University of Westminster Press eBooks, Sep 7, 2021
Books and journals, open access & print www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk Welcome to the latest catalog... more Books and journals, open access & print www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk Welcome to the latest catalogue of the University of Westminster Press, an academic open access publisher since 2015. Our logo, an open laptop and an open book forming a W, was intended as a succinct comment and a visual representation of our mission. For UWP the most signficant development in the last year has been the addition of three new journal titles: the first, Anthropocenes-Human, Inhuman, Posthuman (p.34) an interdisciplinary title of great range tackling some of the big questions of our age including climate change, species extinction and latterly Covid-19. Likewise we are delighted to welcome the Journal of Deliberative Democracy (p.32). As populism surges across the world, the need for democratic legitimacy and real engagement continues to grow. JDD's August 2020 relaunch with UWP highlights key debates in participative democracy and public deliberation and considers how new insights might assist politics grapple with mounting challenges. We also look forward, later in the year to the first issue of Active Travel Studies (p.31). Healthier and more environmentally conscious transport is the focus of the journal's parent research body, the Active Travel Academy at the University of Westminster. Also during this period two of our existing journals Silk Road (p.36) and Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture (p.38) are now presented in a new research environment that of ScienceOpen. We welcome ScienceOpen and other new channels assisting readers in discovering our publications. UWP book titles remain available via JSTOR (www.jstor.org) and OAPEN (www.oapen.org), as MARC-21 records for libraries are also now available to download from our home page. Book trade orders and customers can also be set up via an account with Ingrams at www.ingramcontent.com/publishers/lp/introducingipage. This 2020 catalogue features three forthcoming books in the Critical Digital and Social Media Studies series (pp.4-17)-two focusing on the 'Commons'-in Autumn on top of a total of 30 published book titles, 7 CAMRI Policy Briefs (pp.21-23] and the distributed titles in the the History of the 'University of Westminster' series. One undoubted highlight in 2020 will be Can Music Make You Sick? (p. 18) Sadly the answer to this question appears to be 'yes' for musicians, whose mental health is facing unprecedented challenges in the wake of the gig economy, streaming and currently a cessation of the festival season and most live events. Spreadheading a new wave of publications challenging some of the benign assumptions of previous creative industries literature, this title is sure to contribute to an urgent debate in the field. So we hope there's plenty to engage you in the following pages!.
Public service media (PSM) are widely acknowledged as part of the variety of solutions to disinfo... more Public service media (PSM) are widely acknowledged as part of the variety of solutions to disinformation. The remit of PSM, formed around values of universality, equality, diversity, accuracy and quality, implies a responsibility to fight disinformation by producing fact-based news content and finding anti-disinformation solutions. In this article, we introduce a framework for assessing how PSM organizations are able to counter disinformation in different contexts. Our normative framework provides a triangulation of contextual factors that determine the role of the PSM organization in the national environment, the activities carried out to fight disinformation and expert assessments of the potential of PSM to reduce the impact of disinformation. The framework is illustrated with analyses of PSM from the Czech Republic (CZE), Finland, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK).
Academic debates tend focus on attempts to codify and promote communication rights at the global ... more Academic debates tend focus on attempts to codify and promote communication rights at the global level. This article provides a model to analyse communication rights at a national level by operationalising four rights: access, availability, dialogical rights, and privacy. It highlights specific cases of digitalisation in Finland, a country with an impressive record as a promoter of internet access and digitalised public services. The article shows how national policy decisions may support economic goals rather than communication rights, and how measures to realise rights by digital means may not always translate into desired outcomes, such as inclusive participation in decision-making.
Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, Jul 1, 2020
In this commentary we discuss how five prominent media development organizations (BBC Media Actio... more In this commentary we discuss how five prominent media development organizations (BBC Media Action, Council of Europe, DWA, PMA and Unesco) define public service broadcasting (PSB)/public service media (PSM) and how they envisage its role and functions in their recent projects and reports. In view of the increasing challenges of the current media landscape, international donors are looking at models to provide a path to independent media and journalism and several international organizations support projects and institutional arrangements they label PSB/PSM. However, given the fundamental questions that existing PSBs face, is PSB a meaningful tool for media development? And how do these various advocates for PSB/PSM understand the concept and why do they feel that it is worth supporting? We find that there seems to have been a shift, common to all five organizations, towards defining PSB/PSM in terms of public service ethos, and we explain why this should be seen as a welcome development.
