Lecture Notes For October

1 October 2008

How do technologies of the internet change our social and political landscape?
New field in scholarship: e.g. effect of new generation or ‘digital natives’
What about the effects of democracy? E.g. political campaigning and voting?

But other basic questions about democracy currently at stake:

Can democracy thrive in a one party state?
Does democracy mean that two parties in one powerful nation can vote over whether to bail out bank failures that have potential global effects on finance markets all over the world?
Is floor crossing a betrayal of democratic practice?
What if everyone has the right to vote, but no one cares?
OR, what if no one cares enough to read the news to see what the issues and debates of the day actually are?
Does democracy mean that you can invade other countries and create war to force them into setting up democratic governments?

Our question last term: what kinds of social networks are created through different technologies of communication?

Writing as technology: script, paper, printing
Relevant theorists - Anderson, De Tocqueville, Habermas

Critical model also has important things to say: From a Marxist School of scholarship – The German Ideology

“Dominant ideas will be those that favour the interests of the ruling classes and those with power”

Example of theory from this perspective

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media 1988

“Propaganda model” (Us Case study)


Basic argument:

Mass media is a business and what it sells is not just news but also readers and audiences to advertisers. Its goal is to try to get people to read its papers and watch its programs so that it can attract advertising sponsors

Therefore the media create systematic biases

Filters

ownership
funding
sources
flak
ideology

Does this mean that no news is worth reading? No! but you must be an active agent, not passive of consumer of news

So, what about the internet society? How does the internet change things, if at all?

New technology: what are its properties?

virtual, not paper and ink
imagination – global not national
new form of literacy
new technologies – digital divide

3 October 2008

Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda theory of news media

Filters

Ownership
funding
sources
flak
ideology

Case of US media as industry: 6-10 companies own/control almost all the media

E.g. Sony

Who are the ‘big 10’?

Powerful media moguls: Rupert Murdoch

Robert McChesneys argues that media monopolies in the USA are a threat to public interest. I.e. a threat to free press that is concerned with debate, and therefore, to democracy

Others say that mass media benefits from competition and large scale dissemination, news syndicates, etc. Also that it is pointless to criticize this process since this is the way monopoly capitalism works.

Who owns SA newspapers?

independent newspapers
Johnnic Communication
Media 24/ Naspers
Caxton

When a state owns and controls the media, there are certainly issues about the free press and democratic debate. Patterns of ownership of the press in capitalist societies pose different challenges and different solutions

But, how do we know whether there are stories that the public has the right to know, but which are not reaching that public?

Civic initiatives: Project Censored

How do they define censorship?
As project censored, we examine the coverage of news and information important to maintenance of a healthy and functioning democracy. We define modern censorship as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets.

8 October 2008

Internet news and democracy

A few more issues that we can consider
© Access and availability of technologies (digital divide)
© Censorship and filters
© Uses towards development and by grassroots democratic movements
© Commodification of news

Headlines that sell
è Sex, violence, traumaè Deviance
è Personal dramas of public figures
è Celebrity and royalty and politicians
è Emotion
è Disclosure of secrets
è Scandal
è Confessional narrative


What is the potential impact of the commodification of news on democracy?

Theorist: Richard Sennet
è The fall of public man, 1986
è Argues that contemporary culture has eroded the boundary between public life and private life. ( The boundary which Habermas said was crucial for rational – critical debate )
è Public concern has been replaced with a desire for intimate knowledge
è We are taken to be ‘good’ and ‘honest’ if we tell people everything
è Disclosure of feelings and internal lives – daytime tv, talk shows, tabloids
è What counts as insight and analysis?
è This kind of culture deprives us of having much in common with each other except secrets, confessions, mundane details of personal and internal landscapes
è News companies have to please sponsors or they lose funding

Is Sennet right?

è Entertaining and expensive
è But, they appeal to the enjoyment of gossip
è The verification of their truth is therefore not always important: their articles are more emotion than opinion
è They invite us to apply judgement or derision
è They offer a feeling of moral high ground to the reader
è They celebrate improbable content
è They bring the rich, powerful and famous down – levelling
è They trade in the economy of emotion
è They evoke a world with few real life consequences for the reader
è They appear to disclose secrets
è Revel on conspiracy secrets
è Relish confessional tell all narrative and exclusive disclosure
è Generate and sustain celebrity cults

Why this quest for disclosure
© Historical form of the diary – arose at the same time as the newspaper as a genre of writing, record of the self
© Diaries are where individuals recorded mundane thoughts and things they could not tell others
What is a personal blog?
Often a personal diary that is available to the public
Performance - like reality television, people play to the camera to create a drama of their emotions and lives.
Personal blogging reflects the new culture of disclosure and pseudo-intimacyDisclosures and exhinitionists


How do these forms affect Habermas’s notion of the public sphere?

