Mike was a doctoral student profoundly appreciated and esteemed by faculty, peers, staff, and all who came in contact with him. As is typical in our community, Mike was already a successful mid-career professional. He worked in the tech world and brought his expertise to us. He didn’t have a background in research psychology, but in the last year of his doctoral program, his work was published on nine occasions. Nine publications during the last year of graduate school is an incredible feat for anyone. But the heart-wrenching part of the story is that in the last eight months of his doctoral program, Mike also learned he had life-threatening cancer to which he finally succumbed about a month after graduation.

Mike’s family kept a blog of his progress and not long after graduation we learned that the end had come. Some of us attended the funeral in person. One member of our community gave the eulogy—a very stirring story of their travels, work, and time spent together in the program. The funeral was even livecast on the web so those who couldn’t be there physically could attend virtually.

Mike’s virtual wake

In the midst of these events, several of us wanted to commune so we held what amounted to a kind of virtual wake—a video chat with people from all around the country talking about our shared loss and joy of having had Mike in our lives. Several of us wrote eulogies for Mike and shared them with each other online. In mine, I spoke about how my relationship with Mike flashed through my mind like a dream sequence. In it, I remembered Mike and I in various settings: walking on the beach planning research, touring the MIT Media Lab, attending a presentation at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet research, and talking on the phone or Skyping.

People often grapple with the question of what is “real” versus “unreal” in the realm of media and technology. As a media psychologist I study how media use influences our feelings, actions and thoughts, and use media every day to teach a doctoral program that uses a hybrid model of higher education. While we do meet face-to-face (F2F), more often we use other forms of communication to meet virtually.

My students and I text, call, video chat, email, and post in social networking groups.  We discuss research walking the beach, brainstorm together in a seminar, or hold intriguing debates via video chat. Our F2F meetings are what one colleague calls “intense bursts of togetherness.” They’re the kind of thing where you might spend a week in morning-through-night meetings, classes, and social gatherings.  These varied means of communication have a deep reality for us, and through these experiences we are bonded together in unique ways. Our community is a kind of exciting world-within-a-world where we study what we do and we do what we study.

But for now, I’m honored to tell part of Mike’s story, and in some way, Mike’s presence in our virtual community is a legacy of the powerful ways technology can bring us together.

Karen Dill-Shackleford is the author of How Fantasy Becomes Reality and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Media Psychology. She has testified before the US Congress about media violence and about representations of race and gender in the media. 

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Journalists want to report the news not be the news. But in the case of Ann Curry, the former Today show co-host who was pushed into stepping down from the co-anchor slot last June, she has become the news. New York Times reporter Brian Stelter’s recent feature article about morning television and the toxic culture at NBC’s Today show provides more than enough information to conclude that Ann Curry was a target of workplace mobbing.

Whatever your personal opinions of Curry and her work, she was clearly mobbed out of her Today show job. Workplace mobbing is a process of humiliation and degradation of a targeted worker with the purpose of removing that worker from the workplace or at least from a particular unit of it. It is a dark side of organizational life, involves co-workers ganging up on the target, and includes management’s involvement through active participation in the mobbing or through failure to stop it once it becomes known to them. Mobbing in the workplace includes a characteristic course of events that were first described by Heinz Leymann, the psychiatrist who conceptualized the problem in the 1980s. Let’s look at what Stelter reports as having happened to Ann Curry through the framework of this pattern of events representative of workplace mobbing.

• Today was losing market share, critics were saying the show was stale and that there was no chemistry between the co-hosts Ann Curry and Matt Lauer. Understandably, management was concerned. Their solution, however, is a classic error of logical type. Blame an individual — in this case, Ann Curry — for what was obviously a much more systemic problem. (Precipitating event or situation)
• Once “the problem,” had been identified as Ann Curry, management’s next step, according to Stelter, was to mount a campaign to get rid of her and they even had a name for it, “Operation Bambi.” (Targeting of a worker for elimination and involvement of management or administration)
• Curry was subjected to a series of hostile, negative acts that by most people’s standards would be humiliating and hurtful. Stelter reports the making of a blooper reel that showed Curry’s worst on-air moments and blunders, the gathering of staff to watch a particular on-air gaffe and presumably to talk about it, the collection of boxes of Curry’s belongings in a closet as if she had already left, control room staff making fun of Curry’s clothing choices and “generally messing with her,” and the comparison of a yellow dress that she wore to Big Bird and photo shopping her head on to Big Bird’s image and then asking staff to vote on which one wore the yellow outfit best. (Unethical communication about the target and series of negative acts)
• Such negative acts, tailored to the particular work environment, are characteristic of workplace mobbing and serve several functions. They separate and exclude the target from the rest of the workplace, telegraph to other workers that the target is “damaged goods,” and encourage a general ganging up on the target. Once the target in a workplace mobbing has been cast as “other,” and as “less than” it’s much easier to further objectify that person and treat him or her callously. The negative acts can go on for months, as seems to be the case for Ann Curry, or even years as has been the case for others who have been mobbed in the workplace. It doesn’t take much imagination to appreciate the human toll of psychological and physical suffering that such ongoing hostility and abuse causes. (Isolation and exclusion of the target, more ganging up, and resulting escalation of mobbing)
• On 28 June 2012, Ann Curry emotionally announced her departure from the Today show. It was clear to anyone watching her announcement that she was in pain and that she was not happy about leaving. The mobbing of Ann Curry was entirely successful. She was now gone from the Today show. Stelter notes that the executive producer led a group of Curry’s co-workers in a toast to her departure at a nearby restaurant only hours after her announcement that she was stepping down. Such cheering and celebrating after a successful workplace mobbing is common and fairly predictable. (Elimination from the workplace)

For most people who are victims of workplace mobbing, an unfortunate and common workplace event, the aftermath is difficult at best and disabling at worst. Income is lost, health and retirement benefits can be lost, reputation is damaged, professional identity is compromised as is the victim’s career trajectory, family and friendship relationships are strained, and the lingering traumatic effects of the interpersonal abuse and social exclusion at the heart of workplace mobbing can persist for a very long time. It is no surprise at all that Stelter reports Ann Curry as having described her experience as “professional torture.” Heinz Leymann called workplace mobbing “psychological terrorism.”

Ann Curry’s multi-million dollar salary may make the financial side of being a victim of workplace mobbing a lot easier for her than it is for most victims. I would assume, though, that her salary doesn’t ease the psychological and emotional pain she has had to endure and that is most likely her legacy from having been mobbed. While Ann Curry may not like the position of being the news, the story of how she was a victim of workplace mobbing is important. The stories of many others who have been victims of workplace mobbing but who are not public figures might more fully be understood through hers.

Maureen Duffy is a family therapist, educator, and consultant about workplace and school issues, including mobbing and bullying, and is the co-author of Mobbing: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions and the forthcoming book, Overcoming Mobbing: A Recovery Guide for Workplace Aggression and Bullying. Read her previous blog posts “Seven ways schools and parents can mishandle reports of bullying” and “Excluded, suspended, required to withdraw.”

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In 2006, there appeared to be a remarkable consensus among Internet gurus, activists, bloggers, and academics about the promise of Web 2.0 that users would attain more power than they ever had in the era of mass media. Rapidly growing platforms like Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006) facilitated users’ desire to make connections and exchange self-generated content. The belief in social media as technologies of a new “participatory” culture was echoed by habitual tools-turned-into-verbs: buttons for liking, trending, following, sharing, trending, et cetera. They articulated a feeling of connectedness and collectivity, strongly resonating the belief that social media enhanced the democratic input of individuals and communities. According to some, Web 2.0 and its ensuing range of platforms formed a unique chance to return the “public sphere” — a sphere that had come to be polluted by commercial media conglomerates — back in the hands of ordinary citizens.

Eight years after the apex of techno-utopian celebration, a number of large platforms have come to dominate a social media ecosystem vastly different from when the platforms just started to evolve. It’s time for a reality check. What did social media do for the public — users like you — and for the ideal of a more democratic public space? Do they indeed promote connectedness and participation in community-driven activities or are they rather engines of connectivity, driven by automated algorithms and invisible business models?  Online socializing, as it now seems, is inimically mediated by a techno-economic logic anchored in the principles of popularity and winner-takes-all principles that enhance the pervasive logic of mass media instead of offering alternatives.

