The myth of success: the emergence and maintenance of a specialized gang unit in Stockholm,Sweden

Street gangs and organized crime groups pose a unique challenge to police departments across the globe. Given their penchant for public displays of affiliation through well-recognized signs and symbols, their presence is often associated with media attention and public scrutiny, which threatens the legitimacy of the police and creates added pressure to generate a specific and public response to the threat these groups pose. The current study documents how the Stockholm County, Sweden, police developed and maintained an anti-gang operation in response to an emerging gang problem. While police officials labeled the anti-gang initiative a success in the news media, analyses of prosecution statistics and internal police documents demonstrate a less than ideal effect of this operation. Potential reasons for the discrepancy in public pronouncements of programmatic success relative to evaluation of official data are discussed.     

媒介素养教育：高校文化建设的新举措

在数字时代，媒介文化严重浸染着高校文化，因而媒介素养成为信息社会对大学生素质提出的新要求，加强媒介素养教育、推进高校文化建设势在，必行。开展媒介素质教育，提升高校文化建设水平，是建设高校文化的重要工作，将成为当代高校文化发展新的生长点。     

Has Television Personalized Voting Behavior?

Scholars and political observers have suggested that television has “personalized” voting behavior in American presidential elections by encouraging citizens to cast ballots on the basis of candidate image and personality. Though an oft-heard assertion, little solid evidence exists that this is true, and the reinvigoration of partisanship and the persistence of ideological conflict suggest personalization may be less pervasive than supposed. In this paper, I use National Election Studies data to examine whether voters are more concerned with candidates’ personal characteristics now than they were at the outset of the television era. I find, however, that voters are no more likely today to mention candidate personality as a reason for their vote choice than they were in the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, while personality affects voting behavior, its influence on candidate choice is not significantly larger than it was a half-century ago. The results are not contingent on exposure to television or political awareness and are insensitive to different measures of perceptions of candidate image. The findings are consistent with the resurgence of partisan voting in American elections and suggest that some concerns about TV’s effects on political judgment are exaggerated.

Fetishised data: counterterrorism,drone warfare and pilot testimony

Drones now comprise a major part of our culture – primarily as a consequence of the so-called War on Terror and the rise in violent extremism. Yet the available data on what it means to operate a drone (where this can influence wider perceptions on the appropriateness and effectiveness of remote warfare as an act of counterterrorism) is highly contradictory. This article explores a new source of data capable of shedding light on this contested issue: online interviews with current and former pilots discussing their personal experiences. Access to this testimony has the potential to influence cultural understandings of remote warfare, specifically where these stories highlight the severe psychological difficulties pilots can be subject to. In analysing this new data, however, the article questions whether the media typically employed to express pilot testimony comprises an appropriate space in which to publicise and engage with this evidence. It argues that this presentation has caused these personal accounts to become fetishised – to the extent this undermines the cultural, political, and informative value of the data and even reinforces the narratives of remote warfare this testimony frequently seeks to reverse.     

‘Utterly Disgraceful’: Social Media and the Workplace

Social media use by Australian public servants has given rise to questions pertaining to their political rights, impartiality and privacy outside of work. Drawing on the recent case Starr v Department of Human Services these issues are explored. The findings suggest that social media use has heightened tensions around public servant's rights to comment on issues of the day, and its use by employees both inside and beyond the workplace remains contested terrain.     

Social media as semiotic technology and social practice: the case of ResearchGate’s design and its potential to transform social practice

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the need for critical approaches to social media by bridging the focus on language and other semiotic resources that characterises discourse studies with the broader perspective on social media as social, cultural, economic and technological constructs that dominates media and cultural studies. Specifically, we propose a model for analysing how social media as semiotic technologies, that is, technologies designed to enable and constrain meaning-making, may transform social practices. By incorporating Van Leeuwen’s [2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Analysis. London: Oxford University Press] framework for the critical analysis of discourse and social practice, the model extends the social semiotic approach developed in recent critical multimodal studies of software such as PowerPoint to social media, which function primarily to provide platforms for and commodify social practices, rather than to offer rich arrays of semiotic resources for creating multimodal texts and artefacts. Using the academic social network site ResearchGate and the practice of research peer review, we illustrate the model’s capacity to account for the ways the design of social media platforms – through the semiotic resources they make available and the ways these are presented – enables and constrains their users’ ability to perform key social practices and has the potential to transform these practices.     

