CNN Effect revisited - Media, War & Conflict special issue out

I am delighted to announce that Media, War & Conflict have published a special issue revisiting the 'CNN effect' which drew so much attention in the 1990s. Back then, policymakers feared that if their publics could see events overseas unfold in real-time, those publics would expect their governments to take action. The space between event, deliberation and action seemed to be compressed to the instant. Over 15 years later, in a transformed media ecology, what is the relationship between media, publics and policy in the field of foreign policy?

The table of contents is below. For those without a subscript, please email Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk for copies of any of the articles.

New article - Distancing the Extraordinary: Audience Understandings of Radicalisation

A new article by Ben O'Loughlin, Carole Boudeau and Andrew Hoskins has been published exploring how audiences make sense 'radicalising' media such as jihadist websites even if they have never come into contact with them. The journal is published in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, as part of a special issue on media and security cultures. The article can be accessed here. For those without a subscription, email Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk for a pdf version. The authors are grateful to Hari Harindranath and John Tebbutt for putting a great special issue together. 

Abstract:

The term radicalization proliferated in official and media discourses in the UK in 2005 and has become an anchoring concept in debates about jihadist-inspired political violence. This article presents original research from an investigation conducted in the UK and France in 2008 – 09 to elicit how audiences understand the term and concept of radicalization from multi-methodological analysis of their ordinary language. As a contribution at the intersection of media and security studies, our analysis indicates that audiences are aware of official and media discourses of radicalization, and that they establish disjunctures between those discourses and their own understandings of the concept of radicalization. Critically, these disjunctures are found in the way people talk about radicalization: in their use of language rather than the content of arguments expressed. In establishing these disjunctures through ordinary news talk, audience members position themselves as not-your-typical-viewer, making presumptions about other members of the same audience to which they belong. This supports Scannell’s theorization of mass media as for-anyone-as-someone structures, through which individuals are able to articulate their own sense of difference and identity.

Imperial War Museum trip - a student's view

Artist Jeremy Deller next to the car exhibitWalk into the foyer of the Imperial War Museum in London and you may be forgiven for thinking you were inside a ‘Modelzone’, a shop devoted to collectable war replicas. Littered across the atrium are countless examples of British military iconography. The Spitfire hangs valiantly from the rooftop, emblematic of the triumphalism often associated with military success and War in general. However, juxtaposed against these adulated instruments of warfare lies a burnt-out Volvo from Iraq. Simply entitled ‘5th March 2007’, the wreckage was salvaged from a car bomb explosion that took the lives of 38 people in a busy Baghdad market. Resembling little more than a contorted, rusting wreck, the car acts as a powerful image illustrating not only the literal implications of the Iraq conflict, but of War in general.

The museum offers a very different approach to mediatized forms of war reporting or dramatizations. No framing is in operation, no templates of previous conflicts are used, and exasperated Hollywood storylines do not feature. Instead the eclectic mix of exhibits offers scope for personal interpretation. The wreckage overrules the abstract notion of warfare we develop through the dissemination of news content. Often the constant barrage of images depicting violence and the subsequent unfathomable tally of casualties and fatalities make it difficult to comprehend the human cost of conflicts. Instead, here, the broader political relevance of warfare takes priority. Where the Imperial War Museum really excels is through the collections' ability to deconstruct this discourse and illustrate the realism of conflicts either through symbolism (e.g. 5th March 2007) or through moving personalised narratives, as witnessed within the Holocaust exhibit.

The effect of unmediated communication, directly from a person affected by a conflict to the information consumer, is extremely relevant in the New Political Communication field. Just as the private accounts of Holocaust survivors at the museum caused a much more emotive, tangible interpretation of the traumatic events of the Second World War, social media tools are increasingly connecting personal accounts of conflicts to individuals globally, as seen in recent events in Tunisia and Egypt. This poses an interesting question as to how these direct relationships will affect frame dominance during military action.

Thank you to the Imperial War Museum and Dr O’Loughlin for organising an engaging and informative tour.

James Dennis - @dennisdcfc

MSc New Political Communication 2010-11

Fight Back! A Reader on the Student Protests

It is clear that the student movement of last winter could well represent the genesis of a broader anti-cuts movement that poses not only serious questions to the coalition government and its policy agenda of budgetary austerity, but to how politics itself is conducted and contested in the UK over the coming years.

