Suchergebnisse

Introduction. Protest and the media -- Economic crises and protest movements -- Protest times -- Protest spaces -- Protest speeds -- Protest technologies -- Crisis and critique. Crisis : capitalism in a permanent state of exception? Critique : filling the void? -- Protest movements' media practices -- An archaeological approach to media practices -- Archiving critique : archiving protest movements? -- Overview materials -- Conclusion : critical junctures as histories of media participation -- Protest times : the temporality of protest media practices. Mechanical speed : unemployed workers' movements -- Perpetual flow : tenants' movement -- Perpetual flow of the 1970s television -- Digital immediacy : the occupy Wall Street movement -- Conclusion : digital immediacy in the age of social media -- Protest spaces : the production of space in events of contention. The National Hunger March of 1931 -- Housing crimes trial, 6 December 1970 -- The OWS March on Brooklyn Bridge, 1 October 2011 -- From space bias to hyper-space bias -- Protest speeds : resynchronizing fast capitalism. The speed of fast capitalism -- Desynchronization -- Protest movements' re-synchronization : adaptation, abstention, attack and alternatives -- Conclusion : the speed of Quadruple A -- Conclusion. Protest technologies : pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Historical trajectories : media regimes of time and space -- Notes on technological determinism -- Futures of protest media.

The book gives an intriguing insight into how young people in Estonia, twenty years after the establishment of democracy, perceive their own role as citizens. It does so in a theoretical framework that stresses the embeddedness of the civic experiences in a media-dominated environment, thus closely linking civic and media experiences. Based on the analysis of both qualitative interview data and a relatively new method of using the internet as a complementary tool for engaging with open-ended diaries, the study explores the extent to which young citizens experience the media as being interwoven with their everyday lives and, in fact, constitutive of their social reality as citizens. With its particular focus on young Estonians, i.e. on a generation that has been brought up in a context of rapid political, economic and social change and that is well-known for its fascination with new communication technologies, the book is a valuable contribution to the growing international research on media and civic experiences.

Der Europäische Integrationsprozess schreitet auf politischer Ebene trotz und aufgrund der internationalen Wirtschaftskrise weiter voran, nicht jedoch in den Köpfen zahlreicher Europäer. Die Arbeit analysiert aus der Perspektive junger Bürger im ländlichen Gebiet sowie mit kurzer Ausbildungsphase ein Identifikationsdefizit mit der EU, das eng mit einem Öffentlichkeits- und Demokratiedefizit verbunden ist. Die Autorin rekurriert dabei auf eine Gruppe junger Europäer, die der EU als politischer Institution besonders kritisch beziehungsweise indifferent gegenüber steht. Wie sehen diese jungen Menschen – die in Analysen häufig außen vor sind – die EU und was verbinden sie mit ihr? Dies sind Fragen, die die Arbeit aufwirft und mittels Fokusgruppeninterviews zu beantworten sucht

Automation has sparked dreams of overcoming human boundaries since at least the 1950s, and recent decades have seen an upswing in imagining a bright technological future in which artificial intelligence (AI) will solve social, economic, and political challenges and improve public administration and welfare provision. However, the introduction of algorithmic automation can cause friction. On the one hand, enthusiasm for algorithmic automation in the industrial and public sectors is increasing, and widespread digitalization and automation projects are revolutionizing public administration and welfare. On the other hand, public discourse is increasingly painting a dystopian picture of the digitally automated welfare state, critiquing biases and raising issues of accountability and autonomy. In this article, I take the frictions, conflicts, and contradictions that emerge from technological change as a starting point for considering the temporalities of algorithmic automation, particularly focusing on the Swedish context. Considering three temporal layers of welfare automation—timing, belatedness, and perpetual emergence—I outline the contours of the contemporary Swedish digital welfare state and discuss the critical implications of delegating decisions to algorithmic systems and their mediating features. Drawing on a diverse set of empirical data drawn from in-depth interviews with civil servants and software developers and observations of Swedish public agencies, I engage with the unfulfilled promises of the fully automated welfare state.

Protest movements have successfully adopted media technologies to promote their causes and mobilize large numbers of supporters. Especially social media that are considered as low-cost and time-saving alternatives have played particularly important roles in recent mobilizations. There is, however, a growing concern about the contradictions between long-term organizing for progressive, social change, on one hand, and the media technologies employed, on the other. Hartmut Rosa has argued that the current culture of accelerated capitalism is characterized by a growing desynchronization between political practices (slow politics) and the economic system (fast capitalism). This article traces the increasing social acceleration related to (media) technologies employed by protest activists and asks whether there is an increasing desynchronization with their political practices discernible. Furthermore, the article investigates strategies of resistance to overcome the growing gap between 'machine time' and political time. Empirically, the article builds on archival material and in-depth interviews documenting the media practices of the unemployed workers' movement (1930s), the tenants' movement (1970s) and the Occupy Wall Street Movement (2011/2012) and argues for the need to re-politicize media infrastructures as means of communication in order to tackle democratic problems that emerge from the divergent temporalities.

Media technologies are structuring time and space in crucial ways. Especially the temporal aspect has been of interest lately, which is expressed in a growing commentary on media-related time in terms of speed and acceleration. Taking this discussion as a starting point, I problematize the consequences of temporal structuring by media technologies for civic participation and more specifically protest movements. Drawing on two case studies – the unemployed workers' movements of the 1930s and the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011/2012 – I explore the changing regimes of time that are related to dominant media technologies. The main aim is to disentangle the relationship between temporal regimes suggested by media technologies and their appropriation by protest movements that emerged in major economic crises. Combing archival materials with in-depth interviews, I discuss the importance of media practices for the two movements and uncover a shift from mechanical speed to digital immediacy having crucial implications for democracy and civic participation.

Protest movements are fundamentally about the production and control of space. Whether in a discursive or physically sense protesters aim to carve out spaces that give room to their political causes. The negotiation and contestation of the production of space has potentially changed in the context of social media that connect activists over vast distances and in real time. In line with that, media scholars, urban geographers and sociologists have attributed changes in the production and perception of space to emerging media technologies that are extending the human body (McLuhan 1964), contributing to deterritorialization (Tomlinson 1999) and space-time compression (Harvey 1990). What are then the strategies of protest movements that are actively challenging the hegemonic logic of the production of space and how are the strategies relating to communication technologies? What are the consequences of changes in the production of protest spaces for activism in terms of temporality? This chapter investigates the changes in the production of space of protest movements in the context of advancing capitalism that is increasingly based on digital communication technologies. In that sense it contributes to the discussion of how contentious politics and the production of space are changing with social media while contextualizing these changes historically by putting current protests into dialogue with previous movements and their media practices.

In information and media affluent societies, the critical ability of citizens is increasingly important. This is reflected in a number of political initiatives that aim at engaging citizens in questions of media content and production, often labelled as media literacy. In this context, skills related to media technologies that are often accentuated in media literacy education are a necessary but not sufficient condition for media literacy. Critical reflexivity and critical practices are crucial for media literacy and therefore in the centre of this article. This article proposes an analysis of media criticism from a citizens' perspective. Drawing on solicited, open-ended online diaries as well as in-depth interviews with young Estonian citizens, the article applies an inductive approach to media criticism while paying attention to the specific context in which the media criticism arises.

The book gives an intriguing insight into how young people in Estonia, twenty years after the establishment of democracy, perceive their own role as citizens. It does so in a theoretical framework that stresses the embeddedness of the civic experiences in a media-dominated environment, thus closely linking civic and media experiences. Based on the analysis of both qualitative interview data and a relatively new method of using the internet as a complementary tool for engaging with open-ended diaries, the study explores the extent to which young citizens experience the media as being interwoven with their everyday lives and, in fact, constitutive of their social reality as citizens. With its particular focus on young Estonians, i.e. on a generation that has been brought up in a context of rapid political, economic and social change and that is well-known for its fascination with new communication technologies, the book is a valuable contribution to the growing international research on media and civic experiences.

How do young people in Estonia experience the political, politics and citizenship? How are these civic experiences connected to young peoples' experiences with the media? Anne Kaun's thesis Civic Experiences and Public Connection presents a theoretical and empirical investigation of how civic experiences, particularly public connection, emerge in the context of contemporary Estonia. Employing open-ended online diaries and in-depth interviews, she aims to develop an in-depth understanding of how young people experience democracy today, and how they express themselves as citizens; expression not only through the physical performance of citizenship, but also through orientation, interest in, and reflection about issues that are of common concern or should be seen as such. The empirical investigation of public connection as critical media connection, playful public connection and historical public connection, is based on narrative analysis and embedded in a theoretical exploration of key concepts in the context of civic culture studies, namely the political, politics and citizenship. Combining Chantal Mouffe's conflict theory with Paul Ricoeur's narrative identity, Kaun aims to shed light on contemporary democracy from the citizens' perspective. The author proposes a holistic approach to both civic experiences and the role that media might play in relation to them. Following a non-media- centric approach, she shows that media, despite their ubiquity, are an important but not exclusive source of the civic experiences of young adults in Estonia.

The article concerns civic experiences beyond or prior to civic action. Approaching questions of civic culture and democracy by way of the rather broad notion of civic experience, the author suggests that democratic values and processes involving citizens' participation should be understood as deeply anchored in the lifeworld. The article establishes a view in which civic culture is understood from a holistic perspective as an experience. At the same time, the author is interested in the ways in which media are involved in that process, without assuming their predominance in fostering civic engagement and public connection. Drawing mainly on 20 solicited, open-ended online diaries with young adults from Narva, Tartu, and Tallinn in Estonia and the European Social Survey Round 5, the article proposes civic experience as a helpful notion to overcome the generic divide between utopian and dystopian views on the relationship between media and civic culture.