Television Studies

Panel 17-6 (Television Section): Aesthetics & Representation beyond the Nation

by Sebastian Armbrust

This panel’s presentations focused on changing aesthetics in television and television’s representations of (trans-)national and racial/ethnic identities.

Simone Knox called attention to the process of dubbing, which is often margina-lized/ignored by current research on film and television aesthetics. Dubbing has to be considered a significant transformative practice since it has a remarkable impact on how characters of British and US productions are perceived by audiences in countries such as Germany, where foreign productions are almost exclusively presented in translated versions. Focusing on the German versions of films featuring British actor Michael Sheen, she elaborated on the impact of the German voice actor’s performance on the original actor’s manifestation. One interesting problem is that many German voices, e.g. Nicolas Böll who dubbed Sheen as Tony Blair in The Queen, are their own characteristic persona known to the audience as other actors/roles as well (e.g., Böll also dubbed Owen Wilson and Ben Affleck in various roles). Another largely unexplored question is how the voice actors are selected by the dubbing studios in the first place.

Jamila Baluch presented a case study from her PhD research project on representations of race and ethnicity in contemporary US television drama. As Charles Ramirez Berg and others have shown for mainstream film, non-white characters are traditionally constructed as a racial ‘Other’ that is inferior to their white counterparts in various ways. Baluch’s analysis shows that Gabrielle Solis, the Latina member in the cast of ABC’s Desperate Housewives, encompasses the typical properties of various stereotypes identified for Latina characters in earlier research, such as the “Cantina Girl” and “Vamp/Temptress” (cf. Keller 1994), or the “Harlot” (Berg 2002). That is, she is characterized as an unfaithful nymphomaniac, physically violent, and provoking violent behavior in men. An interesting question emerging in the discussion was to what extent such a stereotyping of race is put into perspective by other traits of the character, or by the comedic attitude of the show.

Elke Weissmann talked about recent co-productions of the BBC with European producers in Sweden, Germany and France – a paradigm shift, since traditionally, the BBC has almost exclusively co-operated with American co-producers. In particular, Weissmann discussed the police dramas Spiral/Engregages (BBC4/Canal+) and Wallander (a British/Swedish co-production). Both series present a more traditional, but also dirtier/messier police work when compared to recent police shows such as the American CSI, and explore crime as a result of unequal distribution across Europe. As a result, when Weissmann explores “the aesthetics of doubt” in these programs, she means not only the professional doubt of the detective directed at his clues and witnesses, but also the skepticism towards and challenges of an integrated Europe expressed by these programs.

Miriam Stehling compared Germany’s Next Topmodel to America’s Next Top Model. A licensed adaptation of the American reality show, it is not surprising that the German show is similar in many aspects. These similarities (which are also shared by the countless world-wide versions of the format) allow for a closer look on the cultural differences that become evident in the different attitudes of judges and contestants towards the main themes of the show. Stehling provided an interesting insight into how the different versions deal with the “model of the enterprising self” and “economization of the self” at the core of the show: The American contestants are more or less self-confident and aware of self-marketing techniques, the judges pose as their more or less well-meaning mentors. Between German judges and contestants, on the other hand, there seems to be more of a power struggle, with the judges frequently challenging the contestants with humiliating comments and assignments. In turn, the German candidates seem more opposed to adopting certain techniques of self-marketing than their American counterparts.

picture by Mascha Brichta

Finally, Gry C. Rustad and Jon Inge Faldalen looked at the “new aesthetics of television comedy”, focusing on American sitcoms like Curb your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development, in comparison to more traditionally styled productions such as Friends, Seinfeld or Two and a Half Men. They discussed how three stationary camera-setups, a live studio audience and/or laughter track made way for more location shooting with single, non-stationary cameras, i.e. an aesthetics more in line with television drama / recent developments in ”quality television”. Most importantly, they argue that the abandonment of a laughter track made way for a different quality of humor, which they describe as a more subtle kind of situation comedy, and introduces to the genre an insecurity about what it is appropriate to laugh about, and when.

