In the broadest sense my research centres on the role of communication in collective decision-making, justice and social coordination: the way deliberative communication can improve collective decisions, and the central function of public communication in the coordination of collective actions (for instance in the context of the Euro crisis).
I run the Euro Crisis in the Press research project at the LSE.
Asking whether social media can plausibly facilitate a European public sphere, this article provi... more Asking whether social media can plausibly facilitate a European public sphere, this article provides the first operationalization and empirical examination of Europeanization of social media communications. It maps the geospatial structure of Twitter activity around Greece’s 2015 bailout negotiations. We find that Twitter activity showed clear signs of Europeanization. Twitter users across Europe tweeted about the bailout negotiations and coalesced around shared grievances. Furthermore, Twitter activity was remarkably transnational in orientation, as users interacted more often with users in other European Union (EU) countries than with domestic ones. As such, social media allowed users to communicate with one another unencumbered by national boundaries, to bring into existence an ad hoc, issue-based European public sphere.
Max Hänska’s book Communication Against Domination: Ideas of Justice from the Printing Press to A... more Max Hänska’s book Communication Against Domination: Ideas of Justice from the Printing Press to Algorithmic Media is devoted to bridging the gap between normative questions of justice and ‘how we ought to communicate with each other’ and empirical research into communication and information technology (blurb). It includes, on the one hand, philosophical analysis into the place of normativity in social science research by offering a normative analysis framework, and on the other hand, an attempt to apply this framework to what the author labels as three ‘technological epochs’ – ‘broadcast communication, the Internet and networked communications, and the increasing integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies into our communication systems’ (blurb). To this aim, the book is split into two main sections. Section I, ‘An Introduction to Normative Analysis’, ‘examines metatheoretical issues to provide a framework for normative analysis’ (p. 11). It consists of four chapters with self-explanatory titles: ‘Normativity, or what we mean when we say ought’, ‘Can the facts tell us what ought to be?’, ‘Why principles are fact-invariant?’ and ‘Communications against domination’. Section II, ‘Technological Transformation of the Normative’, applies this framework for normative analysis to three different technological epochs: ’That of broadcast communication, the Internet and networked communications, and the increasing integration of AI technologies into our communications systems’ (p. 11). It comprises three chapters on print against domination; platforms and networked non-domination; and machine intelligence and discursive control. Some of the questions the author tackles are:
Through the examination of recent developments in Iraq, Brazil and China, this paper explores the... more Through the examination of recent developments in Iraq, Brazil and China, this paper explores the role of public communication in both a) generating, corralling, and buttressing political legitimacy, and b) negotiating, demarcating, and reproducing collective identities. The transformation of Iraq's public sphere after the fall of the Ba'ath regime saw it shift from a tightly controlled and unified communication space to unencumbered yet fragmented spheres split along ethno-sectarian lines, buttressing sectarian politics and identities. The emergence of subaltern publics in Brazil's favelas empowered residents to express public dissent, assert their voice, and develop pride in their community. Chinese efforts to control online public discourse provide the government with ways of managing its perceived legitimacy and foster patriotic fellowship online. Legitimation and the affirmation of identity interact and support one another in public discourse, as we illustrate.
Through the examination of recent developments in Iraq, Brazil and China, this paper explores the... more Through the examination of recent developments in Iraq, Brazil and China, this paper explores the role of public communication in a) generating, corralling, and buttressing political legitimacy, and b) negotiating, demarcating, and reproducing collective identities. The transformation of Iraq’s public sphere after the fall of the Ba’ath regime saw it shift from a tightly controlled and unified communication space to unencumbered yet fragmented spheres split along ethno-sectarian lines, buttressing sectarian politics and identities. The emergence of subaltern publics in Brazil’s favelas empowered residents to express public dissent, assert their voice, and develop pride in their community. Chinese efforts to control online public discourse provide the government with ways of managing its perceived legitimacy and foster patriotic fellowship online. Legitimation and the affirmation of identity interact and support one another in public discourse, as we illustrate.
ARTECH: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts, 2019
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and art share a common past, where artists employed AI algorithms to... more Artificial Intelligence (AI) and art share a common past, where artists employed AI algorithms to generate art. This paper explores the early days of AI-generated images, using Harold Cohen's AARON software as a paradigm of symbolic AI creative systems, and contextualizes the use of modern neural network technologies to create visual artworks. It discusses the methodologies and strategies used to make art using AI in the 1960s, comparing them to new AI algorithms. The discussion focuses on GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence) and GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) as the main technologies used in distinct historical periods to generate images. Vilém Flusser's conception of technical images provides a conceptual framework for examining the qualities and attributes of AI-generated images.
