Nico Carpentier

HEGEMONY, DEMOCRACY, AGONISM AND JOURNALISM: An interview with Chantal Mouffe

Chantal Mouffes political philosophy has been influential in a variety of domains, including sociology, cultural studies, media studies, law, art, literary criticism, and journalism studies. By combining Gramscis focus on hegemony with post-structuralist theory she has developed—in collaboration with Ernesto Laclau—a sophisticated perspective on the political that intersects with all aspects of society, including the role and functioning of journalism. Her emphasis on the productive role of hegemony and conflict in society combined with her plea for a radical pluralist democracy, open a wide range of new perspectives for journalism studies. We present an overview of Mouffes work set against a recent interview with her, in which we discuss, among other things, the potential diversity of contingent journalistic identities, ranging between being complicit with hegemonic socio-political projects, and safe-guarding or even deepening democratic institutions, including itself.

Participation Is Not Enough The Conditions of Possibility of Mediated Participatory Practices

■ The popularization of ‘new’ Internet-based media has generated much optimism about the social and participatory-democratic potentialities of these media, leading to predictions about the demise of the mass communication paradigm, and its replacement by a many-to-many communicative paradigm. But as happened before, the reappraisal of participation also produced a number of theoretical, conceptual and empirical problems. Participation became (at least partially) an object of celebration, trapped in a reductionist discourse of novelty, detached from the reception of its audiences and decontextualized from its political-ideological, communicative-cultural and communicative-structural contexts. These celebratory perspectives on participation cover how some of the basic concepts of the mass communication paradigm are still very much alive, providing the discursive frameworks for the reception of old and new media products. This article aims to show the persistence of (a number of components of) the mass communication paradigm through an analysis of the reception of two north Belgian participatory media products. One of these case studies is based on the ‘new’ world of a YouTube-like online platform called 16plus; the second case study is based on the ‘old’ concept of access television in a 2002 TV programme called Barometer. Through an analysis of these multilayered audience receptions, this article shows that participatory practices are not unconditionally appreciated by audience members, but are subject to specific conditions of possibility that are still embedded within the mass communication paradigm. Albeit in different degrees, these case studies show the importance of two ‘old’ key concepts — professional quality and social relevance — for these audiences’ evaluation of participatory practices. ■

Community Media: Muting the democratic media discourse?

Focuses on the concept of community media. Components that construct the identity of community media; Multi-theoretical approaches for analysis of community media; Definition of community media based on the concept of alternative media; Link between community media and civil society; Problems faced by community media organizations in European countries.

Theorizing participatory intensities A conversation about participation and politics

This conversation started in Prague, the Czech Republic, during a panel moderated by Irena Reifová at the symposium ‘On Empowered and Impassioned Audiences in the Age of Media Convergence’. The event was organized by the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University. The text contains a series of discussions. First, there is a conversation about the nature of the participatory democratic utopia and participatory culture and how groups take (or do not take) advantage of the affordances of new and emerging media. It also emphasizes the political nature and potential of popular culture and touches upon its connection to institutionalized politics. Three other key areas are mentioned: the role of different cultures of leadership, the significance of organizations in structuring participatory processes, and the need to enhance civic learning, providing more support for participatory cultures. This is combined with an interlocking discussion about the definition of participation and how it is tied up with power. It covers the differences between participation and interaction, engagement, interpretation, production, curation, and circulation. Finally, there is an underlying strand of discussion about the role of academia, focusing on the relationship between critical theory and cultural studies, the need to deconstruct our own frameworks and the question of which language to use to communicate academic research to the public.

The BBC’s Video Nation as a Participatory Media Practice Signifying Everyday Life, Cultural Diversity and Participation in an Online Community

The Video Nation project is one of the BBC’s recent major contributions to stimulating audience participation within mainstream media. This project (cl)aims to maintain a balanced power relationship between participants and members of the production team. Despite its transformation from a television setting to a web-based ‘online community and archive’ (although Video Nation partially returned to television in 2003), this project still has the ambition to give people the opportunity to represent themselves and their daily life. At the same time, it signifies the multilayered culture of ‘ordinary people’ and the cultural diversity within the British nation. The analysis illustrates the complex nature of audience participation in the mainstream media as, in contrast to community media, it becomes necessary to find and maintain an equal power balance between participants and media professionals in a structurally-biased institutional context. The power play that is seen at work in a highly fluid and contingent context creates the need for constant negotiation and care in order to protect the vulnerable power equilibrium between media professionals and participants. Crucial in this process is the participatory attitude of the media professionals, whose identity is no longer solely built on being a gatekeeper and producer of content, but also on gate-opening and facilitating the creation of content.

