looking beyond the mass media to digitally mediated issue publics

1\. Introduction 5 2\. Theorizing Issue Publics in National and Transnational Contexts 6 2.1 Who Are the Organizers of Issue Publics in Europe? 7 2.2 Rethinking the Nature of Mediated Public Spheres 8 3\. Analyzing Networked Issue Publics in Nations and the EU 10 4\. Research Design 13 5\. Methods 15 6\. The Case of EU Fair Trade Advocacy Networks 16 6.1 Determining Whether There is A Cross-national EU FT Network 17 6.2 Public Engagement in the EU Networkt 18 7\. The Case of National Level FT Networks in the UK 21 7.1 Issue Framing in the UK Network 23 7.2 Does the UK FT Network Refer to the EU? 23 7.3 Evidence of Opportunities for Direct Citizen Engagement 24 8\. The Case of Germany 26 8.1 Issue Framing 27 8.2 EU References 29 8.3 Citizen Engagement 31 9\. Does the EU Respond to This Bottom-Up Communication? 31 10\. Conclusion: Two Different NGO Spheres 31 LiteratureThe gold standard for discussing public spheres has long been established around mass media, with the prestige print press given a privileged place. Yet when it comes to a European public sphere, the mass media are also problematic, or at least incomplete, in several ways: relatively few EU-wide issues are replicated in the national media of EU countries, the discourses on those issues are dominated primarily by elites (with relatively few civil society voices included in the news), and public attention is seldom paid to EU issues beyond a select few (money, agriculture, political integration, scandals), creating a distant ‘gallery public.’ At the same time, many important political issues such as trade and economic justice, development policy, environment and climate change policy, human rights, and military interventions, among others, are being addressed more actively by networks of civil society actors both within and across EU national borders. These networks utilize the Internet and various interactive digital media to publicize their issues, engage active publics, and contest competing policy perspectives not only within specific issue networks, but across solidarity networks involving other policy issues, and with political targets at national and EU levels. This dimension of the EU public sphere has received relatively little attention from observers, and when it has been explored, it is often dismissed as less inclusive, and therefore less significant than the somewhat reified mass media model. This analysis compares networked, digitally mediated public issue spheres with the mass mediated model, points out ways in which the two types of public sphere are complementary, and also shows how networked issue spheres may be the sites of greater citizen and civil society engagement in keeping with more classical models of public spheres

Grounding the European public sphere: looking beyond the mass media to digitally mediated issue publics

The gold standard for discussing public spheres has long been established around mass media, with the prestige print press given a privileged place. Yet when it comes to a European public sphere, the mass media are also problematic, or at least incomplete, in several ways: relatively few EU-wide issues are replicated in the national media of EU countries, the discourses on those issues are dominated primarily by elites (with relatively few civil society voices included in the news), and public attention is seldom paid to EU issues beyond a select few (money, agriculture, political integration, scandals), creating a distant ‘gallery public.’ At the same time, many important political issues such as trade and economic justice, development policy, environment and climate change policy, human rights, and military interventions, among others, are being addressed more actively by networks of civil society actors both within and across EU national borders. These networks utilize the Internet and various interactive digital media to publicize their issues, engage active publics, and contest competing policy perspectives not only within specific issue networks, but across solidarity networks involving other policy issues, and with political targets at national and EU levels. This dimension of the EU public sphere has received relatively little attention from observers, and when it has been explored, it is often dismissed as less inclusive, and therefore less significant than the somewhat reified mass media model. This analysis compares networked, digitally mediated public issue spheres with the mass mediated model, points out ways in which the two types of public sphere are complementary, and also shows how networked issue spheres may be the sites of greater citizen and civil society engagement in keeping with more classical models of public spheres

An Arts-Employment Analysis : the Effect of Government Funding on Employment at Deck Chair Theatre and Spare Parts Puppet Theatre

It is important for governments to recognise employment generation resulting from public expenditure. Funding alternatives that are a cost effective way of generating employment are key objectives in public finance. One funding alternative is the arts. The arts have to compete with other economic activities for a share of government funding. As a result of increased competition, the economic contribution of the arts has become an important issue in arts advocacy. Therefore, it is important that the measure of employment generated by arts funding is accurate and reliable. Arts employment data is generated by cultural organisations applying for public funding through the Australia Council. The problem is that the existing method of calculation, though reasonably detailed, ignores employment of contracting artists and inaccurately accounts for part-time employment. The purpose of this study is threefold: (1) To develop a more accurate measurement of employment in arts organisations than currently exists with the ·Australia Council via its employment data generation, by including in the measurement, the amount of part-time and contracted-artist employment. (2) To identify the amount of government funding that translates into equivalent full-time jobs. (3) To demonstrate and explain ii the problems and distortions that arise by the use of employment multipliers. These problems are addressed at a sample of two theatre companies: Deck Chair Theatre and Spare Parts Puppet Theatre. The measurement developed: The Government Arts-Funding Employment Ratio shows the amount of government funding that translates into equivalent full-time jobs. This is developed in two versions. One including the effects of an employment multiplier, the other ignoring these effects. The multiplier effect means that for every job within the theatres, 1.667 jobs are generated outside the theatres. The results, ignoring the multiplier effect, show that during 1989-1991, every $30,220 of government funding to Spare Parts Puppet Theatre, translated into one equivalent full-time job. At Deck Chair Theatre, over the same period, every$25,821 of government funding translated into one equivalent full-time job

