Media Ecology Research Articles

The Historic, Present and Future Role of Regulation in Securing the Standards of ‘Public Value’ Media

AbstractThis article examines the evolution of public service broadcasting (PSB) regulation in the UK, contrasting two opposing perspectives on its role and addressing its contemporary challenges. Analysing the historical context and recent regulatory changes, the article argues that PSB remains vital to the UK's media landscape, providing high quality content and serving the public good. However, it identifies technological advancements and political interference as significant threats to its continued success. The article critically evaluates the draft Media Bill's potential to address these challenges and enhance PSB's competitiveness. Additionally, it raises concerns about potential bias within the regulatory body, Ofcom, urging greater transparency and fairness in its oversight of the media market. The article emphasises the need for a robust regulatory framework to ensure the continued viability of PSB and foster a vibrant and diverse media ecosystem.

The Influence of Social Media on traditional Journalism in Uganda. A case study of Capital Radio

This study examines how social media and traditional journalism interact dynamically within the framework of Uganda's Capital Radio. The research uses a case study technique and focuses on how social media affects news creation, audience interaction, and the potential and challenges for maintaining journalistic integrity. Using existing research on social media's impact on news, audience engagement, and journalistic practices, the study explores Capital Radio's maneuvers through this dynamic media environment. The study utilized a descriptive cross-sectional design, which is appropriate when the problem has a clear definition and the researcher needs the respondents to describe specific aspects of the problem. This study focused on 78 important Capital Radio stakeholders, including senior management, specialists in the field of social media's influence on Uganda's traditional journalism, shareholders, customers, and regulatory agencies. Various stakeholders were selected based on their thorough comprehension and insightful opinions of the topic's applicability to the goals of the research. The results are intended to give light on the transformative effects on news creation processes and the larger media ecosystem, as well as to provide insights into the symbiotic interaction between social media and traditional journalism. According to the report, social media has a big impact on Capital Radio's news creation and journalistic methods. It highlights how important it is to reconsider established journalistic procedures and adjust to the changing media environment. The poll underscores the significance of audience involvement in optimizing content generation and augmenting reporting, underscoring the imperative for news establishments to participate actively in audience engagement. Keywords: Social Media, Traditional Journalism, News Production, Audience Engagement, Media, Capital Radio

The In-House Balance: Negotiating Professional Identity, Boundaries, and Ethical Quandaries as an In-House Sports Reporter

ABSTRACT The sports media landscape has shifted to favor outlets with inside access to sports organizations, teams, and athletes. This study interviews 21 NFL in-house reporters working at 19 official team websites to determine how they view their roles as sports journalists, including ethical standards and shifts in media boundaries. Qualitative interviews uncovered that cultivating a positive team image and protecting the interests of stakeholders supersede the production of objective news stories, even from those who started their careers as external sports reporters. Internal reporters are often conflicted with their roles in the sports media ecosystem. Additionally, interviews reveal their efforts to maintain a balancing act between the established ideals of journalism with the positive spin that accompanies public relations. The present study illuminates how such positions both mirror and diverge from the expectations typically placed within sports journalism, while offering fruitful avenues for subsequent scholarly investigation.

The War in Ukraine Through the Prism of Visual Disinformation and the Limits of Specialized Fact-Checking. A Case-Study at Le Monde

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led to a flood of disinformation circulating online, making fact-checking and verification crucial for journalists covering the conflict. Based on five semi-structured interviews and an analysis of 48 debunks published between February and October 2022, this study aims to understand how Les Décodeurs, the fact-checking unit of the French daily newspaper Le Monde, organized its practices in response to the flow of visual disinformation surrounding the conflict, and to place them within the broader framework of practices and categorizations of previous research on fact-checking and disinformation. The findings show that most fact-checks focuses on authentic images with misleading captions, rather than sophisticated manipulation. Previous categorizations prove their ability to describe the 48 pieces of visual disinformation but a more refined approach is suggested by considering visual disinformation as mainly multi-modal. The study reveals the fact-checkers’ role as gatekeepers in filtering content from social networks and addressing the challenge of countering viral disinformation while avoiding unintended amplification. It also identifies a blend of shared and individualized approaches among fact-checking journalists, including manual and pre-digital methods, reflecting the adaptable nature of their work. Based on the latest developments of gatekeeping functions, the study highlights limitations in the challenge of reconciling reactive and retroactive practices with mid-term editorial considerations in a rapidly evolving media ecosystem.