Most contemporary social media giants once started out as informal platforms for networking or “friending” (Facebook), for exchanging user-generated content (YouTube), or for participating in opinionated discussions (Twitter). It was generally assumed that in the new social media space, all users were equal. However, platforms’ algorithms measured relevance and importance in terms of popularity rankings, which subsequently formed the quantifiable basis of data-driven interactivity wrapped in “social” rhetoric such as following, trending, or sharing. In this platform-mediated ecosystem, sponsored and professionally generated content soon received a lot more attention than user-generated content. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook gradually changed their interfaces to yield business models that were staked in two basic variables: attention and user data. By 2012, once informal social traffic between users had become fully formalized, automated, and commoditized by platforms owned and exploited by fast growing corporate giants. Although each of these platforms nurses its own proprietary mechanisms, they are staked in the same values or principles: popularity, hierarchical ranking, quick growth, large traffic volumes, fast turnovers, and personalized recommendations. A like is not a retweet, but most algorithms are underpinned by the norms of popularity and fast-trending topics.

The cultivation of online sociality is increasingly dominated by four major chains of platforms: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. These chains share some operational principles even if they differ on some ideological premises (open versus closed systems). Some consider social media platforms as alternatives to the old mass media, praising their potential to empower individual users who can contribute their own opinions or content to a media universe that was before pretty much closed to amateurs. Although we should not underestimate this newly acquired power of the web as a publishing medium for all, it is hard to keep up the tenet that social media are alternatives to mass media. Over the past few years, it has become increasingly obvious that the logics of mass media and social media are intimately intertwined. Not just on the level of platforms mechanics and content (tweets have become the equivalent of soundbites) but also on the level of user dynamics and business models; YouTube-Google now collaborates with many former foes from Hollywood to turn their platform into the gateway to the entertainment universe. Newspapers and television stations are inevitably integrated in the ecosystem of connective media where the mechanisms of data-driven user traffic determines who and what gets most attention, hence drawing customers and eyeballs.

This new connective media system has reshaped the power relationships between platform owners and users, not only in terms of who may steer information but also who controls the vast amount of user data that rushes through the combined platforms every day. What are the larger political and social concerns behind deceptively simple interfaces and celebrated user-convenient tools? Where in 2006 the notion of user power still seemed unproblematic, the relationship between users and owners of social media platforms is now contentious and embattled. In the wake of the growing monopolization of niches (Facebook for social networking, Google for search, Twitter for microblogging) it is important to redefine and reappraise the meaning of “social,” “public,” “community,” and “nonprofit.” The ecosystem of connective media has no separate spaces for the “public”; it is a nirvana of interoperability which major players argue for deregulation and which imposes American neoliberal conditions on a global space where boundaries are considered disruptions of user convenience. Common public values, such as independence, trust, or equal opportunities, are ready for reassessment if they need to survive in an environment that is defined by social media logic.

José van Dijck is a professor of Comparative Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam; her latest book, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media has just been published by Oxford University Press (2013).

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Image credit: 3D little human character X9 in a Network, holding Tablet Computer. People series. Image by jojje9999, iStockphoto.

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The Very Short Film competition was launched in partnership with The Guardian in October 2012. The longlisted entries are now available for the public vote which will produce four finalists. After a live final in March, the winner will receive £9000 towards their university education.

By Chloe Foster

After more than three months of students carefully planning and creating their entries, the Very Short Film competition has closed and the longlisted submissions have been announced.

The competition asked entrants to create a short film which would inform and inspire us. Students were free to base their entry on any subject they were passionate about. There was just one rule: films could be no longer than 60 seconds in length.

We certainly had many who managed to do this. The standard of films was impressive. How were we to whittle down the entries and choose just 12 for the longlist?

We received a real range of films from a variety of ages, characters and subjects — everything from scuba diving to the economic state of the housing market. It was great to see a mixture of academic subjects and topics of personal interest.

It must be said that the quality of the filmmaking itself was very high in some entries. However not all of these could be put through to the longlist; although artistic and clever, they didn’t inform us in the way our criteria specified.

When choosing the longlisted entries, judges looked for students who were clearly on top of their subject. We were most impressed by films that conveyed a topic’s key information in a concise way, were delivered with passion and verve, and left us wanting to find out more. By the end of our selection process, we felt that each of the films had taught us something new or made us think about a subject in a way we hadn’t before.

The sheer amount of information filmmakers managed to convey was astounding. As the Very Short Introductions editor Andrea Keegan says: “I thought condensing a large topic into 35,000 words, as we do in the Very Short Introductions books was difficult enough, but I think that this challenge was even harder. I was very impressed with the quality and variety of videos which were submitted.

“Ranging from artistic to zany, I learned a lot, and had lots of fun watching them. The longlist represents both a wide range of subjects — from the history of film to quantum locking — and a huge range in the approaches taken to get the subjects across in just one minute.”

We hope the entrants enjoyed thinking about and creating their films as much as we enjoyed watching them. We asked a few of the longlisted students what they made of the experience. Mahshad Torkan, studying at the London School of Film, tackled the political power of film: “I am very thankful for this amazing opportunity that has allowed me to reflect my values and beliefs and share my dreams with other people.  I believe that the future is not something we enter, the future is something we create.”

Maia Krall Fry is reading geology at St Andrews: “It seemed highly important to discuss a topic that has really captured my curiosity and sense of adventure. I strongly believe that knowledge of the history of the earth should be accessible to everyone.”

Matt Burnett, who is studying for an MSc in biological and bioprocess engineering at Sheffield, used his film to explore the challenges of creating cost-effective therapeutic drugs: “I felt that in a minute it would be very hard to explain my research in enough detail just using speech, and it would be difficult to demonstrate or act out. I simplify difficult concepts for myself by drawing diagrams, often spending a lot of time on them. For me it is the most enjoyable part of learning, and so I thought it would be fun to draw an animated video. If I get the chance to do it again I think I’d use lots of colours.”

So, what are you waiting for? Take a look at the 12 films and pick your favourite of these amazingly creative and intelligent entries.

Chloe Foster is from the Very Short Introductions team at Oxford University Press. This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk.

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The last couple of years have been bad for journalists. I’m not referring to phone-hacking, payments to police, and the like, which have occupied much attention in the United Kingdom these last months. Rather, I’m referring to the number of journalists who have been killed in wartime.

Arab news reporters conduct an on-site interview with 4th Civil Affairs Group Public Affairs Officer Maj. M. Naomi Hawkins in front of the Dr. Talib Al-Janabi Hospital in Fallujah, Iraq, on Dec. 2, 2004. The hospital was one stop during a tour for media to different sites where reconstruction efforts are beginning after the November battle with insurgents. Photo by Cpl. Theresa M. Medina, U.S. Marine Corps.

Why are journalists targeted?

Journalists play a critical role in wartime — reporting on events, revealing the horrors of war, investigating abuses by the parties. Their role is a particularly important one given the fog of war. It’s often through media reporting that the public takes notice of a situation and the international community is pushed into action. For these very reasons, journalists are not infrequently viewed as a thorn in the side of the government or the armed group. They may be considered unwanted witnesses to what is going on and targeted for their reporting.

How does the law of armed conflict protect journalists?

The law of armed conflict distinguishes between different types of journalists:

1. Journalists who work for media outlets or information services of the armed forces.
2. Journalists who accompany the armed forces and are authorized to do so, but who aren’t members of the armed forces, e.g., the embedded reporter.
3. Journalists who are undertaking professional activities in areas affected by hostilities but who aren’t accompanying the armed forces, e.g., the broadcaster who is presenting from a conflict zone but who isn’t embedded with the troops.

The first category of journalists constitutes members of the armed forces. Accordingly, they don’t benefit from the protections afforded to civilians and their deaths don’t constitute a violation of the law.

The latter two categories of journalists are civilians. Accordingly, they can’t be attacked, unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities. Reporting on events and investigating abuses committed by the parties can never constitute taking a direct part in hostilities, even if the investigations lead to greater support for one side or another.

Journalists may, however, prove to be casualties of lawful attacks. This is a particular risk for journalists who are embedded with troops. The law allows for the targeting of troops and that targeting may result in bystanders or embedded reporters becoming casualties. In order to judge the legality of such an attack, the law utilizes the principle of proportionality, ie we have to weigh up the expected loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, and damage to civilian objects with the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. Only where the former is excessive when compared to the latter will the attack be unlawful. Although any loss of life is regrettable, the legal test means that deaths don’t necessarily imply that unlawful acts have been committed.

