The traditional foundation of the placed reserved for the Fourth Estate in democratic practice is under pressure. To revitalize this idea, a focus upon how journalists handle silence professionally ...is suggested. It is argued that it is important to bring out how the handling of silence is carried out, and to understand that silence is not only something to be avoided. Silence is of foundational importance for communicative significance to emerge. In a reading of Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida, we argue for a model in which silence is necessary for significant communicative exchanges. We avoid thoughtlessness by allotting a function to silence; for communication requires not just information but a channel of silence, so to speak. It is, finally, argued that it is important not to expect the revealed forms of silence to be problematic. It is demonstrated that certain forms of silence can be analysed as democracy enhancing because they permit less heated exchanges that make room for thoughtful contemplation.
Misinformation in and about science West, Jevin D; Bergstrom, Carl T
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
04/2021, Volume:
118, Issue:
15
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Humans learn about the world by collectively acquiring information, filtering it, and sharing what we know. Misinformation undermines this process. The repercussions are extensive. Without reliable ...and accurate sources of information, we cannot hope to halt climate change, make reasoned democratic decisions, or control a global pandemic. Most analyses of misinformation focus on popular and social media, but the scientific enterprise faces a parallel set of problems-from hype and hyperbole to publication bias and citation misdirection, predatory publishing, and filter bubbles. In this perspective, we highlight these parallels and discuss future research directions and interventions.
The public sphere in India has undergone significant changes during colonial rule and the national movement, leading to its susceptibility to the recent rise of Hindutva. The current state of the ...public sphere in India is shaped by the ambiguities of the national movement, which were influenced by nationalist responses to colonial rule. To fully understand the public sphere, its relationship with the private sphere must be considered, as the public sphere’s definition and shape are derived from this relationship. To institutionalize multiculturalism in the public sphere, it is necessary to renegotiate the relationship between the public and private spheres. Therefore, it is imperative to explore ways to recreate the public sphere in a manner that reflects the country’s diversity effectively.
In the last decade, digital filter bubbles have become widely discussed phenomena in different fields within the broader discipline of media and communication studies. This paper focuses on the ...question of why they are problematic for the functioning of the public sphere. This paper argues that algorithmic personalisation can lead to the fragmentation, polarisation, and radicalisation of the public sphere because of the complex relationship between human agency and technology that mutually encourage one another through habitual adaptation. Through the concept of habit, such theoretical grounding enables a critique of existing empirical research regarding the filter bubble effect, with the argument that the main problem is not information isolation or the reduced accessibility/visibility of selected content, but the habitual adaptation of content to individual users, which can explain why users stick to certain content. The article concludes with the finding that the problem of algorithmic personalisation should be studied as a broader historic phenomenon indicative of the decline of the public sphere, which is itself caused by the conflict between public and commercial interests.
Experience and sociological imagination Ted Fleming
European journal for research on the education and learning of adults,
02/2024, Volume:
15, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Two research projects undertaken ten years ago explored the experiences of mature students’ access, progression and drop-out in higher education, relying on Habermas and Honneth for sensitizing ...concepts. This paper explores the implications of undertaking this research today adopting a different set of sensitizing concepts and in the process transforming the identity of the researcher. To this end, this paper moves beyond Habermas and Honneth to the critical theory of Negt and Kluge as a source of new sensitizing concepts informing a reimagined researcher and research project. Their work on experience, its dialectic nature, imploitation, obstinacy – as an alternative to resilience – and a sociological imagination are explored in order to identify possible new sensitizing concepts for researching adults returning to higher education. Implications for transformative adult education will be identified.
Marked by a layered account that weaves back and forth between the months and moments that molded 2020, the autoethnographic poem, Things I’ve Wanted to Share for a While, seeks to ask the question: ...How do Black scholars navigate instances when racially charged events that take place in the public sphere permeate their personal and professional lives?
Posting comments on the news is one of the most popular forms of user participation in online newspapers, and there is great potential for public discourse that is associated with this form of user ...communication. However, this potential arises only when several users participate in commenting and when their communication becomes interactive. Based on an adaption of Galtung and Ruge’s theory of newsworthiness, we hypothesized that a news article’s news factors affect both participation levels and interactivity in a news item’s comments section. The data from an online content analysis of political news are consistent with the hypotheses. This article explores the ways in which news factors affect participation levels and interactivity, and it discusses the theoretical, normative, and practical implications of those findings.
Previous research indicated that corrective information can sometimes provoke a so-called "backfire effect" in which respondents more strongly endorsed a misperception about a controversial political ...or scientific issue when their beliefs or predispositions were challenged. I show how subsequent research and media coverage seized on this finding, distorting its generality and exaggerating its role relative to other factors in explaining the durability of political misperceptions. To the contrary, an emerging research consensus finds that corrective information is typically at least somewhat effective at increasing belief accuracy when received by respondents. However, the research that I review suggests that the accuracy-increasing effects of corrective information like fact checks often do not last or accumulate; instead, they frequently seem to decay or be overwhelmed by cues from elites and the media promoting more congenial but less accurate claims. As a result, misperceptions typically persist in public opinion for years after they have been debunked. Given these realities, the primary challenge for scientific communication is not to prevent backfire effects but instead, to understand how to target corrective information better and to make it more effective. Ultimately, however, the best approach is to disrupt the formation of linkages between group identities and false claims and to reduce the flow of cues reinforcing those claims from elites and the media. Doing so will require a shift from a strategy focused on providing information to the public to one that considers the roles of intermediaries in forming and maintaining belief systems.
We build on Boltanski and Thévenot's theory of justification to account for the ways in which different stakeholder groups actively engage with discourses and objects to maintain the legitimacy of ...institutions that are relevant to their activity. We use this framework to analyse a controversy emerging from a nuclear accident which involved a large European energy company and sparked public debate on the legitimacy of nuclear power. Based on the findings, we elaborate a process model of institutional repair that explains the role of agents and the structural constraints they face in attempting to maintain legitimacy. The model enhances institutional understandings of legitimacy maintenance in three main respects: it proposes a view of legitimacy maintenance as a controversy‐based process progressing through stakeholders' justifications vis‐à‐vis a public audience; it demonstrates the role of meta‐level ‘orders of worth’ as multiple modalities for agreement which shape stakeholders' public justifications during controversies; and it highlights the capacities that stakeholders deploy in developing robust justifications out of a plurality of forms of agreement.
PDF
