A Turning IR Landscape in a Shifting Media Ecology: The State of IR Literature on New Media1

Abstract

Each year the prevalence of digitized information becomes more entrenched, not least with the amount of activity on social media. Yet, new media studies pose a number of challenges to international relations scholarship, which are only beginning to be addressed. With some exceptions IR scholars who conduct this research tend to rely on traditional qualitative methods and have been hesitant to embrace interdisciplinary collaboration—especially with those disciplines outside of the social sciences—as well as methodological pluralism across interpretive and quantitative approaches within the social sciences. This tendency shows a general lack of understanding of what new/social media might mean, not only as a source of and tool for generating information but also as a structural factor in how we conduct IR research and practice international relations. In this way, social media can provoke IR scholars to ask questions about their own discipline. This article aims to address these challenges and to provide suggestions on how to bring structural aspects of new media into IR research. In particular, it incorporates ideas centered on the shifting media ecology as fundamental to examining these structural challenges in terms of practicing international relations and in the visual turn in IR.

Visual narratives of global politics in the digital age: an introduction

“…Ultimately, then, the rise of social media is having a profound impact on global politics. Despite this, their significance often remains overlooked by scholars of International Relations (Carpenter and Drezner 2010;Hamilton 2016;Jackson 2019). This special issue remedies this, focusing its attention on how visual narratives are produced and shared online by political actors, as well as how audiences engage with and interpret them on social media.…”

Making Sense of Emotions and Affective Investments in War: RT and the Syrian Conflict on YouTube

“…Furthermore, we propose a framework for studying how social media audiences express emotions in the comments they post on social media sites. Our framework builds upon scholarship on affective investments by drawing upon research on media and communication (Lünenborg & Maier, 2018;Papacharissi, 2015), audience studies and conflict (Gillespie et al, 2010;O'Loughlin, 2011;Pears, 2016) as well as work focusing on the importance of social media comments as a data source for understanding war and security (Da Silva & Crilley, 2017;Jackson, 2018;Shepherd & Hamilton, 2016). This enables us to contribute to theorizing and empirically studying affective investments in media representations of war.…”

Understanding militarism after the end of the Cold War: History, international relations, and media studies ask new questions

“…Reflecting on the idea that states are gendered puts militarism into perspective, calling on a wider variety of methodologies. As the amount of visual content continues to grow, more so now with widespread Internet use (Jackson, ), and “visual language [has become] the language of contemporary popular culture—the language that amateurs and experts increasingly rely upon in order to claim contemporary literacy” (Weber, , 138) ‐ feminist and critical IR provides an ever‐growing methodology for understanding militarism. The mediation of war through, for instance, amateur videos posted online challenges traditional state‐centric approaches to understanding the causes, effects, and continuation of war (e.g., Kuntsman & Stein, ).…”

“…Further, information and communication technologies are used to create individual participation in war‐making, illuminating the pervasiveness of everyday militarism, e.g., when soldiers adapt their iPod music lists to a particular task at hand in order to prompt the necessary support for whichever emotion is required to perform that task (Daughtry, ). Because visualization and testimony can influence identity constructions, they inform debates around context and whether researchers can use Internet materials as just another source of materials (Jackson, ).…”