Era of the Individual Viewer? Taste, Value, and Creative Media Work in India’s Streaming Industries

How do key players in Bombay’s screen industries—producers, directors, writers, and business developers—understand, imagine, and navigate the dizzying new world of streaming platforms in India? Tracking the emergence of symbiotic relationships between new streaming platforms and established media professionals, I discuss how a restructuring of industry dynamics is elemental to the processes of cultural legitimation of new streaming tastes and the reconfigurations of the relationships between texts, industries, and audiences. Through case studies of a few prominent creative professionals associated in various capacities with global and local streaming platforms, I sketch the multiple linkages between contemporary streaming cultures and the structural histories of both film and television in the subcontinent. Ultimately, this article argues that media workers’ self-reflexivity and theorizations about the industry-in-digital transit help us not only grasp the heterogeneity of this moment, but also trace notions of value and taste in Bombay’s emerging digital media ecologies.

Influence of network video film and television communication based on sampling theory

The media landscape has been evolving at a dizzying pace in recent years, with short video platforms emerging as a significant public information conduit; yet, it must be acknowledged that the impact of these platforms on transmission is still rather limited. Both the width and the depth are not up to par. Improving the impact, increasing the reach and impact, and making the most of the Douyin platform for scientific communication activity is an immediate concern. Douyin, China's most popular video-sharing platform, with 400 million daily users. Douyin provides regular individuals with the resources they need to start their own video art careers; it is popular outside of tier 1 cities. There are also inventive contests on the site where individuals can try their hand at being famous overnight. In this study, we look at how social media platforms evaluate short video head accounts online. Research is conducted to separate out the communication features of the head accounts based on popular scientific themes, the length of the form, and the use of other platform functions in the operation process. This study use random theory to pick various sorts of short videos as the final effective analysis samples, with a random sampling range of 15% of the empirical sample size, in order to deal with the temporal dimension and the enormous number of online video samples. Among the topics covered by Douyin's popular scientific short video accounts, the percentages for science, technology, innovations, medical care, health, and nature stand at 18.99%, 16.59%, and 15.38%, respectively, according to the article's sample data. Online video and film may be effectively disseminated in this research's media ecosystem, which is based on sampling theory.

Romance as a medium-Lin Huiyin’s relationships in transmedia intertextual discourse

ABSTRACT Lin Huiyin (1904–1955) was the first woman architect in modern China. Her romantic love stories have shaped a discourse that, for optimal engagement, both provides and requires transmedia and intertextual media theories. This research examines Lin’s romantic stories that entangled with her career and life, from the perspective of media ecology, narrative, and gender studies. I argue that although the Chinese media environment is censored, constrained, and scrutinized, given enough time and movement among multiple platforms, a medium can shape its own ecology and develop “organic” discussions on a subject that is commonly perceived as less political and more humanistic, particularly romantic love. These discussions provide a more spontaneous discourse for media users to share their opinions and expose more genuine views on gender, nation, and morality. These topics require continuing conversations rather than didactic education to change. Although change usually does not occur quickly, the airing of genuine yet problematic opinions helps the public and stakeholders observe, identify, and interact with them and create the possibility to reshape public opinions on gender roles, particularly women’s roles in romantic discourse, which always interacts with women’s individual realization as well as professional, familial, and social relationships.

The Evolving Media Ecosystem and Religious Patterns in Anantnag, Kashmir

Abstract This paper explores how followers of Islamic traditions in the Anantnag district of Jammu and Kashmir, India, articulate their religious experiences within the context of various communication mediums. The primary aim is to examine how Islamic traditions in Anantnag uphold their relationship with diverse media symbols and formats, while exploring how individuals in this Muslim-majority region derive religious significance from their engagement with various media platforms. The paper aims to illuminate the processes associated with communicating Islamic traditions within the evolving context of media history in Anantnag. By employing in-depth interviews and a thorough review of existing literature, this paper argues that each media form holds a distinctive influence in shaping religious practices and discourses within the context of Anantnag. To understand how Muslims construct meaning through engagement with media of religious significance, this paper delves into narratives of self-identity, considering them as essential resources for illustrating the intersection of religious patterns and media landscapes in Anantnag.

A media ecology perspective on psychedelics

Psychedelic drugs present an intriguing variation on the widely circulated maxim that the medium is the message. Psychedelics are commonly defined as non-specific agents without intrinsic effects, and their effects are described as crucially dependent on internal and external contexts (commonly referred to as set and setting). Psychedelics can therefore be understood as a medium defined by its exceptional pliability and amenability to contextual cues. It thus follows that the effects of psychedelics as a medium are crucially embedded and shaped by their surrounding media. This article observes the intriguing implications and surprising benefits that emerge when examining psychedelics and media ecology in conjunction. It points to ways in which media ecology may enrich our understanding of psychedelics and their effects and to ways in which psychedelics may serve to enhance media ecological literacy and provide a new experimental space for explorations in media ecology.

