CM - Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies

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BROJ/NUMBER 30 GODINA IX PROLEĆE/SPRING 2014.

ČASOPIS ZA UPRAVLJANJE KOMUNICIRANJEM COMMUNICATION MANAGEMENT QUARTERLY Histories of media(ted) participation: An introduction Nico Carpentier, Peter Dahlgren Fighting for a regime change through active listening Nelson Ribeiro For an archeology of online participatory literary writing: Hypertext and hyperfiction Francesca Pasquali Wrong turns towards revolution? Grassroots media and political participation in Italy (1967-2012) Fausto Colombo Propaganda, critical media literacy and participation: Tracing memories of the Soviet media Natalija Mažeikienė, Kristina Juraitė The tales of the three digital cities of Amsterdam: The application of ICT for social and political participation Dennis Beckers, Peter van den Besselaar Historicising the journalist–audience relationships in the internet era: A case study of the Slovenian newspaper Delo Igor Vobič

BROJ/NUMBER 30 GODINA IX PROLEĆE/SPRING 2014.

Redakcija/Editorial Board: Alić Sead, Center for Philosophy of Media, Zagreb (Croatia) Alvares Claudia, Lusófona University (Portugal) Bailey Olga, Nottingham Trent University (UK) Balčytienė Auksė, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania) Branković Srbobran, University Singidunum (Serbia) Carpentier Nico, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium); Charles University (Czech Republic) Carpentier Reifová Irena, Charles University (Czech Republic) Colombo Fausto, Catholic University, Milan (Italy) Damásio Manuel José, Lusófona University (Portugal) Głowacki Michał, University of Warsaw (Poland) Hasebrink Uwe, University of Hamburg (Germany) Heller Maria, Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary) Hibberd Matthew, University of Stirling (UK) Jevtović Zoran, University of Niš (Serbia) Jirák Jan, Charles University; Metropolitan University Prague (Czech Republic) Kejanlioğlu Beybin, Doğuş University (Turkey) Kleut Jelena, Editorial Assistant, University of Novi Sad (Serbia) Kunelius Risto, University of Tampere (Finland) Lauk Epp, University of Jyväskylä (Finland) Maigret Eric, Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle (France) Milojević Ana, University of Belgrade (Serbia) Nieminen Hannu, University of Helsinki (Finland) Olsson Tobias, Jönköping University (Sweden) Patriarche Geoffroy, Facultes universitaires Saint-Louis, Academie Louvain (Belgium) Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt Pille, University of Tartu (Estonia) Schrøder Kim Christian, Roskilde University (Denmark) Sorice Michele, CMCS – LUISS University, Rome (Italy) Stojković Branimir, University of Belgrade (Serbia) Sundin Ebba, Jönköping University (Sweeden) Terzis Georgios, Vesalius College, Brussels (Belgium); Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium); University of Oxford (UK) Titley Gavan, National University of Ireland (Ireland) Todorović Neda, University of Belgrade (Serbia) Tomanić Trivundža Ilija, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) Turčilo Lejla, University of Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) Türkoğlu Nurçay, Marmara University (Turkey) Vuksanović Divna, University of Arts (Serbia) Wimmer Jeffrey, Technical University Ilmenau (Germany)

Action IS0906

Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies

http://www.cost.eu

http://www.cost-transforming-audiences.eu

Special issue

Histories of media(ted) participation Edited by Nico Carpentier & Peter Dahlgren This special issue is resulting from the work of the Working Group on “Audience interactivity and participation” of the COST Action IS0906 “Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies”. COST is an intergovernmental framework for European Cooperation in Science and Technology, allowing the coordination of nationally-funded research at the European level. The Action “Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies” (20102014) is coordinating research efforts into the key transformations of European audiences within a changing media and communication environment, identifying their complex interrelationships with the social, cultural and political areas of European societies. A range of interconnected but distinct topics concerning audiences are being developed by four Working Groups: (1) New media genres, media literacy and trust in the media; (2) Audience interactivity and participation; (3) The role of media and ICT use for evolving social relationships; and (4) Audience transformations and social integration. Published with the additional support of

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ČASOPIS ZA UPRAVLJANJE KOMUNICIRANJEM COMMUNICATION MANAGEMENT QUARTERLY Broj 30, godina/Year IX Histories of media(ted) participation: An introduction Nico Carpentier, Peter Dahlgren

7–14

Fighting for a regime change through active listening Nelson Ribeiro

15–34

For an archeology of online participatory literary writing: Hypertext and hyperfiction Francesca Pasquali

35–54

Wrong turns towards revolution? Grassroots media and political participation in Italy (1967-2012) Fausto Colombo

55–78

Propaganda, critical media literacy and participation: Tracing memories of the Soviet media Natalija Mažeikienė, Kristina Juraitė The tales of the three digital cities of Amsterdam: The application of ICT for social and political participation Dennis Beckers, Peter van den Besselaar

79–104

105–130

Historicising the journalist–audience relationships in the internet era: A case study of the Slovenian newspaper Delo 131–156 Igor Vobič Instructions for authors

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ČASOPIS ZA UPRAVLJANJE KOMUNICIRANJEM COMMUNICATION MANAGEMENT QUARTERLY

Izdavači/Publishers: CDC – Centar za usmeravanje komunikacija, Novi Sad (Prethodno: PROTOCOL) / Communication Direction Center Fakultet političkih nauka, Beograd / Faculty of Political Sciences, Belgrade Glavni i odgovorni urednik/Editor: Miroljub Radojković, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade (Serbia) Urednik izdanja/Volume Editor: Boris Labudović Za izdavače/Official representatives: Ilija Vujačić, dekan Fakulteta političkih nauka u Beogradu/Dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade Nataša Jovović, direktor CDC-a/Director of CDC Adresa redakcije/Editorial office: Bulevar Mihajla Pupina 25, 21000 Novi Sad, Serbia Telefoni/fax: +381 (0)21 / 2100-925; [email protected] Lektura na srpskom jeziku/Proofreading in Serbian: Dragana Prodanović Prepress: Blur Studio, Novi Sad Štampa/Print: Futura, Petrovaradin Tiraž/Print run: 1.000 Štampanje časopisa finansijski je pomoglo Ministarstvo za nauku i tehnološki razvoj Republike Srbije Publication of the Journal is financially supported by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Serbia

CIP – Каталогизација у публикацији Библиотека Матице Српске, Нови Сад 316.77(05) CM : časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem = communication management quarterly / glavni i odgovorni urednik Miroljub Radojković. – God. 8, br. 30 (2014) – – Novi Sad : CDC–Centar za usmeravanje komunikacija ; Beograd : Fakultet političkih nauka, 2013–. – 24 cm Tromesečno. ISSN 1452-7405 COBISS.SR-ID 218473735

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Histories of media(ted) participation: An introduction Nico Carpentier1

Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium, and Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic

Peter Dahlgren

Lund University, Sweden

doi:10.5937/comman1430007C The attention spent on the notion of participation has oscillated over time and within different academic disciplines and societal fields. For instance, in democratic theory, where the notion of participation points to the citizens’ inclusion in the dynamics of decision-making, it has maintained a presence over time, throughout the history of more than 200 years of democratic revolution (Mouffe, 2000), where political processes have been geared towards more participation and equality, despite many setbacks and concerns which were also discursified, this time as a lack of participation (or a “democratic deficit”). If we follow a Longue Durée approach (Braudel, 1969)—with some critical distance and the acknowledgement that this approach comes at a cost, namely the loss of specificity and detail—we see the role of royalty and aristocracy being undermined by a bourgeoisie claiming its place in society, a process followed by further waves of democratization linked to universal suffrage, but also by further efforts towards egalization within all societal fields. Within media studies, in the recent years, participation re-established itself as a prominent concept, a process which is very much connected to the popularization of the internet, although this did not happen immediately. In a first (pre-web 2.0) phase, the two key signifiers of access and interaction gained dominance. Participation did not (completely) vanish from the theoretical 1

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Histories of media(ted) participation: An introduction

Nico Carpentier, Peter Dahlgren

scene, as especially the theoretical reflections on electronic (direct) democracy and new media offered a safe haven for participation. These elaborations partially continued the work of earlier participatory-democracy theorists such as Barber. For instance, in Strong Democracy Barber (1984: 289) focuses mainly on “interactive video communications”, but already is referring in a balanced way to the potential participatory use of networked computers. Only later, in the 2000s, in the web 2.0 phase, the concept of participation made a remarkable comeback to reach a prominent position. At the same time, these ‘new’ technologies in many cases have led to formulations of strong claims to novelty and uniqueness, in combination with processes of amnesia in relation to the societal roles of old media technologies. As Ekström et al. (2011: 4) write: “by overstating the newness of participatory media, the history of audience activity [and media participation] is made invisible and the present elusively vague.” Apart from the need for historical research for its own sake, and the need to show the complexities and differences over time by going back to periods “when old technologies where new” – to quote Marvin’s (1988) book title – historical research is also very necessary to compensate for the mythologies of novelty that characterize contemporary reflections about ‘new’ – or better: online – media. Today’s digital media landscape is of course in constant evolution, and it is important to understand how its patterns of development, not least in regard to its political economy, technical architecture, and socio-cultural usage, embody built-in contingencies that both engender and delimit its efficacy for democratic participation (Curran, Fenton and Freedman, 2012; Dahlgren, 2013). This special issue took on this challenge to combine historical research with the study of participatory media. This is not new. One of us, for instance, published in 2011 a rather detailed study of the first interactive film, Kinoautomat – One man and his house (1967), which was featured in the Czechoslovak pavilion of the 1967 International and Universal Exposition (Expo 67) in Montréal, Canada (Carpentier, 2011). During the projection of this film, spectators could influence the film’s storyline by voting for one of two possible storylines. The film theatre armchairs were equipped with voting technology, and a basic computer processed the votes. Despite its many limitations, which pushed it towards more minimalist forms of participation, Kinoautomat showed that also more unlikely communication technologies (such as film) could be used 8




to organize processes of audience decision-making, and that these participatory processes were organized as early as the 1960s (within the realm of film). Moreover, both editors have also collaborated with Francesca Pasquali – one of the authors in this special issue – in developing genealogies of media and political participation, which have heavily influenced this text (Carpentier, Dahlgren and Pasquali, 2013; Carpentier, Dahlgren and Pasquali, 2014). As always, other colleagues also helped pave the way. Above we already referred to Ekström et al.’s (2011) introduction of the edited volume History of Participatory Media. Politics and publics, 1750-2000. This very valuable contribution to the history of media participation uses a broad approach to media, incorporating participatory practices in relation to, for instance, fun fairs, exhibitions, cylinder phonographs, photocopies and museums. On the downside, and although the book mobilizes the theoretical distinction between interactivity and participation (mostly in its introduction, but also in some chapters, e.g. Axelsson, 2011), it uses a very broad approach towards participation, also including processes where participants hardly have any control2.

A brief definition of participation In this special issue, a more restrictive definition of participation is preferred and applied. The concept of participation, refers – according to us – to a situation where the actors involved in (formal or informal) decision-making processes are positioned towards each other through power relationships that are (to some extent) egalitarian. This political approach to (the definition of ) participation places significant emphasis on power sharing as a defining characteristic of participation. Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of participation is a prime example of this approach. In her seminal A Ladder of Citizen Participation article, she linked participation explicitly to power, saying “that citizen participation is a categorical term for citizen power” (Arnstein, 1969: 216). She continued: One particular example is Wisselgren’s (2011) chapter in this book, which discusses “reality TV as a participatory medium with a special focus on its social experimental character” (Wisselgren, 2011: 143). Although the chapter critically evaluates the difference between inviting “the audience to affect the outcome of the programme” and making “it possible to switch roles and become a participants” on the one hand and “sharing the power of the heavily capitalized global media industry” (Wisselgren, 2011: 154) on the other, it still uses the label of “participatory media” for these often exploitative media practices.

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It is the redistribution of power that enables the have-not citizens, presently excluded from the political and economic processes, to be deliberately included in the future. It is the strategy by which the have-nots join in determining how information is shared, goals and policies are set, tax resources are allocated, programs are operated, and benefits like contracts and patronage are parceled out. (Arnstein, 1969: 216) Arnstein developed a categorization of participation (the ‘ladder’), in which she distinguished three main categories (citizen power, tokenism, nonparticipation) and eight levels. The category of non-participation consists of two levels: manipulation and therapy. Tokenism has three levels, informing, consultation and placation. The last category is citizen power, which has three levels: partnership, delegated power and citizen control. This useful categorization system allows her to distinguish between processes that are participatory, and processes that are not (tokenism and non-participation). Another classic definition of participation that emphasizes the defining characteristic of power was developed by Pateman in her 1970 book Democratic Theory and Participation. Pateman distinguished between partial and full participation, where partial participation is defined as “a process in which two or more parties influence each other in the making of decisions but the final power to decide rests with one party only” (Pateman, 1970: 70). Full participation is seen as “a process where each individual member of a decision-making body has equal power to determine the outcome of decisions” (Pateman, 1970: 71). While such a process might at first glance be dismissed as utopian, we would argue that it not only shows the importance of power in defining participation, but that it also remains a fundamental normative vision within democratic thought. Democracy itself embodies a utopian dimension, yet those who value democracy do not dismiss it out of hand; its normative vision serves as a compass for political strategy and agency. What Pateman and other theorists inject is an analytic component that operates in tandem with the normative one, and it pivots on the notion of power. Hearn (2012), in his critical review of the major theories about power, reminds us that power relations are not equally distributed throughout society, but that power becomes concentrated in various centres. It is what he calls ‘dispositional’; it has structure. At the same time, however, he asserts a dialectical perspective of structure and agency: “Power is not matter of agency versus 10




structure, but of agencies in structure, which is part of the account of its variable distribution” (Hearn, 2011: 211–212). Various kinds of power structures can thus be understood as comprizing the major contingencies for participation. He further distinguishes between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’, which highlights the relationship between participation as agency and the structures of power relations in which it is embedded. Lastly, Hearn contrasts asymmetrical power with balanced power, underscoring the normative democratic ideals of checks, balances and accountability, as well as the view that the power of domination can and should be confronted by counter-power – which not least takes the form of participation.

The research projects in this special issue These logics of struggle, for instance, also apply to the cultural/symbolic realm and the media sphere, and their political dimension should be acknowledged. In other words, the representational is itself political and an arena of the participatory power struggle. The six articles in this special issue are a modest contribution to further our knowledge about the history of media participation. Embedded within the work of the Audience interactivity and participation Working Group 2 of the Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies Cost Action, they all focus on the 20th and 21st century histories of participation. Moreover, half of them write contextualized histories of the digital. Arguably, this is an indication that it might be time to abandon the concept of ‘new media’ and replace it by ‘online media’ and/or ‘digital media’. But these articles are also indicators of the importance of writing histories of the internet, connecting them with the analyses of other societal evolutions. Amongst the three articles that focus on the digital, is first of all Francesca Pasquali’s For an archeology of online participatory literary writing, which deals with the history of hypertext (and hyperfiction). Secondly, Dennis Beckers and Peter van den Besselaar analyze the history of Amsterdam’s three digital cities in The tales of the three digital cities of Amsterdam: The application of ICT for social and political participation. And finally, also Igor Vobič’s article, Historicising the journalist–audience relationships in the internet era: A case study of the Slovenian newspaper Delo, is situated in the digital era, with its analysis of how a Slovenian news paper has organized audience participation and conceptualized their CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 7–14 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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audience(s) from the mid-1990s onwards. These three articles each show, in their own ways, the interconnections between the online and different other societal fields, such as the cultural, the political and the journalistic. Moreover, they also demonstrate the complexities, fluidities and limitations of specific participatory practices. The three other articles in this special issue move towards earlier media forms. Fausto Colombo’s article, Wrong turns towards revolution? Grassroots media and political participation in Italy (1967-2012), takes a long-term and bird’s eye perspective on the connection between political and media participation, paying attention to a variety of media, including film, radio and the internet. In Fighting for a regime change through active listening, Nelson Ribeiro analyzes the ways that Portuguese listeners interacted with the BBC during World War II, in their attempts to change the broadcasting policies and content. The last article, Propaganda, critical media literacy and participation: Tracing memories of the Soviet media, by Natalija Mažeikienė and Kristina Juraitė, shifts the attention to a history where participation was not allowed, and analyzes how some of the prerequisites of participation were still present. Again, in these articles we can also find the complexities of participation, combined with the hopes and disappointments that participatory processes inevitably entail.

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References

Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216–224. Axelsson, B. (2011). History on the web. Museums, digital media, and participation. In Ekström, A., Jülich, S., Lundgren, F. & Wisselgren, P. (eds.), History of participatory media. Politics and publics. New York: Routledge, pp. 159–172. Barber, B. (1984). Strong democracy. Participatory politics for a new age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Braudel, F. (1969). Écrits sur l’Histoire [Writings on history]. Paris: Flammarion. Carpentier, N., Dahlgren, P. & Pasquali, F. (2013). Waves of media democratization. A brief history of contemporary participatory practices in the media sphere. Convergence, 19(3), 287–294. Carpentier, N., Dahlgren, P. & Pasquali, F. (2014). The democratic (media) revolution: A parallel history of political and media participation.” In Carpentier, N., Schrøder, K. & Lawrie, H. (eds.), Audience transformations. Shifting audience positions in late modernity. London: Routledge, pp. 123–141. Carpentier, N. (2011). Media and participation. A site of ideological-democratic struggle. Bristol: Intellect. Curran, J., Fenton, N. & Freedman, D. (2012). Misunderstanding the Internet. Abington: Routledge. Dahlgren, P. (2013). The political web: Media, participation and alternative democracy. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Ekström, A., Jülich, S., Lundgren, F. & Wisselgren, P. (2011). Participatory media in historical perspective: An introduction. In Ekström, A., Jülich, S., Lundgren, F. & Wisselgren, P. (eds.), History of participatory media. Politics and publics. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–9. Hearn, J. (2012). Theorizing power. Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan.


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Marvin, C. (1988). When old technologies were new: Thinking about electric communication in the late nineteenth century. New York: Oxford University Press. Mouffe, C. (2000). The democratic paradox. London: Verso. Pateman, C. (1970). Participation and democratic theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wisselgren, P. (2011). Expedition Robinson, reality TV, and the history of the social experiment. In Ekström, A., Jülich, S., Lundgren, F. & Wisselgren, P. (eds.), History of participatory media. Politics and publics. New York: Routledge, pp. 142–157.

