Mas105 research 40 - Notes from journals PDF

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The openness of the networked new media environment provides the conditions for the public sphere, consequently leading to more informed societies. The openness of new media connects people, consequently leading to them being more informed? Critically discuss this statement using the readings         

The idea of Heberma’s theory on shaping public sphere Ideas on current new media user using the net (Van Dijck) Uncovering how twitter as a social media platform illustrates a change in the way society is informed Utilising ‘new media’ in reference to the technological developments of web 2.0 Thompson “NEW MEDIA” Impact of broadband internet Dywer and Goggin Marketing and business? Van Dijck Habermas’s concept of the public sphere and a discussion of its relation to the Internet No ownership in media e.g sold (Fuchs)

An informed society is one where citizens have the resources, education and skills to access and participate in the free flow of reliable and useful information through a diverse range of platforms and media organizations that empower them to make considered decisions about their economic, social and political lives.

Dwyer, Martin & Goggin (week 6) https://ap01.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/view/delivery/61MACQUARIE_INST/121966181400021 71 Dwyer, T, Martin, F, & Goggin, G 2011, ‘News diversity and broadband applications: Challenges for content and distribution’, The Telecommunication journal of Australia, vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 65.1-65.11.

While the broadband Internet may extend Australians’ access to information, in this paper we argue that news diversity regulation matters more than ever in the emerging online media environment, where news applications are proliferating. Online news industry trends and research on source, exposure and content diversity indicate that media concentration should be a major policy concern for the Australian Government’s Convergence Review. In light of overseas responses to declining media diversity, we outline ways in which Australia might renovate its traditional approaches to safeguarding pluralism.

In the last decade Australians’ access to new online media channels and services suggests we experience increasing information plurality. Broadband media market trends show new

forms of news media industry consolidation, including content sharing across multiple publications. Other studies suggest that the domestic news Australians consume online is dominated by media sources familiar before social media were born — Fairfax, News Ltd, the ABC and Ninemsn. 65.1

Social media services facilitate the sharing of news and the creation of user generated content, and thus support the potential source diversity of social information and news, as well as civic and political engagement 65.4 a. It is true that from all sides media is undergoing great transformations and that dynamic and unexpected online market sectors are unfolding — viz. the emergence of apps culture and the expansion of social media, alongside the extension of mobile media services. 65.9

Although there is considerable uncertainty regarding the rate of change in the transition of mass audiences to online and mobile media, many agree that the role of government and regulators must be to maintain core social and political principles for media. In converging media a key objective must be to ensure the growth of media environments where the public has pervasive and affordable access to relevant, diverse news media. And as the international reaction to Murdoch’s NoTW scandal has once again shown us, trust in democracy is inescapably linked to the quality and plurality of news. 65.9

Van Dijck (week 8) https://journals-sagepubcom.simsrad.net.ocs.mq.edu.au/doi/pdf/10.1177/0163443708098245 The cultural perspective: recipients versus participants With the emergence of Web 2.0 applications, cultural theorist Henry Jenkins (2006) sees a definite paradigm shift in the way media content is produced and circulated: ‘Audiences, empowered by these new technologies, occupying a space at the intersection between old and new media, are demanding the right to participate within the culture’ p.g 42 The result is a participatory culture which increasingly demands room for ordinary citizens to wield media technologies – technologies that were once the privilege of capital-intensive industries – to express themselves and distribute those creations as 42 Media, Culture & Society 31(1) they seem fit. P.g 42, 43 When ‘old media’still reigned, media recipients had little direct power to shape media content and faced enormous barriers to enter the marketplace, whereas ‘the new digital environment expands the scope and reach of consumer activities’. 43

Jenkins, like other media theorists, applauds the technological opportunities seized by grassroots movements and individuals to express their creativity and provide a diverse palette of voices. 43 relationships with media companies. There are several assumptions implied in the notion of participatory culture that I want to relativize in this section. First, the concept of user is often bolstered by a deceptive opposition between the passive recipient, couched in the rhetoric of ‘old media’, and the active participant cast ideally as someone who is well-versed in the skills of ‘new’ media. Second, participation refers to citizens and community activists as well as to people who deploy their skills and talents towards a common cause. 43 In addition, the popularity of personal and communal media (home movies, home videos, community television) has profoundly affected television culture, particularly since the 1980s. 2 What is different in the digital era is that users have better access to networked media, enabling them to ‘talk back’ in the same multimodal language that frames cultural products formerly made exclusively in studios. This is partly due to the availability of cheap and easy-to-use digital van Dijck, Users like you? 43 technologies, which certainly should stimulate audiovisual production of audiovisual production, but a more important driver is the many internet channels, particularly UGC sites, that allow for do-it-yourself distribution. 43, 44

