Imperial War Museum trip - a student's view

Artist Jeremy Deller next to the car exhibitWalk into the foyer of the Imperial War Museum in London and you may be forgiven for thinking you were inside a ‘Modelzone’, a shop devoted to collectable war replicas. Littered across the atrium are countless examples of British military iconography. The Spitfire hangs valiantly from the rooftop, emblematic of the triumphalism often associated with military success and War in general. However, juxtaposed against these adulated instruments of warfare lies a burnt-out Volvo from Iraq. Simply entitled ‘5th March 2007’, the wreckage was salvaged from a car bomb explosion that took the lives of 38 people in a busy Baghdad market. Resembling little more than a contorted, rusting wreck, the car acts as a powerful image illustrating not only the literal implications of the Iraq conflict, but of War in general.

The museum offers a very different approach to mediatized forms of war reporting or dramatizations. No framing is in operation, no templates of previous conflicts are used, and exasperated Hollywood storylines do not feature. Instead the eclectic mix of exhibits offers scope for personal interpretation. The wreckage overrules the abstract notion of warfare we develop through the dissemination of news content. Often the constant barrage of images depicting violence and the subsequent unfathomable tally of casualties and fatalities make it difficult to comprehend the human cost of conflicts. Instead, here, the broader political relevance of warfare takes priority. Where the Imperial War Museum really excels is through the collections' ability to deconstruct this discourse and illustrate the realism of conflicts either through symbolism (e.g. 5th March 2007) or through moving personalised narratives, as witnessed within the Holocaust exhibit.

The effect of unmediated communication, directly from a person affected by a conflict to the information consumer, is extremely relevant in the New Political Communication field. Just as the private accounts of Holocaust survivors at the museum caused a much more emotive, tangible interpretation of the traumatic events of the Second World War, social media tools are increasingly connecting personal accounts of conflicts to individuals globally, as seen in recent events in Tunisia and Egypt. This poses an interesting question as to how these direct relationships will affect frame dominance during military action.

Thank you to the Imperial War Museum and Dr O’Loughlin for organising an engaging and informative tour.

James Dennis - @dennisdcfc

MSc New Political Communication 2010-11

Fight Back! A Reader on the Student Protests

It is clear that the student movement of last winter could well represent the genesis of a broader anti-cuts movement that poses not only serious questions to the coalition government and its policy agenda of budgetary austerity, but to how politics itself is conducted and contested in the UK over the coming years.

This movement, founded upon street protest, flashmobs and the utilization of online networks to organise, co-ordinate and disseminate its message(s) represents a shift away from a belief that the best approach to affecting policy outcomes is through the offline A to B march, lobbying and the parliamentary process. Indeed the favoured dictum of many protestors in the face of naysayers before the vote on the 9th of December was resolute and defiant,  "...what parliament can do, the streets can undo".

It is this mantra, manifest in the motifs and tactics of the movement, that seem to mark a return to non-parliamentary forms of political contestation in this country that are unprecedented in scale since before the Second World War and seem set to only grow stronger.

Fight Back! is an exploration of an important phase in the emergence of these dynamics. As Stuart White at Open Democracy put it "...Fight Back! is a 350 page reader that is both an initial, hasty record of the protests of November and December...as well as an argument about their originality. As such it has been welcomed from Andreas Whittam Smith in The Independent to Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing." It is as much a record and chronicle as it is analysis and critique.

Elsewhere White adds "...if indeed a new politics does emerge in response to the ultra-Thatcherism of the Coalition, the free downloading of Fight Back! may be seen as one of its starting points."

The text is keen to look at networked forms of protest and we are proud that it is publicly available as a free e-book and that the same values of open, participatory co-production through networks are maintained in how it is distributed. We are seeking to identify the genesis of new modes of political contestation and hope that the chosen model of co-production and distribution is equally innovative.

The launch of the hard copy of Fightback! will be on April 6th at Housmans bookstore where contributors including Nina Power, Anthony Barnett and Aaron Peters will speak.

Go to bit.ly/fightbackUK to download Fight Back! for free, read it on Kindle, join the debate and find out about forthcoming Fight Back! events. 

[Aaron Peters is a PhD student in the New Political Communication Unit. His research examines the internet, protest, and collective action.]

Libya and ‘the shadow of Iraq’

At the beginning of every war, journalists must quickly find a frame that makes the new violence intelligible to their audiences. It is often convenient to compare new events to old events, to see what looks similar and what looks different (journalists routinely follow the principle of comparison earlier articulated by Sesame Street). In 2006, during the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman employed the Vietnam template in an op-ed: ‘in time we’ll come to see the events unfolding — or rather, unraveling — in Iraq today as the real October surprise, because what we’re seeing there seems like the jihadist equivalent of the Tet offensive’ (here, subscription required). The White House rarely responds to op-ed columns. Perhaps alarmed by possible parallels – afraid of the “quagmire” analogy – it responded directly to Friedman’s claim (here).