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Fighting for a regime change through active listening Nelson Ribeiro1

Catholic University of Portugal, Portugal

doi:10.5937/comman1430025R Summary: This article presents a case of political participation through radio broadcasting during World War II. Focusing on how the Portuguese listeners interacted with the transborder broadcasts from the BBC, it demonstrates how politically engaged citizens struggled to use a foreign station to disseminate their views on the country’s political situation. Grounded on Pateman’s (1970) and Carpentier’s (2011) definitions of different levels of participation, it demonstrates that listeners were not given the ability to achieve full or maximal participation due to limitations imposed by organizational and political structures. Departing from this case, the article also reflects on how audiences interact with “traditional media”, questioning the widespread idea of radio listeners as passive agents and suggesting that an understanding of the political and social contexts in which media participation takes place is essential to ascertain the levels of empowerment given to the audiences. Keywords: audiences, BBC Portuguese Service, listener interaction, media participation, Oliveira Salazar, political participation; World War II

Introduction Over the last few years the usage of new media to promote political and social change has become a recurrent theme in media studies (Fraser, 2007; Howard, 2011; Negroponte, 1996; O’Connor, 2012; Sifry, 2011; Tapscott, 1998). For those who advocate that the digital technologies can be used to 1

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Fighting for a regime change through active listening

Nelson Ribeiro

spread democracy and fight against dictatorships, today’s new media environment is described as allowing all to participate and present their ideas in the public arena. Citizens are said to be empowered with the possibility of communicating to a mass audience: something that until the 1990s was reserved for those who possessed specific professional skills that allowed them to have access to broadcasting or publishing. With the internet, the separation between the sender and the receiver is said to have been broken, which has led to the production of a large amount of literature on how journalism and mass media will change and/or survive in this new media landscape (Curran, 2010; Franklin, 2012; Herbert and Thurman, 2007; Küng et al., 2008; McChesney, 2012). This has also propagated the idea that ordinary citizens are replacing journalism as the “fourth estate” since they now possess the technologies that enable them to be heard by the ruling elite. Furthermore, while the internet has made it possible for citizens to produce and disseminate content, bypassing the traditional gatekeepers that are part of the institutionalized forms in which journalism is produced, many have questioned the real impact of the content produced by citizens arguing that these are being given a false sense of empowerment instead of real power (Hindman, 2008; Morozov, 2011). Still, some have praised the new participatory platforms that have emerged in the internet, namely the social networking sites (Qualman, 2009), while others have called attention to the fact that these platforms’ main goal is not to generate a more plural debate in the public arena but to profit from the content produced by free labour (Langlois, 2011). Hand in hand with this discussion that has taken central stage in the academic debate, a simplistic way of looking into the role of the media in previous times has also become dominant. In fact, many of those who praise the active media consumers, or produsers in the definition of Axel Bruns (2008) – tend to present the relationship between the receivers and what is now called “traditional media” as being something linear. In fact, the interaction between audiences and the media is mostly described in a dichotomy fashion: while the audiences of new media are said to be active and to possess the possibility to fully participate in the construction of media content, the audiences of previous media forms are described as passive, as if their level of involvement with newspapers, radio and television has been always limited to a simple act of consumption.

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Following Stuart Hall’s seminal work (1973), the receivers of mass media were recognized the ability to decode media messages, therefore assuming a more active role than the one described by Lasswell (1927) or in the model of Shannon and Weaver (1949). However, if we look not at reception but at the level of production, the role of the mass media audience is still today mostly described as passive despite Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poaching published in 1992 in which he demonstrated media fans’ active role in recreating media texts. In this seminal work Jenkins examines how fans create fiction and other forms of expression through the appropriation of television shows. His analyses sheds light on the relationship between audiences and producers demonstrating how the former feel frustrated and powerlessness as a consequence of not being able to influence or interfere in programming decisions (1992: 121–122). Even though this has been an influential book, as Miroljub Radojković and Ana Milojević (2011) have demonstrated, still today the “traditional media” audience tends to be portrayed as a mere receiving structure with very little opportunity for interaction and participation in the production process. This, we believe, is the result of the fact that attention “has become focused on the participatory potential of ‘new’ media, which allows us to ignore the participatory capacities of ‘old’ media, and to underestimate their cultural importance and their institutional embeddedness in a capitalist economy” (Carpentier, 2009: 410). With this article, we aim to contribute to overcoming the lack of attention given to how audiences interact with “traditional media” and to add complexity to the relationship established between individuals and these previous media forms, demonstrating that those engaged in civic and political movements did take an active stance and struggled to use the media available at a certain period of time to promote social or political change. In other words one might say that with this article we intend to demonstrate that the active role of citizens in the media as a form of political participation is not something new created by the digital technologies but something that is grounded on the individuals’ political engagement which, as argued by Peter Dahlgren (1999), is a precondition for participation. Furthermore, we will also argue that limitations imposed on media participation have to be understood in a broader context focusing on political and social factors and not merely on technological issues since, as the case described below will demonstrate, restrictions imposed by organizational


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Nelson Ribeiro

and political structures can be more powerful in limiting audience participation than the lack of adequate technological appliances. We will illustrate media participation in the pre-internet period with the case of radio broadcasting in Portugal during World War II, demonstrating how Portuguese listeners interacted with foreign broadcasts, particularly the BBC, during a period in which radio was still considered a new medium. Questioning the widespread idea of radio as a unidirectional medium in which listening is usually presented as a mere passive action, we will analyze how politically engaged citizens struggled to use the British broadcasts to Portugal during the war as a means of undermining the dictatorship led by Oliveira Salazar that had ruled the country since 1933. Known as the Estado Novo (New State) it was a single-party regime that exercised severe control over individual rights, namely freedom of speech. All newspaper content was subjected to censorship while the national radio stations’ output was controlled through ownership forms, economic strangulation and also censorship of news bulletins and other major spoken content (Ribeiro, 2010). The data here presented was collected through archive research conducted in Portugal and the United Kingdom, namely at the BBC Written Archives in Caversham, the National Archives in Kew Gardens and the Historical Diplomatic Archive in Lisbon. The content of letters sent by Portuguese listeners was analyzed in order to determine their perception of the broadcasts along with their expectations as regards the effect that their feedback would have on the station’s editorial line. Documents produced by the Ministry of Information, the Foreign Office and the Portuguese diplomacy were also examined in order to develop an understanding of how governmental officials reacted to the audience engagement with the BBC. As we have discussed elsewhere, it was mostly due to censorship imposed by the Salazar regime on Portuguese media during World War II that listening to foreign broadcasters became a habit among several sectors of Portuguese society. International shortwave transmissions were then the only sources available to the majority of the population that presented updated information on the military and political developments of the war. Among the stations that broadcast in Portuguese, the BBC became the most reliable source due to the Anglophile environment that existed in the country and also the station’s strategy of focusing on news, as opposed to the transmissions from the Nazi’s Reichs Rundfunk Gesellschaft (RRG) that mostly aired blatant propaganda (Ribeiro, 2011). 18


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Even though the BBC Portuguese Service, that started to operate in June 1939, was used by the British government to promote its views on the war and to apply pressure to Salazar on several occasions, the strategy adopted by the Voice of London of promoting itself as “the voice of truth” clearly paid off, enabling the station to achieve high listenership. This was, of course, good news for the British that had a particular interest in Portugal during the initial phase of the war since the Lisbon government had signed, in March 1939, a Treaty of Friendship and Non-Aggression with Spain. This gave Portugal the role of “an intermediary between Spain and the western democracies” (Telo, 1998: 138) at a time during which Franco’s declared neutrality was not considered by the British Government as a real guarantee that Spain would not enter the war.2 Due to the small number of receivers available in Portugal, people would gather in private houses and public places to listen to the news from London, creating groups that functioned as social networks. Those who listened to the news of the day would pass it on to the other members of the group and a discussion on the military and political developments of the war would take place. The British station was made aware of listening habits through regular reports that it received from listeners and also from staff of the British Embassy in Lisbon. In fact, the BBC always encouraged listeners to provide feedback, which made it one of the first stations operating in Portugal that encouraged what we will designate as active listening, i.e. listener interaction with the producers providing feedback on the broadcasts. As will be discussed below, listeners went a step further than just providing feedback and used their interaction with the station to demand changes in the editorial line and to become active voices in the orientation of the broadcasts.

The BBC broadcasts to Portugal and the importance of listener’s feedback Assessing the public’s opinion on the broadcasts was considered very important by the Portuguese Service right from the start of its transmissions. The Service counted on the help of its panel listeners to achieve this. The members of the panel had heterogeneous social and cultural backgrounds, as they were supposed to reflect the diversity of Portuguese society, making it possible to deter2

“Conclusions of a meeting of the War Cabinet”, 4 November 1939, CAB/65/2/4.


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mine the reaction of different demographics.3 Moreover, the BBC also received, on a weekly basis, dozens of unsolicited letters from listeners. The majority of those that wrote belonged to the lower-middle class and one-third came from the upper and upper-middle class. This can be considered a fair reflection of the social make-up of Portuguese society.4 Nevertheless, the Corporation was not satisfied with these results and in 1943 it started to give particular attention to the feedback it received from upper class listeners, aiming to increase the appreciation of the Portuguese Service among the elite. By considering the need to conquer the upper class a priority, the Service adopted a policy that led to a decrease in the number of entertainment programmes presented by the main and most well-known announcer of the Service, Fernando Pessa. Known for his unique and humorous style of presentation, he had widespread appeal among the lower and middle class listeners but he was severely criticized by the upper class in the letters that reached Bush House in London, where the Portuguese Service was housed. Pessa, who had been a well-known announcer at the Portuguese public station before the war, was very much responsible for the BBC’s popularity. Besides reading the news, he presented several features, including those in which Hitler was ridiculed. His success among the majority of those who listened to the BBC was undeniable and he easily connected with listeners by using common everyday expressions that attracted attention and created an intimate relation with those who followed his broadcasts on a regular basis. Besides being hugely popular, he was considered a hero by many listeners who believed that he was in charge of the whole Service. However, despite the flattering feedback he received from the low and middle class listeners, the BBC became almost obsessed in 1943 with the need to appeal to the upper class. As a result, letters sent to London by the more educated listeners were given better credit and because these criticised Pessa the BBC decided to take action making him feel During the war the BBC established a panel of a few hundred regular listeners who reported back on a regular basis (Ribeiro, 2011: 302–303). Even though it remains unclear how people were selected and recruited to integrate the panel, by analysing the content of some of the letters sent to the BBC, it seems clear that the panel was intended to represent the different social classes and also to include people from different regions throughout Portugal.

3

4

According to the BBC Lisbon Observer, by May 1943 the audience of the Portuguese Service was composed as follows: upper class: 10%; upper-middle class: 30%; small shop-keepers, workmen and country people: 60%. (Cf. “BBC Survey of European Audiences – Portugal”, 25 May 1943, in the BBC Written Archives). Other BBC reports mention that the percentage of upper and upper middle class listeners represented approximately one-third of the total listeners.

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unwelcomed which led the Portuguese announcer to tender in his resignation and leave the Service in November 1943.5 Fearing the reaction from the majority of the listeners, his departure from the BBC was presented as being merely a holiday period. Nevertheless, this announcement was followed by some speculation about Pessa’s relations with the BBC, causing some reactions from regular listeners who wrote complaining about his absence at the microphone: It was with great regret that we heard Fernando Pessa’s farewell although the announcement made by the “Man with the Walking Stick” gave us the hope that we might not lose our announcer. At the same time, if it had only been a question of ordinary holidays there would have been no need for a farewell [...]. Pessa said: “Until another day...”; but when is that day?6 During December and the first few months of 1944, the regular letter writers and panel listeners constantly enquired as to when Pessa would return. A letter that reached the BBC said that “everybody in Lisbon knows he has left the BBC and why”, adding that “in consequence, the BBC has lost a large percentage of its listeners”.7 According to local reports this seemed to be the truth and the complaints that reached Bush House became overwhelming, which forced the BBC to invite Pessa to return to London. The invitation was done through the British Embassy in Lisbon8 and, as a consequence, he was back at the BBC microphones on 6 March 1944 and would continue to broadcast until June 1947. As this case demonstrates, listeners had a relevant role in the life of the BBC Portuguese Service. However, it was the Corporation that had the last word and it decided, in different periods of time, which demographics would be given more attention, i.e. which active listeners would be given more credit and would be able to influence the content and the style of presentation. In fact, this raises a question about how mass media treat their receivers differently depending on socio-economic variables. In this particular case, the BBC clearly allowed its upper class listeners to have an active role in the decisions that were 5

BBC internal documents sent by Mr. Willimore to Press Office (Lisbon Embassy), 5 October 1943, in the BBC Written Archives, R13/199/2.

6

“BBC Survey of European Audiences – Portugal”, 30 December 1943, in the BBC Written Archives.

7

“BBC Survey of European Audiences – Portugal”, 28 February 1944, in the BBC Written Archives.

8

Cf. Fernando Pessa’s testimony in Costa, 1996 :31.


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being made inside the station, while its middle and lower class listeners were allowed a lower level of participation. This means that the symbolic power of each segment of listeners did gave rise to different reactions inside the BBC that mostly empowered those who were perceived as being close to power. In relation to middle class listeners, as we have mentioned above, not only did they demand the return of Fernando Pessa to the BBC but they also requested that time slots ought to be reserved for popular programming in the construction of the programming schedule. The station gave in to these demands to a certain extent. However, what was at stake here was neither the BBC’s loyalty to the British government nor its positioning towards the Portuguese dictatorship. Nevertheless, many active listeners that were engaged in political movements and fought for a regime change in Portugal also interacted with the BBC expressing their views on how the station should take an assertive stance in the condemnation of a regime that restricted individual rights and that had clear ideological connections with the Axis. How did listeners express their political views to the British station and what were the consequences of this interaction? Can the role of active listeners be considered as political participation through the media? These are two questions that we intend to answer in the next section through an analysis of letters sent to the BBC by listeners who expressed their political beliefs and also through an understanding of the effect this feedback had on the daily life of the Service.

From media to political participation During World War II, and despite the existence of different phases in the relationship between the British Government (and therefore the BBC) and the Portuguese regime, the BBC’s editorial line was mostly marked by a cautious attitude regarding Salazar and the Estado Novo, which raised different reactions among the Portuguese listeners. Those who were in agreement with the Lisbon political regime did not have any strong reasons to protest against the Portuguese Service since it never directly attacked either Salazar or his Government. Even during the first half of 1944, when the exports of the precious metal tungsten from Portugal to Germany were addressed on the broadcasts, the BBC did not criticise the Estado Novo itself but instead focused only on the exports, avoiding references to the nature and the political positioning of the Portuguese regime. 22


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This cautious attitude did not prevent some moments of tension between the British and the Portuguese authorities. This happened mainly because Salazar expected that the Portuguese Service would praise his own work and be, like him, totally against news items that praised the Russians or criticised authoritarian forms of government. Nevertheless, and despite the official protests that the Portuguese Embassy presented to the Foreign Office in London about the BBC, until talks on tungsten exports and democracy were aired, which only occurred in 1944, there is no record of any complaint by listeners who defended the Estado Novo in relation to this official complaint about the BBC’s “too liberal and pro-democracy editorial line” (Ribeiro, 2011: 375). On the other hand, listeners not in favour of Salazar’s regime were disappointed by the BBC broadcasts and this sentiment grew as war progressed to the Allies’ advantage. Politically active citizens who could not openly express their political beliefs, due to the restrictions imposed on political association, actively wrote to the BBC commenting on the content of the broadcasts and criticizing what they considered to be an unjustified concern in pleasing Salazar and his regime. In 1941, after the Portuguese Service introduced talks and entertainment features to its regular schedule, and therefore was not only airing news, those who listened and were politically active felt that they had the right to express to the BBC their desire for a shift in the station’s editorial line. They intended for it to promote the need for a political change to occur in Portugal. This was considered even more crucial by those who were anti-regime, as most of the talks broadcast by the BBC during 1941 praised Salazar and his government: We democrats most indignantly protest against a talk given by Oscar da Silva broadcast by the BBC on 5th May, flattering those two rascals (Salazar and the Cardinal Patriarch) who robbed the Portuguese people of their liberty. Great Britain is losing many friends by such talks.9 Commenting on these reactions, the person responsible for the Portuguese Service at the time, R.E. Broughton, wrote to the Ministry of Information giving notice that the excessive praising of Salazar might not be the best strategy to attract more listeners to the British cause, meaning that the feedback provided 9

Letter from a listener from Setúbal to the BBC, quoted in a letter from R. E. Broughton (BBC Portuguese Service) to C.W. McCann (Ministry of Information), 12 September 1941, in the National Archives, FO 371/26818.


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by listeners did have some impact on the way the BBC officials perceived the path to be followed by the broadcasts: The question to be decided seems to be whether the broadcasting of talks in which the speakers identify themselves with the principles held by the Portuguese fascists and pro-German Catholics is going to bring them over to our side. Frankly I see no evidence to support this supposition, and I am convinced that nothing except the recognition that Great Britain will eventually win the war will make them change their sympathies.10 The internal documents of the Corporation show that the Estado Novo’s elite did not write to the BBC. They mention an absence of reactions from wellknown Portuguese individuals close to Salazar and his power structure. This meant that those from the upper classes that wrote to the station were mainly those who expected a change in the internal situation and were active and attempting to directly influence the course of political affairs. Writing in May 1941, a listener from Vila Nova de Gaia, a village located in the North of the country, mentioned how disappointed he was that the BBC broadcasts took for granted that the Portuguese people were united around Salazar and his policy. He was one of many who complained about the Corporation’s “compliance” with the Estado Novo: I have decided to reply to some of the news the BBC has been giving out. Referring to a leading article in the “Times” you state that Salazar represents the united will of the Portuguese people. There could not be a more mistaken idea. This person does not represent even 10%, because the Portuguese people are not in agreement with the crimes of which he had been the author. Besides, the Portuguese people are deeply attached to liberty and freedom of thought, which do not exist here. The “Times”, the English people and especially the BBC, have lost 30% of their adherents through that article of 29.4.41… It is not worth while you’re spending your time in praising Salazar. It will alienate some of your listeners altogether.11

Letter from a Lisbon listener to the BBC, quoted in a letter from R. E. Broughton to C.W. McCann, 12 September 1941, in the National Archives, FO 371/26818.

10

11

Letter from a listener from Vila Nova de Gaia to the BBC, quoted in a letter from R. E. Broughton to C.W. McCann, 12 September 1941, in the National Archives, FO 371/26818 (underlining in accordance to the original).

