Publications

This chapter explores the practice of crowdsourcing in global governance as a tool of multilateral diplomacy to interrogate its exact role and place in decision-making processes. It focuses on media discourse analysis of the public debates concerning the new definition, focusing mostly on the international Anglophone media and on the blog posts written by museum professionals. Conducive to cultural diplomacy stewardship and the cooperative engagement of the professional museum community, International Commission of Museums (ICOM) strives to tackle cultural engagement challenges and promotes “creativity, innovation, and systematization in this field of inquiry and practice”. The museum definition has traditionally been a part of the ICOM statutes and its revision “is a formally regulated process. The crowdsourcing exercise proved that online participants were highly motivated, interested, and engaged museum professionals who took the challenge with great enthusiasm and commitment.

25 years after the first publication of Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Dayan and Katz 1992), not only has the concept of media events firmly taken root in media theory, but it has also been developed considerably as a result of multiple critical interpretations. Going beyond a neo-Durkheimian ritual perspective, which emphasized the integrative role of ceremonial media events, has allowed a number of authors to identify such genres as ‘disruptive’, ‘traumatic’ or ‘conflictual’ media events, including, first and foremost, terror, disaster and war (Cottle 2006; Dayan 2008; Hepp and Couldry 2010; Katz and Liebes 2007; Mitu and Poulakidakos 2016). However, there is another type of events targeting social and cultural change, which do not exactly fit the ‘integrative/disruptive’ opposition, even if these events take the form of protest, for ‘protests and strikes are agreed forms of sanctioned disruption’ (Katz and Liebes 2007: 159). Until protest grows into a revolution and civil war, it is an instance of ‘ritual’ chaos, constituting a part of the order. Events of this type show some features of social drama and cultural performance (Turner 1974, 1982; Alexander 2006, 2011). Nevertheless, not every ‘transformative media event’ (Mihelj 2008) has such radical goals and sweeping scale.

‘Transformative media events’ are initiated in public spaces by citizens, whose disagreement with certain social conditions and/or a call for change they express. The transformative power can be an inherent element of the event (for instance, in the case of a protest action), or can emerge as a result of public response to a published opinion or document (such as a YouTube video recording police abuse). The latter case includes practices of ‘sousveillance’ (Mann et al. 2003) or ‘citizen witnessing’ (Allan 2013) directed at the democratization of social relations. A key feature of ‘transformative media events’ is their tight connection to the ‘citizen media’, by means of which they become visible and powerful. In this context it seems useful to consider media events as ‘user-generated media events’ (Mitu 2016), ‘new media events’ (Neverson and Adeyanju 2017), ‘transmedia events’ (Bacallao-Pino 2016), etc.

This paper investigates how digital surveillance tools used by East Asian governments against COVID-19 affect privacy and personal data protection. It applies doctrinal legal analysis and case study to compare national regulations of these tools as well as their implementation in China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. The approaches range considerably from total (China) to selective surveillance, which, however, seems overly excessive towards privacy of certain social groups, exacerbating social stratification and business disruptions in East Asia. The paper argues that selective surveillance models vary across the region from voluntary selective (Japan) to compulsory selective surveillance (Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, South Korea) and differ in terms of privacy and related rights. Yet, the increased risks of data misuse and leakages in all the East Asian states and territories need effective legal mechanisms for privacy and data protection that pay sufficient attention to public scrutiny and independent regulators.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the problems that arise in the system of social networks in connection with the intensification of the struggle of law enforcement bodies of the Russian Federation with phenomena that are referred to in the legal field as “extremism”, “incitement to hatred” and “insulting the feelings of believers”. The goal of the project is to analyze the problems of regulating social networks and author’s content in the context of world and domestic experience in the struggle for “network neutrality”. An interdisciplinary analysis was used in the work. In the modern Russian media space, the role of an expert and expertise on which the assessment of the content of social networks depends. The analysis performed in the article indicates that the traditional methods of examining web texts need substantial updating. The question was also raised about the need to clearly describe the qualifications of an expert and to regulate the selection of experts and the boundaries of their functional activities. Keyword: Network Сontent; Net Neutrality; Psycholinguistic Expertise.