The rights-based perspective on ethical and political questions presented by the new digital medi... more The rights-based perspective on ethical and political questions presented by the new digital media has recently regained attention in academic and political debates. As the recent report by the United Nations Secretary-General on digital cooperation notes, digital technologies do not only help to advocate, defend, and exercise human rights, but they are also used to suppress, limit, and violate human rights-and therefore, "the internet cannot be an ungoverned or ungoveranable space." 1 Yet, there is no consensus on what human rights in the digital realm are, and who should take the lead to govern them in the increasingly complex media and communications landscape. The more focused concept of communication rights, in turn, has already a varied history, starting with the attempts of the Global South in the 1970s to counter the Westernization of communication. 2 The connections between human rights and media policy have also been addressed throughout the past decades, especially in international contexts. 3 Communication rights have also been invoked with more specific aims, for instance, as cultural rights, the rights of disabled persons, or the rights of sexual minorities in today's communication environment. 4
This chapter discusses the need to critically reframe the concept of innovation, especially regar... more This chapter discusses the need to critically reframe the concept of innovation, especially regarding North-South development cooperation. The emerging discourse on the "Silicon Savannah" illustrates the situation: Eastern Africa is becoming more and more interesting to the Global North because of local technological innovations and emerging examples of locally inspired content that has begun to reach both local, regional, and global customers. This has evoked discussion on how ICTs, innovation, and entrepreneurship will form the core of bottom-up solutions for development. At the same time, training and mentoring programs tend to be designed to match the ideals of Western start-up culture, without broader regard to local practices. Given some of these conditions,
The future of public service broadcasting (PSB), or public service media (PSM) as it has come to ... more The future of public service broadcasting (PSB), or public service media (PSM) as it has come to be known with the increasing use of multimedia platforms, is more uncertain, and unchartered, than perhaps ever before. With the emergence of networked issue communities, citizen journalist blogs, nonprofit news sites, and the spontaneous viral sharing of information and campaigns, one could claim that there already exists public media de facto, complementing and perhaps even duplicating some functions of institutional public media de jure. In many mature PSM countries, the debate about public service media entails claims how those institutions now distort free media markets. In addition, the commercialization of the legacy and online media landscape is diminishing the original public service ethos of serving the citizens. And yet, given the viral disinformation, as well as both government and corporate control of the media, it would seem that the role of public service media is ever more important, both for existing countries with public service institutions, and for nations building their democratic media systems.
Viral false information, siloed information habits, and growing distrust in the media are amongst... more Viral false information, siloed information habits, and growing distrust in the media are amongst today’s most alarming challenges to digital media markets. These phenomena impact trust in media at all societal levels – global, regional, national, and local. They are enabled by economic, sociocultural, and technological transformations that have destabilised media systems and involve commercial, governmental, and civic stakeholders. The consequences significantly impact the lives of ordinary citizens. In today’s context, the ability of public service media organisations to fulfill a mandated universalism mission and counter these trends requires a new approach that prioritises and operationalises collaborative efforts.Go to the full book to find a version of this chapter tagged for accessibility
Design thinking is not new, but it has recently been embedded into teaching approaches through th... more Design thinking is not new, but it has recently been embedded into teaching approaches through the work of Stanford d.school (d.school, 2018) and the consulting firm IDEO (IDEO, 2018), whose founder is considered an authority in human-centered design. A body of literature is also emerging in the last few years with countless applications of design thinking in various areas, especially product development, and more recently in education. However, while the literature describing design thinking is relatively mature as evidenced by various research, books and literature reviews (Gordon, 2018; Micheli, Wilner, Bhatti, Mura, & Beverland, 2018), its applications in teaching are emergent and, therefore, present an incredible open canvas for exploration. While teaching the foundational concepts of design thinking may be linear, doing design thinking presents interesting challenges because this unequivocally team-based methodology and brainstorming works best in face-to-face and highly creative, non-linear environments. Therefore, its adaptation to online delivery and its effectiveness need to be further studied. As a pedagogical technique, design thinking is less prone to be easily encapsulated easily into an online environment. Nevertheless, emergent methodologies are taking ground, supported by online interactive collaborative technologies, and they are enabling the study of how to transfer this prototype-based approach into an online learning environment (Filatro, Cavalcanti, & Muckenberger, 2017). This integration and growth of fluid and open-ended approaches into education fundamentally represents a challenge for online learning, and online team-learning in particular. If teaching is evolving into more nuanced, flexible and design-oriented pedagogical methods, how will online teaching evolve? How will educators be able to asses unstructured online team interaction? These are key questions that we are trying to answer in terms of pedagogical evolution and its effectiveness. Much attention in online team learning has been paid to structured team interaction processes that can be assessed through objective and automated criteria. For example, team engagement has been evaluated by counting the number of replies, participation frequency or, using social network analysis, by “centrality” and “betweenness” measures of team member communication. The key challenge of these methods is that in order to simplify measurements, they reduce the richness of the team interactions to well-defined learning outcomes. This talk will review various examples of teaching design thinking both face-to-face and online and will discuss a number of opportunities and open challenges that are important to drive changes to pedagogy, to web-based collaboration tools, and to the expectations and demands of online learning.