Virtual Worlds

Panel 6-1: Making Sense of Virtual Worlds as Sites of Innovation in Communication

by Sebastian Armbrust

Fitting its title, the first panel in the Digital Culture and Communication section started with an “innovation in communication.” Five presentations per 90-minute panel, the norm at this year’s ECREA conference, require tight time management by chairs and presenters, a task well-handled by all involved in the panels I attended. But in addition, this panel featured an interesting and well-performed modus operandi: After giving shorter-than-usual introductions to their projects, in a second round the panelists addressed each other’s projects, discussing similarities and differences in research questions, methods, and findings. This (prepared in advance) discussion made the panel a coherent whole, so when in a third round, the audience was invited to ask questions, it resulted in a real group discussion rather than a discussion of individual questions addressed to individual presenters.

picture by Mascha Brichta

This was, of course, also the product of the high thematic coherence between the different research projects presented, four of which based at Roskilde University, Denmark, and all of which explored the sense-making and communication strategies and motivations of private as well as professional and institutional users of virtual worlds such as Second Life (SL).

CarrieLynn Reinhard explores how media users make sense of novel media situations when navigating virtual worlds such as SL or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) like City of Heroes. Informed by Brenda Derwin’s sense-making methodology, and Lakoff & Johnson’s cognitive metaphor theory (1980: Metaphors we Live By), she looked at how users use metaphors in describing their media experiences, conceptualizing the unknown and unfamiliar aspects of their virtual environment in terms of real-world experiences of communication situations and movement in space.

Ursula Plesner talked about how architects use virtual worlds to build 3D models of their projects in order to discuss design decisions with other professionals and/or their clients, at a level of spatial immersion and detail lacking in traditional, two dimensional architectural blueprints. Interesting aspects of this type of architectural communication include the lack of standardization in 3D software for architecture; the double-sided expert role architects adopt as professional real-world architects and expert virtual-world users; and the transformations of the client/architect relationship that emerge from the technical possibilities of direct user configurability.

A closer look into user-driven innovation and collaboration practices by semi-professional and fully professional Second Life designers was given by Ates Gursimsek, who talked in more detail about the tools, skills, and methods of the “builders” (as Second Life architects like to call themselves), and the virtual economy emerging from the various tools and resources offered to and created by the community, re-used and adapted (often free of charge) by other users in various ways.

Lisbeth Frølunde researches the motivations of machinima producers (videos digitally shot by users/fans within the virtual reality environments provided by virtual worlds and computer games). In particular, she presented her work on the “machinimators” partaking in the Metrotopia Contest, who submitted entries shot in the virtual city of Metrotopia in SL, which was developed by Roskilde University as a virtual research lab.

Last but not least, Stina Bengtsson talked about real-world countries’ embassies in SL, namely Sweden’s embassy (here is an article about its opening in 2007), which was actually run by a cultural exchange organization. A failed experiment, the virtual building has since been abandoned by the authorities, and is today used for various activities by Swedish SL citizens. The history of this first virtual embassy in SL reveals interesting insights into the subcultures that have developed there as alternatives to the real-world order, seemingly uninterested in importing real-world politics or national identities into their virtual structures.

One important result of the various dynamics in SL, as explored by the approaches presented and further explored in the discussion, is a diversification of participant roles that complicates traditional conceptions of media producers on one side, and public audiences on the other: “Machinimators” and “builders” can be described as “users” and “amateurs” using the technology provided to them, but are also pioneering experts addressing their own audiences and clients with their creations. Furthermore, as the example of Sweden’s embassy shows, there may be quite a discrepancy between the mainstream public and a virtual public, posing as a difficult challenge for public communication strategies.

Youth and media

Panel 1-4: Youth and media

How television defatted social media, a true story of lack of media literacy and unequal media use among young people.

by Amaranta Alfaro-Muirhead

I was really looking forward to this panel sindce I am interested in youth and new media use, so by the title this panel was an exiting one for me. The best part was that issues such as inequality and media literacy also came along the panel. Unfortunately it also make me realize that social media is not the centre in media use life among teenagers.

Martin Danielsson from the Halmstad University College in Sweden opened the panel with his paper “On the classified and classifying consumption of new media: initial findings from a comparative case study of young men in Sweden”. Where he focuses in the significance of social class for the ways in which young Swedish men (16-18 years old) perceive, relate to and make use of the Internet; and how they relate digital media in their everyday lives. This paper raises the question: Does Internet bring greater equality?, and he aims to answer it by studying 12 young men from four different schools – where two were private and two public – and its digital media uses. The results showed that the use of digital media seems to reproduce inequality of class, dismissing the arguments of “democratizing potential” of digital media and all the technological deterministic assumptions involved.

