Book Review: Media and the Ukraine Crisis: Hybrid Media Practices and Narratives of Conflict by Mervi Pantti (original) (raw)

2018, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly

Media and the Ukraine Crisis is a collection of essays that attempts to understand new ways of waging and narrating a war in the digital era. Its contributors rediscover the role of the media in contemporary international conflicts using the Russian-Ukrainian crisis as a starting point. That crisis, as almost all of the 11 chapters claim, initiated a new Cold War. It has been unfolding during the past four years, changing discursive practices, political processes, and relationships between media, citizens, and other social institutions. Today, when the new Cold War is at its peak-with the new anti-Russian sanctions and espionage scandals-the book becomes even more relevant for understanding the mediatized nature of conflicts and role of the media in their enactment, escalation, and resolution. Using the concept of "cultural chaos," the book demonstrates a structure of a new discursive order, where information flow is porous, hegemonic control over agendas is almost impossible, and traditional propaganda is not quite effective. Pantti, the editor, is head of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki. Examining the Ukraine conflict, its influence on the media, and the way they affected the course of the crisis, this edited volume makes a number of interesting theoretical contributions. They concern new media practices and actors (Part 1) and representation of the conflict in the media (Part 2). I see four theorizations as particularly useful for interdisciplinary scholars as well as researchers who work in the areas of journalism studies, media and communication studies, and Russian and East European studies. First, the book contributes to the development of the concept of hybrid media that does not disregard traditional media in favor of digital ones, but acknowledges their power and the processes of their hybridization with the online realm. Second, examining changing relationships between media consumers and producers, the authors make an interesting point about the role of "prosumers" (aka those who both produce and consume media content). Chapter 2 sees in open source journalism and user-generated content opportunities for nonelite actors to interfere and contest a dominant narrative. However, Chapter 3 complicates this view by 812780J MQXXX10.