Media capture, a situation in which the media can no longer function independently but is control... more Media capture, a situation in which the media can no longer function independently but is controlled by vested interests, has been researched as a concept and empirical phenomenon in a variety of contexts. The capture of Public Service Media has received less scrutiny, even though media organizations with a public service mandate are facing increased pressures from governments and commercial competitors alike. This chapter proposes a framework for assessing the impact of media capture on Public Service Media organizations in different national contexts. It highlights the importance of both media systems and public discourses in understanding the forms in which Public Service Media capture can emerge and become manifest.
Journal of Creative Industries and Cultural Studies
The rise of the internet and the subsequent global reach of digital platforms has provided entire... more The rise of the internet and the subsequent global reach of digital platforms has provided entirely new participatory opportunities for citizens and created new types of content and services in both national and global media landscapes. At the same time, we have witnessed serious new challenges to individuals, organizations, and society, including political polarization, rampant and viral mis- and disinformation, diminishing trust in knowledge institutions, and the like. In this article, we introduce a citizen-centric model of four communication rights as a normative-evaluative framework for assessing the impact of this so-called platformization as it pertains to small nations, with the case of Finland as an empirical illustration.
Viral false information, siloed information habits, and growing distrust in the media are amongst... more Viral false information, siloed information habits, and growing distrust in the media are amongst today’s most alarming challenges to digital media markets. These phenomena impact trust in media at all societal levels – global, regional, national, and local. They are enabled by economic, sociocultural, and technological transformations that have destabilised media systems and involve commercial, governmental, and civic stakeholders. The consequences significantly impact the lives of ordinary citizens. In today’s context, the ability of public service media organisations to fulfill a mandated universalism mission and counter these trends requires a new approach that prioritises and operationalises collaborative efforts.Go to the full book to find a version of this chapter tagged for accessibility
University of Westminster Press eBooks, Sep 7, 2021
Books and journals, open access & print www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk Welcome to the latest catalog... more Books and journals, open access & print www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk Welcome to the latest catalogue of the University of Westminster Press, an academic open access publisher since 2015. Our logo, an open laptop and an open book forming a W, was intended as a succinct comment and a visual representation of our mission. For UWP the most signficant development in the last year has been the addition of three new journal titles: the first, Anthropocenes-Human, Inhuman, Posthuman (p.34) an interdisciplinary title of great range tackling some of the big questions of our age including climate change, species extinction and latterly Covid-19. Likewise we are delighted to welcome the Journal of Deliberative Democracy (p.32). As populism surges across the world, the need for democratic legitimacy and real engagement continues to grow. JDD's August 2020 relaunch with UWP highlights key debates in participative democracy and public deliberation and considers how new insights might assist politics grapple with mounting challenges. We also look forward, later in the year to the first issue of Active Travel Studies (p.31). Healthier and more environmentally conscious transport is the focus of the journal's parent research body, the Active Travel Academy at the University of Westminster. Also during this period two of our existing journals Silk Road (p.36) and Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture (p.38) are now presented in a new research environment that of ScienceOpen. We welcome ScienceOpen and other new channels assisting readers in discovering our publications. UWP book titles remain available via JSTOR (www.jstor.org) and OAPEN (www.oapen.org), as MARC-21 records for libraries are also now available to download from our home page. Book trade orders and customers can also be set up via an account with Ingrams at www.ingramcontent.com/publishers/lp/introducingipage. This 2020 catalogue features three forthcoming books in the Critical Digital and Social Media Studies series (pp.4-17)-two focusing on the 'Commons'-in Autumn on top of a total of 30 published book titles, 7 CAMRI Policy Briefs (pp.21-23] and the distributed titles in the the History of the 'University of Westminster' series. One undoubted highlight in 2020 will be Can Music Make You Sick? (p. 18) Sadly the answer to this question appears to be 'yes' for musicians, whose mental health is facing unprecedented challenges in the wake of the gig economy, streaming and currently a cessation of the festival season and most live events. Spreadheading a new wave of publications challenging some of the benign assumptions of previous creative industries literature, this title is sure to contribute to an urgent debate in the field. So we hope there's plenty to engage you in the following pages!.