The interplay of (semiotic) technologies and genre: the case of the selfie

ABSTRACT

The selfie is one of the most widely publicized, criticized, and debated visual phenomena of our time. However, formulating a definition of the selfie is not straightforward, as visual clues – be they representational or compositional – alone are not sufficient for identification. Recognizing an image as a selfie, rather than a portrait, often requires viewers to interpret the image in relation to the technological and sociocutural context in which the photo was taken and shared. In this paper, we consider the technological conditions that have shaped the evolution of the selfie as a visual genre. Central to our discussion is the premise that the selfie is not simply a genre for self-representation, but means of generating various perspectives: that of the selfie maker, the represented visual participant, and the viewer identification. This unique perspective-generating affordance of the selfie is both facilitated and constrained by the various technologies involved in selfie practices. On the one hand, the technological and physical constraints of the smart phone camera give rise to a specific form of “distorted” look which makes certain types of selfie possible. On the other hand, social media platforms facilitate the sharing of selfies, which results in increasingly stylized and creative ways in which perspectives of the self can be represented, negotiated, and, in the case of selfies manipulated via apps, augmented.     

Social Media and the Paradox of Fear: An Exploratory Study of Political Relationship Marketing Within South Wales

This paper explores the key challenges of social media use by politicians in relation to political relationship marketing. Utilising a case study of the online footprint left by Welsh politicians and their attitude towards social media based on three business based rationales – engagement, level of control, and return on investment – the paper offers an expanded conception of the perceptions and fears influencing the use of social media by politicians in terms of political relationship marketing. The article concludes with some critical thoughts regarding the understanding of relationship marketing principles by politicians.     

The Mix of Media Use Matters: Investigating the Effects of Individual News Repertoires on Offline and Online Political Participation

In contemporary high-choice media environments, people increasingly mix and combine their use of various news media into personal news repertoires. Despite this, there is still limited research on how people compose their individual news repertoires and the effects of these news repertoires. To address this and further our understanding of how media use influences political participation, this study investigates (a) how people combine the use of offline and online media into personal news repertoires and (b) the effects of different news repertoires on both offline and online political participation. Based on a two-wave panel study covering the 2014 Swedish national election, this study identifies five news repertoires, labeled minimalists, public news consumers, local news consumers, social media news consumers, and popular online news consumers. Among other things, the results show that social media news consumers are more likely to participate in politics both offline and online.     

Counter-mythologising “media freedom”: including the audience in media freedom discourses and a new normative position for the global south

This article argues for a conscious counter-mythologisation of the popularly utilised term “media freedom” within media political and policy discourses. It further argues for a diversion from understanding this term to refer exclusively to the sphere of media production involving the ability or freedoms of media producers to do their work without hindrances to their independence – whether these stem from state actors, media owners or other external forces. The article contends that a free media should theoretically, and in addition, be considered from the perspective of the audience(s) and its respective prospects of access and accessibility to the entirety of the media landscape. Since challenges of meaningful access and accessibility to media communications persist in much of the Global South, the article concludes by suggesting a newly theorised normative approach to the role of the media in a democracy, which is in keeping with socio-political conditions in historically “Othered” regions of the world. Utilising the example of a counter-mythologisation of media freedom, and adopting an audience-centred approach, the article additionally contends that any attempt at formulating new media theory ought to be contextualised within the global crisis of inequality in order for it to be relevant to the majority audience.