Colin Agur

Reconstructing the Indian public sphere: Newswork and social media in the Delhi gang rape case

In recent years, a growing literature in journalism studies has discussed the increasing importance of social media in European and American news production. Adding to this body of work, we explore how Indian and foreign correspondents reporting from India used social media during the coverage of the Delhi gang rape; how journalists represented the public sphere in their social media usage; and, what this representation says about the future of India’s public sphere. Throughout our analysis, Manuel Castells’ discussion of ‘space of flows’ informs our examination of journalists’ social media uses. Our article reveals that while the coverage of the Delhi gang rape highlights an emerging, participatory nature of storytelling by journalists, this new-found inclusiveness remains exclusive to the urban, educated, connected middle and upper classes. We also find that today in India, social media usage is rearticulated around pre-existing journalistic practices and norms common to both Indian reporters working for English-language media houses and foreign correspondents stationed in India.

A Foreign Field No Longer: India, the IPL, and the Global Business of Cricket

In the past decade India has become the financing hub for cricket, a broadcaster in its own right, and an agenda-setter in the management of all forms of the game. What some commentators have called the ‘Indianization’ of cricket extends beyond business: it is a social, political, and cultural phenomenon. For five seasons, the Indian Premier League (IPL) has offered a glimpse of this phenomenon, prompting enthusiasm from young fans and those who stand to profit from the new league, and resistance from traditionalists. This paper discusses the material and symbolic roles the IPL has come to play in global cricket. It begins with an overview of the IPL’s history, discusses how the IPL is changing the global business of cricket, and explores how the IPL is challenging the traditional culture of the sport. The paper concludes with arguments about the IPL as a grand spectacle, and a cultural phenomenon that, despite its problems, might prove its critics wrong. Throughout, the paper treats the IPL as a useful case study not only in the business of sports, but also more widely in our theoretical and empirical studies of globalization.

The Changing Physical and Social Environment of Newsgathering: A Case Study of Foreign Correspondents Using Chat Apps During Unrest

Mobile chat apps have shaped multiple forms of communication in everyday life, including education, family, business, and health communication. In journalism, chat apps have taken on a heightened significance in reporting political unrest, particularly in terms of audience/reporter distinctions, sourcing of information, and community formation. Mobile phones are now essential components in reporters’ everyday communication, and particularly during political unrest. In East Asia, the latest trends point toward private networking apps, such as WeChat and WhatsApp, as the most important digital tools for journalists to interact with sources and audiences in news production. These apps provide a set of private (and, increasingly, encrypted) alternatives to open, public-facing social media platforms. This article is the first to examine foreign correspondents’ usage of chat apps for newsgathering during political unrest in China and Hong Kong since the 2014 “Umbrella Movement,” a time when the use of chat apps in newsgathering became widespread. This article identifies and critically examines the salient features of these apps. It then discusses the ways these journalistic interactions on chat apps perpetuate, disrupt, and affect “social” newsgathering. This article argues that chat apps do not represent one interactive space; rather they are hybrid interactions of news production embedded in social practices rather than pre-existing physical/digital spaces. This research is significant as the emergence of chat apps as tools in foreign correspondents’ reporting has implications for journalistic practices in information gathering, storage, security, and interpretation and for the informational cultures of journalism.

Negotiated Order: The Fourth Amendment, Telephone Surveillance, and Social Interactions, 1878–1968

In the United States the words “telephone surveillance” bring to mind contemporary security concerns about smart phone tracking, the NSA warrantless wiretapping scandal, and the telecommunications provisions of the Patriot Act. Yet telephone surveillance is as old as telephony itself, dating back to the nearly simultaneous commercialization of the telephone and phonograph. This article examines telephone surveillance by American law enforcement agencies from the inception of telephone service to the passage of the Federal Wiretap Law in 1968, focusing on the challenges an advancing, proliferating, and shrinking technology posed for Fourth Amendment law. To highlight the technological, institutional, and cultural interactions that have shaped Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, the article deploys Jack Balkin’s theory of cultural software and Anslem Strauss’s concept of a negotiated order and brings together major cases, federal legislation, and evidence of government surveillance. The article argues that during the first ninety years of telephone usage in America, laws on search and seizure developed not from constitutional consistency or logic but as the result of a complex negotiation process involving new media and human agency.

