Tim Markham

The Contribution of Media Consumption to Civic Participation

A national UK survey (N = 1017) examined the association between media consumption and three indicators of civic participation - likelihood of voting, interest in politics, and actions taken in response to a public issue of concern to the respondent. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the variance explained by media use variables after first controlling for demographic, social and political predictors of each indicator of participation. Media use significantly added to explaining variance in civic participation as follows. In accounting for voting, demographic and political/social factors mattered, but so too did some media habits (listening to the radio and engagement with the news). Interest in politics was accounted for by political/social factors and by media use, especially higher news engagement and lower media trust. However, taking action on an issue of concern was accounted for only by political/social factors, with the exception that slightly fewer actions were taken by those who watched more television. These findings provided little support for the media malaise thesis, and instead were interpreted as providing qualified support for the cognitive/motivational theory of news as a means of engaging the public.

Social media, protest cultures and political subjectivities of the Arab spring

This article draws on phenomenological perspectives to present a case against resisting the objectification of cultures of protest and dissent. The generative, self-organizing properties of protest cultures, especially as mobilized through social media, are frequently argued to elude both authoritarian political structures and academic discourse, leading to new political subjectivities or ‘imaginaries’. Stemming from a normative commitment not to over-determine such nascent subjectivities, this view has taken on a heightened resonance in relation to the recent popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. The article argues that this view is based on an invalid assumption that authentic political subjectivities and cultures naturally emerge from an absence of constraint, whether political, journalistic or academic. The valorization of amorphousness in protest cultures and social media enables affective and political projection, but overlooks politics in its institutional, professional and procedural forms.

Connection or Disconnection?: Tracking the Mediated Public Sphere in Everyday Life

The decades-long debate on media and the public sphere has primarily been normative, rather than empirical, in character. We especially lack empirical research detailing how the mediated public sphere is enacted (if it is) in everyday life. There has been, we would argue, a significant gap in studying the experiential dimensions of citizenship (what it actually feels like to be a citizen (cf. LeBlanc, 1999)): indeed what are the practices which link private action to the public sphere, beyond the obvious act of walking down to the polling station to cast your vote?

The political phenomenology of war reporting

Drawing on interviews with war correspondents, editors and political and military personnel, this article investigates the political dimension of the structuration and structuring effects of the reporter’s experience of journalism. Self-reflection and judgements about colleagues confirm that there are dominant norms for interpreting and acting in conflict scenarios which, while contingent upon socio-historical context, are interpreted as natural. But the prevalence of such codes masks the systematically misrecognized symbolic systems of mystification and ambivalence — systems which reproduce hierarchies and gatekeeping structures in the field, but which are either experienced as unremarkable, dismissed with irony and cynicism, or not present to the consciousness of the war correspondent. The article builds on recent theories of journalistic disposition, ideology, discourse and professionalism, and describes the political dimension of journalistic practice perceived in the field as apolitical. It addresses the gendering of war correspondence, the rise of the journalist as moral authority, and questions the extent to which respondent reflections can be defensibly analytically determined.

The Politics of War Reporting: Authority, Authenticity and Morality

Book synopsis: The politics of war reporting: Authority, authenticity and morality challenges the assumptions that reporters and their audiences have about the way the journalistic trade operates and how it sees the world. It unpacks the taken-for-granted aspects of the lives of war correspondents, exposing the principles of interaction and valorisation that usually go unacknowledged. Is journalistic authority really only about doing the job well? Do the ethics of war reporting emerge simply from the ‘stuff’ of journalism? This book asks why it is that the authoritative reporter increasingly needs to appear authentic, and that success depends not only on getting things right but being the right sort of journalist. This, in turn, depends on the uncalculating mastery of practices both before and during a journalist’s career. This book includes interviews with war correspondents and others with an active stake in the field and combines them with the critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to construct a political phenomenology of war reporting – the power relations and unspoken ‘rules of the game’ underpinning the representation of conflict and suffering by the media. It considers the recent phenomena of pooling and embedding journalists as well as the impact of new technologies, and asks what changes in the journalistic area can tell us about authority, authenticity and morality in the cultural industries more broadly. Interdisciplinary in its approach, The Politics of War Reporting will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of media and cultural studies, sociology and political theory.

Celebrity advocacy and public engagement: the divergent uses of celebrity

This article sounds a cautionary note about the instrumental use of celebrity advocacy to (re)engage audiences in public life. It begins by setting out the steps necessary to achieve public recognition of a social problem requiring a response. It then presents empirical evidence which suggests that those most interested in celebrity, while also paying attention to the main stories of the day, are least likely to participate in any form of politics. However, this does not rule out the possibility of forging a link between celebrity and public engagement, raising questions about what would potentially sustain such an articulation. After discussing the broader cultural context of celebrity advocacy, in which perceived authenticity functions as a valorised form of symbolic capital, the article outlines a phenomenological approach to understanding the uses audiences make of celebrity advocacy, using the example of a Ewan McGregor UNICEF appeal for illustration. It concludes that while media encounters with celebrities can underpin a viewer’s sense of self, this is as likely to lead to the rationalisation of inaction as a positive response to a charity appeal.

