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Worldwide, pubic memory initiatives are attempting to memorialize the current COVID-19 crisis whilst it is still ongoing. The Picturing Lockdown collection is one such initiative, led by Historic England (HE), the UK’s statutory adviser on historic environment. Calling out to the public to submit photographed experiences of lockdown to both its website and via social media, HE recruited the public to partake in a national memory-making endeavor. To examine memorialization practices of the present, this research asks: in an era of social media, how is an archive of an ongoing crisis represented? Using a qualitative method for visual and textual analysis, this research compares the official HE Picturing Lockdown archive collection and #PicturingLockdown on Instagram. Analysis reveals tensions in three spheres: the institutional, the temporal, and the spatial. Demonstrating the dynamism and “presentism” introduced by social media, this research illustrates how traditional practices of commemoration are shifting.

In recent years, LGBT issues have received substantial media attention and engendered heated public debate in Ghana. This paper analyzes the prejudiced construction of LGBT issues in the Ghanaian news media and how this contributes to a discriminatory discourse that demeans LGBT people and puts them at the periphery of Ghanaian society. The study employs a critical discourse analysis framework and a dataset of 385 articles, comprising news reports, op-ed pieces, and editorials. The analysis reveals that news content on LGBT issues is biased and inflammatory, and it frames LGBT people as expendables and undesirables. This is realized by exploiting three discourses, or forms of othering, that culminate into the (re)production and naturalization of moral panic: a discourse of amorality/immorality and societal destruction, a discourse of alienization, and a discourse of medicalization or pathologization. The paper concludes with a call for a more balanced and ethically/socially responsible news reporting, especially since LGBT issues in Ghana hold implications for national cohesion and security.

This paper takes a design anthropology approach to understanding the learnings, challenges and opportunities Victorians adopted to choreograph practices of care in and through media practice during and after the Australian 2019–2020 bushfire crisis. In doing so, we frame our inquiry from a perspective of how individuals and communities care through media practice. The study weaves together experiences around informal and formal crisis communication media – such as the government’s VicEmergency App, Australian and international news media and social media sharing – to map what we call the careful attunements of choreographing care.

The COVID-19 pandemic began in 2019, spread to the rest of the world in 2020 and still holds nations in its grip in 2021. There is scant research on the way it has affected Holocaust awareness. Based on scholarly work on Holocaust awareness in Israel, the top-down memory of the Holocaust in the media and the vernacular Holocaust memory on social media, this article analyzes the ways the Holocaust became a frame of reference in Israel for the interpretation of the COVID-19 pandemic and the newest link in a long chain of using the Holocaust as a prism for other topics in Israeli society. The article centers on the evolution of the COVID-19 – Holocaust references and the role of media and social media in it. It shows that the initial panic created a wave of comparisons between the Holocaust and the pandemic in the media and social media. In the second half of the year, as the restrictions and two more lockdowns became part of life, references to the Holocaust changed – negative reactions to COVID-19 government regulations and law enforcement were compared on social media to Nazi acts. The Israeli media did not create these comparisons but reported them widely and contributed to their circulation.

This paper examines the changes and continuities in TV representations of Chinese Communist Party’s revolutionary history and interprets them within the broader context of China’s political, economic and cultural transformations since the 1990s. Drawing on a comparative analysis of three state-sponsored TV dramas produced between the late 1990s and mid-2010s, it traces how the state-sanctioned revolutionary narratives have changed over time in response to the Party’s propaganda imperatives on the one hand, and to the market-oriented production environment on the other. The paper argues that while recent TV productions in the new century have made increasing concessions to audience taste by adopting visually stimulating depictions and introducing fictional characters as points of identification for the audience, the revolutionary narratives were still aligned with the Party’s propaganda agenda at different times. This shows the ongoing competition between ideological and commercial interests in Chinese TV production during the era of market reforms.

“Propagames,” or games with propagandistic content, have been emerging in the past two decades. They operate as a part of digital authoritarianism, together with other forms of new soft propaganda, to legitimate populist authoritarian states around the world. The contemporary democratic struggle against global authoritarian resurgence will require knowledge on how propagames and other digital propaganda work. But knowledge on propagames is seriously lacking compared to the voluminous scholarship on politically progressive, educational, and serious games. This study fills this research gap by analyzing the most popular propagame in China, Kangzhan Online (War of Resistance against Japan Online), and gamers’ reception of it. We begin with theoretical explorations of how to define propagames, how to demarcate them from other games with political content, and what role they play in digital authoritarianism. We eclectically borrow from four frameworks to analyze Kangzhan Online: the dual-process perspective, imaginary world studies, the sociology of collective memory, and the sociology of emotions. Our data include participant observation in the game for 3 months, formal interviews of 30 gamers, informal interviews with dozens of gamers, and documentary data from the official forum and the Chinese game media. The data were collected in 2009, 2010, and 2019.

