scholarly journals NGOs as News Organizations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Wright
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Written Text ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
Mainstream Press ◽  
Media Practices

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are not-for-profit groups, which are independent of commercial businesses and government agencies. They claim to serve various notions of the public good, including advocacy and service delivery. So the definition of an “NGO” is broad, including many different kinds of organizations, such as aid agencies, human rights, indigenous, feminist and environmental lobby groups. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, the predecessors of NGOs—pressure groups—tried to advance their cause by cultivating close relations with the mainstream press, and/or publishing their own periodicals. But from the late 20th century onward, many NGOs started routinely producing their own news content, including written text but also photojournalism, video, and sophisticated interactive projects. Some of this material is disseminated through “alternative” outlets, social media and activist hubs. But it is difficult for NGOs to gain a mass audience in these ways, so most major NGOs recruit or commission experienced journalists to carry out this work for them. Much of the research in this area has focused on either journalists’ increased dependence on NGOs, or on the restructuring of NGOs’ resources, priorities and working cultures in accordance with news norms. Most scholars have also focused on the work of international aid agencies and/or human rights organizations, as well as particular kinds of crises, such as famines, hurricanes and conflicts. The extant literature is heavily weighted toward organizations which are based in North America or Europe. However, a small but growing number of scholars are challenging this, exploring the news work of other NGOs and/or news outlets, in other countries, and during other kinds of news-making periods, including conferences, summits and “quiet” news weeks. These more diverse approaches to studying NGOs as news organizations have led to the theorization of NGO journalism becoming more nuanced. Researchers have shifted away from polarized, and somewhat over-generalized, assessments of the effects of NGO news-making, toward a greater awareness of complexity and heterogeneity. This has involved them using theory about organizations, institutions, fields and moral economies. However, the kinds of power which NGO workers are able to acquire by becoming news reporters is still under-theorized, and scholars still tend to avoid examining the frameworks they use as a basis for normative evaluation. Finally, changing media practices (including social media practices) and NGOs’ adoption of new communication technology (including satellite and drone imagery) means that this area of news work is still evolving very rapidly.

Reforms of Administrative Law in the PRC and Vietnam: The Possible Role of the Legal Tradition

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-290
Author(s):  
Karin Buhmann
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Executive Power ◽  
Reform Process ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Modern System

AbstractThe article takes its point of departure in administrative law and good governance as possible avenues for increased implementation of rights, including human rights. The author discusses the role that pre-modern East Asian ideas on governance and pre-modern administrative law and institutions for monitoring the executive's use of power may play for the substance and focus of the reforms of administrative law that have been undertaken in the late 20th century in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and in Vietnam. The article discusses the possible influence of ideas and institutions inspired by Confucianism and the School of Legalism, including such features as a meritocratic civil service, institutions for monitoring the executive and for dealing with complaints, instrumental use of law, and use of rewards, punishments and instruction to achieve the aims of the law. The author compares the prevalence of the features of pre-modern China and Vietnam with elements in legislation and institutions implemented under the late 20th century reform processes in the PRC and Vietnam. The article concludes that the legacy of the pre-modern system of administrative law and governance and related institutions appears to play a role in the modern reform process that is more than accidental, and that this legacy results in a relatively strong emphasis on a principle of legality in the legislation implemented under the reforms and in a relatively weaker emphasis on the principle of equality. The article suggests that features of the premodern legacy, especially the emphasis on exercise of executive power in accordance with law, may be explored as providing potential for contributing to an increased quality of public administration and an increased implementation of rule of law and specific rights, including human rights and rights of relevance to trade and investment. It is also suggested that these features of the pre-modern system may be explored by the development community and international organizations as potential for creating ownership and sustainability of governance and law reforms that are of interest to external partners of the PRC and Vietnam.

Gatekeeping and Journalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela J. Shoemaker
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Information Diffusion ◽  
Linear Processes ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Decision Points ◽  
New Thinking ◽  
The Mass Media ◽  
Partial Systems

One of the oldest social science theories applied to the study of communication, the gatekeeping approach emphasizes the movement of bits of information through channels, with an emphasis on decision points (gates) and decision-makers (gatekeepers). Forces on both sides of a gate can either help or hinder the information’s passage through a channel. The gatekeeping process shapes and produces various images of reality, not only because some bits of information are selected and others rejected, but because communication agents put information together in different ways. In addition, the timing and repetition of information can affect the prominence of events or topics and can influence the probability of future information diffusion. Gatekeeping was originally modeled as a series of linear processes within the mass media, but in the late 20th century the flow of information through the mass and social media began to interact. Information is now understood to flow among journalists, among social media users, and among agents of both types of media. All such communication agents are gatekeepers. In addition, we can study these networked interconnections as one level of analysis, with the supra-gatekeepers (such as Facebook or Twitter) adding their own gatekeeping processes over and beyond those of their own clients of the mass media. In addition to looking at various pairwise relationships between gatekeepers, gatekeeping theory should go beyond to instead consider the entire web of gatekeepers as a whole or system. A system is composed of elements (gatekeepers), interactions (relationships among them), and a goal or function. Multiple functions have been proposed by 20th-century scholars (such as socialization, entertainment, or surveillance) for the mass media, but scholars should now consider the function(s) of the gatekeeping system (mass and social media, as well as supra-gatekeepers) as a whole. Although each type of medium can be analyzed as its own system, such analysis would not facilitate new thinking about the various ways in which these partial systems affect one another and how the whole system functions beyond the simple addition of its parts.

