Let Us Infotain You: Politics in the New Media Age (original) (raw)
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This chapter critically reflects on the state of the art in research on the political relevance of entertainment media. It is argued that most research on this important topic has been based on the ideas of understanding or consistency. While these lines of research also need to be expanded, the authors call for bringing the hedonic principle into the fold as a primary explanatory principle for the study of political entertainment media. Moreover, the chapter stresses the need to expand the range of entertainment media content/genres/forms that are investigated for their political influence. As an example, the authors reflect on the political influence of graphic novels in this essay. In addition, the authors highlight the importance of an international perspective and of comparative work in this area of study. Only when research expands in such a manner to include these lines of research substantive judgments concerning the political relevance of entertainment media will be forthcoming.
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Politics is everywhere these days. The rampant materialism of the Reagan Years has been succeeded by rancorous contention and angry commitment. I'm not just talking about the ordinary politics of government and party, though that continues to fill the newscasts and the newspapers. Rather I'm referring to the way politics has intruded upon other realms of life, whether the home, the workplace, popular culture, the arts, or academe. We live through successive waves of disputes, few of which are satisfied to anyone's satisfaction. All around us we see signs of fragmentation, polarization, cynicism, and a lot of anger. Voters don't trust politicians, certainly not to deliver on their promises. Gays and lesbians, African-Americans and Canadian aborigines wage identity politics to accentuate and celebrate their sense of difference. Quebec nationalists wait in the wings to play that same brand of politics on a much grander scale at the expense of the Canadian nation-state. Exhibiting the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe or planning a performance of the musical Show Boat excites the political juices, albeit for very different reasons. A Senate hearing over the merits of prospective Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas makes sexual harassment an issue of moment throughout the business world. The so-called 'Clayoquot Compro
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This article discusses two trends in the debates about contemporary television journalism. First, journalism is said to be increasingly subsumed an economic logic, privileging entertainment before serious journalistic practices. Most often, this is framed as if entertainment is eating its way into serious journalism, affecting it negatively and thus being detrimental for the political public sphere and political reasoning. Second, it is often pointed to a changed relation between journalism and politicians, where the latter have lost some of their power, for example, in political debates. This article relates these two trends and argues, against a field model inspired by Bourdieu, that it is not entertainment that is eating its way into journalism, but the other way around: Rather than having been absorbed by entertainment, journalism has differentiated, become more autonomous as a subfield of cultural production, and has gradually come to dominate both factual and entertainment tel...
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In 2003 Ikuo Kabashima and Samuel Popkin invited Professors Masaki Taniguchi, Gill Steel, Susan Shirk, Jay Hamilton and Matthew Baum to join with them in charting a new path for research on the ways changing media are changing politics. In the last two decades, media studies have moved beyond claims of minimal effects by demonstrating how various characteristics of news stories–point of view (framing), connection to political offices (priming), emotional content, or causal implications– affect public opinion and voting. (Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Iyengar 1991; Sniderman, Brody and Tetlock 1991) Here we examine the ways in which changing communications technologies change the issue content of news consumed by the public and political competition within and between parties.
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The New "Media Affect" and the Crisis of Representation for Political Communication
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Political communication research in the United States, despite two decades of change in how the public receives information, follows theories that rely on definitions of citizenship from a century ago and on metaphors growing out of communication techniques and practices of five decades ago. A review of the state of news media, facing technical, labor, and economic crises, and the state of political science, illustrated through research methods, leads to a reexamination of communication at the intersection of media and politics. Political communication theory has come to rely on functional metaphors, economic background assumptions, an emphasis on method, and a legacy of structuralism. The crisis presents current theories with challenges for the representation of citizens and the press in democracy. Especially as young adults reject older forms of information, political communication can renew itself by deepening existing theory and shifting from old effects rationality to a new "media affect" sensibility. Political communication research is at a turning point, its direction unclear in the face of unprecedented change. The conditions of public information are transforming technologies of political knowledge and common perspectives on political life. But political communication research has had difficulty keeping up. Conference planners still receive a bulk of papers going over familiar ground, especially functionalist research on agenda setting, gatekeeping, and the like. 1 As the field expands in each Research Article 574 International Journal of Press/Politics 16 national setting, scholars repeat existing studies, so that in Spain, for instance, researchers have been retracing ground covered decades ago in other countries under different circumstances. Assailed by turbulence in politics and tumult in the media, political communication has remained cautious in method and theory, its firm traditions and horizons generating few new ideas and rendering inert the drama going on in the world today. Political communication in the current century has lost its moorings.
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The advent of the Internet has generated enormous interest about whether and how digital platforms, including Social Media, have any impact on the political sphere. As a result, today we can rely on an increasing body of research addressing the multiple relations between Social Media and politics from different perspectives. The increasing influence of the media on society in general and on the behavior of politicians and the functioning of political and administrative institutions specifically, is defined as a process of ‘medialization’.