Asking whether social media can plausibly facilitate a European public sphere, this article provi... more Asking whether social media can plausibly facilitate a European public sphere, this article provides the first operationalization and empirical examination of Europeanization of social media communications. It maps the geospatial structure of Twitter activity around Greece’s 2015 bailout negotiations. We find that Twitter activity showed clear signs of Europeanization. Twitter users across Europe tweeted about the bailout negotiations and coalesced around shared grievances. Furthermore, Twitter activity was remarkably transnational in orientation, as users interacted more often with users in other European Union (EU) countries than with domestic ones. As such, social media allowed users to communicate with one another unencumbered by national boundaries, to bring into existence an ad hoc, issue-based European public sphere.
Asking whether social media can plausibly facilitate a European public sphere, this article provi... more Asking whether social media can plausibly facilitate a European public sphere, this article provides the first operationalization and empirical examination of Europeanization of social media communications. It maps the geospatial structure of Twitter activity around Greece’s 2015 bailout negotiations. We find that Twitter activity showed clear signs of Europeanization. Twitter users across Europe tweeted about the bailout negotiations and coalesced around shared grievances. Furthermore, Twitter activity was remarkably transnational in orientation, as users interacted more often with users in other European Union (EU) countries than with domestic ones. As such, social media allowed users to communicate with one another unencumbered by national boundaries, to bring into existence an ad hoc, issue-based European public sphere.
Communicative Figurations Working Paper Series, 2019
The ways in which media and communications can enhance and diminish the common good have long att... more The ways in which media and communications can enhance and diminish the common good have long attracted scholarly attention, yet how public communication should be structured, and how normative and empirical perspectives intertwine, often remains unclear. This essay argues that the dominant procedural account of public communication provides a useful framework for delineating a non-dichotomous distinction between the facts and norms of public communication, by showing us how efforts to avoid substantive normative commitments fail, and when and why different guiding values may be incommensurable and/or unworkable. To remain conceptually fruitful, empirically productive and practically useful, the study of media and communications demands this double-focus. (1) It requires clarity about the values that frame research, the norms that structure public communication, and the ideals that guide the interpretation of empirical results. (2) On the other hand, norms of public communication will never hit the road of communicative practice if they fail to account for the socio-political context within which social agents access information, discuss and deliberate, and indeed of our fast-changing communication technologies.
In the social sciences, we often face normative questions, not least because many areas of inquir... more In the social sciences, we often face normative questions, not least because many areas of inquiry intersect with public policy. Understanding and explaining media and communications is one task, deciding how communication systems should be organized quite another, but normative analysis receives scant attention. This article explores normative analysis: what is involved in answering questions about justice and communication, about how sociopolitical and indeed communicative arrangements ought to be organized.
Much has been written about transnational public spheres, though our understanding of their shape... more Much has been written about transnational public spheres, though our understanding of their shape and nature remains limited. Drawing on three alternative conceptions of newswork as public communication, this paper explores the role of international journalists in shaping transnational publics. Based on a series of original interviews, it asks how journalists are oriented in their newswork (e.g. are they cosmopolitan or parochial in their orientation), and how they 'imagine' the public. It finds that interviewees imagine a polycentric transnational public, and variously frame their work as giving voice to those affected by an issue (imagining the public as a cosmopolitan community of fate), performing and reaffirming a particular kind of identity and belonging (imagining the public as a nation), or pursuing audiences wherever they may be (imagining the public as the de facto audience).
Orient: German Journal for Politics, Economics and Culture of the Middle East, 2016
Although social media was not insignificant, we need to take a wider view examining the interac- ... more Although social media was not insignificant, we need to take a wider view examining the interac- tion between interpersonal communication, social media, and satellite TV to understand how the Arab Spring was documented and witnessed by local and global audiences, and how the protests were mobilised. Social media was a clearly important catalyst for the uprisings, but it may also ex- plain why the Arab Spring failed in the medium-term: Multimedia and multi-platform communica- tion environments, which facilitated the rapid diffusion of information, are good at supporting the kind of loose coordination necessary for defenestrating one system of authority. But they are not (yet) good at supporting the kind of deep and sustained coordination that designing and support- ing new political authority requires.
A plethora of media platforms were involved in communicating recent protests across the Middle Ea... more A plethora of media platforms were involved in communicating recent protests across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), though it remains unclear exactly how these interacted. This qualitative article, based primarily on interviews with British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) newsworkers, explores the networked linkages between social and broadcast media, asking how social media content moved into broadcast news, which standards shaped the interface between the two and how these standards were defined. It finds that a set of normative and practical standards caused significant friction at the interface, which is reduced as content assimilates these standards. Standards are shaped mainly in response to broadcast imperatives, but also through the mainstreaming of social media and more efficacious and practicable networked communicative practices, indicating how power may shift in the networked age. Responding to the optimistic view that networked multimedia environments enable unencumbered communication, it argues that the scope and limits of communicative affordances depend on these standards.
