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How prisoners serve as media laborers, while the prison serves as a testing ground for new media technologies. Prisons are not typically known for cutting-edge media technologies. Yet from photography in the nineteenth century to AI-enhanced tracking cameras today, there is a long history of prisons being used as a testing ground for technologies that are later adopted by the general public. If we recognize the prison as a central site for the development of media technologies, how might that change our understanding of both media systems and carceral systems? Prison Media foregrounds the ways in which the prison is a model space for the control and transmission of information, a place where media is produced, and a medium in its own right. Examining the relationship between media and prison architecture, as surveillance and communication technologies are literally built into the facilities, this study also considers the ways in which prisoners themselves often do hard labor as media workers—labor that contributes in direct and indirect ways to the latest technologies developed and sold by multinational corporations like Amazon. There is a fine line between ankle monitors and Fitbits, and Prison Media helps us make sense of today's carceral society.

What does media welfare mean from a normative perspective? The notion of media welfare and “the media welfare state” has mainly been used descriptively, to depict the particular way in which the media are organized in the Nordic welfare states. In this article, we explore media welfare from a normative perspective. Our intention is to open up a discussion about the normative and political implications of the notion of media welfare and to bring the concept into the contemporary discussion on normative perspectives regarding the media.

This article explores the question of trust in news and information about the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus of the article is on trust in radio news and the data are collected in Sweden during spring 2020. Two questions are asked: (1) to what extent do people in Sweden express trust in the radio as a medium, and radio news and information as a form of content? (2) How do people themselves explain and discuss their trust in the radio as a medium and in radio news and information? The article draws on both survey data and qualitative interviews in answering these questions. The results show that radio, together with television, is the most trusted medium in the population but that there are differences in the extent of trust within the population that are related to age, economic status and political affiliation. The qualitative interviews showed that the specificities of how radio is organized and the form and mode of expression of radio news can help explain the high trust in the radio medium during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article engages with the history of Swedish prison papers, situating them as alternative media within the broader media landscape shaped by the emergence and dismantling of the welfare state. The article not only aims to give a descriptive account of the history of Swedish prison papers but also builds and further develops theorizations of alternative media by constructing them not in opposition to established media but as in dialogue and exchange with them. As we show, prison papers have had repercussions for mainstream discourses beyond catering to niche audiences. Therefore, we suggest that alternative media should be understood as part of the broader media landscape rather than being situated outside of it. This also has implications for how we conceptualize newly emerging alternative media, also called alt-media, that are not progressive but populist and right-wing oriented, as well as supportive of conspiracy theories.

This article explores the ways in which prisons are imagined as sites of technology development. By attending to expos that showcase prison technologies and constitute “live theatres of technology” (L. Cornfeld, 2018), we carve out ambivalent sociotechnical imaginaries of technological backwardness that are combined with the idea of radical technological innovation to reform the justice system. In doing so, we highlight the prison as one site of technology development and actors at technology trade shows catering to the prison and security sector as platforms for technological mediators that range from corporate prison tech companies to educators as well as representatives of the criminal justice system. The expos emerge as sites where technological development is negotiated through performative sociotechnical imaginaries of prison tech.

Previous research has neglected media audiences’ and citizens’ opinions on how the media should be organized, how they should function in society and what individual, corporate and state responsibilities should be in regard to these questions. In an attempt to understand the relationship between citizens’ broader political attitudes and their attitudes on media-related politics and responsibilities, this study uses a survey (n = 2003) of the adult Swedish population to investigate the distribution of a range of media political attitudes in the contemporary space of political positions. The results reveal overlaps between the space of media political attitudes and the broader political space, where support for a Nordic ‘media welfare state’ corresponds to leftist and GAL-oriented values, while TAN-oriented and right-wing attitudes link to scepticism towards state interventionism in the media landscape. A small but highly opinionated right-wing and TAN-oriented segment displays laissez-faire views on media policy that are reflected in current policy propositions from right-wing political parties in parliament.

During the last decades the Nordic media model has been challenged by neoliberal policy and welfare retrenchment. This study asks about the extent to which the values, functions and institutions of the “media welfare state” are supported by the adult Swedish citizenry, despite political mobilization against it. Drawing on a national survey ( n = 2003) this study shows that the media welfare state is generally well-supported by the population. Using exploratory statistical analysis, we identify a media welfare state of mind. While widespread in the population, this attitudinal constellation is more common in older segments of the population, in the working-class, and by those who frequently use and trust public service media. The main conclusion is that support for the media welfare state primarily can be explained by political attitudes, where left-leaning and GAL-oriented individuals are more positive than people holding right-wing and TAN-attitudes.