The previous statement find echoes in the phrase “is not a question of access but of skills” said by María José Brites of the New University of Lisbon, Portugal, while presenting the paper “Making sense of old and new media as news providers: young people’s (15-30 years old) perspectives and family contexts”. Her research on news media consumption among 49 young people divided into three groups (15-18 years old; 19-25 years old; and 26-30 years old) revealed that television is the most important news media for each one of these groups. For Brites there is a need of develop media literacy public policies for the construction of critical behavior towards media and news. Ones again, the idea of social media playing a central role in young people’s life like in this case turning into the most important news sources vanishes in the air.

picture by Mascha Brichta

The paper “Communicating health messages through entertainment-education: Testing and exploring the persuasive effects of a Dutch youth drama series” of Lonneke Van Leeuwen from the Wageningen University of Netherlands, agrees with the previous paper, by demonstrating that entertainment education – through television – can be a persuasive health communication tool among Dutch youth. This puts the television again in the centre of the conversation. Is it also because young people relate to this media more efficiently than with other media?

Finally the paper “Adolescents´ reception of television fiction series. Series about young people targeted to young people” presented by Maddalena Fedele from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, corroborated this statement, by arguing that television still plays an important role – if not the most important one – in life of teenagers and in their socialization process.

I was hoping that the paper “Young people, digital media and social practices” could change a little the scenario. But unfortunately Carolina Dover from the University of Westminster, London-UK could not make it to ECREA. So we had to content with the idea that television is still the main media for the youth, and if we want to persuade them, get them informed and entertain them, is better to do it through television instead of putting so much hopes in the potential of social media – at least until we have overcome the media literacy issues and the inequality in media use.

To avoid misunderstandings: I enjoyed the panel. Though it led to changing my former conviction that social media is playing a crucial role among young people, changing the ways they participate and relate to their culture, each other and their reality. It seems that these state has not been accomplished yet. I definitely agree with the statement that media literacy public policies are needed. But I still think that there is an enormous potential behind social media that need to be discovered.

Film Studies

Panel 7-2: Space, Place and Cinema

by Lea Wohl

The panels „Space, Place and Cinema“ and  „Film Reception“ (see report on German “Grenzkinos”) which took place on Wednesday afternoon (13th of October) showed film studies from a very typical – and, in my opinion, very endearing – side: On the one hand, they offer great chances, namely the huge variety of topics, themes, methodological approaches and theoretical backgrounds, which lead to fascinating research, papers, and lectures. On the other hand, it is sometimes not easy to catch the points of contact between the lectures and to see the relationships between the various issues. For profound understanding and a productive discussion it is important to find a common language and to clarify terms.

Rahoul Masrani, a PhD student from London School of Economics and Political Science, showed in a striking and entertaining lecture that global cities have a kind of ‘brand reputation’, which is used to sell themselves as well as luxury products which are associated with their auras. Cinema plays quite an important role for these city images: The advertisements are referring to those cinematic cities (like Paris or New York) whose auras are significantly built by films, namely by using associated personalities and actors. A lot of films stage the cities they play in like characters, thus intensifying the effect of ‘cinematic auras of cities’.

The impact of film stars was also topic of Helle Kannik Haastrup’s paper. She discussed the Academy Awards as a cross-media live event which invites to participate and creates different kinds of potential identifications through the film stars. By analyzing the user comments on oscar.com these identifications can be divided into “believers” who are caring for the stars like family members and “non-believers” who enjoy the construction of the media event. The stars here are a very important reason for joining this cross-media live event and participating through commenting. That seems a bit strange considering how much less important the stars usually are for the choice of films, as was mentioned in the discussion afterwards.

Instead of discussing film-related events or the impact of films on images of the world, Jacqui Miller from Liverpool Hope University analyzed film as text. She examined the transculturality of film noir, taking Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967) as an example. A single film was also the center of the lecture of Secil Büker and Hasan Akbulut from Turkey. They talked about Semih Kaplanoglu´s film Egg (2007) and the re-construction of province. Egg is the first film of a trilogy by the Turkish director. The third part Honey can be seen in German cinemas at the moment.

An important issue in the lectures of Unni Tandberg from Oslo and Victoria Fast from Munich was identity: Unni Tandberg explored the relationship between space and identity in the film installations of the British-Caribbean artist Isaac Julien and focused on the analysis of the aesthetic qualities and political perspectives of Julien’s work. Victoria Fast, who presented the work of several scholars, talked about an empirical study about identity-building during media exposure. Åsa Jernudd from Orebro University in Sweden used interviews with Swedish senior citizens living in a post-industrial Swedish town for her work about (trans)national reflections in film memory.

picture by Mascha Brichta

Interviews about film memory were also a part of Elizabeth Prommer’s paper about cinema audiences who crossed the inner-German border to go to the movies in departed Berlin between 1945 and the building of the wall in 1961.

This description shows the wide range of interdisciplinary approaches – influenced e.g. by psychology or ethnography –, and of different issues and perspectives on the impact of films and cinematic events, on film as aesthetic text or on the perspective of the audience and on film memory in its whole richness. If discussions and lectures are colored by passion for film and cinema, the volition to mutually understand the various approaches and perspectives, and by a chair holding together the plurality of approaches, then the wide range of the film studies lectures doesn´t lead to incoherent fragments, but rather results in intellectual pleasure for the audience.

German “Grenzkinos”

Panel 7-3: Film Reception

German film history and its hidden treasures: A paper about German “Grenzkinos” (“border cinemas”) in Berlin between 1945 and 1961

by Lea Wohl

The lecture of Elizabeth Prommer of the University of Vienna at the ECREA conference in Hamburg was a good example for the hidden treasures of German film history. She presented the result of a study she conducted with master students at the Potsdam Film and Television University. They did research on the phenomenon of the “Grenzkino” (border cinema): In parted Berlin after 1945 and before the wall was built in 1961 there was a type of cinema which was called “Grenzkino”. These cinemas were located in western Berlin, but right at the border to the eastern part of the city. In this period it was still possible to move unrestricted between the parts of the city and to cross the border between West and East Germany without any problems.

picture by Mascha Brichta

The “Grenzkinos” offered mainly American entertainment movies to an audience from eastern Berlin. They were installed to offer them the opportunity to see films differing from the usual German Democratic Republic (GDR) productions and to have a short way home afterwards. To make the cinema visit more convenient for this audience, the “Grenzkinos” were much cheaper than other cinemas in western Berlin. The price for a regular cinema-ticket amounts to between 1 DM and 2,50 DM while a “Grenzkino” ticket cost only 0,25 DM. Furthermore, the tickets could be paid in GDR money, so it was not necessary to change money which was always connected with financial losses.

This form of crossing borders by going to cinemas in the other part of Berlin was a very unique form of crossing borders. 10% of the cinemas in western Berlin were “Grenzkinos”. People attending these “Grenzkinos” were called “Kinogrenzgänger” (“Cinema-Crossers”), and the phenomenon was so well known that even popular phrases were invented: It was very popular to say “Voll wie ein Grenzkino” (“Full like a border cinema”) about someone who was very drunk. Interestingly, on the one hand, these “Grenzkinos” were installed with special prices and programs to suit the eastern German or eastern Berlin taste and, on the other hand, the Eastern German politicians reacted to this phenomenon by developing an eastern German film production and more entertaining movies without “heavy issues”.

The main research question of Prommer’s paper was: Why did people living in eastern Berlin cross the border to go to the cinema? Was it because of the films shown in the “Grenzkinos” or was crossing the border itself the more important part? In order to find out, the researchers conducted biographical interviews with “Kinogrenzgängern” who were born between 1930 and 1945. Some of the individual memories and narratives of these “Kinogrenzgänger” told by Elizabeth Prommer were quite impressive, like that of a woman who was at a “Grenzkino” the night the wall was built. If she had gone for a drink afterwards she would not have been able to return home to her children anymore. This approach of the interviews was combined with extensive archive research, which certainly benefitted from the size of the group of five master students involved.