The 2009 protests in Iran and the 2011 Arab uprisings took place in complex and fast evolving med... more The 2009 protests in Iran and the 2011 Arab uprisings took place in complex and fast evolving media ecologies. The BBC's Persian and Arabic language services, which reach millions, drew heavily on content created by ordinary citizens to cover events. This paper traces the flow of this content through the news process to examine how collaboration between newsrooms and citizen journalists changed from 2009 to 2011. The article argues that participation in the news process hinges on the congruence between newsroom practices, and the practices of those producing content on the streets. Such congruence requires mutual knowledge of broadcasting requirements. It finds that by 2011 journalists felt more comfortable and effective integrating user-generated content (UGC) into their news output. Importantly, UGC creators appear to have taken on board the broadcaster's editorial requirements, making them savvier content creators.
Nowadays, social media are ubiquitous, offering many opportunities for people to share and access... more Nowadays, social media are ubiquitous, offering many opportunities for people to share and access information, to create and distribute content, and to interact with more traditional media. For news organisations the social web has become an important platform for distributing content as well as a space where reporting and newsgathering takes place. This interview, with two news professionals who work exclusively on bringing social media content to broadcast news, explores some of the challenges and opportunities facing journalism as it moves into the digital age.
Drawing on interview data from research with Persian language international broadcasters (IBs), t... more Drawing on interview data from research with Persian language international broadcasters (IBs), this paper asks which ethical ideologies journalists draw on when their work is dislocated between contexts. IBs are both spatially displaced from, and often operate within a journalism culture that is extraneous to the traditions of their audiences. Persian language IBs offer a salient example. Here, the pertinent question about differences in journalism culture and ethical ideology across contexts becomes one about dislocation between contexts. The challenges of dislocation are manifestations of the more general challenge of moving between universal principles and particularistic conditions. At stake are questions about the kind of ethical ideology that should inform journalism. Interpreting conversations with journalists, the analysis follows three directions of ethical ideologies, understood as rationales of journalistic decisions, in the newswork of IBs’ – a) relativist considerations of contextual particularities, b) means-oriented considerations of principles, and c) ends-oriented considerations of consequences. It finds all three orientations present within the newswork of Persian language IBs, suggesting that this diversity can be understood as a product of dislocation. Further, the paper argues that diversity in ethical ideologies challenges assumptions of internal coherence, raising the question whether an emphasis on coherence focuses attention on a false dichotomous choice between universal and particular. As a way forward this paper suggests a distinction between ethical ideologies as normative and pragmatic resources, and that a pragmatic focus has advantages when it comes to supplying global journalists with the resources most useful to doing their work.
Public communication’s normative task is to support the legitimacy of collective decisions. Theor... more Public communication’s normative task is to support the legitimacy of collective decisions. Theoretically, two challenges in particular have proved persistent: (1) defining the purpose of public communication under conditions of pluralism, and (2) defining the composition of the public sphere as communication becomes increasingly transnational. It is argued that shared definitions of these, among actors participating in public communication, are prerequisites for the democratic legitimacy of collective decisions. Achieving this is difficult, particularly because it remains unclear how practices of public communication relate to ideals such as participation, inclusion and public reason. In part these difficulties can be attributed to a lack of congruence between the way political theory and empirical social research frame questions about the public sphere.
To deepen understanding of these challenges, this study asks how purpose and composition are defined in Persian-language transnational newswork. It also asks whether communicating actors enjoy any meaningful definitional agency. The study is designed to align these empirical results with normative questions about public communication so that they speak more fully to one another. An interview-based qualitative study of the way newsworkers who engage in transnational Persian broadcasting define the public sphere provides the setting for this research. Newsworkers are examined because, it is argued, they enjoy a privileged kind of agency over processes of public communication and play an important role in the public sphere.
The results show that transnational newsworkers enjoy some definitional agency, and that both purpose and composition find multiple, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes incommensurable and contradictory definitions in newswork. Newsworkers define a polymorphous public sphere characterised by a plurality of communicative purposes and constituted of a multiplicity of groups with different political allegiances. Some aspects of their definitions resonate with deliberative or agonistic conceptions of the public sphere. Despite these resonances, there are some contradictions between the requirements normative theory makes for a unified single-purpose public sphere and the multiplicity of purposes and criteria for inclusion found in practices of public communication. It is argued that these can be addressed by reducing the fact/value dichotomy and by shifting attention from compositional questions about the public sphere to a greater emphasis on the efficacy of public communication.
This thesis contributes to the analysis of transnational and pluralistic public spheres. Moreover, based on both conceptual and empirical analysis, it examines how practices of public communication relate to ideals of the public sphere, an issue that is neglected in the literature.