Swedish community radio started in 1979 and was the first type of broadcast to be organised outside of the public service monopoly that had been in operation since 1924. This article unveils some of the aspects of the history of Swedish community radio. Through analysis of first-hand sources from the period between 1979 and 1985, the article sheds new light on the history of Swedish community radio by using the archives from the parliamentary committee setting up community radio, public inquiries, parliamentary minutes and other sources of political discourse The analysis shows that religious interests, and especially the free churches and the Pentecostal movement, played an important role for establishing community radio. The connections between the religious field and the political field in Sweden were manifold and strong in relation to the development of community broadcasting, which also had a marked effect on how the reform was designed and how it played out. During the early years of community radio, churches dominated the broadcasts, in some cities being responsible for as much as 100% of the content produced. Hence, this article sheds light on a yet untold story of Swedish media history and shows how the interests of religious organisations can be a driving force in the development of media policy and a driver of media change. It also shows that the community broadcasting reform was a catalyst within Swedish Christianity for starting to work systematically with technologies and issues related to the developing media saturated society.

Social class is one of the most enduring concepts in the social sciences and is associated with many of the key themes and topics across multiple disciplines. Thus, there are many uses to which the concept of social class in media and communication can be put. The ambition of this special issue is to offer a glimpse into the heterogeneity of its uses in the field. While attuned differently in relation to the various approaches and definitions of class, the eight contributions to this special issue collectively focus on the relationship between media and class. One of the ambitions of this special issue is to report on some of the current Nordic scholarship in this growing field of research and to highlight the particularities of the relationship between class, inequality and media in this region. While the special issue also includes contributions from other regions, the main focus is on social class in the Nordic countries. This introductory article begins with a discussion on the concept of social class and its analytical relevance in the contemporary social landscape. We detail the relationship between media and class as manifested in a growing body of research, followed by a brief presentation of the individual contributions to this special issue. Finally, we identify the road ahead and potential research areas for scholars of media and communication concerned about class and social inequality in the twenty-first century.

The concept of the Media Welfare State describes Nordic specificity in how media are organised and how they serve a lively and inclusive democracy. This article engages in a dialogue in regards to the contention that this media system has persisted in the midst of rapid social change. We synthesise previous research and documented changes in media policy in Sweden, covering the last three decades, to show the ways in which the Swedish media system has undergone significant transformations. Media use is becoming more polarised and connected to social class. The state is retreating from its involvement in media policy; consequently, the press and public service media are facing unprecedented challenges. Finally, the "consensual" relation between media companies and the state, which is said to be typical for the media welfare state, no longer characterises the media market. While some of the features of the media welfare state system remain in Sweden, the current media system is best characterised as a neoliberal media welfare state. The article discusses tensions and conflicts in the existing model and possible future developments.

This chapter explores the production of representations of classed identities and of the consequences of social inequalities on Reality Television. Although misrepresentations and shaming of working-class persons on Reality Television have been analysed in previous research, there is a lack of attempts at trying to understand and explain the existence of these representations within the genre, especially through research on the production of Reality Television. This chapter employs a socio-cognitive perspective on media production through which we seek to explain how the socially situated perspective of media producers is translated into the products that come out of media institutions.

What does digital piecework have in common with laboring in the warehouse of a large online shopping platform? How is data cleaning related to digitization work and AI training in prisons? This panel suggests bringing these diverse ways of laboring in the digital economies together by considering these practices as infrastructural labor that takes the shape of shadow work (Illich, 1981) and ghost labor (Gray & Suri, 2019). Work and labor in modern, capitalist society imply power, authority and possibility for resistance, and these dimensions are crucial for understanding why and how infrastructures are realized and how they work. Infrastructure labor is ambiguous. It is both visible and invisible depending on the specific tasks and their inherent power relations (Leigh Star & Strauss, 1999). It includes both manual and cognitive labor. It is geared towards innovation as well as repair, maintenance and servitude. The panel aims to paint the contours of infrastructural labor at the margins of digital economies pointing towards forms of alienation and resistance that have for long been part of labor relations, but that are renegotiated in the context of emerging technologies within digital economies that need human labor to be sustained and further innovated.