Several views
Harmless and entertaining
Escapist

Is hard news becoming more tabloid like?
Stories that indulge in the gruesome and morally repugnant
Stories that focus on dramas of single case to highlight an eventLanguage framing

Is language of ‘real news’ always neutral and objective?
Can newspapers influence how the public behaves? Can it contribute to xenophobia and other forms of fear and hatred?
Can newspapers help appeal to the best and most generous parts of human nature?

15 October 2008

Reporters without borders 2007 Press freedom rankings

Shows restraints that some countries have. The press and freedom of press that some countries have or government restrictions that countries have.

Government censorship of the Internet vs. Grassroots Internet democracy

The case of Burma – Myanmar

What happened there?

mass [non-violent] protests by pro-democracy groups, including Buddhist monksviolent repression of protests by military groups

* Tourism is one of its major industries
* But has been growing concern about repressive and authoritative government, and human rights violations.

Brief history

Was a British colony until 1948
1948-1962 Democratic republic – ‘Union of Burma’
1962 – 1988
1962, democratic rule ended by a military coup d’etat
1988 saw a new political opposition to a government, because of a falling economyAaun Sun Suu Key, influenced by Ghandi she adopts a non-violent approach to protestsShe is the ‘Nelson Mandela’ of Burma

Pro-democracy – refers to the country as Burma
Military – refers to the country as Myanmar

1990 – Aaun San Suu Key is put under house arrest
-- is still there today!
-- won the Nobel peace prize in 1991

Recent context

Government raises petrol by 500%
Monks are killed and tortured
Government shuts down internet accessJ
ournalists are warned not to report regarding the protests
Evidence provided by the ONI

Open Network Initiative
2005 – does not cover current events
Still provides a prospective regarding restrictions and content filtering

Burma – Most restricted regime on censorship and content filtering

Censorship of internet parallels a policy that limits freedom of speech
Internet is very costly and access is mainly to internet cafes
State peace and developmental council uses software to regulate filtering
Access to 11% of content of the internet was denied
Access to 85% of email provided was filtered
Access to pornographic content was restricted and filtered by 65%
Information on the Burmese state was restricted by 80%

Fortinet – Politics of profit at any human costs

Internet provider – tags and firewalls

General censorship laws in BurmaGeneral media regulation
-- everything needs to be presented to a security board before printedOutside communication had to be registered
-- if not, the prospect of jail for 7-15 years
Broadband is too expensive
Dial up internet is far too slow

Facebook as a mobilization tool

Group – “Support the monk’s protest in Burma”
Membership – Half a million
September 29 100000 joined in one day.

4 October - International Bloggers Day for Burma

Human rights watch says that it has sources that can verify that more people are arrested than the government admits.

Burma is a case that demonstrates

Powerfulness of the internet
Availability of information technology

22 October 2008

Photography and power

Propaganda, persuasion and contemporary photography

the photograph as a major technology of the 20th Century

Shaping understanding of news
Iconic photographic images and our understanding of past events

War and photograph today

photographer’s strategies for reportage and persuasion
effort at control and censorship

But why trust photographers?
Why?
Why not?
Contemporary photographic alteration and manipulation

July 22, 2006
August 5, 2006

Same woman, 2 different dates, same situation

All photographs are ambiguous … yet it might be that the photographic ambiguity, if recognized and accepted as such, could offer to photography a unique means of expression.

…Full of meanings, [the photograph] is a dense text

Censorship and the power of photography in the age of the electronic image

Embedded journalism and the US military {Iraq 2003}

*Photos of USA fatalities rarely published
* Photos of USA torturing Iraqi civilians

24 October 2008

Dilemmas in social photography

Sex and violence sells papers
Social commentary – voyeuristic gaze onto other people’s experiences

Ernesto Nhamvuave

No one truly knows this person
He was burned alive with xenophobic violence that was in South Africa
Don’t know the individual itself

Photos (Domestic violence)

Portray violence
Hard to concentrate on the individual face
We see the problem that she represents

The first image

At first glance it is domestic violence
“just another victim”

We see through the lens of a social issue

Beautiful suffering

Photography and the traffic in pain
Photographers dealing with the issues that are present in the social realm

Berger- Mohr

A seventh man
Migrant workers in the UK
Invisible people
Temporary on visas
Generic image

Alex Kayser

Of soldiers and bankers

Formal men – bankers
Dressed in suits and sitting down
Showcasing authority, individualism and confidence
Soldiers
Start with a close up of one soldier
Sad eyes, blank expression
Showcasing vulnerability
No individualism
Gets lost when with all the other soldiers