The results of Prommer´s work showed that the East German audiences went to the “Grenzkinos” for several reasons: they were close to home or work, the tickets were cheap, and they liked the program. It seems particularly interesting to take a closer look at the film program of the “Grenzkinos” which was at least one reason to visit them: The researchers discovered that the eastern Berlin audiences were not emotionally attached and did not feel connected to the East German DEFA (Deutsche Film AG) productions.

As Prommer mentioned, the first phase of DEFA films from 1945 to 1952 can be described as the antifascist and democratic phase, but later the films became very schematic. The audiences of the “Grenzkinos” were mostly young and – as they remember today – they liked the fun and entertaining films, which were mostly genre films like western films, action films, dramas and comedies and, for the most part, of American origin. Ultimately, crossing the border itself seems not to have been among the main reasons for visiting the “Grenzkinos”. Elizabeth Prommers paper presentation was well-structured and therefore easy to follow, highly interesting, inspiring, full of detailed information and a proof that there is still a lot to discover in German film history.

How to sell climate change?

ECREA-Pre-Conference ‘Communication Climate Change II:
Global Goes Regional’ Panel III: Communicating Adaptation and Mitigation

by Linny Bieber

This pre-conference’s first panel focused on media coverage, the second on the context of media coverage. In Panel III ideological components were discussed. Here the central questions is: What do people believe? And as a result, as keynote speaker Shelley Ungar (University of Toronto, Canada) pointed out: How to sell climate change?

Ulrika Olausson & Peter Berglez (Örebro University, Sweden): The ‘Climate Threat’ as Ideology: Interrelations between Citizen and Media Discourses. Olausson and Berglez did a study on social representations of climate change in the media and among citizens in Sweden. How did climate change become a public concern? By interviewing 30 Swedish citizens the sicentists identified a ‘climate threat ideology’ in Sweden as the fundament of climate change meaning-making. This ideologization happens when there is firstly a belief in a climate threat, secondly personal experiences of climate threat and finally an inte-gration of climate threat in everyday life’s behaviour. This can lead, on the one hand, to an increasing ideological support of climate science, or on the other hand, if the ideologization is too big, to a counter-reaction. For this reason, “the role of media is crucial”, the authors pointed out. The media must find the right ideological balance without exaggerating the climate threat in order to give climate science enough support in the population.

Elaine McKewon (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia): Preaching the Controversy: Investigating the Role of Australian Conservative Think Tanks in Manufacturing Doubt about Climate Science in the News Media. An ideological conflict is taking place in Australia’s society: Does an anthropogenic climate change really exist? Or can believing in this be claimed as “religion, not science”? Based on a news source, content and discourse analysis Elaine McKewon examined the media strategies of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). This climate change sceptic Australian think tank aims to create a scientific controversy about climate change in the news media by, for instance, regularly publishing columns in newspapers, by launching books or by constructing media events.

Annika Egan Sjölander (Umeå University, Sweden): ‘The Ethanol Dream’ Scrutinised: Local News as Investigative Journalism. In the summer of 2009, three Swedish local newspapers published a series of 107 articles on biofuel ethanol which in Sweden has been hyped as the perfect ‘green’ substitute to fossil fuels for several years. But in her case study on this newspaper series Annika Egan Sjölander found a change in the tone of the media’s ethanol coverage. The ‘ethanol dream’ is now getting more and more critisized – for instance by pointing out that politicians and industries did not manage to fully replace petrol – although a lot of money has been spent on building an ethanol industry.

Marcus Rhomberg & Nico Stehr (Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany): Communicating Adaptation as Local Issue: Conceptualizing a Research Agenda for Communication Scholars. After the presentations of studies that focused on the media’s and society’s perception of climate change, Marcus Rhomberg at last turned the spotlight on the communication scholars. He presented an approach for doing research on climate change on a local level with the focus on the adaptation issue which is, as he pointed out, on the local level much more relevant than the mitigation issue. His presentation leads to the conclusion that communication scholars should work out their role within the climate change debate by taking the expansion of the climate change issue on the regional level into account.

