Citizen Journalism

In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning. We posit an alternative approach based on the power analytics of Michel Foucault which focuses on ‘what is actually done’, as opposed to Habermas’s focus on ‘what should be done’. We discuss how the Foucauldian stance problematises planning, asking difficult questions about the treatment of legitimacy, rationality, knowledge and spatiality. We conclude that Foucault offers a type of analytic planning theory which offers better prospects than does Habermas for those interested in understanding and bringing about democratic social change through planning.

This article aims to contribute to a critical research agenda for investigating the democratic implications of citizen journalism and social news. The article calls for a broad conception of ‘citizen journalism’ which is (1) not an exclusively online phenomenon, (2) not confined to explicitly ‘alternative’ news sources, and (3) includes ‘metajournalism’ as well as the practices of journalism itself. A case is made for seeing democratic implications not simply in the horizontal or ‘peer-to-peer’ public sphere of citizen journalism networks, but also in the possibility of a more ‘reflexive’ culture of news consumption through citizen participation. The article calls for a research agenda that investigates new forms of gatekeeping and agenda- setting power within social news and citizen journalism networks and, drawing on the example of three sites, highlights the importance of both formal and informal status differentials and of the software ‘code’ structuring these new modes of news production.

Key words:
agenda-setting • citizen journalism • democracy • gatekeepers • metajournalism • social news • Web 2.0

At the same time that case studies are widely used and have produced canonical texts, it may be observed that the case study as a methodology is generally held in low regard, or is simply ignored, within the academy. For example, only 2 of the 30 top-ranked U.S. graduate programs in political science require a dedicated graduate course in case study or qualitative methods, and a full third of these programs do not even offer such a course. In contrast, all of the top 30 programs offer courses in quantitative methods and almost all of them require training in such methods, often several courses. In identifying this paradox of the case study’s wide use and low regard, Gerring rightly remarks that the case study survives in a “curious methodological limbo,” and that the reason is that the method is poorly understood. In what follows, we will try to resolve Gerring’s paradox and help case study research gain wider use and acceptance.

Across multiple societies, we see a shift from regimes of truth (ROT) to “regimes of
posttruth” (ROPT) characterized by proliferating “truth markets.” ROT corresponded
to disciplinary society, tighter functioning between media/political/education apparatuses, scientific discourses, and dominant truth-arbiters. ROPT corresponds to societies of control, where power exploits new “freedoms” to participate/produce/express (as well as consume/diffuse/evaluate). These developments further correspond to postpolitics/ postdemocracy, where issues, discourses, and agency for sociopolitical change remain constrained, despite the enabling of a new range of cultural and pseudopolitical participation around, among other things, truth. ROPT emerge out of postpolitical/postdemocratic strategies common to control societies where especially resource rich political actors attempt to use data-analytic knowledge to manage the field of appearance and participation, via attention and affect.

Back cover text: If the new fin de siècle marks a recurrence of the real, Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power epitomizes that development and sets new standards for social and political inquiry. The Danish town of Aalborg is to Flyvbjerg what Florence was to Machiavelli: a laboratory for understanding the real workings of power, and for grasping what they mean to our more general concerns of social and political organization. Politics, administration, and planning are examined in ways that allow  a rare, in-depth understanding. The reader witnesses, firsthand, the classic and endless drama which defines what modernity and democracy are and can be.

This research, conducted by the author when a Senior Researcher at Newcastle University, UK, was funded by a UK governance organisation to help them assess, integrate and improve their understanding of the governed population.

ABSTRACT: Governance organisations have been urged to develop more holistic evidence-based approaches with partners to better deal with issues affecting the governed population. This presupposes an understanding of the population, yet there has been little research work addressing how governance organisations come to understand their governed population, nor how this understanding can be improved upon within such organisations.

This case study examined in-depth how understanding of a governed population was developed within one UK local governance organisation and it explored how such understanding might be developed and improved through more holistic and evidence-based organisational learning within the organisation and its governance partnerships.

The research methodology involved placement within the governance organisation, participant observations on several projects and innovative initiatives, observations within, across, and outside the organisation, and also interviews with varied key stakeholders.

The study examined:

- stakeholder engagement and networks
- current and varied understandings of the population
- mechanisms actually used for developing understandings
- the influence of context on organisational learning

and analysed these to arrive at a recommendations to improve organisational understanding of the governed population.

