Media Logic Research Articles

Welfare State Values and Public Service Media in the Era of Datafication

Welfare states have historically been built on values of egalitarianism and universalism and through high taxation that provides free education, health care, and social security for all. Ideally, this encourages participation of all citizens and formation of inclusive public sphere. In this welfare model, the public service media are also considered some of the main institutions that serve the well-being of an entire society. That is, independent, publicly funded media companies are perceived to enhance equality, citizenship, and social solidarity by providing information and programming that is driven by public rather than commercial interest. This article explores how the public service media and their values of universality, equality, diversity, and quality are affected by datafication and a platformed media environment. It argues that the embeddedness of public service media in a platformed media environment produces complex and contradictory dependencies between public service media and commercial platforms. The embeddedness has resulted in simultaneous processes of adapting to social media logics and datafication within public service media as well as in attempts to create alternative public media value-driven data practices and new public media spaces.

Rethinking the digital democratic affordance and its impact on political representation: Toward a new framework

This article advances a new theory of the digital democratic affordance, a concept first introduced by Lincoln Dahlberg to devise a taxonomy of the democratic capacities of digital media applications. Whereas Dahlberg classifies digital media affordances on the basis of preexisting democratic positions, the article argues that the primary affordance of digital media is to abate the costs of political participation. This cost-reducing logic of digital media has diverging effects on political participation. On an institutional level, digital democracy applications allow elected representatives to monitor and consult their constituents, closing some gaps in the circuits of representation. On a societal level, digital media allow constituents to organize and represent their own interests directly. In the former case, digital affordances work instrumentally in the service of representative democracy; in the latter, digital democratic affordances provide a mobilized public with emerging tools that put pressure on the autonomy of representatives.

Comparing research topics in European and International Communication Association journals: Computational analysis

This study uses diachronic computational analysis enhanced with a qualitative approach to examine ongoing changes in communication studies, comparing trends in two European media studies journals and three major International Communication Association journals. We analyze the titles, keywords, and abstracts of 2,585 articles published between 1994–2007 and 2008–2016. We find differences between topics in the two periods in each of the journals’ groups and between the two groups themselves. In the European group, we find centrality of topics related to media change and media logic. In the ICA journals, we find a strengthening of scholarly engagement with effects studies. At the same time, we find evidence of erosion of the place of cultural studies as a distinctive research stream.

Pokémon Go as a cognitive map: Simplifying and focusing movement in postmodern urban spaces

The location-based, augmented reality video game Pokémon Go has been an unprecedented phenomenon in the short history of mobile smartphone applications. In this article, I argue that the remarkable success of Pokémon Go derives from its cognitive mapping qualities within postmodern, hyper-mediated environments. By focusing and filtering the vast information associated with navigating postmodern spaces, Pokémon Go provides individuals with greater clarity by defining the subject’s social identity in relationship to the physical environment. In particular, the game recentres the fragmented subject’s disorienting experiences associated with postmodern cultures immersed in digital information. Via its integration of location-based gaming, rudimentary augmented reality, simple mobile game design and collaborative local community-based game-play, Pokémon Go allows the individual to move about the complex urban environment with great confidence, purpose and clarity – the search for Pokémon frames the player’s objectives and attention (literally via the smartphone screen). Drawing upon the media ecology tradition, the contemporary world-view or media logic of ubiquitous digital media is dominated by quantification, clear game-like rules, and the ‘productive’ collection and management of information.

Platform drifting: When work digitalization hijacks its spirit

Organizations are increasingly digitalizing the work associated with information exchange by using enterprise social media. However, social media’s openness to outsider users poses significant challenges to maintaining alignment between social media logic (or platform logic that guides decisions and actions on the platform) and the dominant organizational logic. Through an in-depth, longitudinal, abductive study of three successive social media implementations in a single organization, I explore the process of maintaining (or losing) social media alignment and its long-term consequences on the nature of the work. The paper shows that digitalization exposes the work to continuous adjustment within and across three elements of digital work: digital infrastructure work (embracing new uses of the platform at the user level), digital strategy work (redesigning governance policies), and aligning work (fitting uses with the platform logic underlying digital work). The findings show that despite initial social media alignment, through continuous coevolution of these three elements, the platform logic underlying digital community work eventually drifted away from supporting the organization’s original logic of cohesion to supporting an alternative logic of inclusivity. Accordingly, a process model of platform drifting has been developed. By taking a closer look at actual practices, the paper contributes to digital work research by identifying distinct elements of digital work involved in social media (mis)alignment and illustrates the profound, long-term consequences of social media on the nature of the work.