‘Glocal’ media coverage on climate change

ECREA-Pre-Conference ‘Communication Climate Change II:
Global Goes Regional’ Panel I: Regional & Transnational Perspectives

by Linny Bieber

The main focus of this year’s ECREA pre-conference on climate change communication, held by KlimaCampus Hamburg and the Institute for Journalism and Communication Research, was on the regional aspects of the global climate change. The three presen-tations in Panel I: „Regional & Transnational Perspectives“ showed, how different media coverage of climate change can be – but not always has to be.

Risto Kunelius (University of Tampere, Finland) & Elisabeth Eide (Oslo University College, Norway): MediaClimate from Bali to Copenhagen. An International Research Project Analyzing UN Climate Change Summits as Transnational Media Events. Despite of it’s transnational context, a domestication of climate change journalism can be detected. When Risto Kunelius presented the results from his comparative study about 18 countries’ newspaper coverage of the UN Climate Change Summits in Bali (2007) and Copenhagen (2009), he pointed out that the meanings of the summits had been predicted by national perspectives. Nevertheless, in addition to local and regional differences global shared frames could be discovered – e.g. the tendency to an ‘advocacy of hope’ discourse (‘It’s now or never’) and to the rise of a ‘new realism’ that replaced the more alarmistic way of covering climate change.

Mikkel Eskjaer (University of Copenhagen, Denmark): The Regional Dimension: How Regional Media Systems Condition Global Climate Change Communication. Given the increasing worldwide media attention for climate change issues, Mikkel Eskjaer examined regional variations of climate change coverage due to regional media systems’ influence.

picture by Mascha Brichta

Eskjaer compared western and non-western media systems from three geo-cultural regions: the Middle East (semi-authoritarian model), Scandinavia (democratic model) and North America (liberal model). Based on an analysis of 700 articles (2008-2009), Eskjaers findings show for example that the climate change coverage in Middle Eastern newspapers mostly consists of foreign instead of domestic news, or that Danish newspapers have a tendency to a politicized discourse. Eskjaer concluded that the regional dimension is of high importance, since “international communication is influenced by regional media systems”.

Antigoni Vokou (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium): Representing the Risks of Climate Change in the Belgian French Press. When Antigoni Vokou presented her results the audience was very surprised to hear that in Belgium a conflict between climate change sceptics and believers does not exist, that there seems to be a consensus about anthro-pogenic climate change. In her study about climate change representations in Belgium’s French language press (1997-2009) Vokou classified her results with regard to the following two ways of framing climate change: the ‘Kyoto Approach’ (no or few scientific content and a conflict-oriented discourse) and the ‘Climate Change Risk Approach’ (with importance of scientific content and a catastrophic/alarmic discourse). Vokou found out that on the one hand, the alarmistic disourse intensified during the last years, probably caused by the 2003 heatwave in Belgium. On the other hand, an increasing regionalization of climate change news could be detected, probably based on the increasing importance of regional – not national – climate change policies. By combining both alarmism and regionalism the press “helped to raise a public concern about climate change” and “encouraged a ‘green conscience’ of the people in Belgium”, Vokou concluded.

Constructing European Public Spheres

Plenary Session III: European Media, European Public Spheres, European Identities

by Jana Tereick

The third and last plenary session featured two theoretical approaches towards European Public Spheres and European Identities. The first keynote was given by Ruth Wodak (University of Lancaster), one of the most distinguished scholars in Critical Discourse Analysis, who spoke about the formation of European Public Spheres. Her talk was followed by Beata Klimkiewicz (Jagiellonian University, Krakow), who analysed media and communication research in Central and Eastern Europe with regard to how academics discuss and evaluate the ongoing media system change in the region.

Keynote 1: Ruth Wodak: The Discursive Construction of European Crises – Redefining the ‘European Public Sphere’

Ruth Wodak (picture by Jana Tereick)