Yesterday the BBC’s Andrew North wrote:

There was something familiar in the night-time television images of broken concrete and twisted metal from Col Muammar Gaddafi's Tripoli compound - the shadow of Iraq.

The largest military intervention in the Middle East since the Iraq war is now well under way, and to many the goal looks the same - regime change.

North suggests two things can be seen, the television images and ‘the goals’. There is an implied relationship between how things look and the motives behind the actions that lead to the images. The television images look like television images we saw in Iraq, so what might be happening might be what happened in Iraq, for the reasons that motivated those intervening in Iraq. What happened in Iraq could be a convenient ‘template’ for future events, and North is trying to fit Libya into that template. North adds weight to his argument by claiming that the goals look the same ‘to many’. ‘Many’ is a nebulous collective, but the many are watching these images and perhaps the many are thinking what North is thinking. He tries to alert readers to ways in which history is repeating itself:

Twelve years of no-fly zones and sanctions could not dislodge Saddam Hussein - and in the meantime it was the Iraqi people who bore the cost.

The choice of templates is political, not just a matter of convenience. North is using the 2003 Iraq War template to make a point. He could have used other templates to make other points. The comparison may be valid, and such speculation may serve to provoke readers into more serious thought about what is happening in Libya. But clearly, at this moment, there is space for journalists to offer a range of frames and North has chosen to frame Libya as falling under ‘the shadow of Iraq’, a metaphor for the cost that fell on Iraqi people. North has used a journalistic technique to warn political leaders against a course of action. Let’s see whether this template gains traction, as Thomas Friedman’s did in 2006.

MSc New Political Communication for 2011 entry

For those seeking to understand the interplay of digital new media and communication technologies, political institutions, behaviour and public policy, with emphases on citizen engagement, mobilization, campaigning, and the role of new media in the global system.

The MSc, which has run since 2007, combines specialisation in the area of New Political Communication with the flexibility to choose from a wide range of optional courses. A 10–12000 word supervised research dissertation is written over the summer. Teaching is conducted in small group seminars, supplemented by individual tuition for the dissertation.

The MSc New Political Communication is accredited by the UK ESRC on a 1+3 basis as part of the South East Doctoral Training Consortium.

For further information and to apply online visit the MSc New Political Communication page.

Hoskins & O'Loughlin: new Journalism article on gatekeeping and translation

A new article by Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin has been published in Journalism, entitled ‘Remediating jihad for western news audiences: The renewal of gatekeeping?’ The article is part of a special issue focusing on transcultural journalism and the politics of translation. Many thanks to Marie Gillespie and Gerd Baumann for putting the volume together and all the reviewers for helpful feedback on the article.

Click here to access the article (subscription required). The abstract is below.

Digitization creates an ontological challenge to broadcast-era metaphors (gate, channel, flow), not least to understandings of who news gatekeepers are, where gates lie, the presumed audience, community or culture gatekeeping is done for, and what it means to gatekeep. Analysing how jihadist speeches by bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and others are translated and remediated from their original websites, languages and contexts by various intermediaries and by western mainstream news, including the BBC, illuminates an apparently simple, settled gatekeeping model that produces systematic patterns of translation, selection and omission. Western news creates an obstacle to understanding why such texts may be appealing to some audiences by ignoring intermediaries such as terrorism-monitoring sites, Arabic media, and jihadist websites’ own self-monitoring services, delimiting a ‘mainstream’ understanding. A focus on multilingual, multiplatform gatekeeping demonstrates how loci and forms of power and authority are changing in the ‘connective turn’, to which media practitioners and scholars must adapt.

A new article by Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin has been published in Journalism, entitled ‘Remediating jihad for western news audiences: The renewal of gatekeeping?’ The article is part of a special issue focusing on transcultural journalism and the politics of translation. Many thanks to Marie Gillespie and Gerd Baumann for putting the volume together and all the reviewers for helpful feedback on the article.

 

Click here to access the article (subscription required). The abstract is below.

Digitization creates an ontological challenge to broadcast-era metaphors (gate, channel, flow), not least to understandings of who news gatekeepers are, where gates lie, the presumed audience, community or culture gatekeeping is done for, and what it means to gatekeep. Analysing how jihadist speeches by bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and others are translated and remediated from their original websites, languages and contexts by various intermediaries and by western mainstream news, including the BBC, illuminates an apparently simple, settled gatekeeping model that produces systematic patterns of translation, selection and omission. Western news creates an obstacle to understanding why such texts may be appealing to some audiences by ignoring intermediaries such as terrorism-monitoring sites, Arabic media, and jihadist websites’ own self-monitoring services, delimiting a ‘mainstream’ understanding. A focus on multilingual, multiplatform gatekeeping demonstrates how loci and forms of power and authority are changing in the ‘connective turn’, to which media practitioners and scholars must adapt.



New MSc programme, Transnational Security Studies

A new MSc programme in Transnational Security Studies has been launched by the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. The one-year MSc will run from September 2011.

The programme includes the course Media, War & Conflict as well as several options courses covering issues of global security and political communication.