(Re)Animating The Image. Staging Media in Romeo Castelluci's M.#10 Marseille

Contemporary theater practices show a clear shift toward the visual, leaving behind the authorial voice of the text in dramatic theater. Bonnie Marranca already noticed how avant-garde artists use text merely as pretext (xi) in a theater of high visuality (xii) and also Hans-Thies Lehmann affirms the contemporary preoccupation with visual dramaturgy (93). In the wake of this evolution, theater studies has focused more and more on theater as a visual event, proposing theater as an image-producing medium able to reflect on the politics of image-making (Rottger and Jackob) and capable of critically engaging with historical ways of seeing (Bleeker). Interestingly, these accounts foreground theater as a self-reflective medium that deconstructs the operations of making and seeing images. The article continues this line of thought, analyzing how different media (painting, sculpture, photography and cinema) are staged in the visual dramaturgy of Romeo Castellucci’s M.#10 Marseille. We argue that theater’s critical potential toward the visual is anchored in the clash of the spatio-temporal logics of these respective media. Nevertheless, the account of theater as a self-reflective vision machine also falls short, as it fails to acknowledge the magical aspects of the (re)animation of the image on the theater stage. As visual dramaturgies provide a stage to bring the image to life, they go beyond a self-critical account of theater and experiment with an animistic attitude toward the image as a living organism (Mitchell).

Brazos Fellowship: A Case Study in Digitally Mediated Liturgical Design

This article examines how the liturgy in evangelical churches is influenced by digital media and digital culture. This was accomplished via an ethnographic study at a medium sized church in East Central Texas where participant observation was combined with qualitative interviews with four members of the church’s pastoral and media production team. Theorizing that decisions made about orchestrated liturgical design in churches of this type are strategic responses to social and technological developments rooted in the mediatization of society, the study revealed three key interconnected themes of significance. These are: media as intentionality, media as environment, and media as audience. A critical discourse analysis of these themes demonstrates that the unique liturgical approach in churches of this type is the result of an intentional, strategic orchestration of entertainment media and media techniques rooted in the mediatization of religion and the amplification of select elements of media logic.

The roles of news media as democratic fora, agenda setters, and strategic instruments in risk governance

This study analyzes news media’s role in governmental decision-making processes related to a gradually intensifying series of earthquakes resulting from gas drilling in the Netherlands, and catastrophic natural earthquakes in Italy. According to the risk governance actors interviewed in both cases, media play three roles, as: democratic fora, agenda setters, and strategic instruments. Media attention for risk can create ripple effects in governmental decision-making processes. However, media attention tends to be risk-event driven and focuses on direct newsworthy consequences of events. For ‘non-event risks’, or when newsworthiness after a risk-event fades, the media’s agenda setting and democratic fora roles are limited. This contributes to risk attenuation in society, potentially resulting in limited risk prevention and preparedness. Governmental actors report difficulties in using news media for strategic communication to facilitate risk governance because of media’s tendency towards sensationalism. Our research suggests that, in the governance of earthquake-risk news, media logic overrules other institutional logics only for a short while and not in the long run when the three roles of media do not reinforce each other.

ALGORITHMIC POPULISM AND THE DATAFICATION AND GAMIFICATION OF THE PEOPLE BY FLEMISH INTEREST IN BELGIUM

ABSTRACT Populism studies tend to understand populism as a purely political phenomenon (MUDDE; KALTWASSER, 2017; MÜLLER, 2016). To categorize someone as a populist or not, is in many cases solely based on an evaluation of discourse, style or even ideology. It is much rarer to see approaches to populism that focus on the relation between politics and media and digital media in particular (welcome exceptions are CESARINO 2019 e SILVA, 2019). Throughout this contribution, I will argue that we cannot understand populism in full without focusing in detail on how populists and others actually construct the populist voice, how they communicate themselves on different platforms as the ‘true representatives of the people’. This inevitably means taking the changing media landscape into account as a key-context that shapes contemporary populism. The hybrid media system, its media logics, affordances and its culture of connectivity need to be considered when trying to make sense of populism and politics in general in the 21st century.