Ruth Wodak, whose background is in discourse studies rather than media and communication studies, added an interdisciplinary perspective to the conference. In her talk, she demonstrated “possible synergies” of the different fields by presenting the international transdisciplinary project EMEDIATE – Media and Ethics of a European Public Sphere from the Treaty of Rome to the “War on Terror”. The project’s objective was to conduct a multimodal, qualitative, longitudinal analysis which took into account the “internal heterogeneity” of the European public sphere, which is in fact not one, but multiple European public spheres. Observing that these are characterised by tensions  and a “struggle of ideas” that is often initiated by a crisis in which “things are getting questioned that had been taken for granted”, the project analysed press articles on eight crises (among which the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the  Muhammad cartoons controversy) from eleven different countries. The main research question was “how media discourses on key periods of crisis of the post-war European history contribute to the change in the social and political conceptualisation of ‘Europe’”. To answer this questions, the researches used the Discourse-Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis to isolate and categorize argument structures (topoi) across texts. The first result was that rather than a real “European Public Sphere”, different national perspectives coexisted and that in the covered period from 1953 to 2006, there was “no teleological development towards a unified Europe”. As a second result, Wodak described how over time, crisis events get stripped of their historical context and become desemanticised “snapshots”, so that all in all no correlation between crisis events and a (re-)conceptualisation of ‘Europe’ could be observed.

Keynote 2: Beata Klimkiewicz: Media and communication in Central East Europe: Achievements and challenges for communication research

Beata Klimkiewicz had changed her title to “Media system change in Central East Europe: Reflections on Communication Research” in order to avoid a “too huge terrain”. She went on to describe Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as an area defined by an “elusive geometry” of national borders, an internal division since the Eastern enlargements of the European Union and, most of all, very different “conceptual maps”. Klimkiewicz documented the change of the media system in CEE after 1990 and reactions and descriptions by Central and Eastern European scholars in media and communication studies. She described a media market dominated in certain sectors by foreign corporations and media producers unable “to place recognizable cultural images and products globally”. Accordingly, scholars in communication and media studies criticise CEE media for imitating or copying Western concepts, mixing, as Klimkiewicz  noted, analysis and evaluation. She tracked down the popular metaphorical warning of a “Mediterranization” or “Italianization” of the media system in several publications and illustrated other “conceptual models” which characterise academic publications on the subject. Thereby, she took a critical stance on her own subject area and suggested that scholars should always be aware that their perspectives are “determined by generational experience, sensitivity and attention to certain concepts and facts that preoccupy us”.

Creativity Markets

Panel 6-9B: Creativity Markets

by Brendan Erler

In the panel “creativity markets” the current situation of the culture industry was analyzed in several ways concerning economic, aesthetic as well as structural issues:

Marc Verboord took a look at the effects of internet peer based recommendation-systems like Amazon and Goodreads on attention-creation and commercial success in comparison to “expert-opinions” in traditional newspapers. Where classical newspaper reviews of books don´t seem to transfer into rising attention and higher sales at all, the recommendations on Amazon and Goodreads do have a significant effect. He states an overrepresentation of general fiction books by male authors in newspapers that is challenged by the internet, where other genres like science fiction and female authors have a much higher chance of being recognized and bought. Although this “democratizing effect” of consumers as the new gatekeepers is often stressed, the promising future of the “long tail” remains controversial. Things change, but whether they get systematically more “democratic”, equal or even “better” continues to be highly debated.

Christian Pentzold gave an impression of the structure and work-reality of supposedly “non hierarchical” open source projects. While the wisdom of the crowd as the theoretical background of this cooperation modus is glorified, in reality, according to Pentzold, it is more “the wisdom of controlling crowds”. The prime example for this kind of voluntary and free work, Linux, has a strong hierarchical top down structure with the founder Linus Torvalds as a “benevolent dictator”. The propagated Ideology of openness in theory meets a lack of governance in practice.

Rody Flinn held a very enlightening lecture on the proposed negative effects of digital technology on European and especially Irish cinema. He defines European cinema as something more based on reality and focused on “the truth” in opposition to “fantastical” Hollywood. Where “analog” cinema represents a “physical reality”, its digital successor is more of a “mental reality”. This lack of indexical connection to reality threatens the heart of European cinema, eliminates its local identity and makes it an exchangeable product of a global culture industry. For example Irish film students are intentionally being trained for Hollywood or the advertising market, but not for the Irish film-scene.

Göran Bolin reconsidered the “death of the mass audience”. He quoted Raymond Williams famous remark, that there are no masses, but only ways of seeing people as

picture by Mascha Brichta

masses to illustrate the development of personal media and interpersonal communication and its effects on traditional business models. New methods of (online) marketing like behavioral targeting changed the way audiences are defined and perceived: It´s not the largest audience, but the right audience that counts. Still the idea of the mass communication process remains alive, moving from mass marketing to mass personalization.