This chapter presents the case of Russell Brand in order to look at how the most fundamental antinomies of the type of celebrity activism put in tension some prevalent theoretical frameworks around the field. In November 2013, Brand gave an interview to the journalist Jeremy Paxman for the BBC show Newsnight where he advocated, among other things, a ‘revolution’ and a ‘massive redistribution of wealth’. The chapter explores how the devotion to the revolutionary cause was embodied in the ethos of anarchist and Marxist revolutionaries of the past. Brand’s identity both as a superstar of creative Britain and a revolutionary agent of anti-austerity movements displays the in-built conflicts, tensions, and discrepancies that the figure of the activist celebrity embodies. The tensions that the activist celebrity enables may renegotiate dominant regimes of understanding by offering visibility to new vocabularies around social concerns without necessarily being perceived as a reaction against available electoral politics.

This chapter  analyses the evolution of the relationship between centralized control over local media media systems and local interests at the regional level in Russia. It demonstrates that during the post-soviet period the soviet hierarchical control was reproduced as a result of the dominance of the so called “central media” over the regional media. As the political balance between federal and regional powers evolved,  so did the model of media control. From this point of view the local policy during Yeltsin’s period was shaped by the shift of power from the centre, allowing the regions to develop high levels of autonomy.  This  transformed local media into powerful agents of local politics and contributed to the high pressure on local media from different political and elite groups. Such pressures paradoxically formed more pluralist model of the press. After 2000 the power of local media was weakened, which dissociated retired local media from elite group political processes and contributed to the monopolization of local media by local authorities especially on the basis of commercial contracts between such authorities and the press. Such contracts shape considerably the control of local media by the local authorities paying media for loyal coverage of their policies.  

The paper addresses the questions of data science education of current importance. It aims to introduce and justify the framework that allows flexibly evaluate the processes of a data expedition and a digital media created during it. For these purposes, the authors explore features of digital media artefacts which are specific to data expeditions and are essential to accurate evaluation. The rubrics as a power but hardly formalizable evaluation method in application to digital media artefacts are also discussed. Moreover, the paper documents the experience of rubrics creation according to the suggested framework. The rubrics were successfully adopted to two data-driven journalism courses. The authors also formulate recommendations on data expedition evaluation which should take into consideration structural features of a data expedition, distinctive features of digital media, etc.

This special issue brings together ethnographic scholarship to explore the interlinking of diverse personal, social and larger institutional forms in and through which artistic value emerges. Rather than being inherent in the formal features of art objects or merely a discursive construct, value as craft signifies an arena in which beliefs, ideologies, and histories interweave with art practices, events, and materialities. The articles included in this issue, then, highlight both the constructed and performative aspects of artistic values through a common focus on ethnography and a shared emphasis on temporality, practice, and institutional forms. Accordingly, art is a process both crafted – composed of judgements and social interaction – and crafting – able to individually or collectively mobilise and enable desiring investments in its capacity as art. The interdisciplinary effort at hand retains the sociological ethos and political implications of social constructionism, while looking at how acts of valuation enable affective, agential and aesthetic responses.

This article looks at the so called curatorial statements in global art biennials, that is to say the discourses that independent curators put together so as to interpret, justify, and explain what their exhibitions are about to art professionals, experts and the public. It asks, through which value systems curatorial branding hails and crafts middle-class, educated and self-reflective lifestyles and publics with high cultural and often symbolic capital? I will be arguing that these statements constitute a form of writing genre that follows recurring linguistic patterns, involving strategic gestures of negating dominant culture, refusing idiosyncratic straw-man narratives and blending expert with populist vocabularies. While seemingly written by socially engaged and critical ‘auteurs', these gestures of curatorial self-presentation can be read as tools for producing surplus value in line with creative economy's celebration of uniqueness, difference and unconventionality. I analyze several statements from recent large scale biennials in terms of the binary oppositions they fabricate, the both mass and specialized audiences they address and the confessional, self-reflective politics they employ. The writing and reading of these statements correspond to forms of acquired cultural capital, for instance through education or through the experience of belonging in art milieus. Contemporary biennials thus remediate the arena of cultural distinction as the ‘cultivated’ in these settings are not expected to be out-and-above-of-society experts similarly to the modern art of the past but amateur polymaths and cultural omnivores who are able to discover uniqueness and unconventionality within the total realm of cultural production.

