Letter from the Editor

The Motley has arrived! Let us welcome it as a peer, a friend, a colleague and a liberator! Why liberator? Because it comes to liberate the best academic work that our undergraduate students do from the obscurity of professors’ drawers and hard drives, from the secretive passwords of university servers. It comes to bring that work out into the light of day. Yes, there are personal blogs and social media platforms where students could have published their papers before, but the Motley is different. Papers appearing in it have passed muster, and a tough one for that matter. It is not the “likes” of like-minded friends that raise these papers to the top of visibility. It is the vetting performed by people who may agree or disagree with each other, peers and professors alike, and where knowledge, talent and good argument win the day. That is why the Motley is the opposite of an echo chamber. It is after all a motley of topics, views and forms of expression, all of which have only one thing in common – the high standards of quality that they have met. In our present day of fake news, false theorizing, and vacuous influencing, we have learned how important it is to have a steady intellectual anchor like that.   The liberatory mission of the Motley includes taking down the walls that conceal from the eyes of the community what we learn, create and discuss in our classrooms. It will showcase the gems of original analysis and creativity that our undergrads produce. Where else will your grandma get the chance to revel in your brilliant argument illuminating the major communication and cultural issues of society? How else will your future boss learn about your superior powers as analyst, artist and wordsmith? And maybe, just maybe, your opinionated neighbour or your younger cousin will come to understand some of those complex issues in a new way.   While opening our academic spaces to the outside world, the Motley will also work to bring us, their inhabitants, closer to each other. It will reveal what we collectively value, what we find important and for which we strive. It will compel us to work together – as it already has – by creatively combining the efforts of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, club leaders, librarians, administrators… It will be our collaborative effort, our joint achievement, and our shared pride and joy. We are in it together and we all have a stake to keep it bright, honest, fair and vibrant.  The Motley is marching into the limelight today in shining colour thanks to the tireless work that numerous champions and supporters performed on the backstage for months. Starting a project like this from scratch takes faith, dedication and perseverance. The authors, reviewers and editors of this first issue did not have an established publication outlet to hang their labour and hopes on. They had to take a bold step over the gorge that separates an idea from its realization. And they did a gorgeous job at that! The Motley knows it was all these contributors who breathed life into it, and it is their example that will inspire and instruct others down the road.   Of all those to whom the Motley will remain forever grateful, one name should be flashed across its first page – Melissa Morris. As its first managing editor, Melissa managed the Motley Undergraduate Journal into existence. She brought together people and computer systems, navigated publication formats and citation styles, wooed, nudged and nagged. She convinced all of us that the Motley was possible, and sure enough, it is here – to stay.   Now, it is your turn, the Motley’s first readers. The Motley team expects you to do your job diligently and devotedly. Read, view, discuss, criticize! Then come and join us as authors, reviewers and editors - a motley of powers, all in your hands! &nbsp

The personalization of engagement: the symbolic construction of social media and grassroots mobilization in Canadian newspapers

This article explores the symbolic construction of civic engagement mediated by social media in Canadian newspapers. The integration of social media in politics has created a discursive opening for reimagining engagement, partly as a result of enthusiastic accounts of the impact of digital technologies upon democracy. By means of a qualitative content analysis of Canadian newspaper articles between 2005 and 2014, we identify several discursive articulations of engagement: First, the articles offer the picture of a wide range of objects of engagement, suggesting a civic body actively involved in governance processes. Second, engagement appears to take place only reactively, after decisions are made. Finally, social media become the new social glue, bringing isolated individuals together and thus enabling them to pressure decision-making institutions. We argue that, collectively, these stories construct engagement as a deeply personal gesture that is nevertheless turned into a communal experience by the affordances of technology. The conclusion unpacks what we deem as the ambiguity at the heart of this discourse, considering its implications for democratic politics and suggesting avenues for the further monitoring of the technologically enabled personalization of engagement

Analysis of Photo Sharing and Visual Social Relationships. Instagram as Case Study

