Frank Marcinkowski

Framing Emerging Technologies: Risk Perceptions of Nanotechnology in the German Press

Nanotechnology cannot be directly experienced and observed—all that people know about it and their interpretations and opinions are mainly based on information from the mass media. Therefore, this first systematic study of the German media coverage about nanotechnology aims to analyse the media frames of this emerging technology. It comprises a standardized content analysis of nine print media from 2000 to 2008, which shows that the German media framing is predominantly very positive, specifically emphasizing the medical and economic benefits of nanotechnology. There is hardly any critical coverage opposing this one-sided perspective of progress. This result corresponds to the international media coverage.

Why Do Candidates Use Online Media in Constituency Campaigning? An Application of the Theory of Planned behavior

ABSTRACT Campaigners are increasingly citing the Web as an important election tool for candidates and parties to communicate with voters; however, to what extent is this rhetoric matched to reality? Evidence suggests there is something of a gap in the importance attributed to the medium and the extent to which it is actually adopted. Most studies of the drivers of Web campaigning to date have focused on the environmental factors and personal resources that determine individuals’ use of the medium. We argue here that such models miss a key layer of explanation in accounting for web uptake by politicians—that of individual attitudes and subjective assessments of the value of the Internet as a campaign tool. More specifically, by applying the Theory of Planned Behavior, we account for patterns of Web campaign activity among candidates in a German state level election. We test our model on survey data and an independent audit of Web use by candidates. Our findings confirm that there is a large discrepancy between the intention to use Web campaigning and actual adoption. Furthermore, the theory is confirmed as a useful explanatory of the Web campaigning that does occur, although the individual components of the theory vary in importance.

Organizational Influence on Scientists’ Efforts to Go Public An Empirical Investigation

This article contributes to the debate on the influence of organizational settings on scientists’ media contact. Drawing on a quantitative survey of researchers (n = 942) from 265 German universities, the results indicate that a large proportion of scientists from all disciplines participate regularly in the dissemination of research findings. The authors provide evidence that scientists’ media efforts are influenced by how they adopt their university’s desire to be visible in the media, as well as by the university’s PR activities. The increased orientation toward news media is discussed in the light of the new governance of science within Europe.

Mediatisation of Politics: Reflections on the State of The Concept

Abstract This paper reviews the current state of the literature on the mediatisation of politics. Five common assumptions are being identified, which in my view form the core of a basic understanding of the concept. I discuss for each of these assumptions a number of further deliberations. My analysis is based on a theory of functionally differentiated societies. More precisely, I draw on the vision of modern societies that German sociologist Niklas Luhmann has introduced. According to his view the functional specialisation of social sub-systems is accompanied by an increased consolidation of performance relations between them, because self-referential fixation on the own function inevitably causes deficits in most other capacities. Against this background mediatisation is reconstructed as a response to a serious deficit of political systems: the notorious lack of public attention given to democratic politics within modern societies. This framework has several implications for the reasoning on mediatisation, which are outlined in the article.

Technophobia towards emerging technologies? A comparative analysis of the media coverage of nanotechnology in Austria, Switzerland and Germany

This article examines, through a systematic study of the German, Swiss and Austrian media framing of nanotechnology, whether the concept of a journalistic negativity bias applies to the media coverage of nanotechnology. According to this objectivist approach of risk communication, the media coverage of emerging technologies used to be comparatively too negative. However, the concept has been debated through studies revealing a positivity bias and approaches focusing on contextual elements of journalism. A standardized content analysis of German, Swiss and Austrian print media from 2000 to 2009 analyzes whether negativity bias applies to the media coverage of nanotechnology. We find the media coverage to be predominantly very positive with barely any critical coverage opposing this one-sided perspective of progress. The hypothesis of journalistic technophobia and negativity bias is not supported by the media coverage of nanotechnology. Rather, the results suggest that the media are promoting new technologies.

The changing rationale of science communication: a challenge to scientific autonomy

We argue that the institutionalized push communication of academic institutions has become the dominant form of public science communication and has tended to force other forms and functions of science communication into the background. Given the new schemes of public funding, public communication of science now primarily serves the purpose of enabling academic institutions to promote themselves in a competition that has been forced upon them by the political domain. What academics working under these conditions say about themselves and their work (and what they do not) will depend crucially on the strategic communication goals and concepts of the organizations to which they belong. We surmise that the inherent logic of this form of science communication represents a potential threat to the autonomy of scientific research. We can understand the term science communication in its most general sense as each instance of communication about scientific research which is addressed to a public, as well as about the knowledge (technology) resulting from this [1]. Science communication is in fact a multifaceted phenomenon: it employs a variety of formats and channels of communication, involves different actors, and pursues very different, even sometimes conflicting, objectives. We can nonetheless use three distinctions to make some order of the confusion. First, we should distinguish between individual and institutional communicators — that is, between an individual academic who reports on his or her research, and the press office of an academic institution in which there are usually professional communicators who provide information on the work of academics belonging to the institution. Second, we should distinguish between communication by science, and communication about science. This distinction concerns the question of whether academics or academic institutions provide self-descriptions of their own action, or whether external observers (especially journalists) communicate their assessments of scientific processes and findings, and place them in a social context. Third, we should make a distinction JCOM 13(03)(2014)C04 Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 2 F. Marcinkowski and M. Kohring between different modes of science communication, which are defined by the relationship of communicators and recipients. In so-called push communication, the prerogative lies with the communicator, who consciously and purposefully selects desired recipients whose interest the communicator simply presupposes and whom the communicator addresses directly with its range of communications, i.e., s/he pushes the message. The prime example here is the work of university press offices, which, automatically and usually without there being a particular demand, send out mailings to “their” distribution lists. We distinguish this from so-called pull communication, where the communicator makes his/her information available to an anonymous and dispersed public through appropriate channels, which can then be selected and “pulled” on by recipients according to their individual interests. Examples here are journal articles about science, but also, for example, science blogs or wikis. If we imagine these distinctions as axes of a three-dimensional matrix (Figure 1), then what emerges is a space with eight blocks, each one representing a unique format of science communication. Figure 1. Facets and formats of science communication. We argue here that the lower right square of the first level, i.e., the push communication of academic institutions (usually executed by institutional press offices), has become the dominant form of public science communication and has tended to force other forms and functions of science communication into the background. Given the new schemes of public funding, the public communication of science primarily serves the purpose of enabling academic institutions to promote themselves in a competition that has been forced upon them by the political domain. What academics working under these conditions say about themselves and their work (and what they do not) will depend crucially on the strategic communication goals and concepts of the organizations to which they belong. We surmise that the inherent logic of this form of science communication represents a potential threat to the autonomy of scientific research, with our argument being based on our studies of the publicly funded system of higher education in Germany [2]. The changing rationale of science communication: a challenge to scientific autonomy 3 Is science a genuine public business? The absolute requirement for science to present itself in public is now simply assumed to be obvious and a matter of course. Those academics or academic institutions that try to evade the ubiquitous pressure to communicate publicly come under huge pressure to justify themselves. External communication of almost any kind and amount is considered useful and desirable per se — indeed, it is often already understood as being a genuine component of academic activity. If we consider the process of scientific understanding from a functional point of view, however, then the notion that science has to publish itself becomes by no means selfexplanatory or self-evident. The function of science is clearly to formulate sentences which, assuming a certain understanding of truth and accepted methods, are considered true and which can therefore be particularly useful in guiding human action. The epistemic process itself, the process of attributing truth values to statements, therefore requires neither public visibility nor the sanction of an uninvolved third party. Whether a statement is deemed true or false is determined within science, and usually within the epistemic publics of scientific communities. There is no reason to assume that the process of scientific understanding would be furthered by having as many people as possible observing or being involved in procedures of justification. Science has had to fight for a very long time for this functional autonomy — against the claims, for example, made by religion, politics and, more recently, even against the claims of the public. Also beyond the immediate context of justification in the research process, there is no functional justification for public science communication, since an insight obviously does not become truer simply by being shared publicly, and nor does it become false simply by remaining unknown to most people. That means that the idea and practice of the public self-presentation of scientific processes of understanding are epistemically non-functional at best; at the same time, though, they can have societal consequences. Since every action responds to the fact of its observability, the public domain brings into play motives, criteria and dynamics that can potentially challenge the original “purpose” of science — and thereby also hinder it. In the following, we are concerned exclusively with these negative consequences of visibility for the autonomy and functioning of science. So as not to be misunderstood, we do not want to deny that science has to answer to society, and especially so if it is publicly funded. It has not yet been decided, though, which mechanisms in the production of democratic accountability should be used in this regard. There is in any case no compelling reason to fixate prematurely on PR as the primary mechanism of accountability. Every democratic society knows areas of public action that have to be accountable, but that no one would expect to have to be accountable through presenting itself in public. This applies, for example, to many parts of internal and external security, where the claim is rather that being too much in the public eye could have a detrimental effect. And that is precisely our claim for science, too. Areas of action for which that holds true justify themselves through functioning well. Their 4 F. Marcinkowski and M. Kohring so-called output legitimacy results from “being good” instead of just “looking good” [3]. Furthermore, of course, such areas should be monitored by an independent journalism and thereby exposed to public observation. Who needs science communication? So how did the demand for public communication from science come into being, if it is not a core component of what academics do? Besides certain ideological currents, especially the social-democratization of many European countries and the associated demand for equal access to higher education, it is primarily economic constraints that are responsible. According to these constraints, the demand for public science communication is justified by the organization of science, coupled with the dependence of organizations on money. Science can only be sustained on a permanent basis if it takes place in organizations (universities, colleges, research centres, etc.), and organizations need money to motivate membership. Most European countries have publicly funded organizations of science, with the state collecting money in the form of taxes and passing it on to academic organizations, for which in return it expects extensive involvement in how the money is used and reserves the right to monitor how it is spent. The state is answerable for what results from this to those who provide the money, i.e., to the electorate. As that has become more difficult and costly, so the state has relieved itself of the duty of detailed responsibility by tying funding to performance agreements, withdrawing from micro-management, and granting organizations themselves more autonomy in budgeting and spending [4]. The idea behind this new public management is that, in return, organizations will have to manage the task of justifying themselves to those who provide the money and use their services. In that way, the binding of the reformed unit to its external (non-governmental) “stakeholder” is intended to become clos

