Saturday, December 29, 2012

"The Media Cold War" by Anne-Marie Slaughter | Project Syndicate

"The Media Cold War" by Anne-Marie Slaughter | Project Syndicate


The sociologist Philip N. Howard recently used the term “new cold war” to describe “battles between broadcast media outlets and social-media upstarts, which have very different approaches to news production, ownership, and censorship.” Because broadcasting requires significant funding, it is more centralized – and thus much more susceptible to state control. Social media, by contrast, transforms anyone with a mobile phone into a potential roving monitor of government deeds or misdeeds, and are hard to shut down without shutting down the entire Internet. Surveying struggles between broadcast and social media in Russia, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, Howard concludes that, notwithstanding their different media cultures, all three governments strongly back state-controlled broadcasting.
CommentsThese intra-media struggles are interesting and important. The way that information circulates does reflect, as Howard argues, a conception of how a society/polity should be organized

Broadcast media is usually V-Bi while state owned might be Y-Ro giving a normal and transparent interpretation of the news, it is more stagnant than innovative. Iv-B news is more like iterative journalism where changes are made at the margin with updates, it is highly innovative, unstable, and mutates into many varieties such as online social media. Some social media is also V-Bi, for example facebook is transparent where people are encouraged to use their real names, normal behavior is encouraged while deviant posts might be censored or deleted. People with mobile phone reporting the news are usually Iv-B loners or Oy-R in Roy countries, the facts depend on the margin according to these people's honesty. The system can be prone to manipulation such as in the book Confessions of a Media Manipulator.  

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