In the case studied, significant strengths were found: including innovative past learning trials for development, extensive ongoing networking activities, and many varied and accumulating quantitative datasets available across partnerships.

However, entrenched organisational approaches and practices constrained the development of holistic evidence-based understanding, for instance: the absence of systematic maintained collective learning processes; weak recording and forgetting of understandings; methodological exclusion of stakeholders from the development of understanding; the relative neglect of qualitative data, explanations, investigations, interpretations, and reflexivity; and also implicit organisational acceptance of such limitations and low aspirations.

Nonetheless, untapped opportunities existed to enable change including: latent practitioner knowledge and innovative management champions, the desire for improvement and raised aspirations within learning networks, and the development potential of alterative learning approaches.

It was concluded that more holistic evidence-based understanding was possible, but required new learning approaches beyond those then in use in both local government or academia.   

Recommendations are made to utilise and develop improved organisational learning approaches trialed and reported in the case study.

It is argued that the case study findings, conclusions, and recommendations may be applicable to other similar local governance organisations and partnerships that seek to better understand local populations, services and interventions.

The work was also submitted for, and awarded, an MPhil (at Newcastle University, supervised by Prof. Patsy Healy)

Taken together, the works of Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault highlight an essential tension in modernity. This is the tension between the normative and the real, between what should be done and what is actually done. Understanding this tension is crucial to understanding modern democracy, what it is and what it could be. It has been argued that an effective way of making democracy stronger is to strengthen civil society. This article contains a comparative analysis of the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to the question of democracy and civil society. More specifically, the discourse ethics of Habermas is contrasted with the power analytics and ethics of Foucault evaluating their usefulness for those interested in understanding, and bringing about, democratic social change.

CIMA is pleased to release a new report, Digital Media in the Arab World One Year After the Revolutions, by Jeffrey Ghannam, a lawyer and writer in Washington, DC. The Arab region is experiencing a profound media shift. The year following the start of the Arab revolutions–in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and violent uprisings in Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain–was followed by continued repression and threats to the exercise of free expression online and offline. But the year also saw great strides in the numbers of Arabs across the region turning to social media platforms and the ascendancy of online engagement. This report describes and analyzes the enabling of tens of millions of individuals–as well as established news outlets–to attract wide global followings with Facebook and Twitter updates and YouTube videos about rapidly changing events. The widely diverse and pluralistic online communities in the Arab world are creating and sharing content, casting into question the future of the many state-owned or self-censored media that provide less in the way of engagement that Arab audiences have come to expect.

El artículo es una investigación fomentada como asignación de la cátedra “Teoría de laComunicación” del Máster en Comunicación Social de la Universidad de Almería, bajo la
tutela del profesor Jesús Baca Martín y que servirá de fundamento teórico para el tema de tesisdoctoral del autor. El trabajo da una mirada a la actual sociedad como víctima propiciatoria desu propia desinformación. Asimismo pone en manifiesto y evidencia el manejo de los medios ydel mensaje como elementos existenciales para una manipulación efectiva.

The present article is an investigation based on an assignation
of the subject “Theories of Communication”
included on the syllabus of the Master in Social Communication of AlmeriaUniversity, under the revision of Professor Jesús Baca Martin and will be the theoricalfundament for the doctoral thesis of the author. This work takes a look to the actual society as avictim, but also as a victimary, about its own disinformation. Also looks around the media´smessage tergiversation as a fundament for an effective manipulation

Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign will likely preoccupy future historians for years to come. While a number of factors contributed to his rise—including the growing power of social media, a latent racism and nativism within sections of the American public, and economic malaise resulting from Republican and Democratic administrations’ trade policies—the media deserve special scrutiny for their role in accelerating Trump’s candidacy, most obviously because they set agendas and frame political debates each election cycle.

