Managing Spontaneity: User-Generated Content in the Media Ecology

Author(s):  
a b
2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Murrell

This article examines the role that the global television news agencies play in the handling of user generated content (UGC) video from Syria. In the almost complete absence of independent journalists, Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France-Presse are sourcing citizen videos from YouTube channels and passing it on to their clients. This article examines the verification processes that the agencies undertake to check on the veracity of this material and asks whether the agencies have abandoned independent journalism to activists. This article provides a comparative analysis of two months’ worth of UGC videos from Syria that were broadcast by the global news agencies after Russia joined the bombing campaign in Syria in late 2015. It analyses the content, verification processes and information that the agencies give their clients about this material. Through interviews with senior editors from the three organisations, questions of certainty versus probability are explored, along with ethical arguments about propaganda versus information transparency. The global news agencies are the engine drivers of international news coverage and their decisions and interpretation feed directly into the media ecology of mainstream and then alternative media.


Author(s):  
Ruth Grüters ◽  
Knut Ove Eliassen

AbstractTo understand the success of SKAM, the series’ innovative use of “social media” must be taken into consideration. The article follows two lines of argument, one diachronic, the other synchronic. The concept of remediation allows for a historical perspective that places the series in a longer tradition of “real time”-fictions and media practices that span from the epistolary novels of the 18th century by way of radio theatre and television serials to the new media of the 21st century. Framing the series within the current media ecology (marked by the connectivity logic of “social media”), the authors analyze how the choice of the blog as the drama’s media platform has formed the ways the series succeeded in affecting and mobilizing its audience. Given the long tradition of strong pedagogical premises in the teenager serials of publicly financed Norwegian television, the authors note the absence of any explicit media critical perspectives or didacticism. Nevertheless, the claim is that the media-practices of the series, as well as the actions and discourses of its followers (blogposts, facebook-groups, etc.), generate new insights and knowledge with regards to the series’ form, content, and practices.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Steven Hicks

Inspired by Marshall McLuhan, pianist Glenn Gould dedicated his career to polemics against the concert hall tradition. Through radio/television broadcasts, written works and contentious recorded catalogue, Gould advocated adoption of the new electric media environment of the mid-twentieth century, challenging musical traditions of centuries past. Gould also used telephonic technology to mediate contact with the outside world. Gould has been acknowledged by such authors as Paul Théberge as putting into practice the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. In this study, I follow Robert Logan’s work in media ecology and general systems and investigate Gould’s polemics through systems theory. In particular, I employ Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, offering a model of society through which we may observe the effects of electric technology via the notion of functional de-differentiation of social systems as discussed by authors such as Erkki Sevänen. I suggest that Gould’s polemics are not just commentary on musical tradition but the media environments in which those traditions arose and show how we too can find solace in sound.


Author(s):  
Ian Whittington

In the years after the war, radio faced a new threat from within Britain, as television rose to become the new dominant channel for the mediation of national culture. This transition is best represented by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, the first national event to draw more television viewers than radio listeners across the country. This double coronation—of monarch and medium—represents not so much the total eclipse of radio as the recalibration of the media ecology, as technologies continued to jostle for primacy in a crowded sensory landscape. For the writers who helped to write the radio war, however, it nonetheless signalled the passing of a moment of cultural primacy for those whose work encompassed the written and the spoken word.


Author(s):  
Ceren Sözeri

Mainstream online media is gradually encouraging user contributions to boost brand loyalty and to attract new users; however, former “passive” audience members who become users are not able to become true participants in the process of online content production. The adoption of user-generated content in media content results in new legal and ethical challenges within online media organizations. To deal with these challenges, media companies have restricted users through adhesion contracts and editorial strictures unlike anything encountered in the users’ past media consumption experiences. However, these contractual precautions are targeted to protect the media organizations’ editorial purposes or reputations rather than to engage ethical issues that can also ensure them credibility. It is expected that some public service media strive to play a vital role in deliberative culture; on the other hand, some commercial global media have noticed the importance of worthwhile user-generated content even though all of them are far from “read-write” media providers due to the lack of an established guiding ethos for publishing user-generated content.