The case for starting with Amusing Ourselves to Death

This article builds a case for starting undergraduate media ecology education with reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman’s work puts forward the important and fundamental precepts of media ecology and moves students to think about the connection between medium and content as well as media as environments. The text also illustrates a clear shift in media environments, another building block for understanding media ecology. Most central to the case of starting with this text is that Postman offers a critique of an older media environment, television, which students will find more rhetorically acceptable than criticism of our current digital media environment. Choosing to start with a criticism of an older medium creates space for media ecology pedagogy to thoroughly investigate other media environments.

Some thoughts at the start of a new year

This editorial of the first issue of 2024 looks back on 2023 and then reflects on the upcoming events in the Media Ecology Association that are also important to Explorations in Media Ecology (EME). It reaffirms the relevance of media ecology to important conversations about contemporary challenges.

Information and Environmental Media Hygiene as an Object of Sociological Analysis

Relevance. The widespread use of modern information and communication technologies, in particular, social Internet media, forms a special space (media ecosystem), which has a significant impact on the formation of public opinion, values and behavior of people. Particularly significant in the realities of expanding the boundaries of the media space of the culture of modern society, in the context of human interaction and the media ecosystem, is the researchers' appeal to the problem of determining the basic principles of the information and environmental media hygiene, considered as the ability of society to resist the destructive influence of media discourse in the post-truth era and related to the study of the influence of the media on mental and moral health of a person. The purpose of this work is a sociological analysis of the information and environmental media environment as one of the directions of countering the risks and dangers of the modern media environment. Objectives: disclosure of the essence of the main risks and dangers of the modern media environment; analysis of the relationship between the concepts of "information hygiene" and "information and environmental media hygiene"; definition of the basic principles of information and environmental media hygiene both from the side of modern social media (primarily Internet communication) and from the side of modern active users of the media environment (both media consumers and media producers). Methodology. The article uses such general scientific methods as comparative analysis, synthesis, abstraction and generalization. The research is based on the basic principles of a systematic and structural-functional approach. An ecological approach to understanding the media space was chosen as the main theoretical and methodological guideline. Results. The paper presents the results of theoretical and methodological analysis of the phenomenon of information and environmental media hygiene. The basic principles of the information and environmental media hygiene are defined and formulated both on the part of modern social media (primarily Internet communication media) and on the part of modern active users of the media environment (both media consumers and media producers). Conclusions. The modern media space and the developed media environment, in addition to providing various benefits and privileges to meet the information needs of media users, also carries large-scale risks and dangers, which, first of all, include infodemia and infoxification. Due to the fact that these negative phenomena have serious consequences for society, it becomes especially important to define and develop the principles of information and environmental media hygiene, which must be observed both by modern social media (primarily Internet communication) and by active users of the media environment (both media consumers and media producers).

Rethinking the three origin stories for communication studies in North America

There are three origin stories for communication studies in North America: the Public Speaking tradition in the United States, the Mass Communication tradition in the United States, and the Media Ecology tradition rooted in Canadian scholarship. In this Probe, I want to talk about the three traditions, as I understand them. Then, I want to talk about some experiences surveying residents of rural Lake and Cook counties in Northeastern Minnesota about internet access. Those experiences pushed me to rethink the importance of the third, Canadian tradition of communication studies. This third tradition emphasizes the importance of the materiality of communication, and it is the tradition embraced by media ecology, and I think it asks questions that every communication scholar should think about.

Celebrating and extending the literary roots of media ecology: Spiralling forward and upward in our times

Many in recent years have been seeking solace and illumination due to trying circumstances by various means including reading. McLuhan’s broad pursuits in literature and into other written materials played an important part in the origins of media studies. This article reviews various sources to confirm as well as advocate further celebration and extension of these literary roots. Moreover, it highlights a recent translation of Machado de Assis’s classic Brazilian novel Brás Cubas as a gateway to increased use of world literature and other diverse sources. To advance McLuhan’s and other foundational works, those involved with media ecology should consider incorporating different recently available fiction and non-fiction more extensively. Such a widening of references could help broaden perspectives, foster additional insights, and help in spiralling the field forward and upward in our times.

The Busan International Film Festival

Jason Bechervaise examines the latest edition of the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) in the context of the external and internal problems that have plagued the festival over the past ten years, with a leadership crisis this spring once again putting the festival in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. This report explores BIFF’s curation of Korean cinema, with an emphasis on the festival’s importance as launch pad for young Korean filmmakers as well as how the festival’s programming, which now includes productions financed by streaming platforms, reflects the rapidly changing Korean film and media ecosystem.