Particular controversies

One particularly controversial area of the law is the targeting of TV and radio stations. Civilian broadcasting services are protected from attack. They may be legitimate targets, however, if they constitute military objectives. In legal terms, this refers to objects that, “by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.”

This would render dual purpose broadcasters that broadcast civilian programmes and which are used for military communications possible targets. Civilian broadcasters that broadcast propaganda are not generally considered military objectives, as propaganda doesn’t satisfy the test for a military objective. Thus, following NATO’s targeting of the RTS studio in Belgrade during the conflict in Kosovo, the Committee established by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia noted that, “if the attack on the RTS was justified by reference to its propaganda purpose alone, its legality might well be questioned by some experts in the field of international humanitarian law” (para. 76). Compare that to Radio Mille Collines, the broadcaster that was inciting genocide in Rwanda and which many people consider a legitimate target. The dividing line is a tricky one to draw.

Sandesh Sivakumaran is Associate Professor and Reader in International Law, University of Nottingham. He is the author of The Law of Non-International Armed Conflict (OUP, 2012), co-editor of International Human Rights Law (OUP, 2010) and recipient of the Journal of International Criminal Justice Giorgio La Pira Prize and the Antonio Cassese Prize. He advises and acts as expert for a range of states, inter-governmental organizations, and non-governmental organizations on issues of international law.

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By Jolyon Mitchell

A protestor holds a picture of a blood spattered Neda Agha-Soltan and another of a woman, Neda Soltani, who was widely misidentified as Neda Agha-Soltan.

It was agonizing, just a few weeks before publication of Martyrdom: A Very Short Introduction, to discover that there was a minor mistake in one of the captions. Especially frustrating, as it was too late to make the necessary correction to the first print run, though it will be repaired when the book is reprinted. New research had revealed the original mistake. The inaccuracy we had been given had circulated the web and had been published by numerous press agencies and journalists too. What precisely was wrong?

To answer this question it is necessary to go back to Iran. During one of the demonstrations in Tehran following the contested re-election of President Ahmadinejad in 2009, a young woman (Neda Agha-Soltan) stepped out of the car for some fresh air. A few moments later she was shot. As she lay on the ground dying her last moments were captured on film. These graphic pictures were then posted online. Within a few days these images had gone global. Soon demonstrators were using her blood-spattered face on posters protesting against the Iranian regime. Even though she had not intended to be a martyr, her death was turned into a martyrdom in Iran and around the world.

Many reports also placed another photo, purportedly of her looking healthy and flourishing, alongside the one of her bloodied face. It turns out that this was not actually her face but an image taken from the Facebook page of another Iranian with a similar name, Neda Soltani. This woman is still alive, but being incorrectly identified as the martyr has radically changed her life. She later described on BBC World Service (Outlook, 2 October 2012) and on BBC Radio 4 (Woman’s Hour, 22 October 2012) how she received hate mail and pressure from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence to support the claim that the other Neda was never killed. The visual error made it almost impossible for Soltani to stay in her home country. She fled Iran and was recently granted asylum in Germany. Neda Soltani has even written a book, entitled My Stolen Face, about her experience of being mistaken for a martyr.

The caption should therefore read something like: ‘A protestor holds a picture of a blood spattered Neda Agha-Soltan and another of a woman, Neda Soltani, who was widely misidentified as Neda Agha-Soltan.’ This mistake underlines how significant the role is of those who are left behind after a death. Martyrs are made. They are rarely, if ever, born. Communities remember, preserve, and elaborate upon fatal stories, sometimes turning them into martyrdoms. Neda’s actual death was commonly contested. Some members of the Iranian government described it as the result of a foreign conspiracy, while many others saw her as an innocent martyr. For these protestors she represents the tip of an iceberg of individuals who have recently lost their lives, their freedom, or their relatives in Iran. As such her death became the symbol of a wider protest movement.

This was also the case in several North African countries during the so-called Arab Spring. In Tunisia, in Algeria, and in Egypt the death of an individual was put to use soon after their passing. This is by no means a new phenomenon. Ancient, medieval, and early modern martyrdom stories are still retold, even if they were not captured on film. Tales of martyrdom have been regularly reiterated and amplified through a wide range of media. Woodcuts of martyrdoms from the sixteenth century, gruesome paintings from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, photographs of executions from the nineteenth century, and fictional or documentary films from the twentieth century all contribute to the making of martyrs. Inevitably, martyrdom stories are elaborated upon. Like a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean, they collect barnacles of additional detail. These details may be rooted in history,unintentional mistakes, or simply fictional leaps of the imagination. There is an ongoing debate, for example, around Neda’s life and death. Was she a protestor? How old was she when she died? Who killed her? Was she a martyr?

Martyrdoms commonly attract controversy. One person’s ‘martyr’ is another person’s ‘accidental death’ or ‘suicide bomber’ or ‘terrorist’. One community’s ‘heroic saint’ who died a martyr’s death is another’s ‘pseudo-martyr’ who wasted their life for a false set of beliefs. Martyrs can become the subject of political debate as well as religious devotion. The remains of a well-known martyr can be viewed as holy or in some way sacred. At least one Russian czar, two English kings, and a French monarch have all been described after their death as martyrs.

Neda was neither royalty nor politician. She had a relatively ordinary life, but an extraordinary death. Neda is like so many other individuals who are turned into martyrs: it is by their demise that they are often remembered. In this way even the most ordinary individual can become a martyr to the living after their deaths. Preserving their memory becomes a communal practice, taking place on canvas, in stone, and most recently online. Interpretations, elaborations, and mistakes commonly cluster around martyrdom narratives. These memories can be used both to incite violence and to promote peace. How martyrs are made, remembered, and then used remains the responsibility of the living.

Jolyon Mitchell is Professor of Communications, Arts and Religion, Director of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI) and Deputy Director of the Institute for the Advanced Study in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. He is author and editor of a wide range of books including most recently: Promoting Peace, Inciting Violence: The Role of Religion and Media (2012); and Martyrdom: A Very Short Introduction (2012).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image credit: A protestor holds a picture of a blood spattered Neda Agha-Soltan and another of a woman, Neda Soltani, who was widely misidentified as Neda Agha-Soltan, used in full page context of p.49, Martyrdom: A Very Short Introduction, by Jolyon Mitchell. Image courtesy of Getty Images.

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A New York Post photographer snaps a picture of a man as he is pushed to his death in front of a New York City subway. An anonymous blogger photographs a dying American ambassador as he is carried to hospital after an attack in Libya. Multiple images following a shooting at the Empire State Building show its victims across both social media and news outlets. A little over three months, three events, three pictures, three circles of outrage.

The most recent event involved a freelancer working for the New York Post who captured an image of a frantic Queens native as he tried futilely to escape an approaching train. Depicting the man clinging to the subway platform as the train sped toward him, the picture appeared on the Post’s front cover. Within hours, observers began deriding both the photographer and the newspaper: the photographer, they said, should have helped the man and avoided taking a picture, while earlier photos by him were critiqued for being soft and of insufficient news value; the newspaper, they continued, should not have displayed the picture, certainly not on its front cover, and its low status as a tabloid was trotted out as an object of collective sneering.

We have heard debates like this before — when pictures surfaced surrounding the deaths of leaders in the Middle East, the slaying of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, the shattering of those imperiled by numerous natural disasters, wars and acts of terror. Such pictures capture the agony of people facing their deaths, depicting the final moment of life in a way that draws viewers through a combination of empathy, voyeurism, and a recognition of sheer human anguish. But the debates that ensue over pictures of people about to die have less to do with the pictures, photographers or news publications that display them and more to do with the unresolved sentiments we have about what news pictures are for. Decisions about how best to accommodate pictures of impending death in the difficult events of the news inhabit a sliding rule of squeamishness, by which cries of appropriateness, decency and privacy are easily tossed about, but not always by the same people, for the same reasons or in any enduring or stable manner.

