Javnost–The Public, Vol. 21 - 2014, No. 3
The Sociology of Media System Structure: Communication Policy and the “Double Movement”
Karl Polanyi’s concept of a “double movement” has been used to describe the protectionist measures taken by governments to mitigate damage caused by the expansion of markets. Through a lens of political economy and historical institutionalism, this article uses Polanyi’s framework to examine competing notions of the public interest as exemplified by the socially constructed nature of American and British broadcasting and the legitimating discourse that produced divergent outcomes. A historical analysis points to a decline of the double movement in communication policy, particularly in the U.S., and lends support to calls for noncommercial, public media structures and increased regulation of communication industries.
Technology and Citizens: An Analysis of Citizens’ Jury on the Korean National Pandemic Response System
Due to technical complexity, most public policies in technological society are dominated by expert-centrism and technocracy (an institutional form of expert-centrism), based on the belief that they should be the exclusive realm of technical experts. But globally, expert-led and technocratic policy-making culture is faced with challenges. We analyse the democratic implications of the Korean experience of the citizens’ jury, a form of citizens’ deliberative participation. We document and examine the citizens’ jury on the National Pandemic Response System in 2008, which was the first case of the citizens’ jury in Korea. We conclude that such characteristics of citizens’ jury present positive implications in realising deliberative democracy.
Injecting Immediacy into Media Logic: (Re)Interpreting the Mediatisation of Politics on UK Television Newscasts 1991–2013
This study of UK evening newscasts (1991–2013) interprets the degree to which political news has become mediatised, drawing on the concept of journalistic interventionism to explore edited and live conventions. News examined generally offered little evidence of mediatisation. But when live news was isolated and interpreted over time the study found newscasts were injected with a logic of immediacy, adopting a level of interventionism apparent in instant and rolling news formats. To better understand the mediatisation of politics, future studies could experiment more by theorising different media logics and developing more format specific content indicators that reflect broader influences in journalism.
A Short History of the Epistemic Commons: Critical Intellectuals, Europe and the Small Nations
The quest for more openness and publicity is seen as a continuation of the long historical development of the epistemic commons, which began in the Middle Ages and culminated in the legacy of the Enlightenment. The argument is that European modernity is fundamentally based on the assumption that knowledge and culture belong to the common domain and that the process of democratisation necessarily means removing restrictions on the epistemic commons. Over the last 30 years, this optimism has suffered from two kinds of backlashes. Firstly, from the 1970s onwards, a policy of weakening and privatising public institutions has practically halted the expansion of the epistemic commons. Secondly, the other half of Europe, the CEE countries, did not benefit from the same kind of democratic development after the Second World War as their Western counterparts did. Because there was no tradition of democratic public institutions, the critical intellectuals in the CEE countries were rather helpless in promoting the ideas of publicity and democratic citizenship. The difficult questions are as follows: What can the role of critical scholars in promoting the epistemic commons be today? How should we understand the legacy of the Enlightenment – without falling for nostalgia for the 1960s and 1970s?
A Call to Arms: An Essay on The Role of the Intellectual and the Need to Produce New Imaginaries
The essay takes a historical reflection on the identity of the intellectual as a starting point, highlighting four key debates that have tried to provide meaning to this identity. These debates concern the intellectual’s class position, the intellectual’s connection to other classes and social groups, the location of the intellectual and the relationship with the university, and the publicness of the intellectual. These debates then feed into a more engaged reflection on the desirability of intellectuals to intervene in a society characterised by three types of crisis – the crisis of representative democracy, the economic crisis and the crisis of mimesis – investigating how their rethorics can be transformed into counter-hegemonic discourses. Although it is argued that the production of new ideological projects is not straightforward – because of the complex relationship between agency and discursive structures, the evenly difficult relationship between complexity and simplicity, and the ontological issues triggered by the crisis of mimesis – the essay pleads for the establishment of networks of intellectuals, driven by principles of value centrality, modular collaboration and non-essentialism, that allow them to critically rethink our core social structures, in order to establish new horizons to imagine social change.
Rebordering the Perspective on the EU: A View from the Slovenian Periphery
This paper investigates the prospect of the revival of the European integration project in light of current experiences of global financial crisis. It is argued that the crisis has left an uneven mark on the European community of member state publics, a mark which has introduced a new division between the allegedly diligent North and lazy South. Moreover, the experience of public humiliation of the peripheral states in crisis, i.e., Greek, Cyprus, Spain, Slovenia, perceived as coming from the centres of the EU and the North, has made it difficult to continue with the construction of the postnational constitution, as suggested by scholars of the EU. Rather, EU public is witness to the rise of the condition of internal postcoloniality whereby the periphery has become the resource (in economic, financial and cultural-moral sense) for the reproduction of the power regimes of the centre. Therefore, in this paper, it is claimed that leading European intellectuals who are concerned with the future of the EU, and propose scenarios of bottom-up reconstitution, should consider their own location and build an intellectual transversal which will include critical voices with peripheral experience of second-class citizenship.