The Chinese Internet has developed rapidly in the past decade and given rise to many online phenomena, including digital vigilantism (DV). It refers to citizens' practice of weaponising online ...visibility for retaliation when collectively offended. In China, since the Cat Torture Case in 2006, DV has been widely adopted by citizens to defend social norms and values. With recent technological developments and socio-political changes in China, how Chinese citizens conduct DV and its influence have also changed along various dimensions. This research, therefore, identifies the historical changes of DV in China and situates these changes in relation to contemporary Chinese technological and socio-political development. The study constructs a database of 1265 Chinese DV cases that receive media coverage between 2006 to 2018 and conducts a thematic analysis to identify characteristics, changes, and trends of DV in China. The author argues that these developments demonstrate the mediation and more importantly, the mediatisation of justice-seeking on the Chinese Internet conditioned by the ubiquitous state power.
This paper deals with the question of how the process of digitalisation on the technical basis of the computer can be described in Marxist categories and what consequences are foreseeable as a ...result. To this end, the first section shows, based on a historical analysis of the emergence of the computer, that this apparatus was invented as an instrument of a division of human mental labour and thus complementary to the division of physical labour. It is therefore necessary to analyse computers and digitalisation in their relation to human beings and human labour. In the second section, the central ideology of digitalisation is elaborated, which is supposed to make the current form of digitalisation appear meaningful for people and society: The anthropomorphisation of the computer, which was said to be increasingly able to think, speak, and learn like humans, to become more and more intelligent, and to be able to do everything better than humans once the technical singularity had been reached. This claim, which has been propagated again and again, is contradicted on various levels. The computer operates on about two dozen simple mathematical, logical, and technical commands and can do nothing but run one programme at a time, developed and entered by programmers on the basis of behavioural or physical data. This sometimes produces amazing results because the computer can work quickly and systematically as well as reliably. But in contrast to humans, it faces the world as a behaviouristic machine that can neither understand meaning nor reflect its own or human behaviour. The computer also ”sees” and ”hears” its environment only on a physical basis and it ”thinks” at best on a statistical basis if the programme tells it to do so. The apparatus can therefore simulate mechanical machines, but in interaction with humans its actions and reactions are, as any machine, not socially oriented, but dependent on whether humans interpret them as meaningful und useful. The third section elaborates on the complementarity of mental and physical divisions of labour. This would be a central theme of a critical Marxism for an analysis of digitalisation today, which understands the previous capitalism from the division of physical labour. Even though there are some theoreticians who have contributed to this, so far there is no comprehensive theory of it. Therefore, section 4 wants to contribute to such a theory by collecting empirical observations in an interpretive way regarding the related questions. In this way, it becomes clear how the division of people's intellectual labour made possible by the computer is being dealt with today: Capitalism is reorganising more and more areas of human life such as mobility, social relations, education, medicine, etc. through the use of the computer. As a result, first and foremost the business fields of the digital economy are expanding. Moreover, capitalism no longer has to limit itself to controlling the field of production but is increasingly intervening in the whole symbolic world of people. Consequently, according to the thesis, we are heading for an expanded capitalism that will increasingly restrict and reduce both democracy and people's self-realisation. Section 5 emphasises once again that a different digitalisation is also possible, one that serves humanity and not capitalism. Further, some summarising and comments are added there.
Public research institutions increasingly find themselves operating in a media environment. At the same time there is a growing body of research finding that public institutions and organisations are ...undergoing processes of mediatisation, which potentially threaten their autonomy. Based on interviews with communication staff at six major Norwegian universities and research centres, this study explores the extent to which these institutions have adapted to and internalised media logic. This study finds that the public research institutions to a significant degree are adapting to their media environments in terms of both organisational structure and communication practise. However, in terms of key operational areas such as research dissemination, the execution of research projects and managerial decision making, this study finds little evidence suggesting that public research institutions internalise media logic to such an extent that it critically impinges on their own processes and prioritisations.
Public research institutions increasingly find themselves operating in a media environment. At the same time there is a growing body of research finding that public institutions and organisations are ...undergoing processes of mediatisation, which potentially threaten their autonomy. Based on interviews with communication staff at six major Norwegian universities and research centres, this study explores the extent to which these institutions have adapted to and internalised media logic. This study finds that the public research institutions to a significant degree are adapting to their media environments in terms of both organisational structure and communication practise. However, in terms of key operational areas such as research dissemination, the execution of research projects and managerial decision making, this study finds little evidence suggesting that public research institutions internalise media logic to such an extent that it critically impinges on their own processes and prioritisations.
This article explores the media-related practices of Australian mental health organisations by drawing upon interviews with people whose role was either the CEO, Director, or communications and media ...manager of the organisation. The findings suggest that organisations have become increasingly sophisticated in their media and communication activities. Participants discussed practices such as packaging stories to accommodate news values and journalists' routines, strategically using digital and social media, providing media training, and facilitating contact between journalists and people with lived experience. Participants also identified challenges, including a tension between being in the media for the purposes of advancing advocacy objectives and for branding the organisation. The analysis is informed by research into the mediatisation of organisations, journalists' experiences reporting on mental health issues and Mad Studies scholarship, which provides a critical lens through which to think about the practices of organisations, journalists and other actors in the mental health field.