This chapter offers a bold critique of the notion that Baathist rule in Iraq was a product of a culture of authoritarianism in Iraq. It is important to acknowledge from the start that while this chapter does offer a more nuanced view of the Post-Colonial period, it is no way a defence of the tyranny of the Baath and the brutal megalomania of Saddam. Specifically, the first section examines the quashing of Iraq’s civil society and the tight restraints exerted over the nation’s media throughout the period. It also addresses the ways in which various Post-Colonial regimes, but especially the Baath, were adept at manipulating the discourses of democracy in order to mask their tyranny and coerce people into patriotism. Moving beyond this, however, the second section documents the various clandestine opposition groups that began to emerge across Iraq’s divergent ethno-religious and political divides who resisted Baathist oppression and agitated for democratic change. They produced their own media outlets which proved effective in voicing the various frustrations and grievances of Iraqis of all backgrounds and shades of opinion, giving way to a renewed public sphere. The Post-Colonial era, therefore, alternative history of Iraq from the mid-twentieth through to the early twenty-first century in which one finds a sophisticated political culture deeply concerned with the issue of democratic governance.

Citizen journalism refers to nonprofessionals taking an increasingly central role in news reporting, writing, editing, publication and distribution. These roles are exercised both within news organizations as well as outside them. Studies of citizen journalism are commonly structured around a distinction drawn between citizens and professionals, with the key issue to what extent citizen journalism fulfills the promises of normative liberal-pluralist press theory.

"Two momentous developments have defined the Nigerian journalistic landscape in the last ten years. The first is the migration of all major Nigerian newspapers to the Internet (while actively sustaining their print editions) in hopes of reaching the highly educated Nigerian migratory elite in the diaspora. The second development is the robust growth and flowering of transnational, diasporan citizen online news media that have vigorously sought and captured the attention of Nigerians both at home and in the diaspora. On the surface, these developments seem contradictory, even counter-intuitive: the migration of news content from homeland legacy newspapers to the Internet should have functioned to satisfy the thirst for domestic news by geographically displaced diasporan Nigerians and therefore obviated the need for diasporan-run citizen news outlets.

In this chapter, I trace the evolution and idiosyncratic features of online journalism in Nigeria; explore its variegated manifestations; capture the relational and professional tensions that have erupted between Web-only, mostly diasporan, citizen journalists and more traditional homeland journalists; and show how all this has altered journalistic practice in Nigeria. I also discuss the incidence of the tensile relationship between citizen online journalists and the Nigerian government, a relationship that has led to the high-profile arrests of diasporan citizen journalists who traveled to Nigeria from their base in the West for routine business. Finally, I will explore how the emergent genre of citizen social journalism (i.e., microblogging on Facebook and Twitter by ordinary citizens about news events) helped shape the 2011 general elections in Nigeria and enriched homeland traditional journalistic practice. "

Vaclav Havel observed that a strong civil society is a crucial condition of strong democracy. Empowering civil society is a central concern for the project of democracy, just as the question of how best to think about such empowerment is important to social and political theory. But what is ‘civil society’? A search for clear definitions in the relevant literature is in vain. Not because the concept lacks definitions; rather the definitions are too multiple and varied to bring clarity. Most writers on civil society agree, however, that civil society has an institutional core constituted by voluntary associations outside the sphere of the state and the economy. Such associations range from, for example, churches, cultural associations, sport clubs and debating societies to independent media, academies, groups of concerned citizens, grass-roots initiatives and organizations of gender, race and sexuality, all the way to occupational associations, political parties and labour unions (Habermas 1992a: 453).

In this chapter, I explore the history of Nigeria’s traditional media’s struggles for democracy and inclusion, and show how emergent genres of web-based journalism are supervening upon the traditional media as the sites for the push and pull of democratic discourses. I then deploy case study research to investigate how Nigerian citizens in social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter not only invigorate deliberative democracy, and even democracy itself, by serving as alternative sources of news for Nigerians but for setting the news agenda of the domestic mass media. The chapter also highlights the declining social and cultural capital of the Nigerian legacy media, and shows that the profusion of citizen participation in the democratic project through social media networks isn’t always benevolent. It then suggests ways the legacy media can complement, coopt, or contain the luxuriance and exuberance of the social media scene.

The commercialism driving much of the American media system counts among the many factors that enabled Donald Trump’s election. When it mattered most, too many American media institutions privileged profit over democracy. This does not mean that people working within the media industries are bad. It does suggest, however, that the incentive structures driving these media institutions are skewed. To contest a thriving ecosystem of misinformation, we need to redesign our news media system so that different logics are guiding it.

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

Donald Trump’s election exposed structural pathologies in America’s media system. This commentary addresses three broad media failures that combine to imperil democratic society: the news media’s extreme commercialism; Facebook’s proliferation of misinformation; and the crisis of newspaper journalism. I then outline a policy program that can begin to address these structural pathologies.

