Karlstads universitet
Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap

E-participation and iCitizens - The Making of Citizens in a Digital Age 

In Media and Communication Studies we connect changes in communication patterns to societal and cultural changes at large. For example, it can be argued that the advent of the printing press contributed to the rise of mass society, mass culture and mass media. In this manner Horkheimer (1947) and the Frankfurt School were early to discuss cultural forms as part of a larger societal structure. Today almost everyone agrees that the rise of digital communication and Internet has been remarkable. Many scholars (Benkler, 2006; Shirky, 2009) connect these transformations of communication patterns to us entering into a new kind of society. With the possibility to communicate many to many in digital networks, it is argued that we are leaving mass society behind.

Indeed, digitalization transforms society in many different ways. Concerning political participation and citizenship the Internet is considered the new arena for political action in connected societies, lowering the political threshold with new and different forms for engaging people in deliberations about the structure and organization of our society. When more and more people socialize, organize, contribute, inform and publish their concerns and themselves on the Internet, political participation take on different meanings and citizenships are enacted differently.

The critical question for democratic theory according to Cruikshank (1999: 6, 20) is how citizens are constituted by politics and power. In my research I plan to study implications of Internet for political participation, power relations and citizenship practices. So far I have been focusing on theoretical definitions and delineations, thus what I will present here will be centred on a theoretical starting point. I will finish with a suggestion on how to put these theoretical perspectives into empirical research.

Berend Knauerhase is CEO and senior consultant of Globolio, a communication agency specialized on intercultural competence trainings. He also cooperates with Richard Lewis Communications, an agency located in Stockholm offering services in language, communication skills, and cross-culture. On Monday, 02/15, Berend Knauerhase will be a guest lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication. He is speaking about "Cultural Aspects of Cross-Border Communication". All students are invited to attend the open lecture in room 11C413.

Hyperlinks:
Globolio: www.globolio.com
Richard Lewis Communications: www.rlc.se

Understanding Learning Design when the Class Room is Public on the Net 

Today, more and more teachers and schools are using internet not only as the new library, but also as a tool for communication and a technique to publish school children’s texts. Many teachers have recognized the potential of using so called Web2.0 applications for creating a more collaborative learning environment. Using Skype to keep in touch with other classes, in the same country or abroad, or, in a publishing case having school class blogs, letting the children publish texts on wikis and to upload school related video films on video sharing sites like YouTube, are examples of this.
This paper explores how this public text production can effect the learning process and how we can understand the difference between producing non public texts, i.e. assignments made by a school boy/girl which is handed over direct to the teacher, compared to something that will be published and public on the net.

As a starting point for this discussion we have the notion of Web2.0 tools as semiotic affordances and that school work mainly is based on a series of assignments or learning sequences in which the child, during a given time span, has to transform information into new forms or modes. If this new form is something that will become public on the net, it will probably have an effect on both the text itself, the producer and in some cases even the receiver. By not having the teacher as the primary addressee for a school assignment changes the value of the work and gives it a new meaning. This can probably encourage someone and, at the same time, restrain others.

Communicating about Globalization in a Digital Age 

The Mediatization of Politics: Towards a Conceptual Framework 

While mediatization as a concept has been used for at least two decades (Asp, 1986), it is only during the last few years that it has become a key concept in research trying to understand the impact of media on various political, cultural and social processes (Lundby, 2009). Although the term mediatization is commonly used in the academic literature, it is however rarely defined well and oftentimes no clear distinction is made between mediation and mediatization (Livingstone, 2009).
To further empirical research on the mediatization of politics, there is a need for a conceptual framework that both captures the multidimensionality of the concept and is possible to operationalize. Based on this, I have previously (2008) suggested that the mediatization of politics should be conceived of as a process where four major, although interrelated, dimensions can be identified. The first dimension is concerned with the extent to which the media constitute the most important source of information and channel of communication. The second dimension is concerned with the media’s independence from other social institutions, not least political institutions. Although all institutions should be perceived of as interdependent, for the media to have an independent impact on other social or political actors or institutions, they have to form an institution or a social system in their own right. The third dimension is concerned with media content and the degree to which media content is governed by media logic or political logic. The fourth dimension focuses on political actors and the degree to which they are governed by media logic or political logic.

The talk at Karlstad University will focus on this conceptualization of mediatization of politics, and also provide the first results of a comparative study of mediatization along the third dimension. More specifically, this study compares the mediatization of election news coverage on US and Swedish network news in the context of the 2006 Swedish and the 2008 US elections.

"I'm Still Standing for Hope and Glory" - Reflections on the Obama Phenomenon and the Politics of Resentment vs. the Politics of Cosmopolitanism

'The Obama phenomenon hit even remote corners of the world – like the small Swedish town where I caught myself for the first time ever watching an American president’s inaugural speech – as a historically significant event. It was remarkable not only because the new American president was black but also because he radiated the ambition to perform wise leadership. The question remains however: What is so hopeful about Obama? In this article I will explore this question through the concepts of resentment and cosmopolitanism in politics from an emotionsociological perspective. My discussion will draw on the Obama phenomenon (not his person) as it appears from this perspective and I will be using excerpts from Obama’s Cairo speech as “clarifying depictions”(Goffman, 1986). The Cairo speech is illustrative because it presents Obama’s vision of global unity. I will start with a discussion of the role of emotions in politics and a critique of its displacement in the Western political tradition, to be followed by the politics of resentment and the politics of cosmopolitanism.'

Online Media and the Public Sphere: Mapping the Norwegian Blogosphere 

A lasting charge has itthat online media facilitate a fragmentation of the public sphere that couldlead to balkanization of public debate, and consequently politicalpolarization. To move our understanding forward we need to go beyondAnglo-American generalizations to embark on more analyses that start innon-English language areas. Forsuch an endeavour, blogs are key instances of online media. Firstly, the blogis a widespread form of computer-mediated communication with a comparativelylong history. This makes blogs relatively easy to grasp and study over time.Secondly, more so than for instance static websites, blogs facilitate a form ofcommunication quite different from the traditional mass media, thushighlighting the transformative potential of the internet. Thirdly, practicesof blogging assumingly differ quite substantially across social contexts, thusnecessitating comparisons. If we are interested in the impact of blogging onthe structure of the public sphere, we need to identify the borders of theblogosphere as a community, ask how communal it is, and how its links aredistributed and reciprocated.

The presentation will deal with preliminary findings from an ongoing project aiming to map the blogosphere as seen from Norway. Its blogosphere might tentatively be described as comparatively matured, non-partisan, technology-heavy, with a strong presence of young voices. The mapping is primarily based on hyperlink analyses of different "issue networks" among Norwegian-language blogs. The aim is to understand how different issues playout differently in the blogosphere, and how the blogosphere stands out from, and connects to, mainstream media. Addressing such question should provide insight into the ways in which blogging in Norway compare to other cases, and enable assessment of the impact of this dimension of online media participationon the structure of the public sphere. The project also raises methodological challenges to hyper link analyses of the blogosphere in general, and to issues of selection and data collection in a minor language area in particular.