The question of voice is a central and timeless political issue. Who gets to speak? Who is silenced? Who is listening? One of the main arenas for voice in modern, advanced democracies is the media. Media infrastructures, technologies, institutions and organizations are a precondition for political voice in large-scale societies, but are also an important factor in distributing the possibilities for voice among different groups and sectors of the population. In this article, we take on the question of voice in relation to social class and aim to analyse how the medium of television gives voice to people from different social classes. This study operationalizes the theoretical notion of voice by asking the following questions: who has the opportunity to appear and speak on television, to whom do they speak and under what circumstances does this communication occur? Based on a content analysis of television in Sweden, the results from this study show that voice is distributed in a highly unequal manner. It also shows that the relations enacted by television appearances conform to the social hierarchy. Whereas people from the ruling class frequently speak to people from the working and middle classes, they are rarely spoken to by members of a class that is positioned below their own. Television thus constructs a social hierarchy of voice and authority that reproduces and legitimizes already existing social hierarchies.

This paper presents an analysis of how social class is constructed as a moral category on Swedish mainstream television. Practices of categorisation by the media is an important area of study since these practices are part of a process of co-construction of social categories that are offered to media users as cognitive tools and frames for navigating the social landscape. Based on a content analysis of television in Sweden, we show that the medium of television categorises people appearing on television along the social divisions of class and constructs class as a moral category, with a lower moral value assigned to the working class in comparison to the middle and upper class.

In this article, we address the history of Nordic media research through a case study of the formation of media research in Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s and the role that The Board for Psychological Defence played in the formation of Swedish academic media research during the Cold War era. Based on archival research, we find that the impact of the psychological defence on Swedish media research was mainly concentrated to one Swedish university, and that the impact on the theoretical and methodological development of the discipline has been rather limited. This distinguishes the Swedish case from what has been argued in historical research on the development of media and communication research in the US.

As a leading scholar of the social conditions of cultural production, Pierre Bourdieu had little to say about large-scale media production. This study, however, brings the theoretical-empirical program that underpins studies of fields of cultural production within the Bourdieusian tradition to bear upon the Swedish field of television production. Two research questions are posed. First, what is the structure of the field of television production—what are the main hierarchies that divide agents in the field? Second, how do positions in the field correspond to agents’ ways of orienting themselves—how are various position-takings distributed in the field? These questions are answered with a multiple correspondence analysis with agents in the Swedish field of television production (n = 378). The field of television production is structured, first, along an incumbent-challenger axis; and second, according to an axis separating public service broadcasters and journalists rich on cultural capital from commercial broadcasters involved in drama and entertainment production. These dynamics, along with the position-takings assumed by agents in the field, are discussed.

The aim of this chapter is to explore emerging temporalities linked to datafication through the lens of a specific place: the smart prison. Datafication and the consequent regimes of anticipation, prediction and pre-emption are increasingly discussed from a critical perspective in terms of discriminatory bias, processes of exclusion and as reinforcing inequality. However, there is currently little knowledge and research about how forms of anticipation, prediction and pre-emption are applied in the prison context. The chapter explores this connection by looking into current debates on establishing smart prisons. It concludes with the argument that rather than understanding prisons as removed and secluded from society, they are magnifying glasses for media-related social change and are crucial for exploring emerging-mediated temporalities.

Ghettos and gated communities in the social landscape of television : Representations of class in 1982 and 2015

Community radio broadcasts fill the air in countries around the world, and in many places, not least in the so-called developing countries, it has played a significant role in development and in social- , as well as media, change. Southern Asia, however, has long lacked community radio, even though some stumbling attempts have been made in, for example Nepal, Indonesia and most recently in Bangladesh, just to mention a few. The same goes for India, which did not have community radio until November 2006 when the Community Radio Policy was finally approved by the union cabinet. In the book Other Voices. The Struggle for Community Radio in India, authors Vinod Pavarala and Kanchan K. Malik give an account of the road towards this goal, and try to establish ”good workable models” (p. 44) for the continuing work of organizing, funding, regulating and providing content for the community radio broadcasts in India. Through four case studies of community radio projects the book also seeks to investigate the possibility of radio helping to establish counter public spheres and the potential of these counterpublics to expand ”the discursive space and facilitate collective action that could prove emancipatory” (p. 34).

In music radio broadcasting, radio personalities (presenters, hosts, DJs) have traditionally been of critical importance to programming success. In this article, I seek to add to the understanding of contemporary developments within radio, especially music radio, through focusing on the presenter from a political economy perspective. How do new business models and technologies affect the performances and forms of talk developed by presenters in contemporary radio? What new roles are assigned to presenters in commercial music radio? How are work practices and labor relations affected? The article shows how media convergence has impacted the work of radio personalities in traditional broadcasting.

The cultural significance of reality television is based on its claim to represent social reality. On the level of genre, we might argue that reality television constructs a modern day panorama of the social world and its inhabitants and that it thus makes populations appear. This article presents a class analysis of the population of reality television in which 1 year of television programming and over 1000 participants have been analysed. The purpose of this analysis is to deepen our understanding of the cultural and ideological dimensions of reality television as a genre, and to give a more detailed picture of the imaginaries of class in this form of television. The results bring new knowledge about the reality television genre and modify or revise assumptions from previous studies. Most importantly, we show that upper-class people and people belonging to the social elite are strongly over-represented in the genre and appear much more commonly in reality television than in other genres. This result opens up a re-evaluation of the cultural and ideological dimensions of the reality television genre.

Attack of the clones? Exporting Swedish format radio to Estonia and Latvia Th e purpose of this article is to contribute to a better understanding of the internatio- nalization of the media landscapes around the Baltic Sea, and to analyse how the inter- national dissemination of format radio is organized. Th e article presents results from a study of how radio formats, as modes of production and cultural forms, move between cultural and national contexts. More precisely, the study addresses the organizational and institutional frameworks that have been constructed by the media company Modern Times Group (MTG) in setting up commercial music radio in the Baltic states. Th e article shows that neither »format-trade» nor »network» - models or metaphors previously used to analyse these processes - can explain the case fully. Instead, the article suggests that thinking in terms of »franchising» can further our understanding of how production formats migrate between places. Th e article begins with a discussion of what franchising within this sector of the media would imply, comparing this notion with the concepts of »formats» and »networks», and analyses how franchising functions in practice. Finally, the article points to some of the potential confl icts involved in the franchising of com- mercial format radio.

This article explores the reconfigurations of the control and monitoring of the audience that take place in concert with the digitalization that characterize contemporary radio broadcasting. Three ...

A recent essay in the German weekly Spiegel proclaimed the end of a distinct East German identity (Berg, 2013), the end of Ossi. However, online and offline sites for commemorating cultural artefacts from the former GDR are flourishing. One example is the still-growing Facebook page DT64 – Das Jugendradio der DDR dedicated to a former youth radio station that disappeared from the re-unified German media landscape already in the early 1990s. We consider the Facebook page not so much an example of persistent Ostalgia — that is, nostalgia for the East (Gallinat, 2006; Godeanu-Kenworthy, 2011), but an illustration of how media memories are performed in our digital age, entangling individual and collective memories. In that sense, we are interested in the kind of community of remembrance that is afforded by the Facebook page and the media practices it fosters.

[Review of] Gilfillan, Daniel: Pieces of Sound : German experimental radio, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press 2009 ISBN: 978081664771, eISBN: 9780816667840

The aim of this article is to report, summarize and spread the results of a largescale European research project funded by EBU Radio in 2011 to map best practices in social media and European public radio, focusing on the way successful public service radio formats have incorporated social media in their production flow. The programmes have been selected for one of the following reasons: programmes that are audience leaders in their country, use innovative radio language or are youthoriented productions. The survey has been carried out by a team of ten European researchers from seven countries on a sample of 28 public radio programmes analysed for two months between January and February 2011. The research team attempted to answer the empirical question: ‘How social media are used by public service?’. Are there some common threads and shared practices among successful programmes in different countries? The team adopted an empirical approach based on social media content analysis and interviews with radio producers. This article will present the main results of this empirical research project. It will conclude with practical guidelines for public radio production and social media innovation.

People are spending increasingly more time on social media platforms, with Facebook being the biggest and most successful. Historically, media technologies have for long been considered of importance for the structuration and the experience of time in general. In this article, we investigate the technological affordances of Facebook for the temporal experiences of its users. Relying on a case study of a Facebook page dedicated to media memories, we link user experiences to technological and institutional affordances. By doing so, we seek to answer the question of how a business model and an infrastructure that largely build on immediacy and newness are experienced and negotiated by users that engage in a multiplicity of durations and time layers in their everyday lives. Drawing on a platform analysis, in-depth interviews and a survey among the users of the page “DT64—Das Jugendradio der DDR,” we develop the concept of “social media time” while considering notions of the archive, flow, and narrative, which contribute to shedding light on how specific media technologies afford specific temporalities. We conclude by discussing the consequences for the users and society at large.

The information society, as an ideological formation, has previously been identified as celebrating speed and ephemerality: overcoming of boundaries, destabilization of identities and the dissapear ...

[Book Review:] Keith Sommerville. Radio Propaganda and the Broadcasting of Hatred: Historical Development and Definitions