This article discusses how visuality, through the mobility of Instagram, modifies individuals’ mediated lives. In particular, it examines how Instagram transforms individuals’ perceptions of their interpersonal relationships. It advances a critical re-reading of the concept of mobility (smart mobile devices) and the new approach to sociality. Conducting an empirical examination, this article delineates the changing dynamics that digitality determines within contemporary life experiences. Findings show that the ubiquitous use of smart mobile devices leads individuals towards the development of new forms and conceptions of mobile mediated visualities. In order to understand the rise of new visual practices based on Pink’s (2007) ethnographic work, this article considers how relationships develop among individuals, visual technologies, practices and images, society and culture. A qualitative approach informed by netnography (Kozinets, 2010), computer-mediated interviews and visual analysis (Rose, 2007) is employed in this study. The critical analysis of 44 participant interviews and their photo sharing behaviour presents the transformations that the mediation and mobility of Instagram bring into everyday relations between humans and technologies. The increased use of social media shows how sociality is affected and mediated by new mobile technologies. Although the social potentiality of (visual) social relationships itself does not offer a variety of verbal communication mechanisms, it encourages offline meetings or the relocation onto other social media. This shows that every alteration in the structure of societies has influence on individuals and on their means of expression

The New Media Landscape in Bulgaria

Abstract: This article situates the dynamics of the mass media transformations in post-totalitarian Bulgaria in the context of the political and economic conditions specific to the country. After an initial period of proliferation of numerous party and independent publications, the highly liberalized press market has entered a process of concentration. The political parties represented in parliament have established themselves as the only decision-making authority as far as the functioning of the national radio and television institutions and licensing of private broadcasters are concerned. Résumé: Cet article situe les transformations médiatiques de la Bulgarie post-totalitaire dans le contexte des conditions politiques et économiques particulières à ce pays. Après une période initiale où prolifèrent de nombreuses publications partisanes et indépendantes, le marché de la presse hautement libéralisé entame un processus de concentration économique. Les partis politiques représentés au Parlement s'établissent comme la seule autorité pour la prise de décisions en ce qui a trait au fonctionnement des institutions nationales de radio et de télévision et l'octroi de permis aux radiodiffuseurs privés

Super Network on the Prairie The Discursive Framing of Broadband Connectivity by Policy Planners and Rural Residents in Alberta, Canada

This paper focuses on the case of the SuperNet, an infrastructure project designed and sponsored by the provincial government of Alberta, Canada with the objective of providing broadband connectivity to public facilities, businesses and residences in rural communities. The data were collected through individual interviews, focus groups, and town hall meetings in the course of a collaborative research initiative (The SuperNet Research Alliance) that investigated the social construction of the broadband network from multiple perspectives. The objective of the paper is to examine in parallel the discourses in which the concept of broadband connectivity acquired meaning and substance at the levels of 1) provincial government and industry policy planners and 2) the residents of the rural communities who were the intended beneficiaries of the SuperNet. Using actor-network theory as a departure point, this analysis takes stock of the framing devices employed in the two sets of discourses and of the distinctive worldviews that generated them. It looks for the meeting points and the disjunctions between the grand visions and the grounded projections underlying the positions taken by the two respective categories of actors. Differences in the interpretation and appropriation of broadband among rural Albertans themselves are discerned and related to social factors characterizing different situations within rural areas. Rural broadband connectivity thus emerges not so much as a one-dimensional access equalizer for rural people, but as a complex mediator of opportunity, participation and identity

Digital Citizenship and Activism : Questions of Power and Participation Online

The eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government (JeDEM) is a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal (ISSN: 2075-9517) published twice a year. It addresses theory and practice in the areas of eDemocracy and Open Government as well as eGovernment, eParticipation, and eSociety. JeDEM publishes ongoing and completed research, case studies and project descriptions that are selected after a rigorous blind review by experts in the field

The Mediatization Of Leadership: Grassroots Digital Facilitators As Organic Intellectuals

Whether due to an organizational shift to networks over bureaucracies or due to a change in values, many social movements in the current protest cycle are not characterized by visible leadership. This paper undertakes an in-depth analysis of data obtained through interviews, observations and analysis of media content related to three Canadian cases of civic mobilization of different scale, all of which strategically employed social media: the provincial MLA Playdate, the national Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women campaign, and the Canadian response to the international Refugees Welcome movement. What attributes, competencies, skills, and practices distinguished the individuals and groups that played key roles in the inception and ongoing organization of these movements? How can their role (or roles) be defined, if not as traditional organizational leadership? The paper uses Gramsci’s notion of the “organic intellectual” and Bourdieu’s (1991) model of the “political field” to propose a conceptual framework for understanding the role of these organizers as political discourse-producers, sociometric stars and organic intellectuals. Ultimately, the organizers of the mobilizations under study were successful in infiltrating the political field, typically the domain of institutional players, with discourses collaboratively produced in the exchanges among grassroots citizens. By looking closely at the three cases through the lenses offered by these concepts, we identify the specific competencies, strategies and styles that characterize mediatized civic leadership