International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 8, Issue 2-3, 2012

This article contributes to a developing body of critical work on the ethical and political issues raised by anti-trafficking films and campaigns through a focus on two films, Lilya 4-ever (Luke Moodysson, Sweden/Denmark 2002) and Sex Traffic (David Yates, UK/Canada 2004), which are about young women trafficked to work in the sex industry in Europe. It evaluates the degree to which these films meet the criteria for ‘proper distance’ that are required for a ‘cosmopolitan’ aesthetics of spectatorship as proposed by Lilie Chouliarki (2006) in which our philanthropic compassion for ‘distant suffering’ is accompanied by a reflexive engagement with political questions about causes and solutions. It also argues for a ‘proper distance’ for film analysis that includes how texts are circulated and interpreted within particular discursive contexts, in this case NGO and government anti-trafficking campaigns in the United Kingdom and Sweden. Finally, a move outside trafficking as a discursive frame draws attention to critical perspectives on the ideological assumptions embedded in these campaigns and to alternative conceptions of our ethical relation to migrant labour that are obscured as a consequence. In line with Rosi Braidotti’s (2006) critique of humanist conceptions of cosmopolitanism, it argues for a ‘nomadic ethics’ that avoids voyeuristic ways of seeing these women as objects of our compassion, and takes into account their point of view, agency and right to mobility rather than imposing our own, more powerful, perspective, however sincerely held.

Somalia is often described as ‘lawless’ or ‘the world’s most failed state’, a characterization that overlooks the way law and governance actually works in the absence of a capable central government. This article will explore the role of xeer law, or customary law, in regulating media, including both older media, such as poetry, and newer media, such as mobile phones, in Somalia’s complex legal environment. While Somalia remains one of the most dangerous regions of the world for journalists, dozens of radio stations are broadcasting in South-Central Somalia and there is a competitive newspaper industry in Somaliland. In addition, the telecoms industry is booming with some of the best connections and lowest rates on the continent for the internet and mobile phones. Various authorities govern media and resolve conflicts across the Somali territories. To understand media ‘law’ in this region we must look beyond the formal state structures.

The essay argues that the dynamic conjunction of neo-liberal globalization and the information technology revolution has created not only a new relationship with time – which itself is having an immensely consequential (if under-theorized) effect – but also a transformed relationship with the written word. Today reading and writing are increasingly conducted through liquid crystal display – a new technological form of the ancient technology of the printed word. The printed word has become liquid. This essay argues that liquid and accelerated and burgeoning volumes of words that are overwhelmingly oriented towards market-driven instrumentalized ends are creating a deficit in the accumulation and tradition of critical knowledge production and its dissemination. The negative effects of the knowledge deficit are manifold, but the most salient is in the realm of politics, where questions of power, agency and the democratic process become increasingly problematic.

The rise of digital media is creating new ways for media producers and users to engage with stories from around the world. The use of stories is a common way for content to be shared. The global communication space for sharing stories is referred to as the mediapolis, and it incorporates networked interactions mediated through digital technology and traditional media such as print media. The mediapolis generates ways for users to engage with media stories, and its international reach raises concerns about how stories from across the globe can be mutually understood. To address the various ways in which users engage in events of global and ethical significance we discuss the relationship between media (digital and print), media stories and how users are positioned to engage with stories. We explore how the media environment can foster shared understanding amongst users through the use of stories in the mediapolis. To do this we examine memorialisation, focussing on the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. We analyse the print- and web-based stories produced by the Kigali Genocide Memorial (KGM) in Rwanda. We discuss how the medium and the story engender different types of engagement in relation to an event. We develop the concept of the ‘hybrid-engager’ to show how media users engage with media stories in different ways fostering various levels of understanding. This paper is a positioning exercise for grounding further conceptual development and empirical studies.

In recent years Margaret Thatcher has come to be represented as a gay icon by a number of prominent right-wing gay men in Britain. This appears to clash with her record in office, on the basis of which she has previously been seen as a staunch enemy of gay liberation. The origins of a queer presentation of the former Prime Minister lie in the attacks made upon her during her time in office which portrayed her as androgynous and perverse. Such attacks were based on the complicated and ambivalent position she occupied by virtue of being a radical pioneer in her career and a believer in traditional moral standards. Aspects of her ambiguous image were subsequently available for appropriation by interest groups, such as Conservative gay men, who wished to obscure the political record of her government in the context of attempts to legitimate their status within their party in the twenty-first century. There has been extensive study of the ways in which movie stars and other public figures have been established as inspirational figures for the gay community, but the example of Thatcher is exceptional in that she was previously widely attacked for presiding over an allegedly homophobic government. The study of the queer afterlife of Margaret Thatcher as a gay icon, therefore, develops understanding of the ways in which the canon of gay iconicity is a contested cultural field.

On 9 December 2011 a new Belgian government was sworn in after a record-breaking 541 days of negotiations between all democratic political forces with the aim to alter the constitution and provide more autonomy to the different regions that make up Belgium. In this article, the frequent use of political metaphors by North-Belgian politicians and journalists is analysed through a critical metaphor analysis (CMA) that approaches the different metaphors at a descriptive, an interpretative and a motivational level. Four meta-categories of metaphors were identified – sports and games metaphors, war metaphors, culinary metaphors and transport metaphors. The different metaphors fed into six core frames: expressing immobility, attributing blame, the need for unity, bargaining and teasing, the end is nigh and finally lack of direction and leadership. Metaphors were instrumental in strategies to present the Flemish demands as unquestionable and common sense, while the counter-demands of the French-speaking parties were positioned as unreasonable, impossible to accept. In other words, the strategic use of metaphors, some of which resonated throughout the long period of analysis, not only served to represent complex political issues in an easily digestible language, but also shaped and influenced the negotiations through their various mediations and the ideological intentions embedded within the metaphor.

As the Internet becomes increasingly cheap to access and easy to use, some scholars and industrial figures have argued that the digital divide – the information and democratic gap between different socio-economic segments of societies – will by itself shrink over time and eventually disappear. This paper will employ a forecasting model of online news adoption and use, to argue that, even if the Internet becomes accessible and easy for virtually everybody in the future, such a ‘digital delay’ thesis will not materialise. The digital divide is a social rather than technologically driven phenomenon, caused by variation in many factors beyond access and skills. In addition, the ‘logic of upgrade culture’ of the Internet means that users have to continuously acquire new resources and skills to keep up with its evolution and, therefore, there are always people who are well in advance and those far behind. These are well reflected in the area of online news, where the intertwined effect of Internet experience, news orientation/behaviour, innovativeness and perception of online news attributes render the online news gap between SES (socio-economic status) groups likely to widen, rather than narrow, in the years and decades ahead.

The UK Government is committed to helping ‘nurture a new generation of local media companies’. Changes to local media ownership rules allowing companies to follow their customers from platform to platform are supposed to assist in this by encouraging economies of scale. This article provides a timely case study examining a UK-based commercial local news network owned by Daily Mail & General Trust that leverages economies of scale: Northcliffe Media’s network of 154 Local People websites. The study evaluates the level of audience engagement with the Local People sites through a user survey, and by looking at the numbers of active users, their contributions and their connections with other users. Interviews with ten of the ‘community publishers’ who oversee each site on the ground were conducted, along with a content survey. Although the study reveals a demand for community content, particularly of a practical nature, the results question the extent to which this type of ‘big media’ local news website can succeed as a local social network, reinvigorate political engagement or encourage citizen reporting. The Government hopes that communities, especially rural ones, will increasingly use the Internet to access local news and information, thereby supporting new, profitable local media companies, who will nurture a sense of local identity and hold locally elected politicians to account. This case study highlights the difficulties inherent in achieving such outcomes, even using the Government’s preferred convergent, commercial model.

Much scepticism exists about the transformative effects of the Internet, frequently seen to replicate existing patterns of finance and control, including of the media. Yet there is evidence, not least at international state level, of awareness of the potential for divergence or dissent from ideologies reproduced by older media. Using chiefly the instance of the representation of the Royal Jubilee of 2012 in the United Kingdom as its central example but also mediation of the gay marriage debate in the same period, this article explores the question of ideological production in the context of change in delivery platforms. It asks two questions in particular: One is whether, alongside the leakage of revenue as media organizations move activities online, there also occurs ideological leakage. The second question is to what extent the ideological world is significantly augmented by online news and current affairs-related production and comment. Through analysis of media coverage of these two cases from 2012, the article argues that the ideological production of Internet news sites and other online news and opinion sources need not be written off as doomed to subordination to a larger pattern of ideological dominance.

Like many other major European media corporations, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) has begun the digitisation of its audio-visual archives. This transformation from analogue to digital archives raises a number of questions regarding the archive-specific character, history and content of the broadcast material. Furthermore, the digitisation process renders visible a number of problems. This includes possible access for researchers, general availability of the content and permission to present archival material in the public domain, problems all related to intellectual property rights. The article will present the historical broadcast archive from a cultural historical and media policy perspective, suggesting that the cultural heritage of state-owned audio-visual archives remains a contested area due not only to the existing copyright laws but to aspects of historical contextualisation as well. The article presents this perspective through a case study consisting of 48 radio programmes all related to the clearing of the children’s playground Byggeren in Copenhagen in May 1980. The case study underlines the complicated institutional and cultural political implications in which the historic audio-visual source material is situated.

LATINAMERICANISM AFTER 9/11, JOHN BEVERLEY (2011) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 166 pp., ISBN 9780822351146, (pbk), $22.95THE DIGITAL PUBLIC SPHERE. CHALLENGES FOR MEDIA POLICY, GRIPSRUD, JOSTEIN AND MOE, HALLVARD (EDITORS) (2010) Göteborg: Nordicom, 167 pp., ISBN 9789186523022 (pbk), € 25,– MEDIA NATIONS. COMMUNICATING BELONGING AND EXCLUSION IN THE MODERN WORLD, MIHELJ, SABINA (2011) Basingstoke: Palgrave. 232 pp., ISBN: 9780230231856, £57.50 (hbk), ISBN: 9780230231863, £20.99 (pbk)