What Satellite Television Has Done to the Public Sphere and to the Public in the Maghreb

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ratiba Hadj-Moussa
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Satellite Television ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
Historical Turn ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter shows how the advent of satellite television in the Maghreb constitutes a historical turn that recomposes the Maghrebin public spheres. The existing duality between national and satellite televisions has produced a unique configuration where parallel, conflicting ideas and perspectives came into existence. These perspectives, which opposed most of the official discourses’ orientations, are conveyed in daily life practices and interactions, such as the streets and semipublic spaces, and relayed by social media. Hence, the understanding of the novel and complex realities of Maghrebi political public spheres requires that the ordinary practices be considered as spaces and moments of the political fabrics in the Maghreb.

Political Science in Real Time: Engaging the Middle East Policy Public

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Good Work ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Middle East Policy

A decade ago, very few political scientists had either the opportunity or the incentive to engage with the political public in a direct, unmediated way. Today, there is a dense and eclectic ecosystem of political science and international relations-focused blogs and online publications, where good work can easily find an audience through social media. There are multiple initiatives dedicated to supporting academic interventions in the public sphere, and virtually every political or cultural magazine of note now offers a robust online section featuring commentary and analysis in which political scientists are well represented. This has transformed publication for a broader public from something exotic to something utterly routine. I discuss how these changes have affected individual scholars, the field of political science, and the political world with which we are engaged.

scholarly journals Social Media as Valuable Anti-Corruption Assets in the Public Sphere in Nigeria

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
B. Babasanya ◽  
L. Ganiyu ◽  
U. F. Yahaya ◽  
O. E. Olagunju ◽  
S. O. Olafemi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Class ◽  
The Public ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Individual

The issue of corruption in Nigeria has assumed a monumental dimension in such a way that it has become a household song and practice. Thus, adopting a rhetoric definition may not be appropriate instead a succinct description will suffice. The dimension of corruption is monumental because it started from pre-independence in the First republic with the first major political figure found culpable and investigated in 1944 and reach its peak recently with the evolvement of ‘godfatherism’ in the political landscape of the country. Therefore, corruption in Nigeria is more or less a household name. Using Social Responsibility Media Theory as a guide, this paper undertakes an examination of the right of the media to inform the public, serve the political system by making information, discussion and consideration of public affairs generally accessible, and to protect the rights of the individual by acting as watchdog over the governments. This discourse analysis is backed up with the presentation of documented materials on tracking corruption through the use of social media. Since the use of mainstream media only is disadvantageous owing to its demand-driven nature, social media stands as a veritable and result-orientated asset in tracking corruption across the public sphere. This paper found that complimented with mainstream media, social media and civic journalism have exposed corrupt tendencies of contractors and public office holders including the political class in the provision and handling of infrastructural development projects thereby make public officials accountable and create an open access to good governance.

(Un)seeing dead refugee bodies: mourning memes, spectropolitics, and the haunting of Europe

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (8) ◽  
pp. 1048-1068 ◽  
Author(s):  
Penelope Papailias
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Body Image ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
The Public ◽  
Syrian Refugee ◽  
Political Border ◽  
The Public Sphere

This essay addresses the user remediation and performative rematerialization of the 2015 photographs of 3-year-old Kurdish-Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, as well as acts of concealing and deferring access to those images following intense public debate. This article shifts the frame of discussion from moral spectatorship to mediated witnessing and networked mourning in the context of contemporary affective publics. To speak of the memeification of Kurdi’s corpse-image is to underline the way repetition operates as a gesture of both inhabitation and differentiation by users who connect in this way to others and to the issue at hand. The Kurdi images, thus, were not so much observed by a global audience as produced by, and productive of, a massive, dispersed corporeal network. The conceptual figure of spectrality links the mediality and materiality of the dead body-image to contemporary necropolitics that dispossesses subjects, producing the ‘living death’ of the global precariat. If the public sphere is defined by prohibitions on grieving, conflicts regarding who views, mourns, and speaks for which dead bodies, although often ascribed to debased social media mores, tell us more about the political border of human and nonhuman that produces the revenant figure of the refugee haunting inhospitable and neoliberal, but nominally post-racial, Europe.

scholarly journals Post-Truth Politics, Digital Media, and the Politicization of the Global Compact for Migration

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maximilian Conrad
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Global Compact ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

The debate over the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) in late 2018 showcases the crucial role of digital and, in particular, social media as vehicles of disinformation that populist actors can exploit in an effort to create resentment and fear in the public sphere. While mainstream political actors and legacy media initially did not address the issue, right-wing populist actors claimed ownership by framing (presumably <em>obligatory</em>) mass immigration as a matter of social, cultural, economic, and not least political risk, and created an image of political and cultural elites conspiring to keep the issue out of the public sphere. Initially advanced via digital and social media, such frames resonated sufficiently strongly in civil society to politicize the GCM in various national public spheres. In this article, these dynamics are explored by comparing the politicization of the GCM in three EU member states, namely Germany, Austria, and Sweden. Using a process-tracing design, the article (a) identifies the key actors in the process, (b) analyzes how the issue emerged in social and other digital media and travelled from digital media into mainstream mass media discourse, and finally (c) draws comparative conclusions from the three analyzed cases. Particular emphasis is placed on the frames used by right-wing populist actors, how these frames resonated in the wider public sphere and thereby generated communicative power against the GCM, ultimately forcing the issue onto the agenda of national public spheres and political institutions.

Clowns of the Revolution: The Malas Twins and Syrian Oppositional Performance

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
EDWARD ZITER
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
The State ◽  
Satellite Television ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Revolution

Ahmed and Mohammad Malas, two Syrian actors who have made themselves the unofficial clowns of the revolution, have emerged from a vibrant culture of cyber-activism. They have made use of Facebook and YouTube to circulate work that simultaneously reflects on the possibilities for, and failures of, social media and satellite television to forge a new idea of Syrian identity – one that prominently features active participation in the public sphere. I argue that unlike earlier Syrian plays that employed similar tropes (the interrogation scene as emblematic of the state–citizen relation, the failed actor as symbol of the disheartened citizen), the Malas twins use these tropes to demonstrate the necessity of resistance. Their plays assert that Syrians will persist in resistance because new technologies have provided new options and have transformed Syrian identity.

scholarly journals Permeable representations: Feeling and ideological clash

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-99
Author(s):  
Henrique Godoy
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Awareness ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Under objectivist communication premise, the political power reproduces its ideology through diverse social layers and pilars that consciously or unconsciously embrace it. Behind this impartiality cloak lives the normalisation of violence and its subsequent permanence over daily life. The epistemological opening of representations put the current social order under dispute. Considering the subjectivity of feelings and emotions as part of the process of raising political awareness, allows us to put Sociomuseology side by side with communitarian practical expertise, including photography. It is discussed here, under these concepts, how important it is for the memory repairing act to be welcomed by the public sphere and making its way to invert historical narratives. Keywords: Representation, Ideology, Museology, Sociomuseology, communication.

scholarly journals The Public Sphere in the Field of Power

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Calhoun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
Social Foundations ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Public Sphere

In this article I ask (1) whether the ways in which the early bourgeois public sphere was structured—precisely by exclusion—are instructive for considering its later development, (2) how a consideration of the social foundations of public life calls into question abstract formulations of it as an escape from social determination into a realm of discursive reason, (3) to what extent “counterpublics” may offer useful accommodations to failures of larger public spheres without necessarily becoming completely attractive alternatives, and (4) to what extent considering the organization of the public sphere as a field might prove helpful in analyzing differentiated publics, rather than thinking of them simply as parallel but each based on discrete conditions. These considerations are informed by an account of the way that the public sphere developed as a concrete ideal and an object of struggle in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain.

The Chaste Parricide: Murder, Femininity and the Subversion of Authority in the Reception of the First Performance of Shelley’s The Cenci, 1886

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-211
Author(s):  
Lee Michael-Berger
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
The Public ◽  
True Story ◽  
The Public Sphere

The story of The Cenci’s first production is intriguing, since the play, based on the true story of a sixteenth-century Roman family and revolving around the theme of parricide, was published in 1819 but was denied a licence for many years. The Shelley Society finally presented it in 1886, although it was vetoed by the Lord Chamberlain, and to avoid censorship it had to be proclaimed as a private event. This article examines the political and social context of the production, especially the reception of actress’s Alma Murray’s rendition of Beatrice, the parricide, thus probing the ways in which The Cenci question was reframed, and placed in the public sphere, despite censorship. The staging of the play became the site of a political debate and the performance – an act of defiance against institutionalised power, but also an act of defiance against the alleged tyranny of mass culture.

scholarly journals Heiner Goebbels's Stifters Dinge and the Arendtian Public Sphere

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-127
Author(s):  
Luke Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
Collaborative Working ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Working Processes

Heiner Goebbels’s works are examples of “postdramatic” theatre works that engage with the political by seeking to challenge socially ingrained habits of perception rather than by presenting traditional, literary-based theatre of political didacticism or agitation. Goebbels claims to work toward a “non-hierarchical” theatre in the contexts of his arrangement of the various theatrical elements, in fostering collaborative working processes between the artists involved, and in the creation of audience-artist relationships. In offering a reading of Goebbels’s “no-man show” Stifters Dinge, this paper seeks to situate Goebbels’s practice within a theoretical tradition that also encompasses Hannah Arendt’s deployment of the theatre as a metaphor for the public sphere. Within this analysis, I suggest, theatre can be seen to offer the possibility of a participatory democracy through its attention to disappearance and absence.

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