Intimacy, Emotion, and Journalism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
Emotional Impact ◽  
Audience Engagement ◽  
News Production ◽  
The Public ◽  
Journalism Studies ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
The Ideal

Research on emotion and intimacy has been slow to develop in journalism studies. This is due to an allegiance to the model of liberal democracy and the associated ideal of objectivity. However, a growing body of work has shown that despite the historical allegiance to the ideal of objectivity, journalistic texts are—and always have been—profoundly infused with emotion. Emotion and intimacy serve crucial roles in the public discourse of journalism. They are used deliberately and strategically by journalists because they facilitate audience engagement and understanding. Audiences appear to connect with concrete stories of lived experience that dramatize the large and often abstract events that make up the news. Such connection can facilitate the cultivation of compassion—or feeling with others—and thereby engender cosmopolitan sensibilities. Growing scholarly attention to emotion and intimacy in journalism has occurred within the context of a rapidly changing media ecology. Technological changes associated with the digital era, including the rise of user-generated content and the emergence of social media, have ushered in a greater role for “ordinary people” in news production and participation. This has brought about the privileging of more emotional and embodied forms of storytelling. At the same time, these transformations, alongside broader existential threats to journalism, have rendered attention to the emotional impact of journalistic labor particularly urgent.

scholarly journals Questioning the Ideal of the Public Sphere: The Emotional Turn

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630511985217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media System ◽  
Essential Resource ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Ideal

This article discusses the usefulness and limitations of Habermas concept of the public sphere, on the basis of the trajectory of the author’s work. It starts from the observation that the concept has generated a rich scholarly debate on tensions between the normative ideals and the nitty-gritty lived experience of mediated publics. While fundamental norms of interaction associated with the ideal of the public sphere remain essential to the creation of meaningful debate, it also relies on a series of unhelpful binary distinctions that may be neither normatively desirable nor attainable. Key assumptions of the public sphere model include the idea that public debate should be rational, impartial, dispassionate, and objective. This, in turn, implies the undesirability of emotionality, partiality, passion, and subjectivity. In recent years, particularly in response to the rise of digital and social media, scholars have begun to question the rigid delineation of such norms. The article draws on the author’s work to illuminate how an “emotional turn” in media studies has opened up for a more nuanced appraisal of the role of subjectivity and personal stories in the articulation of the common good, challenging Habermasian understandings of rational-critical debate. This “emotional turn” constitutes an essential resource for theorizing public debate as it unfolds within a hybrid media system, for better and for worse. The article shows how the “emotional turn” has shaped the author’s work on mediated public debate, ranging from letters to the editor and user-generated content to Twitter hashtags and the “emotional architecture” of Facebook.

scholarly journals What is an author now? Discourse analysis applied to the idea of an author

2015 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 1094-1114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Martínez-Ávila ◽  
Richard Smiraglia ◽  
Hur-Li Lee ◽  
Melodie Fox
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
Intellectual Content ◽  
Shed Light

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss and shed light on the following questions: What is an author? Is it a person who writes? Or, is it, in information, an iconic taxonomic designation (some might say a “classification”) for a group of writings that are recognized by the public in some particular way? What does it mean when a search engine, or catalog, asks a user to enter the name of an author? And how does that accord with the manner in which the data have been entered in association with the names of the entities identified with the concept of authorship? Design/methodology/approach – The authors use several cases as bases of phenomenological discourse analysis, combining as best the authors can components of eidetic bracketing (a Husserlian technique for isolating noetic reduction) with Foucauldian discourse analysis. The two approaches are not sympathetic or together cogent, so the authors present them instead as alternative explanations alongside empirical evidence. In this way the authors are able to isolate components of iconic “authorship” and then subsequently engage them in discourse. Findings – An “author” is an iconic name associated with a class of works. An “author” is a role in public discourse between a set of works and the culture that consumes them. An “author” is a role in cultural sublimation, or a power broker in deabstemiation. An “author” is last, if ever, a person responsible for the intellectual content of a published work. The library catalog’s attribution of “author” is at odds with the Foucauldian discursive comprehension of the role of an “author.” Originality/value – One of the main assets of this paper is the combination of Foucauldian discourse analysis with phenomenological analysis for the study of the “author.” The authors turned to Foucauldian discourse analysis to discover the loci of power in the interactions of the public with the named authorial entities. The authors also looked to phenomenological analysis to consider the lived experience of users who encounter the same named authorial entities. The study of the “author” in this combined way facilitated the revelation of new aspects of the role of authorship in search engines and library catalogs.