This essay reviews the works ‘Television and the Afghan Culture Wars’ (University of Illinois Press) by Wazhmah Osman and ‘Media Imperialism in India and Pakistan’ (Routledge) by Farooq Sulehria as recent contributions to the fields of global and comparative media studies. It considers the overlapping themes in these works through ruberics of media imperialism and development in terms of growth of television industry in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan in the broad context of globalization and transnational media flows.

In the context of sustained interest in the mobilization of Muslimness beyond generic and hence immobile identity tropes, I consider how Australian mainstream television and film productions work to challenge and disrupt essentialist representations of Muslimness. Case studies feature two television series and a feature film, examined through the lens of transnational mobility theory and in the context of mediated anti-racism. The productions I discuss, ‘The Spice Journey’, ‘The Mosque Next Door’, and ‘Down Under’, all turn on intra- and inter-communal mobility of Muslim identities. They are part of a larger trend in popular media productions in current Australian film and on television, which reacts to Islamophobic sentiments in the country by drawing attention to embodied multiple subjectivities. Findings suggest that Australian entertainment media can add meaningful input to the diverse and complex negotiations of culture and identity among Muslims in Australia but may sidestep other forms of racism like anti-Indigeneity in the process.

This treatise conflates cultural sociology, media theory, and Japanese philology in order to better understand the way media scandals are produced in contemporary Japan. In cultural sociology, scandal is understood as a social performance between ritual and strategy. In my previous research I focused on the ritual aspect, analyzing Japanese scandals as dramatic public performances of confession, exclusion, and reintegration. In this treatise, I focus on the strategy aspect, approaching scandals as symbolic products of media routines and journalistic practices. The former part of this treatise examines how the actor-network of power circles co-defines the way scandals emerge and unfold in Japan. The latter part focuses on the role of Japanese media organizations in the process of transforming leaks into scandals.

This article is a response to calls for more reflexivity in media scholarship. It argues that despite various attempts towards challenging the ‘Western-centrism’ of the field (notable among them is the ‘de-Westernisation’ project), media studies has remained highly captive to the distinctions between ‘West’ and ‘non-West’ as the principal starting point for analysis. Building on Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, and employing Said’s idea of methodological self-consciousness, this paper critically assesses the often taken-for-granted assumptions in media research. It reflects on anecdotal and personal experience, and on observations that I have made in the literature I have consulted, in the queries by colleagues, and in teaching. This article shows how and through which terminology the Orientalist discourse materializes in the field of media research. It reveals how a network of interests is shaped on any occasion when media and journalism in contexts that are deemed ‘non-Western’ are in question. This paper shows that media scholarship is marked by the use of binary terminology, collective terms and generalities, a one-sided relationship between the ‘West’ and ‘non-West’, and the notions of the superiority of Anglo-American research.

The paper brings together two segments of contemporary humanitarian practice – celebrity advocacy and virtual reality (VR) – in order to more fully comprehend the relationship between emergent technologies and humanitarian advocacy efforts. Numerous VR documentaries intended to immerse audiences into the full experience of “distant suffering” have been crafted for audiences in the global North. Between 2015 and 2019, the United Nations invested in at least 21 VR documentaries covering crisis situations around the world. VR’s popularity is premised on the promise of bringing spectators and “distant sufferers” together through immersive experiences. Performances of humanitarian advocacy use traditional representational tools of Western humanitarian discourse. This leads to the question whether advocacy efforts using immersive VR flatten real and material differences that exist between sufferers and spectators in safe zones through the “illusion of co-suffering”? To what extent do such experiences risk “improper distance” by translating the irreducible alterity of other lives into familiar terms?

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the precarisation of journalistic work by looking at the case of Syrian exiled journalists in Turkey, whose professional and personal lifeworlds are underpinned by multiple layers of precarity. The article builds on data collected during a 3-month-long period of participant observations at the newsroom of Enab Baladi, a Syrian news outlet based in Istanbul, Turkey. It develops a relational notion of precarity through insights from the growing body of work on precarity in the journalistic field, as well as research on precarity and migration. It proposes a multidimensional understanding of the ‘precarious newsroom’ that takes into account the people, organisation and place, as a way to map how different layers of precarity, and responses to them, are articulated, experienced and negotiated. Our research underlines the complex anatomy of the precarious newsroom as a paradoxical place and an amalgamation of precarity and agency.

