Finland

Valaskivi

2021

New Media & Society

We examine the position of five online-only ‘countermedia’ publications often publicly labelled as ‘fake media’ and use them to indicate how the ‘post-truth era’ takes place. Both academic and public discussions perceive countermedia as separate and distinct from the established, professionally produced journalist media outlets. We argue that the studied outlets are an integral part of the hybrid media environment. Our data show countermedia mainly remediate content initially published by professional Finnish media. We also suggest that media references are used strategically to explicate a relationship with mainstream media, as there are different ways of remediating the mainstream media content. This evidence contributes to the growing body of work criticising the usage of the ‘fake media’ concept and attempts to create a more nuanced understanding of countermedia’s role in its contexts. Furthermore, we suggest remediation as a lens may help scholars understand the integrated hybrid media environment.

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remediation in the hybrid media environment: Understanding countermedia in context

Toivanen

Valaskivi

2021

New Media & Society

“…Second, nationalism-populism and political polarisation, although historically low, have seen rapid growth, most recently in response to the 2015 spike in asylum seekers (e.g. Bengtsson et al, 2014; Palonen, 2017). Third, the main language of 90% of people in Finland is Finnish, which is not spoken in any other country.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective economy of national-populist images: Investigating national and transnational online networks through visual big data

Hokka

2019

New Media & Society

In our article, we investigate the affective economy of national-populist image circulation on Facebook. This is highly relevant, since social media has been an essential area for the spread of national-populist ideology. In our research, we analyse image circulation as affective practice, combining qualitative and quantitative methods. We use computational data analysis methods to examine visual big data: image fingerprints and reverse image search engines to track down the routes of thousands of circulated images as well as make discourse-historical analysis on the images that have gained most attention among supporters. Our research demonstrates that these existing tools allow social science research to make theory-solid approaches to understand the role of image circulation in creating and sustaining national and transnational networks on social media, and show how national-populist thinking is spread through images that catalyse and mobilise affects -fear, anger and resentment -thus creating an effective affective economy.

“…Today, there exist four political issues that serve to divide the public: support for traditional values, cultural and social diversity, economic freedom, and economic equality [e.g., 110]. Still, these issues do not typically form strong dividing lines, since citizens can at the same time support economic freedom and economic equality [83,101,102,110]. However, through analysis of voters' responses to attitude questions, each of the parties can be clearly distinguished (Figure 1) even when there is an overall trend of declining party identification [25].…”

Section: Research Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Party Politics, Values and the Design of Social Media Services

Grön

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

2020

There have been several attempts to support political engagement through novel social media services. While the political nature of any technologies is widely acknowledged in human-computer interaction, such considerations have been less studied when designing for political engagement in social media services. We used speculative design probes to gauge how political elites perceive alternative social media interfaces designed to increase media diversity and decrease political polarisation. We show how elites? reactions to design probes could be rooted into party ideologies. Based on these, we discuss directions how social media services could be designed. Our underlying contribution is wider. We show how studying elites can provide insights about politics embedded into proposed novel social media services for political engagement. Second, we demonstrate what elites? perspective provide fruitful way to expand and rethink concepts that have been used to study ordinary people before. Finally, we discuss potential challenges of replacing economic interests with political interest in social media service design and provide a richer account on the discussion about social media regulation. Therefore, we pave the way to more research to critically study elites within social computing scholarship and highlight the importance of understanding political motivations which can guide the development of social media.