Fuchs (week 9) https://ap01.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/view/delivery/61MACQUARIE_INST/121957499900021 71 Twitter revolution claims imply that Twitter constitutes a new public sphere of political communication that has emancipatory political potentials. 218 Concepts of the public sphere are strongly connected to Jurgen Habermas’s theory 218 Dealing with the posed research question requires, therefore, a close engagement with Habermas’s concept of the public sphere and a discussion fits relation to the Internet 218 Habermas has defined the notion of the public: “We call events and occasions ‘public’ when they are open to all, in contrast to close or exclusive affairs” (Habermas 1989c, 1). 218 Habermas characterizes some important dimensions of the public sphere (1989b, 136, 1989c, 27): « 219 Formation of public opinion. • All citizens have access.

• Conference in unrestricted fashion (freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of expression and publication of opinions) about matters of general interest. • Debate over the general rules governing relations 219 new user agency

TWITTER. SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE The rise of blogs (e.g. Wordpress, Blogspot, Tumblr), social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, Linkedln, Diaspora*, VK), microblogs (e.g. Twitter, Weibo), wikis (e.g. Wikipedia) and content-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, Flickr, Instagram) has resulted in public discussions on the implications ofthese media for the political realm. There are, on the one hand, more optimistic and, on the other hand, more sceptical views. This section introduces five approaches that have in common that they focus on discussing the role of social media in politics. 227 Twitter is a platform dominated by entertainment. It is predominantly an information medium, not a communication tool. 244

Clay Shirky argued in 2008 that the political use of social media” ultimately enhances freedom: Social tools create what economists would call a positive supply-side shock to the amount of freedom in the world. [...] To speak online is to publish, and to publish online is to coimect with others. With the arrival of globally accessible publishing, freedom of speech is now freedom of the press, and freedom of the press is freedom of assembly. (Shirky 2008, 172) 227 Whereas one assumption in this discourse is that new media have predominantly positive effects, another one is that they bring about radieal change: “Oursocial tools are dramatically improving our ability to share, co-operate, and act together. As everyone from working biologists to angry air passengers adopts those tools, it is leading to an epochal change” 227 Habermas argues that political communication and political economy are two important aspects of the public sphere. According to Habermas (1989b, 1989c), the public sphere is a sphere of political debate. It is therefore important to test how communicative political Twitter use is 244 Habermas’s concept of the public sphere stresses that a public sphere is (a) a space of political communication and (b) that access to resources that allow citizens to participate in the public sphere is crucial. • Habermas’s notion of the public sphere is a critical concept that helps to analyse whether modem society lives up to its own expectations. It allows testing whether the freedom of speech and public opinion are realized or rather limited by the distribution of educational and material resources.

Furthermore, it enables the same test for the values of freedom of association and assembly by analysing whether there are powerful actors that dominate visibility and influence. Social media are embedded into contradictions and the power structures of contemporary society. They have contradictory characteristics in contradictory societies: they do not necessarily and automatically support/amplify or dampen/limit social change, but rather pose contradictory potentials that stand in contradiction with influences by the state, ideology, capitalism and other media Social media are in antagonistic societies antagonistic communication systems. In antagonistic societies, there are opposing interests expressed in power relations. These interests shape the use of technologies, including social media. Given that there are various opposing interests in an antagonistic society, different interests in how to use technologies exist. These uses also have unpredictable dimensions and consequences. As a result, technologies tend to have complex, contradictory impacts on society. T

Thompson week 2 https://ap01.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/leganto/readinglist/citation/32131582140002171 Cinque Week 2 https://ap01.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/leganto/readinglist/citation/32189741520002171

Week 3 Flew https://ap01.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/leganto/readinglist/citation/32131582180002171 P.G 51 information 56 new transformation

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/48964/1/Amended%20_Livingstone_Mass_media_democaracy.pdf Nonetheless, a critical perspective on the mass media in general and on audience access and participation programmes in particular has long existed, suggesting that such programmes are a trick to capture a passive, mass audience through the illusion of influence and involvement. Lazarsfeld and Merton (1948) argued that the media have a narcotizing function on their audience, undermining the practice of democracy: ‘modern media may encourage citizens to know more, even to be more opinionated, but to do less about public affairs’ (Tuchman, 1988:604). Similarly, commenting on media debates, Habermas claims that ‘critical debate arranged in this manner certainly fulfils important social-psychological functions, especially that of a tranquillizing substitute for action’ (Habermas, 1989:164).

