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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.
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.
Map.
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.
Digital Media Research Seminar
School of Humanities & Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney
http://www.uws.edu.au/hca
Date: Thursday 15 November
Time: 1-3pm
Venue: EB2.21 Parramatta Campus, UWS, Cnr of James Ruse Drive and Victoria Road, Rydalmere.
All welcome.
Ben O’Loughlin, Royal Holloway, University of London
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.
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.
ESRC SEDTC Politics Postgraduate Conference - Call for Papers
Ben O'Loughlin is giving a presentation this Thursday 25 October in the Department of International Relations at Australia National University. His paper is entitled, Strategic Narratives and Power Transition: Communicating a New Order. The paper is based on a forthcoming book on Strategic Narratives with Alister Miskimmon and Laura Roselle. Details of the seminar are below. Thanks to Sarah Logan and Matthew Davies for organising the event.
Strategic Narratives and Power Transition: Communicating a New Order
Professor Ben O'Loughlin
05:00pm - 06:30pm
25 October 2012
Seminar Room 3, Hedley Bull Centre (130), Garran Road, ANU
Abstract
This presentation explains how strategic narratives play a vital role in defining international order and power transition. The analysis of power transition has been dominated by studies focusing on material conditions (Gilpin 1981; Organski 1958), changes in balance of power (Waltz 1979; Kennedy 1988) and more recently the evolution of a liberal order (Ikenberry 2011). Today, a changing distribution of material power will be reflected in greater challenges for great powers to project strategic narratives about the future of the international system, signs of which we are already witnessing. Power transition now occurs in the conditions of a global media ecology in which states must narrate to multiple audiences; this more transparent order affects how states achieve legitimacy for their narrative. A strategic narrative framework can help analysts account for the social, ideational and relational dimensions of power transition neglected in traditional theories. Analysis of the formation, projection and domestic and international reception of China's strategic narrative shows that while China might become a superpower in material terms, its ability to gain legitimacy for an alternative vision of world order is constrained. Its narrative must work against a range of prior understandings of China and of the international system itself. The current rise of the BRICs is a fascinating period for those concerned with how the future of international order will play out because each rising power has an ambiguous relationship to the existing order as well as different concepts and values underpinning its narrative of future order. Given that previous power transitions have often led to systemic violence, it remains to be seen whether any existing or rising powers can craft a strategic narrative that other powers can align with their own.
Tahrir Square, 22 November 2012Billur Aslan will present a paper at the DGAP 17th New Faces Conference on "Pluralism in Egypt and Tunisia – How the Political Opening is Changing Islamist Forces" on 4–7 October 2012 in Cairo. Billur's talk is entitled, 'Connective Power of Islamist Parties: How does the Internet shape the activities of Islamists in Egypt?'
The conference is organised by the German Council on Foreign Relations and the American University in Cairo. Speakers include Khaled Hamza, Chief Editor of the Muslim Brotherhood’s main website, ikhwanweb.com, and Gudrun Krämer, Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies and Director of the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies at Freie Universität Berlin.
Call for papers
Media, War & Conflict Fifth Anniversary Conference
11-12 April 2013
Royal Holloway, University of London
250 word abstracts to Lisa.Dacunha@rhul.ac.uk by 10 October 2012
Media, War & Conflict’s fifth anniversary conference will be held on 11-12 April 2013 at Royal Holloway, University of London. The conference is open to scholars, journalists, military practitioners and activists from around the world.
Keynote speakers:
The journal was first published in April 2008, bringing together international scholars and journalists from the fields of political science, history, and communication, and military, NGO and journalist practitioners. The aim was to map the shifting arena of war, conflict and terrorism in an increasingly mediated age, and to explore cultural, political and technological transformations in media-military relations, journalistic practices and digital media, and their impact on policy, publics, and outcomes of warfare. The fifth anniversary conference offers the chance to showcase the best research in this field while also taking stock of how the field has developed and identifying the emerging challenges we face.
We invite papers on a range of topics, including:
The deadline for abstracts is 10 October 2012. Please submit 250-word abstracts and author-affiliation details to Lisa.Dacunha@rhul.ac.uk.
NPCU PhD students Billur Aslan and James Dennis will present at the 6th Annual PhD Conference at the Institute of Communication Studies, University of Leeds, on 24 May. The iCS conference has quickly established a good reputation and features keynotes this year from Natalie Fenton from Goldsmiths and Stephen Coleman, on his home turf. Details of papers below.
This research aims to illuminate and evaluate assumptions about the political impacts of the Internet by taking into account the relation of online social networks and political protests. For evaluating the influence of those novel technologies, this research offers two case studies from Iran, where members of the Green Movement have organised spontaneous protests via social networks. Although in the first case study, the movement members succeeded in overcoming state barriers and spreading their movement via social networks, in the latter these social networks did not succeed in resisting state restriction. By exploring the filtrations and censorship attempts of the Iranian government, this research draws attention to the novel capacities of governments in their attempts to restrict the media. These Iran cases show that despite the existence of social networks, the Internet alone cannot bring liberty. On the contrary, governments can utilise it for monitoring their citizens or for spreading their manufactured ‘facts’. Thereby, although the current protests in Egypt, Tunisia or Libya have fortified the power of social networks on protests, claims about their transformative effects require careful and comparative scrutiny. In order to understand the real impact of the Internet, today, one should analyse diverse factors that affect the outcomes of the movements. For this reason, alongside its cases studies, this research revises the theories of social movement scholars. It offers a theoretical framework to help explain the elements that affect the emergence, mobilisation and outcome of collective actions with a particular focus on how the Internet influences these processes.
This paper offers a critique of the artificial utopian / dystopian dichotomy that has re-emerged within academic literature examining the effect of social-networking sites on political engagement, and sets out an alternative approach aiming to capture the nuance of mediated citizenship at varying scales. The prevalence of unsubstantiated generalisations, anecdotal case studies, and a lack of empirical testing is exemplified through the scholarly debate surrounding ‘Slacktivism’; that low-threshold forms of political engagement online are inauthentic, narcissistically motivated, and a distraction replacing more meaningful forms of offline mobilisation (The Substitution Thesis).
This paper proposes a number of deficiencies within this approach. Firstly, the problematic emphasis on the medium itself leads to an arbitrary distinction between online and offline, and subsequently lacks appreciation for the complexity of engagement repertoires and organisational structures. Secondly, conceptual clarity is required in regards to what encompasses participation in relation to social-networking site. Slacktivism offers a narrow perspective of what engagement entails, notably end-product, ‘revolutionary’ activism without an appreciation of the informational and discursive stimulants that form part of this process (Carpentier 2011). The utopian / dystopian dichotomy and Slacktivist approach fundamentally miss the key function of social-networking sites as a commercial and entertainment-based medium, i.e. their role as a facilitator for conversations and networking. Finally, a collection of revisions are proposed to re-frame the Slacktivist critique to construct a viable research agenda aiming to systematically examine the effect of routine social-networking usage on political engagement.