International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2015

This article looks at the messages given by factual TV programmes to audiences about work, and, in particular, the models of working behaviour that have been presented to them during the period following the 2007–2008 financial crisis. It focuses particularly, but not exclusively, on daytime TV, which has an audience made up disproportionately of people who have low incomes and are poorly educated: an audience that, it can be argued, is not only more likely than average to be dependent on welfare benefits and vulnerable to their withdrawal but also more likely to be coerced into entering low-paid insecure and casual employment.

It argues that the messages cumulatively given by ‘factual’ TV, including reality TV programmes ostensibly produced for entertainment, as well as documentaries, combine to produce a particular neo-liberal model of the deserving worker (counterposed to the undeserving ‘scrounger’ or ‘slacker’) highly suited to the atomized and precarious labour markets of a globalized economy. This is, however, a model in which there are considerable tensions between different forms of desired behaviour: on the one hand, a requirement for intense, individualized and ruthless competitiveness and, on the other, a requirement for unquestioning and self-sacrificing loyalty and commitment to the employer and the customer. These apparently contradictory values are, however, synthesized in a rejection, often amounting to demonization, of collective values of fairness, entitlement and solidarity.

This article tries to examine the latest European Commission (EC) policy developments in the media sector through the new concept of soft regulation. Much criticized for its media policy approaches, the EC seems to try to rebuild media freedom and media pluralism protection foundations at the EU level with several new initiatives based on soft regulation. This article analyses these soft-regulatory media policy actions to answer the following questions: Have soft-regulatory measures been a good option to improve media pluralism policy at the EU level? Are there better mechanisms that EU can employ to assist Member States in promoting media pluralism? The aim of the research is to see whether these new EC debates and softregulatory initiatives have made a real change in the traditional way that EC has been dealing with audio-visual matters or whether it is only repeating old answers to old questions.

This article investigates the methods of hegemonic framing of the NSA/GCHQ surveillance scandal in a television interview of the journalist Glenn Greenwald on the flagship BBC Television news magazine Newsnight. Having uncovered the greatest mass surveillance project in human history, much of the mainstream media and indeed many academic studies have focused on the debates over the ethics and responsibilities of the journalists and news organizations involved. This research investigates how a television news interviewer inflects the story and directs attention to a series of ‘public concerns’, articulated primarily by those who caused the scandal and mediated through the journalistic voice. The main focus for this article is how a television news interviewer fails to articulate a set of concerns, instead being led by the newspaper mediation of those in authority.

This article considers the intersections between digital and open education to explore how openness, as a value and currency, has conditioned the mediation trajectories of pedagogical knowledge domains and communicative learning spaces. Drawing on critical political economy and deploying a discourse analytic approach, it traces the dimensions of openness as a techno-cultural frame and socio-economic structure conditioning policies and genres stemming from the Open Education Resource (OER) movement in the early 2000s and through the influx of Massive Open Online Coursese (MOOCs). When a practice such as Open Education simultaneously challenges and enhances educational institutions’ concentration of symbolic resources, analysing the wider consequences for society may be difficult. Yet several dimensions and paradoxes can be addressed through correlating a number of contingent factors: the development of settings for the increasing mediatization of pedagogical knowledge other than those traditionally anchored to distance and open education; the many interlocking technological, social and political processes that have created new contexts for cultural production; new circuits for facilitating alternative and cultural pedagogies; and the institutional instrumentalization of openness in neo-liberal restructuring of higher education.

Can a community – a culture – produce change and evidence ‘transformative practice’? This paper investigates the process by which marginalized individuals incite change through the means of language within their cultural communities. The musical Rent is the case study. In Community: Pursuing the Dream, Living the Reality, Suzanne Keller reveals recurrent elements of community: communities have shared territory, ideals, allegiances, and collective frameworks. All of these elements of community are featured in Rent. In Rent, there are three prominent manifestations of community: the AIDS Community, New York City Community, and America as Community. Each of these three manifestations evidence Michel Foucault’s three power struggles. Rent demonstrates the struggle against domination that the AIDS community faces as a result of being marginalized and disenfranchised. Additionally, Rent exposes the struggle against exploitation of residents during gentrification of the Lower East Side of New York City. Furthermore, Rent evidences America’s attempt and failure at constructing a community, subjecting its citizens to a dominant capitalist society and forcing its citizens into submission. Ultimately, Rent challenges America’s dominant ideology through the creation of a counter-discourse. The very act of challenging a dominant ideology is a powerful act. Rent evidences that community constructed through creativity and defined by love can inspire change.

The Labour of Memory: Memorial Cult ure and 7/7, Matthew Allen (2014) 1st ed., London: Palgrave Macmillan, 176 pp., ISBN: 9781137341631, h/bk, $95.00

The Undersea Network, Nicole Starosielski (2015) 1st ed., Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 312 pp., ISBN: 9780822357551, p/bk, $25.95

Fight Back: Punk, Politics and Resistance, The Subcultures Network (ed.) (2014) 1st ed., Manchester: Manchester University Press, 320 pp., ISBN: 9780719090295, h/bk, £75.00