Asking whether social media can plausibly facilitate a European public sphere, this article provi... more Asking whether social media can plausibly facilitate a European public sphere, this article provides the first operationalization and empirical examination of Europeanization of social media communications. It maps the geospatial structure of Twitter activity around Greece’s 2015 bailout negotiations. We find that Twitter activity showed clear signs of Europeanization. Twitter users across Europe tweeted about the bailout negotiations and coalesced around shared grievances. Furthermore, Twitter activity was remarkably transnational in orientation, as users interacted more often with users in other European Union (EU) countries than with domestic ones. As such, social media allowed users to communicate with one another unencumbered by national boundaries, to bring into existence an ad hoc, issue-based European public sphere.
Max Hänska’s book Communication Against Domination: Ideas of Justice from the Printing Press to A... more Max Hänska’s book Communication Against Domination: Ideas of Justice from the Printing Press to Algorithmic Media is devoted to bridging the gap between normative questions of justice and ‘how we ought to communicate with each other’ and empirical research into communication and information technology (blurb). It includes, on the one hand, philosophical analysis into the place of normativity in social science research by offering a normative analysis framework, and on the other hand, an attempt to apply this framework to what the author labels as three ‘technological epochs’ – ‘broadcast communication, the Internet and networked communications, and the increasing integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies into our communication systems’ (blurb). To this aim, the book is split into two main sections. Section I, ‘An Introduction to Normative Analysis’, ‘examines metatheoretical issues to provide a framework for normative analysis’ (p. 11). It consists of four chapters with self-explanatory titles: ‘Normativity, or what we mean when we say ought’, ‘Can the facts tell us what ought to be?’, ‘Why principles are fact-invariant?’ and ‘Communications against domination’. Section II, ‘Technological Transformation of the Normative’, applies this framework for normative analysis to three different technological epochs: ’That of broadcast communication, the Internet and networked communications, and the increasing integration of AI technologies into our communications systems’ (p. 11). It comprises three chapters on print against domination; platforms and networked non-domination; and machine intelligence and discursive control. Some of the questions the author tackles are:
Through the examination of recent developments in Iraq, Brazil and China, this paper explores the... more Through the examination of recent developments in Iraq, Brazil and China, this paper explores the role of public communication in both a) generating, corralling, and buttressing political legitimacy, and b) negotiating, demarcating, and reproducing collective identities. The transformation of Iraq's public sphere after the fall of the Ba'ath regime saw it shift from a tightly controlled and unified communication space to unencumbered yet fragmented spheres split along ethno-sectarian lines, buttressing sectarian politics and identities. The emergence of subaltern publics in Brazil's favelas empowered residents to express public dissent, assert their voice, and develop pride in their community. Chinese efforts to control online public discourse provide the government with ways of managing its perceived legitimacy and foster patriotic fellowship online. Legitimation and the affirmation of identity interact and support one another in public discourse, as we illustrate.
Through the examination of recent developments in Iraq, Brazil and China, this paper explores the... more Through the examination of recent developments in Iraq, Brazil and China, this paper explores the role of public communication in a) generating, corralling, and buttressing political legitimacy, and b) negotiating, demarcating, and reproducing collective identities. The transformation of Iraq’s public sphere after the fall of the Ba’ath regime saw it shift from a tightly controlled and unified communication space to unencumbered yet fragmented spheres split along ethno-sectarian lines, buttressing sectarian politics and identities. The emergence of subaltern publics in Brazil’s favelas empowered residents to express public dissent, assert their voice, and develop pride in their community. Chinese efforts to control online public discourse provide the government with ways of managing its perceived legitimacy and foster patriotic fellowship online. Legitimation and the affirmation of identity interact and support one another in public discourse, as we illustrate.
ARTECH: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts, 2019
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and art share a common past, where artists employed AI algorithms to... more Artificial Intelligence (AI) and art share a common past, where artists employed AI algorithms to generate art. This paper explores the early days of AI-generated images, using Harold Cohen's AARON software as a paradigm of symbolic AI creative systems, and contextualizes the use of modern neural network technologies to create visual artworks. It discusses the methodologies and strategies used to make art using AI in the 1960s, comparing them to new AI algorithms. The discussion focuses on GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence) and GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) as the main technologies used in distinct historical periods to generate images. Vilém Flusser's conception of technical images provides a conceptual framework for examining the qualities and attributes of AI-generated images.
Asking whether social media can plausibly facilitate a European public sphere, this article provi... more Asking whether social media can plausibly facilitate a European public sphere, this article provides the first operationalization and empirical examination of Europeanization of social media communications. It maps the geospatial structure of Twitter activity around Greece’s 2015 bailout negotiations. We find that Twitter activity showed clear signs of Europeanization. Twitter users across Europe tweeted about the bailout negotiations and coalesced around shared grievances. Furthermore, Twitter activity was remarkably transnational in orientation, as users interacted more often with users in other European Union (EU) countries than with domestic ones. As such, social media allowed users to communicate with one another unencumbered by national boundaries, to bring into existence an ad hoc, issue-based European public sphere.