This article provides an answer to what has been called the biggest problem in theorizing and understanding planning: the ambivalence about power found among planning researchers, theorists, and students. The author narrates how he came to work with issues of power and gives an example of how the methodology he developed for power studies—phronetic planning research—may be employed in practice. Phronetic planning research follows the tradition of power studies running from Machiavelli and Nietzsche to Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. It focuses on four value-rational questions: (1) Where are we going with planning? (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (3) Is this development desirable? (4) What should be done? These questions are exemplified for a specific instance of Scandinavian urban planning. The author finds that the questions, and their answers, make a difference to planning in practice. They make planning research matter.

The fields of public relations has dramatically grown to build the relationships between an organization and its key publics through effective communication. The study is conducted to assess the practice and challenge of Public Relations in government universities public relation offices in Ethiopia. The research used mixed approach which enable the researchers to use both qualitative and quantitative data and analysis. The main subject of the study were internal publics and external stakeholders. The researcher used questionnaire as a data gathering tool from the above subjects. The findings of the study depicted that professional Public Relations practice in the given13 government universities are in difficult condition as the office is not professionally and structurally organized despite its key role is well recognized. The PR practitioners have not well understood the concept of Public relations especially its management function to create mutual understanding with the internal and external public rather they are considered to stage the debate other than mediates. Lack of professional skilled human power, having minimal attitudes and lack of empowering the office, absence of adequate capacity building training, lack of infrastructure, inadequate assistance from the concerned leaders took the first line as challenges for the public relations practitioners

There is ferment in the social sciences. After years of sustained effort to build a science of society modelled on the natural sciences, that project, long treated with suspicion by some, is now openly being rethought. A critical intervention in this period of reflection was Making Social Science Matter (MSSM) by Bent Flyvbjerg, published in 2001. In that book Flyvbjerg challenged the very idea of social science as a science modelled on the natural sciences. Flyvbjerg argued that, as the social sciences study human interactions that involve human consciousness, volition, power and reflexivity, attempts to build generalizable, predictive models such as those for the natural world are misplaced and even futile.

The emergence of citizen journalism has prompted the journalism field and scholars to readdress what constitutes journalism and who is a journalist. Citizen journalists have disrupted news-media ecosystems by challenging the veracity and representativeness of information flowing from mainstream news-media newsrooms. However, the controversy related to the desired level of citizen involvement in the news process is a historical debate that began before the citizen-journalism phenomenon. As early as the 1920s, journalist and political commentator Walter Lippman and American philosopher John Dewey debated the role of journalism in democracy, including the extent that the public should participate in the news-gathering and production processes. This questioning of citizen involvement in news reemerged as an issue with the citizen journalism phenomenon around the late 1990s. People with no news-media organizational ties have taken advantage of the convenience and low cost of social computing technologies by publishing their own stories and content. These people are referred to as citizen journalists. Scholars have assessed the quality and credibility of citizen-journalism content, finding that citizen journalists have performed well on several standards of traditional news-content quality. Levels of quality differ dependent upon citizen journalists’ goals and motivations, such as serving the public interest, increasing self-status, or expressing their creative selves. As it is an emerging area of study, unarticulated theoretical boundaries of citizen journalism exist. Citizen-journalism publications emphasize community over conflict, advocacy over objectivity, and interpretation over fact-based reporting. In general, citizen journalists have historically acted when existing news-media journalists were not fully meeting their community’s informational needs. Scholars, however, vary in how they label citizen journalists and how they conceptually and empirically define citizen journalism. For example, researchers have shifted their definitional focus on citizen journalists from one of active agents of democratic change to people who create a piece of news content. The mapping of the citizen-journalism literature revealed four types of citizen journalists based on their levels of editorial control and contribution type: (1) participatory, (2) para, (3) news-media watchdog, and (4) community. Taken together, these concepts describe the breadth of citizen-journalist types. For those of us interested in journalism studies, a more targeted approach in the field of citizen journalism can help us build community around scholarship, understand citizen journalists’ contributions to society and practice, and create a more a stable foundation of knowledge concerning people who create and comment on news content.

