Hamburg.
The final keynote speaker at ECREA 2010 is Beata Klimkiewicz, whose interest is in media system change in central and eastern Europe (CEE), focussing especially on structural processes. That said, the boundaries that define CEE are highly elusive – national boundaries in this area have shifted more than elsewhere in Europe, not least in recent decades, which means that there are various overlapping and conflicting criteria for defining geographic, regional, ethnic, and other boundaries. Additionally, the boundary changes which happened in 1989 provided a distinguishing generational experience for scholars in this field, which is not necessarily shared with the generations preceding or following them.

This can be examined from a number of perspectives. Much CEE research underlines the fall of communism as a unique and isolated moment in history; CEE societies are said to have been overtaken by processes of change that are of unprecedented magnitude and complexity in modern history – but this claim of uniqueness derives from a fairly self-centred preoccupation specifically with CEE history: many similar processes in other global regions have been overlooked. Changes in South Africa or South America during the 1990s can be usefully compared with developments in CEE, for example – they, too, aimed for media pluralism and diversity and for guarantees of freedom of expression, of course.

Hamburg.
We’re now in the final plenary session at ECREA 2010, which starts with a keynote by Ruth Wodak. Her interest is in a multi-level, qualitative, and longitudinal analysis of the European public sphere (EPS), which necessitates a multidisciplinary approach. She begins by taking us back to the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which started the process of European unification – at a virtually all-male, all-elderly meeting of (western) European heads of state.

Compare this, for example, with the original Website of the European Union, as a very different public space – constructed at some great effort, but highly bureaucratic, and ultimately shut down for being ineffective in engaging with citizens – or with the at once transnational and local public spheres which formed for example around the mass demonstrations across Europe at the start of the Iraq war.

So, there are many genres of public spaces and public spheres in Europe, which can be approached from perspectives including the Europeanisation of the national, the formation of structures of resonance across Europe, the transnationalisation of (national) public spheres, the Europe of multiple publics and multiple public spheres, or the Europe of multiple vertical and horizontal flows of communication.

Hamburg.
My own paper was next at ECREA 2010. Here’s the presentation – and I also recorded the audio for it, and will add it as soon as I can which is now attached to the slides. As it turned out, one of the other presenters in the session also broadcast the whole event to Justin.tv – so go there to see it all in action (my presentation starts around 52 minutes in, and you can also see the other papers on our panel)…

Hamburg.
The last day at ECREA 2010 starts with a paper by Tom Bakker, whose interest is in mapping participation in citizen media activities in the Netherlands. He notes that participation in social media still appears to be growing strongly overall – and these shifts in the media ecology necessarily bring about some significant changes. The potential for such change has been highlighted for journalism (gatekeeping is said to be declining, agenda setting, news values, standards, and ethics are shifting, and diversity is increasing), as well as for the wider public sphere (thought to be more inclusive, active, deliberative, with more political discourse that is more representative of public opinion).

The present study tested this in a large-scale study in the Netherlands. It surveyed some 2130 people over 13 years of age during December 2009. One question asked in this context was whether people were reading comments: some 55% never did, the rest read them at various levels of intensity. 75% never read political comments, 83% never posted comments, and 94% never posted political comments online.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Veronica Barassi, whose interest is in researching social media and political activism. The relationship between these practices remains underresearched, and while the democratic potential of social media has been highlighted, it is also undermined by a political culture of free labour, neoliberal surveillance, and corporate control.

One way of addressing this is to understand social media as practice – and Veronica has conducted an ethnographic study of three political groups of in Britain, Italy, and Spain. Key conclusions from this is that social media become tools of opportunity and challenge for social movements. Uses of social media and the way they are understood as sites of opportunity and challenge also depend on context-specific political imaginations.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Max Hänska-Ahy, whose interest is in the use of Twitter and satellite TV in the recent Iranian election and its aftermath. The outcome of the election was highly disputed, of course, with widespread protests; domestic media and other channels of communication were shut down or disrupted by the government. External media sources (BBC World News, CNN, etc.) remained important sources of information during this time, but their satellite channels, too, were disrupted.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Inta Brikše, whose interest is in Latvian and Russian news media’s coverage of each other’s countries. Russia is still seen as a major enemy of Latvia, for historic reasons, so it is interesting to examine how each country is framed by the news media of the other.

The study examined the Websites of three Russian and three Latvian newspapers, as well as of three Latvian newspapers which are published in the Russian language. This content was examined for issues, sources, source types, causes for coverage (events, opinions, …), and levels of neutrality in coverage.

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 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.