Ben O'Loughlin

The emerging viewertariat and BBC Question Time: television debate and real-time commenting online

This paper advances the study of microblogging and political events by investigating how one high-profile broadcast acted as a stimulus to real-time commentary from viewers using Twitter. Our case study is a controversial, high-ratings episode of BBC Question Time, the weekly British political debate show, in October 2009, in which Nick Griffin, leader of the far-right British National Party, appeared as a panelist. The “viewertariat” emerging around such a political event affords the opportunity to explore interaction across media formats. We examine both the structural elements of engagement online and the expressions of collective identity expressed in tweets. Although many concerns noted in previous studies of online political engagement remain (inequality in the propensity to comment, coarseness of tone), we find certain notable characteristics in the sample, especially a direct link between the quantity of tweets and events on the screen, an ability to preempt the arguments offered by panelists, and ways in which viewertariat members add new content to the discussion. Furthermore, Twitter users commenting online express a range of overlapping identities. These complexities challenge broadcasting and political institutions seeking to integrate new, more organic models of engagement.

Social Media Analysis and Public Opinion: The 2010 UK General Election

Social media monitoring in politics can be understood by situating it in theories of public opinion. The multimethod study we present here indicates how social media monitoring allow for analysis of social dynamics through which opinions form and shift. Analysis of media coverage from the 2010 UK General Election demonstrates that social media are now being equated with public opinion by political journalists. We use interviews with pollsters, social media researchers and journalists to examine the perceived link between social media and public opinion. In light of competing understandings these interviews reveal, we argue for a broadening of the definition of public opinion to include its social dimension.

Analyzing the semantic content and persuasive composition of extremist media: A case study of texts produced during the Gaza conflict

While terrorism informatics research has examined the technical composition of extremist media, there is less work examining the content and intent behind such media. We propose that the arguments and issues presented in extremist media provide insights into authors’ intent, which in turn may provide an evidence-base for detecting and assessing risk. We explore this possibility by applying two quantitative text-analysis methods to 50 online texts that incite violence as a result of the 2008/2009 Israeli military action in Gaza and the West Bank territories. The first method—a content coding system that identifies the occurrence of persuasive devices—revealed a predominance of moral proof arguments within the texts, and evidence for distinguishable ‘profiles’ of persuasion use across different authors and different group affiliations. The second method—a corpus-linguistic technique that identifies the core concepts and narratives that authors use—confirmed the use of moral proof to create an in-group/out-group divide, while also demonstrating a movement from general expressions of discontent to more direct audience-orientated expressions of violence as conflict heightened. We conclude that multi-method analyses are a valuable approach to building both an evidence-based understanding of terrorist media use and a valid set of applications within terrorist informatics.

News media, threats and insecurities: an ethnographic approach

This article presents research from a three-year study of shifting understandings of threat and security in Britain following the 2003 Iraq War. We develop the case for a more integrated and nuanced approach to studying the relationship between policymakers, media practitioners and media publics given the increasing importance of these relationships to international relations (IR) matters of concern. Our analysis demonstrates the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors that explain why certain individuals and groups arrive at certain understandings or perceptions of threats. Responding to recent calls in IR for the use of diverse and interdisciplinary methods, our methodology enables us to demonstrate how disparities emerge between official and public understandings of threats. These understandings result from peoples engagement with political and media discourses, and the experience of this engagement can be characterized by connectivity, (un)certainty and contradiction.

Convincing Claims? Democracy and Representation in Post-9/11 Britain

This article is about political representation and representative claim making, taking as its backdrop the ongoing public controversy and disaffection concerning the British governments policy and conduct in the ‘war on terror’. We investigate ethnographic-style data that chart the responses of citizens to foreign and domestic policy in the war on terror and in particular their responses to the representation and justification of policy decisions by political leaders. Our focus is not on political representatives and their intentions, but on the representations of objects and identities in political discourse and how citizens respond to these representations. We suggest that despite the existence of matters of potentially shared concern, such as ‘Iraq’ and ‘terrorism’, the representations offered by the British government have often been too certain, fixed and direct, making it difficult for citizens to comprehend or connect to their representations as meaningful and negotiable. Following Bruno Latour, we describe this mode of representation as ‘fundamentalist’, and contrast it with a ‘constructivist’ mode of more contingent representations where politicians take into account and can be taken into account. Our analysis suggests citizens respond to fundamentalist claims in several ways. For some, the response has been antagonism, alienation and a lack of belief in the ability of democratic politics to arrive at responsible decisions on shared problems and concerns. For others, however, inadequate representative claims generate a demand for the construction of more nuanced, complex representations, even acting as a spur for some to contest the claims through political engagement.

