Blogs

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Lina Dencik, whose focus is on BBC World News and its implications for global civil society. Global civil society has grown out of a cosmopolitan notion that privileges public deliberation and involves non-state actors as key transformative agents, resisting and overcoming the attempt at imposing a state-based international order. In this context, the media have three main functions: providing the basis for global citizenship, global public deliberation, and global public opinion and governance. This follows a globalised liberal narrative of media.

But how does this correspond with actual developments in news narratives. BBC World News provides a useful case study here: it is one of a handful of major global news broadcasters, with a substantial audience reach and a mission to provide a global news perspective to a global audience (and yet, compared to CNN and Al Jazeera it has been underresearched so far).

Hamburg.
The first round of parallel sessions at ECREA 2010 is starting now (and there are some 15 sessions running in parallel, so what I’m covering will be far from representative for the whole conference). In the Communication and Democracy session, we start with Hartmut Wessler, whose interest is in a cross-national comparison of TV news in the US, Germany, and Russia – the focus in this is on how political discourse and debate is organised and orchestrated by the news media. This builds on the arena model of (mass-) mediated public debate.

The three countries were chosen as they represent different systems: parliamentarian multiparty democracy in Germany, presidential bipartisan democracy in the US, and defective, authoritarian democracy in Russia. Additionally, various types of TV channels (public service, commercial, state-owned; general interest or neutral or partisan news-only) were observed.

Hamburg.
The second keynote speaker this opening morning at ECREA 2010 is Paolo Mancini, whose focus is on cross-national comparative research. This builds on two main assumptions: that comparative research is crucial to media studies, but also that such comparative work is often delayed. The latter may apply more to some forms of comparative research than others.

Any observations about specific national systems ultimately build on comparisons with other countries (even if such comparisons are mainly implicit rather than explicit); most scientific statements in social science and related fields are relativistic: researchers who know only one country know none. Media studies have often been only implicitly comparative, however; there is a delay in the move towards cross-national comparative work, as acceptance of the comparative approach has taken some time to take hold.

Hamburg.
The main ECREA 2010 conference starts with a keynote by Kevin Robins, whose focus is on transcultural communication. In this, ‘transcultural’ is a very specific term, and different from transnational, international, intercultural, and other similar terms: this is not about an interaction of one supposedly distinct entity (for example, of one nation with another, or of ‘Europe’ and ‘Islam’) with another, but about a more complex traversing of boundaries that more closely describes the interchanges and crossovers that actually do happen. Recent research, especially in Europe, has been pushing especially in this direction, not least also to deal with the complexity of a changing Europe.

The key difficulty with this is that it has been connecting with agendas beyond communication research – sociological and anthropological migration research, for example. Crucial to such transcultural research in Europe is that Europe itself has changed – it has become larger and more complex, and is facing the challenges of global migration. Germany, for example, is currently experiencing some very acrimonious debates about migration, and especially some ugly right-wing islamophobic dog-whistling about migration from Muslim countries.

Bremen.
The final speaker at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference is Friedrich Krotz; he begins by noting our conservatism in using methods – once we have learnt them, we tend to utilise the same methods each time, regardless of the specific object of study.

Friedrich draws on the work of Clifford Geertz and Norbert Elias in approaching the study of culture and society; Elias’s main concepts are figuration (of various groups of actors – nations, families, groups of people in specific social situations) and habitus. It is not enough to simply measure cultural exchanges, of course, but we must aim to understand their meaning; this is complicated also by the fact that researchers themselves are embedded in their own cultures, of course.

Bremen.
The next speaker at the ECREA 2010 pre-conference ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ is John Downey, whose view is that comparative media methods are not as well developed as those in the social sciences. We might be able to learn from these other fields.

Comparative media analysis has made little progress in recent time in terms of explaining media phenomena; there is a danger of ethnocentricity, and an overemphasis on normative concerns. Data are often difficult to compare across different frames of research, and the appropriate methodological approaches are disputable; case studies, for example, are approached in a relatively unsystematic manner. Comparative approaches often build on a choice of the ‘most similar’ or the ‘most different’ cases.

Bremen.
The final session at this very enjoyable ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference starts with Felix Ortega, whose focus is on the Iberian and Latin American mediasphere (which increasingly also includes the US, of course).

His research group began by running a questionnaire directed at media experts across a range of Spanish-speaking countries, to identify which research tools and instruments they were currently using. Advanced statistical methods, ranked highly here, along with bibliographical analysis and data work. For non-Spanish speaking researchers, this would look different – there is very little engagement with the wealth of Spanish-language-only research by Anglo-Saxon and other researchers doing satellite projects in Spanish-speaking countries.

Bremen.
The next speaker at ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ is my CCI colleague Jean Burgess, presenting on our Mapping Online Publics research project; this presentation is the methodological part, and I’ll show some more results at the main ECREA 2010 conference later in the week. Our research is part of an ARC Discovery project exploring methods for examining Australian social media use – the aim is to develop methods for computer-assisted cultural analysis. Over the course of the three years, we’ll examine blogs, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

Here’s Jean’s Powerpoint, and my transcript is below, too. I’ll add the audio later.

Bremen.
The next speaker at this ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference for ECREA 2010 is Asimina Michailidou, whose interest is in online public opinion formation in the European Union. This is deliberately avoiding an examination of party politics or opinion polls, but rather goes straight to online interaction – in this case, in the context of the EU parliamentary elections in 2009. The focus here was on twelve EU nations as well as a number of pan-European opinion and debate sites.

There are a number of methodological challenges with this – across the three areas of sampling, analysis, and interpretation. The project necessarily proceeds from a mixed-methods design, as it attempts to measure the forms and processes of communication on online platforms and investigate the content and participant community.

Bremen.
The next session at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference for ECREA 2010 starts with Ben Peters, who begins by noting the work of Paul Lazarsfeld as a pioneer of media research methods. Ben’s work focusses on the critical, historical, and international dimensions of networks, and he notes the importance of sharing datasets to the project of building a field of global network studies.

Ben’s research is on studying the failed Soviet attempts to build a domestic Internet-style network around the same time that the US developed ARPANET – while there was substantial expertise available, where the US succeeded through a collaborative approach, the Soviet Union failed because of strong competition between bureaucrats. Researching this topic encounters a number of obstacles – a particularist/structuralist divide, the positioning of the researcher, and the researcher’s own skills and preoccupations.