Pictures are powerful because they condense the complexity of difficult events into one small, memorable moment, a moment driven by high drama, public engagement, the imagination, the emotions and a sense of the contingent. No surprise, then, that what we feel about them is not ours alone. Responses to images in the news are complicated by a slew of moral, political and technological imperatives. And in order to show, see and engage with explicit pictures of death, impending or otherwise, all three parameters have to work in tandem: we need some degree of moral insistence to justify showing the pictures; we need political imperatives that mandate the importance of their being seen; and we need available technological opportunities that can easily facilitate their display. Though we presently have technology aplenty, our political and moral mandates change with circumstance. Consider, for instance, why it was okay to show and see Saddam Hussein about to die but not Daniel Pearl, to depict victims dying in the Asian tsunami but not those who jumped from the towers of 9/11. Suffice it to say that had the same picture of the New York City subway been taken in the 1940s, it would have generated professional acclaim, won awards, and become iconic.

At a time in which we readily see explicit images of death and violence all the time on television series, in fictional films and on the internet, we are troubled by the same graphic images in the news. We wouldn’t expect our news stories to keep from us the grisly details of difficult events out there in the world. We should expect no less from our news pictures.

Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Chair of Communication and the Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of About to Die: How News Images Move the Public.  

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DRM and the new Thought Police

The answer is snooping. And it’s not just electronic textbooks that monitor reading habits. Kindles and iPads track what we read and when, record our bookmarks and annotations, remind us what we searched for last, and suggest other titles we may like. They collect our personal reading data in the name of improving, not our grade, but our digital reading experience, and along the way they may sell the metric of how and what and when we read and use it to improve the company’s bottom line as well.

It’s uncomfortable enough to sense a reader over your shoulder on your morning commute, but every time we fire up an iBook, Kindle, or Nook, there’s an e-reader over our shoulder as well. CCTV may monitor our comings and goings from the outside, but e-readers have spyware that actually looks inside our heads. And e-books provide the ultimate interactive experience: they read us while we are reading them.

Most people don’t seem to mind: they insist it’s no Faustian bargain to trade a little bit of personal data for the convenience of a digital download. Besides, ebooks cost less than printed ones, and didn’t Mark Zuckerberg say that privacy is dead?

And yet we still expect our reading to be private. Librarians will risk jail rather than tell government snoops what their patrons are reading, because the right to read unobserved is a fundamental component of the right to privacy. But when a vendor like Apple or Amazon tracks our reading matter, we don’t invoke Big Brother. Instead, we’re more complacent, accepting this intrusion on our literary solitude because that’s how capitalism is supposed to work.

Another thing that’s different about ebooks besides their lower price is that most of them, including electronic textbooks, are covered by a digital rights management agreement, or DRM. That means we’re actually renting ebooks, not buying them, and that has implications for our reading privacy as well. DRM gives the ebook’s real owners the right to manage their property and to check up on readers to make sure we’re not violating the terms of our lease.

Typically that means we can’t copy passages from an ebook, resell it, lend it to a friend, or give it away. Kindle’s DRM says it all: “You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense, or otherwise assign any rights to the Kindle Content or any portion of it to any third party.” And even though Amazon invites you to “buy” a Kindle ebook, it’s the language of the DRM, not the button that we click, that governs the transaction: “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.” [Kindle Content is what we used to call books, and content providers are what we used to call bookstores.]

Content providers are free to control their property even after we’ve downloaded it to our personal e-readers. That’s how Amazon justified secretly removing copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from readers’ Kindles when the company discovered it had been selling a bootleg edition of the work. When news of this peremptory take-back came out, though, there was a public outcry. Amazon apologized for not notifying customers in advance, but not for seizing the books — the DRM gives Amazon the right to reach into customers’ digital devices and remove company property. Moreover, in cases where it thinks that customers have violated the terms of service agreement, Amazon, like any responsible landlord, may lock them out of their account and delete the contents of their library. The DRM agreement may not say so explicitly, but it allows Amazon, Apple, or any other “content provider” to revoke your right to read.

And what about a student’s right to read? Or not to read? Enrolling in a class shouldn’t require students to surrender their privacy to the Thought Police any more than it requires them to surrender their freedom of speech at the schoolhouse gate. It’s not even clear that ebook spyware will improve student performance. It may tell instructors if their students are hitting the books, and how much time it takes them to plow through chapter seven. But that may not really correlate with success in a course. Many students insist they learn the course material not from the textbook, but from lectures and discussions, by working problem sets, or by reading SparkNotes.

Digital technology gives us access to information, to content, if you will, on a scale never before possible. But it works two ways, giving content, or content providers, access to us as well. Our keystrokes, our browsing history, our likes and dislikes, all of that becomes the property, not of the reader, but of the digital rights manager. As George Orwell put it so succinctly in 1984, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.”

Ebook analytics, or, the watcher watched: While you read 1984 on your digital device, 1984 reads you.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site, The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared. Until next time, keep up with Professor Baron on Twitter: @DrGrammar.

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This week (11-17 November) is University Press Week from the American Association of University Presses (AAUP), now celebrating their 75th anniversary. It salutes the extraordinary work of university presses and their many contributions to culture, the academy, and society. To mark University Press Week, we’re sharing commentary from around academic publishing.

By Fredric Nachbaur

As I was preparing to write my post for University Press Week post-Hurricane Sandy, I reflected on how university presses have bonded together in the past during times of tragedy to help us all understand what is happening at and in the moment and how we can try to move forward. The Association for American University Presses (AAUP) created “Books for Understanding” soon after 9/11 to bring the latest and most valuable scholarship to readers in an easy-to-find and easy-to-use place. The AAUP instantly became a resource for people who wanted to know more and to find it from reliable sources — university presses, the pillars of knowledge. The day after Hurricane Sandy hit, a reporter from the Huffington Post contacted me about a Fordham author who had written a history of the NYC subways; she wanted to interview him about the flooding of the tunnels and the mass transit shutdown. It is a prime example of how the media turns to university presses for expertise during times of crisis.

We emphasize scholarship by being witnesses to global events, detectives for finding the best authors, and sharers of critical information that has been researched and vetted. Combining efforts to make all of our books on a specific topic of current concern to citizens of the world is invaluable. There is already a list started for Hurricane Sandy. Thank you, AAUP!

I’d be remiss if I didn’t touch on digital books. While I see print books for the foreseeable future, I’m not in denial or oblivious to the fact that digital is a fast-growing segment of the book market in all areas from academic to trade and everything in between. Even art books can be seen on tablets. Fordham has established a tremendous number of initiatives these past few years. I don’t want to give a laundry list of partnerships but would like to touch upon University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO), which has helped us put our scholarly content in front of users hungry for digital versions.

We have learned that libraries want flexibility; they don’t want to be tied to a single platform. Libraries want full availability for all titles, access to all aggregators, fluid pricing models, minimal DRM, and simultaneous electronic and print editions.

Publishers should not choose just one platform on which to feature their books. They should have content on as many platforms as possible. Libraries will choose which source best suits their needs. They have been clear with their expectations. We as publishers need to figure out how best to meet their needs.

With a Fordham University Press-branded portal, Fordham Scholarship Online (FSO) has provided a wonderful opportunity for Fordham’s content to be made available in an XML environment that allows for profound discoverability and searchabilty. XML allows for more granular tagging and cross-referencing and is a more versatile format that is more “future proof” and far less cumbersome than PDF.

Fordham was able to reap the benefits of Oxford’s ten years of experience promoting its Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) product to libraries and research institutions, its dedicated marketing team marketing UPSO exclusively, and its market share. Sixty percent of research libraries in the world are currently OSO subscribers. FSO launched in March 2011 as UPSO’s pilot site and was part of UPSO’s big launch in October 2011. I am extremely excited to be part of this well-established, extremely searchable, cross-referenced program. It clearly meets the needs and anticipates future needs of libraries and patrons. How much does that decrease my anxiety? A lot!

So as the AAUP turns 75 and university presses celebrate for a week, we can take a moment to congratulate ourselves on adapting to the evolving landscape by embracing new technologies while also continuing to provide information in traditional format that help us understand the ever-changing world around us. Here’s to another 75 years!

Fredric Nachbaur is Director of Fordham University Press. Fordham University Press, a member of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) since 1938, was established in 1907 not only to represent and uphold the values and traditions of the University itself, but also to further those values and traditions through the dissemination of scholarly research and ideas. You can follow Fordham University Press on Twitter, like them on Facebook, watch their videos on YouTube, and read the “Fordham Impressions” blog.