Perhaps the most important organizational development in journalism since its professionalization more than 100 years ago is the emergence of citizen journalism. Although non-professionals have engaged in journalism for as long as it has been regarded as a profession, today citizen journalism as a form of non-professional journalism has disrupted conventional institutional boundaries and practices at a time of severe economic and social challenges to the industry. Citizen journalism calls into question institutionalized presumptions such as that journalism requires a period of intensive training to do properly, and its corollary claim that legitimate journalism can only be conducted by people who have completed such training and who work for established news organizations. Yet, today, non-professionally gathered accounts and images are increasingly and paradoxically an accepted part of the output of professional news organizations and their claims to producing an authoritative account of the world’s events. Granting the complex reasons for this and the complex ways in which it occurs, citizen journalism is both a symptom and a cause of the current crisis in journalism economics and cultural authority, one with great significance for the role of journalism in democratic societies.

Il nuovo giornalista sarà sempre di più un content producer: dovrà essere in grado di intercettare l’informazione, di analizzarla, valutarla, e ridiffonderla, possibilmente in diversi formati. È questo l’identikit del professionista nell’era digitale disegnato da Marco Marsili nel libro “La rivoluzione dell'informazione digitale in Rete. Come Internet sta cambiando il modo di fare giornalismo” (Odoya, Bologna, 2009; prefazione Gianpiero Gamaleri, postfazione Massimo Esposti).

Selezionare nella marea di informazione del web sta diventando il vero valore aggiunto della professione. Trovare news davvero utili e favorirne la diffusione è una delle sfide più difficili per chi vuole esercitare questa professione in un momento storico di grandi cambiamenti: le barriere di accesso, tanto per cominciare, sono sempre più basse e chiunque può fare informazione attraverso il suo blog o caricare un servizio video. La crisi attuale di molte imprese editoriali e la dilagante sfiducia dei lettori verso la stampa sono altri segnali evidenti di un settore al bivio.

È vero che la rivoluzione digitale apre nuovi scenari molto interessanti: la lenta erosione del potere di una casta, lo spirito di collaborazione e condivisione delle notizie, la partecipazione dei lettori e il boom del citizen journalism, gli straordinari sviluppi delle tecnologie di connessione (si parla già di web 3.0!) e il sempre più facile accesso ai servizi. Non ultimo la prospettiva di nuove figure professionali. Ma la rete pone anche delle
problematiche di non facile soluzione: quanto è neutrale il web? Chi controlla l’accesso? Chi garantisce la sicurezza? Come combattere il digital divide?

Problematiche che Marco Marsili, docente di Teorie e tecniche del linguaggio giornalistico presso l’Università degli Studi dell’Insubria,
direttore responsabile de "La Voce d’Italia" (uno dei più importanti quotidiani indipendente on line), prospetta già nelle prime pagine di introduzione, per poi affrontare in ogni capitolo tutti i diversi aspetti del giornalismo di oggi. Giornalismo inteso come processo, come lavoro e come industria. Ne esce un vero manuale non solo per chi fa questa professione o vi aspira, ma utile per coloro che vogliono capire di più dell’ecosistema delle telecomunicazioni, dei modelli di produzione e fruizione delle news, dei rapporti tra politica e informazione, degli interessi nascosti, delle distorsioni degli aiuti statali, delle problematiche aperte e delle false ideologie che circolano nell’era del web 2.0.

Ogni capitolo presenta in genere qualche elemento storico che rende più completa la lettura del presente e meno azzardata – anzi, sempre circostanziata e molto argomentata - di qualche ipotesi di sviluppo futuro. Si comincia dalla stampa: un focus sul panorama editoriale italiano e internazionale, il passaggio dalla carta al web, lo stato di salute dei giornali (non certamente buono), i rapporti tra informazione e politica. La chiarezza sulle dinamiche di potere presenti dietro i giornali non serve a innescare una sterile polemica, piuttosto aiuta a capire perché una
testata fa determinate scelte e non altre, e quali sono le conseguenze di avere in Italia solo editori il cui core business non è mai l’impresa editoriale: costruzioni, motori, moda, tutto ma non i giornali.

L’approccio è lo stesso anche per gli altri capitoli sulla pubblicità on line, le reti dell’informazione e del sapere (documentatissima la sezione dedicata alla banda larga), il giornalismo on line in tutte le sue articolazioni (tecnogiornalismo, tv su web, cellulari, peer to peer, video, social network…), la proprietà intellettuale e la privacy fino al funzionamento dei motori di ricerca. Tanti i nodi che via via emergono, a partire dalla crisi della stampa, la mancanza di indipendenza e pluralismo, la partita del digitale terrestre, il freno del monopolio allo sviluppo delle infrastrutture per la connessione veloce a Internet, il problema del rispetto della privacy da parte delle piattaforme di behavoural targeting.

Pagina dopo pagina il lettore si sente così più accorto e consapevole delle straordinarie opportunità che la rete offre per fare informazione ma anche dei suoi problemi, delle questioni chiave che bisognerebbe affrontare per realizzare un sistema editoriale più solido, capace di produrre informazione di qualità. “Collaborazione, organizzazione e innovazione costituiscono i presupposti irrinunciabili sui quali deve essere fondata
qualsiasi iniziativa che voglia avere una qualche possibilità di successo”, dice in sintesi l’autore. Come agire in questa direzione, però, non è di così semplice evidenza.

Proprio di fronte a un quadro così completo sembra ancora più difficile rispondere a quelle domande iniziali poste dall'autore: come sta cambiando il giornalismo con la rete? Chi sopravviverà a questa rivoluzione digitale? E soprattutto quali forme sta assumendo il giornalismo in un mondo di contenuti gratuiti dove il problema è disporre di un budget sufficiente a garantire la ricerca di fonti attendibili, l’accuratezza dei contenuti, il giusto compenso del collaboratore, la sopravvivenza di una testata?

Certamente Marsili offre “una messe rilevante di dati e di chiavi interpretative”, spiega Gamaleri nella prefazione, aiutandoci a formare “le griglie mentali che ci consentono di cogliere il cambiamento”, perché la più grande sfida per l’uomo è sempre stata quella di “padroneggiare la trasformazione che egli stesso ha messo in movimento”.

Back cover text: Making Social Science Matter presents an exciting new approach to social science, including theoretical argument, methodological guidelines, and examples of practical application. Why has social science failed in attempts to emulate natural science and produce normal theory? Bent Flyvbjerg argues that the strength of social science is in its rich, reflexive analysis of values and power, essential to the social and economic development of any society. Richly informed, powerfully argued, and clearly written, this book provides essential reading for all those in the social and behavioral sciences.

For over fifty years, successive waves of critique have underscored that the apolitical character of much of Political Science research betrays the founding mission of the discipline to have science serve democracy. The Caucus for a New Political Science was originally based on such a critique, and the Perestroika movement in the discipline included a call for more problem-driven as opposed to theory- or method-driven work that would better connect Political Science research to ongoing political struggles. In recent years, movements for a public Sociology and public Anthropology as well as dissonant movements in Economics and related fields have added to the insistence that social science research was too often disconnected from the real world. Phronetic Social Science has emerged out of the ferment for change in the social sciences, starting with the much-debated book by Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge 2001). Flyvbjerg critiqued the social sciences for mimicking the natural sciences while proposing an alternative approach that focuses research on helping people address the problems they are facing in the context they are facing them. Today, Phronetic Social Science goes beyond the call for an alternative approach to social inquiry and its growing adherents are providing evidence that this alternative approach to doing research can enrich the social sciences by more effectively connecting research to efforts to address real world problems as people experience them. This essay provides a genealogy of efforts to connect Political Science to politics, a review of the major critiques of mainstream research, an explication of the rationale for more problem-driven, mixed methods research, a specification of the key principles of the phronetic approach, and examples of its application in the public realm. The essay concludes with implications for realizing a more political Political Science by way of taking a phronetic approach.

Last November, a YouTube video portraying a young boy rescuing an even younger girl from what seemed to be a hail of bullets went viral and hit the headlines.  The video, titled “SYRIA! SYRIAN HERO BOY rescue girl in shootout,” demonstrated both the promise and pitfall of social media for the public generation of accounts and accountability.  On the one hand, the spread of this video demonstrated how social media facilitates the participation of new communicators.  On the other, the BBC eventually debunked this video as a fake, funded by the Norwegian Film Institute and Arts Council Norway and shot by a Norwegian director in Malta on a set used by blockbuster films Troy and Gladiator, using professional child actors.  Social media’s affordance of misinformation is a problem not just for the information professionals trying to parse the wheat from the chaff, but also for the civilian witnesses trying to publicize their documentation.  This is because well-publicized incidents of misinformation reinforce gatekeepers’ verification barrier between private information and public evidence.

