"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.

#ForgiveUsForWeHaveSinned:

Conceptual integration theory and political Internet humour

Author(s): Nihada Delibegović Džanić,Sanja Berberović / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2017

The aim of the paper is to uncover the extent to which different forms of political Internet humour can criticise current political affairs in a developing democracy such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. Specifically, applying a cognitive linguistic theory of meaning construction, namely conceptual integration theory, the paper analyses the construction of meaning of humorous Internet forms, such as memes, demotivational posters, hashtag posts, and memetic photographs, representing innovative ways of providing political commentaries on current political affairs. The meaning of political humour is constructed in conceptual blending as a basic cognitive mechanism. As it is claimed (Coulson & Pascual 2006, Coulson & Oakley 2006, Coulson 2006, Oakley & Coulson 2008) that blending can be used as a rhetorical tool influencing the audience to change the reality and even act upon it, the analysis of the construction of meaning of political humour as products of conceptual integration can reveal hidden ideologies in political discourse.

#METOO AND US POLITICS: ANALYSING THE TWITTER CONVERSATION

Author(s): Vittoria Bernardini / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2021

The #MeToo movement has had a profound cultural impact on US society, and notably on US party politics. While many studies have addressed the #MeToo-related controversy arising from the Brett Kavanaugh nomination to Supreme Court Justice in 2018, the relationship between #MeToo and US politics before this event has remained understudied. This article, therefore, addresses this gap by looking at the role of politics at the beginning of the #MeToo movement. Focusing on the first six months of online activity on Twitter (October 2017 – April 2018), over 2 million tweets with the #MeToo hashtag are analyzed to identify the main activity patterns across the dataset and to gain insight on user behavior and participation in the conversation. Results point to the weaponization of #MeToo in the political context from its inception. It is suggested that #MeToo reflects the polarized political climate in the US and that it can be conceptualized as part of the wider “culture wars” (Hunter 1991) that characterize the public debate.

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 CALL TO ACTION: RESPONDING TO RUSSIAN HYBRID WARFARE

Author(s): Caroline Grace,Jiaming Huang,James M. Keagle / Language(s): English / Issue: 23/2020

Using its well developed and practiced programs in propaganda, deception and denial, Russia has conducted its hybrid warfare and anti-access area denial strategy using the 21st century information technologies of communication. In light of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Romania felt threatened by Russia’s use of information campaign, especially the narratives that seem to have polarized the Romanian society and discredited the NATO establishment from its prompt execution of its Article 5 commitment. Confronted with these threats, Romania and NATO must understand war in the hybrid domain on an aggregate and its effect on Romania in particular.

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 FORMAL FORM OF SOCIAL CONTROL AGAINST ONLINE HATE SPEECH IN INDONESIA

Author(s): Gatot Eddy Pramono / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2020

The development of technology and information gave rise to new media in communication. This new media, called social media, has different characters from well-known characters. The emergence of this new media also has the potential to be used in spreading hate speech online. Unlimited hate speech content can lead to various negative impacts in the community; it can even cause social conflict, physical violence, harassment, and demonstrations. This paper aims to explain the implementation of formal social control over hate speeches in Indonesia by using a qualitative approach through literature studies as a data collection technique. As a result, formal social control over hate speeches in Indonesia is carried out by law enforcement officers by enforcing existing legal rules. In addition, the use of formal social controls that are not balanced in tackling hate speech in Indonesia can cause bias and discrimination and ultimately lead to public distrust of law enforcers and the criminal justice system. A need for alternative social control in controlling hate speech that occurs in the community is to be discussed further.

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 New Political Scarecrow? The Political Program and Activity of the ”Serbian Right“

Author(s): Srđan Mladenov Jovanović / Language(s): English / Issue: 11/2020

The organization known as Srpska desnica (SD; the Serbian Right Wing) during 2019 become increasingly seen in the Serbian media, as well as receiving augmented visibility on posters throughout the country. With their recent electoral success in the town of Medveđa, as well as their announcement that they are turning into an official party that would enter the 2020 parliamentary elections, coupled with the troublesome past of their leader, Miša Vacić, the situation calls for investigation. In this article, we are putting Miša Vacić’s public and political engagement under a magnifying glass, positioning him within the broader nationalist political spectrum of the country, engaging his official political program. We shall furthermore define the concept of the political scarecrow, a political party or figure that serves primarily to frighten, as shall be clear from the case study that this is the role of his organization.