Democracy and Deliberation in the Age of Facebook

In 2016, we witnessed two shocking political decisions in stable democracies: the election of Donald Trump as American president and the United Kingdom’s referendum to exit the European Union membership. After the scandal of Cambridge Analytica mining Facebook data to influence the 2016 U.S. elections, a public conversation began to question the role of data use, surveillance practices, and especially of social media companies such as Facebook in shaping democracies. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book, Antisocial Media. How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford UP, 2018), paints the larger picture of the logics by which Facebook operates. It encourages readers to understand not only political outcomes such as Brexit and the U.S. elections, but also the erosion of democracy globally (from India to Poland and Hungary) as the result of media logics of audience fragmentation, narrowcasting, and discursive polarization.

Data Privacy and Displacement: A Cultural Approach

Abstract Recent research has pointed to the increasing impact of digitally derived data on forced migration processes, including legal mechanisms for accessing social media profiles of asylum seekers. These developments raise the issue of data privacy, specifically how asylum seekers understand data privacy and protect their data. This article pays particular attention to cultural variants of data privacy. Culture, here, refers to a communication culture linked to displacement, with safety as a key code and variant of data privacy. For the asylum seekers and refugees from South(east) Asia, the Middle East and African nations, safety was a concern in daily digital practice. Safety was a relational way of being, exercised through selective contacts and playful presentations of the self. Those presentations were deeply embedded in the logics of social media and stood in contrast to narratives of persecution, potentially posing problems for asylum claim determination in the future. Based on the lack of awareness of asylum seekers about data privacy and safety, a data safety workshop was designed, available on GitHub.

Making enemies with media

This article examines the role of media technology in determining preconstitutive enemies of the political order. To do so, it analyzes how discipline-specific methods of enemy detection, analysis, and neutralization correspond to different media environments. Media have a diagnostic and prescriptive significance: not only do they locate enemies that conform to their own unique standards of measurement, they also offer reprogramming resources that accentuate their own peculiar biases and capacities. Episodes in the history of biology and psychology are examined for evidence of this media logic.

Prison media work: from manual labor to the work of being tracked

Incarcerated individuals have long contributed to crucial societal infrastructures. From being leased work force building the railway in the United States to constructing canal systems in Sweden, prisoners’ labor has been widespread as an important part of value production. Part of the labor conducted by incarcerated people is related to the production, repair, and maintenance of media devices and media infrastructures constituting what we call prison media work. In this article, we trace the changing logics of prison media work historically since the inception of the modern prison at the turn of the 20th century. Based on archival material, interviews, and field observations, we outline a shift from physical manual labor toward the work of being tracked that is constitutive of surveillance capitalism in- and outside of the prison. We argue that prison media work holds an ambiguous position combining elements of exploitation and rehabilitation, but most importantly it is a dystopian magnifying glass of media work under surveillance capitalism.

From #MeToo to #MeTooIndia: News Domestication in Indian English Language Newspapers

ABSTRACTThis study examines news domestication in an Indian context by analyzing the press coverage of the global #MeToo movement in India. The findings were based on the textual analysis of 641 news articles from five prominent English language newspapers published between October 2017 and October 2018. Accordingly, this study reveals that the press domesticated the global #MeToo movement by highlighting similar concerns in the Indian entertainment industry. It also filtered the stories through a local media logic, which included market/commercial and cultural logic. The news which passed through this media logic resulted in the selection of certain types of celebrity stories over others. While this helped to raise the issue of sexual harassment among educated middle-class Indians, it also trivialized it by focusing on celebrity scandals and ignoring problems faced by ordinary and less organized women in marginalized communities.

Between Mutation and Glitch

The following paper considers the immanent principles of digital media evolution. The features of the evolutional route of digital objects are conditioned by glitches, errors and bugs, which appear in media functioning, what in its turn gives birth to the new forms, structures and configurations of digital reality. The glitches are considered not only as a kind of digital mutations, but also as a sign of activity of media. Decisions elaborated from the programs’ failures enlarge the resolution capacity of new technologies. The paper provides an analysis of certain errors and glitches, which engineers, programmers, game designers faced with during their work with digital environment. The theoretical framework includes Henri Bergson’s theory of creative evolution, Gram Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, media philosophical approach to the problem of the activity of object proposed by Valery Savchuk and the theory of self-organisation and autopoiesis of the social systems worked out by Niklas Luhmann. The analysis of digital objects activity demonstrates two levels of functioning. The first one, fictional level, reveals mainly (but not only) in the computer games and concerns the content of media, when we gain a habit to interact with digital objects/characters as if they are real. The second level, operational, realises in the digital environment in general and concerns the form of media. On this level, glitches and bugs have crucial meaning, because they might evoke the changes in the digital world organisation, starting from the local decisions for the certain program (e.g. the elaboration of the new ways in solving locomotional tasks in simulations, which might be later use in other projects) and ending with the replacement of practices and representations typical for the human of digital era. The paper shows that it is possible to talk about digital evolution not in terms of the history of technological inventions, but in terms of the changes in digital objects caused by the inner logic of media, independently from the human will and expectations.