scholarly journals EDUCATING THE NATION I: SCHOOLS

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 5-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Mandler
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Education ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
High Quality ◽  
The Public ◽  
Selection For ◽  
Post War ◽  
Universal Secondary Education ◽  
Educational Thinking ◽  
The Welfare State ◽  
The Ideal

ABSTRACTThis paper assays the public discourse on secondary education across the twentieth century – what did voters think they wanted from education and how did politicians seek to cater to those desires? The assumption both in historiography and in popular memory is that educational thinking in the post-war decades was dominated by the ideal of ‘meritocracy’ – that is, selection for secondary and higher education on the basis of academic ‘merit’. This paper argues instead that support for ‘meritocracy’ in this period was fragile. After 1945, secondary education came to be seen as a universal benefit, a function of the welfare state analogous to health. Most parents of all classes wanted the ‘best schools’ for their children, and the best schools were widely thought to be the grammar schools; thus support for grammar schools did not imply support for meritocracy, but rather for high-quality universal secondary education. This explains wide popular support for comprehensivisation, so long as it was portrayed as providing ‘grammar schools for all’. Since the 1970s, public discourse on education has focused on curricular control, ‘standards’ and accountability, but still within a context of high-quality universal secondary education, and not the ‘death of the comprehensive’.

scholarly journals Critical Pedagogy as a Response to Datafication

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (8) ◽  
pp. 754-760 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette N. Markham
Keyword(s):  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Pedagogical Tools ◽  
Data Literacy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Digital Or

Critical pedagogy is a vital part of building data literacy. It moves beyond the level of data critique to social action in response to datafication. This article contends that academics can do more to teach those in the public sphere as well as classroom to become critical interpretive researchers of their own lived experience, an action/participatory research framework that identifies critical thinking as the purpose of research and improved digital or data literacy as the outcome of research. This article suggests three strategic modes through which the strengths of critical approaches and qualitative epistemologies can be blended to serve as pedagogical tools for understanding and critically analyzing data, datafication, and other aspects of the digital era.

scholarly journals Democratic Speech in Divided Times

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxime Lepoutre
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Democratic Life ◽  
The Ideal

Democratic Speech in Divided Times offers a comprehensive account of the norms that should govern public discourse in circumstances marked by deep and often unjust social divisions. Part I investigates what forms of democratic speech are desirable in these settings. This part shows, firstly, that some forms of public discourse that are symptomatic of division can nevertheless play a crucial democratic function. In particular, it argues that emotionally charged speech—and most notably, speech voicing deep anger—plays a fundamental role in overcoming entrenched epistemic divisions and in facilitating the exchange of shared reasons. This part also examines how, in contrast, other characteristic features of the public discourse of divided societies endanger democratic life. Here, the argument considers the proliferation of hate speech and misinformation, and examines what forms of democratic speech should be used to combat them. Part II considers how realistic the foregoing account of public discourse is. Specifically, it assesses the complications that arise from intergroup antipathy, pervasive political ignorance, and the fragmentation of the public sphere. The normative picture of public discourse that this book defends can largely withstand these problems. And, while these social conditions do qualify the value of democratic speech in some respects, they are at least as problematic for political ideals that give up on inclusive democratic speech altogether. Accordingly, while realising the ideal of democratic speech that this book outlines is challenging, we should not lose patience with this task.

13 Communicative Power and the Public Sphere

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Regina Kreide
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Communicative Power ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractA deliberative model of politics has recently been criticized for not being very well equipped to conceptualize public spheres in world society.A first critique is that this model assumes a conception of public spheres that is too idealistic, because it presupposes counterfactual conditions of communication in public discourse that do not meet empirical real word conditions. Secondly, it assumes an antiquated notion of a shared “we” of political actors. Because of this it does not take into consideration the “digital turn” and the ego-centering and depersonalizing effects of social media like Facebook, twitter, and blogs, which have led to a rapid decline of the public sphere. And a third critique states that the deliberative model ignores the fact that politics, and especially protests and revolutions, are not seminar-like debates but spontaneous, chaotic and sometimes violent expressions. So it is not just unreceptive for the “digital space” but also for gathering and protesting in real public places surrounded by military troops.I will argue that all of these critiques fall short. A deliberative model of politics allows us to address the tension between the ideal and the real, the “old media” and the so-called digitalization of public spheres as well as peaceful discourse and violent uprisings. Especially the concept of communicative power, a notion also used by Hannah Arendt, reveals the potential for future participation in digital spaces and public places.