Lang and Lang (1983:21) claim that ‘the mass public is still condemned to a bystander role… privy to, but not part of, the giveand-take through which parties with conflicting interests hammer out an acceptable policy’. The ever-increasing importance of opinion polls in elections suggests to some one way in which ‘the media discourage political participation and meaningful social change’ (Tuchman, 1988:604), providing a ‘managed show’ (Thompson, 1990) of public participation without any accompanying influence, role or power. Elliot (1986) argues that we face ‘a continuation of the shift away from involving people in society as political citizens of nation states towards involving them as consumption units in a corporate world’ (Elliot, 1986:106) In this chapter we explore the role played by the mass media in political participation, in particular in the relationship between the laity and established power. There is a longrunning debate in media theory over the ways in which the media not only disseminate elite, critical opinion but also influence the formation, expression and consumption of public opinion (Halloran, 1970; Lang and Lang, 1968). How far do the mass media provide a public sphere in which citizens may debate issues in a democratic forum and in which those in power may be held accountable to the public? 10 discussion of the media as a public sphere of political communication is the work of Habermas (1984; 1989) on the bourgeois public sphere. Influenced by critical theory, Habermas sees the media as creating a society of private and fragmented individuals for whom it is difficult to form the public rational-critical opinion which could oppose established power. He attacks the media for providing a pseudo-public sphere which distracts the laity from political action, being a sphere of public relations and passive spectatorship rather than genuine public debate. However, Habermas’s position (1987b) contains within it an ideal of public communication: if unfettered by institutional control, this ideal public communication might generate the critical consensus which he considers necessary for public participation in democratic political processes. The mass media, primarily concerned with symbolic reproduction, address both family and public sphere and have complex relations with both economy and state. Does the impact of the media inevitably result in the fragmentation of public opinion or can a more positive role for the media in the formation of a discursive public sphere be worked out? For Habermas (1989), the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) is a space where private individuals discuss public matters, a space which mediates between society and the state. The public sphere has a potential influence over power by forming a critical consensus which produces a coherent public opinion and by making the state accountable to its citizens: ‘the public sphere is… what one might call the factory of politics–its site of production…the space in which politics is first made possible at all and communicable’ (Kluge, 1981–2:213). Central to the public sphere is ‘the necessity of discursive justification of democratic politics’

https://journals-sagepub-com.simsrad.net.ocs.mq.edu.au/doi/pdf/10.1177/0163443712464562

https://multisearch.mq.edu.au/primo-explore/fulldisplay? docid=TN_proquest1667698189&context=PC&vid=MQ&lang=en_US&search_scope=PC_P LUS_LOCAL&adaptor=primo_central_multiple_fe&tab=books_more&query=any,contains, The%20mass%20media,%20democracy%20and%20the%20public%20sphere%20%20Sonia %20Livingstone%20and%20Peter%20Lunt&offset=0 ??

This paper discusses the role of the concept of the public sphere for understanding social media critically. It argues against an idealistic interpretation of Habermas and for a culturalmaterialist understanding of the public sphere concept that is grounded in political economy. It sets out that Habermas’ original notion should best be understood as a method of immanent critique that critically scrutinises limits of the media and culture grounded in power relations and political economy. The paper introduces a theoretical model of public service media that it uses as foundation for identifying three antagonisms of the contemporary social media sphere in the realms of the economy, the state and civil society

2013 Rasmussen https://multisearch.mq.edu.au/primo-explore/fulldisplay? docid=TN_sage_s10_1177_0163443712464563&context=PC&vid=MQ&lang=en_US&searc h_scope=PC_PLUS_LOCAL&adaptor=primo_central_multiple_fe&tab=books_more&query =any,contains,media%20and%20public%20sphere&offset=0 Gerhards & Schäfer 2010

https://multisearch.mq.edu.au/primo-explore/fulldisplay? docid=TN_sage_s10_1177_1461444809341444&context=PC&vid=MQ&lang=en_US&searc h_scope=PC_PLUS_LOCAL&adaptor=primo_central_multiple_fe&tab=books_more&query =any,contains,habermas%20new%20media&offset=0 2015 Heyman & Pierson https://multisearch.mq.edu.au/primo-explore/fulldisplay? docid=TN_sage_s10_1177_2056305115621933&context=PC&vid=MQ&lang=en_US&searc h_scope=PC_PLUS_LOCAL&adaptor=primo_central_multiple_fe&tab=books_more&query =any,contains,media%20habermas&offset=0 Ausserhofer & Maireder 2013

https://www-tandfonlinecom.simsrad.net.ocs.mq.edu.au/doi/pdf/10.1080/1369118X.2012.756050?needAccess=true&

2013 Rasmussen??????? https://multisearch.mq.edu.au/primo-explore/fulldisplay? docid=TN_sage_s10_1177_0163443712464563&context=PC&vid=MQ&lang=en_US&searc h_scope=PC_PLUS_LOCAL&adaptor=primo_central_multiple_fe&tab=books_more&query =any,contains,Internet-based%20media,%20Europe%20and%20the%20political%20public %20sphere&offset=0...