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The first title in the book series I recently established, Oxford Studies in Digital Politics, has just been published.
The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam
By Philip N. Howard
Click here for more detail on Phil's book (pdf). See also Phil's site for his Project on Information Technology and Political Islam.
Click here for more detail on the book series and forthcoming titles.
Here are the details of my paper with James Stanyer at the APSA this week...
Political Communication in Transition: Mediated Politics in Britain’s New Media Environment
CALL FOR PAPERS
CONFERENCE: QUESTIONING TRANSNATIONALISM: CULTURE, POLITICS & MEDIA
17 December 2010
Royal Holloway College, University of London
The Departments of Media Arts and Politics and International Relations
(PIR)
Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Thomas Diez -Political Science, University of Tübingen
Prof. Deniz Göktürk -Department of German, University of California,
Berkeley
Prof. Randall Halle -Department of German, University of Pittsburgh
This interdisciplinary postgraduate conference focuses on
transnationalism and securitisation, issues of increasing relevance in
both Politics and International Relations, and Media and Film Studies.
In both disciplines, there is currently a prevailing tendency to
conceive of borders as ever increasingly permeable elements in a
globalising world. The new communication technologies have certainly
reinforced the image that the world becomes a single place. However, a
‘borderless world’ proves to be illusionary as witnessed in the global
rise of securitization practices after the September 11 terrorist
attacks. Since then, even a bottle of water -at the airport- has
started to be perceived as a potential security threat.
‘Transnationalism' thereby becomes a useful lens through which issues
such as securitization, borders, legitimacy, citizenship, memory and
solidarity can be re-examined from a fresh theoretical perspective.
Within this framework, the major aims of this international conference
are threefold: to question the extent and limitations of
transnationalism; to analyse the cultural and political functions of
transnational actors and the impact of new communication technologies
such as the internet in the contemporary world; and finally to
encourage interdisciplinary approaches and critical perspectives in
the studies of transnationalism.
This conference will be organised by and run for postgraduate students
from various disciplinary backgrounds. It aims to give all
participants the opportunity to develop and broaden our knowledge in
this area of research. In this respect, the Departments of Media Arts
and Politics and International Relations would like to collaborate to
highlight the interdisciplinary character of transnationalism as a
phenomenon within a context whereby a diverse range of techniques such
as paper presentations, poster exhibitions and plenary discussions are
combined.
In order to disseminate the research findings, selected papers will be
considered for publication in the Journal of Critical Globalisation
Studies, a fully peer-reviewed, open-access academic journal published
by Royal Holloway, University of London.
The topics include but are not limited to:
• Current restrictions over the free movement of people, goods and
ideas
• Border policies
• Communication policies
• Political freedoms and cultural diversity
• National, religious, ethnic and gender issues
• The role of media in framing transnational terrorism, conflicts and
humanitarian crises
• Power of transnational media
• Power of transnational non-governmental actors
• Soft/hard power
• Multiculturalism, pluralism, cultural diversity
• Cosmopolitanism
• Post-colonial or post-national; centres versus margins/periphery
• Hybridity
• Glocalisation
• Representation of transnational identities
• Transnational cinema
• Diasporas and diasporic cinema
Submission of abstracts: by 10 September 2010
Official Acceptance: by 1 October
Early registration: by 15 October 2010
For submission guidelines, registration and further details please
see: http://royalhollowayconference.wordpress.com/
The Sage journal Television & New Media have just published an article by Chris Perkins, a PhD candidate at the New Political Communication Unit. Chris looks at how nationalism is represented in the Japanese comedy nodame cantabile. The article can be found here (subscription only).
