Updates to essay instructions

• Essay topics
• Deadline

Power of voice

Shouting elections.
Who has the voice and visibility? Relation to money.
• First order media power

Power of ontology

Who decides the categorization and perspective to the news?
• Second order media power

Manuel Castells

Castells (2009): Four types of media power:
• framing
• agenda-setting
• priming
• indexing

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault:
Media create discourses and dictate the rules of the discussion.
• Foucault and Deleuze discuss power

Jean Baudrillard

• Jean Baudrillard
The idea of the real as power?
Who constructs the truth?
related: Constructivism

Jacques Derrida

Any text has more than one interpretation. Need to be "deconstructed.
=> Multi-perspective media?

Power of community media

• Great visibility
• Immense masses get involved quickly
Participants set the ontology?
Example: Audi sales chief resigns
=> What kind of power does the OWNER of community media have, e.g. Google?

Voting

• Estonian Internet elections

Digital divide

• More and more governmental and private services become digitalized
Who has access? Division by:
• social status
• economy
• education
Varies greatly by country.

Democracy and media

Representative democracy

• regular elections
• fixed parties
Outdated in the world of immediacy?
Is it still necessary to delegate power?

Participatory democracy

• Continuous 'elections' online, Bollnäs
• Internet activism, emergent 'parties'

Roles of mass media in democracy

• Stage of campaigning (with implicit opportunities of manipulation)
• Follow up representative's actions from the owner's perspective (news value)
• Power of ontology

Example: News categories

• Dagens Nyheter
Environment? Health?
Whose priorities does the news categorization reflect?

Roles of bottom-up media

• Constitute community environments for participatory action from the participant's perspective
Power of ontology, as emerging from the participants:
• Agenda-setting
• Priming
• Framing
• Follow up of representative government without depending on the news value
• Root-level engagement of citizen activity and fund-raising by means of social media. E.g. Obama's campaign

Assignment

Collect examples of Internet or mobile based activism, political movements, protests etc. with a sentence or two of the context using internet searches to a collaborative. Describe also the medium applied.
List them to the shared Wiki document. Check the examples of the Södertörn students.
Link to your course blog.