Second Order Networks, Gambling, and Corruption on Indian Mobile Phone Networks

This article explores unintended effects of recent growth in India’s mobile phone network. Using a case study of the Indian Premier League (IPL) – a popular cricket league that has encouraged mobile phone usage among fans – this article argues that India’s large and inclusive mobile phone networks have enabled significant new gambling and corruption. The spatial possibilities of mobile networks have led to new organizational forms in gambling and corruption, with small-scale local activity increasingly supplanted by organized syndicates located in Mumbai and Dubai. Based on interviews with mobile phone users and participants in betting rings, this article shows that the IPL mobile network enables second-order networks of criminal activity by making it easier to administer illegal action and easier to escape detection. This article emphasizes three ways that mobile networks facilitate gambling. First, their functionality, portability, and near-universality allow for new flows of information and capital. Second, mobile networks allow for new scale and new organizational forms, allowing a shift from local bookies to national and international syndicates. Third, mobile networks have dramatically enlarged the gambling sector in India. These changes have helped turn cricket gambling into a global industry with India at its center.

Mobile sourcing: A case study of journalistic norms and usage of chat apps:

Since 2011, mobile chat apps have gained significant popularity worldwide and the leading chat apps have surpassed social networking sites in user numbers. These apps have become the hosts for everyday communication among a wide variety of users and, thanks to the functionalities of certain apps, have taken on new significance in reporting. Especially in Hong Kong (a high-income, high-tech society in which smartphones are in widespread use) and mainland China (an emerging market with more than 1 billion mobile phone users), journalists have turned to these apps to complement face-to-face interactions to gather news. Drawing on a case study building on in-depth interviews with foreign correspondents based in China and Hong Kong, this article discusses how journalists use chat apps and establish trust with their sources. This article explores journalistic sourcing on apps (e.g., encrypted or not encrypted; open or one-to-one communication), and seeks to understand individual and systemic levels of trust. It finds that there are differences of trust depending on the functionalities of individual chat apps, and that interactions in journalistic sourcing in face-to-face and online environments affect the generation and output of news stories. Chat apps allow reporters to use open or closed networks, and adopt one of several approaches: trust the network, master the network, or abandon the network. These findings suggest that chat apps have an important role in communicating with sources, and should be a part of efforts to theorize journalistic sourcing.

Media capture with Chinese characteristics: Changing patterns in Hong Kong’s news media system:

In the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, a former British territory in southern China returned to the People’s Republic as a semi-autonomous enclave in 1997, media capture has distinct characteristics. On one hand, Hong Kong offers a case of media capture in an uncensored media sector and open market economy similar to those of Western industrialized democracies. Yet Hong Kong’s comparatively small size, close proximity, and broad economic exposure to the authoritarian markets and politics of neighboring Mainland China, which practices strict censorship, place unique pressures on Hong Kong’s nominally free press. Building on the literature on media and politics in Hong Kong post-handover and drawing on interviews with journalists in Hong Kong, this article examines the dynamics of media capture in Hong Kong. It highlights how corporate-owned legacy media outlets are increasingly deferential to the Beijing government’s news agenda, while social media is fostering alternative spaces for more skeptical and aggressive voices. This article develops a scholarly vocabulary to describe media capture from the perspective of local journalists and from the academic literature on media and power in Hong Kong and China since 1997.

The Bully Pulpit, Social Media, and Public Opinion: A Big Data Approach

ABSTRACT In this paper, we seek to understand the contemporary power of the presidential “bully pulpit”—the persuasive power of the nation’s highest elected office—in a context of shifting patterns of mediation. We do so by examining a major social media communication platform (Twitter) for evidence of changes in public opinion before and after President Obama’s high-profile statements on net neutrality in November 2014. This study includes novel and comprehensive data on the effects of a presidential announcement on public opinion. With social media playing a growing role in both electoral and policy discourse, this paper offers a methodological foundation for future studies in the changing nature of the presidential bully pulpit and the role of social media as a tool of mediation in political communication.

Re-imagining the Indian state: External forces and the transformation of telecommunications policy, 1947–present

This article examines Indian telecom policy from independence to the present. Dividing this period into three phases – from 1947 to 1984, 1984 to 1991 and 1991 to the present – the article explores the role of the state in India’s dramatic transformation from a telecommunications laggard to one of the world’s largest markets in mobile communication. It draws on a wide range of government documents, institutional surveys (domestic and international) of Indian telephony, memoirs and analyses by policy officials, and interviews with telecom executives. This article makes two arguments. First, it emphasizes the importance of external forces, including economic pressures, obligations to foreign creditors and the arrival of outsiders into key policymaking positions. Second, it provides an alternative to the simplistic argument that the state has ‘left telecommunications to the private sector’. Rather than abandon its role in network building and maintenance, the Indian government has deployed its power in specific and deliberate ways. While much of this policy development was unanticipated and at times accidental, Indian telephony has been transformed from an inward-looking and defensive statist monopoly to an internationalized, technocratic marketplace.