Farming on Facebook, Camera-less Food Photography and a New Indian Pastoral

Lacunae in media images and reports of death and agrarian based suffering, experienced by India's debt prone farmers, have only begun to be addressed in the Indian news media. While the agrarian crisis is spectacularized through 24 hour news cycle images, analysis of underlying causes is less common in print and digital media. Kheti Badi, a photo-series produced from screenshots of FarmVille (an Adobe Flash gaming application on Facebook), interrogates this media impasse. It critiques homogenized images of food and farming, which rise to the top of web search results, and photojournalistic images showing the dignified suffering of Indian agricultural workers. Kheti Badi's computer made images are an alternative to visual stereotyping of rural India in photojournalism. Its technological inventiveness neither spectacularizes farmer protests or suicides nor aestheticizes pastoral qualities associated with the land. To make visible the changing nature of food production and need to reform farming in India, and its media coverage, Kheti Badi supplants the Indian pastoral with a new pictorial.

Citizen Engagement and Social Media

Social media has transformed election campaigns around the world. While it is difficult to determine to what extent social media influence voters' decisions, there is no doubt that social media platforms impact on candidate advertising and public debate during elections. This research, the methodological formulation of which is based on a case study, seeks to investigate the use of social media during political campaigns to collect signatures of support. In the elections of 2018, aspiring candidates for presidential election required a certain number of signatures of support in order to register as official candidates. We collected social media data on a weekly basis from the Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts of seven candidates and contrasted this data with the number of signatures validated by the electoral authority. We found no relationship between the level of support received and the use of social media in the case of any of the candidates. However, we observed candidates who did achieve the required number of signatures and who did receive official presidential candidate status as a result of their high level of visibility. This research contributes methodologically to the current literature and provides empirical evidence regarding independent candidates in Mexico.

The Potential of Interactive Negotiated Narratives in Rebuilding and Reimagining Northern Irish Society

This research explores the role of the writer in interactive transmedia production through a research project that has been primarily designed to take place within contemporary Northern Ireland. Red Branch Heroes was created, in association with Bellyfeel Productions1, as a prototype for a more extensive fictional interactive web series that will be known as The Eleven. The author developed a game-like scenario where, through their play, the audience influenced and developed character and story elements. The research asks if interactive forms such as transmedia offer any new storytelling potentials to the people of Northern Ireland and how such projects can contribute to debates about e-politics and e-democracy in post-conflict societies. Evidence is presented in this article to suggest that the ‘negotiated narratives' formulated in this prototype offer further creative community-building possibilities, in neutral spaces that can facilitate discourses about the future.

A Possible Framework for Attention-Based Politics

According to scholars, the use of mediatization could be understood as a communicative representation of politicians or spin doctoring, but either way, it ends in self-representation and in “self-initiated stage-management.” However, the social media environment could give a new perspective on the communication of the political actors in political communication. This communication could be seen as self-broadcasting that could be conceptualized as attention-based politics. This article aims to give a brief introduction to a theoretical framework of the phenomenon and to provide research directions in order to understand politician's strategies in attraction, maximization, and the direction the attention of followers and journalists.

Theorizing the Journalism Model of Disinformation and Hate Speech Propagation in a Nigerian Democratic Context

Since its political independence in 1960, Nigeria has been a partially united country. Nigerians have always regarded themselves as ‘us' versus ‘them.' This creates a fertile ground for the propagation of hate speech and disinformation. The Fourth Republic in Nigerian democracy, which triumphantly began in 1999, after 16 years of military rule is now in its 21st year. However, since the emergence of the Trumpian fake news era in 2016, the Nigerian democratic atmosphere has been polluted with more devastating hate messages and disinformation which, aided by the ‘supersonic' social media, threaten the nations hard-earned democracy. As the constitutional watchdogs of the society, journalists are tasked to cleanse the democratic atmosphere of the filths of disinformation and hostility. To help the journalists achieve this goal, this article proposes the Journalism Model of Disinformation and Hate Speech Propagation through a critical review of extant literature. Policy recommendations were offered at the end.

An Exploration of Social Media as Forms of Social Control and Political Othering

The twenty-first century problem is of “Othering.” In a world beset by challenges, global, national, and regional conflict wrapped within or organized around group-based difference. The concept of “Othering” is used for social media platforms as the cause of many, if not all of the stresses of globalization, and the “collision of cultures.” This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of social media in the wake of political othering on the Zimbabwean political landscape. More so, political othering is viewed as exacerbated by the various manipulations of different social media platforms. The article uses critical discourse analysis to unravel the unequal power relations inherent in social media platforms as both users and receivers of the peddled messages. Much as public media platforms are known to propagate a certain kind of mediated reality aimed at agenda setting and ideological persuasion in the presumed receivers. Social media platforms are used to negatively propagate rivalry, especially among political opponents.

The Popularization of Political Communication

This article presents and adopts a new definition of the popularization of political communication, which is defined as a strategic communicative action through which political actors try to create new connections with those citizens who do not still know, follow and support them and to emotionally strengthen the political bond with their current sympathizers. Second, a comparative analysis of the Facebook pages of the main political leaders of 31 countries shows that the popularization of political communication is a relevant phenomenon on Facebook, while a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) indicates that the presence of a presidential system, a high digitalization of the media system, and a high level of trust in political institutions are three sufficient conditions for a “pop” communication on Facebook. Finally, the article identifies and discusses its main properties and development under the current hybrid media system.

Simulating Experiences of Displacement and Migration

Immigration is a highly politicised and emotive area of public discourse. During the peak of the so-called ‘Refugee Crisis' in Europe, a number of EU politicians and mass media outlets manipulated the abstract idea of ‘the migrant' as a scapegoat for a number of social ills including rising crime, unemployment and national security. Yet, during these years, some news organisations did seek to counter the dominant negative narratives around migration by exploring new modes of storytelling around interactive and immersive digital environments. This study examines four such media projects, all developed between 2014 and 2016. Their interactive narratives sought to break down popular discourses which portrayed migrants as “the other” by creating an emotional connection between media user and the experience of refugees themselves. For this research, journalists, editors, and producers were interviewed to determine the motivations of the content creators and the impact their storytelling techniques had on viewers.

Deleveraging Creative Capital

The purpose of this research is to improve understanding of how democratized video technology is changing the market for video communication during political campaigns. The same content analysis methodology was applied to United States senate campaign YouTube videos during both the 2006 election when YouTube first made its mark on politics and the 2016 election a decade later. The evidence does not support the theory that democratized video technology will produce new winners communicating in new ways about political campaigns. The 2016 election was marked by a slight increase in the proportion of repurposed television ads compared to the 2006 election. Over the course of its first decade, the market for political campaign communication on YouTube has increasingly struggled to attract investors of creative capital.

Post-Truth

Information quality is an increasingly pressing problem in network society, as it is the price we pay for the information overload afflicting us. This article illustrates three empirical cases that will help provide a better understanding of the range and breadth of misinformation, distinguishing between hoaxes, rumors, and conspiracies. The following sections discuss the limitations of remedies based on fact checking and debunking, and of proposed legislation to counter misinformation. The conclusions suggest several approaches to learning to deal with misinformation which should be addressed by future research: the processes of building and assessing reputation, the development of pragmatic trust, the dangers of the bubble effect, and the need for greater transparency concerning the algorithms that control online platforms.