The politics of journalistic creativity: expressiveness, authenticity and de-authorization

This article begins with the assertion that creativity in journalism has moved from being a matter of guile and ingenuity to being about expressiveness, and that this reflects a broader cultural shift from professional expertise to the authenticity of personal expression as dominant modes of valorization. It then seeks to unpack the normative baggage that underpins the case for creativity in the cultural industries. First, there is a prioritization of agency, which does not stand up against the phenomenological argument that we do not own our own practices. Second, creative expression is not necessarily more free, simply alternately structured. As with Judith Butlers performativity model, contemporary discourses of creativity assume it to have a unique quality by which it eludes determination (relying on tropes of fluidity), whereas it can be countered that it is in spontaneous, intuitive practice that we are at our least agentive. Third, the article argues against the idea that by authorizing journalists (and audiences) to express themselves, creativity is democratizing, since the always-already nature of recognition means that subjects can only voice their position within an established terrain rather than engage active positioning.

Conditions of Mediation

This paper discusses my documentary film practice, which explores the filmic mediation of subjectivity through materiality on two levels: the pro-filmic event and the film form. The concept of “materiality” offers a good starting point for identifying and capturing physical manifestations of subjectivity in line with Searle’s theory of externalized subjectivity (1992: 97). ‘Materiality refers to the fleshy, corporeal and physical, as opposed to spiritual, ideal and value-laden aspects of human existence’ (Tilley, 2006: 3). Chateau posits that the filmic mediation of subjectivity constitutes in the employment of specific signs of subjectivity, depending ‘both on the subjectivity taken as a reference point … and on the material and formal choices made to the purpose of subjectivity’ (2011: 12). This distinction between referred or pro-filmic subjectivity (observed by the filmmaker during the encounter with the subject), and depicted subjectivity (the film formal treatment of pro-filmic subjectivity that aims to elicit an equivalent experience in the viewer), is key to the process of mediation. I argue that these two levels of subjective experience require different, though interrelated methodologies, which requires their distinction from each other. But, this distinction should not be seen as a structuralist-semiotic separation. It is rather a cross-disciplinary interpretation of Searle’s anti-representationalist approach to subjective perception. ‘There is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed, between the perception and the object perceived’ (Searle, 1992: 97). For the first level that relates to the pro-filmic encounter I will propose two anthropological methods that facilitate the identification and filming of subjective experiences manifested through objects and spaces: the “biographical object” (Morin in Hoskins, 1998) and the concept of “objectification” (Miller, 2010; Tilley, 2006). For the second level that relates to film form and its impact on the audience, I will suggest methods based on film spectatorship theories, especially cognitive film theory (Currie, 2004; Smith, 1994). I will demonstrate the proposed methodology by reference to a particular scene from my current documentary film, “Material Experiences”, which is work-in-progress and explores the filmic mediation of subjectivity with regards to the representation of blind people.

Review essay: Social media, politics and protest

Invited review of three recent titles on social media and protest cultures: Lina Dencik and Oliver Leistert (eds), Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest: Between Control and Emancipation. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs (eds), Social Media, Politics and the State: Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime and Policing in the Age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. Julie Uldam and Anne Vestergaard (eds), Civic Engagement and Social Media: Political Participation Beyond Protest. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

The uses and functions of ageing celebrity war reporters

This article starts from the premise that recognition of professional authority and celebrity status depends on the embodiment and performance of field-specific dispositional practices: there is no such thing as a natural, though we often talk about journalistic instinct as something someone simply has or does not have. Next, we have little control over how we are perceived by peers and publics, and what we think are active positioning or subjectifying practices are in fact, after Bourdieu, revelations of already-determined delegation. The upshot is that two journalists can arrive at diametrically opposed judgements on the basis of observation of the same actions of a colleague, and as individuals we are blithely hypocritical in forming (or reciting) evaluations of the professional identity of celebrities. Nowhere is this starker than in the discourse of age-appropriate behaviour, which this paper addresses using the examples of ‘star’ war reporters John Simpson, Kate Adie and Martin Bell. A certain rough-around-the-edges irreverence is central to dispositional authenticity amongst war correspondents, and for ageing hacks this incorporates gendered attitudes to sex and alcohol, as well as indifference to protocol. And yet perceived age-inappropriate sexual behaviour is also used to undermine professional integrity, and the paper ends by outlining the phenomenological context that makes possible this effortless switching between amoral and moralising recognition by peers and audiences alike.