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It has been more than 25 years since Gerald Ford narrowly lost the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter.

Ford’s presidency has become a dim memory. “The more I think about the Ford administration,” John Updike wrote in 1992, “the more it seems I remember nothing.” Taking office after Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974, Ford struggled to restore the public’s faith in the presidency, badly shaken by the numerous illegalities associated with the Nixon White House.

Ford also had to contend with another Nixon legacy: a new, unrelentingly critical journalistic style.

I have been working on a book about American political journalism since 1960, focusing on certain candidates and reporters. Political journalism has changed over the past fifty years, mainly for the better. It is more interpretive and searching. Yet not all changes, in my view, have been good.

One change involves journalists’ point of view toward politicians. Reporters always had their opinions. They were not stenographers, even if some of their coverage sometimes appeared stenographic. Yet the post World War II generation of journalists tended as a group to believe they should keep their private judgments to themselves. Even more, they strove to give political leaders the benefit of the doubt.

President Gerald Ford tosses a watermelon in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Sep. 1976. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko. Source: Library of Congress.

Some journalists began to question this aspired neutrality in the 1970s. America’s intervention in Vietnam and, even more, the revelations involving the Nixon presidency, encouraged a far more skeptical, even dismissive approach to reporting. Richard Nixon, in that regard, did not only destroy his own reputation, but hugely damaged the prestige of the presidency itself.

To be clear, these more critical journalists were in the minority. Yet they had prominent platforms. Covering the 1972 race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hunter Thompson of Rolling Stone made no effort to cloak his contempt for such prominent contenders as Senators Edmund Muskie and Hubert H. Humphrey.

I wanted to explore the growing divide between this new journalistic point of view and the more conventional approach. Ford’s first year in office offered a clear contrast. Writing for the 25 November 1974 New York magazine, Richard Reeves painted a scathing portrait of the new president. Reeves questioned the president’s intelligence. He found him a sometimes incoherent public speaker. At a Colorado rally, “President Ford had nothing to say and said it badly.” In the end, Reeves’s Jerry Ford was a “comfortable mediocrity,” symbolic of a political class that appeared to be taking on the attributes of the fast food industry and network television. Redeeming features were all but impossible to find in Reeves’s account, which he later expanded into a book, A Ford, Not a Lincoln. To take one seasonal example, Reeves mocked Ford’s college football career. Michigan, he noted, had a 1-7 record when Ford was the starting center. Reeves didn’t report that two NFL teams, including my wife’s beloved Green Bay Packers, offered Ford contracts, which he turned down to attend Yale Law School.

A second Jerry Ford appeared in the 20 April 1975 New York Times Magazine. John Hersey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and writer, wrote a long article, based on spending a week with the president. It was a classic “fly on the wall” reporting that Hersey had helped to perfect writing for The New Yorker in the late 1940s. (For The New Yorker, he had written a similar profile of President Harry S. Truman in 1950.)

President Gerald Ford reading the newspaper in the living quarters of the White House, Washington, D.C. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko. 6 Feb 1975. Source: Library of Congress.

Hersey is determined to give readers a sense of what Ford is like as a person and leader. “I want to know what I suppose every citizen wants to know,” he wrote. “What is the quality of the person murmuring to his aide?” The author witnessed, with one exception, all of Ford’s meetings, whether with the Secretary of Defense or the Maid of Cotton for 1975. Hersey describes a competent and confident leader, calm. While aides decry Senate Democrats’ efforts to involve themselves in a diplomatic matter, the president remains calm. “Gerald Ford sounds, as always, totally serene.”

Yet Hersey’s profile is hardly fawning. He all but echoes Reeves in concluding that Ford is a poor public speaker. Nor can Hersey, a longtime liberal Democrat, reconcile Ford’s compassionate personality with his conservative fiscal policies. “The man who has been so considerate, so open and so kind to me as an individual,” Hersey wrote, possessed “what seems a deep, hard, rigid side.”

Nevertheless, Hersey crafted a mainly positive profile. And for an American political junkie reading his article, together with Reeves’s reportage, there were two Gerald Fords.

Reeves, for his part, came to regret his treatment of Ford. The growing toxicity of America’s political culture made him realize that he may well have contributed to what was becoming an unhealthy contempt for the political class. In a 1996 American Heritage article, Reeves admitted that his Ford profile was at times “cruel, unnecessarily so.” Politicians and journalists “continue to poison the wells of democratic faith and our political dialogue. I wish I had not been part of the problem.”

James L. Baughman is the Fetzer-Bascom Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of “There Were Two Gerald Fords: John Hersey and Richard Reeves Profile a President” in the latest issue of American Literary History, which is available to read for free for a limited time. He is also the author of four books, including Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America since 1941.

Recent Americanist scholarship has generated some of the most forceful responses to questions about literary history and theory. Yet too many of the most provocative essays have been scattered among a wide variety of narrowly focused publications. Covering the study of US literature from its origins through the present, American Literary History provides a much-needed forum for the various, often competing voices of contemporary literary inquiry.

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We’re at the Tacoma Theatre in Washington, DC, packed house, predominantly Black crowd. Chris Rock struts across the stage: “You know how I could tell he can’t be President? Whenever he on the news, White people always give him the same compliments, always the same compliments. ‘He speaks so well.’ … Like that’s a compliment… What the fuck did you expect him to sound like?!”

Rock was not talking about Barack Obama, but Colin Powell, and his routine was first performed in 1996. But the insidious racism that Rock identified when Powell’s name was being floated as a presidential candidate has persisted, indeed been amplified, by Obama’s presidency, and there are already hints that Romney supporters intend to exploit it again this campaign cycle, as one website describes Obama as “exceptionally intelligent, articulate.”

Why the obsession with Obama’s speech? There has been a particular bipartisan fascination with President Obama’s ability to string together sentences. The same sentiment that Rock joked about was expressed by even Joe Biden, who, in early 2007, as a Democratic presidential hopeful, described his future boss as the “first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” That same week former president George W. Bush told a reporter, “He’s an attractive guy. He’s articulate.” As Lynette Clemetson wrote at the time, “When whites use the word [articulate] in reference to blacks, it often carries a subtext of amazement, even bewilderment. . . . [which] is inherently offensive because it suggests that the recipient of the ‘compliment’ is notably different from other black people.”

As the campaign heated up, it only got worse. In Game Change, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s account of the 2008 election, they reported that Senator Harry Reid thought that Americans might finally be ready to elect a Black president, commenting privately that this was especially true because Obama was, relative to such other Black candidates as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, “light-skinned” and spoke “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

Reid later apologized for his comments, but not before he found an unusual ally in Rush Limbaugh who repeatedly played a snippet of an Obama speech on education and Title I. Limbaugh urged his audience to listen closely. Obama said: “As a condition of receiving access to Title I funds, we will ask all states to put in place a plan…” Limbaugh stops the tape and asks, “D-ahhhh… Did you catch that? No? You missed it… See, you’re listening to the substance here. You missed this.” After replaying it, Limbaugh said: “This is what Harry Reid was talking about. Obama can turn on that black dialect when he wants to and turn it off. The President of the United States just said here, ‘As a condition of receiving access to Title I funds we will aks [pause] all states.’ … Now, if I use the word aks for the rest of the day, am I gonna get beat up and creamed for making fun of this clean, crisp, calm, cool, new, articulate [pause] President? … I’ll aks my advisors.” [Note to Limbaugh: you could also ask Chaucer and other classic writers who used “axe,” the literary form of the day.]

When Black people are “complimented” for being “articulate,” it often comes along with other adjectives like “good,” “clean,” “bright,” “nice-looking,” “handsome,” “calm,” and “crisp.” This is precisely what makes the articulate compliment feel backhanded. It’s not merely the use of articulate that’s problematic, nor the expression of surprise or bewilderment that makes it suspect, it is also the fact that its adjectival neighbors describe qualities that help create talk about “exceptional Negroes.” These common linguistic patterns open articulate up to charges of racism, which folks may not even realize they’re perpetuating.

