Hybrid Politics by Laura Iannelli

Author:Laura Iannelli [Iannelli, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Reference & Language, Reference, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Social Science
ISBN: 9781473917712
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2015-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

Research Challenges

This chapter has outlined contemporary studies on political newsmaking which are abandoning the idea of a single, dominant media logic wherein older media professionals have the strongly unbalanced power to define the rules and the procedures of selecting and presenting information about political actors and issues. According to these studies on the mediation of electoral events, controversies, and scandals in politics, the contemporary processes of media content production involve older media professionals, but also online non-elite and new media elite, who employ newer and older media logics of content production, circulating political information through different media technologies.

Moreover, this second chapter has visited contemporary key positions in audience research that have underlined the convergence between the subcultural practices of the last century’s media fans and those of contemporary political activists and performative publics. In these theoretical perspectives, the internet has been seen as enabling a greater control by publics over the production and circulation – across multiple media platforms – of bottom-up texts. Yet, according to these positions, the bottom-up texts that are more apt to be ‘spread’ across the diverse media expand the meanings and salvage the languages of the top-down mass-produced media contents – referring in particular to the entertainment media industry and to the potential affective participation it can bring about.

Finally, this chapter has analysed contemporary studies on social movements and political activism that have shown the networked layers of agency in the mediation of the politics of dissent. As with electoral campaigns and politicians, the news media coverage of protests and protesters is no longer understood, in the studies visited in this chapter, as influenced by a single media logic. Rather, the storytelling of recent uprisings was seen as characterised by hybrid news values, in which the traditional news values of media professionals compete and integrate with the newer news values of online contributing publics. Contemporary activists have been understood as highly media-reflexive and spectacle-oriented, informing the practices of production of their own contents using their knowledge of how older and newer media function. According to the scholarship analysed in this second chapter, the internet has assumed a central role for a wide range of political groupings in organising mobilisations which switch between online and offline, and between traditional repertories of parties and digital network repertories of the post-Seattle mobilisations. In the analyses of multimodal social movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Spanish Indignados, the internet has been seen as unfolding within broader representational arenas of protest, made up of corporate and independent digital platforms, mainstream media coverage, and the physical occupation of public spaces.

The multidisciplinary theoretical perspectives analysed in this chapter delineate, then, some important challenges for contemporary research on hybrid media and political participation. Research is challenged to understand and explain, in different socio-cultural and political-economic contexts, the changing participatory practices of the non-elite media actors in the hybrid logics of political newsmaking and in the spreading of top-down and bottom-up contents, across older and newer, corporate and independent media technologies. But, at

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