"Informacija" i teorija komunikacije - Bilješke za buduću povijest tog koncepta

Author(s): Hanno Hardt / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 01/1987

A historical analysis of the concept of information, within communication theory, begin with its determining as a historical framework, a socio-cultural context for the study of media and communication; information as knowledge, and communication as the integration and transformation of the different segments of society. Information is defined as a form of practical knowledge in the process of change and the realization of a democratic society. With the stressing of a scientific, empirical, analysis of society the scientific status of information is getting stronger. Such an approach relies on the model patterns of analysis with a stress on cybcrnetical and mathematical problems. More ambitious, globally directed approaches connect this approach with general system theory. A fundamental limitation of this model conception of information manifests itself in the production of distorted images of social reality and of complex human interaction.

"Plutajući označitelji": pregovaranja oko značenja nacionalnog u Crnoj Gori na Internet-forumu Café del Montenegro

Author(s): Čarna Brković / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 1/2008

The paper represents the analysis of the narratives that deal with the sentiment of national belonging in Montenegro within the chat room Café del Montenegro. The practice of the Internet chat room users is perceived as cultural engagement – „practicing" the State and the emotion of national identification of its own kind. By writing, arguing, negotiating the meaning of the state and nation an abundance of different and broken knowledge’s are created- many histories, geographies, ethics and politics are offered. On the one hand, these directly undermines, jeopardizes and questions the power of the State narrative, hitherto negotiating the nation, the State, authentic devotion, simultaneously manufacturing the state-nation as a reality. The result of mutual correspondence in the chat room is persistent negotiation of the meaning of national categories in Montenegro over the years.

30-second politics, 30 years too late: Political TV advertising in Swedish election campaigns, 2006–2018

Author(s): Marie Grusell,Lars Nord / Language(s): English / Issue: 24/2019

Televised political advertising appears in very different national political communication contexts. Sweden is an interesting case study. For many years, political ads on TV were not allowed at all. However, with the transition from analog to digital terrestrial television the public service obligations of the “hybrid” channel TV4 were dismantled. In the 2010 national election campaign, all Swedish parliamentary parties bought advertising time on TV4. This article intends to shed new light on political TV ads as a new campaign feature in a rapidly transforming political communication environment. The study relates to the concept of hybridization of election campaigns and intends to increase knowledge about hybridization processes by focusing on a critical case where one of the most adopted campaign practices worldwide is finally implemented within a specific national context and deviating political culture.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF VERIFICATION/FACT-CHECKING ORGANIZATONS IN TURKEY: dogrulukpayi.com and teyit.org

Author(s): Gökmen Hakan Karadağ,Adem Ayten / Language(s): English / Issue: 29/2020

The developments in Internet and new communication technologies have many negative impacts besides its positive impacts. In recent years, the most widely articulated one of these negative impacts is the notion of “fake news”. The notions of “fake news,” “post–truth era” and “echo chambers” are increasingly being topical issues. Fake news, the most important indicator of the post-truth era, is mostly circulated and spread through social networks. Researchers are scrutinizing the role of especially Twitter and Facebook algorithms in spread of fake news. If the solution of this problem that emerged in digital environment will be found again in the same platform, development and efficiency of fact-checking organizations is gaining importance. The two prominent fact-checking organizations in Turkey are “teyit.org” and “dogrulukpayi.com”. The scope of the research is comparison of the structures and working manners of these two fact-checking organizations. To conduct the research, semi–structured in-depth interviews were done with authorized team members of the organizations. Doğruluk Payı and Teyit have similarities on human resources, financing and organization; however, they exhibit differences on the scope and process of verification/fact-checking and assessment. Both organizations do not require being a journalist or having a journalistic education to be a verifier/fact-checker and operate with a multi-disciplinary staff. According to interviewees, one of the most difficult thing about being a verifier/fact-checker in Turkey is excessive polarization. Another difficulty about the fact-checking of politicians’ statements is that these statements are mostly value-based.

A Discourse Analysis of South Park’s PC Principal

Author(s): Silvia Branea,Teodor Dumitrache / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2020

This research aims to expose how South Park, a polemical entertainment program, deals with some of the most socially divisive topics from 2015 onward, thus establishing a new type of criticism that had been, for a long time, specific to news media only. The methodology used for analyzing the reflection of the political correctness paradigm is scientific narration. The actions of an autocratic persona, PC Principal, are interpreted during three relevant episodes (#1, #5, and #8) of the 19th season. The personification of censorship through the naïve Butters, an obedient schoolboy turned into a humble clerk serving PC Principal's overzealous fight for his idea of equal rights, can remind one of Hanna Arendt's work "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil." Thus, people who blindly follow orders without questioning the imposed regime might have a more significant negative influence than dictators themselves. As tolerance is becoming a feature of selfishness rather than a noble human attribute due to increased competitiveness, abnormally creating the circumstances to make one more socially visible, South Park often sanctions the excessive flaws of the liberal doctrine, exposing the various absurdities can arise from such biased behaviors. Even though the show depicts thoroughly grotesque images, the authors seem to balance them with moral teachings. The present study intends to highlight the need for an alternative to formal debates regarding social issues to avoid ideological bias.

A háború ára. A jobboldali populizmus popkulturális reprezentációja

Author(s): Veronika Hermann / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 01/2021

In this paper I aim to present the complex relationship between the rise of populist political parties and anti-gender movements and their effect on popular culture. First I depict how populism became the foremost power technique in Europe and the United States in the past decade and why social sciences have difficulties to detect and define this slippery-slope phenomenon. Then I draw the outline of a possible connection between the 1970s conservative, anti-feminist organizations and the polarization of public speech. I intend to use this frame to analyze two popular television series from the last few years, The Handmaid’s Tale (2016) and Mrs. America (2020). By doing so I argue that members of real life anti-gender organizations have been committed to a future that presents itself as a theocracy in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead. Like two sides of the same coin, a series based on real-life events and another based on a dystopia, the series show why it is important to be aware of populist and anti-gender movements.

A New Culture of Truth? On the Transformation of Political Epistemologies since the 1960s in Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe

Author(s): Friedrich Cain,Dietlind Hüchtker,Bernhard Kleeberg,Jan Surman / Language(s): English / Issue: 17/2019

A Semantic Analysis of the Notion of Consultative Democracy: Xieshang Minzhu (协商民主) in the Chinese Official Political Discourses

Author(s): Li Rongxin,Zhou Xiaofang / Language(s): English / Issue: 01/2020

Chinese politics are characterized by the complex issues of a large population and centralized political powers, which offers a distinct political model from the Western models. However, the last two decades have witnessed a sharp collision between Chinese and Western political thinking. In response, domestic authors have increasingly focused on the indigenization (bentuhua 本土化) of Chinese political theories and, therefore, defend the concept of politics with Chinese characteristics. In this article, the authors focus on the discourse of “deliberative democracy” within the Chinese language, namely, Xieshang minzhu 协商 民主. In the current literature, almost no scholarly discussions have explored the semantics of the notion of Xieshang minzhu within Chinese politics. This article engages with this issue, both as a subject and a methodology, to better understand the political language that has been used in the official discourses in China1 by 1) establishing a textual corpus by collecting relevant data into the Chinese and English groups through keywords; 2) conducting a statistical analysis based on the Word Cloud and Diagram analyses; and 3) using Word2Vec to calculate the relationship among other sub-keywords. The purpose of this contribution is to differentiate Xieshang minzhu as adopted by Chinese official discourses embedded in the logic of political reforms from the Western discourses. The semantic analysis presented here also serves as a methodology that systematically develops a conceptual model of xieshang, which further clarifies the misconceptions and errors in the existing literature. The authors also provide an outline of the polysemic notion of deliberative democracy, which not only exists within an authoritarian regime but is also present in other forms and other languages (such as Chinese). This serves to further maintain the legitimacy of the “socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics.”

Agents Politiques et Discursifs de La Modernité Roumaine. Origines, Hésitations, Malentendus

Author(s): Raluca Alexandrescu / Language(s): French / Issue: 3-4/2019

Representing states and citizens in the political rhetoric and construction of the XIX century means investigating the origins of such discourses in the political thought. In the Romanian case, one should get a closer look into the ways of intellectual nurturing in the rising of a Modern political elite in the XIX century, especially in the aftermath of 1848 Revolution and of the 1859 Union. The political agents of this period are to be analyzed in a broad theoretical and rhetorical framework, conditioned by philosophical and historiographical discontinuities between the periods. One should see and interpret in that sense the intellectual sources, the political and institutional framework of that time, that could draw a more accurate image of what political power and agents’ discourse meant at that time and how it influenced, for that matter, the further construction of modernity during the XX and XXI centuries.