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The talks dealing with issues concerning the internal situation in Portugal were the ones that motivated least enthusiasm. Many listeners pointed out Salazar was not to be moved by pro-Estado Novo broadcasts and called the BBC’s attention to the fact that the Portuguese government was not truly hoping for an Allied victory but it was instead keeping good relations with both sides of the war. These kind of comments, such as the following from a listener in Estoril (near Lisbon), were intended to change the British perception about Salazar and to promote a more critical attitude towards his regime: The Portuguese Government is sitting on the fence, hoping for the best, as did some other small neutral countries with the result that we all know… The reason is that the Portuguese Government is not really convinced which side is going to win and will continue to pander to whichever side may get the better of the other…12 Another line of feedback provided by listeners tried to convince the BBC officials that they were misinformed about the political situation existing in Portugal and that the majority of the population was “not favourable to the present government in Portugal”.13 This kind of feedback clearly indicates that among those writing to the BBC were listeners belonging to the internal opposition. However, as this was very weak and not well organised at the time, the Press Attaché of the British Embassy in Lisbon, Marcus Cheke, was very cautious when analysing these comments. In a letter addressed to the Portuguese Section of the Ministry of Information, Cheke considered many of the letters to have emanated from “subversive political elements in Portugal who, primarily for motives of self-interest, wish to label Salazar and his Government as pro-German”.14 He also mentioned that the flattering of the Portuguese Head of Government was not such a bad policy as some letters that reached Bush House had mentioned: I am not in any way suggesting that adulatory essays on Dr. Salazar should be a regular item of the BBC programmes, but from time to time favourable references should certainly be made to the real achievements of the 12

Letter from a listener from Estoril to the BBC, quoted in a letter from R. E. Broughton to C.W. McCann, 12 September 1941, in the National Archives, FO 371/26818.

13

Letter from a listener from Vila Franca de Xira to the BBC, quoted in a letter from R. E. Broughton to C.W. McCann, 12 September 1941, in the National Archives, FO 371/26818.

14

Memorandum from Marcus Cheke (Lisbon Embassy) to Michael Stewart (Portuguese Section of the Ministry of Information), October 1941, in the National Archives, FO 371/26819.


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present Portuguese government. These are of the highest value in offsetting German propaganda which incessantly endeavours to identify British victory with a return to the disgraceful disorder of the pre-Salazar days. [...] To sum up, the BBC should eschew Portuguese internal politics: it should give plenty of “straight news”, and personal stories of British heroism: it should continue to ridicule and expose Hitler and the Nazis, [...] it should represent Britain as the seat of justice and fair play and of ordered freedom combined with justice.”15 By advocating that the broadcasts should continue on their path, not giving in to the negative feedback being received from some listeners, Marcus Cheke was of the opinion that the Portuguese Service should not “allow the relatively few anti-regime supporters to feel that they have the backing of the BBC.”16 Similar opinion was expressed by Colonel Pope who was responsible for the feedback on the BBC broadcasts until the nomination of the first Lisbon Representative which only took place in 1942: The principle grumblers in letters to the B.B.C. are, I am almost certain, opposers of the present regime, who are trying to use the B.B.C. as a tool for attacking the present regime, hence their excessive criticisms of your praise of the present regime. It is necessary, therefore, to strike a very careful balance here. Anything about Germany, for instance, is most acceptable, and don’t be too tame in your remarks. The general public like them, but the Germans here, of course, do not like the B.B.C.17 Although many of those who wrote to the BBC expected to receive the support of the British authorities in the condemnation of the Portuguese authoritarian regime, this support was not forthcoming. Furthermore, the Portuguese Service always maintained its distance from those that were expecting the BBC to play a more active role in terms of disseminating and promoting democratic values. This clearly reveals that active listening, in this case, understood to mean action taken by receivers that seek to participate in the construction of the content, did not ensure full participation since the final decision remained with the 15

16

Memorandum from Marcus Cheke (Lisbon Embassy) to Michael Stewart (Portuguese Section of the Ministry of Information), October 1941, in the National Archives, FO 371/26819 (underlining in accordance with the original).

Summary of report nos. 105 & 106 – from 21 September to 5 October 1941, in the National Archives, FO 371/26819.

17

Letter from Colonel Pope to R. E. Broughton, 4 October 1941, in the BBC Written Archives, EI/1165/4.

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producers, who therefore retained most of the power in the relationship. The BBC, with setting up a panel to assess listener feedback and appealing for listeners to write to Bush House, was in fact close to applying what Sidney Verba (1961) has defined as “pseudo-participation”, creating the feeling that listeners were empowered when this was not really the case. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that we cannot consider those who interacted with the BBC to be empowered, they did become a source of concern for the Portuguese government, which was made aware of the feedback sent to London.18 In a letter addressed to Salazar, the Portuguese Ambassador in London, Armindo Monteiro, stated how he was working to spread the idea among the British government that the letters produced by BBC listeners did not represent the national will and were written by a minority opposed to the Estado Novo. According to Monteiro, political opposition was so weak and so non-representative that it had no real presence in Portugal and, for this reason, its only form of action was to write letters to the BBC.19 As the war developed, many letters addressed to the Voice of London openly started to express the desire for political change in Lisbon. For some of those who listened, including an English resident in Lisbon who wrote in July 1943, it was clear that the Corporation had to make a choice between pleasing the regime in power and openly defending democratic values. Those who wrote to the station were well aware that the BBC had a difficult task: “If you speak of the advantage of democratic institutions and of Russia’s achievements, you upset the Government and the Nationalists and if you don’t, you disappoint the others.”20 It is clear that those opposing the Estado Novo did try to use the BBC as a vehicle for disseminating their arguments against the regime in power. Some believed that Britain, as a democracy, would not allow the Estado Novo to continue to exist once the war had ended and the other authoritarian regimes had been dismantled. Several letters tried to create the image that all those in Portugal who defended the British and the Allied forces were also all simultaneously against Salazar’s government: Confidential letter from Armindo Monteiro to Salazar, 16 September 1941, in Rosas, Barros and Oliveira, 1996: 183-184.

18

Confidential letter from Armindo Monteiro to Salazar, 16 September 1941, in Rosas, Barros and Oliveira, 1996: 185.

19

20

“BBC Survey of European Audiences – Portugal”, 25 March 1943, in the BBC Written Archives.


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Nearly 100% of the Anglophiles disapprove of your excessive friendliness towards a certain Government and certain rulers who, I affirm, are in complete disagreement with your thoughts and institutions. It is not my opinion, but that of many of my good compatriots, that the BBC ought to use less “soft soap”.21 As the war evolved, those who hoped for the end of Salazar’s regime started to become more confident about political change. The overthrow of Mussolini was very important in this particular regard. The news was first heard in Portugal through the BBC evening broadcast of 25 July 1943,22 and it was greeted with joy by all those who did not support Salazar’s government. Many of them gained new hope that a regime change would take place in Portugal and there was a significant rise in the number of letters sent to the BBC condemning the Estado Novo. The letters underlined the connections between the nature of the regimes headed by Mussolini and Salazar. Some expressed the idea that those opposing the Lisbon government were now more active than ever: These people [those opposing the government] – mostly of the artisan class – have been openly saying not only should the Portuguese Government have allowed free comment on Mussolini’s departure, but that the time was ripe for clearing up all scandals connected with profiteering, hoarding and the export of foodstuffs across the border [...]. In fact, as I write, it looks very much as if a determined effort may be in active gestation, having as its aim a modification of Portugal’s totalitarian regime.23 Despite its concern for not annoying the regime in power, after the opening of the Eastern Front, the BBC addressed the role of Russia in the war which caused some discomfort to Salazar. Nevertheless, even during the last phase of the war the broadcasts tended not to comment on Portugal’s internal situation. Furthermore, the BBC omitted news about strikes and social protests while pieces of news about the Government’s achievements could be regularly heard. This was not very well accepted by the more liberal listeners, who complained as a means of exercising pressure on the BBC so that it would introduce some alterations to its editorial line: 21

“BBC Survey of European Audiences – Portugal”, 16 July 1943, in the BBC Written Archives.

22

“BBC Survey of European Audiences – Portugal”, 30 October 1943, in the BBC Written Archives.

23

“BBC Survey of European Audiences – Portugal”, 10 September 1943, in the BBC Written Archives.

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We are well aware [...] that flattery is, very often, the foundation of diplomacy, but, in this instance, it would be better to keep silent so that no contradictions are apparent in a future which is not far off. Here one lives in a permanent atmosphere of rumours, having their origin in the scarcity of news worthy of credence.24 As time went by and an Allied victory became foreseeable, some of the listeners confessed their disappointment with the fact that the BBC, despite airing some talks on democracy, did not openly defend the implementation of a democratic regime in Portugal: [The Portuguese Service has never broadcast] even lightly, any criticism of the Fascist system and of the atrocities and persecutions practised by the Portuguese Government. [...] Nor [...] have we heard the slightest hope given to listeners that after the victory of the United Nations, the rights of the citizen, liberty of the press, and democracy for which the people of Portugal are wholeheartedly yearning, will be brought into being in Portugal.25 Churchill’s speech on 24 May 1944 was a big disappointment to those who expected Britain to impose a change on Portugal. By guaranteeing no interference in neutral countries, the British Prime Minister frustrated many BBC listeners in Portugal who had up to that point believed that the Allied forces would force the end of Salazar’s regime. Moreover, even after this speech, many regular listeners did not give up and continued to pressurize the BBC to alter its editorial line and to condemn the Lisbon government. Furthermore, the talks on democracy aired throughout 1944 (Ribeiro, 2013), together with several other features broadcast by the BBC after the liberation of Paris, were seen as a last hope that the British would impose democracy in the country. For those that expected external intervention, these talks were primarily seen as a first step by the British authorities to expose Portugal’s authoritarian regime. Nevertheless, Salazar’s survival instinct was stronger and led him to give in to the Allies’ demands in time to be able to negotiate his continuation in power after the conflict had finished. All those who had believed that it would be impossible for his regime to continue after the defeat of the Fascist and Nazi regimes were disappointed. 24

“BBC Survey of European Audiences – Portugal”, 30 October 1943, in the BBC Written Archives.

25

“BBC Survey of European Audiences – Portugal”, 16 May 1944, in the BBC Written Archives.


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Concluding Remarks The case of BBC broadcasts to Portugal during World War II clearly illustrates the unbalanced power relationship that existed between the producers (the BBC) and the receivers. Even though the latter were given the possibility to interact with the station, and did so due to their commitment to actively participate in a political change, the fact is that their attempts to influence the editorial line of the Voice of London did not achieve the proposed goals. Therefore, and although the feedback provided by listeners did have some impact, influencing some decisions and leading to internal debates inside the BBC on its editorial line, the active listening that took place did not achieve a level of power that would enable us to consider it as full participation. Furthermore, the audience was not treated equally, meaning that those who were perceived as possessing more symbolic social power were given higher credibility and therefore achieved greater influence over the station’s decisions. Even though there is no fixed definition of media participation, and it is a “highly fluid and contested notion” (Carpentier, 2007: 87) that has been used to describe “a wide variety of different situations by different people” (Pateman, 1970: 1), it does seem consensual that empowerment of the receiver is required for it to exist. This means that the receiver ought to be given the possibility of directly influencing media content. This was not the case with the BBC Portuguese Service. Listeners were urged to provide feedback or, in order words, they were given the opportunity to interact, but that did not mean that they were invited to participate in the construction of the station’s output. Instead of full participation, this configures a situation that Carole Pateman has defined as partial participation: “a process in which two or more parties influence each other in the making of decisions but the final power to decide rests with one party only” (Pateman, 1970: 70). In fact, the BBC provided access and encouraged its listeners to interact but retained the power of decision for itself. If we take a more maximalist version of the concept of participation, like the one defended by Nico Carpentier (2011), this case could be considered not as true media participation but merely as media interaction, i.e. a minimal form of participation in which “media professionals retain strong control over process and outcome” (2011: 26). In any case, irrespective of how we stretch the use of the concept of participation, it still remains clear that the Portuguese listeners of the BBC during World War II cannot be described as passive receivers, 30


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or atomised members of a mass, as audiences of “traditional media” tend to be presented in order to legitimise the theoretical dichotomy that seems to have been created between the audiences of digital and previous media forms. This, on the other hand, has helped to establish the idea that political participation via the media is something new brought about by the digital environment and which, therefore, cannot find any kind of parallel in the past, a notion that this case contradicts. We have argued that a simplistic vision of the role of the audience in broadcasting, reducing it to a passive attitude of consumption, has led us to neglect forms of participation and interaction developed by politically involved communities that, in different historical moments, have used “traditional media” to engage in the political debate. Looking back to the 20th century, we will find evidence of how politically engaged individuals have managed to participate in the media, even in authoritarian contexts, namely through the creation of clandestine newspapers and broadcasters. These examples, along with the one described in this article and others where audiences have had an active role in struggling to influence the editorial line of media organizations, do constitute cases of political participation through the media. Such cases can, however, only be understood when taking into account the context in which they take place, namely the power struggles involving all those who seek to determine the content produced and disseminated by the media. The case analysed herein highlights that the nature of the participation in mass media is dependent on power logics and can only be fully ascertained after it takes place, when a contextual analysis of the entire communication process can be conducted. Furthermore, it seems that to understand the origins of interactivity, we should not focus so much on the technology but rather on how social movements (engaged in political or social change) have used all the means at their disposal, in different periods of time, to give visibility to their ideas and proposed plans. This said, we agree with Rob Cover who, departing from Raymond Williams’ (1981) cultural materialist perspective, considers that interactivity should “not be understood as the ‘making available’ of a newly-invented technological tool but the extension to media technologies of a culturally-constituted desire for communication that is located in the lived expressions of culture” (Cover, 2006: 143).


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For an archeology of online participatory literary writing: Hypertext and hyperfiction Francesca Pasquali1

Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy

doi:10.5937/comman1430045P Summary: This article analyzes one of the roots of contemporary online participatory writing practices within the literary field, focusing on an object that had its theoretical heyday twenty years ago: hypertextual fiction. Invented in the sixties by social informatics visionary Ted Nelson, the word “hypertext” gained academic attention in the humanities in the early nineties with the works (among others) of George P. Landow, Paul Delany, David Bolter and Stuart Moulthrop. In 1992, in his review of Michal Joyce’s Afternoon (still credited as one of the first pieces of hypertext fiction) Robert Coover (1992) wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “much of the novel’s alleged power is embedded in the line […] [T]hrough print’s long history, there have been countless strategies to counter the line’s power […] but true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text”. Since then, hypertext started to be defined as an artefact empowering the reader to subvert the linear text and the author’s authority, and thus, within a post-structural and postmodern theoretical framework, deconstructing and subverting the very roots of power tout court. By addressing hypertext theory (a mixture of history of textual forms, of reading practices, and of technologies of memory, semiotics, poststructuralist and feminist theory, etc.) and tracing the influences of postmodern literature and the literary avant-gardes on hypertext fiction, the article will thus investigate both the construction of hypertext as a participatory “cultural object” – in Wendy Griswold’s (1994) terms – and the legacy of that theoretical debate and those artistic practices in contemporary reflections on online collaborative literary writing. Keywords: hypertext, collaborative fiction, literary theory, history of computing, media archaeology, cultural participation 1

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For an archeology of online participatory literary writing: Hypertext and hyperfiction

Francesca Pasquali

Introduction According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which first recorded its existence in 1993, a hypertext is a “text which does not form a single sequence and which may be read in various orders”, providing “text and graphics [...] interconnected in such a way that a reader of the material (as displayed at a computer terminal, etc.) can discontinue reading one document at certain points in order to consult other related matter” (Simpson and Weiner, 1993). Digital hypertexts had been first developed in the second half of the sixties; it was only in 1987, however, that they gained public attention when Apple decided to install on its computers free hypertextual software, called Hypercard. In the same year the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) held the first conference entirely dedicated to hypertext and hypermedia (AAVV, 1989). In the following years hypertexts became very fashionable, to the point that Norman Meyrowitz’s2 (1989) speech at that ACM conference debunked its rhetoric as he wondered whether hypertext would “reduce cholesterol, too”. Hypertexts were not only fashionable, however: they were one of the most successful areas of experimentation in computer sciences and their associative structure was extremely influential in the developing of the world wide web at the beginnings of the nineties. In 1999 the website of the 10th ACM Conference on hypertext and hypermedia was opened by this statement: “much has changed in this field since the first workshop in 1987. Most notably, the WWW became a de-facto standard and brought the notion of hypertext to millions of users” (http://www.kom.e-technik.tu-darmstadt.de/%7Eht99/). This statement is the best acknowledgment of the hypertext success; paradoxically, it also acknowledges the fact that hypertext, as such, had become obsolete, collapsing under the success of the hypertextual structure of world wide web. Nowadays, hypertexts may be little more then a curiosity for media archaeologists, but going back to that debate, with all its hype and rhetoric, can still be of some interest not only for those interested in the development of digital literature but also for scholars investigating, more broadly technological mediated practices of participation. From 1987 to the mid-nineties, hypertexts become an interdisciplinary crossroads, connecting people interested in humancomputer interaction, social informatics, literary theory and the arts. Hypertext 2

Norman Meyrowitz is the creator of Intermedia, a didactic hypertextual system used in the eighties at Brown University.

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theory (a mix of informatics, history of textual forms and reading practices, semiotics and post-structuralism, feminist theory, etc.) was indeed one of the main fields where people started to reflect on what happens when author/text/ reader interaction meets interactivity. Moreover, relying on a series of different circumstances (circumstances that we will address later on), hypertext was “shaped” by hypertext theory as a participatory tool useful for subverting the dominant cultural paradigm. Starting from a social shaping of technology (SST) approach, this essay will investigate the construction of hypertext as a participatory “cultural object” – i.e. a shared significance embodied in form (Griswold, 1994). Thinking of hypertext as “cultural object” – more than as a technology and / or medium –means working on it as a construct, investing the term “hypertext” itself with social meanings that cross both the history of hypertext as technological artefact and the history of “hypertextuality” as a theoretical definition of a specific type of text. From a SST-perspective, the “material” production and adoption of a technological artefact cannot be separated from the discourses and imaginaries that surround it and that, in turn, needs to deal with the various concrete configurations of the technology in itself (see for example Flichy, 1995). In this perspective the history of hypertext technology and the history of the idea of hypertext in their intermingling become the place of articulation of what Carolyn Marvin (1988) defines the “common sense” of a technology that drives (although not exclusively and not hegemonically) the way in which a new cultural resource is distributed and embedded in society. After addressing both the history of hypertext as a technological artefact and hypertext theory (and the influences of postmodern literature and the literary avant-gardes on hypertext fiction) the essay will discuss some of the contradictions of that debate still relevant for those interested in participation in and through the media (Carpentier, 2007) in the contemporary cultural environment. There hypertext is nothing more than a curiosity for media archaeologists, while users’ participation, spanning from increased interactivity to content generation, has become more present in the literary field – not to mention the artistic field (Graham, 2010) – and definitely common in contemporary cultural scenarios.


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Hypertexts and the “home computer revolution” The first major area of discourse that built hypertexts as participatory texts is connected with the emergence, in the sixties, of a number of theories and visions on emancipatory and political uses of informatics. Hypertext is placed within the fundamental intersection (described by Flichy, 1999, 2001) between the academic computational culture and Californian countercultures that shaped – well before the material advent of personal computers (Ceruzzi, 1998) and computers networks (Abbate, 1999) – the idea of computers and computer networks as a means of social interaction. These technological developments soon became seen as resources for empowering both individuals and communities. From Vannevar Bush’s (1945) Memex (an analogue mnemonic machine considered to be among the precursors of the hypertext idea) through Douglas Engelbart’s oN-Line System (Nyce and Kahn, 1991) from the 1960s, the hypertext associative structure is indeed linked to the idea of mind-machine isomorphism: hypertexts were in fact recognized as sophisticated, interactive “tool for thought” (Rheingold, 2000) empowering personal intellectual performances and creativity. However, if we look at the social history of hypertextual technology we see that the definition of hypertexts as “tools for thought” (Rheingold, 2000) blurs with another powerful idea that started to spread in the late sixties: the idea of computers as “tools of conviviality” (Pasquali, 2003). In the developing of hypertexts, a significant role was in fact played by the new cultural climate of the seventies, when computer cultures merged with a broader counter-cultural political framework, with the consequence that computers started to be defined as amplifiers of imagination and as a means of personal and collective emancipation (Levy, 1984; Woolley, 1992). Close to pacifism, ecology movements, pop culture and the “psychedelic revolution”, anti-authoritarian computer subcultures of the west coast positioned themselves against the exclusive connection between computer research and the academic, economic, military and political establishments. The idea was to make technologies accessible, transforming them from “instruments of oppression” into “tools of liberation” for society and of personal creativity. More politically oriented groups, close to the civil rights movements, also played an important role, igniting different projects meant to bring computer resources to communities and the people. Projects like Com38


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munity Memory – established in 1973 in Berkeley and credited to be the first public, computerized BBS – were designed around the idea of low cost computers as a resource of democratization and civic participation (Crosby, 1995). Quoting Ivan Illich’s (1973) influential book, we might say computers started to be considered “tools of conviviality”, extracted (both in their production and use) from technocratic control and incorporated into common people’s everyday life. In this complex scenario, mirroring the cultural and political participatory orientation of sixties’ counter-cultures and social movements (Carpentier, Dahlgren and Pasquali, 2014), computers stood for “symbols of hope for a new populism in which citizens would band together to run information resources and local government” (Turkle, 1984: 172). Hypertexts were at the very heart of this scenario, thanks to one of its pioneers, Ted Nelson, whose books can be considered a real manifesto of the new convivial sensibility. In The Home Computer Revolution (1977), for example, Nelson envisioned the advent of direct, immediate, personal and domestic uses of the computer: a new computing era in which interaction was no longer framed in its mere technical dimension, but was conceived in its fully cultural dimension as a form of participation in public life. In Computer Lib/Dream Machine (1974), Nelson had also proclaimed the “liberation” of the computer from big industries control and a computer-enhanced “liberation”, and he has defined computers as “dream machines” and as the new frontier of personal freedom and democracy. In Computer Lib, Nelson stated that the importance of computers resides not only in their capacity for calculation, but also in the fact that they would enable new generations of media undertakings with the audience in mind (Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, 2003: 301). These new media experiences should be designed within a radical, open publishing network that Nelson was studying since the mid-sixties when he conceived the Xanadu project (from ST Coleridge’s Kubla Khan): a universal publication system (inspired by literary intertextuality) based on computer networks and on digital text with an associative architecture (Nelson, 1990). The goal of Xanadu was the democratization of knowledge through the expansion of access to information, increased possibilities of interaction with the content, and the possibility for users to participate directly in the creation of new content. To define this project, in 1965, Nelson coined the word “hypertext” (Nelson, 1992). CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 35–54 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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Hyperfiction, interactive fiction and postmodern narrative Soon after its Apple diffusion to the broader public and its ACM canonization as a specific area of study, hypertext software started to be used in order to write novels and fictional texts. While Michael Joyce’s Afternoon (1987-1992) is probably the only hypernovel known by the wide literary public, there are other “classic” literary hypertexts like John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse (1991), Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1991a), Jayne Yellowlees Douglas’ I Have Said Nothing (1994), Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1994), and those collected in the 1991 special issue of the UC Davies creative writing journal Writing on the Edge (Moulthrop, 1991b), as well as the “constructive” (Joyce, 1988) hypertext novels Hypertext Hotel started by Robert Coover in 1992/1993 and The Unknown by William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton and Frank Marquardt (1999). After the limited but highly significant popularity they gained in the early nineties, hypernovels continued to be produced both offline and on the web, and today hyperfiction is part of the bigger literary field named “electronic literature”3. Pieces of hyperfiction were for example published in the Cybertext yearbook 2000-2006 (http://cybertext.hum.jyu.fi/index. php?browsebook=8and), some were included in the Electronic Literature Collection published by Electronic Literature Organization (Hayles et al., 2006; Borràs et al., 2011), while some others were presented at the Electronic Literature Exhibit at the Modern Language Association 2012 Convention (http:// dtc-wsuv.org/mla2012/). However, within electronic literature, hyperfiction constitutes a very coherent literary corpus (Ensslin, 2007) that has raised its own critical practices devoted to the study of hypernovels within a very broad network of cultural references, both digital and in print. Even if hyperfiction is much more complex in its textual structure and in the levels of interactivity it allows (Ryan, 2005), it has been compared, for example, to “interactive fiction”: a genre of fictional textuality, whose digital variations had some success in the eighties, based both on the experimentation with human/computer interaction/dialogue and with computer adventure games (Montfort, 2003). We are not going to discuss here the distinction between electronic, ergodic or cyber literature. See among others Aarseth, 1997, Murray, 1997, McGann, 2001, Hayles, 2002, Landow, 2006.

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In tracing an archaeology of hypertext as digital text, it is impossible not to mention interactive fiction but if we look at hyperfiction as a literary genre we see a much broader network of cultural references connecting hypertext to a long tradition of literary experimentation in print. On the one side hypertext fiction is connected to the history of combinatory text and to those textgenerating mechanisms (Gitelman, 1999) that were very popular in literary avant-gardes back in the fifties and sixties (Bolter, 1991), such as William Burroughs’ re-actualization of the Dadaist technique of cut-up, as well as Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) and the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) experiments in story making mechanisms and techniques (Campagnoli and Hersant, 1973; Eruli, 1994). In cut-up and combinatory texts, like in hypertexts, the very materiality of the text is up for discussion; quoting Jane Yellowlees Douglas (2000), hyperfiction dialogues with other “books without pages and novels without endings” playing with printed book surface and linearity. Among the authors mentioned in establishing the hypertextual literary tradition one may find Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, George Perec and the broader (and highly controversial in its definition) field of so-called “postmodern fiction” (McHale, 1987)4. More generally, this stance can also be found in the early nineties, during the second wave (Dezeuze, 2010) of attention toward new relations between art, literary text and the audience, which became connected with digital and video art and postmodern culture (Gere and Gardiner 2010); this second wave followed the first wave, in the sixties and seventies, of participatory engagement of artistic and literary avant-garde (Popper, 1975). In this cultural climate, it is not surprising then that the most important literary acknowledgement to hyperfiction in the nineties was awarded in 1992 when postmodern author Robert Coover reviewed Michal Joyce’s Afternoon in The New York Times Book Review: “much of the novel’s alleged power”, Coover (1992) wrote, is embedded in the line […] through print’s long history, there have been countless strategies to counter the line’s power […] but true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text. It is not possible to enter here the huge debate on postmodernism and on postmodern fiction. For a synthesis see Bertens, 1995.

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Hypertext technology, in Coover’s perspective, made it possible to achieve what postmodern fiction had tried to do for a long time: break the traditional time structure (beginning, development, end) of narration, open different plots within a story, and question the very “end” of stories. In postmodern narratives these objectives were pursued (or at least evoked) by staging a multiplicity of contradictory events and timelines, by subverting the linearity of the plot (thanks to digressions, loops, repetitions in different contexts, recursive structures, mises en abyme and metalepsis), and short-circuiting the ends of stories through the establishment of a circular pattern in the text (on the model of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) or through the suspension of all closure – e.g., Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (1973) concludes with the indefiniteness of the word “etc.” – or through the presence of two or more mutually exclusive endings – famous examples, both published in 1969, being Robert Coover’s The Babysitter and John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman. What in postmodern fiction was evoked by playing with and within the material constraints of printed books, in hypertext fiction was the norm and was embedded in its technological affordances, calling for user activity in order to actualize the different reading paths and plots within the virtual structure of pages and hyperlink of the novel.

Hypertext and post-structural literary theory Following the popularity gained by hyperfiction in creative writing classes, and the adoption of a hypertextual system as archiving technologies and teaching tools within Humanities departments in the US, hypertexts and hyperfiction came under the focus of literary scholars (Delany and Landow, 1991, 1993). Semiotics, narratology and reader-response criticism were invoked to frame pragmatic functioning, multilinear plot construction, and reader activity of hypertexts (Aarseth, 1997; Douglas, 2000; Liestøl, 1994; Murray, 1997; CornisPope, 2000); it was the meeting of hypertext with post-structuralism, however, that had the biggest impact in structuring the participatory aura of hypertexts. In 1992 George P. Landow published Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, a very influential book whose opening reads: “when designers of computer software examine the pages of Glas or On Grammatology, they encounter a digitalized, hypertextual Derrida; and when 42


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literary theorists examine Literary Machines, they encounter a deconstructionist or poststructuralist Nelson. These shocks of recognition can occur because over the past decade critical theory and computer hypertext, apparently unconnected areas of inquiry, have increasingly converged [...] working often, but not always, in ignorance of each other; writers in these areas offer evidence that provide us a way into the contemporary episteme in the midst of major changes” (1992: 2). According to Landow, hypertext embodies Roland Barthes’ (1970) “writerly” text (a text that establishes a multilateral relationship between text and reader, opening the plurality of the language that is traditionally hidden by the material surface of traditional printed text). The reader activity necessary to translate hypertexts from the potentiality of its “virtual” status to an “actual” text (Lévy, 1995) is the ideal answer to Michel Foucault’s (1969) reflection on the disciplinary relations between print technology, the oeuvre and authorship. Barthes and Foucault were not the only ones called forth in structuring hypertext theory; in Landow’s eclectic book Bachtin’s polifony and multivocality are also evoked, and the deconstruction operated by hypertext of the very idea of a textual coherent body is associated to Donna Haraway’s (1991) “cyborgs”, a metaphor collapsing the technical, with the organic, the mythic, the textual, and the political. In Landow’s perspective not only there was a perfect correspondence between hypertext’s open textuality and post-structuralism: hypertext was also a participatory tool that could be of high usefulness in the classroom, directly engaging students in literary criticism and theory. In the late eighties he started three hypertext programmes, one devoted to the work of Alfred Tennyson (In memoriam Web), another devoted to Dickens’ Great Expectations (the Dickens Web) and a third – a larger, and still running on the internet, project – devoted to Victorian culture (The Victorian web: http://www.victorianweb.org/misc/ vwintro.html). While Landow (1992, 1994) has probably been the most influential voice in hypertheory, other scholars worked on the convergence between hypertext and post-structuralism. Gregory Ulmer (1990), for example, wrote a book comparing Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction to the fluidity of hypertextual corpora that blurs the distinctions between the text and the different discourses around the text (for instance, critical discourse). Similarly, Stuart Moulthrop (1991c: 296) defined hypertext as a “deconstructive” technology to be applied to linear texts as a tool to open their inner CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 35–54 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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multiplicity, and elsewhere (1994) described hypertexts in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome (1980): a conceptual tool which was used (amongst other applications) for analyzing the constitution and reception of a book that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in the text.

The politics of hypertexts In the early nineties hypertexts were among the most frequently cited technologies to talk about the pluralisation of information sources and the increased access for the people (and not only for cultural élites and professionals) to content creation and management. Hypertext was used in order to develop different projects of social interest within academia and civil society. In one of the first collections of essays devoted to hypertext (Berk and Devlin, 1991), for instance, we find two hypertexts developed in Canada by local media and devoted respectively to collect information on Hiv and to give useful information to new immigrants in the local area (MacPhail, 1991). Let’s also not forget that in many US universities hypertext was hailed as a device for re-conceiving literary curricula so as to involve students, opening up a space for investigating new connections within the literary corpus, and challenging the naturalised power of the literary canon. Very ambitious under this perspective was The Brown University Women Writer Project developed in collaboration among the University of Pennsylvania, the University of New Hampshire and the Texas A&M. The project, one that is still successfully running, was hypertextual and networked (every workstation was connected to the others via Ethernet), and it was devoted to the collection and the study of the entire female literary production, in English, in the period between 1330 and 1830, aiming to enhance the visibility of women’s writing within the academic literary curricula (http://www.wwp.brown.edu). Writing and reading a hypertext, thus, was seen as a political gesture: asking for readers’ performances in order to move from virtuality to actuality, hypertext started to be defined as an artefact empowering the reader to subvert the linear text and the author’s authority. Within a post-structural and postmodern theoretical framework, such an artefact was claimed to deconstruct and subvert the very roots of power tout court. Hypertexts were claimed to reveal the disciplinary power of authorship, blurring the roles of the author and the reader; deconstructing text linearity, hypertexts were recognised to act upon narrative 44


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devices and their teleological order; in dematerializing the text, hypertexts were credited with the power to demystify the taken-for-grantedness of print culture. In this perspective, hypertext was an example of those artistic forms that shortly afterwards began to be called “relational” art on the basis of the success of the book of Nicolas Bourriaud (1998) in which meaning is elaborated collectively through interpersonal relations, and a truly “convivial” technology (Illich, 1973), one that not only offers an open access to information but that also enhances the reader participation in the production of the text, undermining a naturalized cultural order – in fact a historical outcome of modernity (Williams, 1976) – based on the separation between production and consumption, and between author and reader (Hamilton, 2003). Although the development of hypertext technology is firmly connected with the studies of human/computer interaction, the intersection – in the material history of hypertext – of the different discourses that we have seen above has thus loaded hypertexts with a strong participatory dimension that widely transcend the idea of computer interactivity. However, hypertext is also an interactive text5, and this circumstance does have some relevance. In hypertext, readers’ performativity is situated within a range of choices already made by the hypertext author, and it works within the interactive frame offered by the software. Only starting from a set of given options and abiding to already established interactive patterns (no matter how complex and flexible they are) the reader can structure his/her own choices. The awareness that the participatory process is structured by hypertext interactivity entails two consequences. On the one side it shows that hypertext provides the very same freedom that was warranted in those artistic and literary works Umberto Eco (1962) named “open works”: the possibilities of interaction given to readers and viewers by the works’ openness, Eco acknowledged, always operates within a given field of relations, and participation is always given along an “axis spanning the two extremes of constraints and openness” (Dezeuze, 2010: 12). On the other side, exactly as in other “do-it-yourself ” artwork (be it digital or not), in reading a hypertext that participation takes place within an interactive and thus controlled framework. 5

This is not the place to address the multidimensionality of the “interactivity” concept (McMillan, 2002), but beyond all the different definitions, one should not forget that interactivity is always a “style of interaction control” (Guedj et al., 1980) that enables multidirectional communication (Markus, 1990).


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The consonance of hypertexts with post-structuralism has been described primarily in terms of a fulfilment by hypertext technology of post-structuralist theoretical assumptions. As David Bolter (1991: 143) put it: “what is unnatural in print becomes natural in the electronic medium and will soon no longer need saying at all because it can be shown”. Despite Bolter’s assumptions, if we look at the tension between freedom and control in interactive textuality, it is evident that the goal of post-structuralism is not to subvert the primacy of production in favour of consumption, or the primacy of the author in favour of the reader. On the contrary, post-structuralism’s main concern lies in its constant reminding of the fact that power relations are always inscribed in language and texts, and should be deconstructed in reference to specific contexts in which they perform, even when there is a reversal of power relations (from production to consumption) and when, as in hypertext, authors’ authority is scaled by readers’ performances. The risks connected to the naturalization of hypertext’s interactive structure (and to the betrayal of the post-structuralist ambitions) were evident to (some) scholars addressing hypertheory. Stuart Moulthrop (1991d, 1994) for instance spoke of the need to build hypertexts that had in themselves the keys of their own “deconstruction”. He exemplifies this practice by looking at John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse (1991). In this hyperfiction the tension between the opening / closing of the text is explicitly evoked through a “script” named “Porno Recursion”. If activated, this script starts a loop that, in a short time, saturates the RAM, causing the shutdown of the programme and thus forcing the reader to turn off the computer. However, the reader is given the opportunity to consider the sequence of orders and to decide whether to activate the script or not: readers can make sure that nothing happens as long as they do not succumb to the seductive surface of the “Porno Recursion”. In Stuart Moulthrop’s (1991d: 76, 77) words, the “jump into the infrastructure in Porno Recursion gives hypermedia fiction a critical agenda” and it has the double goal to “spoil our fun, deconstruct its entertainment value, and by extension, to question the value of each ‘entertainment’ that is based on an interactive system”. Undermining the very act of participation, the script thus draws us toward a participatory writing and reading that stimulates the readers reflectivity on their performance, positioning them between their action and the interpretation of the contextual consequences of their actions. In this per46


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spective, probably, the most important legacy of post-structuralism for a theory of hypertexts (and, more generally, for do-it-yourself art works) can be found in its work against the order of the signified, in favour of the signifier. In hypertexts, the discursive and material devices that are used to control the text and its interpretations and meanings, are made visible (or at least can be made visible), while the reader participates in the construction / deconstruction of the text. Readers’ actions on the surface of the screen (clicking links, following paths, etc.) in hypertext continuously displaces him/her from the content of the text focusing his/her attention at text’s structural organization. As Richard Lanham (1989: 5) puts it: “the textual surface is now a malleable and self-conscious one ... [it] has become permanently bi-stable. We are always looking first at it and then through it – at the structure, the design and through it for the story, the concept, the point”. But of course, once again, this is not “natural”. It highlights reader reflexivity on his/her reading practices both when s/he is “looking at” the text and when s/he “looks through” the text. Indeed, if on the one side the immersion in the story denies the work needed to produce the text, from the other side the automatic adherence to the patterns of interaction provided by the text itself ends by denying, paradoxically, the very conditions of participation in the production of the text opened by hypertexts.