Rather than referring to successful African Americans as “intelligent” and “articulate”—like Chris Rock said, “What the fuck did you expect?” — a “post-racial” society would assume that its successful citizens possessed these qualities. And a “post-racist” society would learn to read this “exceptionalizing” talk as language patterns that reinforce racist stereotypes. Such commentary invariably demands that all “Other” Americans gain access to “the Promised Land” based on how “closely [our] speech patterns, dress, or demeanor conform to the dominant white culture,” as Barack Obama put it in The Audacity of Hope. We must continue to challenge ourselves to do better in forming a just, democratic society.

H. Samy Alim directs the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL) at Stanford University. Geneva Smitherman is University Distinguished Professor Emerita of English and Co-Founder of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Their book, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S., examines the racial politics of the Obama presidency through the lens of language.

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Image credit: President Barack Obama, right, announces that he will send U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, left, to Burma, during the ASEAN Summit in Bali, Indonesia, on November 18, 2011. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]

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By Patricia Aufderheide

Documentary film both creates and depends on memory, and our memories are often composed of other people’s. How do we remember public events? How do you remember 9/11?

On this anniversary of 9/11, along with your own memories, you can delve into a treasure trove of international television covering the event. The Internet Archive’s “Understanding 9/11” video archive provides a record of international television news in the first week after the event, between 11-17 September 2001. (It starts about an hour before the event.) Eight international channels and 11 US channels (local and national, broadcast and cable) are available for searching, viewing and link-sharing in 30 second clips. Internet Archive made the archival material available soon after the event, and encouraged researchers to use it.

Having been out of the country (trapped for days in Canada, where a substantial portion of lower Manhattan’s population and I were grouped for the Toronto International Film Festival) for the event itself, I had missed a lot of coverage. I seized on the archive to see how my own nation’s television had covered the event while I was watching images of planes grounded on Canadian tarmac.

The theme I picked up, powerfully from Days 3-7, I called “therapeutic patriotism” in “Therapeutic Patriotism and Beyond.” I argued that TV news “assumed a public role of funeral director and mourning counselor for a nation that had, once again, had its innocence shattered.” That innocence was apparently grounded in ignorance: “A whole raft of dark new issues — Islamic fundamentalism, terrorist networks, biological warfare, diversified nuclear weaponry — suddenly seemed to fly into our range of vision just like the second airplane had on our TV sets.”

Television as therapy, I argued, was potentially expensive, because it can excuse forgetting in the name of healing:

Americans have their innocence shattered with astonishing frequency, and reconstruct it with remarkable swiftness. American innocence has been shattered, for instance, with the quiz show scandals, with the assassinations of public leaders, the Vietnam War, Iranian hostages, the Gulf War, the Oklahoma City bombing, with terrorism, computer hacking, and Y2K. And somehow it has been there to shatter again later.

This investment in our own innocence is a feature of deeply-held, widely shared, enduring values of American culture. Cultural historians and literary figures have noted among the myths of American culture the intertwined notions of American exceptionalism, a removal from the ordinary process of history, the ability to have a fresh start that wipes away the past, and anti-intellectualism that is paired with confidence in the practical and empirical. The assumption of American exceptionalism among other things exempts American citizens from perceiving the U.S. as a nation among nations, with a history of geopolitical relationships that are remembered elsewhere, and with ongoing diplomatic entanglements that preclude wiping the past away and having a fresh start. The reverence for the plain-spokenly empirical makes it easy to discount the role of ideology in shaping anyone’s worldview, especially our own.

What’s creepy, reading that at the distance of 11 years, is that television is still the nation’s amnesiac therapist. When the Aurora shooting happen, The Onion published a savage preview of the coverage to come, predicting the sentimental mourning, the calls to resist “politicization” (including discussion of gun laws), and in the words of a (fictional) interviewee, “In exactly two weeks this will all be over and it will be like it never happened.”

Since the first batch of scholarship and journalism making use of the 9/11 video archive, the archive has grown and now includes community and hyper-local video work on 9/11 as well. It’s also been enriched by conference papers and podcasts, related books, and archived websites. Tell your editor. Tell your students. Plunge in. Contribute. This resource is still a rich repository for new documentary work, of all kinds.

Patricia Aufderheide is a professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C., and founder-director of its Center for Social Media. She received the career achievement award for scholarship from the International Documentary Association in 2006 and has served as a Sundance Film Festival juror and as a board member of the Independent Television Service. She is the author of Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction and The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat, among others.

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Clint Eastwood took the stage at the Republican convention last week and gave a… well, let’s call it a memorable performance. I’m not sure if there’s ever been such a bizarre prime time address given at a national convention. The celebrated actor/director spent eleven minutes in a mumbling debate with an empty chair representing President Obama. Political conventions are highly-scripted events. Eastwood’s extended, failed ad lib was anything but scripted.

In years past, such a performance would have provided fodder for late-night comedians, but little more. Saturday Night Live and Letterman could weigh in, while you and I were left to passively chuckle. Living in the age of social media, events unfolded at a different pace and among different participants.

Within minutes, an anonymous Twitter user registered the name @InvisibleObama. Conjuring shades of @MayorEmanuel, the participatory features of the hybrid news environment allowed formerly-passive members of the audience to swap jokes. That evening, Twitter users launched a new hashtag, “#eastwooding,” wherein individuals post pictures of themselves pointing at empty chairs. Thusly a new “meme” was born.

Within less than a day, @InvisibleObama has attracted over 55,000 Twitter followers. Newsweek/DailyBeast has posted an #Eastwooding “best of” list. CNN covered it as well. Participatory engagement with Eastwood’s odd performance made itself became the subject of news.

The President himself even weighed in, tweeting “This Seat’s Taken.”

This is all in good fun, of course. Twitter during national events adopts the texture of a giant Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. But in the course of this distraction, one might wonder, does it actually make any difference?

I would argue that political memes and twitter games like #eastwooding have a very specific, but very limited, effect.

Let’s start with the obvious limitations: @InvisibleObama and #Eastwooding will have no direct impact on the outcome of the 2012 election. These are games played by the already-politically-engaged. 55,000 Twitter followers is a drop the ocean compared to the ~38 million total viewers of the Republican National Convention, or the 100 million+ citizens who will cast a vote in the November election. Individuals who #Eastwood are among the most attentive segments of the populace. They’re also more likely to be liberal. Conservatives have taken to defending Eastwood’s display as counter-intuitively good for Romney. #Eastwood’ers have already made up their minds, and they each only have one vote.

Secondary effects are also pretty limited. Politically-aware Twitter users tend to be connected to one another (social network theorists call this phenomenon “homophily”). We should not expect individuals who chose to ignore the RNC convention to pick up on it after-the-fact due to social media chatter.

Furthermore, memes of this sort have a pretty brief half-life. With the Democratic National Convention scheduled for this week, the hybrid media system will quickly turn its attention to a new set of images and statements. One impact of new media on political news is that the “churn” of the news cycle has sped up. Congressman Todd Akin’s outlandish claims about female biology already seem part of the distant past. By the time of the October Presidential debates, #Eastwooding will have been replaced a half-dozen times. We shouldn’t expect it to be on anyone’s mind when they enter the voting booth.

That said, the limited size and duration of these Twitter memes doesn’t render them useless. In very particular ways, this participatory nature of the new media system has an important effect on media and politics today.

Consider this post as an example:

BuzzFeedBen is Ben Smith, formerly of Politico.com, current editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed.com. Ryan Lizza is an accomplished political journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Vanity Fair. Other journalists, such as Slate’s Dave Weigel, also joined in the fun.

These journalists aren’t revealing some hidden liberal bias through their actions; they are revealing a participatory bias. A small segment of the US population pays a lot of attention to politics. The hybrid media environment allows journalists to engage with these attentive citizens. The interactions can help shape news coverage, or (in cases where the media runs stories on #Eastwooding) become the subject of news coverage. Rather than writing about the policy details (or lack thereof) in Romney’s acceptance speech, many news outlets turned instead to Eastwood’s odd performance, and the global audience’s playful reaction. This changes the texture and content of media coverage.

The Internet didn’t cause this merger of news and entertainment. It began in the 1980s, as newsrooms sought higher ratings and larger profits. Political communication scholars raised concerns about “infotainment” before the average citizen owned a modem. Twitter isn’t the cause of this merger; it is merely the latest iteration.

The limitations of these incidents are likewise nothing new. Everyday political gaffes don’t determine the outcome of a national election. Today’s media environment churns faster, so we see more of the gaffes. It is also more segmented, so those of us who aren’t interested in seeing them can tune out more easily.