Amerykańskie oceny dotyczące ingerencji Rosji w przebieg wyborów prezydenckich w USA

Author(s): Marcin Andrzej Piotrowski / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 2017

Opublikowane dotychczas materiały amerykańskiego wywiadu potwierdzają ingerencję służb specjalnych Federacji Rosyjskiej w przebieg kampanii prezydenckiej w 2016 r. Ujawnienie zdobytych za pomocą cyberoperacji dokumentów kompromitujących Hillary Clinton wpłynęło na jej porażkę oraz na sukces Donalda Trumpa. Ambitna operacja Rosjan ma poważne konsekwencje dla nowej administracji USA, jej polityki zagranicznej i działalności wywiadu. Także po zaprzysiężeniu Trumpa kontynuowane będzie bowiem śledztwo FBI wobec niektórych jego doradców. Będą się także toczyć dwa dochodzenia Senatu w sprawie błędów w działalności wywiadu i w cyberobronie USA.

An active local public sphere: the role of new media in creating a contemporary local democracy in the case of Poland

Author(s): Ilona Biernacka-Ligięza / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Globalization does not render locality irrelevant, but challenges it, as was emphasised, for instance, by the concepts of glocalization (Featherstone, Lash, & Robertson, 1995, pp. 25–44) or translocality (Appadurai, 1996). In general, these concepts suggest that encounters of the local and the global can be productive in terms of modifying locality by placing it in the wider context of the global and vice versa. In the case of using digital technologies in a local context, we are not interested in the width but in the depth. Looking at the implementation of the digital technologies in local communities, we are not concerned with the question of how the local gets modified by the global, but if it can become intensified. Some scholars provide sceptical accounts of the decaying sense of participation in the life of local communities and argue that in the late modern period real (off-line) local communities dissolve into isolated individuals (Putnam, 2001). Potential intensification of the local participatory energy on and through the internet is therefore more important in that it is missing even in the real life of local communities.

An Ad Hoc Nation. An Analysis of Moldovan Election Campaign Clips

Author(s): Julien Danero Iglesias / Language(s): English / Issue: 04/2015

Since independence, nationalism has been at the front of politics in the Republic of Moldova in the context of a persisting political struggle about the very definition of the Moldovan nation. Looking at campaign video clips produced in 2009 by Moldovan political parties and using a methodology inspired by Critical Discourse Analysis, the article gives a better understanding of nationalism in Moldova nowadays. The article demonstrates that the focus of political parties on the nation is purely symbolic. They adapt their discourse to the context in which they evolve (audience of the videos and targeted voters). Pursuing the objective of gaining or holding on to power, parties construct an ad hoc nation whose content they fill with the needs of the moment, using mirroring arguments to win the elections over competing parties seen as enemies of an endangered country.

An Elite of Transition. The National Party from Wallachia (1838-1840)

Author(s): Cosmin Mihuţ / Language(s): English / Issue: 18/2019

From the years of the Russian occupation (1829-1834), the power of words and the political rhetoric started to exceed the traditional framework, becoming in time the main horizon of affirmation, reproduction and legitimation of power in the Principalities. The traditional structure of the public space, of symbolical averment of the princely power, started to erode allowing the emergence of a public political language that ‘freed’ the political act from the narrow framework of boyar bargains, mediations, conspiracies. Being at the border of tradition and modernity, the practices of the National Party had features specific to both, combining new ideas with older practices and vice-versa. Unlike previous political groups, which extracted their power legitimacy through patronage over society and by managing the social relations (controlling offices), this group differentiated itself by using a public discourse, built on rational criteria (law, liberty), which offered the group a shared identity, appropriated in a political project.

Analiza obilježja poštanske mreže u Bjelovarsko-bilogorskoj županiji

Author(s): Katarina Mostarac,Zvonko Kavran,Petar Feletar / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 13/2019

According to the regulatory framework, universal service in the postal system ought to be accessible to all citizens of the Republic of Croatia under equal and transparent conditions, regardless of their geographical position. The universal service provider has to establish the postal network in such a way that the elements thereof be accessible to all citizens. The accessibility of the elements of the postal network and services is ensured by regulatory criteria (international and domestic regulations) that the universal service provider ought to fulfil. The organisation of the postal network in rural areas is rather demanding, since the network has to ensure accessibility in order to fulfil the universal service obligation even under the conditions of reduced economic activity. The paper analyses the status of postal network accessibility in the Bjelovar-Bilogora County. This will also enable the analysis of the regulatory criteria and their impact on the actual accessibility of the postal service.