In this paper, I investigate how Instagrammers re-construct themselves as agentive and digitally mobile despite their physical immobility during the early COVID-19 pandemic. By examining four types of post that emerged or became popular during this period, I delineate how Instagrammers take subject positions to negotiate their (im)mobile selfhood in the online-offline nexus. I contend that as the Instagrammers negotiate their own invisibility and sociality during the lockdown, their physical bodies are reconfigured digitally as part of their multimodal self-presentation, troubling the traditional (im)mobile divide. While this study illuminates the democratic potential of Instagram, it also contemplates the extent of an individual’s agency on a global scale.

Critics of weight loss reality shows often present the contestants as victims of commodification and exploitation without any form of agency. This paper seeks to contest this one-sided view of such shows. It draws on interviews with the producers and 19 contestants in the first season of a dance reality show in Ghana, the Di Asa show, as well as recorded video performances online. We argue that indeed the show was organised in a manner that commodified the contestants for purposes of improving the ratings of the private television station that hosted the show. However, to read these contestants purely as commodified objects misses half the story. We demonstrate that these contestants participated in the show with parallel motives to that for which the producers created the show, and were successful in their endeavours. They thus engaged in what we call subversive commodification, a situation where the object of commodification actively takes part in the commodification process to gain benefits that accrue solely to them and not the subject of commodification.

Comments on social media provide a suitable site to view text-reader relations from the perspective of news reading. This article interrogates readers’ evaluative responses to Weibo shared news in China. The study, drawing upon Discursive News Values Analysis and appraisal, first identifies the news values of Eliteness, Personalization, Negativity and Positivity in a news story about car quality sourced from the Weibo network of People’s Daily. Then the following 1027 comments, including Chinese characters and emojis, are investigated by using a mixed-methods approach. The corpus analysis shows that business Eliteness (the Mercedes dealership) and Personalization (the buyer) are convergently valued news actors, while readers evaluate authoritative Eliteness (the Bureau) in an unexpected way. Close examination of the appraisal devices in the comments uncovers a divergence between negative judgment toward Eliteness and positive affect/judgment for Personalization. Emojis play an important role in activating attitudes through the interplay with language. In commentary journalism, the readers’ response can influence news value decisions when there is a mismatch between the news values promoted by news organizations and the values that readers perceive as newsworthy.

This discussion centers on a critical textual analysis of 10 episodes of The Shop: Uninterrupted, an HBO television series produced by and starring iconic Black American basketball player LeBron James. The aim is to provide a considered explication of representation activism: the anti-racist strategy keying on collapsing racial hierarchies through accenting positive Black representation, and so advancing greater Black inclusion, within mainstream media (Andrews, 2018; Gilroy, 2000; Godsil and Goodale, 2013). The politics and constructions of Blackness within The Shop exemplify the logical flaws, superficiality, and insipid practical outcomes of representation activism. Though The Shop proclaims to demonstrate Black liberatory representation, this analysis elucidates how The Shop’s centering of the Black celebrity elite as the agents of change falsely universalizes the experiences of everyday Black people; its pursuit of a mythological Black authenticity essentializes and romanticizes Black vernacular and identities; and its mediation through the White racial frame prohibits the articulation of an effective liberatory politics. The discussion concludes by challenging the possibilities of “positive” representation in capitalist media as a credible and sincere tactic of collective Black liberation (Hooks, 1992; Marable, 2015; Spence, 2015; West, 1994); instead, suggesting a grassroots-oriented approach prefigured on targeting the structural roots of racism.

How does the governance of the newspaper business in mid-20th century India enrich our understanding of contests over media diversity? This essay examines the anxieties of media diversity in regulatory debates in India during the decades between the two Press Commissions of 1954 and 1982. I argue the contests spawned during these debates being driven as much by normative standpoints on the press as a modern institution as by enumerations of the actual dynamics in the newspaper business. My purpose is twofold: to highlight the anxieties about media diversity expressed by both press commissions and related policy debates in the interim; and to reveal the desires to mitigate the risks to media diversity being undermined by mobilising unqualified notions of media freedom.

Understanding the relationship between media and communication as increasingly conflictive under conditions of de-democratization in India, this essay proposes a focus on violence-induced conditionalities of political communication among the affected. I introduce the term ‘media/violence’ as I look at two spaces in North Indian cities that have been turned into ‘Muslim ghettos’ over the past two decades: Jamia Nagar in New Delhi and Juhapura in Ahmedabad (Gujarat). Based on intermittent fieldwork between 2015 and 2020 (partly online), I argue that differences both in the quality of the violence as well as in the interaction between mediated and physical violence executed on the two spaces conditioned long-term options of collective communication (and their absence). The analysis helps us understand how massive political and legal protests could eventually erupt in Jamia Nagar (Shaheen Bagh) in late 2019, while the very reason for protest appears to have eluded residents of Juhapura.

This article returns to the geopolitical scene and racial logics that provide the underacknowledged conditions of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and, specifically, its well-known proposition that media should be understood foremost as ‘outerings’ or ‘extensions of man’. Attending to the structuring inheritances of racial slavery and the plantation system in this founding statement of mid-twentieth-century media theory, as well as its debt to the literary and intellectual movement of the Southern Agrarians, I consider how the racializing figure of ‘Man’ conserved by the nascent field of media studies was contemporaneously brought to crisis by black (and) anticolonial freedom struggles. Arguing for the need to reread the career of western media theory through its political vocation in attempting to manage this crisis, the article concludes by turning briefly to a revisionary account of media and exteriority also circulated in 1964: the revolutionary intellectual James Boggs’s ‘The Negro and Cybernation’. Boggs’s writings, which situate emergent forms of computing and cybernation within a longer materialist genealogy of race, capitalism and technology, offer both a proleptic critique of the early disciplinary formation of media theory and a divergent set of coordinates for approaching media technology on the terrain of black political struggle.

This study presents a novel analysis of social network sites as a staged performance of interpersonal ties in front of a third party, here defined as public intimacy. This concept moves away from the current focus on the presentation of self in social media to the performance of relationships. Users of social media are compared to an interactive audience in a round theater. As inner circle network members display their exclusive ties in front of ther users they may also tease them into joining the conversation. Building on studies of Simmelian ties, interactive exchange, and phatic communication the study presents six characteristics of public intimacy along with brief examples drawn from users’ experiences on Facebook and Twitter. It is concluded that by mediating the shift from dyad to triad and from triad to mass community social media do not necessarily entail a reduction in intimacy but rather a concretization of social relations. The recursive relationship between interpersonal ties and mass solidarity is sustained and reaffirmed thanks to triadic interactions of public intimacy.

This study took place in Habana, Cuba over approximately 1 year, wherein the researcher collaborated with Reggaeton artists. While scholarship in multimodality has explored its potentials for literacy pedagogy, developing new literacies, and expanding identity possibilities, less research has focused on the creation of the spaces, tools, and resources required for composing multimodal products and on the liberatory dimensions of multimodality. This study highlights the backstories of these production processes, including the innovative use(s) of spaces and tools, the resources leveraged in order to construct and distribute multimodal media, and the ways artists made meaning together. The findings elucidate the ways the artists leveraged their ingenuity, collaboratively developed digital literacy practices, and produced multimodal texts to create new possibilities.

This article explores the relationship between connective and collective group identity through the example of “You Won’t Walk Alone,” a social media platform of solidarity for women suffering from the pressures of Islamic dress code in Turkey. While Turkey has a long history of conservative women’s initiatives against secular institutional code and of secular women against Islamic and misogynist social reactions, the social media platform You Won’t Walk Alone (Yalnız Yürümeyeceksin) illustrates a striking self-reflexivity of women mobilizing against their very own conservative communities. The research is based on multimodal content analysis of the posts including both images and texts in order to grasp to what extent social media offers a genuine public space for anonymous participants of the online platform as opposed to digitally networked movements which primarily reflect personalized agency. We analyze how connective and collective group identity can be correlated in this case in which online participants build solidarity by sharing content anonymously. Hence, this article questions the ways in which activist design of communication affects and shapes activism through this case study.

The subject of this study is media discourse on the Covid-19 pandemic in the Republic of Serbia. The study seeks to contribute to the understanding of the communication aspects of the current public health crisis within the transitional (hybrid) regime of Serbia. One of the paper’s objectives is to explore how Serbian media frame the discourse on the Covid-19 pandemic. The second objective is to examine whether journalists produce investigative and analytical contents on this pressing topic independently or just mediate to the public patterns created by the public health crisis management. By applying language analysis and intertextual analysis methods to a sample of 230 media texts, we point to the incoherence of media discourse on the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as to the lack of media independence in an environment of the permanent political campaign.

This study focuses on the BTS sensation, examining how three entities – digital networks, the K-pop industry, and fandom – have engaged in the production of an alternative global culture. Based on a multimodal critical discourse analysis of this rising cultural act, the current study pays attention to the dialectical interaction of digital transformation and cultural subjectivization in the contemporary music ecosystem. By integrating Manuel Castells’ notion of the network society into Stuart Hall’s articulation of cultural resistance, I consider BTS as a counter-hegemonic cultural formation from the periphery within the network society. I also argue that the BTS phenomenon has not only unveiled the ideological dimension of Korean cultural formations, but has also proposed new possibilities of non-western and peripheral societies and subjects in the globally networked cultural sphere.