Public service media (PSM) are widely acknowledged as part of the variety of solutions to disinfo... more Public service media (PSM) are widely acknowledged as part of the variety of solutions to disinformation. The remit of PSM, formed around values of universality, equality, diversity, accuracy and quality, implies a responsibility to fight disinformation by producing fact-based news content and finding anti-disinformation solutions. In this article, we introduce a framework for assessing how PSM organizations are able to counter disinformation in different contexts. Our normative framework provides a triangulation of contextual factors that determine the role of the PSM organization in the national environment, the activities carried out to fight disinformation and expert assessments of the potential of PSM to reduce the impact of disinformation. The framework is illustrated with analyses of PSM from the Czech Republic (CZE), Finland, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK).
Academic debates tend focus on attempts to codify and promote communication rights at the global ... more Academic debates tend focus on attempts to codify and promote communication rights at the global level. This article provides a model to analyse communication rights at a national level by operationalising four rights: access, availability, dialogical rights, and privacy. It highlights specific cases of digitalisation in Finland, a country with an impressive record as a promoter of internet access and digitalised public services. The article shows how national policy decisions may support economic goals rather than communication rights, and how measures to realise rights by digital means may not always translate into desired outcomes, such as inclusive participation in decision-making.
Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, Jul 1, 2020
In this commentary we discuss how five prominent media development organizations (BBC Media Actio... more In this commentary we discuss how five prominent media development organizations (BBC Media Action, Council of Europe, DWA, PMA and Unesco) define public service broadcasting (PSB)/public service media (PSM) and how they envisage its role and functions in their recent projects and reports. In view of the increasing challenges of the current media landscape, international donors are looking at models to provide a path to independent media and journalism and several international organizations support projects and institutional arrangements they label PSB/PSM. However, given the fundamental questions that existing PSBs face, is PSB a meaningful tool for media development? And how do these various advocates for PSB/PSM understand the concept and why do they feel that it is worth supporting? We find that there seems to have been a shift, common to all five organizations, towards defining PSB/PSM in terms of public service ethos, and we explain why this should be seen as a welcome development.
The rights-based perspective on ethical and political questions presented by the new digital medi... more The rights-based perspective on ethical and political questions presented by the new digital media has recently regained attention in academic and political debates. As the recent report by the United Nations Secretary-General on digital cooperation notes, digital technologies do not only help to advocate, defend, and exercise human rights, but they are also used to suppress, limit, and violate human rights-and therefore, "the internet cannot be an ungoverned or ungoveranable space." 1 Yet, there is no consensus on what human rights in the digital realm are, and who should take the lead to govern them in the increasingly complex media and communications landscape. The more focused concept of communication rights, in turn, has already a varied history, starting with the attempts of the Global South in the 1970s to counter the Westernization of communication. 2 The connections between human rights and media policy have also been addressed throughout the past decades, especially in international contexts. 3 Communication rights have also been invoked with more specific aims, for instance, as cultural rights, the rights of disabled persons, or the rights of sexual minorities in today's communication environment. 4
This chapter discusses the need to critically reframe the concept of innovation, especially regar... more This chapter discusses the need to critically reframe the concept of innovation, especially regarding North-South development cooperation. The emerging discourse on the "Silicon Savannah" illustrates the situation: Eastern Africa is becoming more and more interesting to the Global North because of local technological innovations and emerging examples of locally inspired content that has begun to reach both local, regional, and global customers. This has evoked discussion on how ICTs, innovation, and entrepreneurship will form the core of bottom-up solutions for development. At the same time, training and mentoring programs tend to be designed to match the ideals of Western start-up culture, without broader regard to local practices. Given some of these conditions,
The future of public service broadcasting (PSB), or public service media (PSM) as it has come to ... more The future of public service broadcasting (PSB), or public service media (PSM) as it has come to be known with the increasing use of multimedia platforms, is more uncertain, and unchartered, than perhaps ever before. With the emergence of networked issue communities, citizen journalist blogs, nonprofit news sites, and the spontaneous viral sharing of information and campaigns, one could claim that there already exists public media de facto, complementing and perhaps even duplicating some functions of institutional public media de jure. In many mature PSM countries, the debate about public service media entails claims how those institutions now distort free media markets. In addition, the commercialization of the legacy and online media landscape is diminishing the original public service ethos of serving the citizens. And yet, given the viral disinformation, as well as both government and corporate control of the media, it would seem that the role of public service media is ever more important, both for existing countries with public service institutions, and for nations building their democratic media systems.