Cases like #Eastwooding provide a variation on these longstanding trends. American politics has accepted the blurring of political news and political entertainment. Social media provides a participatory element, making the entertainment aspects much more entertaining.

David Karpf is an Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. He is the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy. His research focuses on the Internet’s disruptive effect on organized political advocacy. He blogs at shoutingloudly.com and tweets at @davekarpf.

Oxford University Press USA is putting together a series of articles on a political topic each week for four weeks as the United States discusses the upcoming American presidential election, and Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Our scholars previously tackled the issues of money and politics, and the role of political conventions. This week we turn to the role of media in politics. Read the previous article in this series: “Networked politics in 2008 and 2012.” And you can see OUP’s contribution to #Eastwooding on Google Plus.

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Image credits: Both screencaps were taken on 4 September 2012 at 11:11 am ET.

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Over the past two years there has been much furore over journalists accessing the voicemail of celebrities and other newsworthy people, particularly the scandal involving Milly Dowler. As a result of the subsequent police investigation, ‘Operation Weeting’, some 24 people have since been arrested and the first charges were brought by the Crown Prosecution Service in July 2012 against eight people, including Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. The leading charge was one of conspiracy “to intercept communications in the course of their transmission, without lawful authority.” But what does ‘phone hacking’ mean and has the CPS got it right?

The charge, under section 1 of the Criminal Law Act 1977, relates to an offence under the ominously worded Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (‘RIPA’), section 1(1). The RIPA is primarily concerned with the powers of law enforcement agencies to investigate criminality by listening into phone calls and other types of covert surveillance. The Act also criminalises the interception of communication by others, including journalists.

When drafting the 2000 Act, one of the objectives was to update the law of interception to reflect developments in modern telecommunication systems and services, especially email. One element of that reform was to recognise that telecommunication systems sometimes store messages on behalf of the intended recipient, to enable them to collect the message at their convenience. In such circumstances, according to section 2(7) of the RIPA, the communications shall be considered still ‘in the course of transmission’. One key issue to be decided in the forthcoming ‘phone hacking’ cases is therefore whether listening to somebody’s voicemail message falls within this exception.

So why does uncertainty arise? The issue for the court to decide is whether a distinction should be made between accessing voicemail messages that have been listened to by the intended recipient and those that have yet to be heard. In the former case, it can be argued, the communication is at an end and the voicemail service is simply being used as a storage medium. As such, no act of ‘interception’ has taken place.

Answering this seemingly simple question of interpretation is made more complex as a result of an apparent change of position on the part of the CPS. In November 2009, Keir Starmer QC, Director of Public Prosecutions, gave evidence before the Culture, Media and Sports Committee about the meaning of section 2(7). He argued, on the basis of the observations of Lord Woolf CJ in R (on the application of NTL) v Ipswich Crown Court [2002], that the provision should be interpreted narrowly, such that a message was only ‘in the course of transmission’ until it had been collected by the intended recipient. This statement led to a very public disagreement between Keir Starmer and John Yates, the then Acting Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan police, who argued for a wide interpretation of section 2(7). By July 2011, however, the CPS had committed a volte-face and decided to “proceed on the assumption that a court might adopt a wide interpretation.”

As a consequence of this legal uncertainty, there would appear to be a very real chance that the coming prosecutions may fail. As well as the considerable waste of police resource that would result, and the adverse impact on public confidence, this reliance on the crime of ‘interception’ seems unnecessary, as suggested by the moniker ‘phone hacking’. An alternative charge would seem to be available under section 1 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, for ‘unauthorised access to computer material’. This was the original ‘hacking’ statute, and the offence carries the same maximum tariff as that for unlawful interception, i.e. two years imprisonment. There can be no question that a voicemail service is held on a ‘computer’, while it would seem relatively easy to show that the perpetrator, which can include both the private investigator and the requesting journalist, knew that such access was unauthorised.

The rationale for pursuing journalists for ‘intercepting’ rather than ‘hacking’ phones is not immediately clear, but the outcome of the forthcoming cases may simply represent another sorry stage in the long running saga of newspaper phone hacking.

Ian Walden is Professor of Information and Communications Law at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary, University of London. His publications include Computer Crimes and Digital Investigations (2007), Media Law and Practice (2009) and Telecommunications Law and Regulation (4^th ed., 2012). Ian is a solicitor and Of Counsel to Baker & McKenzie.

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Privacy: A Very Short Introduction

By Raymond Wacks

Are celebrities entitled to privacy? Or do they forfeit their right? Is privacy possible online? Does the law adequately protect private lives? Should the media be more strictly controlled? What of your sensitive medical or financial data? Are they safe and secure? Has the Internet changed everything?

Newspapers are no longer the principal purveyors of news and information, and hence the publication of private facts has expanded exponentially. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and a myriad other outlets are available to all.

The pervasive mobile telephone fuels new privacy concerns: witness the current British hacking hullabaloo. The weapon is new, but the injury is the same. It is not, of course, technology itself that is the villain, but the mischief to which it is put. Nor has our appetite for gossip diminished. A sensationalist media continues to degrade the notion of a private domain to which individuals legitimately lay claim. Celebrity is frequently regarded as a licence to intrude.

Hardly a day passes without reports of yet another onslaught on our privacy. Most conspicuously, of course, is the fragility of personal information online. But other threats generated by the digital world abound: innovations in biometrics, CCTV surveillance, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems, smart identity cards, and the manifold anti-terrorist measures all pose threats to this fundamental value – even in democratic societies.

At the same time, however, the disturbing explosion of private data through the escalation of the numerous online contrivances of our Information Age renders simple generalities about the significance of privacy problematic. Is privacy dead?

The manner in which information is collected, stored, exchanged, and used has changed forever – and with it, the character of the threats to individual privacy. The electronic revolution touches almost every part of our lives. But is the price of the advances in technology too high? Do we remain a free society when we surrender our right to be unobserved  - even when the ends are beneficial?

Although the law is a crucial instrument in the protection of privacy (and it is locked in a struggle to keep apace with the relentless advances in technology), the subject has many other dimensions: social, cultural, political, psychological, and philosophical. The concept of privacy is not easy to nail down, despite the attempts of many scholars and judges.

The courts have boldly sought to offer refuge from an increasingly intrusive media. Recent years have witnessed a deluge of civil suits by celebrities seeking to salvage what remains of their privacy. An extensive body of case law has appeared in many common law jurisdictions over the last decade. And it shows no sign of abating. For example the supermodel Naomi Campbell succeeded in the House of Lords in her claim against the Daily Mirror that published an article revealing her drug addiction, details of her treatment, and photographs of her outside a meeting of Narcotics Anonymous.

In Britain, the current Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practice, and ethics of the press, sparked by the alleged hacking of telephones by the News of the World, is likely to reveal a significantly greater degree of media intrusion than is now evident. It may well propose legislative protection to buttress – or even replace – those judicial remedies fashioned by the courts.

A comprehensive privacy statute may well be the most effective solution. Carefully drafted legislation, such as exists in four Canadian provinces, would provide a remedy for intrusion and gratuitous publicity. Key elements of any such legislation should include an objective standard of liability, as well as several defences (including consent, public interest, and privilege).

Freedom of speech is, of course, no less important, and any statute will inevitably ensure that it receives explicit recognition. The two rights are often thought to be in conflict, but they are frequently complementary. How, for example, can you exercise your right to free speech when your telephone is hacked or your email messages intercepted?

Privacy is accorded superior safeguards in Europe than in the United States which has still to acknowledge the inadequacy of its reliance on the Supreme Court to protect privacy against an escalating digital onslaught. Much of its common law privacy protection is based on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution which protects the right of the people “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” It would be more effective if the government were to ratify the Council of Europe Privacy Convention. This would mark a significant step towards safeguarding this rapidly eroding right. The United States lags far behind the more than fifty countries with comprehensive data protection legislation. It surely cannot continue to seek eighteenth century remedies to twenty-first century challenges.

In the case of film stars, models, pop stars, and other public figures, it seems that our – frequently lurid – interest in their private lives spawns a thirst for intimate facts which many tabloids are more than willing to satisfy.

Raymond Wacks is Emeritus Professor of Law and Legal Theory. He has published widely on the subject of privacy for almost four decades, most recently Privacy: A Very Short Introduction. In 2013, Oxford University Press will publish his Privacy and Media Freedom.