The US State Department's thinking on digital diplomacy still seems mired in a 'push' model of message projection. Instead of responding to the concerns publics around the world want to talk about, or engaging in a more dialogic model of conversation, the strategy is: get the message out. In last week's New York Times magazine two US State Dept. digital diplomacy advisers, Jared Cohen and Alec Ross, were given an extended chance to sell their latest strategies. It quickly became clear in the article that policymakers still assume that the US has a coherent message: itself, its values, its history. In the article, Hillary Clinton is quoted as saying, "Much of the world doesn't really know as much as you might think about American values." So, let's say there are such things as American values and that these can be pushed out to much of the world, how would this work in an age of social media? Here, Ross explains:
“You have a body of great material [promoting America]. We ought to have somebody go through it and do grabs. Figure out over the course of whatever it is you’ve said, those things that can be encapsulated in 140 characters or less. Let’s say it’s 10 things. We then translate it into Pashto, Dari, Urdu, Arabic, Swahili, etc., etc. The next thing is we identify the ‘influencer’ Muslims on Twitter, on Facebook, on the other major social-media platforms. And we, in a soft way, using the appropriate diplomacy, reach out to them and say: Hey, we want to get across the following messages. They’re messages that we think are consistent with your values. This is a voice coming from the United States that we think you wanted to hear. So we get the imam. . . .”
“. . . the youth leader. . . .” [Farah] Pandith [also US State Dept.] said.
“We get these other people to then play the role of tweeting it, and then saying, ‘Follow this woman,’ and/or putting it on whatever dominant social-media platform they use.”
The strategy of finding (or paying) credible intermediaries and creating a translation bureaucracy is not the same thing as allowing peer-to-peer public diplomacy to blossom. Most importantly, it does not equate to listening and taking into account the perspectives of others -- people around the world for whom 'American values' might seem threatening, hypocritical etc. Hence, the mission will preach to the converted.
The report does tell us about other strings to the digital diplomacy bow, such as encouraging cyberactivism in authoritarian countries. Nevertheless, it is astonishing that a push model of political communication is being written about in the New York Times as somehow novel; not just novel, but so exciting that eating must be put on hold, for, as the journalist reports, "Ross hadn't eaten anything besides a morning muffin ... dinner could wait."
On the fifth anniversary of the 7/7 bombings of 5 July 2005, Chatham House today held a conference to examine our security culture and the development of counter-terrorism in the years since 52 people were killed. The event also marked the publication of a special issue of International Affairs featuring articles reporting on the various aspects of our security culture – including an article by Andrew Hoskins and myself on media coverage of ‘radicalisation’ in which we argue, controversially, and based on a recent study of British Muslim audiences, that the BBC may have more of a radicalising effect than jihadist websites.
Central to today’s discussion was evaluating risk: what risk of terrorism is serious, and how much risk can we live with? With no repeats of 7/7, has British counter-terrorism policy been a success? To reach an answer, we’d need to know exactly the number of cases security agencies have followed and attacks they’ve thwarted. But such data is necessarily secret, and without it, citizens, many politicians, and journalists are all at sea. Take the front page of today’s The Times:
Security agencies are monitoring round the clock two active terrorist cells known to be planning attacks in Britain, The Times has learnt.
The cells stand out from dozens of police and security services operations because they have discussed methods of attack, including “soft targets” that could result in large-scale civilian casualties, according to security sources.
[…] Andy Hayman, the former assistant commissioner who led the 7/7 investigation … writes in The Times today that Britain is under its biggest ever threat from terror. He says: “There are now probably more radicalised Muslims, their attack plans are more adventurous and the UK still remains under severe risk.”
Biggest ever threat? More radicalised Muslims that ever? What are journalists to do, given that they don’t have access to the data and security agencies have manipulated threat perceptions in the past? The Times decided to publish what appears scaremongering. But what if Hayman is under-playing the number of cases? The point is we cannot know. Five years on from 7/7, security journalism is still not equipped to report with clarity, insight and proportionately on its subject matter.
‘We are not involved in the ‘long war’ or the ‘war on terror’ but the ‘long change’ and only soft power will bring that about’.
So reads the latest report [click here] from Wilton Park, the informal meeting place of invited foreign policy thinkers and practitioners in the English countryside, following a conference on ‘Public Diplomacy: Moving from Policy to Practice’ last month. Even if the phrase does not take hold, it indicates current thinking on how Britain and the US should engage with the world through public diplomacy.
To exercise soft power is to project the attractiveness of one’s own country in order to make other states and societies amenable to one’s political and economic interests. The Long Change will be a change of opinion towards the UK and US and social change in target countries who contain people who don't like us. This is primarily couched as a security issue – making individuals at home or abroad less likely to use terrorist violence against UK/US interests. But the Long Change is also about making foreign publics more disposed to UK/US policies around trade, development, and climate change.