In this chapter, I demonstrate how professional human rights fact-finders can be understood, after Bourdieu, as a field characterized by an information logic governed by verification.  In contrast, civilian witnesses – particularly at the accidental rather than activist end of the spectrum – can be thought of as a non-field. The verification of social media information depends on digital information forensics, a rapidly evolving field combining new verification technologies with tried and tested gumshoe techniques.  These verification strategies are part of the cultural capital of the human rights fact-finding field, distributed via the networks or social capital within the field.  The flipside of these verification strategies are verification subsidies, which, after Gandy’s concept of information subsidies, are characteristics sources can supply with their information to make it easier for others to verify; these include a digital footprint to facilitate the source’s identification.  Part of the usefulness of Gandy’ concept is that it is an economic metaphor that highlights the connection between the ability to provide information subsidies and the possession of other types of resources.  The implication for civilian witnesses is that those with the least amount of symbolic capital in the form of digital footprints and the least amount of cultural capital in the form of understanding verification (in part because they are not part of a networked field) will have the most trouble in getting their social media information verified; it is often those with the least resources, however, who most need access to the public accountability mechanism of human rights.  The chapter concludes with considering how the phenomenon of third party verification subsidies, both human and machine, might lower the verification barrier.

This chapter seeks to re-interpret Iraqi politics after the US-led intervention of 2003 by examining the alternative discourses of democracy emanating from within Re-Colonial Iraq. It details the complex public sphere of the post-Saddam era and points to the inclusive nature of the positive developments that have occurred across the nation since 2003. The first part discusses the post-Saddam media landscape which has played a positive role in covering the nation’s difficult transition to democracy. The second part of this chapter documents and examines the Iraqi people’s exercise of their democratic right to protest and the influence these protests have had on the politics of the post-Saddam era. The chapter concludes that Iraqi citizens who play an active role in their own governance and participate in democratic mechanisms such as elections and mass demonstrations are helping to create a more robust democracy.

A collaborative relationship between citizen journalists and professional journalists has long been an aspiration for many media scholars. While tensions surrounding professional control are significant, scholars also have to consider the structural dynamics of content online and across social media networks, particularly in an era of the corporatized and commercialized Web. The rise of social discovery tools and algorithms is also addressed. This article aims to bring to light these concerns and moves the conversation about citizen journalism forward by proposing a model that identifies the pathway through which news organizations gather, select, package, and disseminate citizen journalism content.

Cite as:
Salvatore, Armando. 2011. 'New Media and Collective Action in the Middle East: Can Sociological Research Help Avoiding Orientalist Traps?' Sociologica, 5(3): 1-17.

You can find a pdf with the entire edited journal 'symposium' on my academia web page, section 'Edited Journal Issues.'

Since Max Weber, sociology has not been immune from orientalist bias concerning the normative irreducibility of Western modern achievements. This problem becomes more acute with regard to the role of media in the public sphere. The article first looks at Western perceptions of the protests in Iran that followed the contested presidential elections of 2009 and at the “Arab Spring” of 2011 (and particularly at the role of the blogosphere and of social networks as factors of mobilization) as a major test of the resilience of orientalist preconceptions. The author further argues how the focus on “new media” within collective action and revolutions, instead of helping break up orientalist bias, might have provided them a new ground, located right at the core of the sociology of media and communication, and resulting in trivializing the much more complex types of agency at work in the uprisings. The article concludes by showing how the studies collected in this symposium not only help us avoiding this neo-orientalist trap but go one step further in problematizing taken for granted, sociological notions of collective action, the public sphere and even “media.”

Keywords: Orientalism, collective action, new media, public sphere, revolution.

Discussions about role of communication to development have happened for a long time. In the latest statement scholars said that communication functions not as big as their supposition before. Their conclusions before publicized that mass communication as a magic multiple for development and have big influences to accelerate development programs in many developing countries. In actual fact communication has not a direct impact for development progress, it's supported no more than completing and could not change other media of communication who lived in traditional communites. The local communities gave their participations through the media to distribute special information form and to them, and preserve it for communication space for local actualization. The rising citizen journalism has a new different about public involvements to share their information to others. Public can publicize their all information such as news, opinions, and critics, included development programs. Public can make use of it as their participations to improve an alternative development communication media. Although not all Indonesian can do citizen journalism for a lot of reasons, it can be a new communication media for development in Indonesia.