News Ecology and News Ecosystems

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Wiard
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking Sites ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Specific Area ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
News Production ◽  
Journalism Studies ◽  
Relevant Notion ◽  
The Impact ◽  
And Diffusion

“News ecology” and “news ecosystems” are two terms often used in journalism studies. They are, however, different concepts that draw from different lines of research and are used by different groups of scholars rarely connected to one another. The notion of “news ecology” stems from media ecology, a branch of media theory that aims at understanding the effects that mediated technologies have on communication and social interactions. Media ecology has challenged traditional media research by focusing on how communicative technologies impact media consumption on a daily basis. Specifically it argues that communicative technologies encompass a set of implicit rules that affect how humans see, understand, and think about the contents that are being mediated. Building on these principles, “news ecology” is a relevant notion to reflect on how citizens get acquainted with the news as well as the diversity of technologies involved in news use. The notion aims at capturing the fact that news products exist in a diversity of formats, are consumed in diverse manners, and take place on different sites and platforms. Out of all the economic, social and technological changes of the last decades, the popularization of the Internet is often seen as the keystone of this change. However, most recent reception studies mention the terms “news ecology” without relating it to media ecology. The use of the “news ecosystem” metaphor in journalism studies is more recent and focuses on the diversity of actors involved in news production and diffusion. If some scholars use a restricted definition of ecosystems (i.e., the ecosystems of blogs, websites, or social networking sites), others give it a more organic and composite meaning (i.e., the ecosystems of actors, technologies, and contents produced in a specific area or regarding a specific topic). Using the first definition, one can analyze the configuration of news ecosystems online, the diversity of actors involved in news production and their relationships, as well as how news circulates through diverse technologies. Using the second definition forces researchers to consider news as a complex social practice in which a diversity of actors competes to influence the news narrative through mediated and unmediated practices. The two research traditions rarely intersect, as media and news ecology focus more on the reception side of news (i.e., the impact of mediums on people) and the study of news ecosystems has so far paid more attention to the production and diffusion of news. However, they share similarities—such as the facts that they both analyze media as dynamic processes are not normative in nature, or focus on complexity and change more than structure and stability—and could inspire one another in an effort to break the production/reception dichotomy in journalism studies.

The Promise of Audience Engagement

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-44
Author(s):  
Jacob L. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Chicago Tribune ◽  
Audience Engagement ◽  
News Production ◽  
The Public ◽  
Widespread Agreement ◽  
Definition Of

Though there is widespread agreement surrounding the problems journalism faces, there also is a growing rift among journalism professionals and researchers about how best to solve them. A growing number of journalism stakeholders argue that the news should focus more on “audience engagement,” a loosely defined term that generally involves journalists’ incorporating more audience input in news production to more accurately reflect their lived experiences. Those at City Bureau and Hearken believe this more collaborative form of news production will increase the audience’s trust in news as well as the amount of value they derive from it. Others, including many at the Chicago Tribune, disagree. In addition to offering a comprehensive definition of audience engagement, this chapter also traces the disagreement surrounding it to enduring differences in how journalists perceive the public.

scholarly journals God as a private matter: culture of memory and religious life in socialism

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Lidija Radulović
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Positive Experiences ◽  
Private Matter ◽  
The One

The revitalization of religion in postsocialism is followed by the revitalization of individual narratives about religious life in socialism. On the one hand, the lived experience is connected to the contemporary revitalization of religion and the public discourse promoted by the Serbian Orthodox church on the repression it suffered during socialism, and on the other hand, interlocutors tell of their positive experiences which stand in contrast to official stories. The research presented in this paper is directed toward the conceptualization of individual narratives which actualize the memories of the faithful of the life during socialism. Special attention has been paid to those aspects of the past which interlocutors consider relevant for interpreting their own relationship with religion, meanings attributed to memories and ways in which they are connected and interpreted i the context of the present.

scholarly journals The Persuasiveness of a Message and the Problem of Legitimacy

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 59-73
Author(s):  
Rafał Leśniczak
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Jürgen Habermas ◽  
The Public ◽  
Jurgen Habermas ◽  
Ideal Speech Situation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Silvio Berlusconi ◽  
Speech Situation ◽  
The Ideal

The author analyses several selected speeches of Italian politicians: the founder of the Forza Italia party, Silvio Berlusconi; the founder and leader of the Five Stars Movement, Beppe Grillo; and the current Prime Minister of Italy, Matteo Renzi. The study makes it possible to evaluate whether the conditions for the ideale Sprechsituation (the ideal speech situation) of Jürgen Habermas are fulfilled in analysing the public discourse. Particular attention will be given to the relationship between the persuasiveness of the communication and the problem of legitimacy.

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