Academic Convergences in Korean Communication Studies

abstract: In the early 21st century, Korean communication has become one of the most vibrant in the global communication sphere. Due to the recent surge of Korean popular culture and digital technologies, media scholars and global media outlets have attempted to analyze why and how Korea has advanced numerous communication fields in such a short time. This article attempts to develop new perspectives to reflect the ever-changing media ecology. It offers some normative ideas to deal with these new challenges, which may provide some guidance to scholars who study Korean communication.

Embodied Cognition and Empathic Experiences in War Communication


 
 
 Using the perspective of phenomenological-enactive embodied cognition, this paper examines the role of the body in constituting specific social interactions via specific media ecologies (war imagery) during the times of (refugee) crisis. Such media ecologies give affordances that can amplify social beliefs and turn subjective judgments into an intersubjective action. We consider the human body in relation to war media as playing an important role in sustaining social experiences and relations. To that end, the article explores the fundamental experience of empathy, combining the theoretical perspectives of phenomenology and enactivism with the examples from war imagery and refugee embodiment. It is shown that the classical phenomenological tradition offers different yet useful conceptualisations of empathy. We also argue that war images and/or messages should be viewed as means/tools for, rather than representations of, the enaction of certain important experiences. Hence, the article connects the analysis of the affection by war imagery with the subsequent social interactions in the context of refugee crisis.
 
 

Mainstreaming and Weaponizing Satire in Nigerian Journalism Practice

Satire has gained increased scholarly traction across journalism and related fields. The genre increases the entertainment value of journalism and broadens its appeal. Satirical news also serves as a catalyst to pique the curiosity of ordinarily disinterested audiences in news, particularly political news. However, there are some concerns emerging from the weaponization of satire in this contemporary period, which is characterised by the proliferation of fake news and misinformation. From the Nigerian context, there have been minimal empirical spotlights placed on satirical journalism. We employed semi-structured interviews to explore the views of Nigerian print satirical journalists and cartoonists. Our finding broadens scholarship in the evolving area of satirical journalism. It demonstrates how the mainstreaming and the weaponization of satire have changed the texture of satire in Nigerian journalism. Although ethical concerns are admitted, we argue that cartoonists and satirical journalists have a responsibility to adjust to the dynamic media ecology, where satire continuously provides insightful critique and entertaining commentaries.

Affective, defective, and infective narratives on social media about nuclear energy and atomic conflict during the 2022 Italian electoral campaign

In the digital age, poor public communication catalyzes the spread of disinformation within public opinion. Anyone can produce political content that can reach a global audience, and social media has become a vital tool for political leaders to convey messages to the electorate. The 2022 Italian election campaign has seen the term “nuclear” debated with two different declinations: on the one hand, regarding nuclear energy for civilian use, and on the other hand, regarding the fear of an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine and the use of atomic weapons. This research aims to analyze the social media debate by exploring multiplatform dynamics to qualitatively identify and analyze the connections between social media platforms that we have termed Bridges, a concept drawn from Transmedia Theory to describe the narrative relationship between platforms. The methodological approach will follow an explanatory sequential design that will rely on digital methods to identify connections between platforms (bridges) and then apply an exploratory qualitative approach to enrich the data and capture the nuances of the debate. As expected, we found polarized positions and fragmentation on both issues of civilian nuclear energy and the atomic conflict narrative. Primary evidence shows bridges spreading affective, defective, and infective content across platforms in a multifaceted social media ecosystem. Affective refers to rhetoric that appeals to people’s feelings. Defective means the discussion that brings attention to hyper-partisan news channels, fake news, and misinformation. Infective means bridges with below-the-radar platforms, niche channels, or pseudo-information channels. They use bridges with mainstream platforms to gain the potential to go viral. The paper highlights the importance of cross-platform and interdisciplinary approaches to addressing disinformation in a media ecosystem where social media plays an increasing role in a country’s democratic dynamics.

American indie cinema between DIY cultures and global Hollywood: Exploring the paradigm of Slacker

A landmark of the 1990s independent cinema and emblem of Generation X, Slacker (1991) is a significant event in the genealogy of Austin, Texas DIY scenes, with a long-lasting impact on the city's film industry and cultural history. The article applies research on DIY to the realm of American independent cinema, using Richard Linklater's iconic film to define indie cinema as a complex idea, linking the global media industries to cult performers emerging from intense subcultural contexts. After touching upon the history of American independent cinema, the film's content is read against its production networks, suggesting the historical role of DIY media ecologies in the value chain of Hollywood. The flexible career pathways emanating from Slacker chart various fates that creative labour undergoes in today's media industries. This methodological perspective reinforces a relational approach to the study of independent cinema, suggesting possible lines of inquiry for future research.