Many CDA scholars assume there is an inherent opposition between democratization with its advances toward social justice and neoliberal marketization with its array of negative consequences. Analyzing the discourse of democratization in the context of contemporary Ukraine, this paper argues that the issue is more complicated. Neoliberal marketization can go hand-in-hand with the discourse of universal democratization, which only contributes therefore to the perpetuation of neocolonial injustice as manifested in ongoing neoliberal projects.

In his recent book The Discursive-Material Knot, [Carpentier, N. (2017). The discursive-material Knot: Cyprus in conflict and community media participation. New York: Peter Lang]. Nico Carpentier identifies three nodal points of antagonistic discourse: the need for destruction of the enemy, homogenization of the self as opposed to the enemy, and the radical difference of the enemy. The latter appears when the self and the other are thought to be irreconcilably at odds, and the enemy is presented as inferior. In the more extreme cases, this radical othering leads to a dehumanization and demonization of the other, which makes the destruction of the enemy easier. Using post-Maidan social confrontation within Ukraine and its Facebook discussions as a case study, this paper analyzes how exactly the radical othering and subsequent dehumanization of the enemy is discursively structured, and describe the conditions under which such extreme manifestations of conflict could be eliminated with the ultimate goal of transforming antagonistic into agonistic discourse.

This study proposes the interventionist and the detached orientations to watchdog journalism through the conceptual lens of journalistic role performance. Based on a content analysis of 33,640 news stories from sixty-four media outlets in eighteen countries, we measure and compare both orientations across different countries using three performative aspects of monitoring: intensity of scrutiny, voice of the scrutiny, and source of the event. Our findings show that the interventionist approach of watchdog journalism is more likely to be found in democracies with traditionally partisan and opinion-oriented journalistic cultures or experiencing sociopolitical crises. In turn, the detached orientation predominates in democracies with journalistic traditions associated to objectivity. Although both orientations have a lower presence in transitional democracies, the detached watchdog prevails, while in non-democratic countries the watchdog role is almost absent. Our results also reveal that structural contexts of undemocratic political regimes and restricted press freedom are key definers of watchdog role performance overall. However, the type of political regime is actually more important—and in fact the most important predictor—for detached than for interventionist reporting.

An innovative development based on the use of modern media and communication technologies requires a certain level of competence in how to use such technologies. These competencies are united by the concept of “information literacy”, proposed by Paul Gilster in 1997. The tradition of studying digital literacy in Russia is the subject of the following chapter. The different approaches to understanding digital literacy are as follows: ICT, psychological and pedagogical, media and information and industrial approaches.

Special attention is paid to the four-component digital literacy model, proposed in the framework of the project by ROCIT and the Higher School of Economics. This model is based on two substantial oppositions: firstly, the opposition “technical-technological/socio-humanitarian” and, secondly, the opposition “opportunities/threats”. It was used to construct the Index of Digital Literacy in the Russian Regions, measured since 2015.

The results of a series of media literacy measuring surveys by the ZIRCON Group from 2009–2016 are also presented.

Today, the internet has become a very fragmented research object that can be understood differently depending on contexts, research goals and methods. However, the internet [in this text, we write “internet” with a lower case “i”, following the process of decapitalisation of this term. The logic behind this process is that we understand internet as “computer network connecting a number of smaller networks” rather than as “the global network that evolved out of ARPANET, the early Pentagon network” (Herring S. Should you be capitalizing the word “internet”? Wired, 2015)] of a particular country is often treated by researchers as an umbrella term combining heterogeneous phenomena and practices. In this chapter we propose an alternative way of analysing the internet in Russia’s regions. Contrary to the concept of RuNet as common space, we explore diversity of what the internet is in different localities in Russia. The cases of five cities aim to illustrate the variety of histories and usage patterns of the internet in particular locations, such as in cities in Russia’s regions. Qualitative data consisting of interviews, observations, digital ethnography and archival documents have paved an additional (to more conventional quantitative data) way to explore the internet as a complex phenomenon rooted in previous development, local cultural and societal norms and political and economic situations. In particular, we stress the significance of the early internet, the diversity of basic and alternative platforms, the access and infrastructure divide as objects that are important to understand the development of the internet in a particular location.

It has been argued that by allowing users to unfriend, unfollow, and block political and cultural ‘others,’ Facebook facilitates the discouragement of dialog between those holding different views on political issues. Using a case study of a civil confrontation in Ukraine, the paper analyzes the reasons for unfriending political ‘others’ reported by 699 respondents of a qualitative survey. Its findings are in line with researchers who have also found that the likelihood of selective avoidance is higher among people who are more politically active, emotionally involved, and who have more online friends. The paper also discusses an interesting discovery that has not been previously considered. The respondents often shunned political ‘others’ out of suspicion that they were trolls. As this paper suggests, whether real or imagined, trolling has turned out to be a real force influencing people’s decisions to withdraw from communication on the most important issues of public life.

The increase of internet penetration across Russia has reduced entry barriers for individuals and companies who want to report locally. New digital technologies have given rise to many semi-professional local media projects, so-called ‘hyperlocal media’ (Metzgar et al., 2011; Tenor, 2018), created on various online platforms and social networking sites. Websites, blogs, and social media groups (the so-called ‘pabliki’ in Russian) on the popular social networking site VKontakte have opened up new access routes to local news, both for ordinary citizens and the authorities, but have also become a challenge for traditional local media. This article investigates how the media landscape changes in response to digital technologies in a provincial town of nearly 40,000 in the European part of Russia. More specifically, the article investigates how professional journalists from traditional media and practitioners from hyperlocal media sites understand the influence of digital technologies on the aims and work practices of media in a Russian province. The study is based on in-depth interviews with the editors of traditional local media (e.g. print newspapers) and owners of new hyperlocal media initiatives. The research explores different approaches to the ways in which two groups of media actors understand and make use of the internet and digital technologies. However, within peculiar Russian media model, these differences have led to collaborative rather than competitive relations between the two groups.

For a long time, the basic underlying principle of cultural industries was the idea that the process of reproduction could be industrialized but not the creation itself. Over the course of a few dozers years, this idea determined the nonindustrial character of particular domains of culture, such as theater and performing arts, and some fields of education, maintaining them on the margins of the industrialization process. This chapter examines the complexity of the ongoing mediatization process, which brings such marginal domains into industrial logics, making them reproducible or partly reproducible. We can now see new schemes of the division of labor appearing in performing arts and other fields in which craft-based activity mainly consists of conceptualizing products, while the performances themselves become increasingly industrialized.

Cultural diplomacy has traditionally been a strategic instrument of national governments to achieve foreign policy objectives. Nation states have supported the international missions of museums to promote national cultural ideas and values abroad to pursue strategic geopolitical interests. However, in the twenty-first century the complex process of neoliberal globalisation and political decentralisation have transformed traditional cultural diplomacy based on exclusively national projections. There are new forms, channels and narratives of cultural diplomacy that emerge with the appearance of new types of cultural institutions, such as franchise museums, like Guggenheim Bilbao, Hermitage Amsterdam or Louvre Abu Dhabi. This article explores the case of Louvre Abu Dhabi to exemplify the phenomenon of ‘glocal’ museum diplomacy that rests on global ambitions of the local Abu Dhabi government and at the same time draws on national aspirations of France to strengthen its geopolitical presence and influence in the Middle East. The article identifies multiple museum narratives that transform museum diplomacy from a bilateral, state-initiated strategic activity into a multilateral and multidirectional endeavour engaging stakeholders and audiences on local, national and global levels.

The title of the book refers to the sociological survey, conducted by the "Public opinion" Fund in 2000. It is focused on the representation of Internet as a complex phenomenon in modern Russia. First, the Internet is considered as part of the media system that not only rapidly developing, but also significantly transforming the system as a whole. Second, it contains the analysis of main online markets in Russia. Thirdly, the Internet is analyzed in political, social and cultural contexts.

Based on a standardized operationalization of the watchdog, civic, interventionist, loyal-facilitator, infotainment, and service roles, this study combines survey (N = 643) and content analysis data (N = 19,908) to explain gaps between newspaper journalists’ role conceptions and the performance of their press organizations in nine countries from Latin America, Western Europe, and Asia. Taking an institutional approach by focusing on institutional influences on the conception–performance gap at three levels (individual, organizational, societal), our results show that these gaps are largest for the two roles most connected with the public functions of journalism, the civic, and the watchdog roles. Multilevel analyses offer significant evidence on that, across all six analyzed roles, the size of the gaps differed more clearly between journalists and between media organizations, than among countries. Although influences on an individual level (i.e., perceived autonomy) have some explanatory power, influences on the organizational level and, more specifically, ownership and codified editorial policies are the factors that best explain conception–performance gaps. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of the public skepticism about the performance of journalism and the media.