Rethinking Ethnography: An Introduction

2012 ◽  
Vol 145 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Horst ◽  
Larissa Hjorth ◽  
Jo Tacchi

This special issue of Media International Australia seeks to ‘rethink’ ethnography and ethnographic practice. Through the six contributions, the authors consider the variety of ways in which changes in our media environment broaden what we think of as ‘media’, the contexts through which media are produced, used and circulated, and the emergent practices afforded by digital media.

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (8) ◽  
pp. 1019-1021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seungahn Nah ◽  
Masahiro Yamamoto

This special issue presents a total of seven articles concerning digital media and citizenship in various political, civic, and cultural contexts. Specifically, the entire collection investigates how digital media use and civic engagement can be conceptualized, operationalized, and theorized in the current digital media environment. The seven studies further examine how the use of traditional and newer forms of media influences civic engagement across communities of places, interests, and practices as well as different social groups at the local and global levels. With an interest in social conditions and contexts surrounding the civic utility of digital media, this special issue brings a unique perspective to the existing scholarship and provides new venues for continued scholarly attention to this important subject.


Author(s):  
Germaine Halegoua ◽  
Erika Polson

This brief essay introduces the special issue on the topic of ‘digital placemaking’ – a concept describing the use of digital media to create a sense of place for oneself and/or others. As a broad framework that encompasses a variety of practices used to create emotional attachments to place through digital media use, digital placemaking can be examined across a variety of domains. The concept acknowledges that, at its core, a drive to create and control a sense of place is understood as primary to how social actors identify with each other and express their identities and how communities organize to build more meaningful and connected spaces. This idea runs through the articles in the issue, exploring the many ways people use digital media, under varied conditions, to negotiate differential mobilities and become placemakers – practices that may expose or amplify preexisting inequities, exclusions, or erasures in the ways that certain populations experience digital media in place and placemaking.


Journalism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146488492098570
Author(s):  
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen ◽  
Mervi Pantti

In journalism studies, an interest in emotions has gathered momentum during the last decade, leading to an increasingly diverse investigation of the affective and emotional aspects of production, text and audience engagement with journalism which we describe as an “emotional turn.” The attention to emotion in journalism studies is a relatively recent development, sustained by the concurrent rise of digital information technologies that have accentuated the emotional and affective everyday use of media, as well as the increasing mobilization, exploitation and capitalization of emotions in digital media. This special issue both builds upon research on emotion in journalism studies and aims to extend it by examining new theoretical and methodological tools, and areas of empirical analysis, to engage with emotion or affect across the contexts of journalistic production, content and consumption. In proclaiming ‘an emotional turn’ in journalism studies, the intention of this special issue is not to suggest a paradigm shift or a major change in the prevailing research agenda in the field. Rather, against the backdrop of the increasingly diverse field of journalism studies, it is to point out that the relationship between journalism and emotion represents a rapidly developing area of inquiry, which opens up for new research agendas.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-87
Author(s):  
Jenni Hokka

With the advent of popular social media platforms, news journalism has been forced to re-evaluate its relation to its audience. This applies also for public service media that increasingly have to prove its utility through audience ratings. This ethnographic study explores a particular project, the development of ‘concept bible’ for the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE’s online news; it is an attempt to solve these challenges through new journalistic practices. The study introduces the concept of ‘nuanced universality’, which means that audience groups’ different kinds of needs are taken into account on news production in order to strengthen all people’s ability to be part of society. On a more general level, the article claims that despite its commercial origins, audience segmentation can be transformed into a method that helps revise public service media principles into practices suitable for the digital media environment.


Author(s):  
Klaus Bruhn Jensen

Climate change raises the stakes of human communication to the existential level of the species and the planet. This article presents an empirical study of how users make sense of climate change as they traverse the contemporary digital media environment. Departing from a baseline survey and drawing on the tradition of reception analysis, focus groups of different ages and with various political and religious affiliations identified distinctive themes, narratives, and arguments regarding the natural environment as represented and received across different media. Climate change appears out of scale – incommensurable not only with established media formats and genres but also with common frames of human cognition and communication. In conclusion, the article addresses climate change from the perspective of human rights and social justice, under the recent heading of climate justice.


2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 575-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galina Miazhevich

The article examines Russia’s international multinational broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today), which was launched in 2005 with the direct support of the Russian government. RT promotes a distinct ‘counter-hegemonic’ brand of broadcasting. This article goes beyond RT’s branding to explore the broadcaster’s nation branding of Russia. It considers the range of strategies used by RT, placing these within RT’s change of mission – from ‘informing others about events and life in Russia’ to comprising those ‘who question more’. By analysing RT’s coverage of the Republic of Crimea in 2016, and using a framing approach, the article explores RT’s branding of Russia and the online audience’s engagement with this within the contemporary transnational, convergent media environment. This article forms part of the Theorizing Media in Nation Branding special issue.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas Graves ◽  
CW Anderson

News organizations have adapted in various ways to a digital media environment dominated by algorithmic gatekeepers such as search engines and social networks. This article dissects a campaign to actively shape that environment led by professional fact-checking organizations. We trace the development of the Share the Facts “widget,” a device designed to give fact-checks greater purchase in algorithmically governed media networks by driving adoption of a new data standard called ClaimReview. We show how “structured journalism” gave journalists a language for the social and technical challenges involved, and how this infrastructural technology mediates between fact-checkers, audiences, and platform companies. We argue that this standard-setting initiative exhibits both promotional and disciplining facets, offering greater distribution and impact to journalists while also defining their work in specific ways. Crucially, in this case, this disciplining influence reflects internal professional-institutional agendas in an emerging subfield of journalism as much as the demands of platform companies.


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