When Australian physicist, Peter Ridd, lost his tenured position with James Cook University, he was called a ‘whistleblower’, ‘contrarian academic’ and ‘hero of climate science denial’. In this ...article, we examine the events surrounding his dismissal to better understand the role of science communication in organised climate change scepticism. We discuss the sophistry of his complaint to locate where and through what processes science communication becomes political communication. We argue that the prominence of scientists and scientific knowledge in debates about climate change locates science, as a social sphere or fifth pillar in Hutchins and Lester’s theory of mediatised environmental conflict. In doing so, we provide a model to better understand how science communication can be deployed during politicised debates.
Comparative and international higher education scholarship frequently notes that technology plays a role in higher education internationalisation, but there is low consensus about how. In this paper, ...we offer interdisciplinary considerations to theorise technology in higher education internationalisation using three theoretical and methodological avenues. Deep mediatisation details how digital technologies datafy our world and reshape sociality alongside higher education. Actor-network theory provides an avenue for social inquiry into a deeply mediatised international higher education. Finally, assemblage thinking attends to fluidity and multiplicity in a deeply mediatised internationalisation of higher education.
Twenty-first-century politics have been defined by celebrity leaders such as Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, and Barack Obama. How have 'traditional' politicians like 'Mutti Merkel', who embody the ...opposite of star status, still managed to compete with these celebrity politicians in an attention economy in which politicians continuously vie for media exposure? Scholarship on concepts such as 'mediatisation', 'personalisation', and 'celebritisation' explains the emergence of charismatic media personalities, but fails to explicate the success of 'conventional' politicians within systems of mediatised politics structured according to a celebrity logic. Based on an analysis of newspapers and both historical and contemporary political actors, this article argues that celebrity politics produced an antithesis, the 'anticelebrity'. This political figure constitutes an 'authentic' alternative to the supposed mediatised 'superficiality' of celebrity politicians, but could not have the same appeal without the latter superficiality to contrast itself with. The text constructs an ideal type of the anticelebrity figure within different political and media systems, distinguishing between 'reactionary anticelebrities' and 'natural anticelebrities'. By focussing on the anticelebrity concept, the article shows the photographic negative of the celebrity politician, which also enables us to see the contours of the notoriously blurred phenomenon of celebrity more distinctly.
This article provides an overview of the mediatisation approach, which for the last two decades has gradually become a systematic concept for understanding and theorising the transformation of ...everyday life, culture and society in the context of the ongoing transformation of media. The article is divided into four sections. The first section addresses the ongoing transformation of media and the emergence of a computer-controlled digital infrastructure for all symbolic operations in a society; some of the new types of media are also presented. In the second section, the development of the mediatisation approach as a reaction to media changes is explained, and the central assumptions and conditions of this approach are discussed. This section also shows why, in addition to actual mediatisation research, historical mediatisation research is also necessary to understand the developments occurring today. The third section clarifies this and discusses how the transformation of media produces a transformation of everyday life, culture and society; this section also presents some results of empirical studies. The fourth and final section provides some preliminary ideas about how to establish a necessary third branch of mediatisation research, which offers a critical view with reference to civil society, besides actual and historical mediatisation research.
While the exact nature of Britain’s exit from the EU – or ‘Brexit’ as it has been popularised – is still as unclear as whether it will take place at all, the complex ontology, unfolding and impact of ...such an unprecedented event have been investigated widely in several academic fields and especially in the sizeable body of work at the intersection of sociological, political and communicative dimensions (see for example, Clarke & Newman, 2017; Evans & Menon, 2017; Koller, Kopf, & Miglbauer, 2019; Ridge-Newman, Leon-Solis, & O'Donnell, 2018; Outhwaite, 2017; Wincott, Peterson, & Convery, 2017). While our special issue joins the existent studies, it also differs from such work by specifically taking a critical discursive perspective. In doing so, we rely on an interpretation of Brexit as a ‘critical juncture’ (see below) in which different historical and contingent discursive nexuses and trajectories have been at play. Hence, we focus on the interplay between socio-political contexts as well as, therein, on various patterns of discursive work of both mediatisation and politicisation of Brexit, both before and after the UK 2016 EU Referendum. Through our focus, we explore a variety of context-dependent, ideologically-driven social, political and economic imaginaries that were attached to the idea/concept of Brexit and related notions in the process of their discursive articulation and legitimation in the UK and internationally. Our contribution has thus three interrelated aims. First, the articles in this special issue provide evidence of how the Brexit referendum debate and its immediate reactions were discursively framed and made sense of by a variety of social and political actors and through different media. Second, we show how such discourses reflect the wider path-dependent historical and political processes which have been instrumental in defining the discursive and mediatic contexts within which Brexit has been articulated. Third, we identify discursive trajectories at play in the ongoing process of Brexit putting forward an agenda for further analysis of such trajectories.
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