Digital Nationalism on Weibo on the 70th Chinese National Day

China’s digital nationalism has been on the rise during the last decade. This article examines the digital nationalistic expression of solidarity and unity on China’s 70th National Day celebration in 2019. It conducted a qualitative content analysis of 500 posts regarding China’s National Day, which were posted on October 1, 2019, on Sina Weibo. This study finds that Chinese internet users employ textual and visual posts to express their pride and loyalty, thereby reflecting their Chinese identity, a call for national unity, and their best wishes for China’s bright future. This study suggests that Weibo offers a virtual “imagined community” for netizens to interact with national symbols to spontaneously strengthen a sense of national identity by highlighting the Chinese Communist Party’s achievements. The findings concluded that national identity is socially constructed, rather than being permanent. Moreover, the Internet facilitates a more liberating Chinese media system; however, digital media is also somehow influenced by the Chinese government’ s media logic, which helps to further disseminate the government’ s interests.

The Story Logic of Social Media: Co-Construction and Emergent Narrative Authority

The Story Logic of Social Media: Co-Construction and Emergent Narrative Authority

Serving the populist agenda. How German public media broadcasters inadvertently facilitate populist movements by evoking fear and anger

The term Media Populism is used to indicate a ‘involuntary complicity’ between news media and populist movements based on the convergence of commercial media logic and populist communication style. It grants populists and their messages a high degree of media visibility. According to the literature, this applies more to tabloid media and infotainment content in commercial television than to upmarket media outlets and news programs. In this paper, we refer to another form of involuntary collaboration between news media and populists that is not based on similar communication styles, but simply on the fact that news media have to report on topics which populists claim issue ownership for. This applies foremost to upmarket media and public service broadcasting, which are obliged by their own quality standards or legal mandate to report completely and comprehensively on all topics of public concern. We are especially interested in the emotional response of German audiences to news coverage on two topics: mass migration and the role of Islam in Germany. With the help of two experiments, we demonstrate that public service news reporting on these issues provokes strong negative emotional reactions. What is more, our results indicate that media induced fear and anger lead to increased support for anti-migration and Islam-critical demands. Hence, German public service broadcasters may not only be ‘secret accomplices’ in creating negative emotions towards Muslim migration, but also facilitate populist movements.

German Public Television, Social Media and Audience Engagement

This article discusses how social media affect German public service broadcasting (PSB) in terms of PSB’s efforts to reach younger audiences in the digital age. Since social media play a significant role for younger media users, German PSB is attempting to integrate social media into television (commonly referred to as social TV). Social TV has the ability to develop into fairly integrated multiplatform application systems that are driven by the logic of social media. One example is the content network funk, launched by ARD and ZDF in 2016. The content network’s shows demonstrate a changed television-audience relationship within the social media environment. I will analyze this changed television-audience relationship in terms of the way it addresses audience engagement due to its policy of participation.

Satirizing international crises. The depiction of the Ukraine, Greek debt, and migration crises in political satire

In international crises, the media’s information and orientation function is particularly important in the public sphere. While the news media’s crisis coverage has been well researched and often criticized, very little is known about the depiction of crises in political satire. This study examines how German satirical shows (n = 154 episodes, 2014–2016) covered the Ukraine, Greek debt, and migration crises and whether or not these depictions corresponded to news media logic. In its attention to the crises, satire follows news media’s conflict orientation. Parallels with news media logic also relate to the information function because the predominant frame elements in satirical shows mirror governmental positions. This is different regarding the orientation function. In their evaluation of the frame elements, satirical shows’ criticism of governmental positions and their support for minority positions create a counter-narrative for the crises. Thus, satirical shows provide added value for public discourse.