What is new is that this public diplomacy can be done by publics themselves through social media. The clumsy strategic communication officers of the state can stand back. This approach assumes that communication and connection between people across borders through social media can have a liberal, pluralizing effect. But its not clear why people would engage in patient, deliberative, possibly multilingual conversation with people in other countries about controversial political issues. Anyone familiar with the ‘under the line’ discussions on news websites will see how quickly and often the conversation becomes a hostile dialogue of the deaf.
So, perversely, publics must be taught how to be spontaneously deliberative. Forums for ‘global conversations’ will be created, along the lines of the BBC’s Have Your Say online spaces. These will form the ideal of what public-to-public diplomacy is about, for emulation by progressive media around the world. Unacceptable opinions or styles of participation will be moderated out. The mechanism for the long change is us, or what has been called in recent years ‘the power of we’ and ‘we the media’. But any global ‘we’ will have to be carefully constructed and edited.
It is the harnessing of social media tools that mark the Long Change from the War on Terror and Long War. The War on Terror also targeted foreign publics as security threats, following the 9/11 attacks, but relied primarily on military tools to create the liberal countries which would thereafter pose not security risks. In 2006, Brid. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the head of the US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM), set out his vision of the Long War. The objective of the Long War was to maintain US pre-eminence by organising a global network of forces to deter would-be threats and rivals.
This time, the US-led network would not be primarily military. It would be composed of whatever was felt necessary to win, prevent and defeat threats, through soft power ‘hearts and minds’ campaigns and economic incentives as well as special forces security operations.
However, if the criteria of success in the War on Terror and the Long War was ‘whose story wins’, in Jo Nye’s terms, then the US and UK stories were not winning. The narrative of benign liberal interventionism was contradicted by the realities of civilian deaths and political instability in Iraq and Afghanistan and images from Abu Ghraib prison, all of which reinforced long-held narratives of victimisation and injustice among Muslim publics around the world. The lessons learnt from the mid-2000s were that actions must match words and the story had to be told in new ways, hence Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009 (though not followed by actions) and the notion that ordinary people can tell the story, do the diplomacy.
The principle of the Long Change is cultivating long term relationships between publics and between foreign publics and your state. The notion of long term relationships reflects the influence of marketing and branding experts on current public diplomacy practices. I form a long term attachment to a brand of shaving cream or a band if I trust they will always deliver the experience I enjoy, so why couldn’t an attachment to the Cool Britannia and 'our boys' overseas be created?
In theory, all this would be cheap. Creating online forums, and even spreading technology so people can connect, is much less expensive than traditional military tools. In our financial climate, the Long Change would still need to demonstrate value for money. Hence, there would be a need to devise measures of the ‘impact’ of public-to-public communication on, say, political attitudes and behaviour among foreign publics. At this stage of the Long Change, it is not clear what such metrics would be. No doubt political scientists, sociologists, psychologists and media evaluation firms will be asked to partner-up.
We might also ask, who or what is expected to change. At first glance, it appears that foreign publics are the targets of persuasion, based on the assumption that ‘our’ ideas would naturally win in any rational deliberation and the soft power theory that the attractiveness of ‘our’ values will prevail. This is risky and perhaps arrogant. In public-to-public communication, whether spontaneous or staged, perhaps it will be people in the UK or US whose attitudes will change if they begin deliberating international affairs with people in Pakistan or Syria. Other countries and other political groups around the world have their own narratives about the future of the international order, their own readings of history, their own interests to promote. They, too, want to enact long changes.
And how long is Long? The Long War was to be generational, a second Cold War to defeat a second evil ideology, that of Al-Qaeda. Yet the policies referred to in the War on Terror and Long War began before the 9/11 attacks and endure still, a set of approaches to counter-terrorism and issues like international development, immigration, finance and the regulation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) that became treated as matters of security rather than fields in their own right during the 1990s. To define an era in these broad terms may give focus to foreign policymakers but it is also to implicitly rationalize a set of policies as ‘fitting’ but whose appropriateness we may question.
The Long Change, should it come to pass, implicates social media - and us as users and citizens – directly into international affairs in ways that require very careful scrutiny.
