The digitalisation of communication, internetisation of everyday life and society in all its segments, and the closely related processes of globalisation, bring about important economic, political and cultural consequences based on the increasing permeability of borders between formerly separate spheres, activities and geographical areas, and the intensification of mobility and free flow of information, people, goods, services and capital. Our everyday life has become inextricably intertwined with the internet, which has not only revolutionised communications, with smartphones and tablets, but has become a global infrastructure for all activities, ranging from economy and governance to education and healthcare. Compared to traditional mass media, the internet (at least in the early days) has seemed much more suitable for eliminating barriers that restrict or prevent the public to access to information about transactions with significant societal implications. The internet and information space of the World Wide Web have long been regarded as hard to control by institutional (state) surveilance and censorship due to their complex structure. Nevertheless, the most important or the most commonly used parts of the internet have not developed in the direction that - following the ideas of the "classical" mass media - would strengthen their role as a watch dog, ensure the public use of reason, and create a public sphere as a field of interaction between citizens and authorities.
COBISS.SI-ID: 41653549
The article reflects on contemporary processes of de-professionalisation of journalism, its consequences for democratic processes and challenges to citizen journalism. It is argued that both the dilemmas of mainstream journalism and the emergence of citizen journalism are consequences of an array of evolving factors having to do with complex transformations in the media landscape and its industries, professional and 'leisured' content creation, employment and technologies, shifting patterns of media use among citizens, as well as broader permutations in social and cultural patterns. In the first section, we briefly address the long-term historical decline of professional journalism; in the second section, we look at some of the attributes of the current crisis; in the third section, we probe some of the key features of what has come to be called citizen journalism, a development that is contradictorily entwined with both the de-professionalisation and the democratisation of journalism. In the conclusion, we turn our eye to some paths for future research.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33870941
This article analyses the shifting use of violence as a framing device that determines the legitimacy of political actors in mainstream media coverage of mass political protests. Building on an analysis of news reports on the largest political protests in Slovenia in the past two decades, which lasted between November 2012 and March 2013, we show how violence can be used as a floating framing device that articulates the legitimacy or illegitimacy of protesters at large, and of specific groups of protesters, state institutions (e.g. police) and political elites. The analysis is grounded in the tradition of protest paradigm research but is conducted according to a revised analytical framework, which better captures the nuances of mainstream media reports on mass protests and the complexities of contemporary protest action. A qualitative multimodal analysis of protest coverage in the main evening news programmes of two leading Slovene mainstream news sources - commercial TV station POP TV and national public broadcaster TV Slovenia - shows that mainstream media can resort to providing a normative social function, even in cases when protesters are framed as legitimate political subjects. It also shows that the legitimization of protesters as political subjects does not necessarily imply legitimization of their explicitly political challenges to the status quo, but can serve to shift the discourse from the sphere of politics to that of morality.
COBISS.SI-ID: 34882909
The chapter offers a literature review of modest, but nevertheless valuable academic research on populism in Slovenia. Authors point out that research on populism in Slovenia has conceptually been based on two types of populism. In the early stage of the research, which was historically connected to the formation of independent Slovenia and largely waned by the end of the millenium, the focus was aimed especially at the so-called exclusionary populism, which denotes bigotry against (mostly ethic) minorities and rise of the extreme right. The second stage of academic research on populism in Slovenia, which followed the early stage, was characterised by the rise of academic focus on the so-called anti-elitist populism. This type of populism is based on the detachment of political elites from citizens and consequently on exclusion of citizens from socio-political decision-making. Authors emphasize there is an inherent problem with the concept of populism, since it lacks a consistent defition. This is true especially for Slovenian research on populism, but is in part relevant also for the wider research on this topic. The definition is often missing or relativized to such an extent that it is impossible to separate it from other related concepts such as political marketing, consumer hedonism, rhetorical demagoguery, or ethno-exclusivism. Authors believe future research in Slovenia must first focus on providing a stricter and clearer definition of this important social phenomena, since it currently too often serves simply as an all-encompassing pejorative denominator.
COBISS.SI-ID: 34172765
The chapter analyses web communication of political actors in European perspective, foregrounding the concept of mediatization, emphasizing reciprocal media-politics interactions, referring to different degrees in which media and political logics interact and try to “prevail” over one another. The focus lies on the analysis of web communication of political actors in nine European states; to what extent online political communication enables participation of the public, and if and how communication practices adopt characteristics of “web populism”? Answers to this question are provided based on a quantitative analysis of websites of political parties and selected case study analyses across Europe. The chapter foregrounds similarities and differences between the inclusive and exclusionary populism, pointing to media praxis and rhetoric of right wing and extremist political parties that use social networks for spreading “politics of fear”.
COBISS.SI-ID: 35240541