Asking whether social media can plausibly facilitate a European public sphere, this article provi... more Asking whether social media can plausibly facilitate a European public sphere, this article provides the first operationalization and empirical examination of Europeanization of social media communications. It maps the geospatial structure of Twitter activity around Greece’s 2015 bailout negotiations. We find that Twitter activity showed clear signs of Europeanization. Twitter users across Europe tweeted about the bailout negotiations and coalesced around shared grievances. Furthermore, Twitter activity was remarkably transnational in orientation, as users interacted more often with users in other European Union (EU) countries than with domestic ones. As such, social media allowed users to communicate with one another unencumbered by national boundaries, to bring into existence an ad hoc, issue-based European public sphere.
Communicative Figurations Working Paper Series, 2019
The ways in which media and communications can enhance and diminish the common good have long att... more The ways in which media and communications can enhance and diminish the common good have long attracted scholarly attention, yet how public communication should be structured, and how normative and empirical perspectives intertwine, often remains unclear. This essay argues that the dominant procedural account of public communication provides a useful framework for delineating a non-dichotomous distinction between the facts and norms of public communication, by showing us how efforts to avoid substantive normative commitments fail, and when and why different guiding values may be incommensurable and/or unworkable. To remain conceptually fruitful, empirically productive and practically useful, the study of media and communications demands this double-focus. (1) It requires clarity about the values that frame research, the norms that structure public communication, and the ideals that guide the interpretation of empirical results. (2) On the other hand, norms of public communication will never hit the road of communicative practice if they fail to account for the socio-political context within which social agents access information, discuss and deliberate, and indeed of our fast-changing communication technologies.
In the social sciences, we often face normative questions, not least because many areas of inquir... more In the social sciences, we often face normative questions, not least because many areas of inquiry intersect with public policy. Understanding and explaining media and communications is one task, deciding how communication systems should be organized quite another, but normative analysis receives scant attention. This article explores normative analysis: what is involved in answering questions about justice and communication, about how sociopolitical and indeed communicative arrangements ought to be organized.
Much has been written about transnational public spheres, though our understanding of their shape... more Much has been written about transnational public spheres, though our understanding of their shape and nature remains limited. Drawing on three alternative conceptions of newswork as public communication, this paper explores the role of international journalists in shaping transnational publics. Based on a series of original interviews, it asks how journalists are oriented in their newswork (e.g. are they cosmopolitan or parochial in their orientation), and how they 'imagine' the public. It finds that interviewees imagine a polycentric transnational public, and variously frame their work as giving voice to those affected by an issue (imagining the public as a cosmopolitan community of fate), performing and reaffirming a particular kind of identity and belonging (imagining the public as a nation), or pursuing audiences wherever they may be (imagining the public as the de facto audience).
Orient: German Journal for Politics, Economics and Culture of the Middle East, 2016
Although social media was not insignificant, we need to take a wider view examining the interac- ... more Although social media was not insignificant, we need to take a wider view examining the interac- tion between interpersonal communication, social media, and satellite TV to understand how the Arab Spring was documented and witnessed by local and global audiences, and how the protests were mobilised. Social media was a clearly important catalyst for the uprisings, but it may also ex- plain why the Arab Spring failed in the medium-term: Multimedia and multi-platform communica- tion environments, which facilitated the rapid diffusion of information, are good at supporting the kind of loose coordination necessary for defenestrating one system of authority. But they are not (yet) good at supporting the kind of deep and sustained coordination that designing and support- ing new political authority requires.
A plethora of media platforms were involved in communicating recent protests across the Middle Ea... more A plethora of media platforms were involved in communicating recent protests across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), though it remains unclear exactly how these interacted. This qualitative article, based primarily on interviews with British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) newsworkers, explores the networked linkages between social and broadcast media, asking how social media content moved into broadcast news, which standards shaped the interface between the two and how these standards were defined. It finds that a set of normative and practical standards caused significant friction at the interface, which is reduced as content assimilates these standards. Standards are shaped mainly in response to broadcast imperatives, but also through the mainstreaming of social media and more efficacious and practicable networked communicative practices, indicating how power may shift in the networked age. Responding to the optimistic view that networked multimedia environments enable unencumbered communication, it argues that the scope and limits of communicative affordances depend on these standards.
The 2009 protests in Iran and the 2011 Arab uprisings took place in complex and fast evolving med... more The 2009 protests in Iran and the 2011 Arab uprisings took place in complex and fast evolving media ecologies. The BBC's Persian and Arabic language services, which reach millions, drew heavily on content created by ordinary citizens to cover events. This paper traces the flow of this content through the news process to examine how collaboration between newsrooms and citizen journalists changed from 2009 to 2011. The article argues that participation in the news process hinges on the congruence between newsroom practices, and the practices of those producing content on the streets. Such congruence requires mutual knowledge of broadcasting requirements. It finds that by 2011 journalists felt more comfortable and effective integrating user-generated content (UGC) into their news output. Importantly, UGC creators appear to have taken on board the broadcaster's editorial requirements, making them savvier content creators.