For further details, including how to apply, see: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/politics-and-IR/News-and-Events/New-MSc-Programme.html

New journal article by Andrew Chadwick: "Explaining the Failure of an Online Citizen Engagement Initiative: The Role of Internal Institutional Variables"

Andrew Chadwick (2011) “Explaining the Failure of an Online Citizen Engagement Initiative: The Role of Internal Institutional Variables” Journal of Information Technology and Politics 8 (1): 21-40.

Abstract
This article presents an exploratory case study based on fieldwork consisting of in-depth, semistructured interviews and group discussions with administrative, legal, political, and technology staff involved in an online citizen engagement initiative in “TechCounty,” a pseudonymous U.S. local government authority operating in one of the most favorable sociodemographic and technological contexts imaginable. In contrast with many of the dominant approaches in the literature, the article reveals how a rich, complex, and sometimes surprising array of internal institutional variables explains the initiative’s failure. The article highlights the fragile and uncertain adoption of online engagement by public organizations and the significance of this study’s method for building theory and guiding future research.

Keywords: Citizen engagement; democracy; e-democracy; governance; Internet; online consultation; online forums; organizations; public services.

Link.

Email me or direct message me on Twitter if you would like a free PDF copy of this journal article.

India’s soft power is unclear

India has soft power to the extent that its values, its way of managing its affairs and its vision for the international system are so attractive to other nations that the latter start doing what India wants without India having to use the sticks and carrots of traditional international relations. By achieving relatively stable democracy in such a geographically large and religiously diverse polity, for instance, India may inspire others to emulate its political institutions. Nevertheless, to understand Indian soft power, we must first ask how others see India. Indian soft power is a function of others’ perceptions of India. Hence it was a surprise that a conference held in London this week, India as a Soft Power, concentrated almost exclusively on India itself.

It was certainly interesting to hear what Shashi Tharoor and other leading Indian political and cultural figures think about what story India should tell the world. As a nuclear power with tricky relations to regional neighbours like China and Pakistan, how India balances its use of military and economic resources against the softer methods of diplomacy or intangible cultural “influence” is important, both for local problems (Burma, Afghanistan) and the broader transition this century to a multipolar or non-polar order. How the Indian story is told through global media around breaking events and crises may also contain lessons for other states about controlling or letting go of “the message”. All governments try to manage opinion; can India avoid the sin of being seen to do so? 

But the success of India’s story depends on others. Indian soft power becomes significant if it has effects on the behaviour of other states or on public opinion towards India outside its borders. Have there been any effects or signs of effects? How would those in the Indian government be able to tell? First, we need to examine the foreign policy decisions of those India is trying to affect. Is there any evidence that China, the EU or the US have modified their actions because they have bought into an Indian narrative? Second, we need to see whether India’s story is indeed viewed positively. State departments in the US, UK and Canada have tools to measure the impact of their public diplomacy initiatives using a variety of digital, survey and face-to-face methods. While embryonic, these tools allow governments to track public responses around the world to its statements at summits, treaty negotiations and so on. This makes it possible to begin to evaluate not just whether “other people like us” but also why. If India is spending money on projecting its soft power, we might expect the Indian government to have a way to find out whether its efforts are having any impact.

The popularity outside India of Bollywood movies, Tata cars or Indian IT services does not mean India’s rivals will alter their foreign policies to align more closely with Indian strategic interests. The export of Coca-Cola and HBO box sets has not created US allies or persuaded non-US publics of the virtues of US foreign policy. To realise its interests, India will have to upset others at some point, and it will have to use at least the threat of hard power. And if India is to become a leading power, it will face the same dilemmas others face. Should it use soft power to put an attractive face on the use of hard power? Can its actions match its positive narrative or, as with every other leading power, will India eventually be accused of hypocrisy? Either way, India will need to find a way to understand how it is perceived. Until then, little certain will be known about Indian soft power. 

2011-02-17 Twenty20 Cricket as a Media Event? One day workshop

Nick Anstead (LSE) and Ben O’Loughlin will tomorrow present at an event, Twenty20 and the Future of Cricket at Royal Holloway, University of London. Their paper, entitled, ‘Media, identity, and the co-escalation of political and cricket controversies’, examines how media framing of Twenty20 cricket provides a framework for players, administrators and audiences to think through the political controversies associated with two shifts in balances of power. The first shift is one of format, from test match cricket to T20 as ‘the future of cricket’. The second is one of power, as the game’s administration gravitates from England and Australia to the emerging geopolitical power that is India. Based on analysis of Indian, UK and Australian media, they ask whether each nation’s media frame T20 as a different kind of media event (in Dayan and Katz’s terms) – of potential sporting contest, political conquest, or tradition-affirming coronation – and how this impedes or enables a sense of shared destiny among cricket-playing nations.

With the Cricket World Cup beginning in India on Saturday, this should be a lively and timely discussion of globalisation, sport and media, with participants from the BBC, Cricinfo and the International Herald Tribune amongst others. Thanks to Prof. Chris Rumford for organising the event.