scholarly journals Starving at the Laid Table? Journalism, Digitalization and Corporate Capitalism

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiane Schnell

Professional journalism fulfills an important role in modern democracies, while always standing with one leg in the public sphere and the other in the private media economy. Within the era of digitalization, the limits of a market-driven professionalism become apparent. Since information appears to be easily accessible due to new media, journalism lost its role as a gatekeeper for “what the world needs to know”. But dropping an anachronistic idea of professional authority—as reform projects within the journalistic profession demanded for decades—does not necessarily lead to a more open and participatory public sphere. On the contrary, the chance for reliable news seems to shrink in the everyday flood of information. Facing a severe shortage of professionalism against the background of an oversupply in the field of journalism might indicate a general paradox of contemporary societies.  

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Szostak

YouTube is a massively popular video streaming website. It has become so ingrained in daily consciousness that it is almost difficult to conceive of a time in which it did not exist. YouTube’s slogan is “Broadcast Yourself.” It connotes a sense of freedom to be whoever you want to be and communicate this conceptualization of the self with the world. Vlogs, or video blogs, share the same function as a traditional diary except there is no assumption of privacy since the videos are uploaded publicly. Both men and women participate in the production of these videos. However, the experience of male and female YouTubers is quite different. The following paper will explore whether YouTube operates as a public sphere in light of the gender divide that appears to have formed on the site. The four objectives of the paper are as follows: to define the concept of the public sphere, to determine the factors that have contributed to a gender divide on YouTube by analyzing the gendered use of the medium, to examine the reception of the controversial “Girls on YouTube” video by female vloggers, and to evaluate whether YouTube operates as a public sphere in light of the findings of the preceding sections. Ultimately, this paper will give greater insight into whether new media offers the possibility for women's voices to be heard or if it is simply a remediation of older patriarchal technology.


2020 ◽  
pp. 151-154
Author(s):  
Olivier Roy

This concluding chapter discusses how values are returning today in the guise of dominant norms, both in the secular world and in religion. Today's crisis is not simply a crisis of values, but of referring to values at all. For what should values be founded on? On one hand, religions, which are no longer in sync with Europe's dominant cultures, are returning to the public sphere on behalf of a normative demand. On the other hand, the secular culture that professes freedom and rights is coming to a head in a burst of normative production. This is a normativity toward all forms of religion and religiosity, of course, but also normativity with respect to its own foundation, the social contract, and human nature, that of the desiring subject. Ultimately, the chapter argues that it is time to re-examine the question of values, to restore the particular cultural and social aspects of norms and to reinject them into society. In the face of globalization, the issue is at once to be more in touch with society and to act as a counterweight to other influences in the world: only Europe can meet these two objectives.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
MIKI KANEDA

AbstractFocusing on a multimedia practice labelled ‘intermedia art’, this article shows how experimental musical practices complicate popular characterizations of the idea of politics in 1960s Japan that are polarized by their focus on extraordinary economic growth, on the one hand, and radical protest, on the other. Like their counterparts in art, experimental musicians and artists such as Shiomi Mieko, Kosugi Takehisa, and Yuasa Jōji took an interest in everyday sounds, spaces, and technologies as sites for artistic exploration. However, their musical approaches did not share the overtly political engagement with the scenes of protest playing out in the public sphere that played a central role in the visual arts. Through an investigation of the notion of ambiguity in the acoustics of intermedia, the article seeks to re-examine understandings about the role of sound in shifting perceptions about political participation.


Author(s):  
Dmitry Valuev ◽  

The article covers the issue of consistency of manifesto texts with a political system underpinned by publicness principles. The ever-increasing production of manifestos witnesses a crisis in the political system which necessitates the investigation of how such texts influence both their readers and public sphere as a whole. The public sphere concept by J. Habermas, perception of policies by J. Ranciere, and dialogue-based approaches of M. Buber and A. Pyatigorsky constitute the basis for analysing structural elements of a manifesto text, and highlighting their core traits shedding light on the relationship between a manifesto text and the public sphere. Through highlighting the three main elements of a manifesto text, i.e. ‘speaking I’, ‘Object’, and ‘Other’, and by clarifying the configuration of interrelations between the elements, the militant message of a manifesto is asserted as the opposite to the dialogue-based foundation of the public sphere. Such texts postulate the necessity both to eliminate the ‘Other’ and to immediately achieve a set objective by way of taking on an active participative position. The latter to be implemented via the ‘speaking I’ replication mechanism, which is expressed through a call for readers to take on the image of the person speaking through the manifesto. Thus, the manifesto becomes both a tool for getting rid of an existing system incapable of satisfying the needs of an actor, and a tool for leveling political space. Manifesto texts demonstrate the monological basis expressed in the postulation of the necessity for action to uncompromisingly transform the world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-36
Author(s):  
Nisar Alungal Chungath

