Can Media Enhance Deliberative Democracy? Exploring Media Monitoring Capabilities in 14 EU-Countries

The editorial introduces the topic of this thematic issue, which is the important role of society’s media monitoring capabilities, i.e., to produce information about what media “do” to society, and more precisely for democratic development both the here and the now and in the longer term. The theoretical and methodological aspects of the thematic issue are presented according to the approach of an EU-funded project Mediadelcom, which aims to explain interconnections between the news media transformations and the risks and opportunities for deliberative communication. One of the stages of the project investigates media monitoring capabilities in different countries. The eight articles introduced in the editorial contribute to deepening the perspectives on the capabilities of media monitoring in the 21st century, and to understanding their function in detecting potential risks and opportunities for democratic public deliberation

ON GENERALIZED DERIVATIVES AND FORMAL POWERS FOR PSEUDOANALYTIC FUNCTIONS

We consider pseudoanalytic functions depending on two or three real variables. They are characterized by the corresponding Bers-Vekua equations. In the case of two dimensions we use the complex notation whereas for the case of three variables the concept of complex quaternions serves for our investigations. In a particular plane case we give an explicit representation of formal powers with which a complete system of solutions of the corresponding Bers-Vekua equation can be given. By an example we show how the concept of formal powers may also be applied to the case of three variables.We consider pseudoanalytic functions depending on two or three realvariables. They are characterized by the corresponding Bers-Vekua equations. In the case of two dimensions we use the complex notation whereas for the case of three variables the concept of complex quaternions serves for our investigations. In a particular plane case we give an explicit representation of formal powers with which a complete system of solutions of the corresponding Bers-Vekua equation can be given. By an example we show how the concept of formal powers may also be applied to the case of three variables

Smileys Without Borders : A Critique of Transboundary Interaction Between Politicians, Journalists and PR practitioners on Social Media

The purpose of this article is to contribute a critical theoretical understanding of cross-professional relations on social media, focusing on politicians, journalists and PR practitioners. It is well known that these professional groups establish personal and close relations in offline contexts, but more attention needs to be paid to the role of social media. Here, it is argued that in the context of digital media use, semi-private chatting, humour, and mutual acknowledgment, including the use of likes, smileys, heart symbols, etc., are evidence of a ‘neoliberalisation’ of cross-professional relations. The underlying idea is that the common practice of self-branding undermines representations of professional belonging and exacerbates the blurring of professional boundaries. The critical conceptualisation of such ‘transboundary’ interaction between politicians, journalists and PR practitioners, which is guided by a culturalmaterialist approach, includes the presentation of examples deriving from the Swedish Twittersphere, and suggestions for empirical research

Few-to-many communication : Public figures' self-promotion on Twitter through 'joint performances' in small networked constellations

The purpose of the study is to examine how members of a Twitter elite act together on a raised platform, thus performing “before” their manifold followers/audiences. A discourse study of Swedish public fi gures’ Twitter activities resulted in the identifi cation of three discourse types: expert sessions, professional “backstage” chatting, and exclusive lifestreaming. Altogether, they demonstrate how nationally recognized politicians, journalists, and PR consultants socialize on Twitter in a top-down manner that works against broader participation. This “elite collaborative” tweeting can be conceptualized as a particular mode of mass communication, namely few-to-many.Lo scopo dello studio è quello di analizzare come i membri dell’élite di Twitter operano insieme sulla piattaforma “elevata”, dove si esibiscono “davanti” a un’ampia varietà di followers/pubblico. L’analisi qualitativa discorsiva delle attività dei personaggi pubblici svedesi su Twitter ha portato all’identifi cazione di tre tipi discorsivi: sessioni di esperti, conversazione professionale “dietro le quinte” e rivelazione esclusiva delle esperienze personali (ingl. lifestreaming). Le tipologie menzionate mostrano come i politici, i giornalisti e i consulenti in pubbliche relazioni conosciuti a livello nazionale, socializzano dall’alto verso il basso, il che fa allontanare la partecipazione più ampia. Questa forma di “collaborazione dell’élite” può essere concettualizzata come un modo particolare della comunicazione di massa, ovvero come il modo “da pochi a molti” (ingl. few-to-many).The Journalism-Politics-PR Interplay on Twitter: Hybridized, Cross-Professional Relations on the We

The materiality of media discourse : on capitalism and journalistic modes of writing

The purpose of the study is to analyse the relationship between the capitalist hegemonic order and the mass media, with the latter restricted to two elite newspapers (Swedish DN and Slovenian Delo) and the selection of news materials from three bodies of international media coverage: NATO’s military intervention in former Yugoslavia, 1999, the political demonstrations against the IMF and the World Bank in Prague, 2000, and 9/11, 2001. There are two sub-purposes, one theoretical-methodological and one political-democratic. The first sub-purpose is to accomplish an integrative kind of media analysis (Williams 1977) in which the approaches of political economy (emphasising the economic/material) and cultural studies/discourse analysis (emphasising the symbolic/discursive) are supposed to interact. The hypothesis is that such a ‘third way’ approach is possible to achieve through the qualitative analysis of journalistic modes of writing. The second sub-purpose (the political-democratic one) takes an interest in the modes’ political dimensions. In what manners do the identified modes counter-act, or co-produce, miscellaneous political struggles? In addition, the purpose of the study also includes a more practical dimension. In the light of the results, how should one nowadays imagine an emancipating kind of journalism that tries to explain, unmask, or even counteract the mechanisms of the contemporary global capitalist system? The news media material consists of 438 items (articles, photos etc.), which are analysed by means of a cultural materialist CDA (critical discourse analysis). An identified journalistic mode is analysed as: (1) a practice with certain cognitive, discursive and linguistic characteristics, (2) a structural product (as constituted by underlying social and material structures), and (3) a dialectical force, being a potentially active part of an ongoing mode of production (the capitalist or another mode). The last analytical moment is the central one. Two categories of journalistic modes are identified. To begin with, the modes of de-permanence (The Remote control mode, Differentiation, Semiotic compression), which comprises modes that are part of the ‘new economy’, of reflexivity, individualism, consumption, mobility, and flexibility. The political dimension of these modes is that they counteract radical (leftist) politics by reducing emancipation, freedom, justice etc. to a matter of individualism and privatisation. The second category is the modes of permanence (Disconnection, Cognitive recycling), which involves an opposing structural dimension of the capitalist system: the production of reification, i.e. the repression of the complex nature of reality – how seemingly autonomous ‘things’ (spaces, objects etc.) are de facto interwoven with a ‘complex whole’ of various social, material, cultural, economic relations that are in constant motion. More precisely, the here identified modes reify and eternalise an explanatory structure (the modern division of explanatory labour), a particular power (the US) and a particular territory (the nation state), generating the impression that social reality works ‘as usual’ while repressing the complex network-like development of global capitalism and its impact on our lives. By sustaining these increasingly archaic structures, what is politically counteracted is the emergence of ‘the new’: transnational politics and democracy (Beck 1998). The analysis of modes (in total 8) furthermore demonstrates that Swedish DN is more integrated with the capitalist system than Slovenian Delo. The study emphasises the democratic importance of creating new journalistic modes endowed with a transnational journalistic epistemology that decisively include the reality of global capitalism in everyday (local) news reporting when covering and explaining social, political, cultural etc. issues

Smileys Without Borders : A Critique of Transboundary Interaction Between Politicians, Journalists and PR practitioners on Social Media

The purpose of this article is to contribute a critical theoretical understanding of cross-professional relations on social media, focusing on politicians, journalists and PR practitioners. It is well known that these professional groups establish personal and close relations in offline contexts, but more attention needs to be paid to the role of social media. Here, it is argued that in the context of digital media use, semi-private chatting, humour, and mutual acknowledgment, including the use of likes, smileys, heart symbols, etc., are evidence of a ‘neoliberalisation’ of cross-professional relations. The underlying idea is that the common practice of self-branding undermines representations of professional belonging and exacerbates the blurring of professional boundaries. The critical conceptualisation of such ‘transboundary’ interaction between politicians, journalists and PR practitioners, which is guided by a culturalmaterialist approach, includes the presentation of examples deriving from the Swedish Twittersphere, and suggestions for empirical research

On generalized derivatives and formal powers for pseudoanalytic functions

We consider pseudoanalytic functions depending on two or three real variables. They are characterized by the corresponding Bers-Vekua equations. In the case of two dimensions we use the complex notation whereas for the case of three variables the concept of complex quaternions serves for our investigations. In a particular plane case we give an explicit representation of formal powers with which a complete system of solutions of the corresponding Bers-Vekua equation can be given. By an example we show how the concept of formal powers may also be applied to the case of three variables

Characterization of certain differential operators in the representation of pseudo-analytic functions

Per le funzioni pseudo-analitiche esistono delle rappresentazioni per mezzo di speciali operatori integrali e differenziali. Si deduce una condizione sufficiente per gli operatori differenziali usati, di modo che tutte le soluzioni della $$w_{\overline{z}}=aw+b\overline{w}$$ siano contenute in questa rappresentazione per le soluzioni.For pseudo-analytic functions we have representations by means of special integral operators and differential operators. Here we deduce a sufficient condition on the differential operators used or all solutions of $$w_{\overline{z}}=aw+b\overline{w}$$ to be representable in that form