Andrew Dubber finally spoke about his internet music experiment aftershock.com. Aftershock organizes collaborative music events with selected musicians, who jointly compose a new piece of music that is then performed live only once. All the members of the experiment are equipped with digital video cameras throughout the whole process to catch on camera what seems interesting to them. These different perspectives of one event are then uploaded to aftershock without further editing. Where recorded music presents a kind of idealized and artificially perfect version of music and its production process, this so called “musicking” defines music as a social object in a media-ecology (McLuhan). As a result within the members of the production process a quick normalization of technology could be determined, while the consumers made sense of the material by arranging it in a unique way, creating multiple first person perspectives.

Democracy, citizenship & cultural public spheres

Panel 2-2: Democracy, citizenship & cultural public spheres

by Amaranta Alfaro-Muirhead

Linking Habermas with music culture

This panel had two main red strings to follow, first Habermas’ approach of public sphere – in terms of understanding and applying it -, and secondly the aspect of music in more than half of the presented papers – in shape of Norwegian dance-band music, the Eurovision Song Contest, and the DJ´s of the Dutch and Flemish radio telethons. At first the connection between these two factors could be seen as arbitrary, but after hearing the presentation “The cultural public sphere – a critical discussion of the role of music in Jürgen Habermas´ theory of deliberative democracy” of Torgeir Uber Naerland, from the University of Bergen in Sweden, the connection actually appears reasonable after all.

Naerland makes an interesting point by arguing “that music does have an impact on processes such as deliberation and the formation of opinion in the public sphere” based on examples like the role of soul, funk and jazz in the African-American civil rights movement in the 60´s; or the role of punk music in the UK anti-Thatcher movement in the early 80´s. In the Norwegian dance-band culture, the dominant values are conservative and traditional – like for instance moral decency – and the dominant discourse is anti-modern as well as anti-urban, and reflects a working class identity, as he stated. In his research he came to the conclusion, that this type of music makes the audience a political one, by raising political questions and its impact on identity and the formation of opinion. In this sense, according to Naerland, any festival or concert of Norwegian dance-band music is an episodic public sphere and a political event because it consolidates the rural and traditional values and patters of identity, to a point that it has been used for political movements and campaigns.

Following this string, music could be perceived as a way in which citizens participate in their (political) culture and conceive a cultural collective identity; even an European one if we consider the paper “European identity in the media – Public discourse on the European parliamentary elections and the Eurovision Song Contest 2009” presented by Nicole Landeck from the University of Manheim, Germany. She elaborates how media publicly negotiates membership of a community in terms of cultural citizenship, using the Eurovision Song Contest as an example. In her paper, she explained what needs to be covered when one is dealing with collective identity: Inclusion (definitions of membership), internal differentiation, exclusions (definitions of the others), and the outside perception. And if one may think about it, the Eurovision Song Contest applies all these aspects named above, contributing to a common European identity, corroborating Torgeir Uber Naerland´s statement.

Finally Nathalie Claessens and Koen Panis from the University of Antwerp, Belgium with their paper “Putting the “fun” in fundraising: The Serious Request and Music for Life radio telethons, media and citizenship”, approach the public sphere and music culture issue too, this time from the perspective of charitainment events, also known as radio telethons. Their main focus of research is the audience that attends such events and their reasons to do so. The findings of the papers once more show a relationship between music and public sphere, identified in this case in civic engagement and social cohesion.

But at the end of the panel, the last paper: “Playful connectivity – Playful citizenship?” by Anne Kaun, Södertörn University, Sweden triggers to rethink all of this, by asking how far certain modes of playful connectivity could be linked to citizenship and political attention.

Maybe we are used to think of the participative ingredient of everyday activities such as attending a radio telethon or a concert of a “politically provocative” band, but if we consider these actions more seriously probably one did not even have the intention of performing a civic act while doing them. Are these actions over rated? Or do human beings intrinsically search for social connection/cohesion in such rituals? Is the interest in a common concern or the sense of community what is crucial in these activities or is just a reasonable reason to take part in them?