This chapter provides an overview of some aspects of the convergence context and concepts presented in previous chapters. The media sector and the main characteristics of the entertainment industry are described. Several elements are underlined: access, user-generated content, and a higher number of physical supports and electronic platforms. Key trends and developments in ICT industry are explored and main aspects of convergence are described: definitions of convergence, industry impact of convergence, and implications for firms' strategies. Indeed, technological and industrial convergence made possible by digitalization has changed the strategy of ICT companies and has accelerated the erosion of the existing frontiers between the media industries leading to the emergence of new actors (web giants, technology enablers, telecommunications operators, etc.). These compete directly with the “traditional” media players. These ICT groups have adopted different relational strategies to strengthen their activities in the field of entertainment and to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.


Author(s):  
Samuel Mateus

Media ecology is characterized today by the frequent airing of disruptive events. The shared experience of broadcasting is thus taken by disenchantment, fragmentation and individualization. Does this mean that integrative and ceremonial media events are condemned to disappear? What about media rituals and collective consensus? In this chapter, we argue that the Media Events category is not just an invaluable frame to understand contemporary television but it is also a vital process on the way societies re-work their solidarities, negotiate collective belonging and publicly stage social rituals. Analysing the live coverage of the funerary ceremonies of Eusébio, the Portuguese world-wide football legend, we address this major social occurrence approaching it as a death media event, a public mourning ceremonial and a tele-ritual. Media events are still a powerful example of how media plays a major role on social integration and national identity. The television broadcast of Eusébio's funeral - it is claimed - constitutes a key example, in the Portuguese society, of the integrative dimension of public events.


Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen

The conclusion shows that several of the embodied aspects of writing fiction discussed for the eighteenth-century novel can be traced into the nineteenth century through an example from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. It is shown that, like the earlier authors in the case studies in this book, Dickens features shifting embodied stances and involves elements of the media ecology of his day rather than deploying the concrete particulars that “formal realism” considers central to the novel. Links to larger arguments about the role of the novel in literary history are then drawn in contrast with accounts, based on Adorno/Habermas and Benjamin, that argue that eighteenth-century fiction becomes rationalised and disembodied with the novel and its culture industry. Rather than impoverishing experience, it is argued that the novel as a lifeworld technology depends profoundly on readers’ embodied engagements and that 4E cognition is a critical perspective that affords such an alternative take.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter A. Thompson

The formation of a new coalition government in New Zealand in the wake of the 2017 election ended three terms of National-led governments and raised the prospect of a significant shift in media policy. National had insisted that in the digital media ecology, the funding of public broadcasting institutions was no longer a priority and that platform-neutral contestable funding of local content would ensure the quality and diversity of content. This saw the demise of the TVNZ Charter and its two commercial-free channels (TVNZ 6 and 7), while both Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and the local content funding agency, NZ On Air, had their funding frozen. The 2017 election of the Labour-NZ First-Green government came with the promise of an additional investment of NZ$38m in public media, the expansion of RNZ’s remit to include a commercial-free television channel, and the establishment of an independent commission to assess funding needs for public media. However, the media ecology Labour now faces entails new policy complexities. Deregulation, financialization and convergence have not only intensified commercial pressures on the media, they have led to important shifts in the ways audiences discover and engage with media content. In turn, this complicates the traditional models of state intervention intended to deliver public service outcomes. Adopting a critical institutionalist framework this article will highlight key shifts in media policy trajectory since 1999 and highlight some key differences between the public broadcasting initiatives of 1999–2008 and the approach thus far of the incoming government. The article analyses how competing intra-party and inter-ministerial priorities have circumscribed the media policy options available and thereby highlight the way political–economic interests in the media ecology manifest in public policy.


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