Conclusion In 1991 the political agenda, evoked by Stuart Moulthrop, was mainly directed against the seduction of the digital surfaces and the paradoxical “immersive” reading in the mesmerizing combinatory “surface” of postmodern fiction, which might offer, indeed, a perfect expression of Jean Baudrillard’s (1981) “hyperreality”. Far from being emancipatory and participatory, hypertext might provide the reader with an illusion of autonomy, while actually deeply shaping his/her reading and stifling his/her autonomy in text interpretation. Hypertext (and combinatory text) would be a form of “supervised” literature masked in the demagogic rhetoric of text democratization (Pomian and Souchier, 1988). In this perspective, hypertext was fully compromised with an issue that was raised more generally in reference to digital art and postmodern literature: they were often blamed for being “neo-conservative” both by artists, literary authors and cultural critics. For example, as pointed out by Dezeuze (2010: 12), Bruce CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 35–54 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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Nauman’s critical position toward those participatory postmodern artistic practices he defined “game playing”, involve calling in its own work for the demystification of the illusion of audience participation through artistic environments that were mobilising “devices of confinement, oppression and control”. While Hal Foster (1985: xii), in one of the most influential books on postmodernism, distinguishes between “postmodern reaction” and a “postmodernism of resistance”, a counter-practice which on the contrary is “not only against the official culture of modernism but also to the ‘false normativity’ of a reactionary postmodernism. Not least we must recall Fredric Jameson’s (1984) critical definition of postmodernism as the “cultural logic of late capitalism”. Today, screens and virtuality have become a substantial part of everyday life. This implies that the political agenda of digital text should be oriented towards a better understanding of the very conditions and contradiction of participation through interactivity. As we have seen, hypertheory, as well as the practice of writing and reading hypertexts and hyperfiction, have been of significant importance to historically contextualize and theoretically discuss participatory processes in digital writing and within the literary field. Placed at the convergence point of counter-cultures, post-structuralism and postmodern theory, hypertexts could embody a paradigmatic form of convivial and participatory technology. However, if it is true – as claimed by Landow (1992, 1994) – that hypertext epitomises the convergence between computer science and post-structuralist literary theory, and it is configured as a radically participatory text working on the power inscribed in the language and textuality, it is equally true that this participatory value cannot claim any naturalness whatsoever. Thanks to the shift they instigate (through the reader performativity) from the content of the text to the very conditions of textual production, hypertexts were theorized as revealing that the strong dichotomy between text production and consumption is a social and discursive constructum, not a datum. However, other scholars argued that this very same convergence between reader perfomativity and the hypertext’s open structure should not become taken for granted. Otherwise there is the risk of losing all the demystifying power of hypertext, turning the participatory potentialities of interactivity into tokens of control. This is a risk glimpsed by hypertextual scholars and postmodern cultural analysts twenty years ago. Nowadays, it is seriously taken into consideration by art 48


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scholars who suggest that the participatory art forms and relational aesthetics have become hegemonic (Bishop, 2010) and by contemporary participatory theorists who are debating the risks and opportunities opened by the complex and ambiguous links between interactivity, connectivity (van Dijck, 2013) and participatory practices (Carpentier, 2011; Jenkins and Carpentier, 2013) within a networked society.

References AAVV (1989). Hypertext 1987: Proceedings. New York: ACM. Accessed 28.07.2013. URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=317426&CFID=350 354724&CFTOKEN=27351066. Aarseth, E. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Abbate, J. (1999). Inventing the Internet. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. Barthes, R. (1970). S/Z. Paris: Seuil. Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacres et simulation [Simulacra and simulation]. Paris: Éditions Galilée. Berk, E. & Devlin, J. (eds.) (1991). Hypertext/Hypermedia handbook. New York: Intertext/McGraw-Hill. Bertens, H. (1995). The idea of the postmodern: A history. London, New York: Routledge. Bishop, C. (2010). Antagonism and relational aestetics. In Dezeuze, A. (ed.), The ‘do-it-yourself ’ artwork: Participation from Fluxus to new media. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 257–280. Bolter, J. D. (1991). Writing space: The computer, hypertext, and the history of writing. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. Borràs, L., Memmott, T., Raley, R., & Stefans, B. (eds.) (2011). Electronic literature collection. Volume two. Cambridge, Mass.: Electronic Literature Organization. Accessed 28.07.2013. URL: http://collection.eliterature.org/2/ extra/about.html.


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Bourriaud, N. (1998). Esthétique relationnelle [Relational aesthetics]. Dijon: Les presses du réel. Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 641–649. Campagnoli, R. & Hersant, Y. (eds.) (1973). OULIPO – La littérature potentielle (Créations Re-créations Récréations). Paris: Gallimard. Carpentier, N. (2007). Participation and media. In Cammaerts, B. & Carpentier, N. (eds.), Reclaiming the media communication rights and democratic media roles, London: Intellect, pp. 87–91. Carpentier, N. (2011). The concept of participation: If they have access and interact, do they really participate?”. CM: Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem: Communication Management Quarterly, 6(21), 13–36. Carpentier, N., Dahlgren, P. & Pasquali, F. (2014). The democratic (media) revolution: A parallel genealogy of political and media participation. In Carpentier, N., Schroder, K. & Hallett, L. (eds.), Audience transformations: Shifting audience positions in late modernity. London: Routledge, pp. 123–141. Ceruzzi, P. E. (1998). A history of modern computing. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. Coover, R. (1992). The end of books. New York Times Book Review, June 21, 1, 23–25. Coover, R., et al. (1993). The Hypertext Hotel. Providence, Mass: Brown University. Accessed 25.11.2013. URL: http://netlern.net/hyperdis/hyphotel/. Cornis-Pope, M. (2000). Hypertextual and networked communication in undergraduate literature classes: Strategies for an interactive critical pedagogy. In Hickey, D. & Reiss, D. (eds.), Learning literature in an era of change. Sterling, VA: Stylus, pp. 152–67. Crosby, B. (1995), Convivial cybernetics devices: From vacuum tube flip-flops to the singing Altair. An interview with Lee Felsenstein (Part 1). The analytical engine. Newsletter of the Computer History Association of California, 3 (1), November 1995. Accessed 28.07.2013. URL: http://opencollector.org/history/homebrew/engv3n1.html. Delany, P. & Landow, G. P (eds.) (1991). Hypermedia and literary studies. London, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Delany, P. & Landow, G. P. (eds.) (1993). The digital word: Text-based computing in the humanities. London, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 50


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Murray, J. M. (1997). Hamlet on the Holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace. New York: Free Press. Nelson, T. H. (1974). Computer lib/dream machines. Theodor Holm Nelson. Rev. edition Seattle: Microsoft. Nelson, T. H. (1977). The home computer revolution. Theodor Holm Nelson. Nelson, T. H. (1990). Literary machines 90.1. Theodor Holm Nelson. Rev. edition Sausalito: Mindful Press. Nelson, T. H. (1992). Opening Hypertext: A memoir. In Tuman, M. C. (ed.), Literacy online: The promise (and peril) of reading and writing with computers. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, pp. 43–57. Nyce, J. M. & Kahn, P. D. (eds.) (1991). From Memex to hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the mind’s machine. San Diego: Academic. Pasquali, F. (2003). I nuovi media fra tecnologie e discorsi sociali. Roma: Carocci. Pomian, J. & Souchier, E. (1988). Les machines écrivantes ou l’écriture virtuelle. Traverses, 44–45, 108–119. Popper, F. (1975). Art, action and participation. London, New York: Studio Vista and New York University Press. Rheingold, H. (2000). Tools for thought. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. Accessed 28.07.2013. URL: http://www.rheingold.com/texst/tft/index. Simpson, J. & Weiner E. (eds.) (1993). Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, vol. II. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ryan, M. (2005). Peeling the onion: Layers of interactivity in digital narrative texts. Accessed 28.07.2013. URL: http://users.frii.com/mlryan/onion.htm. Turkle, S. (1984). The second self: Computers and the human spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ulmer, G. L. (1990). Teletheory: Grammatology in the age of video. London, New York: Routledge. van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. London: Oxford University Press. Wardrip-Fruin, N. & Montfort, N. (eds.) (2003). The new media reader. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Williams, R. (1976). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. London: Fontana. Woolley, B. (1992). Virtual worlds: A journey in hype and hyperreality. London: Blackwell. 54


Wrong turns towards revolution? Grassroots media and political participation in Italy (1967-2012) Fausto Colombo1

Department of Communication and Performing Art Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milan, Italy

doi:10.5937/comman1430065C Summary: The article presents a socio-historical analysis of the connections between media and participation in the political realm in Italy from the sixties, when social and political protests interrupted the pedagogical relationship between public (radio and TV), or commercial (newspapers) media and their audiences. In particular, the article focuses on three different phenomena in two phases: first, the social appropriation of cinema and the birth of the free radio stations during the historical period of the “Contestazione” (protest: from the late sixties to the late seventies); second the development of the blogosphere and social media and their relationship with political engagement during the last 10 years. The examples demonstrate different forms of media appropriation related to different forms of participation. By the term appropriation, the author refers to the choice by collective parties to learn the communicative, organizational behavior and business of one or more media, in order to participate in social and political life. In the years of the contestazione, in Italy, the practice of appropriation covered two traditional media: cinema and radio. Both, as we have seen, were put to the service of new expressive and participative needs related to politics. They became a place of socialization for a generation of young people (the baby boomers), highly educated and keen on change and modernization. In the years after 2000, we still have forms of explicit political appropriation, for which, the web is central for participation and also for the building of new forms of representation in Beppe Grillo’s movement/party. In these forms the means of appropria1

[email protected]


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tion are different, because of the particular nature of social media, the different cultures and goals of the new generations using social media and for the new social and political framework. Keywords: media appropriation, media social history, Italian media, political participation

Introduction The following article presents a socio-historical analysis of the connections between media and participation in the political realm in Italy from the sixties, when social and political protests interrupted the pedagogical relationship between public (radio and TV), or commercial (newspapers) media and their audiences. In particular, I will focus on three different phenomena in two phases: first, I will analyse (1) the social appropriation of cinema and (2) the birth of the free radio stations during the historical period of the “Contestazione” (protest: from the late sixties to the late seventies); then, (3) the development of the blogosphere and social media and their relationship with political engagement during the last 10 years. The examples demonstrate different forms of media appropriation (a concept that will be defined later) related to different forms of participation. The basic thesis of this work is that these different forms depend not so much on the use of different media, but on profound socio-economic and political culture differences between the phases that involve different generations (the parents in the first period and children in the second), and have distinct political cultures. The article is comprised of two parts, each dedicated to a phase. For each phase, I will present a socio-historical description and then an analysis of the considered phenomena. In the conclusion, I will summarize the different forms of political participation through the appropriation of the media.

The ’60s and the ’70s: from school desks to the Media This period, which is often called the Contestazione (protest), began in Italy in the years 1967/68, after the crisis of the political experience of the so-called 56


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Center-Left alliance (between the Christian Democrats and the Italian Socialist Party), which had attempted to build a “well-tempered modernization of the Country” (according to the hypothesis formulated by Ginsborg, 2006). In 1967, the first student protest took place at the University of Trento, but it is also the year when the Lettere a una professoressa (Letter to a Teacher) was published, the book written by Don Lorenzo Milani’s “Boys of Barbiana”. Don Lorenzo opened in Barbiana, a small town of Mugello, a school for the children of the popular classes, and carried out experiments of shared didactics and collective writing. The resistance of the traditional schools to the revolutionary experimentation of his little school, though, threatened to derail the project: several of his “pupils” were inexorably rejected at the official examinations. From the rebellion against this state of affairs came the Lettere a una professoressa (Scuola di Barbiana, 1967), in which the protagonists of the school of Barbiana denounced the entire school system, accusing it of classism and inconclusiveness in the face of illiteracy. Here is a small extract, example of the strongly “alternative” contents of the book: Dear Lady, You won’t remember me or my name. You have failed so many of us. On the other hand I have often had thoughts about you, and the other teachers, and about that institution which you call ‘school’ and about the boys that you fail. You fail us right out into the fields and factories and then you forget us2. The complexity and the problematic nature of the Italian school system, which brought forth the generations of the protest are very important for our subject. School was central, indeed, for at least three reasons. The first one, of a structural nature, is the circularity between institutional innovation and demographic pressure. On one hand, the sixties marked a new focus on the school, and its necessary democratization (Gabusi, 2010): the launching (1962) of a uniform and compulsory middle school, the free distribution of textbooks (1964) in the elementary school; the modification (1969) of high school final exams, qualification and middle school exams and, in the same year, the liberalization of access to university and study plans. These turns promoted the access to education by an impressive number of “new students”, a number made even more explosive by the baby-boom years at the turn of the fifties and sixties. 2

Translated by Nora Rossi and Tom Cole. This translation is linked to the English version of Wikipedia, article Lorenzo Milani, footnote 4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Milani)


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The second reason of centrality is that the new access to school for people “from the bottom” of the social ladder fed a growing demand for participation. Not surprisingly, another of the fundamental reforms of the school in the seventies is constituted by the School Regulation Reform (so called “Decreti delegati”) of 1974, which opened the doors of institutional government of schools to its “social partners”: students, parents and teachers. It is a participatory request that came from beyond and from inside the school, and more generally from the world of youth. Young people, after becoming (in the sixties) an important new target for the promotion of both cultural and general consumption, became protagonists in society, starting from 1966, with the symbolic gesture that brought thousands of students in Florence. They provided relief to the city, devastated by the flood, and saved precious masterpieces of art and cultural memory (Bargellini and Bargellini, 2006). Young people’s participation took new forms, even within the industrial sector, where the “new” young workers contributed innovative elements to the relationship between the unions and the companies that will last through the seventies. The third reason consists in the cultural output that accompanied young people toward innovation and change. This new generation became simultaneously the target audience, the protagonists, as well as the content for radio, television, cinema, comics, books and the periodical publishing industry (Colombo, 2012). As target audiences, young people were not only a new audience to be reached, but also a strata of the population who developed new ways of thinking. On the one hand, there was the rejection of the old school, the old university, the old media, the inadequacy of which was recognized. On the other hand, there was the revival of cultural trends and fads that drew on that same cultural tradition, albeit with a new force. A school still articulated and structured in the traditional way was in fact accompanied on one side by the pedagogical role of the public service broadcasting, and on the other by a hugely influential model of the middle-class family. In the second case, it was a model shared between classes and the two major sub-cultures (Catholic and Marxist) in the period of the reconstruction. So, if the school was no longer deemed sufficient, from a certain point of view young people of the sixties and seventies continued to think about the cultural exchange according to pedagogical models, and they followed for a certain period – in their alternative proposals – the same pattern

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of the relationship between intellectuals and mass/audience on which the whole Italian cultural system was more or less explicitly based. As protagonists, young people were enactors of the Italian cultural revival of the decade. This happened through the expansion and transformation of the consumption of for example films, publishing and music, but also through an independent production, often commissioned to countercultural circuits, of new genres, products and practices, from theater to songs, from movies to newspapers. This production changed – regardless of how we judge its influence – the overall picture of the national imagination, as the language developed by young literary authors, screenwriters, directors, radio presenters and journalists broke substially with the previous language, becoming the bearer of new visions and values. As content, young people became the ideal topics and themes of the products of mass narrative, amplifying a tradition that started abroad and that, in Italy too, had been a mainstay of the industrial production of culture, from Pinocchio (1881-83 by Carlo Collodi) to Cuore (Heart, 1886, by Edmondo De Amicis) from the Giornalino di Gian Burrasca (Diary of Hurricane Johnny, 1907, by Vamba) to the many young stars of Children Television. Of course, these were very different young people, motivated by demands for change: the son of the Commissario Spada, the character of the comic magazine of Catholic inspiration “Il giornalino”, drawn by Gianni De Luca and written by Gianluigi Gonano (1970-1982), who struggled with the Oedipus conflict toward his fatherpolice officer and with complex histories of domestic terrorism; the participants in Renzo Arbore’s live-recording TV broadcasting Speciale per voi (Especially for you, 1969/70), so active in “judging” the protagonists of the Italian song with no psychological subjection; Fortunato Santospirito, the young emigrated worker from the South, protagonist of the militant film Trevico-Torino. Viaggio nel Fiat-nam (Trevico-Turin: Journey into the Fiat-nam, 1973), by Ettore Scola and Diego Novelli; finally, in a completely different way, Rocco and Antonia, the two teenagers, children of the protest, whose erotic stories and paratactic language/thought were presented in Porci con le ali (Pigs have Wings), a novel by Marco Lombardo Radice and Lidia Ravera published by Savelli in 1976 and translated into a film by Paolo Pietrangeli in the following year. So, young people were at the center of the Italian society and cultural industry: it was the student struggles that started the renewal cycle that would lead the country – in the short span of a decade – to change, to modernize and CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 55–78 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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globalize its face. Those struggles had their immediate and remote causes in the backwardness of the education system, displaced by a new student inflow that the system itself was unprepared to integrate into its ranks. On the other hand, we can say that the crisis expressed by the student world was the first sign of a widespread feeling that disclosed the end of the boom expansion phase, and foreshadowed a future far more uncertain than that continuously prefigured by the naive consumerist promises of the official media. No wonder that the youth perceived, with a new collective sensibility, the crumbling of the postwar welfare myths, put to the test by industrialization, urbanization, and internal migration from agricultural regions of the South toward the industrial metropolis in the North. Therefore the labour movement finds in the young Southerners, unrelated to the traditional logic of the union, the strongest advocates of new forms of struggle. In short, we can say that one or two generational cohorts, brought up with a homogeneous cultural and consumerist ideal, and recognized as central by politicians and the media, became key societal protagonists. An important part of this change was their new relationship with the media, through what I will call “media appropriation”, that is the ability not to be mere recipients or spectators, but also producers of cultural contents and products, innovating the forms and representations of the traditional media industry3. The following analysis of two media appropriation phenomena, as a form of political and social participation, seeks to demonstrate the connection between these phenomena and the original mix of education and new consumption patterns that formed the generations involved. In the case of cinema, the utopia of a high culture democratization based on the school model prevailed, while in the case of the “free” radio stations it was the youth-oriented trends of consumption that dictated new modes of expression. Cinema in cinema halls, magazines and film clubs The relationship between cultural and political participation and cinema in the protest period was very complex. On the one hand, in fact, there was the 3

“‘Appropriation’ is Marx’s most general expression for the fact that man incorporates the nature he comes into contact with into himself. Activity enters this account as the chief means by which man appropriates objects and becomes, therefore, the effective medium between the individual and the outer world. Marx sees such activity in three special relationships to man’s powers: first, it is the premost example of their combined operation; second, it establishes new possibilities for their fulfillment by transforming nature and, hence, all nature imposed limitations; and third, it is the main means by which their own potential, as powers, is developed.” (Ollman, 1976: 138)

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great effort to make the “seventh art” a means of grassroots production: cinema and audiovisual began to be “taught” in schools (fueled by a period of ferment and innovation), in some cases bringing experimentation up to the creation of short Super8 films. On the other hand, some theorists such as Roberto Faenza (1974) could see in the new technologies extraordinary possibilities extraordinary possibilities for so-called video-activism, which conceivably would, for example, challenge the traditional television news. However, in those years, the contribution to the cinema brought by the new generations did not pass through production, but rather through interpretion and comment. Here, it needs to be clarified that the traditional school education of those years tended to promote, in the reading of films, a literary perspective, which consisted mainly in centering each film analysis on the figure and intentions of the ‘“author” (the director). Curiously, while semiotics and Marxist critique highlighted, even in Italy, the often filmic nature of industrial and commercial products, the widespread knowledge on cinema (which remained an important and often central medium) still seemed idealistic and romantic. The participatory practice in cinema – in line with this attitude – materialized in the animated comments and discussion, both in magazines and in the widespread practice of film clubs. It should be clear that, in the period we are considering, domestic film production was still firmly in the lead in terms of ticket sales, and the great Italian directors were at the heart of this production. In addition to old favorites such as Roberto Rossellini, Ermanno Olmi, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Marco Ferreri, “young lions” such as Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci and the Taviani brothers began to be active, not to mention directors who definitively broke the primacy of men in the film authoriality, such as Liliana Cavani and Lina Wertmüller. Moreover, even in serial production, some directors went from obscurity to great fame and international recognition, as was the case of Sergio Leone, inventor of the commercial spaghetti western subgenre, and later a world-famous director. Finally, the cinema of civil commitment of Elio Petri, Damiano Damiani, and Sergio Lizzani was also highly popular and successful. Enjoying, analyzing, commenting on and criticizing these “authors” meant, therefore, participating in the cultural national debate, fostering a continued and fruitful collective discussion.


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The years we are dealing with saw both the survival (often in new forms) of magazines from the previous decade, as well as heirs of the first post-war studies on the cinema by militant criticism that linked up with the wave of neorealism and the emergence of new experiences. In all magazines, however, there was considerable social commitment, often overtly political. These magazines looked at the cinema as a means able to “reveal” the truth via art, or at least to arouse feelings and awareness in their artistic production. However, they seemed quite remote from the general public, even though the ranks of film fans simultaneously spread out to curious and culturally engaged young people 4 . The same happened during film discussions, which in those years became even richer in ideological disputes; there were various associations (mainly expression of the Catholic or left wing culture) that coordinated the organization and presentation of films in avant-garde cinema halls. What was characteristic in militant film criticism and cinema debates was the identification of the author (director) as a focal point. The authors were identified as examples of a cultural, intellectual and creative activity to which everybody could aspire in a new and more egalitarian kind of society, in terms of knowledge distribution and control of the means of production. In a recent book, based on a series of interviews with representatives of the baby boomer generation, I tried to narrate the film club experience and its demise from perhaps an unusual perspective. Allow me to quote here an extract of those pages which, though they are written in an essayist style, are the result of evidence gathered with rigorous ethnographic methods: In addition to television and books, another of our generation’s classrooms was represented by cinema. Obviously, films were also a wonderful opportunity for fun, both if we went alone - in the oratories’ halls or in summer cinemas - (...) and with our parents in bigger cinema halls, to watch films for the family or for a more ‘adult’ public. It was a widespread fun, which permeated the city, extending radially from the center (first run cinemas) to the suburbs (reruns, and more and more distant cinemas) (...) Yet, even the TV has played, with regard to us, an important role of education toward 4

“After their great development in the years between the two World Wars, the next phase was one of decline: in Italy 194 magazines were being published between 1950 and 1959 and 56 between the 1960 and 1969, while in the 70’s there were only 35 magazines. Essentially aimed at a target audience of film fans and insiders, and characterized by non-fictional slant, magazines from this period reflected the disaffection of the popular audience for the big screen” (Piredda, 2005: 300–301) [my translation].

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the cinema. To avoid excessive claims by cinema owners, RAI prudently aired only old movies (i.e. released at least twenty years earlier): gangster movies and westerns of the forties; musicals; Laurel and Hardy, Bob Hope or Marx Brothers’ comedies, not to mention Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. (…) So, the cinema became a parallel classroom (...) Yes. We went to film school, without knowing it, and also the ‘television’ cinema brought us to school, again and forever, because we became accustomed to think of the films as of audio-visual books that we looked at with respect and passion. We later transferred this experience into a mature manifestation: the film club. During the winter, in the sixties and seventies, in all cities and in almost every village, some rooms (often in the parishes, but also ‘secular’ rooms or meeting rooms of cultural associations) filed debates about movies. There was an expert, who presented the ‘author’ (...) and the film. Then followed the film show, and finally there was a debate. (…) In cinema halls, as well as at home in front of the TV, it was not considered polite to leave after the screening, and then the rather many who did so, crept outside during the credits, in the shelter of the persistent darkness, before the debate started (…). In the film club experience two aspects were decisive: first, a ‘democratic’ idea of culture, which saw in the diffusion of cinema a kind of artistic mass pedagogy, even though it created a caste of priests (critics, film club conductors, film buffs, the first university teachers) dedicated to the worship of the seventh muse and the celebration of its rites. Secondly, there was the passion for discussion, even for harsh debate, in a context in which (...) dialogue and discussion were seen as the salt of society and democracy (...). The year 1976 in particular, constituted a breaking point (...): when two very different films came out in cinemas, featuring surreal play scripts. The first is I am Self-Sufficient by Nanni Moretti, and the other is The second, tragic Fantozzi by Luciano Salce, on the subject of Paolo Villaggio. At the end of the first film, a cry raised: ‘No debate! No debate!’, which (finally) expressed the fatigue of the more self-critical intellectuals regarding a ritual in which they no longer believed, and that was dragging on wearily with its watchwords and its sometimes manic frenzies. In the second film, Fantozzi, CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 55–78 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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the protagonist, when compelled to participate in yet another debate on the film Battleship Potemkin, during a qualifying match between England and Italy, uttered the now famous proclamation: ‘For me, Battleship Potemkin is nothing but crazy shit!’, giving rise to an endless applause. In that applause lies the revolt of the ‘uncultured’, tired of serious films, specific filmic, and mass pedagogy. It is the revolt of provincial and white collar Italy that has always looked with skepticism towards (...) dreams and (...) snobbery, in short, (...) utopias. (Colombo, 2008: 76–78 [my translation]) Radio Days If the appropriation of cinema passed through discussions and analysis, other means became the instrument of collective expression, also for the drive towards change of more traditional institutions. It is the case of the radio, which was already in a state of renovation and reform in this period marked by the rise of the broadcasting freedom. In 1966, the great re-launching of Radio RAI, by Leone Piccioni had profoundly changed the public offering of radio content. In the same year, the music emission Pervoigiovani (For you young people) began, designed and conducted by Renzo Arbore and Maurizio Costanzo, which opened the radio station to young people, and began to teach them about British and American music genres of beat, rock and pop. In 1967, the Second Channel began broadcasting Hit Parade, led by Lelio Luttazzi, which, at lunchtime on Friday, proposed the ranking of the most successful songs of the moment on the Italian market. In 1968, La Corrida was inaugurated, a program of “amateurs” that has never lost its popularity in subsequent years. In 1969, the program Chiamate Roma 3131 (Call Rome 3131) had the brilliant idea to contact the audience at home through the telephone (Monteleone, 2003: 394). In 1970, Renzo Arbore again (this time with Gianni Boncompagni) achieved an extraordinary success with Alto Gradimento (High Rating), a true “cult” radio show that expertly mixed music and typical characters wrapped in their own catchphrases, in the form of a surreal variety. For several years, the program was a fixed appointment for adolescents and young people at home for lunch after school, and the language and sketches it offered, often close to non-sense, were often cited by them (Grasso, 1985; Ortoleva, 2003; Dark, 2009).

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These new initiativess created, between 1967 and 1974, a strong increase in the listening to Radio Rai, regularly registered by the surveys. Yet, despite the experimentation and novelties of the new Radio Rai, the drive to create new contexts and communication vehicles began to grow and bear fruit. Michele Sorice explains: The first experience of free radios came in secret and without fanfare. The protagonists were not looking for technical quality (...), but for the possibility of opening new spaces of freedom of expression. So, in 1970, Danilo Dolci started broadcasting from Belice Valley with his Radio Sicilia Libera. An admittedly illegal experiment, which aimed more at drawing the attention to the issue of media freedom than at starting production processes: Radio Sicilia Libera was quickly switched off by law enforcement. (Sorice, 2001: 34) [my translation] According to Sorice, the factors that enabled the development of free radios were three: “a) a strong social consensus that legitimized a different use of the radio medium (...), b) a type of broadcasting that tended to flow and deconstruct the tradition of the program schedule, getting the audience recognition as a dimension of democratic social life; c) the development of local advertising investments that allowed the creation of a previously non-existing market – accessible to small and medium sized operators, too” (Sorice, 2001: 34) [my translation]. To these factors, I would add the low cost of the equipment; if cinema required quite substantial investments and long production processes in order to reach audiences radio immediately allowed airing programs in the neighborhood, city, wider areas, and produced immediate notoriety and visibility, as well as social and political effects in the spreading of news and local counter-information. What is certain is that the experimentation, provocatively started by Dolci, exploded with unimaginable strength: in 1977 there were 938 stations, equally distributed between city centers and peripheries. Northern Italy hosted about half of the stations, while the center and the south/islands (with a slight primacy of this last area) shared the other half (Trasatti, 1977). In short, “radio stations raised and developed, located in areas traditionally excluded from the spread of mass communication” (Sorice, 2001: 35). Of course, the story of free Italian radio stations is part of a supranational trend: in the seventies, in the UK, music radio stations broke the ether state monopoly (Radio Caroline I and CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 55–78 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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II, Radio Atlantis, Radio Seagull) through a series of gimmicks on the border of legality (e.g. broadcasting from ships moored outside the territorial waters). The main difference between the British and Italian “radio revolutions” was in the aims of the stations: mainly musical and commercial the earlier, more complex the latter. Indeed, part of the Italian independent radio station were absolutely similar to their British version, but a big part of them were – at the opposite – politically oriented (mainly to the left-wing parties), and their lives were strictly connected to the social and political movements of protest and participation. In any case, they were all designed and made by young people. Were they music radios or (they broadcasted dedications from the small province or suburbs of large cities), or political ones, they embodied and spread an overwhelming desire of expression. About the music radios Umberto Eco writes, (Radio Milano International ) began as a family radio, young men who take shifts bringing their girlfriend to the studio. It seemed as they did not want to talk politics (...) it went from small advertising on some restaurant or boutique to a very good style of advertising; it was clear that professionals had arrived, and the presenters improved their level, they were experts in the field. After the news started being broadcasted, the radio powered up: it was business, already. (Eco, 2003: 328–329) [my translation] “This is Radio Bologna for a democratic information”: this announcement (23 November 1974: Dark, 2009: 43) is on the contrary the emblem of the politicized and engaged wave, not surprisingly inspired by Roberto Faenza, determined theorist of antagonist communication (Faenza, 1973). There is a thread that binds this type of broadcasting from Radio Popolare of Milan to Radio Alice of Bologna, protagonist of the ‘77 movement (a new wave of protests that was the expression of the contestazione): on the one hand the ideological awareness, on the other hand the tenacious roots in the respective territory. However, beyond the polarization between the two instances, it is worthwhile to illustrate what the birth of free radio stations meant for the Italian scene: for the first time, young broadcasting stations showed that a generation raised in a media immersion (a generation of students and consumers, where education had fostered a new attention to cultural consumption) was able to innovate the medium of which it was a passionate consumer. It made it through some sort of organizational revolution, which could combine volunteering 66


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loaded, with amateurism and with paradoxical communication effectiveness. On the spur of the moment, the comic writer Stefano Benni described the creative experience of an imaginary (but not too much) free radio: One who calls to see if Marx Brothers films are in English. One who asks: “Are you interested in knowing that here is one with his head crushed, full of blood, a destroyed Lambretta, a shoe here and one there, a mess.” One who wants Elisa A comrade who wants to sell a turntable. A comrade who wants to sell hamsters. One who wants to listen to the Genesis, that song of the blue cover album, the third of the second side or the second of the third side, that goes like this: za-da-za-da-daaaaa, babum, taratara, rirarara, but come on, how come you don’t understand? … A noise, a whistle, a skipping record, one out of tune, a comrade who cannot speak, a self-confident one, a serious one, a brilliant one, an educated one, a stoned one (...) and then the news, radios turned on in prisons, closed radios, radios sticking out and there is never a penny… (Benni, 1978 [my translation]). What is the reason for the success of these broadcasting radio stations, soon embedded in the large commercial and music business? According to Gianfranco Bettetini, they codified an equal relationship between broadcasters and audience, which previously could only take the form of “extraordinary testing” (Bettetini, 1985). Somehow, as the researcher suggests, the strong interaction between listeners and speakers abolished the last “institutional aura” of broadcasting, creating a new equal communication environment (and thus in consonance with the demands of the period). Yet, the new communicative citizenship to which the consumer had access, was not fully political. It was rather one aspect of that right, the right to consumption, which at the end of the decade incorporated and replaced the libertarian and participatory instances. Perhaps we should re-evaluate the innocent, trivial and naive belief of that generation of broadcasters and consumers according to whom the new radio stations could better express not a strategy, but a whiff of freedom. From this point of view, it is worth remembering the simple, spontaneous ballad devoted CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 55–78 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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to these broadcasting stations by a songwriter of the last generation of committed singers-songwriters, Eugenio Finardi: When I am home alone and alone I have to stay/ to finish a job or because I have a cold/ there is something very easy that I can do:/ turn on the radio/ and listen/ I love the radio/ because it comes from the people,/ enters our homes and speaks to us directly/ and if a radio is free, but truly free/ I like it even more, because it frees my mind/ While listening to the radio you can write, read or cook/ no need of standing still, sitting there to watch./ And maybe that’s what makes me prefer it/ it is that listening to the radio/ you do not need to stop thinking” (Eugenio Finardi, La radio, 1976 [my translation]. The libertarian expression The seventies can be described, according to the perspective used here, as a decade of the multiplication of “voices” (Couldry, 2010). Generating pluralism in and of the communication subjects, the policy of “a Hundred Flowers” is nothing more than a new possibility for the citizens to access the public sphere, claimed, conquered, and ultimately lost – or rather sold – on the wave of disappointment or collective fatigue. Of course, the desire to participate and “communicate their own opinion” was not devoid of ingenuity: it was an example of the parable of the so-called “programmi dell’accesso” of the post-reform RAI, in which groups of organized citizens showed their collective identity and their objectives in a frame of television broadcasting direction that was much too simple, almost amateurish. On the one hand, this type of broadcasting expressed the belief that expression and self-declaration was everything; on the other hand, the strenuous practice of public discourse, which required – to be effective – long preparation, awareness, and style, was forgotten. However, beyond all this, it is important to understand the form and content of this wave of collective expression, which characterized the decade, as it is important to ask what happened to it in the immediate aftermath, i.e. what was the legacy from the seventies to the culture of Italian society. This legacy of expression, which we have briefly illustrated in the preceding pages, was based on societal needs that somehow questioned the present in the 68


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light of a strong tradition of past militancy, although it was transfered to new players (especially young people). Firstly, this type of participation in the public debate represented a continuation of traditional forms of intellectuality, which it sometimes imitated in its stylistic motifs. From the cyclostyle to the Dazebao, from the documents of student assemblies to newspapers and their debates, the “words of revolution” fatally attracted – also in their rituals – the seriousness of “adult” politics that they wanted to challenge and overcome. The model of politics and its themes, with its strict seriousness, the effort and commitment it required, was (and still is) one of mass parties, even if it applied to small groups or even cliques. Large general issues remained central (the working class, the capitalist society, the role of the intellectuals), and political-participatory activities required demanding duties and tasks (meetings, demonstrations, leaflets ...). Yet macro or micro social practices that pointed to the transformation of the existing order operate according to rather prescriptive ideals. Playing politics – especially in its militant dimension – was a commitment that involved inserting the individual not just as a volunteer into a collectivity, but also as a cog in the machinery of change, in which all energies of had to be channeled by common visions. Of course, as evidenced by the splitting of the formations in the Alternative Left, this model had elements of contradiction, because the common ideals, when viewed up close, could be less “common” than previously thought, and the “strategic” obsession could sometimes (actually often) cancel the overall vision and the sense of the primacy of strategy tactics. However, this great immersion into serious politics served to give to many people the perception of having their own role in society; it introduced the habit to a critical look; it stimulated an intense role for intellectuals and an intellectual dimension of citizenship. The contestazione was thrown into a crisis by some very specific factors: the evolution/involution of political participation into the violence and terrorism by a few but very effective activists; the paradigm shift in the Italian society, as in much of the Western world, by the neoliberal wave, with fundamental changes in economy, work and social fabric, education and cultural hegemony; the progressive reduction of the role of school and university as cultural agencies, able to transmit and keep alive the cultural heritage; the new centrality of television as a dominant medium (with the consequent crisis of the status of cinema, and especially of domestic cinema). CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 55–78 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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In the following years, Italian society met a decade of boosting innovation and consumption, financed by the growth of the public debt, followed by a major economic political and social crisis, between the eighties and nineties. And finally came the so-called Berlusconian period that lasted twenty years. These years have still been marked by moments of important mobilization, but we can say that only with the development of the web they have reappeared on a more central stage.

