Media and Cosmopolitanism

The purpose of this paper is to provide not only a review of how cosmopolitanism has been theorized in the past; it also aims to propose a new way of thinking about cosmopolitanism. Beginning with a critique of how media and morality literature (Silverstone 2006, Chouliaraki 2006) ignores an exploration of cosmopolitanism from the perspective of everyday life, this article proposes that we examine cosmopolitanism as an identity with four key ‘performances’ with a distinct moral hierarchy: a) ecstatic cosmopolitanism, b) banal cosmopolitanism, c) instrumental cosmopolitanism, and d) closed cosmopolitanism. I argue that individuals weave in and out of expressions of openness to the Other based on particular contexts. Taking a bottom-up perspective, I posit that the field of media and morality will benefit from asking when and why do individuals ‘open up’ and ‘close in’ from the wider world and how is the media significant (or not) in expressions of cosmopolitanism. Studying cosmopolitan identity as a contextual, fragile identity that is enabled/disabled by various factors allows us to see which media contents and contexts transform our ‘fear of touch’ to a ‘caress’ for the Other and which ones prompt us to fall back on the scale.

2014

The contemporary media landscape invites us to experience a belonging to various distant places, mourn the victims of faraway disasters, expose ourselves to foreign cultures and engage in political issues in places far from our local context of living. In other words, we are invited to become citizens of the world – cosmopolitans. But are we? And if so, how is such cosmopolitanism expressed in a given society, under what social conditions, and in relation to what media practices? Contemporary social theory depicts a global or cosmopolitan mode of orienting in the world as paradigmatic of social life in global modernity. To date, little is known about the structural realities of such orientations. Against this backdrop, the aim of the present study is to understand the potentially “cosmopolitan” character of peoples’ outlooks and practices, and the societal conditions in which they can be identified. On the one hand, the aim of the study is to contribute to the largely theoretical accounts of the “cosmopolitan” character of social life in present times, andon the other, to understand the specific role of various media practices in the process generally described as “cosmopolitanization”. Results yielded by a national survey deployed in Sweden (n = 1 025) show that the distribution of various cosmopolitan dispositions abides by logics of social stratification. In tandem with previous research, cosmopolitanism – when studied “from below” – has a tendency to emerge in more privileged spheres of society. Being “connected” and simply living in a potentially global media landscape does not nullify this pattern. Contrary to significant parts of popular and scholarly conviction, the media is no uniform, all-encompassing environment operating as a force of cosmopolitanization across all social strata. The results of this study point towards a “mediatized cosmopolitanism” that is impossible to disentangle from social context and the power dynamics pertaining to that context.

In: Volkmer, Ingrid, (ed.) The Handbook of Global Media Research. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2012

2003

Open-access article published in Nordicom-Review with Martin Danielsson: http://www.nordicom.gu.se/sites/default/files/kapitel-pdf/10.1515_nor-2017-0408.pdf Various media allow people to build transnational networks, learn about the world and meet people from other cultures. In other words, media may allow one to cultivate cosmopolitan capital, defined here as a distinct form of embodied cultural capital. However, far from everyone is identifying this potential. Analyses of a national survey and in-depth interviews, conducted in Sweden, disclose a tendency among those in possession of cultural capital to recognise and exploit cosmopolitan capital in their media practices. Those who are dispossessed of cultural capital are significantly less liable to approach media in this way. Relying on various media practices in order to reshape one’s cultural capital exemplifies what Bourdieu called a reconversion strategy. As social fields undergo globalisation, media offer opportunities for the privileged to remain privileged – to change in order to conserve.

2020

Radio, television, film, and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of "us" and "them." Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture. Media spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence, and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the power of the forces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be oppressed.

2013

Journalism Studies, 2013

ABSTRACT Drawing on the idea that citizen images of crisis events can function as “ruptures” within mainstream journalistic narratives—instances in which distant others can speak and be heard—this article examines from a dual perspective how the global citizen images (photographs and videos) embedded in Finnish print and broadcast coverage of the Arab uprisings and the Japan tsunami disaster facilitate the construction of cosmopolitan imagination. Specifically it explores, first, how emotional proximity is constructed through the conventions of citizen images that break with the aesthetics of professional photojournalism, and, second, how professional journalists see the role of amateur images in their work of reporting distant crises. The analysis identifies four defining characteristics of the aesthetics of citizen images—unconstructedness, unconventional framing, mobility and embodied collectivity—which may invite enhanced affective engagement and reflection. Moreover, it reveals that the increasing significance of global citizen imagery prompts renewed internal reflection on established journalistic practices and norms, but this is not accompanied by a new consideration on the relationship between journalists and their audiences, on journalism as a resource for cosmopolitan attitudes.