Novi načini in globalni vzorci (re)produkcije spletnih novic (Slovene)

Code:

N5-0086

Period:

1.7.2018 - 30.6.2021

Range on year:

0.79 FTE | 2018

Project leader at FDV:

prof.dr. Alojzij Slavko Splichal

Research activity:

Social sciences

The phases of the project and their realization:

Associated with the main objectives, the original project is structured into three work packages: Work Package 1 is devoted to the IPPCN affordances for public action and privacy protection. It ought to track important, defining traits and shifts in the meanings and practices of public(it)y and privac(it)y, and their relationship to proficiency in certain technology skills. Three generations in terms of communication technologies they encountered during their primary and secondary socialization – the TV generation born before 1960 and raised in the analogue age, the PC generation born after 1960, and the smartphone generation born after 1990 – ought to be the subject of this WP in the original project. Work Package 2 concentrates on journalists’ responses to internetization. Internetization challenges the basic critical-normative functions of mass media related to the formation of publics and public opinion: (1) making visible developments in the socio-political environment with important long-term consequences for citizens; (2) providing citizens access to the media needed for their “public use of reason”; (3) conducting surveillance of political and economic rulers and legitimising their decisions; and (4) mediating between the rulers and the ruled and cultivating reflexive publicity. This WP ought to investigate how internetization affects the articulation of these functions of the media as the central pillars in the public sphere constitutive to democratic governance. Work Package 3 is aimed at measuring public-worthiness of news and events. Based on the existing affordances of the EventRegistry developed in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Jožef Stefan Institute, this WP ought to develop Artificial Intelligence-based tools to measure specific qualities and importance of news/events in the online environment, which would offer internet users new possibilities for communicative action locally, nationally and transnationally. WP3 is based on the EventRegistry system, which gathers news on more than 10,000 events daily from all over the world, reported by over 100,000 most widely used media sites/sources, social media and blogs in 100 languages. In each news item, the system identifies specific topics, actors, location, date, and source. News items in different languages that report the same event can be recognized and clustered to make an ‘event’ the unit of analysis.

Abstract:

New private, public and hybrid modes of communication challenge social researchers to reconsider democratic potentials of ‘revolutionary’ communication technologies and reconceptualise privateness, publicness, and conceptual categories related to them. This brings us also to the central research question of this project: How can the communicative potential of the internet be used to support an effective public opinion generated by publics, able to achieve an outlet in collective action extending beyond short-term mobilization, and protected against autonomy and privacy threats? Its primary interest is in the internet’s emancipatory power: Is it strong enough to enhance new democratic platforms cultivating reflexive publicity, the Kantian “public use of reason?” Or has internetization blended publicness and privateness in a way that not only would not allow us to reach “the final stage of democracy,” but may also seriously compromise our rights and freedoms? The project is structured in two work packages concentrating on hybridization of journalism (WP1) and reconfiguration of the 'newsworthiness' of events (WP2). They are both focused on the expanding scope of publicity attributed to the internet and its emancipatory potential of creating new democratic platforms and fostering reflexive publicity. Information abundance appears to generate an inflation in political communication and a communicative liquefaction of politics. In the anarchic online environment, citizens function as their own gatekeepers navigating a world saturated with information, yet strongly affected by corporations that increasingly control both the infrastructure of integrated public-private communication networks and content production, distribution and consumption. While customising their services to users’ tastes and preferences, corporate content providers suppress visibility of certain actors and contents, and trap internet users in the ‘filter bubbles’ of like-minded people not exposed to information that could challenge opinions reinforcing their preferences. The threat of structural invisibility, a permanent possibility of not being granted online visibility by algorithmic logic of search engines and news feeds, is as perilous as the Benthamian-Orwellian threat of a permanent digital surveillance and imposed visibility. Specifically, WP1 is designed to provide a clearer picture of the new dynamics in the field of journalism that internetization spurred, in regard to professional identities, practices and norms of journalism, modes of engagement and the struggles for legitimacy of various categories of journalism, and its mediating role in the public sphere. WP2 is aimed at the reconfiguration of the 'newsworthiness' of events that has been originally defined by Galtung and Ruge (1965) and subsequently amended with additional “news values” or “factors”, but never reconceptualized from the viewpoint of citizens or internet users as editors or gatekeepers – as ‘public-worthiness’. The idea of public-worthiness refers to the question, what events, processes and actors should be (able to be made) visible, and to whom? The public-worthiness algorithm should offer the internet users information on relevant events and processes with potentially important long-term consequences for a significant number of people.

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