Coping with dilemma: How German sport media users respond to sport mega events in autocratic countries

In recent years, sport mega events have been frequently awarded to autocratic countries whose regimes violate democratic values and human rights. Based on the theory of cognitive dissonance, we assume that this is a potential source of internal conflict for viewers, especially for sports enthusiasts and politically aware recipients. Special attention rests on the consequences of the recipients’ strategies of addressing this predicament for important stakeholders of these events, namely the reporting media, the host country and sponsors. We conducted an online survey among 711 German respondents to examine how recipients cope with this dilemma using the forthcoming FIFA soccer World Cup 2018 in Russia as an example. Our results show that while recipients are strongly interested in soccer and politics, most of them do not necessarily perceive these two spheres as inextricably connected. Their awareness of sociopolitical issues in the context of sport events—and thus the decisive factor to explain cognitive dissonance—is arguably low. Still, when recipients experience cognitive dissonance they rely on certain strategies to reduce or avoid dissonance. They do not elude this dilemma by preferring sports broadcasting without coverage of the event’s negative circumstances, but are actually willing to pass on parts of the tournament. They also do not denigrate the credibility of the media or emphasize positive aspects of the host country Russia. In fact, the recipients would prefer if the World Cup had not been awarded to Russia in the first place. However, respondents experiencing cognitive dissonance are also more likely to engage in political consumerism, by deliberately deciding against or in favor of products and sponsors depending on whether or not those are associated with the event.

