Blogs

Hamburg.
The final speaker in this ECREA 2010 panel is Angela Phillips, who highlights the disappearance of local news; this is a significant challenge to democracy, as it makes it more difficult for citizens to participate in democratic processes in an informed fashion. She highlights hyperlocal blogs as a potential solution here, but these sites are in the main run by enthusiasts without any financial base, and this means that their quality and reach remain limited.

Finding hyperlocal news information is difficult: we don’t know what we need to know; there is no obvious equivalent to a front page of newspaper poster; there is no obvious equivalent to a news bulletin; and there are homogenising effects of online search. So, the hyperlocal sites which do exist could be seen as speaking only to a small elite of the already converted.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Tamara Witschge, who examines the debates around the future of news. New media technologies are coupled with an idea of progress, and are sometimes mythologised as the answer to dwindling audience figures for journalism; this needs to be critically examined. There is very little space for working journalists to challenge how technology is implemented, which is driven often by technological determinism.

Technological determinism is rife in journalists’ understanding of current changes, in fact; technology is seen as the only way out of the current crisis in journalism. First, there is the perception of an imminent threat; second, audiences are going online, and journalists perceive a need to chase them; embracing new technologies is seen as the only way to do so. So, technology has been coupled directly with progress, and this is seen as the only salvation for the industry.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Des Freedman, who shifts our focus to Net neutrality; he suggests that debates over Net neutrality have become overly legalistic and abstract, and discussions of democracy have largely disappeared from them. The overall debate is now about openness: an open Internet. The principles which underlie arguments for an open Internet are now about consumer entitlements rather than democracy.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Natalie Fenton, who highlights four key themes in research on media and democracy during the online age. There is a need for deeper contextualisation of the available research, she sees, which will also help realise the full potential of what is happening here.

The first dimension is the idea that social media are communication-led rather than information-driven. Social media are used for a variety of reasons, with the sense of being connected, being part of a community, as a key driver. What’s missing from a lot of that is that some basic questions aren’t yet asked – especially, who is communicating what to whom. There often remains an elite which is guiding and even dominating the discussion – and of course the majority of users are using the Net for non-political uses.

This communicative nirvana is a means of self-expression organised around class affiliations and categories of taste, and therefore also reinforces pre-existing hierarchies. Our activities here leave footprints which are captured and analysed by various corporations; the participative turn does not necessarily entail a democratisation of activity.

Hamburg.
The second day of the ECREA 2010 conference is about to begin, and I’m starting the morning with a session on media and democracy in the digital age. We begin with James Curran, who begins by noting that there are three standard views of media and entertainment: a diversion from the serious nature of media coverage; a new category unrelated to politics; and crossover between public affairs coverage and entertainment. Each of these are myopic, for various reasons, and fail to understand the democratic functioning of entertainment.

Rather, entertainment allows us to debate the social and moral values that underpin society; to affirm identity; to examine contrasting interpretations of society; and to debate social norms. James names the 24 series as providing a cue to debating the balance between protecting society from terrorist threats and upholding individual liberties.

Hamburg.
The final speaker in this ECREA 2010 session is Sabine Baumann, whose interest is in online grassroots campaigning especially in the past US presidential election. There, of course, to win a candidate not only needs votes, but campaign funding in the first place, and the Obama campaign was exceptionally successful in attracting campaign contributions (collecting twice as much money as John McCain, mainly from small donations under US$200).

Spending figures are also interesting in this regard – McCain spent some US$4.6m on Internet campaigning, Obama spent a whopping US$24m. The Obama campaign Website also prominently displayed its donation and online merchandise functionality, of course; the online store was hugely successful, in fact (offering campaign clothing and art from notable designers and artists).

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Adam Shehata, whose interest is in the extent to which the news media influence gaps in political participation between socioeconomic groups, and how this can be analysed from a cross-national comparative perspective. The study examines nine European countries, and builds on an institutional framework that examines the joint impact of institutional mechanisms on participation.

There are two dimensions of influence here: institutional strength (the effects of news consumption on political participation, which is a necessary condition for influencing gaps), and the distinctiveness of the population base of the media (the socioeconomic characteristics of news consumers). The hypothesis here is that news media use has a positive effect on political participation, and that news media institutions with a low-education bias (targetting less educated audiences) will narrow gaps in participation between socioeconomic groups, while those with a high-education bias will widen such gaps. Further, news media use is likely to narrow gaps in voting participation than other, less widespread forms of political participation. These hypotheses were tested using European Social Survey data.

Hamburg.
The next speakers at ECREA 2010 is Emiliana de Blasio, whose focus is on Italian politics in the age of Web 2.0. Key themes here are access, interaction, and participation. Participation here means both participation in content production (co-deciding on content), in content producing organisations (co-deciding on production), and in technology producing organisations (co-deciding on technology).

Advantages of these shifts are greater interactivity, connectedness, participatory deliberation; disadvantages include a loss of control, and other negatives. The present research examined the information, fundraising, involvement, and mobilisation functions of Italian political Websites, to determine the interrelationships between social networking and political participation. This was done through questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and participant observation.

Hamburg.
The next session at ECREA 2010 starts with Elisabeth Stúr, whose interest is in the mediated debates in the lead-up to a referendum in a small community in Sweden about the extension of a hydroelectric power scheme. In this case, public opinion was communicated both through old and new media, as well as through public meetings, raising the question to what extent political debates moved to new media platforms.

Hamburg.
We move on to Elisabeth Klaus and Ricarda Drüeke as the next speakers at ECREA 2010; their focus is on media coverage of Austrian migration policy. This is a question of cultural citizenship, concerning cultural belonging and identity formation, and conducted through cultural and media participation. Cultural citizenship entails all those cultural practices that allow or prevent cultural participation.

Media present spaces of identity that offer certain positions to people according to their markers of identity. So, the question arises which identities are presented in the media. In the context of Austrian migration policy, citizenship is based on the citizenship of one’s parents as well as a number of other social and cultural conditions (examined in a citizenship test), but can also be granted to persons with extraordinary achievements in science, economy, arts, or sports without other conditions being met.