Mapping Digital Media: Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Mapping Digital Media project examines the global opportunities and risks created by the transition from traditional to digital media. Covering 60 countries, the project examines how these changes affect the core democratic service that any media system should provide: news about political, economic, and social affairs.Both media organizations and the organization of media in Bosnia and Herzegovina have been profoundly affected by ethnocentrism, political clientelism, the withdrawal of international donors, and the financial crisis. As a result, the country's march towards digitization has been protracted and uneven.Nevertheless, there have been recent signs of progress, with the installation of digital transmitters developing apace in 2012. Advances in the rest of Europe have put pressure on authorities to get their act together and the new deadline of 2014 for analog television switch-off may yet be achievable.This report proposes a series of compelling policy recommendations aimed at catalyzing the digitization process, improving the function of public service broadcasting, and enhancing the stability and independence of both media markets and the regulatory institutions that oversee them. These include a call for new legislation on media ownership; ensuring efficient work of the Digital Terrestrial Television Forum with a view to expediting switch-over; a new system of funding for the Press Council; a range of measures to protect the autonomy of the Communications Regulatory Agency; and greater coordination between public broadcasters and adherence to their mandates

Will the Internet set us free: New media and old politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina

The Internet has become a significant tool and very important channel of political communication in contemporary world. The first advocates of on-line political communication promoted the idea that the Internet is removing barriers to free information flow between political decision-makers and those in whose favor these decisions are made (public) and that incorporation of the Internet in political communication sphere causes changes of former dominant models of political communication, based on secrecy and non-transparency. Thus, the Internet “could set us free”, and open new ways of citizens’ participation in political communication. This paper tries to find an answer to a question: has that happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina? Has the Internet started to “set us free”? It analyzes the usage of the Internet in political communication in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the pre-election time. The hypothesis from which we start in this paper says that the Internet is not fully incorporated in political communication in Bosnia-Herzegovina (or, to be precise, is not incorporated in the proper manner), so the accurate term to describe situation in B&H politics when it comes to new media usage is “political communication using the Internet” rather than “on-line political communication”

Information operations as a means of cognitive superiority - theory and term research in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The goal of today\u27s information operations is to over-throw reality, i.e. to establish an imposed perception and understanding that lead to the same thinking, which will ultimately cause the desired action. Therefore, the mass media no longer transmit only interpretations of past events or model a narrative, but also teach the target audience how to think correctly, thus producing a behavioral outcome of a political and social character. Consequently with the political-security evolution, communication has become a means of a new hybrid war where the goal is cognitive superiority as the ultimate tool of subjugation and rule. This paper deals with the theory and research of the term information operations and cognitive superiority in Bosnia and Herzegovina through a sociological field survey of residents with the aim of inductively determining the level of knowledge and awareness of the public about them

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Shortly after Bosnia and Herzegovina’s declaration of independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in March 1992, the country broke into conflict that lasted three years. A peace agreement ended the conflict in 1995, but the country had already become littered with landmines and unexploded ordnance. Today BiH is the most mine-affected country in Europe, with an estimated 1.3 million people, roughly one third of the population, living in 1,366 mine-impacted communities. The latest government statistics disclose that there are more than 12,000 locations requiring clearance. The country’s goal of being mine-free by 2009 set by the National Mine Action Strategy will require a great deal of time and cooperation, but steps are being taken to give the citizens of BiH a safe place to live