Viral false information, siloed information habits, and growing distrust in the media are amongst... more Viral false information, siloed information habits, and growing distrust in the media are amongst today’s most alarming challenges to digital media markets. These phenomena impact trust in media at all societal levels – global, regional, national, and local. They are enabled by economic, sociocultural, and technological transformations that have destabilised media systems and involve commercial, governmental, and civic stakeholders. The consequences significantly impact the lives of ordinary citizens. In today’s context, the ability of public service media organisations to fulfill a mandated universalism mission and counter these trends requires a new approach that prioritises and operationalises collaborative efforts.Go to the full book to find a version of this chapter tagged for accessibility
Design thinking is not new, but it has recently been embedded into teaching approaches through th... more Design thinking is not new, but it has recently been embedded into teaching approaches through the work of Stanford d.school (d.school, 2018) and the consulting firm IDEO (IDEO, 2018), whose founder is considered an authority in human-centered design. A body of literature is also emerging in the last few years with countless applications of design thinking in various areas, especially product development, and more recently in education. However, while the literature describing design thinking is relatively mature as evidenced by various research, books and literature reviews (Gordon, 2018; Micheli, Wilner, Bhatti, Mura, & Beverland, 2018), its applications in teaching are emergent and, therefore, present an incredible open canvas for exploration. While teaching the foundational concepts of design thinking may be linear, doing design thinking presents interesting challenges because this unequivocally team-based methodology and brainstorming works best in face-to-face and highly creative, non-linear environments. Therefore, its adaptation to online delivery and its effectiveness need to be further studied. As a pedagogical technique, design thinking is less prone to be easily encapsulated easily into an online environment. Nevertheless, emergent methodologies are taking ground, supported by online interactive collaborative technologies, and they are enabling the study of how to transfer this prototype-based approach into an online learning environment (Filatro, Cavalcanti, & Muckenberger, 2017). This integration and growth of fluid and open-ended approaches into education fundamentally represents a challenge for online learning, and online team-learning in particular. If teaching is evolving into more nuanced, flexible and design-oriented pedagogical methods, how will online teaching evolve? How will educators be able to asses unstructured online team interaction? These are key questions that we are trying to answer in terms of pedagogical evolution and its effectiveness. Much attention in online team learning has been paid to structured team interaction processes that can be assessed through objective and automated criteria. For example, team engagement has been evaluated by counting the number of replies, participation frequency or, using social network analysis, by “centrality” and “betweenness” measures of team member communication. The key challenge of these methods is that in order to simplify measurements, they reduce the richness of the team interactions to well-defined learning outcomes. This talk will review various examples of teaching design thinking both face-to-face and online and will discuss a number of opportunities and open challenges that are important to drive changes to pedagogy, to web-based collaboration tools, and to the expectations and demands of online learning.
Media capture, a situation in which the media can no longer function independently but is control... more Media capture, a situation in which the media can no longer function independently but is controlled by vested interests, has been researched as a concept and empirical phenomenon in a variety of contexts. The capture of Public Service Media has received less scrutiny, even though media organizations with a public service mandate are facing increased pressures from governments and commercial competitors alike. This chapter proposes a framework for assessing the impact of media capture on Public Service Media organizations in different national contexts. It highlights the importance of both media systems and public discourses in understanding the forms in which Public Service Media capture can emerge and become manifest.
Journal of Creative Industries and Cultural Studies
The rise of the internet and the subsequent global reach of digital platforms has provided entire... more The rise of the internet and the subsequent global reach of digital platforms has provided entirely new participatory opportunities for citizens and created new types of content and services in both national and global media landscapes. At the same time, we have witnessed serious new challenges to individuals, organizations, and society, including political polarization, rampant and viral mis- and disinformation, diminishing trust in knowledge institutions, and the like. In this article, we introduce a citizen-centric model of four communication rights as a normative-evaluative framework for assessing the impact of this so-called platformization as it pertains to small nations, with the case of Finland as an empirical illustration.
Viral false information, siloed information habits, and growing distrust in the media are amongst... more Viral false information, siloed information habits, and growing distrust in the media are amongst today’s most alarming challenges to digital media markets. These phenomena impact trust in media at all societal levels – global, regional, national, and local. They are enabled by economic, sociocultural, and technological transformations that have destabilised media systems and involve commercial, governmental, and civic stakeholders. The consequences significantly impact the lives of ordinary citizens. In today’s context, the ability of public service media organisations to fulfill a mandated universalism mission and counter these trends requires a new approach that prioritises and operationalises collaborative efforts.Go to the full book to find a version of this chapter tagged for accessibility
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