With the rise of internet-based digital participatory cultures in India, social networks have become sites of volatile political discourse. As in other countries such as Brazil, China and Russia, this has led to the concurrent eruption of memes in India’s political landscape. This paper examines humorous politicized memes that are deployed to critique the Hindu right-wing in India. Through an examination of the formal nature of the meme and its connection to other visual forms such as the caricature, the visual joke and the graphic novel, I demonstrate how seemingly frivolous objects can hold potential for serious discourse. Employing a mix of visual and textual analysis, as well as a survey of virally circulating memes on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, I forward the concept of “memetic visuality”—a mode of imagining the world and the political community through a series of intertextual connections. I argue that social media communication has led to the eruption of a memetic mode of engaging with political culture in India, in which virally fueled parody and satire infuses seemingly non-memetic objects with meme-like characteristics. In doing so, memetic political discourse in India becomes part of a larger global language of online political discourse.

Research exploring digital intimate publics tends to consider social media platforms and dating/hook-up apps separately, implying distance between social and sexual communication practices. This paper troubles that delineation by drawing on LGBTQ+ young people’s accounts of negotiating safety and risk in dating/hook-up apps, in which friendship practices are significant. We explore four key themes of friendship that arose in our analysis of interviews and workshop discussions: sharing mutuals (or friends-in-common) with potential dates/hook-ups; making friends through apps; friends supporting app negotiations; and friends’ involvement in safety strategies. Through analysis of these data, we firstly argue that friendship is often both an outcome and an organising force of LGBTQ+ young people’s uses of dating/hook-up apps, and secondly, that media sites commonly defined as social (e.g. Instagram) or sexual (e.g. Tinder) are imbricated, with friendship contouring queer sex and dating practices.

The severe restrictions on public life in many countries following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic specifically affected Holocaust memorials and museums in all parts of the world, especially in Europe and in Israel. These measures posed a significant challenge, because contemporary forms of Holocaust commemoration are particularly based on the personal experience of presence at museums and historical sites. In contrast to the experience of distancing in face of the COVID-19 pandemic, establishing the presence of the past is thus a crucial element of contemporary Holocaust commemoration. This article explores the relationship between presence and absence, proximity and distance, guided commemoration and online engagement by critically analyzing digital activities of Holocaust memorials and museums in response to the pandemic. It argues that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Holocaust memorials began experimenting with the potential of social media for Holocaust memory. These experiments finally accepted the ongoing generational change and reacted to significant previous shifts in media consumption that were already affecting Holocaust commemoration.

Campaign song created as part of Mexico’s 2018 national election, usually circulated as part of music videos, produced citizenship as intimate, sentimental, affectionate and partial. In music videos published online, often anonymously, musicians sought to develop affective links with political candidates, negotiating intimate pathways for the construction of democratic subjectivities. Such videos pose difficult questions for the notion of the rational, information-driven voter. In this article I take a partly ethnographic, partly analytical approach to explore the rich set of affordances these videos present for the construction of political coalitions within emerging democracies. Exploring Brian Massumi’s theory of ‘ontopower’, I show how overlaps between threat and love served to heighten political indeterminacy, and demonstrate some of the perverse effects of this affective entanglement on the musicians involved. These videos, I highlight, raise questions about the power relations between political campaigns and audiovisual creativity in an increasingly rich media landscape.

This article explores the mechanisms used by the creators of Russian political talk shows to turn public discussion into a propaganda display. Analysis of three popular shows demonstrates that informational selectiveness combined with an illusion of equal representation among guests with opposing views are the main mechanisms in the process of pre-production. The roles chosen by talk show hosts demonstrate the various communicative techniques used to achieve propaganda objectives, while the major propagandistic tool is discrediting opponents of the Russian authorities. The reactions of the audience are framed to create a fictitious background of ‘nationwide support’ for the propaganda discourse.

Social movement-media/public interaction has been largely examined from the lens of “asymmetric dependency” in which both movements’ representation and self-understanding are mainly shaped by their media and public opinion environment. The introduction of digital technologies, however, has diversified this discursive environment and seemed to reverse the uneven dynamics. Using a case study of a protest campaign organized by Chinese American immigrants, this study demonstrates a new pattern of movement-media/public dynamics that goes beyond the “asymmetric dependency” model or its obverse. In the aftermath of a Chinese American police officer who shot a black man to death, Chinese immigrants stood with him and deliberated on WeChat, a China-based digital platform engineered like a “walled garden.” The technolinguistic enclosure of the platform facilitated the development of a separate interpretative universe in the WeChatsphere vis-à-vis the one in the mediasphere. Later, even when immigrant protesters confronted the public in the Twittersphere, they continued talking past each other. By unpacking the decoupling processes between movements and the media/public, this study shifts the research focus from understanding their interaction to examining their disengagement, as well as the “filter bubble” effects that contribute to contemporary fragmentation and polarization in political and civic engagements.

This article examines the social-commercial activity of microcommerce ( wei shang), which has become popular on Weixin (WeChat), one of the most popular messenger applications/social app installed on smartphones in China. By drawing on the notion of platform affordances and data collected from mixed methods centered on the analysis of primary and secondary data, we contend that microcommerce embodies Weixin’s structural (political economy) and cultural (social lives and norms) qualities in China. While microcommerce might have emerged from Weixin’s ecosystem, which is defined by corporate interest and state’s regulatory power, the practice of microcommerce is embedded within the traditional Chinese notion of shuren guanxi (familiar, non-stranger social relational) networks. This article puts forward a sociomaterial approach as a possible conceptual complement to the existing political economy approach of platform studies to call for greater attention to the intersection and interaction between the structural arrangements and social conditions of platform media.

LGBTQ representation has dramatically increased on US television over the past two decades. While many media scholars highlight the importance of LGBTQ characters moving from television’s margins to the mainstream, others critique this increase in visibility. They argue that media mainstreaming promotes neoliberalism through post-gay or post-queer sensibilities. This article moves beyond quantitative studies of LGBTQ representation to map and interrogate neoliberal discourses within narrative television produced in the United States. It examines how a specific set of post-gay politics characterized by themes of ‘tolerance, acceptance and genuine love’ mask a troubling politics of normalization. This article demonstrates how these ideas have been reproduced in adult gay and lesbian characters on mainstream US television series, and subsequently negotiated by the gender and sexually diverse youth of contemporary teen television. Taking MTV’s Faking It as a primary case study, this article demonstrates how youth-oriented media both embrace and critique the neoliberal ideology of the post-gay era.

This essay discusses the impact of defining English as the lingua franca in academia, taking it as an additional barrier to achieving more equitable participation and a diversity of perspectives in scientific publications in the field of communication studies. Two aspects are particularly problematised. The first is the characterisation of a so-called research that travels, contrasting the ideal model of a strategic definition on what materials should be published on which platform with a scoring and evaluation system that prevents or limits intelligence in these choices. The second aspect is the definition of an acceptable level of eloquence for international circulation, in which the domestication of language leads to an epistemological domination. The debate is illustrated with a series of data regarding the (in)visibility of Latin American scientific production in international academic publications. Such barriers are, finally, presented as mechanisms of power that feed the so-called status of #CommunicationSoWhiteAndRich. The reflection suggests that the search for scientific rigour should not be confused with the rigidity of forms, valuing the construction of solidarity networks that contribute to the decolonisation of scientific thought.

This commentary describes a case from India that illuminates challenges associated with contentious political engagement among activists on social media. It specifically highlights what is posited as a disjuncture between two distinct modes of interpretation of political legitimacy in the domain of gender justice activism, and analyses how the delegitimisation of activists’ legacy can polarise political engagement on social media. It highlights how an absence of ethical engagement can lead to a distortion of activists’ legacies of actual participation in civil and political society, and asks how this distortion may inflect public conception of the ethics of social media-driven activism. It builds on work analysing the emancipatory potential (and pitfalls) of political engagement on social media.

Facebook facilitates more extensive dialogue between citizens and politicians. However, communicating via Facebook has also put pressure on political actors to administrate and moderate online debates in order to deal with uncivil comments. Based on a platform analysis of Facebook’s comment moderation functions and interviews with eight political parties’ communication advisors, this study explored how political actors conduct comment moderation. The findings indicate that these actors acknowledge being responsible for moderating debates. Since turning off the comment section is impossible in Facebook, moderators can choose to delete or hide comments, and these arbiters tend to use the latter in order to avoid an escalation of conflicts. The hide function makes comments invisible to participants in the comment section, but the hidden texts remain visible to those who made the comment and their network. Thus, the users are unaware of being moderated. In this paper, we argue that hiding problematic speech without the users’ awareness has serious ramifications for public debates, and we examine the ethical challenges associated with the lack of transparency in comment sections and the way moderation is conducted in Facebook.

This study examines peace journalism as manifested toward the Israeli Arab minority in a time of seven security crises from 1996 to 2014 in the Israeli Hebrew sports media. Studies of peace journalism in periods of crises focus mainly on political news and find that the media largely conform to alienation practices. This study argues that sports media encourage a ‘conditional integration’ of all actors that participate in the sport. The sports media have three strategies: acknowledging a notion of ‘normalcy’ in which Arabs encourage the maintenance of the sports season at the national and international levels, curtailing alienation practices such as condemning racism and objection to boycott of Arab teams, and encouraging integration that allows the Israeli-Arabs to have a unique voice, as long as they do not openly adopt anti-Israel political stances such as making pro-Hamas or Hezbollah statements. Therefore, sports sections in the news can deepen our understanding of the diverse role of media in times of security crises.

The idea of a public sphere has long been central to discussion of political communication. Its present condition is the topic of this essay. Debate about the public sphere has been shaped by the boundary-policing of competing political systems and ideologies. Current discussion reflects the accelerating transition from the mass media era to the ramifying entrenchment of the internet age. It has also been influenced by the vogue for analysing populism. The present transitional phase, whose outcome remains unclear, is best described as an unstable ‘post-public sphere’. This instability is not unusual as, over time, conceptions of the public sphere’s underpinnings and scope have continually shifted. Latterly, states’ responses to thedevelopment of the internet have given rise to a new shift of focus, a ‘regulatory turn’. This is likely to influence the future shape of the public sphere.

Folk economics has become increasingly influential in today’s era, where laypeople can (inter)actively deconstruct official discourse and form their truth in social media. This article examines the formation and popularization of folk economics by investigating the localized China collapse theory known as zhibao in one of the most influential online forums in Hong Kong. By analyzing the popularization of zhibao as citizen curation – the subjective and non-professional collection, assessment, and criticism of information by participants in online discussions for the benefit of the group – this article questions the dichotomy between folk economics and mainstream economics, arguing that laypeople may selectively appropriate conventional economics into their discourse. Furthermore, by investigating the citizen curation of zhibao diachronically, this article suggests that online discussion participants’ attention to the credibility of the news sources may be negatively related to the credibility of the discourse they are curating.

The academic discourse on the West and the East is not new, and it has been commonly believed that non-Western countries must learn from the West in order to develop their own societies. Here, comprehending the notion of the West is considered significant, as it offers a model of comparison. While it is not necessary for the perspectives and process to be radical, it should be convincing to grasp Asia as a formation of a changeable force to the West. Of course, media scholars have to avoid limited perspectives emphasizing only intra-Asian dialogues; instead they must analyze Asian perspectives in the globalization context. What non-Western scholars must contemplate are not only paradigms that are unique to Asian society but also general trends and norms that apply to the globe so that they can identify new trends and directions, which provide fundamentals to advance new theories and norms in global media studies. This certainly contributes to a broadening of media theory and comprehension in a way that takes account of the practices of non-Western countries outside the Anglo-American sphere.

Despite certain structural limitations, Indymedia provided three vital functions for movement-based media coverage: (1) it established a secure website that shielded its users’ identities when navigating it or producing content, (2) its platform united sympathetic reporting on local and global struggles that fueled an imaginary of worldwide struggle, and (3) it established behind-the-scenes momentum in engaging new participants in independent media that continues to this day.

This article examines Twitter use by audiences of the popular South African television show, Our Perfect Wedding. We argue that the show’s Twitter feed provides an extension of South Africa’s ‘Black Twitter’ facilitating a space for recognition and group identity for Black South African television viewers. Such a space is significant since Black audiences have been neglected in the short history of South African television broadcasting. On Our Perfect Wedding, broadcast on a satellite television service DStv to paying subscribers, questions of class and race are salient for an audience group prized as an emerging market of Black middle-class viewers. Through qualitative analysis of a sample of tweets featuring the hashtag, #OPWMzansi ( Our Perfect Wedding South Africa), we demonstrate how Twitter is used for the performance and negotiation of class and race for the audience. The comedy of the show’s Twitter commentary is largely dependent upon judgements around class, taste and language. While the Twitter feed features creative user contributions, the #OPWMzansi network reveals that much of the communication is prompted and networked back to the official programme Twitter site, demonstrating the centrality of the traditional television broadcaster to Twitter interactions with the text.

The year 2019 marked the 20th anniversary of Indymedia. The last two decades have seen revolutionary moments in the field of alternative media, both from a historical and technological dimension. Indymedia has been one of the key players in this landscape, and reflecting on its experience 20 years later, is useful to try and unpack the factors that have shaped its journey.

This article briefly summarizes the general trajectory of IMCs over the past 20 years since their emergence in 1999. Despite their decline since the mid-2000s, this article also makes a case for their continued relevance for radical cultural activism.

The political context for practicing free and independent journalism has always been challenging in Turkey and ever more so after the failed coup d’état of 2016. This article examines and analyzes the changes brought about by this failed coup d’état in terms of their civil, legal, and political significance for news journalism and news journalists. More specifically and based on two sets of semi-structured interviews with Turkish editors and senior journalists supported by an analysis of gray literature, we argue that between 2013 and 2018 Turkey has moved from a pre-coup repression of news journalism (2013–2016) to a post-coup oppression of news journalism (2016–2018). The former was characterized by unsystematic attacks on news journalism conducted with impunity leading to a climate of fear that made self-censorship inescapable. In contrast, the latter relied on constitutional changes and the use of law to systematically compromise the civil institution of news journalism and to cast news journalists as political enemies of the Turkish state resulting in what can be likened to a loss of their citizenship. We further argue that the development from the repression to oppression of news journalism has been ‘authorized’ and ‘legalized’ by the constitutional changes that came into force on 9 July 2018.

This article explores the complexity of minority creative workers in the media industry. It challenges the common notion in the literature that minority creative workers are fully submissive to the dominant power structure and examines whether such workers could still be conceived as active agents by resisting submission and marginalization even when they cannot influence their own representation in hegemonic media texts. To answer this question, it explores the performances of minority creative workers in a hegemonic cultural industry. To determine whether one can speak of subaltern agency and, if possible, examine how it manifests itself in reality, it addresses the daily performances of Palestinian creative workers during the production of the second season of the Israeli television series, Fauda. Observations conducted during production demonstrate that since in such contexts minority creative workers cannot avoid being projected in negative roles in the media text, they adopt creative subversive practices of passing and transgressive mimicry, resisting full compliance with the production, without endangering their own position. By doing so, the article contributes not only to the emerging field of creative entrepreneurship in cultural production, but also enables determination of common practices of creative subversion in the cultural industries.

The purpose of this issue of Media Culture and Society is to discuss the possible role of social media in the struggle for democracy, against authoritarianism, and over hidden power structures. The articles included in this volume are meant to offer empirical interventions to beliefs, some of them unproven, on whether the emergence of new media technologies has driven Africa towards democratic change. Papers in this Special Issue cover a wide variety of African countries delving deep into comparative studies of participatory citizens’ media on the continent. This introduction is an attempt to offer an explanation on African democratisation and authoritarianism before conceptualising the role of social media in political processes with the backing of current case study dispatches in Africa, demonstrating the dilemmas of digital disparities in promoting or denting democratisation in Africa.

The article discusses the role of social media in relation to the traditional journalistic sphere in Uganda. Through an analysis of how journalists in three Ugandan newspapers use social media in their daily work, the article discusses how social media affect conventional sourcing practices, reportage and professional norms. The article is particularly interested in how Facebook and Twitter serve as alternative channels through which sources with less access to traditional means of communication get their message(s) across to journalists. The findings are discussed in light of the present development of social media legislation in Uganda. The discussions feed into a larger reflection on social media’s potential to create avenues of access in a semi-democratic setting where attempts to curtail media freedom and freedom of expression are frequent. This study was supported with funding from the Norhed Project UGA 13-0015, Bridging Gaps Building Futures for the research and authorship of this article.

The potential for the Internet to play a role in political life, and the extension of the public sphere, has been widely documented. More specifically, social media has emerged as an arena of political communication, widely used by political parties for campaigning, and also by citizens to choreograph various forms of protest. In the African context, the growth of the mobile Internet has resulted in the rise of social media platforms, most notably Facebook and Twitter. These social networking sites are used for a range of purposes, from personal connectivity, to various citizenship practices, including political debate and activism. It has subsequently been argued that the Internet has contributed to the formation of alternate public spheres, in which citizenship can be practiced in different ways. This article explores the use of Facebook for political discussion in Africa, focusing on Zimbabwe and Kenya, two countries at the forefront of developments with regard to Internet connectivity and digital activism. We explore Facebook as a communicative platform for political discourse, through an analysis of the Facebook pages of two prominent politicians. The article uses Netvizz, a data collection and extraction tool, to extract quantitative data from Facebook pages, and conducts a thematic qualitative content analysis of posts.

Social media commonly function as alternative channels for debate in controlled media societies, often supported by the digital diaspora. This study takes a closer look at Ethiopia, where communication traditionally has been controlled by the government. The situation was particularly tense between 2016 and 2017, when a state of emergency act was declared following anti-government protests. The study scrutinizes three of the most popular online channels during the unrest (Ethiopian DJ, Mereja.com and Zehabesha), all of which used Facebook as their primary means of communication. The findings show that the stories posted by the sites were overwhelmingly political, with a particular focus on ethnic issues. Reader reactions show a slightly different pattern, concentrating less on politics and more on society and culture. This could be an expression of felt anxiety among the public due to the tense political situation. Interestingly, when users did comment on ethnic issues, they were not in agreement, but debated the issues intensely and fiercely. A diversity of views was represented. The study concludes that an echo chamber effect was not detected. For lack of appropriate channels for public discussion in the mainstream media, Facebook accommodated a space for political exchange during the state of emergency.