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We’ve seen Earth Day pictures of our planet that highlight its symmetry, its chaos, and its beauty. We’ve learnt about the pollution and environmental decay that threaten us all.

Image created by Reto Stockli with the help of Alan Nelson, under the leadership of Fritz Hasler. Source: NASA.

Media coverage of the environment over the last five decades has shown how natural beauty and human and animal health have been affected by mining and manufacturing, and the increasing danger of climate change. In this context, the media have generally been regarded as sources of information. Their role has been to examine and explain scientific issues, political-economic struggles, policy options, and interest-group activities.

But in 2008, the proportion of the world’s metals going into media technologies, from televisions to telephones, was 36% of tin, 25% of cobalt, 15% of palladium, 15% of silver, 9% of gold, 2% of copper, and 1% of aluminum. The best estimates suggest that media technologies and production accounted for 3% of greenhouse gases emitted around the world in 2007. Those numbers propel us to think about the media and the environment in a different way. The media aren’t just sources of information about the environment. They participate in it.

So rather than focusing on how well the media explain the environment, we need to ask what they do to it. The answer is that they pollute, endanger occupational health and safety, and produce electronic or e-waste.

Ever since the development of print, the media have drawn upon, created, and emitted dangerous substances, producing multi-generational risks for ecosystems and workers. For example, poisonous solvents, inks, fumes, dust, and wastewater have been byproducts of printing newspapers for two centuries. Similar conditions have affected workers in film-stock manufacture, where cotton dust adds the additional risk of contracting brown lung.

Manufacturing and installing batteries exposes employees to lead and other pathogens, fatally damaging the skin, lungs, and nervous system. Such illnesses have made battery workers the group most at risk of lead poisoning in the United States. The use of plastics to create media and communication technologies can cause brain, liver, kidney, and stomach cancer, while disposing of them releases carcinogenic dioxin and hydrochloric acid into the environment. And the habitats, flight paths, and lives of the world’s original and most able globalizers — birds — are endangered by telecommunications towers.

We love watching TV on our Apple tablets and phones. But as everyone now knows, Apple’s subcontractor Foxconn uses military-style discipline on the factory floor. Worker suicides have produced sustained critiques and investigations of both companies.

What happens to the iPads and iPhones those workers make after they have been used by consumers? Wealthy people regularly throw these gadgets out in favor of replacements as they chase the dream of the next, tantalizing upgrade. Consider that great shift from fat-screen analogic TV sets to sleek flat-screen digital ones. Cool stuff indeed. But the e-waste from yesterday’s not-so-cool stuff is between twenty and fifty million tons annually. And a thousand different, often deadly, materials are in each computer.

In the past, such e-waste mostly emanated from Australasia, Western Europe, Japan, and the US. Disposal through landfills in these nations is generally illegal because of the risks to soil, water, residents, and workers posed by the dozens of poisonous chemicals and gases in these machines. So vast amounts of e-waste was dumped in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. Today, many of those economies are booming, so these regions are generating immense levels of their own e-waste. This media plenitude is creating a crisis of global dimensions.

It goes without saying that the role of the media in shedding light on our environment is important. But the media are not green; far from it. We must weigh the cost of their environmental impact alongside their contribution to our culture and democracy.

Richard Maxwell is Professor and Chair of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. Toby Miller is Distinguished Professor of Media & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Together, they are the authors of Greening the Media. Join them on Facebook and listen to their podcast for more information on the media and the environment.

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The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. In this week’s VSI column, we give you Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series!

Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction

By Patricia Aufderheide

What happens to documentary when media goes interactive? It’s not always a welcome question. Documentarians aren’t necessarily thrilled at the idea of someone poking at their precious work on a smartphone, rather than settling into a seat at a theater or on a couch.

But they’re going to have to get used to it. Media users want to do more than just watch these days. Unless it’s in 3-D or otherwise dazzling, we increasingly think we want to play with our media. Go ahead, revisit your childhood haunts at The Wilderness Downtown.

As discussions at the leading industry conference South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX showed this March, early documentary adopters are leaping to the challenge. With HTML5 and other tools coming to make video more seamless on the web, interactive documentary is almost here.

Here are some of the lessons those early adopters learned while hanging out on the bleeding edge of change:

1)      Story is key.

Documentary is about its characters undergoing a transformation of some kind. Documentary takes users on an emotional journey. If you lose the story, you lose the user. So don’t let the bells, whistles, coding challenges, and new apps lead you away from the core obligation to tell a story. Here’s Mozilla’s Ben Moskowitz on Tribeca’s blog: “The Pixar artists on Up were inspired by the challenges of rendering thousands of balloons with rainbows and refraction techniques using computer graphics. But the movie succeeded because those technologies helped captivate viewer imaginations and better tell the story. And, frankly, all the beautiful rainbows in the world won’t make up for the lack of a strong story.”

What’s the best storytelling platform of all time? As Lance Weiler, a pioneer in interactive work and creator of Pandemic 1.0 (which debuted at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival), put it in a word, “Christmas.” It’s got a built in narrative, and people endlessly rework that narrative and interact with it to tell their own stories with it.

2)      Don’t think technology, think experience.

James Burns of Zeega doesn’t want the documentarian to get bogged down in coding challenges. There are people for that, and Zeega’s among the tools (Popcorn is another) they can use. Where do you want people to go, and what would you like them to do? That’s the biggest challenge, to him.

It’s not so easy to think of what kind of experience you’d like people to have. Documentarians are used to making longform stories in an inert format; gamers are used to building systems. The overlapping edges of that Venn diagram are still in the first stages of exploration. One cool example: The National Film Board of Canada’s Interactive division nurtured into existence Bear 71, which lets users experience an ever-more-constrained-and-surveilled environment from animals’ perspective.

3)      Expect to pioneer.

The new opportunities to engage viewers and tell stories with new possibilities and resources also mean solving problems people didn’t use to have. Take the challenges facing the makers of 18 Days in Egypt.  Jigar Mehta and Yasmine Elayat are developing a crowd-sourced documentary that retells, using smartphone video and photos, Twitter, and other media taken at the moment by participants, the story of the Egyptian Spring. Mehta faced the problem of combining five minutes of personal testimony about a moment in the Egyptian Spring with 15 seconds of video from that very moment. How to use both in the same scene? They foregrounded the testimony and used a looped version of the video as background. Developer Brian Chirls, who worked with them, said that open video today is in a similar position to film before D.W. Griffith worked out the basics of narrative editing; creators are still working out the basic formal strategies that soon will be completely obvious.

Pioneering can be painful, too, as Luisa Dantas noted. Her film Land of Opportunity, about rebuilding New Orleans post-Katrina, was completed before she began work on an open video platform that allows educators, organizers and urban development experts recombine the narratives for their own purposes. As her demo shows, there’s plenty of promise when you have a rich database and lots of potential users, but she struggles with the problems of working with home-made technology that is still being iterated. “Some of this is still a dark art,” she said.

The hardest part for her, as for many documentarians, is realizing that in the interactive world, iteration is key. You need to learn from feedback what users want, and how they want to get it. The software designers’ cliché, “Always be shippin’” (keep putting product out), violates what every documentarian knows: Keep your work under wraps until you’re ready for release. Of course, both rules are appropriate for their environments.

How to negotiate the new world? One way is to simultaneously develop several platforms. That’s what Six to Start, the makers of the BBC documentary series The Code, about mathematics, did. They developed a series of three traditional documentaries with a classic narrator (Marcus du Sautoy), four Flash games, and a real-life treasure hunt. User engagement generated thousands of photos, videos and even 3-D sculptures made by users, as well as a Wiki page with more than a hundred thousand viewers. The different parts of the project appear to have fed interest in the others.

Interactive documentary is still on the bleeding edge of change, and the longform, passive viewing experience isn’t going away either. But for documentarians who want their work to touch and change the people they reach, interactivity is moving close to being an off-the-shelf option.

Patricia Aufderheide is University Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. and director of the Center for Social Media there. She is the author of, among others, Documentary: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007)She has received numerous journalism and scholarly awards, including the Preservation and Scholarship award in 2006 from the International Documentary Association, a career achievement award in 2008 from the International Digital Media and Arts Association, and the Woman of Vision Award from Women in Film and Video (DC) in 2010. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota.

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