Nowadays, social media are ubiquitous, offering many opportunities for people to share and access... more Nowadays, social media are ubiquitous, offering many opportunities for people to share and access information, to create and distribute content, and to interact with more traditional media. For news organisations the social web has become an important platform for distributing content as well as a space where reporting and newsgathering takes place. This interview, with two news professionals who work exclusively on bringing social media content to broadcast news, explores some of the challenges and opportunities facing journalism as it moves into the digital age.
Drawing on interview data from research with Persian language international broadcasters (IBs), t... more Drawing on interview data from research with Persian language international broadcasters (IBs), this paper asks which ethical ideologies journalists draw on when their work is dislocated between contexts. IBs are both spatially displaced from, and often operate within a journalism culture that is extraneous to the traditions of their audiences. Persian language IBs offer a salient example. Here, the pertinent question about differences in journalism culture and ethical ideology across contexts becomes one about dislocation between contexts. The challenges of dislocation are manifestations of the more general challenge of moving between universal principles and particularistic conditions. At stake are questions about the kind of ethical ideology that should inform journalism. Interpreting conversations with journalists, the analysis follows three directions of ethical ideologies, understood as rationales of journalistic decisions, in the newswork of IBs’ – a) relativist considerations of contextual particularities, b) means-oriented considerations of principles, and c) ends-oriented considerations of consequences. It finds all three orientations present within the newswork of Persian language IBs, suggesting that this diversity can be understood as a product of dislocation. Further, the paper argues that diversity in ethical ideologies challenges assumptions of internal coherence, raising the question whether an emphasis on coherence focuses attention on a false dichotomous choice between universal and particular. As a way forward this paper suggests a distinction between ethical ideologies as normative and pragmatic resources, and that a pragmatic focus has advantages when it comes to supplying global journalists with the resources most useful to doing their work.
Public communication’s normative task is to support the legitimacy of collective decisions. Theor... more Public communication’s normative task is to support the legitimacy of collective decisions. Theoretically, two challenges in particular have proved persistent: (1) defining the purpose of public communication under conditions of pluralism, and (2) defining the composition of the public sphere as communication becomes increasingly transnational. It is argued that shared definitions of these, among actors participating in public communication, are prerequisites for the democratic legitimacy of collective decisions. Achieving this is difficult, particularly because it remains unclear how practices of public communication relate to ideals such as participation, inclusion and public reason. In part these difficulties can be attributed to a lack of congruence between the way political theory and empirical social research frame questions about the public sphere.
To deepen understanding of these challenges, this study asks how purpose and composition are defined in Persian-language transnational newswork. It also asks whether communicating actors enjoy any meaningful definitional agency. The study is designed to align these empirical results with normative questions about public communication so that they speak more fully to one another. An interview-based qualitative study of the way newsworkers who engage in transnational Persian broadcasting define the public sphere provides the setting for this research. Newsworkers are examined because, it is argued, they enjoy a privileged kind of agency over processes of public communication and play an important role in the public sphere.
The results show that transnational newsworkers enjoy some definitional agency, and that both purpose and composition find multiple, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes incommensurable and contradictory definitions in newswork. Newsworkers define a polymorphous public sphere characterised by a plurality of communicative purposes and constituted of a multiplicity of groups with different political allegiances. Some aspects of their definitions resonate with deliberative or agonistic conceptions of the public sphere. Despite these resonances, there are some contradictions between the requirements normative theory makes for a unified single-purpose public sphere and the multiplicity of purposes and criteria for inclusion found in practices of public communication. It is argued that these can be addressed by reducing the fact/value dichotomy and by shifting attention from compositional questions about the public sphere to a greater emphasis on the efficacy of public communication.
This thesis contributes to the analysis of transnational and pluralistic public spheres. Moreover, based on both conceptual and empirical analysis, it examines how practices of public communication relate to ideals of the public sphere, an issue that is neglected in the literature.
This chapter examines how eyewitness footage travels from the street, through verification proced... more This chapter examines how eyewitness footage travels from the street, through verification procedures in newsrooms, or diffusion on social media until it reaches our screens, and whether its ubiquity, the fact it is now systematically collected, processed and authenticated by newsrooms, has changed the mediation and visibility of protests. It argues that eyewitness footage is polysemic and polyvalent, because it is easily stripped of the context of its original upload, to appear in different contexts, with different descriptions, advancing different interpretation of events and different political goals. Eyewitness media of protests complicates journalism's task of providing a trusted record of the present.
