International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 15, Issue 3, 2019

This article unpacks how legislators in five Canadian provinces turn to official languages (French and English) for digital constituent outreach. In a linguistically fragmented society, use of languages is highly strategic as they can help spread information on political matters to the public and help legislators build support ahead of elections. This article first measures legislators' uses of bilingualism in the digital mediascape with the help of an index. It finds that legislators tend to be mostly unilingual in their digital constituent communications. Second, this article identifies factors influencing legislators' linguistic choices. It tests correlations between legislators' socio-demographic and political profile (e.g. gender, party affiliation, political rank) and uses of official languages. It also determines if the linguistic makeup of legislators' ridings impacts language choices. This article concludes that these variables may impact legislator's use of bilingualism depending on the province of origin and the type of online platform.

In the past decade, public service broadcasters have been confronted with major shifts affecting their remit, portfolio and financing. Heavily fuelled by cutbacks and increasing competition, discussions on 'distinctiveness' have resurfaced again and stand central in many policy discussions on the legitimacy of public service broadcasting. This article critically contextualizes discussions on distinctiveness within broader scholarly work on genre and genre diversity in public service broadcasting. It presents the findings of a comparative, quantitative study of the programming schedule of seven public broadcasters (Flanders, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Portugal and the United Kingdom). The article addresses how discussions on distinctiveness tap into broader discussions on genre diversity and the amount of entertainment in public service broadcasting programming, how we can assess and compare the diversity of genre programming across different broadcasters, and to what extent high levels of specific genres such as entertainment can be linked to other performance indicators of the selected public broadcasters. The article provides a consistent comparison of genre outputs, based on an original database made of a large set of countries and a high, representative number of programmes and applies a consistent set of indexes to assess not only the share of entertainment but also the diversity of the programming. The underlying question to this article is to what extent genre is still valuable to measure performance and legitimacy of public service broadcasting, considering difficulties of measuring 'genre' as proxy for public service media's (PSM) effectiveness.

Digital mediation is implicated in the production of cultural identity in multiple ways. The representations produced and circulated on social media platforms, along with the ubiquitous nature of these platforms, become part and parcel of the production and performance of cultural identity. This paper investigates discourses of Facebook mediation and cultural identity among a sample of international undergraduates in media and communication at a major Dutch university. The analysis of 43 written student essays reveals four discourses: Facebook as a mirror of cultural identity, as a cultural mosaic, as a site of cultural difference and as an opportunity for critical reflection on the idea of cultural identity. Interestingly, these discourses are permeated by a recurrent vision of individual control of both mediation and cultural identity. This article discusses the ideological work entailed in these discourses, calling for more awareness raising on the ways in which social media actively construct social reality.

The immigrant Chinese family has increasingly been represented in transnational Chinese cinema(s) over the past three decades. Two representative films, The Wedding Banquet (Lee, 1993) and Saving Face (Wu, 2004), are chosen to shed light on Chinese filmmakers' engagement with the complex process of identity formation for immigrants through the artifice of family conflict. Both movies examine how homosexuality can pose a threat to traditional Chinese family ethics such as filial piety, family continuity and family reputation, and how the seemingly incompatible ideological standpoints can be accommodated in the end. In both cases, on the one hand the depicted denial of homosexuality comes from its association with failed family education and bad ethnic and cultural practice, and its violation of traditional Chinese values. Therefore, sexuality becomes linked to the effect of Americanization and what it means to be Chinese. On the other hand, the 'undesirable' homosexual identity can be accepted or at least tolerated within the family as long as the family lineage is ensured, or the family remains intact. The disaporic subjects show us that submission to one's ethnicity can be modified or unlearned.

Intersectionality is a critical approach to theorizing and exploring the interlocking of social inequality categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality in various levels of policies, social discourses, institutions and subject positionings. While social discourses do not arise in isolation from an all-encompassing media world, media, as co-producers of social power relations, are particularly interesting for the concept of intersectionality. However, the intersectional approach is rather a research field at the margins of German communication studies. This article discusses the theoretical prerequisites and methodological implications of intersectionality and provides examples of how an empirical implementation is possible in media research.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) is one of the world's most followed political leaders on Twitter. During the 2014 and 2019 election campaigns, he and his party used various social media networking and the Internet services to engage with young, educated, middle-class voters in India. Since his first sweeping win in the 2014 elections, Modi's political communication strategy has been to neglect the mainstream news media, and instead use social media and government websites to keep followers informed of his day-to-day engagements and government policies. This strategy of direct communication was followed even during a critical policy change, when in a politically risky move half-way through his five-year prime ministership, Modi's government scrapped more than 85 per cent of Indian currency notes in November 2016. He continued to largely shun the mainstream media and use his social media accounts and public rallies to communicate with the nation. As a case study of this direct communication strategy, this article presents the results of a study of Modi's Twitter articulations during the three months following the demonetization announcement. We use mediatization of politics discourse to consider the implications of this shift from mass communication via the mainstream news media, to the Indian prime minister's reliance on direct communication on social media platforms.