Philip Hammond

From Computer-Assisted to Data-Driven: Journalism and Big Data

Despite claims of continuity, contemporary data journalism is quite different from the earlier tradition of computer-assisted reporting. Although it echoes earlier claims about being scientific and democratic, these qualities are understood as resulting from better data access rather than as being something achieved by the journalist. In the context of Big Data in particular, human subjectivity tends to be downgraded in importance, even understood as getting in the way if it means hubristically theorising about causation rather than working with correlation and allowing the data to speak. Increasing ‘datafication’ is not what is driving changes in the profession, however. Rather, the impact of Big Data tends to be understood in ways that are consonant with pre-existing expectations, which are shaped by the broader contemporary post-humanist political context. The same is true in academic analysis, where actor–network theory seems to be emerging as the dominant paradigm for understanding data journalism, but in largely uncritical ways.

Simulation and dissimulation

Abstract This article proposes that the concept of simulation can provide an alternative framework for understanding contemporary trends in the media representation of war, and that the concept can usefully be extended to encompass the rationale for and conduct of war itself in the post-Cold War era. Rather than war being the pursuit of politics by other means, it now seems that western elites use war and intervention as a way to simulate a sense of political purpose and mission. Equally, the media presentation of war is less concerned with the dissimulation of hidden interests than with display and spectacle, although the very absence of clearly defined interests and values also means that this presentation is often incoherent and self-conscious. Examples discussed include both the conventional wars launched since 9/11 and the operations other than war undertaken in the name of humanitarianism or human rights in the 1990s.

Making war and peace

JAKE LYNCH, Reporting the World (Conflict and Peace Forums, Taplow, 2002), 103 pp., ISBN 0-9542064-0-1 MONROE E. PRICE and MARK THOMPSON (eds), Forging Peace: Intervention, Human Rights and the Management of Media Space (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2002), 408 pp., ISBN 0-7486-1501-6 PIERS ROBINSON, The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention (Routledge, London, 2002), 177 pp., ISBN 0-415-25905-3

Post-screen experiments

This themed issue presents a selection of contributions from the Post-Screen Cultures/Prac- tices symposium held at London South Bank University in June 2016. It inaugurates what will become a new tradition of publishing an edition of the journal based on the annual MeCCSA Practice Network/JMP Practice Symposium. The 2016 symposium sought to explore the changing nature of our contemporary engagement with emergent screen- oriented technologies. The overarching theme to emerge was that the current moment is in some ways similar to the earliest days of cinema – a time of vibrant experimentation in which, while rejecting the fetishisation of technology and technological determinism, artists and media practitioners are grappling with emerging media forms and new tech- nological contexts in order to harness their potential.

Propaganda: The good, the bad and the entertaining

In the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq many MPs and media commentators in Britain complained that they had been “taken to war on a false prospectus”, apparently shocked that a British government would be less than honest in making its case for war. That ‘truth is the first casualty of war’ is an axiom which everybody always seems to forget at the moment when it matters—in the build-up to conflict—and recalls bitterly only when it is too late. After the Hutton and Butler Enquiries the British public know all about propaganda, and we know that it is a bad thing. It may therefore come as a surprise to read in Philip Taylor’s authoritative history that “we need more propaganda, not less” (p. 320). His argument throughout the book is that we should not think of Ethnopolitics, Vol. 4, No. 3, 329–335, September 2005