This movement, founded upon street protest, flashmobs and the utilization of online networks to organise, co-ordinate and disseminate its message(s) represents a shift away from a belief that the best approach to affecting policy outcomes is through the offline A to B march, lobbying and the parliamentary process. Indeed the favoured dictum of many protestors in the face of naysayers before the vote on the 9th of December was resolute and defiant,  "...what parliament can do, the streets can undo".

It is this mantra, manifest in the motifs and tactics of the movement, that seem to mark a return to non-parliamentary forms of political contestation in this country that are unprecedented in scale since before the Second World War and seem set to only grow stronger.

Fight Back! is an exploration of an important phase in the emergence of these dynamics. As Stuart White at Open Democracy put it "...Fight Back! is a 350 page reader that is both an initial, hasty record of the protests of November and December...as well as an argument about their originality. As such it has been welcomed from Andreas Whittam Smith in The Independent to Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing." It is as much a record and chronicle as it is analysis and critique.

Elsewhere White adds "...if indeed a new politics does emerge in response to the ultra-Thatcherism of the Coalition, the free downloading of Fight Back! may be seen as one of its starting points."

The text is keen to look at networked forms of protest and we are proud that it is publicly available as a free e-book and that the same values of open, participatory co-production through networks are maintained in how it is distributed. We are seeking to identify the genesis of new modes of political contestation and hope that the chosen model of co-production and distribution is equally innovative.

The launch of the hard copy of Fightback! will be on April 6th at Housmans bookstore where contributors including Nina Power, Anthony Barnett and Aaron Peters will speak.

Go to bit.ly/fightbackUK to download Fight Back! for free, read it on Kindle, join the debate and find out about forthcoming Fight Back! events. 

[Aaron Peters is a PhD student in the New Political Communication Unit. His research examines the internet, protest, and collective action.]

Libya and ‘the shadow of Iraq’

At the beginning of every war, journalists must quickly find a frame that makes the new violence intelligible to their audiences. It is often convenient to compare new events to old events, to see what looks similar and what looks different (journalists routinely follow the principle of comparison earlier articulated by Sesame Street). In 2006, during the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman employed the Vietnam template in an op-ed: ‘in time we’ll come to see the events unfolding — or rather, unraveling — in Iraq today as the real October surprise, because what we’re seeing there seems like the jihadist equivalent of the Tet offensive’ (here, subscription required). The White House rarely responds to op-ed columns. Perhaps alarmed by possible parallels – afraid of the “quagmire” analogy – it responded directly to Friedman’s claim (here).

Yesterday the BBC’s Andrew North wrote:

There was something familiar in the night-time television images of broken concrete and twisted metal from Col Muammar Gaddafi's Tripoli compound - the shadow of Iraq.

The largest military intervention in the Middle East since the Iraq war is now well under way, and to many the goal looks the same - regime change.

North suggests two things can be seen, the television images and ‘the goals’. There is an implied relationship between how things look and the motives behind the actions that lead to the images. The television images look like television images we saw in Iraq, so what might be happening might be what happened in Iraq, for the reasons that motivated those intervening in Iraq. What happened in Iraq could be a convenient ‘template’ for future events, and North is trying to fit Libya into that template. North adds weight to his argument by claiming that the goals look the same ‘to many’. ‘Many’ is a nebulous collective, but the many are watching these images and perhaps the many are thinking what North is thinking. He tries to alert readers to ways in which history is repeating itself:

Twelve years of no-fly zones and sanctions could not dislodge Saddam Hussein - and in the meantime it was the Iraqi people who bore the cost.

The choice of templates is political, not just a matter of convenience. North is using the 2003 Iraq War template to make a point. He could have used other templates to make other points. The comparison may be valid, and such speculation may serve to provoke readers into more serious thought about what is happening in Libya. But clearly, at this moment, there is space for journalists to offer a range of frames and North has chosen to frame Libya as falling under ‘the shadow of Iraq’, a metaphor for the cost that fell on Iraqi people. North has used a journalistic technique to warn political leaders against a course of action. Let’s see whether this template gains traction, as Thomas Friedman’s did in 2006.

MSc New Political Communication for 2011 entry

For those seeking to understand the interplay of digital new media and communication technologies, political institutions, behaviour and public policy, with emphases on citizen engagement, mobilization, campaigning, and the role of new media in the global system.

