Blog

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Leen van Brussel, who shifts our focus from the world stage to northern Belgium, and the debate about euthanasia and the right to die being played out in newspapers there. The relevant players in that debate are the ‘right to die’ and ‘palliative care’ movements, with their respective, opposing, points of view. This is a struggle for meaning, played out in good part through the mainstream media.

Key themes in the newspaper coverage of these debates are pro-choice discourses (allowing others to retain control of their own lives), dignity (control and autonomy …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …