[liberationtech] Communication, Politics and Culture Vol 49, Issue 2 (2016)

[Yosem Companys]

From: Carpentier Nico <nico.carpentier at vub.ac.be>

I am pleased to announce the publication of the latest issue of
Communication, Politics & Culture:

Volume 49,  Issue 2 (2016)

It can be accessed at:

http://tinyurl.com/hkuezso

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Editorial – Technology, politics and identity (PDF 19 KB)
Chris Hudson

I need not remind readers that the revolution in communications technology
has radically altered the scope of approaches to communication in its
intersection with politics and culture. A glance at a wide range of
academic publications tells us that contemporary research now seeks to
answer questions about the role of technology in structuring human
relations and about their political manifestations, amongst other issues.
Profound social changes of the last decades, including the proliferating
use of social media accompanied by the rise of the mediated self,
globalisation, and the increasing power of neo-liberal ideology, have
precipitated changes and transformed studies of communication. One
significant shift in focus that would be wholly expected in a journal
dealing with contemporary issues in communication, politics and culture has
been the number of submissions dealing with digital communication
technologies. The articles in Volume 49, Issue 2 are all generally located
in the context of technology, politics and identity.

Vale Dr Peter Williams (PDF 30 KB)
Michael Dutton

Peter Williams was an Editorial Board member (and later Advisory Board
member) of Southern Review, which became Communication, Politics & Culture.
Despite blindness from the late 1990s, Peter continued to teach until
November 2014, and was an active researcher until his death, co-writing a
book on media and the government of populations (Palgrave, forthcoming).

Caught in the web: Male Goths using online ICTs to transcend rural reality
(PDF 108 KB)
Angela Ragusa and Olivia Ward

This empirical qualitative study explores male Goths’ lived experiences in
rural Australia. Offline, participants felt rural communities’
‘conservatism’ and hegemonic masculinity norms restricted their Goth
identity expression and subcultural participation. Further, their commonly
perceived homosexuality, irrespective of self-identified sexuality, was
believed responsible for much assault, ostracism, and ‘othering’
experienced in rural, but not urban, environments. To escape rural
realities and engage in ‘authentic’ identity expression, participants
vociferously interacted in online communities which, more than augmenting
offline reality, created opportunities systemically impossible due to
rurality and permitted subcultural participation and self-identity
expression they believed reduced isolation and positively affected their
mental health.

A straight gay wedding? News images of same-sex marriage in the mainstream
and alternative New Zealand press (PDF 269 KB)
Linda-Jean Kenix

New Zealand was the first country in Oceania and the fifteenth in the world
to allow same-sex marriage. This research explores whether the visual
re-presentations of same-sex marriage in newspaper coverage surrounding the
Parliamentary vote coalesced to form a heteronormative or homonormative
‘image’ of gay marriage through an examination of 654 articles about gay
marriage in the mainstream, New Zealand Herald, and the alternative
publication, GayNZ. This research asks whether there was a difference in
that re-presentation across ‘alternative’ and ‘mainstream’news media
outlets given that visual codes of reference have been suggested to shift
within an alternative communicative space.

Understanding the Indonesian mediapolis: The role of social media during
the 2014 Indonesian presidential election (PDF 298 KB)
David Holmes and Sulistyanto

This article examines the role of social media during the 2014 Indonesian
presidential election. It analyses how candidates used Facebook and Twitter
and how celebrities were enlisted to promote candidates to their fans. The
coinciding development of rapid internet literacy, together with the
introduction of a direct election system that appeals to identity- and
celebrity-driven politics, came together to make social media a central
part of Indonesian elections. This confluence has radically altered the
conduct of campaigns. In order to explain this transformation, it is
necessary to understand the nature of the Indonesian mediated public
sphere, characterised by strong inter-media connections between social
media and broadcast forms.

To censor or not to censor: Roots, current trends and the long-term
consequences of the Chinese Communist Party’s fear of the internet (PDF 251
KB)
Giovanni Navarria

This article explores the reasons behind the Chinese Communist Party’s fear
of digital media and outlines its effects on the Party’s approach to the
internet. By closely examining the heavily-contested field of digital
networked media, we see that the control of the internet in China is not
only based on censorship but that the Party has been experimenting for some
time with a variety of unusual quasi- democratic strategies, each of them
designed to go beyond the need for censorship; each of them a new Party
strategy to learn from its critics and win public consent for its rule.

The July 20 plot: Reading news as myth in the imagining of the British
nation (PDF 111 KB)
Eloise Florence

This paper analyses foreign news articles that appeared in three London
newspapers during the Second World War, covering ‘The July 20 Plot’, an
assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler in 1944.

The analysis is supported by reading the news articles as an ‘other world’
myth, through which characteristics of their own nation, imagined by
Britons, was observed as existing in opposition to that of the Germany
portrayed. International news is thus solidified as a source of historical
enquiry, as well as a site of discourse that can be examined as the
expression of mythological knowledge that typifies an imagined national
community.
Book reviews

Post-Yugoslav cinema: Towards a cosmopolitan imagining, by Dino Murtic,
(2015) (PDF 53 KB)
Reviewed by Hariz Halilovich

The Australian Greens: From activism to Australia’s third party, by Stewart
Jackson, (2016) (PDF 20 KB)
Reviewed by Geoff Robinson
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