Identity is not a fixed and frozen prison-house for the self, but a liquid continuum, affected and shaped by the ‘outside’ or the world. The self, which is situated and which undergoes revisions and transformations, keeps identity as a frame within which it makes sense of things. On the one hand, there is a ‘history’ within which an identity is rooted and through which meaning-making is made possible, and on the other hand, every person aspires to be a ‘universal’ and recognition-worthy human being. Both inherent identity and inherent universality of the self should be considered in their interactions in the public sphere, which has been traditionally viewed as a space of discrete individualities. The ontological force of this argument aside, the paper demonstrates that reduction of an identity without crediting its aspiration for universality and consideration of universality without crediting the historical underpinnings of identity are both acts of violation. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Mălina Ciocea ◽  
Alexandru Cârlan ◽  
Bianca Cheregi

This article proposes an analytical shift in the theorization of public problems, from the standard (institutional) constructionist view which has informed the tradition of conceptualising social problems since Spector and Kitsuse’s classic work, to a communicative constructionist view, stemming from the mediatization paradigm. The rationale behind this shift is based on the conceptualization of the relation between various types of actors as claim makers and the logic of visibility governing processes of publicization in a media ecology marked by accelerated development. If, in the new communicational landscape, claim-making activities can turn any new-media user into a potential constructor of public problems, then we need to explain how developments in media technology reconfigure the practices of claim-making. In our understanding, such reconfigurations are just a particular case of the socio-cultural processes of transformation which are the focus of the mediatization paradigm. On the other hand, in a Foucaultian tradition, a shift from problems to problematizations is required in order to account for the processual dynamic through which certain phenomena are analysed under specific circumstances and at certain times, while others are ignored. This shift leads to an understanding of communicative figurations as a meta-theoretical framework for the construction of public problems, accounting for the interdependencies between articulations of public problems and the dynamics of the public sphere. With this aim in view, we first identity and evaluate the theoretical directions that are symptomatic for the transition from social problems to public ones and from problems to problematizations. In the second part, we present the heuristic potential of the concept of communicative figurations for our topic and articulate some methodological implications for a research agenda.


Author(s):  
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

The archives are generally sites where historians conduct research into our past. Seldom are they objects of research. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya traces the path that led to the creation of a central archive in India, from the setting up of the Imperial Record Department, the precursor of the National Archives of India, and the Indian Historical Records Commission, to the framing of archival policies and the change in those policies over the years. In the last two decades of colonial rule in India, there were anticipations of freedom in many areas of the public sphere. These were felt in the domain of archiving as well, chiefly in the form of reversal of earlier policies. From this perspective, Bhattacharya explores the relation between knowledge and power and discusses how the World Wars and the decline of Britain, among other factors, effected a transition from a Eurocentric and disparaging approach to India towards a more liberal and less ethnocentric one.


Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-930
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin

This article uses the materials of the Drezdensha affair, a large-scale investigation of “indecency” in St. Petersburg in 1750, to explore unofficial sociability among the Imperial elite, and to map out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the post-Petrine “sexual underworld.” Sociability and, ultimately, the public sphere in eighteenth century Russia are usually associated with loftier practices, with joining the ranks of the reading public, reflecting on the public good, and generally, becoming more civil and polite. Yet, it is the privately-run, commercially-oriented, and sexually-charged “parties” at the focus of this article that arguably served as a “training ground” for developing the habits of sociability. The world of these “parties” provides a missing link between the debauchery and carousing of Peter I's era and the more polite formats of associational life in the late eighteenth century, as well as the historical context for reflections on morality, sexual licentiousness, foppery, and the excesses of “westernization.”


2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Beyeler ◽  
Hanspeter Kriesi

This article explores the impact of protests against economic globalization in the public sphere. The focus is on two periodical events targeted by transnational protests: the ministerial conferences of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Based on a selection of seven quality newspapers published in different parts of the world, we trace media attention, support of the activists, as well as the broader public debate on economic globalization. We find that starting with Seattle, protest events received extensive media coverage. Media support of the street activists, especially in the case of the anti-WEF protests, is however rather low. Nevertheless, despite the low levels of support that street protesters received, many of their issues obtain wide public support.


2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 836-854 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lake

AbstractThis article responds to the pieces collected in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies, all of which seek to take some notion of the politics of the public sphere and either apply it to, or break it upon the wheel of, various versions of British history during the post-Reformation period. It seeks to bring the other articles into conversation both with one another as well as with existing work on the topic.


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