Reporting War: Exploring the Way Forward
Media responsibilities in conflict situations
A Centre for Journalism and Communication Research Symposium
Bournemouth University
2 July 2010
Ben O'Loughlin has been invited to present to a workshop exploring how conflict reportage can be improved. Questions to be discussed include:
What can the analysis of the reporting of past conflicts tell us about future ones?
What role should ‘peace journalism’ have in the future media landscape?
In what ways does the training of journalists need to change?
How are citizen journalists challenging traditional practices of war reporting?
What are the ethical issues posed by social media, such as Twitter?
How might media professionals and academics help government, military and NGO institutions redefine the priorities of war reporting?
Ben will examine how news media stage public opinion and 'global conversations' in the run up to, and aftermath, of conflict situations. War and conflict reporting is a field full of criticisms and laments about the nature and quality of coverage, so constructive discussion about how to improve journalistic practices and the structural conditions journalism occurs within can only be a good thing.
Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Volume 7 Issue 2 & 3 2010
Kevin Wallsten's article is free to non-subscribers. Here's the lineup:
GUEST EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States — Michael Xenos
RESEARCH PAPERS
Congressional Candidates’ Use of YouTube in 2008: Its Frequency and Rationale — Girish J. “Jeff” Gulati and Christine B. Williams
The Sidetracked 2008 YouTube Senate Campaign — Robert J. Klotz
YouTube Politics: YouChoose and Leadership Rhetoric During the 2008 Election — Scott H. Church
Macaca Moments Reconsidered: Electoral Panopticon or Netroots Mobilization? — David Karpf
“Yes We Can”: How Online Viewership, Blog Discussion, Campaign Statements, and Mainstream Media Coverage Produced a Viral Video Phenomenon — Kevin Wallsten
Online Video “Friends” Social Networking: Overlapping Online Public Spheres in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election — Scott P. Robertson, Ravi K. Vatrapu, and Richard Medina
A New Opportunity for Democratic Engagement: The CNN-YouTube Presidential Candidate Debates — LaChrystal Ricke
REVIEW ESSAY
The Obamachine: Technopolitics 2.0 — Cheris A. Carpenter
WORKBENCH NOTE
Supporting Research Data Collection from YouTube with TubeKit — Chirag Shah
KEYNOTE LECTURE
Internet Research: The Question of Method: A Keynote Address from the YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States Conference — Richard Rogers
Polity today published War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War, by Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin.
War is diffused through a complex mesh of our everyday media. Paradoxically, this both facilitates and contains the presence and power of enemies near and far. The conventions of so-called traditional warfare have been splintered by the availability and connectivity of the principal locus of war today: the electronic and digital media. Hoskins and O’Loughlin identify and illuminate the conditions of what they term diffused war and the new challenges it raises for the actors who wage and counter warfare, for their agents and mechanisms of the new media and for mass publics.
This book offers an invaluable review of the key literature and presents a fresh approach to the understanding of the dynamic relationships between war and media. It will be welcomed by military and media practitioners as well as by students of war and media courses across media, communication and cultural studies, politics and international relations, sociology, journalism, and security studies.
Early reviews:
"In today′s new environment of an apparent never–ending war on terror, governments put together their media strategy with as much care as they construct their military one. This important book helps us understand the fragile relationship between war and media and examine it with a fresh and informed eye."
Phillip Knightley, author of The First Casualty, a history of war correspondents and propaganda
"The most singular feature of Hoskins and O′Loughlin′s′ achievement in their comprehensive sweep of scholarship in this multi–disciplinary field of war and media is its critical assessment of existing paradigms and theories, and the development of new ones. The work represents an important and ground–breaking milestone in the development of this relatively new specialism about one of the oldest and most important spheres of human experience."
Joseph Oliver Boyd–Barrett, Bowling Green State University
"Whether we approach the field of contemporary war and communications through preferred optics of ′control′, ′chaos′ or perhaps ′complexity′, this book challenges us all – and rightly so. It invites us to take seriously how today′s media ecology not only mediates contemporary wars, but becomes insinuated inside the course and conduct of warfare itself."
Simon Cottle, Cardiff University