The years 2000 and the web We have seen so far that the role of the media in the years of the contestazione was based on some very specific factors: first of all the presence of a broad youth base (a result of the population growth of the post-war years and the economic boom) that was highly educated and able to impact on the education system and absorb some of its cultural forms. Secondly, the collective experiences of participation and sharing that permeated the Italian society (as well as the international one), which saw politics as an essential dimension of social life. Finally, the instances of media appropriation, where the term appropriation refers to both the acquisition of literacy, and a willingness to learn how to use technological means for autonomous and direct self-expression. In the following decades, these three factors have been profoundly transformed: a) The youth “class” has undergone a demographic resizing, becoming gradually less numerous and compact; its tide has gradually subsided, and the school is less seen as a place of genuine education. Indeed, the school has been gradually altered in its nature as a culture transmitter, to become a place of professional training, in the spirit of neoliberal reconstruction. b) In Italy, as in much of the world, the participatory trajectory has been diminished by the powerful market-oriented groundswell that has gradually replaced collective ideals with individualism, sharing with success, cultural ideals with entrepreneurial work. The role of commercial television in this hegemonic transformation of the Italian society has been widely documented (Gozzini, 2013), and on the other hand, it’s no coincidence that TV (after some experiments of “free” television in the latest 1970s) has never entered into the process of appropriation by users. c) There have been very strong processes of technological domestication (see Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992), especially technological means of socialization, 70


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without any particular instances of participation. This is particularly true of mobile phones, with Italy still being one of the leading countries in terms of diffusion and use (Colombo, 2001; Colombo and Scifo, 2005). With regard to the Internet, the story is a little different: Italy is relatively backward in terms of connections and broadband distribution; nowadays, however, in particular, the presence of social media is expanded, made easier by the spreading of smartphones. When I speak of domestication, I emphasize the difference from the mechanisms that I described as appropriation. In the case of domestication, in fact, we have learning and adaptation that – starting from certain affordances – make the technology compatible with the user’s home life. With the term appropriation, I refer instead to the attitude of learning that aims at subverting and adapting the same affordances of the medium, its organizational and economic structure. From the 1980s to today, the differences in the context do not prevent explosions of political participation, also expressed through non-mainstream media (Pasquali and Sorice, 2005). This is the case of school and university movements such as the one called La pantera (the panther, 1989/90); the great wave of opinion that led to the 1993 electoral referendum, after the political and judicial scandal called Tangentopoli; the great collective indignation that followed the G8 Summit in Genoa (2001). For the sake of brevity, I would like to dwell here on some civic and political movements strongly linked to the emergence of web 2.0, in which the Italian case inserts itself into some more global trends. Web and extemporaneous mobilization The first scenario is that of web 2.0 as a tool for base mobilization, outside the relationship with traditional political institutions (see Dahlgren, 2009). In recent years, also in Italy, we have witnessed a phenomenon comparable to the various versions of Occupy, the Mexican movement Yo soy 132, the so-called Arab Springs, the Green Movement in Iran, the protest of Gezi Park in Turkey, the Spanish Indignados, all characterized by an original mix of spontaneity and organisation, land occupation and use of social networks. The Italian examples are strongly linked to national peculiarities, i.e. the opposition to Silvio Berlusconi, the governments he chaired, and the culture he represented. A prime example of these movements and initiatives can be found CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 55–78 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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in the protests of the so-called Popolo Viola (Purple People), with the organization of the No Berlusconi Day (December 5th, 2009; in which they requested the resignation of premier Silvio Berlusconi) and the subsequent creation of an informal network (born out of a Facebook group). A second example is the women’s movement Se non ora quando (If not now, when?), from 2011, which objected to the exploitation of women and their image in the Berlusconian political and mass culture. Also in this case, the social media (Twitter and Facebook especially) were key elements for the success of massive street demonstrations. In my opinion, the most relevant characteristics of these movements (in the context of this article) regarding the use of the web are two: a) The conflicting relations with the traditional media; these can of course still filter the news for the general public, but the circulation of alternative social networks threatens them, because it selectively reaches exactly those citizens escaping the mainstream information, for intellectual curiosity or programmatic suspicion. Moreover, the news and comments on social networks have become sources that the media cannot ignore. b) The social networks, as horizontal tools, ensure the best possible integration between the circulation of ideas and the organizational success of citizenbased political action (demonstrations, boycotts), without being rooted in organized structures such as political parties or trade unions. These demonstrations use the network and its potential of relations and circulation of ideas to build light organizational forms, which are particularly practical and consistent with the contemporary diffused sensitivities (Cammaerts, Mattoni and McCurdy, 2013). These movements have a limited duration in their superficial presence, while the activism that characterizes them remains in the protagonists’ consciences and can play a long-term cultural role. They base their activism not only on the web, but also on physical territory, with an original integration of strategies and tactics. Often, the objectives of their politics (as Hardt and Negri, 2012 remind us) relate to the “common”, i.e. the ownership of goods of which a share is claimed collectively and that constitute a new frontier in relation to the so-called “public”. Sometimes web-based activism in Italy was put at the service of more traditional political occasions. This happened for example in the spring of 2011, during the campaign for local elections in some major cities, and the referendum against some privatizations of common assets (including water). 72


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In that case, the strength of use of the social media in “traditional” campaigns was shown especially in the case of the election of the mayor of Milan, with the surprising victory of the Centre-Left candidate Giuliano Pisapia against the outgoing mayor Letizia Moratti, candidate of the Centre-Right (a coalition that had had a very broad consensus in Milan for years). Web-politics A second example of participatory use of the web in Italy is provided by The MoVimento 5 Stelle (Five stars movement), recalling – with some specificity – the German or Swedish Piraten Partei. To briefly explain its history: in 2005 a comedian, Beppe Grillo, who in the 1980s was a television star, and then continued in ecologist theatre shows, became a successful blogger. In his blog he suggested to use Meetup as a technology to coordinate activists who shared his critical ideas of consumption. In 2007 Grillo organized via his blog a protest against traditional politics, called V-Day (“Vaffanculo Day”), which had great success. In 2008, for the first time, the activists of Grillo’s movement participated in local elections. In 2009, the MoVimento 5 Stelle was officially founded, and it took part in the local elections of 2012 and, above all, in the 2013 elections, attaining eight million votes. Unable due to space to perform an in-depth analysis of the movement, I summarize here three features that I deem essential: The first aspect is related to leadership. The movements that use the web emphasize the role of horizontal democracy, in which the “one head one vote” logic prevails. The philosophy of some of them, such as the Pirate Party or Occupy movements, recall in some way the utopia of the Paris Commune, which is translated into the rotation of those appointed to coordinate. MoVimento 5 Stelle appears more complex though, because it combines the rotation of the Parliament’s spokesperson among the elected candidates with a stable charismatic leader like Beppe Grillo (who, by the way, is also somehow the “owner” of the Statute of this movement and who shares some of the leadership role with Gianroberto Casaleggio). The coexistence of horizontal democracy and a strong leadership are typical of the “new movements”, and some theorise that this situation is essential to the renewal of politics. Philosophers such as Žižek (i.e. Žižek, 2010) and Badiou (i.e. Badiou, 2011), for example, argue that the new movements, consisting of informal organisations resulting from CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 55–78 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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specific dissatisfaction and anger towards traditional politics, do not have the ability to last. In the case of MoVimento 5 Stelle, their leader does not run for an office while he continues to manage the political movement outside of institutions, often coming to a conflict with the elected representatives and their own choices. There have already been cases of expulsion of representatives who were considered traitors of the purity of the message of the MoVement certified by Beppe Grillo. Some paradoxes of these formations relate both to the ambiguous nature of leadership and with the issue of the formation of political elites, which is precisely the second node of the problem. The second issue is that in spite of public statements, MoVimento 5 Stelle certainly has some elitist traits. In the first place, only a few thousands voters of listed representatives voted in the “Parlamentarie” (the primary elections for the parliament) and then in “Quirinarie” (the on line referendum to propose a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic). Their selection depends on the use of the network as a tool for aggregation and discussion, on participation on the blog comments or meet-ups, and not on class, gender and other forms of belonging and membership. Still we are speaking about elites. Besides, the elected representatives of the Movement are a sort of “superelite”, because chosen by a wider elite. Both of them describe themselves as opposed to and different than the rest of the political class, and they manifest their distinction in various ways, even in Parliament, with rather drastic speeches and haughty gestures (for example refusing to shake hands, the use of sarcasm and snobbery). This presumably conveys a sense of a prior moral superiority within the movement, an “otherness” to preserve and to defend against mainstream political culture. Thus there are very strict codes of conduct, which allow the expulsion of those who do not comply to them, with a mechanism that could be called elitist ostracism. The third issue concerns the political discourse of the movement and of its charismatic leader. This discourse is often critiqued for being an expression of anti-politics, but here I argue that it is mainly counter-political: it seems to me a useful definition to include a form of expression that draws on the carnivalesque and the scatological, mocking the discourses made by the mainstream political ‘caste’ and media. The tradition of satire, from the politically acute to the more indulgent, is reused by Beppe Grillo in his speeches and in his blog in the name 74


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of a new politics. The abysmal distance that this counter-discourse creates, compared to traditional political language, is an excellent tool for consent because it is simple and liberating (carnivalesque in fact, in the Bakhtinian sense of the word) to laugh at the opponents, at institutions and powers, thus tasting one’s revenge.

Conclusions In conclusion of this article, I would like to summarize its path and offer some inspiration. I followed the story of two different historical moments in which somehow (what Carpentier (2011) calls) the “participation through the media” was marked in Italy by processes of appropriation. By this term, I mean the choice by collective actors to learn the communicative, organizational behavior and business of one or more media, in order to participate in social and political life. In the years of the contestazione, in Italy, the practice of appropriation covered two traditional media: cinema and radio. Both, as we have seen, were put to the service of new expressive and participative needs related to politics. They became a place of socialization for a generation of young people (the baby boomers), highly educated and keen on change and modernization. Of course, for their economic and organizational structure, cinema and radio were not appropriated in the same way: with cinema they attempted a critical appropriation, aimed at promoting the improvement of knowledge of the public and – as a consequence – the desirable diffusion of a more politically and aesthetically aware cinema. With radio the appropriation was in the sense of building a “new radio”, very different from that of the monopolist public service, sometimes confused in objectives and contents, but still capable of changing the relationship with the public in a sense of greater closeness. In the years after 2000, we still have forms of explicit political appropriation, for which, as we saw, the web is central for participation (as a protest or as electoral activism: see Carpentier, 2011), and also for the building of new forms of representation in Beppe Grillo’s movement/party. In my opinion, these forms are very different from those of the earlier protest period for several reasons: a) The means of appropriation are different: Social media tend by their nature (and interest) to build a membership and a strong use. Learning processes by users are required by Facebook or Twitter, both in the sense of literacy and CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 55–78 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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the actual production of content. Of course, radio and cinema are very different, as they grew up with a view of the traditional cultural industry, with a clear separation between production and consumption. In this case, therefore, the appropriation processes were more complex, tiring, and certainly collective, largely enacted by groups, while the use of social media is largely individualistic. b) Social subjects have different cultures and goals: The young baby boomers lived in a strong participatory culture, had a strong education and a dialectic relationship with their traditional culture. Their children, protagonists of the post-2000 era, are less numerous and therefore less able to influence collectively with their social presence. Further, their shared culture is less traditional and less educated, more often linked to forms of consumption than to cultural transmission as heritage; c) The social and political framework – including civic cultures – of the two moments are extremely different: At the time of the earlier protests, participation was intended as an essential element of an unfinished democratic system marked by strong iniquities. In the years after 2000 we are in presence of a strong sense of disillusionment, in which participation is even aimed at overcoming the democracy as we know it.

References Badiou, A. (2011). Le réveil de l’histoire [The rebirth of history]. Nouvelles Editions Ligne. Bargellini, P. & Bargellini, L. C. (2006). Il miracolo di Firenze. I giorni dell’alluvione e gli ‘angioli del fango’ [A miracle in Florence. The days of the Flood and the ‘Angels of Mud’]. Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina. Benni, S. (1978). Radio libera [Free Radio]. In Non siamo stato noi [We are not the state]. Roma: Savelli. Accessed 24.12.2013. URL: http://www.stefanobenni.it/fabula/libri/non78/radio.html. Bettetini, G. (1985). La radio come mezzo di comunicazione [The radio as a medium]. In Bellotto, A. & Bettetini, G. (eds.), Questioni di storia e teoria 76


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della radio e della televisione [Matters of history and theory of radio and television]. Milano: Vita e Pensiero, pp. 44–49. Cammaerts, B., Mattoni, A. & McCurdy, P. (eds.) (2013). Mediation and protest movements. Bristol: Intellect. Carpentier, N. (2011). Media and participation: A site of ideological-democratic struggle. Bristol: Intellect Books. Colombo, F. (2001). Mobile telephone use in Italy in the 1990s: Interpretative models. Modern Italy, VI(2), 151–161. Colombo, F. (2008). Boom. Storia di quelli che non hanno fatto il 68 [Boom. History of people who didn’t take part in the ‘68]. Milano: Rizzoli. Colombo, F. (2012). Il paese leggero. Gli italiani e i media fra contestazione e riflusso [The Light Country. Italians and media between protest and restoration]. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Colombo, F. & Scifo, B. (2005). The social shaping of new mobile devices among Italian youth. In Haddon, L., Mante, E., Sapio, B., Kommonen, K.H., Fortunati, L. & Kant, A. (eds.), Everyday innovators. Researching the role of users in shaping ICTs. Dordrect: Springer, pp. 86–103. Couldry, N. (2010). Why voice matters. Culture and politics after neoliberalism. London: Sage. Dahlgren, P. (2009). Media and political engagement. Citizens, communication, and democracy. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Dark, S. (2009). Libere! L’epopea delle radio italiane degli anni ’70 [Free! The epic of Italian radios in the seventies]. Viterbo: Stampa Alternativa. Eco, U. (2003). Dalla periferia all’impero. Cronache da un nuovo Medioevo [From the suburbs of the Empire. Chronicles of a New Middle Age]. Milano: Bompiani. Faenza, R. (ed.) (1973). Senza chiedere permesso. Come rivoluzionare l’informazione [Without given permission. How to make a revolution in comunication]. Milano: Feltrinelli. Gabusi, D. (2010). La svolta democratica nell’istruzione italiana [The democratic turn in the Italian school]. Brescia: La Scuola. Ginzborg, P. (2006). Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi [History of Italy in the Postwar]. Torino: Einaudi. CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 55–78 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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Gozzini, G. (2013). La mutazione individualista. Gli Italiani e la televisione 1954-2011 [The mutation of individualism. Italians and television 1954– 2011]. Roma, Bari: Laterza. Grasso, A. (1985). Regia radiofonica. In Bellotto, A. & Bettetini, G. (eds.), Questioni di storia e teoria della radio e della televisione. Milano: Vita e Pensiero, pp. 38–43. Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2012). Declaration. Allen: Argo-Navis. Monteleone, F. (2003). Storia della radio e della televisione in Italia. Un secolo di costume, società e politica [History of radio and television in Italy. Lifestyle, society, and politics]. Venezia: Marsilio. Ollman, B. (1976). Marx’s conception of man in capitalist society. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Ortoleva, P. (2003). Alto Gradimento [High rating]. In Ortoleva, P. & Scaramucci, B. (eds.), Enciclopedia della radio [Encyclopedia of radio]. Milano: Garzanti, pp. 20–21. Pasquali, F. & Sorice, M. (2005). Gli altri media. Una ricerca nazionale sui media non mainstream [The different media. A national research on nonmainstream media]. Milano: Vita e Pensiero. Piredda, M. F. (2005). Riviste cinematografiche. In Colombo, F. (ed.), Atlante della comunicazione [Atlas of communication], Milano: Hoepli, pp. 300–301. Scuola di Barbiana (1967) Lettera a una professoressa [Letter to a professor]. Firenze: Libreria editrice fiorentina. Silverstone, R. & Hirsch, E. (eds.) (1992). Consuming technologies: Media and information in domestic spaces. London, New York: Routledge. Sorice, M. (2001). ‘Radio days’ in the 70’s. In Colombo, F. (ed.), Gli anni delle cose [The years of things], Special Issue of Comunicazioni Sociali. Rivista di Media, Spettacolo e Studi Culturali, vol. XXIII, pp. 33–41. Trasatti, S. (1977). Geografia delle radio locali [Geography of local radios]. Roma: Fare. Žižek, S. (2010). Living in the end times. London: Verso.

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Propaganda, critical media literacy and participation: Tracing memories of the Soviet media Natalija Mažeikienė1 Kristina Juraitė2

Department of Public Communications, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania

doi:10.5937/comman1430089M Summary: The role of media is crucial in promoting the public sphere and determining the forms of civic participation. In the post-Soviet context, the relationship between media audiences and the legacy of propaganda-driven media is of particular importance from the perspectives of media history and democratic development. The post-Soviet media environment was shaped by particular political traditions and notions of citizenship. The Soviet mass media was subordinated to the state ideology as its main instrument, enabling the state authorities to impose their propaganda and keep control over the population. On the other hand, contemporary civil cultures and active public participation is being shaped by citizens’ memories of their media practices then and now. Effective civic participation can only be realized by developing critical reflection towards the past, identifying and articulating personal perspectives towards the propaganda and its effect on the citizens’ societal participation. The main aim of the article is to explore the relationship between democratic participation and critical media literacy. We underscore media literacy in Lithuania began developing well before the democratic transition that took off in the late 1980s; moreover, today we see what is termed as a process of democratization of memory of the Soviet past. Oral history research shows that citizens express well-defined critiques of the power manipulation and propaganda persuasion in the media during the Soviet era. Reconstructions of the individual strategies of watching Soviet television in the past and comparing them to the present practices reveal critical media literacy skills as an important prerequisite for democratic and deliberative participation. Keywords: critical media literacy, participation, Soviet propaganda, democratic habitus, democracy of memory, politics of memory, Soviet television, oral history 1

[email protected]

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[email protected]


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Propaganda, critical media literacy and participation: Tracing memories of the Soviet media

Natalija Mažeikienė, Kristina Juraitė

Introduction At the beginning of the Second World War, Lithuania was occupied by the USSR, initiating a Soviet era that lasted half a century. In this period, an authoritarian regime was in place, which did not leave much space for democracy or participation. The Soviet media system was subordinated to the state ideology, becoming its main instrument and enabling the state authorities to impose its propaganda and political control over the population. People were pumped with positive information about labour achievements and victories, but rarely informed on critical public issues like drugs, prostitution, mafia, unemployment, accidents, ethnic clashes, environmental risks, etc. These issues that actually worried people were “nonexistent” in the Soviet media. The development of television in Lithuania began as late as 1957, after the Soviet authorities in Moscow took the decision to expand television broadcasting and build a local television network. By the beginning of television broadcasting in Lithuania, there were 0.6 television receivers per 1,000 inhabitants. Television could hardly compete with other media, such as radio and the press until 1980s, when domestic television sets increased to over 300 per 1,000 inhabitants and television became the main source of news and information for the Soviet audience (Hoyer et al., 1993: 357; McNair, 1991: 40). From the very beginning television broadcastings were under stringent supervision of the communist party’s leadership. Any kind of independent, unauthorized or critical activity was severely punished. No freedom of speech, no objectivity, no pluralism were the defining characteristics of the Soviet media, especially before 1985. Together with the glastnost and perestroika campaigns launched by Gorbachev in 1985, the freedom of expression in the mainstream media made some gains, and television production became more open, diverse and attractive. However, pluralism and democratization could not be achieved straightaway. This also had its impact on the contemporary era. Sovietologists and political researchers have argued that in post-communist societies individual and collective habitus and political values, as well the relationship between the citizens, the state and other institutions inherited from the Soviet system, have persisted in terms of a passive political culture and a paternalistic perception of the state by its citizens (Verdery, 2002; Rose, 2009). This can also be found in Lithuania, where despite over 20 years of liberal democracy, market economy and free media, political participation has been among the lowest in the EU (European 80




