Javnost - The Public, Vol. 29 - 2022, No. 4
Talking Communication Studies: Negotiating Power and Promise
Consensus regarding what becomes mainstream, popular, and commonplace within academia is subtly managed in accord with conformity of thought, contemporary popular ideas, and major assumptions/paradigms predominating fields, which in turn are comprised of hegemonic, ideological ideas, frameworks and arguments that are informed and bound by power. Power, professionalisation, and dominant ideological currents inform and legitimise paradigmatic ideas, which in turn influence perceptions and reception. This paper explores how Communication Studies have been impacted by dominant configurations of power and encourages debate on the extent to which ideological bias and ideological marginalisation are normative dimensions of Communication Studies.
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Islamic Worldview as a Model for De-Westernising Journalism Studies and Profession
Despite the various attempts to de-Westernise journalism studies and profession, the dominance of Western theories and practices remains absolute. This article seeks to develop a hybrid Islamic/Western worldview that represents a comprehensive, flexible and multicultural paradigm that emphasises sharing rather than imposing one’s heritage and view. The article particularly reflects on resolving the existing ontological, epistemological and methodological issues as a crucial task in overcoming obstacles and stagnation related to the hybridisation of theory-building efforts. This article demonstrates how the proposed normative paradigm can be grounded in the realistic context of journalistic practice by examining two research issues: media and democratisation and the globalisation of journalism ethics.
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Visual Popular and Political: The Non-profit Influencer and the Public Sphere
The influencer has become a common phenomenon in digital societies. The emphasis on exposure and popularity in social media is materialised through the growing prominence of these popular individuals with large audiences. This article examines the rhetoric of two “non-profit influencers” on Instagram, demonstrating that they can be understood beyond economics, fandom and traditional politics. Rather than being profit-focused as the more commonly known influencer, they are normatively oriented. Their communication reflects rhetorical demands prompted by the public matters they address and the social media environment. This study suggests that the non-profit influencer may be seen as a phenomenon crystallising social and technological emphases on the individual. It contends that the non-profit influencer may be located in the popular cultural public sphere, illustrating social media’s role as relevant arenas in deliberative democracy.
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“Hi Folks!” Attention Populism as a Strategy for Dominating the Dissonant Information Environment
This study describes a strategy for dominating the digital political information environment: attention populism. Dissonance in the information environment is a significant trend that is forcing political communication to change. Strategies of political communications experts aimed at dominating the dissonant information environment, and thereby winning the support of various civic and electoral groups, are becoming increasingly apparent, especially among populist parties. We use discourse analysis in a case study to describe the communication strategy of the former Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Andrej Babiš. We focus on his weekly long posts on Facebook that open with the greeting, “Hi, folks!” The case study demonstrates how attention populism works in contemporary political communication practice.
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The interplay of personal storytelling with rational justifications in online discussions: A qualitative exploration of news user comments
In light of theoretical controversies among deliberation scholars, this study thoroughly explores the interplay of personal storytelling with rational justifications in online discussions. In a qualitative content analysis, it examines how this relationship manifests in online news user comments on the public role of religion and secularism in society from the period of August 2015 until July 2016. To provide more general interpretive insights, the study analyses highly comparable data from multiple countries. The material stems from the websites of nine daily news media in Australia, the United States, Germany and Switzerland. In the investigated online news user comments, personal storytelling regularly interplays with rational justifications in the shape of a narrative rationality and a supportive narrativity. While narrative rationality relies on personal narratives to make a point in the form of a rational justification, supportive narrativity builds on personal experiences referenced in passing to further reinforce a general line of reasoning. Personal storytelling thus plays a vital role in justifying the normative rightness of the positions that the commenters take on the contested issue. This supports normative theories that acknowledge the merit of personal storytelling for public deliberation and provides new impulses for their specification.
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Public Broadcasting and Topic Diversity in The Netherlands: Mentions of Public Broadcasters’ Programming in Newspapers as Indicators of Pluralism
Following debates on media pluralism and decentralised public service media, this article discusses the contribution of Dutch public broadcasters to pluralism. While the Dutch system operates under the assumption that external pluralism of broadcasting associations contributes to diversity, here we empirically explored this relation with respect to topics within societal discourse. We argue that mentions of public broadcasters’ programming in newspapers can function as indicators of diversity. As such, we traced mentions of all television and radio programmes by eleven Dutch public broadcast associations in a collection of 263,476 Dutch newspaper articles published during the 2017–2018 TV and radio season. Employing Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling, we thematically contextualised those mentions, which then allowed us to map the breadth of topics associated with programming by different public broadcast associations as well as the extent to which individual public broadcasting associations play a distinct role within a characteristic set of topics. The results of our exploratory analyses support the idea that the external pluralism of the Dutch system produces diversity in alignment with the intentions of the distributed system.
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Correction
Article title: Habitual Generation of Filter Bubbles: Why Is Algorithmic Personalisation Problematic for the Democratic Public Sphere?
Author: Jernej Kaluža
Journal: Javnost – The Public
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2021.2003052
When the above named article was first published, the authorship of the book Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016) was incorrectly given as Wendy Chun and Hui Kyong.
The authorship of the book has now been corrected throughout the article to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun.
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