Historicising perceptions and the national management framework for invasive alien plants in South Africa

Abstract: This article offers a historical framework for understanding changes to human perceptions and efforts to manage invasive alien plants and weeds in South Africa from the mid-nineteenth century until the present. The article argues that South African legislation and policy for managing invasive alien plants and weeds has historically been limited because people have held contradictory values about plants, many private land owners have lacked resources and have not been compelled to follow government legislation, and because policy has reflected the interests of a small group of farmers or scientific experts who have had limited influence on most private land owners and traditional land users. Successful control efforts often relied on technical expertise that was applied controversially or could be implemented on government land without extensive public consultation or social conflict. The creation of a national framework for invasive alien plants through the Working for Water Programme in 1995 and National Environmental Management of Biodiversity Act (no. 10) of 2004 (NEMBA) has increased public awareness, but the Programme and NEMBA remain limited by many of the same institutional and social constraints that experts and institutions faced in the past. In conclusion, the article draws on history to provide insights to contemporary challenges

Scheme for implementing quantum information sharing via tripartite entangled state in cavity QED

We investigate economic protocol to securely distribute and reconstruct a single-qubit quantum state between two users via a tripartite entangled state in cavity QED. Our scheme is insensitive to both the cavity decay and the thermal field.Comment: Final version to appear in Physica

An efficient quantum secret sharing scheme with Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Pairs

An efficient quantum secret sharing scheme is proposed. In this scheme, the particles in an entangled pair group form two particle sequences. One sequence is sent to Bob and the other is sent to Charlie after rearranging the particle orders. Bob and Charlie make coding unitary operations and send the particles back. Alice makes Bell-basis measurement to read their coding operations.Comment: 7 pages 2 figures. The revised version of the paper published in Physics Letters A 340 (2005) 43-50. A way for preventing the dishonest agent from eavesdropping with a fake signal is presente

Generalized Quantum Telecloning

We present a generalized telecloning (GTC) protocol where the quantum channel is non-optimally entangled and we study how the fidelity of the telecloned states depends on the entanglement of the channel. We show that one can increase the fidelity of the telecloned states, achieving the optimal value in some situations, by properly choosing the measurement basis at Alice's, albeit turning the protocol to a probabilistic one. We also show how one can convert the GTC protocol to the teleportation protocol via proper unitary operations.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, RevTex4; v2: published version, 8 pages, 4 figures, RevTex4, to appear at Eur. Phys. J.

From the fringes into mainstream politics: intermediary networks and movement-party coordination of a global anti-immigration campaign in Germany

Many liberal democracies have witnessed the rise of radical right parties and movements that threaten liberal values of tolerance and inclusion. Extremist movement factions may promote inflammatory ideas that engage broader publics, but party leaders face dilemmas of endorsing content from extremist origins. However, when that content is shared over larger intermediary networks of aligned supporters and media sites, it may become laundered or disconnected from its original sources so that parties can play it back as official communication. With a dynamic network analysis and various-time series analysis we tracked content flows from the German version of a global far-right anti-immigration campaign across different media platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, and collections of far-right and mainstream media sites. The analysis shows how content from the small extremist Identitarian Movement spread over expanding networks of low-level activists of the Alternative for Germany party and far-right alternative media sites. That network bridging enabled party leadership to launder the source of the content and roll out its own version of the campaign. As a result, national attention became directed to extremist ideas

Witnessing effective entanglement over a 2km fiber channel

We present a fiber-based continuous-variable quantum key distribution system. In the scheme, a quantum signal of two non-orthogonal weak optical coherent states is sent through a fiber-based quantum channel. The receiver simultaneously measures conjugate quadratures of the light using two homodyne detectors. From the measured Q-function of the transmitted signal, we estimate the attenuation and the excess noise caused by the channel. The estimated excess noise originating from the channel and the channel attenuation including the quantum efficiency of the detection setup is investigated with respect to the detection of effective entanglement. The local oscillator is considered in the verification. We witness effective entanglement with a channel length of up to 2km.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure