Javnost - The Public, Vol. 22 - 2015, No. 2
Democracy and the Media—Revisited
The model which dominated twentieth-century analysis of political communication systems is now out of date in many respects. Essential in the authors’ view is a reconsideration of some of the foundational concepts of political communication scholarship. They propose fresh lines of thought on: a communication-sensitive definition of democracy; the purposes of civic communication; evaluations of media roles in terms of those purposes; the politics–media axis; and new citizen roles in new-media conditions. Noting that values are always at stake in how political communication is organised, practiced and received, they distinguish two different conceptualisations of researchers’ policy roles for harnessing and enhancing communication, citizenship and democracy—as a visionary destination and as a journey towards it, respectively. They conclude that both deserve prominent positions on academic road maps.
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Contradictions of Media Production and the Heterogeneity of Products
This article confronts theoretical predictions, according to which innovations of information and communications technologies will spur the media production towards greater diversity and variety, with basic contradictions of the currently-prevailing media economy. In actuality, the promise of the ubiquity of media content and plurality of possible mediated experiences is contested by the constraints that the production side has to meet in order to divert the trend of the rate of profit to fall—to alleviate the consequences of the law, with which Marx explained the circular movement of the economic activity in general. Special attention is devoted to the contexts which especially information society theorists claim might bring diversity of supply; however, diversity is usually postponed by managerial strategies that choose between many possible equilibriums of supply and demand. Critical scholars have so far been regularly demonstrating that investments in technology most often bring about increases in distribution capacities instead of fulfilling the promise to increase diversity of content and media, whereas the author of this article uses the classical tools and the basic laws of Marxian analysis to explain the internal drives and the contradictory forces that propel media supply towards the decisions to preserve the existing range of products and not to risk changing it.
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From Public Service Media Organisations to De-centralised Public Service for the Media Sector: A Comparative Analysis of Opportunities and Disadvantages
Ideas on plurality and competition in public broadcasting delivery have re-surfaced in discussions on the future of public surface media (PSM) on regular occasions in different geographical settings since the 1980s. This article analyses several of the debates on distributed public service, critically evaluating whether governments across Europe would indeed be “better off” should they choose a distributed and de-centralised model of public service media. The article, firstly, investigates which arguments have been made in order to make the case for a distributed PSM model. On the basis of these insights, a typology of different forms of distributed public service delivery is then developed. Setting out from this typology, policy plans and actual practices of de-centralised PSM are being analysed. Findings in the four case studies (the United Kingdom, Flanders, the Netherlands, and New Zealand) are based on a combination of secondary literature, a qualitative document analysis, desk research and semi-structured expert interviews. The article concludes that distributed public service is as much a normative idea as the centralised public broadcasting project, that distributed public service as a policy solution lacks a clearly defined policy problem and, moreover, that there is, given the variety of media systems, not one distributed model that would fit all.
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Impact of Temporality and Identifiability in Online Deliberations on Discussion Quality: An Experimental Study
There is a perception that citizen deliberation brings about higher-quality discussions than discussions where deliberative norms are not used. Often, deliberations are realised in mini-publics in which certain contextual features ensure, a priori, that the discussions are likely to be of a high quality. However, few studies have as yet explored the boundaries of deliberation; that is, contemplated what happens to discussion quality if the ideal-speech situation is strayed away from. To address this point, this article reports on an online experiment in which the discursive setting of citizen deliberations is manipulated. The experiment (n = 50 participants) was carried out online in Finland in November 2013 in order to test the impact on discussion quality related to two factors: the temporality (asynchronous or synchronous discussions) and identifiability of participants (known or anonymous) in an online deliberation. The findings clearly indicate that asynchronous discussions have the most positive influence on discussion quality. Moreover, the identifiability factor only had a small weak influence on discussion quality, and there was only one weak interaction effect between the two factors.
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A Quasi-public Sphere: Letters to the Editor in the German Democratic Republic
Using the example of the German Democratic Republic, the present article argues that communist leadership established a non-public communication channel between politics, administrations, industry and the population that took on most of the functions of the non-existent public sphere: letters to the editor. By law, those letters were considered petitions. The editorial offices had to register and answer them in a timely manner or transmit them to the authorities for consideration. This policy of focusing on individual cases while avoiding public sphere levels of mass communication and public meetings had two advantages for the ruling communist party: Critics were satisfied and “kept quiet” and other people were left in the dark unless they heard rumours during “encounters”. Those in power accepted that the absence of a critical discursive space hampered the process of innovation and social change—setting the German Democratic Republic apart from countries with autonomous media systems. The petition “solution” could only work as long as the number of critical readers’ letters remained within a reasonable limit, something that became impossible during the crisis of the late 1980s.
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Alternative Internet Radio, Press Freedom and Contentious Politics in Hong Kong, 2004–2014
This article analyses the rise and development of alternative Internet radio in Hong Kong in the past decade in tandem with the changing status of press freedom and contentious politics in the city. The article illustrates that alternative Internet radio first emerged a decade ago as the self-defence of the civil society against political encroachments on the media. Cognisant of the political potential of alternative Internet radio, pro-democracy radical political parties and social activists have subsequently appropriated this new medium to facilitate and engage in contentious politics. In the face of tightening political control of mainstream media in recent years, alternative Internet radio has become a “safe haven” for the exited rebel voices. Despite the considerable political significance of alternative Internet radio (and alternative Internet media in general) at this moment, its prospect remains uncertain due to potential regulatory control and increasing political pressures on Internet media in the future.
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