Soft power and its audiences: Tweeting the Olympics from London 2012 to Sochi 2014

The ‘Tweeting the Olympics’ project (the subject of this special section of Participations) must be understood in the context of efforts by host states, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and other actors involved in the Games to cultivate and communicate a set of meanings to audiences about both the Olympics events and the nations taking part. Olympic Games are not only sporting competitions; they are also exercises in the management of relations between states and publics, at home and overseas, in order to augment the attractiveness and influence or the soft power of the states involved. Soft power is most successful when it goes unnoticed according to its chief proponent Joseph Nye. If so, how can we possibly know whether soft power works? This article reviews the state of the field in thinking about public diplomacy, cultural diplomacy and soft power in the period of this project (2012-14), focusing particularly on how the audiences of soft power projects, like the London and Sochi Games, were conceived and addressed. One of the key questions this project addresses is whether international broadcasters such as the BBCWS and RT used social media during the Games to promote a cosmopolitan dialogue with global audiences and/or merely to integrate social media so as to project and shape national soft power. We argue first that the contested nature of the Olympic Games calls into question received theories of soft power, public and cultural diplomacy. Second, strategic national narratives during the Olympics faced additional challenges, particularly due to the tensions between the national and the international character of the Games. Third, the new media ecology and shift to a network paradigm further threatens the asymmetric power relations of the broadcasting paradigm forcing broadcasters to reassess their engagement with what was formerly known as ‘the audience’ and the targets of soft power

Negotiating connection without convention: the management of presence, time and networked technology in everyday life

This thesis explores the social processes through which technological change and technologies themselves are negotiated in everyday life. I look to interpersonal communication as a site of such negotiation and focus on the networked practices that extend from mobile telephones, personal computers, and online social platforms. The management of everyday life and interpersonal relationships are shaped by practices of communication management that work through the use of these technologies. I extend and inflect the phenomenological approach to co-presence in interpersonal communication, also reassessing notions of time, for the context of constant networked connection. Drawing from divergent theoretical approaches for understanding technology, an entry point for this thesis was formulated through social interaction. A grounded qualitative approach was used to engage with individuals’ experience of interpersonal communication across everyday domains and contexts of activity. A selection of 35 participants was asked to complete two in-depth interviews, thinking-aloud tasks, and a communication diary. The empirical findings are explored from three perspectives. First, individuals’ relationships to communication tools as objects in an everyday environment are understood for the perceived temporal pressures and a need for networked connection. Second, individuals’ management of those pressures is explored through their imposition of individually controlled barriers to interaction, through which domains of activity are managed by communication practices as relational domains, developing a form of networked awareness between individuals. Third, I examine the forms of negotiation taking place through the interdependency of individual practices, captured by notions of authenticity and perceptions of technologies, as well as a discourse about technology that is enacted through practice rather than communicated through content, what I call meta-communication. I conclude that the negotiated use and role of technologies in interpersonal relationships has implications for the negotiation of wider social changes to the role of technology and to everyday life itself

Soft power and its audiences: Tweeting the Olympics from London 2012 to Sochi 2014

The ‘Tweeting the Olympics’ project (the subject of this special section of Participations) must be understood in the context of efforts by host states, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and other actors involved in the Games to cultivate and communicate a set of meanings to audiences about both the Olympics events and the nations taking part. Olympic Games are not only sporting competitions; they are also exercises in the management of relations between states and publics, at home and overseas, in order to augment the attractiveness and influence or the soft power of the states involved. Soft power is most successful when it goes unnoticed according to its chief proponent Joseph Nye. If so, how can we possibly know whether soft power works? This article reviews the state of the field in thinking about public diplomacy, cultural diplomacy and soft power in the period of this project (2012-14), focusing particularly on how the audiences of soft power projects, like the London and Sochi Games, were conceived and addressed. One of the key questions this project addresses is whether international broadcasters such as the BBCWS and RT used social media during the Games to promote a cosmopolitan dialogue with global audiences and/or merely to integrate social media so as to project and shape national soft power. We argue first that the contested nature of the Olympic Games calls into question received theories of soft power, public and cultural diplomacy. Second, strategic national narratives during the Olympics faced additional challenges, particularly due to the tensions between the national and the international character of the Games. Third, the new media ecology and shift to a network paradigm further threatens the asymmetric power relations of the broadcasting paradigm forcing broadcasters to reassess their engagement with what was formerly known as ‘the audience’ and the targets of soft power

Beyond Close Reading: An Empirical Approach for Annotation and Classification of Multimodal Texts

While a range of approaches and techniques for linguistic annotation and classification are currently available, they have not been designed to handle multimodal texts with a pronounced visual dimension such as posters, webpages, or moving images (i.e., film, TV). In this paper, we present an approach for annotation and classification of multimodal texts that could facilitate their computational analysis. The approach builds upon prior work on multimodal discourse analysis and social semiotics that is unified by its common roots in the tenets of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). By combing insights from this work, the approach we present provides techniques for annotating and classifying key communicative elements commonly found in multimodal texts including (1) layout and composition, (2) image motif and aesthetics, (3) image-text relations, (3) navigation, (4) visual rhythm, and (5) visual sequencing. To illustrate the approach, we discuss the key ideas informing its design—namely, ideas developed within the framework of the Genre and Multimodality (GeM) model (Bateman, 2008), and its subsequent elaboration in the study of online political communication (Seizov, 2014). We also describe the context of application within which we developed the approach—i.e., to systematically classify and analyze the communicative elements of news coverage of the Syrian war. We then present an overview of the data classification procedures the approach presupposes and the classification schema and data dictionary we have developed to aid annotation and classification

Practicing Media \u2013 Mediating Practice: Introduction

More than a decade and a half after the concerted application of practice theory to media and communications, this IJoC Special Section \u201cPracticing Media\u2014Mediating Practice\u201d aims to assess, apply, and expand on the diverse approaches to practice theory. Our focus on contemporary practice theories as well as empirical practice-based research comes at a time when the understanding of mediated and mediatized social life as practices is proliferating across research settings that may not explicitly engage with practice theory literature. This editorial introduction begins with the historical emergence of practice theories and the paradigmatic implications of engaging with practices as essential elements of the social world. Second, it considers the particular tensions emerging when considering both mediating practices and practicing media. In so doing, we outline the contributions to this Special Section, dividing them into three sets of articles that deal with (a) media practices as constituent elements of the social; (b) the employment of practice as a lens through which to make sense of processes of media production and its interpretation; and (c) the foundations of practice theories, their limits, and potential combination with other theoretical approaches