The MSc, which has run since 2007, combines specialisation in the area of New Political Communication with the flexibility to choose from a wide range of optional courses. A 10–12000 word supervised research dissertation is written over the summer. Teaching is conducted in small group seminars, supplemented by individual tuition for the dissertation.

The MSc New Political Communication is accredited by the UK ESRC on a 1+3 basis as part of the South East Doctoral Training Consortium.

For further information and to apply online visit the MSc New Political Communication page.

Hoskins & O'Loughlin: new Journalism article on gatekeeping and translation

A new article by Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin has been published in Journalism, entitled ‘Remediating jihad for western news audiences: The renewal of gatekeeping?’ The article is part of a special issue focusing on transcultural journalism and the politics of translation. Many thanks to Marie Gillespie and Gerd Baumann for putting the volume together and all the reviewers for helpful feedback on the article.

Click here to access the article (subscription required). The abstract is below.

Digitization creates an ontological challenge to broadcast-era metaphors (gate, channel, flow), not least to understandings of who news gatekeepers are, where gates lie, the presumed audience, community or culture gatekeeping is done for, and what it means to gatekeep. Analysing how jihadist speeches by bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and others are translated and remediated from their original websites, languages and contexts by various intermediaries and by western mainstream news, including the BBC, illuminates an apparently simple, settled gatekeeping model that produces systematic patterns of translation, selection and omission. Western news creates an obstacle to understanding why such texts may be appealing to some audiences by ignoring intermediaries such as terrorism-monitoring sites, Arabic media, and jihadist websites’ own self-monitoring services, delimiting a ‘mainstream’ understanding. A focus on multilingual, multiplatform gatekeeping demonstrates how loci and forms of power and authority are changing in the ‘connective turn’, to which media practitioners and scholars must adapt.

A new article by Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin has been published in Journalism, entitled ‘Remediating jihad for western news audiences: The renewal of gatekeeping?’ The article is part of a special issue focusing on transcultural journalism and the politics of translation. Many thanks to Marie Gillespie and Gerd Baumann for putting the volume together and all the reviewers for helpful feedback on the article.

 

Click here to access the article (subscription required). The abstract is below.

Digitization creates an ontological challenge to broadcast-era metaphors (gate, channel, flow), not least to understandings of who news gatekeepers are, where gates lie, the presumed audience, community or culture gatekeeping is done for, and what it means to gatekeep. Analysing how jihadist speeches by bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and others are translated and remediated from their original websites, languages and contexts by various intermediaries and by western mainstream news, including the BBC, illuminates an apparently simple, settled gatekeeping model that produces systematic patterns of translation, selection and omission. Western news creates an obstacle to understanding why such texts may be appealing to some audiences by ignoring intermediaries such as terrorism-monitoring sites, Arabic media, and jihadist websites’ own self-monitoring services, delimiting a ‘mainstream’ understanding. A focus on multilingual, multiplatform gatekeeping demonstrates how loci and forms of power and authority are changing in the ‘connective turn’, to which media practitioners and scholars must adapt.



New MSc programme, Transnational Security Studies

A new MSc programme in Transnational Security Studies has been launched by the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. The one-year MSc will run from September 2011.

The programme includes the course Media, War & Conflict as well as several options courses covering issues of global security and political communication.

For further details, including how to apply, see: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/politics-and-IR/News-and-Events/New-MSc-Programme.html

New journal article by Andrew Chadwick: "Explaining the Failure of an Online Citizen Engagement Initiative: The Role of Internal Institutional Variables"

Andrew Chadwick (2011) “Explaining the Failure of an Online Citizen Engagement Initiative: The Role of Internal Institutional Variables” Journal of Information Technology and Politics 8 (1): 21-40.

Abstract
This article presents an exploratory case study based on fieldwork consisting of in-depth, semistructured interviews and group discussions with administrative, legal, political, and technology staff involved in an online citizen engagement initiative in “TechCounty,” a pseudonymous U.S. local government authority operating in one of the most favorable sociodemographic and technological contexts imaginable. In contrast with many of the dominant approaches in the literature, the article reveals how a rich, complex, and sometimes surprising array of internal institutional variables explains the initiative’s failure. The article highlights the fragile and uncertain adoption of online engagement by public organizations and the significance of this study’s method for building theory and guiding future research.

Keywords: Citizen engagement; democracy; e-democracy; governance; Internet; online consultation; online forums; organizations; public services.

Link.

Email me or direct message me on Twitter if you would like a free PDF copy of this journal article.