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Neurosis in mass society America, from Crooks & Liars
On 19 February at 5.15pm Ben O'Loughlin will present the early stages of his new work with Andrew Hoskins. Please join, details below.
The new mass: the return of political collectivity?
Department of Politics and International Relations: Seminar Series 2013
Founders West room 101
5.15pm – 6.30pm
For information on further seminars please click here.
Ben O’Loughlin has agreed to make a formal contribution to the hearing on “Internet and politics: the impact of new information and communication technology on democracy” that will take place at the Council of Europe in Paris on 11 March 2013, from 2 pm to 5.30 pm. Ben will discuss the impact of the Internet on political communication and political mobilization and the challenges of e-democracy. These include:
The other invited experts are Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulz, Director of the Hans-Bredow-Institut für Medienforschung, Hamburg, and Prof. Patrice Flichy, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, Director of Réseaux.
I am excited to announce that I will be giving the 2013 Attallah Lecture at Carleton University on March 7, 2013. The Lecture takes place annually in honour of Paul Attallah and is part of Carleton's Communication Graduate Caucus Annual Conference, whose theme this year is [Re]visions: Protest and Resistance.
Many thanks to Carleton's CGC and to the Faculty of the School of Journalism and Communication for inviting me. It is a real honour and I very much look forward to participating in the conference.
Attallah Lecture specifics:
Date: Thursday, March 7, 2013.
Time: 6:30 PM.
Location: National Arts Centre, Ottawa, 53 Elgin Street, at Confederation Square, Ottawa, Ontario, K1P 5W1, Canada.
Free and open to the public.
Map.
Christopher Boerl, who was recently awarded his PhD for research he carried out here in the New Political Communication Unit, has a new article out in Information, Communication and Society. Here is the abstract and a link.
Abstract
Contrary to the effects of broadcast media, a medium through which American evangelicals were largely unified along conservative theological and political lines, this article explores how the Internet is empowering divergent religious movements within the evangelical community. As a result of this development, the previously unfettered authority of the Christian Right is being usurped and the religious monologue it once enjoyed is gone. Instead, today's evangelical media landscape is more diversified, more decentralized, and ultimately more politically moderate than it once was. Understanding this phenomenon is of central importance to this article.
Link.
A quick note to say that I'll be speaking at an event about the European Citizens' Initiative in central London this coming Thursday, November 29.
Organized by the European Parliament Information Office, held at Europe House, Smith Square, Westminster, and entitled Can Digital Democracy Work? the meeting will consist of MEPs and representatives from the Officer of the Leader of the House of Commons, 38 Degrees, and transnational civil society movement, European Alternatives.
If you would like to attend the discussion, please RSVP to Agnieszka.PIELA@ext.ec.europa.eu
Links:
European Citizens' Initiative.
Article for The Independent.
38 Degrees.
European Alternatives.
Timothy Kirkhope MEP.
Ben O'Loughlin is the invited speaker at tomorrow's Digital Media Research Seminar at the School of Humanities & Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney. His presentation explores how media have been used in the expression of critiques by activist groups in Japan since the 3/11 disaster. It draws on research in progress with Chris Perkins at the University of Edinburgh, who completed his PhD here at the NPCU. Details of the talk are below. If you're in Sydney, drop in.
Date: Thursday 15 November
Time: 1-3pm
Venue: EB2.21 Parramatta Campus, UWS, Cnr of James Ruse Drive and Victoria Road, Rydalmere.
All welcome.
Post-Fukushima Activism and Global Indignation: The Mediality of Critique in Japan
This paper explores how digital media and political claims-making enabled activists in Japan to link their critique of the Japanese state to activism around the world in 2011, including the Indignados in Spain and uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. The Japanese government was found lacking both in its pre-disaster planning and its inability to form a convincing strategic narrative about Japan’s future that could rally citizens after the 3/11 disaster. In response, activists and opposition voices started to drill down from specific policy complaints to the constitutive arrangements of the polity itself. This is a more abstract level of justification and one that is more easily linked to global struggles. This paper explores how these critical operations were launched from diverse political positions and through different medial practices and media forms, including Sakaguchi Kyohei’s best-selling book How to Build an Independent Country, film by the Radioactivists, the 'Sayonara Genpatsu' (Goodbye Nuclear Power) movement, and digital self-publishing by individual citizens. The paper applies an analytical framework derived from Boltanski and Thevenot’s work to examine how critique and justification operate through media ecologies marked by modulating experiences of distance, proximity, insecurity and uncertainty.
We know your dreamsAre academic researchers being left behind by their commercial counterparts? Is the rigour and transparency of social science being sacrificed in the name of revolution? ‘The Big Data Revolution’ workshop hosted by Innocentive on 12 September 2012 offered an excellent chance to weigh up these questions. The workshop brought together a mix of commercial, academic and government researchers including representatives from Amazon, City University, Royal Bank of Scotland, and the US Department of Homeland Security.
James Dennis, NPCU doctoral candidate, offers his thoughts here.
Billur Aslan and James Dennis will present our ongoing study of global audience reactions to the 2012 London Olympics at CIBAR 2012 in Manchester on 11 November. The annual conference of the Confederation of International Broadcasters’ Audience Research Services, hosted this year by BBC Global News, is the main international forum for discussion of audience research among public service broadcasters. There will be other presentations from Deutsche Welle, Radio Free Europe, Gallup and the BBC themselves.
CIBAR have generously given the project an entire session, and we hope anyone in Manchester is able to attend. Thanks to Marie Gillespie for convening the panel.
The Olympic Games 2012, the BBC World Service & Twitter
Marie Gillespie, Rob Procter, Billur Aslan, James Dennis, Nour Schreim & Marzieh Targhi
This session will examine how international news organisations like the BBC World Service (WS) are adapting to social media and integrating it into their journalistic practices. In particular, it evaluates the Twitter strategy adopted by the WS during the London Olympic Games. It does so comparatively through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a carefully selected sample of approximately 10,000 tweets harvested from the BBC’s Arabic, English, Persian and Russian Services. Our particular concern was to get at the nature of ‘the global conversation’ - who is reacting to who in what way, and in particular how people are reacting to the BBC coverage and its social media output.
The project set out to address the following questions: what impact did the WS Twitter strategy have during the Olympic period on reach and/or engagement? Did it generate more followers? Did it allow for greater exposure to WS content? Did increased transparency among broadcasters and audiences attract new followers and audiences? Did its twitter strategy make it easier for overseas audiences to follow and understand the Olympics? To what extent did the BBC’s language services become a hub/centre for discussions of Olympics in Arabic, English, Persian and Russian? Do WS Tweeters exert influence in the Twitter sphere? Do WS tweeters create greater engagement? The panel will examine issues of methodology (our methodology included a coding frame that allowed us to trace gender, national and religious dynamics), as well as the wider implications of social media, like Twitter, for issues of democratising media participation.
Ben O'Loughlin has a new column in Global Policy discussing the new project on the 2012 Olympics, the BBC and Twitter being conducted by the NPCU, Open University, NCeSS and the BBC. The column asks who benefits from the 'Habermas on steroids' ideal of a global public the BBC is tasked with creating.
ESRC SEDTC Politics Postgraduate Conference - Call for Papers