Mapping Genocide? Giving Visual Memory to Oral Culture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Maisel
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Visual Memory ◽  
Oral Culture ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
New Class ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
Traditional Class

Yezidi religion and history had been largely transmitted orally until the late 20th century due to the closeness, isolation, and marginalization of the community in their various home countries. It was the advent of digitization that sparked a radical switch and concurrent emergence of a new class of protagonists who used social media as a tool to theorize and generalize sacred knowledge. The new actors often do not belong to the traditional class of clergy in charge of preserving and transmitting this information. In this chapter, I argue that their use of social media to spread deliberate knowledge has contributed to the development of new forms of identity and loyalty among Yezidi groups in Syria and Iraq.

25th volume celebration paper Policies for the aged in the 21st century: more ‘structured dependency’ or the realisation of human rights?

2006 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER TOWNSEND
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Older People ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Individual Market

By the late 20th century, the plight of millions of older people in many developed countries was regarded as serious and was acknowledged to require concerted cross-national remedial action. Sociologists and social gerontologists only then were beginning to put together explanations rooted in the evolution of social policy and its corresponding institutions. One thesis that attracted support was that the dependency of the aged had been ‘structured’ by long-term economic and social policies. During the final decades of the 20th century, older people were perceived and treated, according to accumulating research evidence, as more dependent than they really were or needed to be. This had been fostered by the emerging institutions of retirement, income maintenance, and residential and domiciliary care. This development had been the responsibility primarily of the State, which tried to deliver welfare but also to accommodate the market. Forms of discrimination against older people had become, or continued to be, as deep as forms of discrimination against women and ethnic minorities. Such ‘institutionalised ageism’ had to be countered. Hopes were invested in anti-discriminatory policies that reflected good reciprocal relationships between the generations in many families and the rights of individuals of any age to human dignity and opportunities to practise their skills. The globalisation of the market and affiliation to neo-liberal policies, together with the simultaneous passage of various instruments of human rights, have changed the nature of the problem, and therefore the debate, during the early 21st century. This paper argues that the release and implementation during and after the Second World War of collective liberal egalitarian values, expressed in many countries in international statements on human rights, as will be shown, had a big impact on the design of public services, including those for older people. If the claims for the elderly in the welfare states of 50 years ago were exaggerated, as we can now safely conclude, the claims for older people today are even more exaggerated – at a time of heightened emphasis on individual rights and individual market powers. The various problems of ‘structured’ dependency persist, and seem set to grow in many parts of the world. Human rights offer a framework of rigorous analysis and anti-discriminatory work. Success depends on good operational measurement, and the incorporation of international and national institutions and policies that reflect those rights.

scholarly journals Metacritique on Bentham and Foucault’s Panoptic Theories as Analytic Tools for Three Modes of Digital Surveillance

Plaridel ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feorillo A. Demeterio III, ◽  
June Benedict Parreno
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Data Gathering ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Digital Surveillance ◽  
Late 18Th Century

The panopticon was originally a prison design made by Bentham in the late 18th century to efficiently reform offenders. Foucault appropriated Bentham’s panopticon in the late 20th century to conceptualize and critique the society and state’s coercive practices in making individuals conform to social and state norms. Although Foucault’s appropriation of Bentham’s panopticon was done prior to the full emergence of the digital age, a number of present day scholars use the panopticon in conceptualizing and critiquing digital surveillance. This paper problematizes the applicability of both Bentham and Foucault’s panoptic theories to such contemporary phenomenon. This paper dissected both panoptic theories into five components—subjects; observers; data gathering, storage, and analysis; goals and effects of the systems; and management of the systems—and compared and contrasted these to their corresponding components from three cases of digital surveillance representing state digital surveillance, social media digital surveillance, and e-commerce digital surveillance. This paper established that Bentham and Foucault’s panoptic theories have moderate resemblance to each other; that both Bentham and Foucault’s panoptic theories are applicable to the conceptualization and critique of state digital surveillance; and that both Bentham and Foucault’s panoptic theories are not applicable to the conceptualization and critique of social media and e-commerce digital surveillances. As a metacritique this paper is significant in the sense that its findings will hopefully enlighten other scholars about the actual levels of usefulness of both panoptic theories in conceptualizing and critiquing different modes of digital surveillance.

Human Rights and Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pramod K. Nayar
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Ariel Dorfman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modified Forms

The field of human rights (HR) and literature has expanded in the last two decades. Fiction, poetry, memoirs, and graphic novels with HR themes have been examined, and also cognate fields like popular culture and HR, humanitarianism, and the history of HR itself. The literary, with its emphasis on the human ‘subject,’ the formation of this subject, and the hurdles that confront its formation, is appropriate for the study of how humans are conceptualized as deserving (or not) of rights, and the conditions in which the human loses her humanness. Victims, perpetrators, and bystanders are characters in literary texts that critics study as models of subjectivity. The literary text asks us to imagine the nature of the human person, the universal state of human vulnerability, and the situations in which this vulnerability is prised open for exploitation. The entries here consist of those that engage directly with literary texts but also with frames, contested and debated, that define the human, and without which a rights regime cannot be put in place or modified. Forms and aesthetics that are central to the documentation, witnessing, and communicating the urgency of HR themes in various genres are also necessarily a part of this bibliography. Various forms and genres in literature—across ages, geocultural formations, and nations—have addressed the theme of HR, explicitly or implicitly. The war novel, for instance, is more concerned with mass HR violations such as genocide, rape, and continuing trauma. The child-abuse novel is focused on individual HR. Plays by authors like Ariel Dorfman, (e.g., his Resistance trilogy) use theatre to speak of unspeakable horrors like torture. In the late 20th century, especially in the wake of Art Spiegelman’s pioneering Maus, numerous graphic novels, comics, and pieces of comics journalism have sought to document atrocity and HR. Testimonial texts and fiction by victims have constituted a globally visible genre, again since the last half of the 20th century.

scholarly journals Using interpersonal communication strategies to encourage science conversations on social media

PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (11) ◽  
pp. e0241972
Author(s):  
Curtis Martin ◽  
Bertrum H. MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Communication Strategies ◽  
Scientific Information ◽  
Scientific Content ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
Understanding Of Science ◽  
Media Practices ◽  
Insight Into

Today, many science communicators are using social media to share scientific information with citizens, but, as research has shown, fostering conversational exchanges remains a challenge. This largely qualitative study investigated the communication strategies applied by individual scientists and environmental non-governmental organizations on Twitter and Instagram to determine whether particular social media practices encourage two-way conversations between science communicators and citizens. Data from Twitter and Instagram posts, interviews with the communicators, and a survey of audience members were triangulated to identify emergent communication strategies and the resulting engagement; provide insight into why particular practices are employed by communicators; and explain why audiences choose to participate in social media conversations with communicators. The results demonstrate that the application of interpersonal communication strategies encourage conversational engagement, in terms of the number of comments and unique individuals involved in conversations. In particular, using selfies (images and videos), non-scientific content, first person pronoun-rich captions, and responding to comments result in the formation of communicator-audience relationships, encouraging two-way conversations on social media. Furthermore, the results indicate that Instagram more readily supports the implementation of interpersonal communication strategies than Twitter, making Instagram the preferred platform for promoting conversational exchanges. These findings can be applicable to diverse communicators, subjects, audiences, and environments (online and offline) in initiatives to promote awareness and understanding of science.

scholarly journals CONSTITUTIONALIZING ROLE OF TERMS OF SERVICE OF SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND PROPOSED SOCIAL MEDIA USER BILLS OF RIGHTS

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nino Shengelia
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Private Governance ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
Fast Pace ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Multiple Challenges ◽  
Democratic Principles

Multiple challenges and risks to democratic values and fundamental human rights emerge from the constitutulization processes of social media platforms. This article submits that more consideration has to be put on how private governance of social media platforms should be transparent, consensual, relatively stable in its application and how it should be enforced fairly. The values presented by the rule of law as well as traditional democratic principles of a sovereign state should inform the debate around contested relationship between the users and social media platforms. Digital constitutionalism is a concept that explains waves of constitutional counteractions as a result of a fast pace development of digital technologies. Digital constitutionalism is regarded as the idea that considers the constitutionalism of the digital society. This article focuses on examining constitutional tone of existing terms of service of a world leading social media platform Facebook and reviews potential value that digital Bills of Rights, intiated by various non-governmental organizations and individuals, may hold in shaping  human rights’ compliant governance framework for social media platforms in the years to come. From the terms of service and bills of rights, it is based to show that Facebook is ready to show a peculiar configuration. At present, social media bills of rights and terms of service play the constitutionalizing roles.  Nevertheless, it is not the aim of the current author to exhaust the topic, but rather to provide potential answers to the matters examined.

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