A POLISH SATTELZEIT? NEW CONCEPTS IN THE POLITICAL LANGUAGE AT THE TWILIGHT OF THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN COMMONWEALTH

Author(s): Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz / Language(s): English / Issue: 122/2020

The political discourse in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth changed deeply in the second half of the eighteenth century. New concepts, terms and notions were integrated into it, some of them drawn from the vocabularies of Western philosophers. The article tries to answer the question what these concepts or notions were, and how their adaptation informed the language itself and the descriptions of the political world and political-system projects formulated in it. Based on the analysis of theoretical treatises as well as writings produced as part of current political debate of the years 1764–92, the author seeks to demonstrate the ways in which the political disputants of King Stanislaus Augustus’s time endeavoured to face the state’s crisis through introducing new words and ideas, and in which the language was adapting to the challenges of the changing socio-political situation. She argues that the concepts which appeared in the last quarter of the century in the Polish political language were fundamental to the description and view of the world – to the extent that a breakthrough in Polish discussion on society and state is identifiable along these lines.

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME? STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS IN ISRAEL

Author(s): David Siman-Tov,Ofer Fridman / Language(s): English / Issue: 8/2020

The term strategic communications is missing from the Israeli academic and professional discourse. Instead, there are three different conceptual approaches to state communication in Israel—hasbara, public diplomacy, and cognitive campaign. Analysing the history of the development and employment of these three concepts, this article makes two contributions important for the field of strategic communications. First, it analyses how Israel has found itself with various approaches; why it does not have one comprehensive framework; and whether any of the three approaches can be considered the equivalent of ‘Israeli strategic communications’. Second, based on the case of Israel, it establishes the need for states to have an exhaustive conceptual framework to conduct strategic communications and the consequences of the absence of such a framework.

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.”

A Vision of the European Union: A Study of Media Coverage of Polish Election Campaigns for the 2019 European Parliament Elections

Author(s): Ewa Stasiak-Jazukiewicz,Marta JAS-KOZIARKIEWICZ,Renata Mienkowska-Norkienė / Language(s): English / Issue: 2(98)/2020

The 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections coincided with the discussions about the need to change the European integration model. These discussions were forced by the refugee crisis and Brexit. In this article, the authors investigate the media representation of programs proposed by Polish political parties in the campaign for EP 2019 elections. The purpose is to determine how the media reported on these programs (media agenda). The research question required the supplementation of the study with an analysis of the political parties’ programs. The research model is based on an agenda-setting theory. The empirical section presents the results of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of both media and political agendas, confirming the discrepancy between them.

Abuse of Power: Coordinated Online Harassment of Finnish Government Ministers

Author(s): Kristina Van Sant,Rolf Fredheim,Gundars Bergmanis-Korats / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 2021

This report is an explorative analysis of abusive messages targeting Finnish ministers on the social media platform Twitter. The purpose of this study is to understand the scope of politically motivated abusive language on Finnish Twitter, and to determine if, and to what extent, it is perpetrated by inauthentic accounts. To this end, we developed a mixed methodology, combining AI-driven quantitative visualisations of the networks delivering messages of abuse with a qualitative analysis of the messages in order to understand the themes and triggers of abusive activity. We collected Twitter data between 12 March and 27 July 2020, a period spanning the state of emergency declared in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This report is informed by the findings of three recent Finnish studies, one of which investigated the extent and effects of online hate speech against politicians while the other two studied the use of bots to influence political discourse during the 2019 Finnish parliamentary elections.

Age and Technology in Digital Inclusion Policy: A Study of Italy and the UK

Author(s): Simone Carlo,Maria Sourbati / Language(s): English / Issue: 26 (2)/2020

The role of media and communication technologies in increasing the quality of life of the elderly is today a key topic in academic and policy debates. This article discusses findings from a study into the way public policy frames the role of technologies in later life. The aim of our study was to critically investigate the policy discourses on ‘old age’ and on the role of digital ICT in fixing challenges associated with ageing. Our focus was on digital inclusion policies of the UK and Italy, two countries experiencing similar trends in population ageing but different ICT diffusion patterns. We found that an age-based understanding of digital technology use was quite common, as was an enthusiastic embracing of the role of digital ICT in the implementation of Active Ageing and Information Society goals. We also found that the understanding of the role of digital technology and its relationship to (old) age has been changing over the last decade, starting to reflect social complexity as ICT diffusion increases among older age groups.

Age-Based Marginalization in Political Discourse about Crisis

Author(s): Katarína Chovancová / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2021

The paper raises the issue of age-based marginalization reoccurring in political discourse produced by political elites in the time of the pandemic crisis. Discursive identity of the elderly population in a central European post-election spacetime is under focus, within a framework of theories of discourse in crisis. Lexicometric analysis of core media coverage of political discourse in Slovakia carried out upon the corpus of mainstream electronic press and a reading of its results is the objective of the empirical part of the study. The scope is to put forward a critical insight into short-term evolution of dominant vocabulary item series and into collocation patterns stressing the connotative features of prominent elements of discourse co-created by political and mediatic actors. The results show recurrent denomination practices with a strong tendency towards negative connotative load of dominant label words. Individual and group identities deserve to be further studied as socially undermined discursive constructs accessible through selected discrete elements.

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.