Authority Legitimation In Campaign Discourse Of American Presidential Candidates

Author(s): Boryana Kostova / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2020

This article addresses legitimation in discourse seen as a complex and multifaceted concept. The specific focus is on authority legitimization which is understood not simply as ethos construction but rather as a claim to rightness, i.e. the claim to be normatively right to perform the speech act. Building upon work on legitimation by van Leeuwen and van Dijk, the article studies intertextuality as one aspect of authority legitimation. The presence of elements of one text in other texts can take various forms and degree of visibility and intensity. Therefore the main purpose of the article is to identify the types and functions of intertextuality. A framework within the scope of Critical Discourse Studies is proposed by which a small corpus of acceptance speeches of contemporary American political leaders is analyzed. The results from the quantitative and qualitative analysis have shown that speakers of different political backgrounds use intertextuality similarly. It is revealed that the most common source of intertextuality is the voice of the political opponent. The main functions of intertextuality in the analyzed speeches are solidarity and credibility building as well as downgrading opposing points of view.

Automatic Identification of Political Ideology in Online News Articles

Author(s): Vikki Fiore / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2019

The following research discusses text analysis approaches to automatically categorize news articles based on their political ideology. In this case, ideology is defined as a writer expressing either a liberal or a conservative point of view. This classification is done at both the document and the phrase level, as previous research has indicated that doing so increases classifier performance over using a "bag of words" approach. Linguistic features related to lexical richness are extracted from the articles via Python, and features related to emotions and values are extracted via the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software. The machine learning software Weka is then used to apply various classification algorithms on the numeric features. Additionally, Amazon Mechanical Turk is used to measure human accuracy and inter-rater agreement on identifying the ideology of the same texts. In all, the trained classifiers perform well above the baseline and outperform the human annotators on the same tasks.

AUTONOMY VS INSTRUMENTAL NATURE OF THE MEDIA

Author(s): Sławomir Soczyński / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2019

Autonomy of the media and their instrumental character. Both the media and politics or business are subsystems that are part of the general social system. The relations between them are not free from mutual attempts to exert influence. Trends present in the world of politics and in the business world for the domination of the media and their instrumentalization for non-media purposes are a problem that is not new and still valid. They result to a large extent from a different understanding of the scope of media autonomy by individual entities of the social system. This article attempts to indicate the scope of media autonomy, and more specifically, to determine what autonomy decides about this autonomy. The basis for the analysis will be two theories of the system – Niklas Luhmann and Talcott Parsons – differently captivating autonomy of the elements belonging to it and the relations between them.

BEING AT HOME IN SOLITARY QUARANTINE. PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYTICS AND EXISTENTIAL MEDITATIONS

Author(s): Nader El-Bizri / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2020

This ontological investigation is mediated via multifaceted phenomenological analytics and existential mediations over the architectural mode of being at home in solitary quarantine under communal global lockdowns. The present line of inquiry is undertaken by way of probing the attuned metamorphoses in solitude of the lived experiencing of the intertwined phenomena of space-time, embodiment-in-the-flesh versus being-with-others via cybernetic and telecommunication technologies, dwelling amidst things and paraphernalia, and the underlying affectivities of the mode of being-toward-death.

Between Anarchy and Censorship. Public discourse and the duties of social media

Author(s): Judit Bayer / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 2019

Social media platforms have become powerful enough to cause perceptible effects in societies on a global scale. They facilitate public discussion, and they work with excessive amounts of personal data – both activities affecting human rights and the rule of law. This specific service requires attention from the regulator: according to this paper, a new legal category should be created with clear definitions, and a firm delineation of platforms’ rights and responsibilities. Social media companies should not become responsible for third-party content, as this would lead to over-censorship, but they should have the obligation to create and maintain safe and secure platforms, on which human rights and the rule of law are respected.

Between overt disinformation and covert practice. The Russian special services’ game

Author(s): Jolanta Darczewska / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 2019

It is generally believed that one sign that the secret services are doing their job well is that the media says nothing about them. In this respect, Russia is a special case: the services receive an excess of media coverage. This is only partly due to the media’s natural interest in an attractive subject, as well as the services’ own selfpromotion (although that is increasingly true around the world). In fact, it is a symptom of Russia’s information warfare, in which the special services’ public image is just one block in building the appearance of a strong state and a strong government. It also justifies and legitimises the high position which the services and elite members of the institutions of force enjoy in the Russian Federation’s political system. However, this artificial, mythologised image of the services conflicts with their non-public practices. These are revealed when their cover is blown, when journalists investigate criminal scandals involving the services, when controlled and uncontrolled leaks of compromising information take place, and when the opposition publicises cases where the special services violate fundamental rights and civil liberties – something they often do under the pretext of fighting the ‘fifth column’ of the West, international terrorists and foreign spies. This produces two different images of the services: the official one and the common one. The former presents the services as professional, patriotic and a stronghold of traditional values, Russia’s ‘sword and shield’; the latter shows them as pampered by the regime, lawless, corrupt and undisciplined, involved in brutal competition with one another, bureaucratised and criminalised.