The Media and Austerity: Comparative Perspectives., 2018
Social media allow disparate groups to spontaneously coordinate in support of a common cause. At ... more Social media allow disparate groups to spontaneously coordinate in support of a common cause. At the height of Europe's sovereign debt crisis in 2015, as Greece was negotiating its third bailout and was about to be saddled with new austerity measures, the hashtag #ThisIsACoup emerged and quickly went viral on Twitter. How did it emerge and diffuse across Europe's twittersphere – and with what impact on wider public discourse? This chapter uses data collected through Twitter's streaming API and a qualitative content analysis to examine these questions. #ThisIsACoup first emerged in Spain. Within hours, people across Europe had coalesced around the hashtag, which succinctly expressed the shared sentiment that Greece was being treated unfairly. Moreover, the impact of #ThisIsACoup on public discourse reached well beyond social media, with more than700 newspaper stories worldwide mentioning the hashtag. But people did more than adopt a common hashtag. They engaged with other Twitter users across national boundaries, calling into being a transnational, pan-European communication space. Social media provided a potent means of connecting people from across Europe to voice their collective objection to controversial austerity policies. Through the hashtag, Twitter acted as a 'stitching technology', activating disparate, far-flung groups around a shared grievance.
“Indignez-vous!” was the title of the 2010 essay of the French diplomat Stéphane Hessel, who plac... more “Indignez-vous!” was the title of the 2010 essay of the French diplomat Stéphane Hessel, who placed the emotion of indignation at the centre of political engagement and called for a non-violent uprising against the failures of finance capitalism (Hessel 2011). It was this call that the disgruntled Spanish citizens responded to when they took to the streets in the spring of 2011 and occupied squares all over Spain in the wake of the global financial crisis in what has been named the 15-M or Indignados movement. Indignados has been the most organized and vocal form of civic resistance to the ways European governments responded to the euro crisis and the austerity measures they implemented (Hyman 2015). Linked to the Arab revolutions of 2011, 15-M has been celebrated as the predecessor of the Occupy movement (Oikonomakis and Roos 2013). More immediately, the Spanish Indignados inspired similar movements across other Southern European countries affected by the Eurozone crisis, such as Portugal, Italy and especially Greece, where the respective Aganaktismenoi occupied the squares of Greek cities over the summer of 2011. Adopting peaceful means of demonstration and largely coordinated through social media, the Indignados has been a movement unique both in its expressions and in its organisation. It was also unique, we argue here, in the treatment it received from the mainstream European press. Drawing upon a comparative content analysis of the Spanish, Greek and German press, this chapter argues that, in contrast to the dominant paradigm of protest coverage, the protests of the Indignados were not dealt with in a negative way by the European press. Indeed, the reporting of the movement often resembled the celebratory character of a media event, where the citizens were at the forefront of the nation – especially in the cases of the Spanish and Greek coverage. At the same time, however, this focus on the spectacle hardly constructed the movement as an effective political force or presented its voice as a valid alternative to austerity politics. We understand the protest movement of the Indignados here to be one of the most vociferous examples of political participation and citizen engagement beyond institutional politics within the context of the euro crisis. A movement of mass and international character, the Indignados directly confronted and challenged the malfunctions of domestic and European political institutions and ultimately of liberal democracy (Prentoulis and Thomassen 2013). Enabled by social media, these alternative forms of political participation are still, however, subjected to the media logic of the mainstream press for its public representation and reach. Our aim in this chapter is to explore these mainstream media representations of the protests of the Indignados and the type of (mis) understandings of the movement to which mass media have contributed.
Short Abstract How did Eurosceptic (Leave) and pro-European (Remain) activity compare on social m... more Short Abstract How did Eurosceptic (Leave) and pro-European (Remain) activity compare on social media in the run-up to the EU referendum, what kind of information did users share, and did this confine the two camps to informational echo chambers? To answer these questions we collected more than 7.5 million Brexit-related tweets through Twitter's streaming API. We enriched our data using a support vector machine to identify which tweets clearly supported the Leave or Remain camp, mapped twitter users within our data to the location specified in their user profile, and mined URLs shared in tweets. We find that Leave users were more numerous, and individually more active in tweeting to support their cause. Leave users also tended to be less open, and more engaged within their own echo-chamber, something that is reflected in the URLs they shared. URLs pointing to Eurosceptic domains were shared more widely than those pointing to pro-European domains. Surprisingly, The Express was one of the most prominent domains shared on twitter, more than its more prominent Eurosceptic counterpart, the Daily Mail. Overall, twitter users who supported Leave appeared to be much more active and motivated in advancing their cause than Remainers were in advocating continued EU membership. The use of twitter in the Brexit campaign demonstrates how social media users pushed a hitherto marginal political agenda to the front and center of public discourse.
This book tackles the philosophical challenge of bridging the gap between empirical research into... more This book tackles the philosophical challenge of bridging the gap between empirical research into communication and information technology, and normative questions of justice and how we ought to communicate with each other. It brings the question of what justice demands of communication to the center of social science research.