CONTEXTUALISING AUTHOR-AUDIENCE CONVERGENCES

New media discourses are often engulfed by a variety of claims that emphasize their specificity. We can find the formulation of strong claims of novelty and uniqueness, in combination with processes of forgetfulness in relation to the societal roles of old media technologies. This article starts with a discussion on (new) audience theory, mapping and structuring the diversity of audience articulations with a focus on two of its main dimensions: the active/passive and the interaction/participation dimension. This mapping will then be used to problematize and critique the strong claims of novelty and uniqueness that ‘new’ participatory technologies have generated. Moreover, this theoretical mapping will also show that audience theory turns out to be quite stable in its capacity to facilitate the understanding of the diversity of relations between humans and media technology. Three claims are scrutinized: the shift from one-to-many to many-to-many communication; the re-articulation of the audience into the ‘produser’; and the convergence of top-down business with bottom-up production and consumption practices. Each of these claims is critically evaluated, in combination with a case study discussion that shows the complexities and contradictions of these claims. These three case studies are the BBCs Video Nation project in the UK, a reception study of nine films on the Belgian online video-sharing platform 16plus, and formal participatory (alternative and community media) organizations.

Different trends in euthanasia acceptance across Europe. A study of 13 Western and 10 central and eastern European countries, 1981-2008

We examined how acceptance of euthanasia among the general public has changed between 1981 and 2008 in western and central and eastern European (CEE) countries using data of the European Values Surveys. Data were collected in 1981, 1990, 1999 and 2008 for 13 western European countries and in 1990, 1999 and 2008 for 10 CEE countries. Euthanasia acceptance increased each decade up until 2008 in 11 of 13 western European countries; in CEE countries, it decreased or did not increase between 1999-2008 in 8 of 10 countries. A number of explanations for and implications of this apparent east-west polarization are suggested.

Waves of media democratization A brief history of contemporary participatory practices in the media sphere

The article aims to provide a more historically grounded approach to the relationship between communication and participation, by distinguishing different waves of media democratization. The article first discusses the concept of participation and some of its complexities, and then sketches a series of intense moments of participation in and through the media in (mainly the second half) the 20th and the 21st century. At the same time, care is taken not to organize a linear-historical narrative, keeping in mind that the history of the democratization of Western societies and their media spheres is characterized by a series of continuities and discontinuities, dead ends and sedimented practices. Despite these ever-present fluctuations, the article argues that we can still see that structures, cultural resources and subjective dispositions have over time been geared more towards participation and equality, also within the media sphere.

Beyond the Ladder of Participation: An Analytical Toolkit for the Critical Analysis of Participatory Media Processes

Participatory research is facing three challenges—how to deal with the theoretisation and conceptualisation of participation; how to support the research with analytical models; and how the evaluate the research outcomes. This article aims to address these three problems by distinguishing two main approaches (a sociological and a political) in participatory theory and developing a four-level and 12-step analytical model that functions within the political approach. In this analytical model, a series of key concepts are used: process, field, actor, decision-making moment and power. The normative-evaluative problem is addressed by reverting to the critical perspective to evaluate the societal desirability of particular participatory intensities. This critical perspective—potentially—adds a 13th and final normative layer to the analytical model.

On the contingency of death: a discourse-theoretical perspective on the construction of death

Death is frequently seen as the ultimate manifestation of materiality. Without denying this materiality, this article will investigate the discursive character of death and its contingent nature, through the lens of Laclau and Mouffes [(1985). Hegemony and social strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso] discourse theory. First, the core elements of the (Western) discourse of death, such as end/cessation/termination, negativity, irreversibility, inescapability, and undesirability, in combination with life as deaths constitutive outside, will be analysed, showing the specificity of this discourse of death. The contingency of death is argued further from a more genealogical stance, through the changes over time in the articulation of death and good death. Finally, the political nature of the discourse of death is illustrated by an analysis of end-of-life debates and the struggle between the hospice and the right-to-die social movements over the exact articulation of a good death. The article concludes by pointing to the necessary and constitutive failure of discourse to capture the materiality of death.