Arrested war: the third phase of mediatization

After Broadcast War and Diffused War comes Arrested War, the latest paradigm of war and media. Each paradigm coincides with a discrete phase of mediatization. This article explains how war and media operated during each phase, describing the key characteristics of war, the form and nature of the prevailing media ecology, and how power was exercised by and distributed within government, military, and media elites. Following the sense of flux and uncertainty during the second phase of mediatization, when digital content and non-linear communication dynamics generated Diffused War, Arrested War is characterized by the appropriation and control of previously chaotic dynamics by mainstream media and, at a slower pace, government and military policy-makers. We use the ongoing Ukraine crisis to examine Arrested War in operation. In setting out a new paradigm of war and media, we also reflect on the difficulties of periodizing and historicizing these themes and ask what theoretical and conceptual tools are likely to be needed to understand and explain Arrested War.

Radicalisation and media : connectivity and terrorism in the new media ecology

1. Media and Radicalization: Grappling Uncertainties in the New Media Ecology 2. Legitimising Jihadist ideology 3. Media Jihad 4. Media Events: Televisual Connections 2004-2006 5. The Mainstream Nexus of Radicalization: The 2008-09 Gaza Conflict 6. Audience Uncertainties: Imagining the Mainstream and Extremes 7. Conclusion: The New Media Ecology Model

Remediating jihad for western news audiences: The renewal of gatekeeping?

Digitization creates an ontological challenge to broadcast-era metaphors (gate, channel, flow), not least to understandings of who news gatekeepers are, where gates lie, the presumed audience, community or culture gatekeeping is done for, and what it means to gatekeep. Analysing how jihadist speeches by bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and others are translated and remediated from their original websites, languages and contexts by various intermediaries and by western mainstream news, including the BBC, illuminates an apparently simple, settled gatekeeping model that produces systematic patterns of translation, selection and omission. Western news creates an obstacle to understanding why such texts may be appealing to some audiences by ignoring intermediaries such as terrorism-monitoring sites, Arabic media, and jihadist websites’ own self-monitoring services, delimiting a ‘mainstream’ understanding. A focus on multilingual, multiplatform gatekeeping demonstrates how loci and forms of power and authority are changing in the ‘connective turn’, to which media practitioners and scholars must adapt.

Pre-mediating guilt: radicalisation and mediality in British news

This article offers an account to terrorism and security studies of radicalisation as a discursive phenomenon delivered and constructed by news media. In our mediatised lives the ubiquitous recording of our activities and opinions means we may be inadvertently pre-mediating a later category of criminality which can be imposed retrospectively on what we thought was an innocent life. A study of two instances of ‘radicalisation’ reported on British television news appears to demonstrate this. Family photographs, mobile cameraphone footage and other recordings may be used retrospectively to construct a single definition of a person as radicalised. Equally, such media materials can be used to achieve a coherent meaning of radicalisation. We identify three dimensions of British news medias relationship to radicalisation: (1) an unreflexive and possibly incoherent clustering of terms, phrases and discourses by journalists, policy-makers and security services to form a rhetorical structure of radicalisation; (2) the uncertainty around radicalisation may itself contribute to the terms connotations of risk and danger; and (3) media reporting of radicalisation constructs and presents a continuum of normality/safety and deviant/dangerous because of the medial continuity of ‘our’ media practices with those of ‘radicals’.

New Labour's information age policy programme: An ideology analysis

Since its election in 1997 the New Labour government in the UK has initiated an ambitious and wide-ranging public policy programme for information and communication technology. The authors of this article consider how an analysis of political ideology can help to understand and explain these policy developments. The case is made that New Labours distinctive policy approach to technology is structured, defined and made sense of by preceding ideational change, both epistemological and conceptual in form. To understand and explain New Labours response to new technologies at the level of policy, it is therefore necessary and productive to interpret its broader response to the ‘information age’ at the level of political ideology. Carrying out such an analysis, the article examines how New Labours ICT policies are framed and shaped by new conceptions of networked order and technological citizenship. The article concludes by suggesting that a productive avenue for future research would be to address the often messy ‘translation’ of ideology and policy in practice.