Uploads
Papers by Max Hänska
arrangements ought to be organized.
Personal Website by Max Hänska
Blogs by Max Hänska
Thesis by Max Hänska
To deepen understanding of these challenges, this study asks how purpose and composition are defined in Persian-language transnational newswork. It also asks whether communicating actors enjoy any meaningful definitional agency. The study is designed to align these empirical results with normative questions about public communication so that they speak more fully to one another. An interview-based qualitative study of the way newsworkers who engage in transnational Persian broadcasting define the public sphere provides the setting for this research. Newsworkers are examined because, it is argued, they enjoy a privileged kind of agency over processes of public communication and play an important role in the public sphere.
The results show that transnational newsworkers enjoy some definitional agency, and that both purpose and composition find multiple, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes incommensurable and contradictory definitions in newswork. Newsworkers define a polymorphous public sphere characterised by a plurality of communicative purposes and constituted of a multiplicity of groups with different political allegiances. Some aspects of their definitions resonate with deliberative or agonistic conceptions of the public sphere. Despite these resonances, there are some contradictions between the requirements normative theory makes for a unified single-purpose public sphere and the multiplicity of purposes and criteria for inclusion found in practices of public communication. It is argued that these can be addressed by reducing the fact/value dichotomy and by shifting attention from compositional questions about the public sphere to a greater emphasis on the efficacy of public communication.
This thesis contributes to the analysis of transnational and pluralistic public spheres. Moreover, based on both conceptual and empirical analysis, it examines how practices of public communication relate to ideals of the public sphere, an issue that is neglected in the literature.
arrangements ought to be organized.
To deepen understanding of these challenges, this study asks how purpose and composition are defined in Persian-language transnational newswork. It also asks whether communicating actors enjoy any meaningful definitional agency. The study is designed to align these empirical results with normative questions about public communication so that they speak more fully to one another. An interview-based qualitative study of the way newsworkers who engage in transnational Persian broadcasting define the public sphere provides the setting for this research. Newsworkers are examined because, it is argued, they enjoy a privileged kind of agency over processes of public communication and play an important role in the public sphere.
The results show that transnational newsworkers enjoy some definitional agency, and that both purpose and composition find multiple, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes incommensurable and contradictory definitions in newswork. Newsworkers define a polymorphous public sphere characterised by a plurality of communicative purposes and constituted of a multiplicity of groups with different political allegiances. Some aspects of their definitions resonate with deliberative or agonistic conceptions of the public sphere. Despite these resonances, there are some contradictions between the requirements normative theory makes for a unified single-purpose public sphere and the multiplicity of purposes and criteria for inclusion found in practices of public communication. It is argued that these can be addressed by reducing the fact/value dichotomy and by shifting attention from compositional questions about the public sphere to a greater emphasis on the efficacy of public communication.
This thesis contributes to the analysis of transnational and pluralistic public spheres. Moreover, based on both conceptual and empirical analysis, it examines how practices of public communication relate to ideals of the public sphere, an issue that is neglected in the literature.
austerity measures they implemented (Hyman 2015). Linked to the Arab revolutions of 2011, 15-M has been celebrated as the predecessor of the Occupy movement (Oikonomakis and Roos 2013). More immediately, the Spanish Indignados inspired similar movements across other Southern European countries affected by the Eurozone crisis, such as Portugal, Italy and especially Greece, where the respective Aganaktismenoi occupied the squares of Greek cities over the summer of 2011.
Adopting peaceful means of demonstration and largely coordinated through social media, the Indignados has been a movement unique both in its expressions and in its organisation. It was also unique, we argue here, in the treatment it received from the mainstream European press.
Drawing upon a comparative content analysis of the Spanish, Greek and German press, this chapter argues that, in contrast to the dominant paradigm of protest coverage, the protests of the Indignados were not dealt with in a negative way by the European press. Indeed, the reporting of the movement often resembled the celebratory character of a media event, where the citizens were at the forefront of the nation – especially in the cases of the Spanish and Greek coverage. At the same time, however, this focus on the spectacle hardly constructed the movement as an
effective political force or presented its voice as a valid alternative to
austerity politics.
We understand the protest movement of the Indignados here to be one of the most vociferous examples of political participation and citizen engagement beyond institutional politics within the context of the euro crisis. A movement of mass and international character, the Indignados directly confronted and challenged the malfunctions of domestic and European political institutions and ultimately of liberal democracy (Prentoulis and Thomassen 2013). Enabled by social media, these alternative forms of political participation are still, however, subjected to the media logic of the mainstream press for its public representation and reach. Our aim in this chapter is to explore these mainstream media representations of the protests of the Indignados and the type of (mis) understandings of the movement to which mass media have contributed.