This article examines the relationship between citizen journalism and professional journalism by means of a theoretical discussion combined with empirical data gathered through focus group interviews with students of international journalism. The article discusses the process and ongoing struggle within journalistic practice of keeping up the idea as well as the practice of journalistic objectivity. Working on from Schudson (2003), Schudson and Anderson (2009) and Tumber and Prentoulis’ (2003) analyses of journalistic professionalism, the article develops the idea of journalistic objectivity as it is faced with the technological advances that support citizen journalism. The interviews focus on the ways in which the students understand the tension of the changing relationship between professional journalism and citizens, brought about by citizen journalism or User Generated Content (UGC), and focus further on the question of how the students address and react to this paradigmatic shift.
As the number of digital images of globalized conflicts online grow, critical examination of their impact and consequence is timely. This editorial provides an overview of digital images and globalized conflict as a field of study by discussing regimes of visibility and invisibility, proximity and distance, and the multiplicity of images. It engages critically with these interlinking themes as they are addressed in the contributing articles to the Special Issue as well as beyond, asking how genres and tropes are reproduced, how power plays a role in access to images, and how the sheer quantity of conflict-related images raise issues of knowledge production and research. Keywords digital images, globalized conflict, multiplicity of images, operative images, proximity and distance, usergenerated images, visibility Digital media, particularly mobile media, have fundamentally and dramatically altered the role that images play in conflicts by easing access to creating and sharing photographs and videos. Digital images do more than just change the way in which conflicts are represented; conflicts themselves change as the decline in control over image flow contributes to shaping, escalating, de-escalating, and even creating conflicts (e.g. Allan, 2013; Andeń-Papadopoulos and Pantti, 2011; Eder and Klonk, 2017; Mortensen, 2015a; Zelizer, 2010). Over the past decades, the rapid and extensive dissemination of images from conflicts has intensified the struggle for public visibility. This has encouraged competing visual narratives and counter narratives, persistent allegations of falsification and manipulation, yet also resulted in unprecedented access to more 'unfiltered' and subjective images from conflicts, documenting violence, human rights violations, and mundane aspects of daily life in conflict zones. As the title of this Special Issue 'Digital Images and Globalized Conflict' suggests, the role of images in conflicts today is conditioned by their increasingly globalized circulation through digital media. Existing scholarship has persuasively argued that conflicts are now connected across the globe through the dissemination of images via networked technologies (perhaps most prominently; Castells, 2012). Even if images cross regional, cultural, and linguistic borders, however, they are received and interpreted in often divergent and conflicting manners in different social, cultural, and geopolitical contexts, prompting diverse readings, meanings, and actions.
Though that [imperial and colonial] history remains marginal and largely unacknowledged, surfacing only in the service of nostalgia and melancholia, it represents a store of unlikely connections and complex interpretative resources. The imperial and colonial past continues to shape political life in the overdeveloped-but-no-longer-imperial countries. (Gilroy, 2004, p. 2) 'Europe' in a sense is a phantom of the past, a name that 'is history' rather than society, political, or economics, since the flow of capitalization, population, communication and political action, cross its territory, invest its cities and workplace, but do not elect it as a permanent of specific site. Europe is not only de-territorialized, but also de-localized, put 'out of itself', and in the end deconstructed. It may be part of an imaginary, but less and less of the real. (Balibar, 2004, p. 10) This special issue approaches feminist, postcolonial and race theory from different cultural, disciplinary and national backgrounds. The contributors engage with the question of what makes Europe postcolonial and how memory, whiteness and religion figure in representations and manifestations of European 'identity' and selfperception.This intervention is necessary as the notion of Europe is now contested more than ever, both internally (through the proliferation of ethnic, religious, and regional differences) and externally (Europe expanding its boundaries but closing its borders). Is Europe a bulwark, an exclusionary and discriminatory fortress, or the last romantic ideal of a supra-national organization based on ideas of peace, justice and emancipation?Many people still hold onto the notion that Europe is not simply a continent, a mere geographical space that continually redefines its boundaries and peripheries, but they want to see it as an ideal, the cradle of the Enlightenment and of scientific revolutions, and therefore of Western modernity and democracy. But as Gilroy writes in his epigraph, Europe is not innocent and does not reside beyond the disruptive forces of colonization; and as Benhabib states, the idea of Europe is an illusion instrumentalized to enforce new power dynamics: *
This article discusses the relationship between theories of photography and mobile phone footage. In doing so, it asks if theories of photography still apply in a technologically saturated world of imagery. Technology is an increasingly important part of viewing imagery today and enables imagery to become part of a global cultural flow, thus calling into question the physical connection between viewer and image. This article analyses what happens to that connection when not only the image but also the physical body is mediated and challenged in post-human relations, and examines the ensuing ethical implications. The author takes photojournalism and, in particular, mobile phone footage as a starting point for an exploration of the (post-human) body as evidence and sign of authenticity in the modern age of digital communications and journalism.
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