model and the theory of compensatory internet use, we developed (...) a research model to study the causes of social media overload and its impact on college students’ academic performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 441 valid responses from college students through questionnaires in China are collected via purposive sampling and used in the data analysis. This study conducts PLS-SEM to analyze collected data, finding that boredom proneness is associated with overload, which has a bearing on social media overload and the reduction in final performance. Through illustrating the psychological and behavioral conditions that hinder the academic performance of students, this study provides deeper insights into students’ uncontrollable use of social media. Moreover, with respect to the identified antecedents, this study aims to find solutions to mitigate the impact of social media overload resulting from boredom proneness on the academic performance of college students. (shrink)

The phenomenon of ‘sharenting’, whereby a parent shares news and images of their child on social media, is of growing popularity in contemporary society. There is emerging research into children’s attitudes regarding sharenting and their associated concerns regarding privacy; however, this research most often involves young people who are approaching adulthood and are competent to participate. As a result, children who experience illness or disability are largely absent from current research, and as such, the moral permissibility of a parent (...) sharing their child’s illness journey on a public social media platform is largely unexplored. In this essay, I explore this issue by using the United NationsConvention on the Rights of the Childand Joel Feinberg’s principle of the child’s right to an open future as the basis of my argument: that children with illness and disability have the same rights as healthy children to privacy, identity and an open future and that publication of their illness on a social media platform violates these rights. I conclude that parents, as surrogate decision makers for their children, have the same responsibilities in protecting their child’s privacy as they do in making medical decisions on behalf of their children. As children of the social media generation approach adulthood, it is important to consider the rights of those who cannot speak for themselves and the ethical consequences of sharenting for children with illness and disability. (shrink)

The relativistic optics of the nondispersive media endowed with the metric gij(x) [Eq. (1.6)] and with a nonlinear connection [Eq. (1.2)] is studied. The d-connection [Eqs. (3.3)– (3.4)] relates the conformal and projective properties of the space- time. A post-Newtonian estimation for the metric gij(x) is also given. It is shown that the solar system tests impose a constraint [Eq. (4.20)] on a combination of the post- Newtonian parameters describing the model.

This article reports results of an empirical study of Slovak media coverage of international affairs. The goal of the article is to determine whether the outputs of selected Slovak media correspond to the expectations of the Propaganda Model. In order to accomplish this goal, a content analysis of coverage of two cases of international conflict was performed and two hypotheses were evaluated. The hypotheses amount to an expectation that there will be a quantitative and qualitative difference in the (...) way that selected Slovak media cover civilian casualties and potential breaches of international law based on the relationship of Slovak elites to the perpetrator. The analysis concludes that the degree of quantitative and qualitative inconsistency in the coverage of the selected issues could not be attributed to factors external to Slovak media and therefore have to be attributed to structural factors of Slovak media space, which need to be further examined. (shrink)

As gene editing technologies such as CRISPR have become increasingly prominent, so have media portrayals of them. With this in mind, the present study builds on theoretical accounts of framing effects, cultivation effects, and genre-specific viewing effects to examine how different forms of media use predict attitudes toward applications of gene editing. Specifically, the study tests how news use, overall television viewing, and science fiction viewing are related to such attitudes. The analyses draw on original data from two (...) surveys of the U.S. public, one conducted in 2020 and the other in 2021. The results from both surveys indicate that news use and overall television viewing predict support for uses of gene editing, whereas science fiction viewing is not significantly related to opinion. The findings suggest that media frames and images may carry implications for the trajectory of public opinion about gene editing technologies and, ultimately, the social context for their development and adoption. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate Libyan journalists’ perspectives regarding the media laws Articles 37,132, 38 and 46, which address media freedom in the new Libyan Constitution of 2017. Design/methodology/approach Focus group discussions were done with 35 Libyan journalists, 12 of them from the Constitution Committee, while 23 of them reported the update of the constitution in the Libyan Parliament. Findings The results of the study indicated that there were media laws articles that did (...) not conform to the international laws and United Nations treaties, which the Libyan Parliament committee approved. Another finding from the journalists was the Constitution should provide and guarantee press freedom, while media laws articles approved to put a paragraph about “censorship” in the press and media as a tool to silence government opposition. In addition, journalists indicated future constitution should redraft Article 38 to conform with Article 19 of the “International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” to support the “principles of freedom of expression and information” without control. Moreover, Article 46 needs to be changed and linked to the “provisions of international law on the right of information access” to improve the access and dissemination of information in the media. Practical implications Redrafting the constitution articles in the future can be summarised as follows: First, the Libyan Constitution should provide and guarantee press freedom without any censorship and include clear articles to protect journalists in conflict zones. Second, Articles 37,132 and 38, about “freedom of information and publication,” need to be redrafted to link with Article 19 of the “International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” to support the principles of freedom of expression and information, and the use of this right must not be subject to prior control. Third, Article 46 needs to be changed and linked to the provisions of “International law on the Right of Access to Information” to improve access and dissemination of information in the media to protect confidentiality sources. The most important articles should be implemented because after the Arab Spring revolutions, there was a transitional period in societies and a change in the constitutions of Tunisia and Egypt. They developed legal articles about media freedom so that Libya resembles other Arab countries. From that point, the journalists recommended that all information should be protected from government interference to ensure transparency, combat corruption and protect independent journalists. These articles will open the way to add more development articles to media freedom rules in the Journalists’ Syndicate. Fourth, there are also various types of threats encountered by journalists in their work. In pursuit of their right and freedom of expression, they recommended that Libya must establish an independent self-regulatory media that are free from political and economic influence. Fifth, journalists need licenses for them to work through the syndicate. The new syndicate should play an active role to safeguard the rights of journalists, activists and media entities to carry out their work and end the self-censorship. Sixth, the constitution should also add articles to end the impunity and change the articles in the penal code. Overall, the journalists covering the conflict and war are encountering threats, violence and imprisonment. As a result, Libyan journalists must seek new legislation to defend independent journalism and freedom of expression in their deeply divided country. In addition, they need to have a strong central authority to defend journalists and journalism in wartime, where journalists are regularly threatened, abducted and sometimes killed. Also, the Libyan Journalists Syndicate should stress the importance of the media’s self-regulation to guarantee their rights to freedom of expression, grant their readers’ respect and minimise government’s interference. Finally, they need to develop new laws to grant media freedom from regulations and restrictions, as well as defend and promote democracy, the citizens’ right to be informed, as well as their right to discuss and disseminate information. There is also the need to implement articles in the constitution, articles about the protection of political speech, which would be specific enough to differentiate between what is legally permitted and what may be ethically offensive. Originality/value This study will help the new Libyan parliament after the legislative elections on 24 December 2021 to amend the media laws articles in the constitution. (shrink)

The focus of this study is on media reporting of police involved shootings in Florida. Given that knowledge of killings committed by law enforcement are frequently restricted to what people get from news sources, it is important to investigate the way these messages are being communicated. An exploratory analysis of 199 articles and transcripts covering 86 cases relevant to deadly use of force by police officers as reported from 2013 to 2015 provided the primary data source. The analysis engaged (...) a critical examination of media content and goodness of fit models to identify commonalities used by the media when reporting police involved shootings. The goal is to determine the potential impact of race, age and gender of a victim with regard to the media’s portrayal of events that result in lethal use of force by police. It is expected that exposure of the discoveries in this study will influence future law enforcement reporting systems for a more transparent relationship between police, news and the community. The demographics characteristics race, sex and age that were assessed in this study were not significantly associated with the length of media coverage on police involved shootings. However, further analysis using different modeling approaches are required for a better understanding as to whether a relationship exists. (shrink)

This article examines contributions from members of the public featured in British television news coverage of the 2005 London bombings. Specifically, it explores how images captured by ordinary people on their mobile devices were used in the live news reportage of 7/7 and, given the current salience of commemorative journalism, how these were used in the tragedy’s first year anniversary coverage. The analysis reveals broadcasters’ selection of uniform, repetitive and ‘sanitized’ mobile media footage, as well as a tendency towards (...) non-attribution. This article contributes to the scant body of discourse analytic research into ‘participatory journalism’ practices, particularly their interaction with ‘traditional’ forms of journalism. (shrink)