The Deliberative Quality of Referendum Coverage in Direct Democracy: Findings from a Longitudinal Analysis of Swiss Media

Abstract The article presents a systematic and standardised content analysis of 4,559 newspaper articles; it covers nine popular votes in Switzerland between 1983 and 2004 and measures the deliberativeness of the mediated public debate. In the last decade, a growing number of studies employ a deliberative framework in analysing mass media contents. However, these studies followed a sceptical perspective and found evidence that mediated deliberation inevitably falls short of the demanding criteria provided by normative theory. Nevertheless, the article demonstrates that there are examples of deliberative journalism in Swiss direct democratic campaigns. We argue that a political system of a mature direct democracy, such as the Swiss democracy is, together with a journalistic culture which is “educated” by initiative and referendum, might provide an appropriate environment for mediated-public deliberation.

Online-Campaigning als Wahlkampfstrategie

Seit Barack Obamas erfolgreichem Prasidentschaftswahlkampf von 2008 gilt das Internet bei Parteien, Kandidaten und Kampagnenmanagern aller westlichen Demokratien als Wunderwaffe im Kampf um Wahlerstimmen. Deutschland trat spatestens mit dem Bundestagswahlkampf 2009 in das Internetzeitalter ein. Dabei erwies sich die zeitliche Nahe zu Obamas Kampagne als folgenreich. Mit seinem Erfolg, den Politik und Medien masgeblich auf eine ausgefeilte Online-Strategie zuruckfuhrten, stiegen auch in Deutschland die Anspruche an die Online-Auftritte der Parteien. Nicht nur Wahlkampfplattformen im World Wide Web, sondern auch die Nutzung von Web 2.0-Anwendungen wie Twitter oder Facebook waren angesagt wie nie zuvor (vgl. Bieber 2011; Lilleker und Jackson 2011; Schweitzer und Albrecht 2011). Seitdem betonen deutsche Wahlkampfmanager unisono die Relevanz des Internets als „eine der tragenden Saule[n] der CDU-Kampagne,“ als „zentraler Bestandteil unseres Wahlkampfes“ oder als „Herzstuck der Kampagne.“

Öffentliche und veröffentlichte Meinung zu Hochschulen

Der Beitrag konzipiert die „Offentliche Meinung“ als Einheit der Differenz von Inhalten offentlicher Kommunikation und Inhalten individueller Bewusstseinssysteme. Kommunikationswissenschaftliche Offentlichkeitsforschung bemuht sich im Allgemeinen um systematische Beschreibungen der beiden Seiten sowie den Nachweis von uberzufalligen Zusammenhangen zwischen ihnen. Mit speziellem Fokus auf die Einrichtungen des tertiaren Bildungsbereiches sind solche Forschungsbeitrage – zumal im deutschsprachigen Raum – rar gesat. Um den Forschungsuberblick materiell anzureichern, werden insoweit auch Befunde zur Kommunikation uber und Wahrnehmung von Wissenschaft und Technik allgemein einbezogen, auch wenn sie keinen speziellen Hochschulbezug aufweisen. Der luckenhaften Behandlung des Themas in den einschlagigen Wissenschaften, steht eine wachsende Bedeutung der Sache fur die Praxis von Hochschulpolitik und Hochschulkommunikation gegenuber. Dafur ist, so die zentrale These des Beitrags, die politisch durchgesetzte Okonomisierung der Bildung verantwortlich, die (auch) einen verscharften Aufmerksamkeits- und Imagewettbewerb zwischen Bildungseinrichtungen befordert hat. Der zentrale empirische Beitrag des Artikels besteht in der Prasentation einer Umfragestudie, die nachweist, dass Universitaten und Hochschulen in Deutschland vor allem als Ausbildungsstatten wahrgenommen und geschatzt werden. Nur eine Minderheit der Befragten kommt von sich aus auf die Idee, dass Hochschulen auch etwas mit wissenschaftlicher Forschung zu tun haben konnten.