Commission, 2013). Lithuania has been one of the most sceptical among the European countries with regard to political participation, trust in political institutions and citizens’ engagement in public life (European Commission, 2013). This means that the democratic transition does not by itself guarantee increased political activism or enlightened political discourse. Even though democratic structures and institutions, such as free elections and independent media, are of crucial importance, the democratizing potential of these institutions depends on other factors, namely socio-cultural, political and economic structures that have been developing for decades, if not centuries (Papacharissi, 2002; Schudson, 2003). In the post-Soviet context, propaganda-driven media have disappeared, replaced by a neo-liberal media market. To ensure media freedom and pluralism, a rather liberal legislative framework and professional standards have been adopted, following the Western democratic media model (Juraitė, 2008; Balčytienė, 2006). However, the processes of privatization and liberalization have led to an increase in commercialization, combined with a lack of professionalism and social responsibility. Popular media content has gained a strong presence, to the detriment of information focussed on the public interest, such as news programs, political talk shows, analytical programs and documentaries (Balčytienė and Juraitė, 2009). Nevertheless, media can still (at least potentially) play a crucial role in promoting the public sphere and determining the forms of civic participation. People can participate “in the media”, but citizens can also participate in society more broadly “via the media” (Carpentier, 2011). Participation is a complex and multi-layered concept that is closely connected, but still different from a series of other concepts, which act as its conditions of possibility. Carpentier (2011) mentions access and interaction as pre-requisites, while Dahlgren (2009) refers to civic cultures. Carpentier, Schrøder and Hallett (2014: 10) add trust and literacy to this list of prerequisites. In this article we want to follow this line of thought and argue that (critical) literacy, but also reflexive agency, are conditions of possibility for participation. This argument also extends to the past. Today’s civil cultures, engagement and participation are being shaped not least by citizens’ memories of their social practices, then and now. Critical literacy also requires developing critical reflections towards the past, identifying and articulating personal perspectives towards the propaganda and its effect on citizens. Reflecting, understanding CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 79–104 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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and interpreting are elements of an ongoing process of comparing the past with the present. This also implies the need to investigate the relationship between the citizens’ democratic competences in the present evaluation of media (in particular television) role and experiences of mediated participation in the past. But at the same time we should acknowledge the existence of critical media literacy during the Soviet era. Even though the Soviet system was based on propaganda, censorship and a ban of democratic participation, citizens developed critical approaches and modes of resistance towards the dominant ideological discourses. The main aim of this article is to explore the relationship between democratic participation and critical media literacy, that existed in Lithuania well before the democratic transition, in the late 1980s. Reconstructions of the individual strategies of using Soviet media in the past and comparing it to the present practices shed light on these critical media literacy skills, which we see as an important prerequisite for democratic and deliberative participation. An oral history approach has been selected to collect personal stories of the Soviet television media usage to show the existence of such skills.

Participation and critical media literacy In order to understand the historical prerequisites of participation in the post-Soviet environment, we first need to deal with the complexity and variety of theoretical approaches of participation. Carpentier (2011) refers to participation, from a democratic theory perspective, as the inclusion of people into political decision-making processes. This is not a mere formal process, and more and more attention is given to the democratic cultures and practices besides the formal conception of democracy as the delegation of power to the others. Differences between the two understandings of democratic participation, namely minimalist and maximalist, are well defined by Carpentier (2011). The minimalist democratic participation model strongly emphasizes representation and the delegation of power. The main focus is on macro-level participation (national level of politics and political imagined communities) and popular will formation, which is built on consensus rather than multivocality, homogeneity rather than diversity. By contrast, in the maximalist democratic participation model, both macro and micro level participation forms are equally important for the promotion of citizens’ active engagement into different levels of social life, including schools, family, workplace, church and community. 82




These participatory processes also have a communicational dimension, as Habermas’s (1989) work confirms. His articulation of deliberative democracy shows the importance of having decisions deliberated, discussed and clarified in the public sphere, which is to be open for everyone willing to engage into the debate via different forms of communication action. Apart from Habermasian deliberative democracy theory, Dewey’s theory of participatory democracy, and the concepts of habitual and reflexive human agency (Wipple, 2005) also have relevance here. Habit and reflectivity are crucial components in Dewey’s democratic and social theory. Reflective agency helps facilitate resistance to system-level manipulations and distortions by encouraging and empowering citizens. In his social theory, Bourdieu (1972) refers to historically and socially constructed habitus as a dynamic process constructed and actualized through available field and practices. In other words, habitus includes open, enduring and experience-based schemes of perception, classification and action (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2003): The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor. (Bourdieu, 1972: 72) The relationship between habitus as socialized subjectivity (mundane, taken-for-granted individual structures) and the field as objective societal structures (such as social, political or media institutions) results in the particular formation of particular practices and representations such as adjustment, nonconformity, resistance and reconciliation (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2003). However, as products of history and of the social, individuals are also active in shaping structural conditions and positions. For this, reflections on the existing dispositions and understanding of available positions are important for individuals to engage in the public discourse and action. Deconstruction CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 79–104 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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of democratic or non-democratic schemes of perception, thought and action embodied in social norms and practices (i.e. habitus) is essential for participation in socio-political environment. The deconstruction of available habitus can be performed through reflexive agency with competences and skills of critical assessment of the present by remembering the past, which renders reflexive agency a condition for possibility of participation. Participation then becomes understood as a discursive, reflective, and educational process, which is important as formal involvement in political processes (Dryzek, 1994). In this regard it is important to address critical thinking and (critical) media literacy as democratic practices, as well as imperatives for participation (Kellner and Share, 2007). For this reason, we want to argue that (critical) literacy (Turkoglu, 2011) is a prerequisite for participation. In communication and education policy documents, the notion of media literacy often refers to the individual competences to access the media, to understand and have a critical approach towards information and media power, and to communicate in different forms and contexts (Study on Assessment Criteria for Media Literacy Levels, 2009; Turkoglu, 2011). Three levels of communicative competences and skills are identified: (1) accessing and using different information sources, including official, mainstream, as well as alternative and public-generated media; (2) understanding and exploring the principles and techniques of media content production; (3) creating, participating and interacting in the media environment to practice one’s democratic rights and responsibilities. Kellner and Share (2007) further expand the normative understanding of media literacy: they call for critical media literacy as a political project for democratic social change by emphasizing the need for enhancing critical analytical processes, challenging dominant ideologies and transforming society into less oppressive and more egalitarian democracy. They also identify a direct relationship between critical media literacy and participation, which is further elaborated by Türkoglu (2011). She points out that critical media literacy should be considered as a theoretical, interpretative and evaluative framework for participation of citizens through the media: Critical media literacy also has a crucial role to play in offering interpretative and evaluative frameworks for understanding the possibilities and limits of the (allegedly) participatory process media organise, structuring the traces of power imbalances these mediated processes often contain. Both 84




(home) audience members and (future) participants would highly benefit from an in-depth understanding of the wide range of participant management. (Türkoglu, 2011: 148) At the same time, we should keep in mind that the conditions for participation, such as reflective agency and critical media literacy, can also exist outside a participatory and even democratic context. The existence of reflective agency and critical media literacy is not dependent upon this participatory or democratic context, but at the same time they can (at least potentially) become mobilized once a political community enters a more democratic context. Within the focus of our article, this implies that we can look at the role of critical media literacy skills in the Soviet past, and see how they pre-exist the transition to democracy. Moreover, the memories of how these critical media literacy skills were deployed in the Soviet past also plays a crucial role in contemporary Lithuania. Given that recollection of the Soviet past is shaped by socially constructed discourses, it is crucial to elaborate on the memory construction process in more detail. In the following section, the controversies of memory politics are discussed in view of the Soviet experience.

Participation and democratization of memory For a democratic habitus to develop, exposure to different interpretations of the past is a crucial precondition. Memory is not merely an individual, but also a social construction. On the one hand, memory is a subjective reality, an intention of consciousness streamed towards a specific historical moment and personal experience. On the other hand, individual memory is never only personal, but immersed into a more general social configuration of memory; it is socially determined. The politics of memory adopted in different countries invokes different mnemonic strategies and uses relevant mnemonic practices and devices. Mnemonic devices include public spaces, streets, monuments, buildings, art, museums, commemoration activities like memorable days, images in public spaces, art and media. Memory cannot be imagined and embodied without the role of the media, which is seen as a key carrier of memory. The politics of memory deals with institutional memory which, according to Richard Ned Lebow (2006), describes efforts by political elites, their supporters, and their opponents to construct meanings of the past and propagate CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 79–104 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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them more widely or impose them on other members of society. However, it is important to understand that multiple memory discourses coexist in society in various degrees of correspondence, and they compete with each other. Institutional memory and discursive formation of the memory are by no means fully controlled and determining processes. The politics of memory describes a process that involves large number of actors, some of them are private individuals, some government officials. These actors have access to a wide range of resources and mobilise them to achieve goals that may be discrete and quite diffusive. They act in political and cultural setting where other influences, many of them unpredictable and unforeseen, help shape the consequences of their behavior and the ways in which debates evolve. It is a complex and open-ended process may produce short- and long term outcomes at odds with expectations of key actors. (Lebow, 2006: 26) Policies of memories often transform into memory games, when memory is instrumentalized to defend and construct certain group identity: “The concept of memory games encompasses the various ways by which political and social actors perceive and relate to certain historical events, according to identities they construct, the interests they defend and strategies they devise to define, maintain or improve their position in society” (Mink and Neumayer, 2013: 28). These games are played by institutional actors (e.g. parties, elected officials, governments), social movements and professional groups (e.g., historians, journalists). For the recognition of the diversity of interpretation of the past and potential memory formation in a democratic society, it is important that people have skills (and are helped to acquire them) to critically understand what is happening around them, understand and recognize which “memory games” are played, who the players of these games are, and how these games are played. Critical thinking and critical media literacy skills enable citizens to identify the ways memory games, their main actors and discourses, both dominant and alternative ones, are represented in the media, and to understand what communicative strategies, techniques and resources are used in dominant discourse constructions. When dealing with memory games, as well as memory wars, critical media literacy is a set of competences using a critical approach towards dominant discourses, tolerating diversity of opinions and mediated interpretations of the past. 86




From the perspective of democratic participation culture and habitus, it is important that citizens understand discursive formations of memory; are able to identify what institutions and actors produce dominant discourses and what their relationship with individual memory is; are capable of differentiating between conflicting discursive practices and alternative discourses of memory; and can grasp social reality in the present and in the past as a complex phenomenon of contradictory nature. The social world is criss-crossed by ideological and sometimes even propagandistic projects striving to give meaning to past and present; thus it becomes crucial to understand the nature and specificity of these projects, how they are articulated, and how they are responded to, and how they are remembered. In short, reflexive agency contributes to democracy (and participation) when citizens gain the ability and habitus to tolerate conflicting realities within society and are able to recognize different interpretations of the past, strategies and politics of memory. This also involves understanding one’s own social identity in relation to memory politics. Following German historian Joern Ruesen’s (2007) concept of historical consciousness, one of its core dimensions is critique. In a democratic society, the democratic attitude to memory processes should be promoted. The “democratization of the history” and the “democratization of memory” (Brüggemann and Kasekamp, 2008: 441) refer not only to the ability to critically reflect on complex and ambiguous historical events, but also to tolerate and accept alternative views of history, to understand the plurality of social memories which exist in each social setting. Thus, both, the critical thinking skills of citizens, and the state of historical consciousness, as well as sensitivity to otherness and openness to diversity of reality interpretations, enable the development of democratic citizenship. But, as we shall see, this critical reflexivity can also exist outside democracy, potentially opening up spaces for democracy within non-democratic settings. In addition to critical thinking skills, critical media literacy enables the exploration of the role of media as carriers of memory in different memory politics. In the process of remembering the past, it is important to understand the power of media in representing democratic and undemocratic models of participation. Speaking of Soviet television, it is vital to understand the ways that Soviet propaganda was transmitted through the media and the effect such information had on the citizens, inhibiting their democratic habitus or, alterCM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 79–104 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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natively, provoking their resistance to power holders and manipulation. Thus, critical media literacy, understood as the critical awareness of the ideological power of the media, is again an important component of democratic participation, and again it can pre-exist participation and democracy.

Politics of memory and mnemonic strategies in Lithuania After the restoration of Lithuania’s independence in 1990, the processes of building national identity intensified. Desovietization took place not only as the dismantling of institutional structures, but also as the transformation of the public sphere, communication and culture. Starting in early 1990s, streets, squares, and public spaces were renamed to eliminate Soviet semantics. All Soviet monuments were removed from public spaces. Also at this time, Russian television broadcasts were reduced, the Lithuanian broadcasting sector became diversified in terms of new commercial channels introduced separately from the public service broadcaster with two national channels. New commercial television channels focused on popular local creative industries, as well as imported Western production, mainly films and television series (Pečiulis, 2000). Through derussification, the separation of the new cultural and political space from the entire geopolitical Russianspeaking former Soviet Union region was achieved. Along with reconstructing national identity, from the mid-1990s the aim was also to engender a European identity. In order to distance the public from certain layers of historical memory, a strategy of forgetting the past was actively applied. In terms of television programming, there was a clear decline in the representations of Soviet life and a withdrawal of Soviet production from the broadcasts, including films and broadcasts in Russian (Pečiulis, 2000). The systematic forgetting of traces of the Soviet era daily life style, pop culture, and media production, as well as avoiding any positive mention of this period was aimed at minimizing the effects of the Soviet regime’s ideology as well as countering any nostalgic feelings of this past. When discussing the politics of memory in Lithuania, and the public communication strategy towards the Soviet era, the analysis of the Lithuanian researcher Linara Dovydaitytė (2010) on the role of museums as public communicative spaces in the politics of memory is of particular relevance. She reveals similar trends of keeping silence and excluding particular historical facts. The role of the museum as mnemonic device for the former Eastern bloc has been 88




in line with the post-communist attempts to reaffirm national identity. The author argues that one of the challenges of constructing post-communist national identities is precisely the problem of dealing with the communist past and its placement in post-1989 memory politics. According to the author, most museums represent an uncomplicated anti-communist attitude to the past rather than the complex history of life under communism. The absence of the history of communism in museums is symptomatic of the post-communist culture of memory in Lithuania. The historical narrative is reduced to a story of communist crimes and victims, or incorporates a distancing of oneself from the communist past by turning it into an exotic story of the “other”. Indeed, after 1989, the main events and topics of the past in Eastern Europe included, first of all, the history of resistance against the communist regime and a commemoration of the victims of the crimes of the Soviet regime. Memory politics in Lithuania ignores daily life under communism. Looking at the above-described politics of memory and certain processes of forgetting from the critical theory perspective, it should be admitted that such a selective memory strategy simplifies the past and thereby hinders the development of a critical relationship with the Soviet epoch. It limits the possibility to develop citizens’ ability to critically evaluate the past by “weighing” all the arguments, to make informed judgments, to assess controversy, ambiguity and complexity of the history. Avoiding this confrontation with the Soviet past through silencing, forgetting and exclusion in the Lithuanian politics of memory may trigger unexpected reactions. One of the most obvious consequences of forgetting the past is that such a subjective strategy impedes the understanding of present identities and habitus, which are rooted and embodied in the past. On the basis of these theoretical assumptions, in combination with the values of participation and democratization of memory, we have investigated the expressions of citizen’s critical thinking skills and at the same time the manifestations of critical media literacy in the process of evaluation of the past – their experiences and accounts of the Soviet television. In the following section, first the research methodology, based on an oral history approach, and then the research sample are detailed.

Research strategy and implementation In order to investigate the social construction of public communication and the critical responses it provoked within the memory space of Soviet television CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 79–104 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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and post-Soviet period, we implemented audience research by carrying out oral history interviews. Memory is the main subject of oral history; it is considered to be an activity that gives meaning to the past through its reconstruction in narrative. The research has been carried out following methodological guidelines for oral history research (Ritchie, 2003, 2011). We use a critical theory approach in oral history, seeking to reveal critical readings of Soviet propaganda and alternative communicational practices in the past and the influence of memory politics in the recent present. The sample is composed of 163 interviews with people of different ages conducted in different areas of Lithuania. Individual accounts were collected by a group of trained students who were following interview guidelines and questions at Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania) in April 2013. The main questions were related to the people’s memories, experiences and opinions on the use, production, content of the Soviet television and its comparison with today’s television. To preserve confidentiality of the recorded accounts, interviews have been anonymized. In asking our informants about their television practices in Soviet times we understand that their responses reflect not just their own memories of their relationship with the Soviet past. We realize that our study participants are the subjects (in Foucault’s terms) affected by the dominant official discourses. We cannot deny that our informants in one way or another have been influenced by the Soviet propaganda and socialization system. A request for the research participants to recall and evaluate Soviet television is an invitation to reflect on its potential impact on them as citizens, given the common socialization strategy (where television had its distinctive role), and official propaganda effect of the Soviet era. But at the same time these interviews show the resistance that the Soviet propaganda provoked. More particularly, we were searching for participants’ evaluations of television under the communist regime with reference to critical thinking skills and critical media literacy competences – in relationship to the past and the role of media. Yet it should be noted that the informants’ individual and historical memory (what and how they remember about the past) is affected by the politics of memory developed in Lithuania over the past decades and is shaped by the participants’ socialization and social life. Individual memories are shaped in intersubjective spaces through interactions with others, and at the same time reflect dominant discourses in society. Thus, hypothetically we envisage that the way individu90




als reconstruct and evaluate the past may build not only on their authentic lived individual experiences of the past, but also on different conflicting webs of memory and diverse vectors of evaluation of the past. While we understand that individual memory may be selective and can provide biased and inaccurate representations, we also realize that it relates to broader social and political processes in society. Hypothetically we can try to retrace national identity building and desovietization ideology with its corresponding politics of memory during the period of the recent 20 years that have been affecting representations of the past. We believe that such research represents not only our effort to understand some aspects of social reality, but also a kind of invitation to the research participants to engage into the critical discourse process and confront the Soviet past while taking into account its controversy, complexity and ambivalence. Following an oral history approach to study media history, we are seeking to identify a set of configurations of individual and collective memories, which indirectly refer to the objective reality through the subjective reconstruction of the facts and events in the past. When questioning people about the past we reveal their memories and the ways the past experience is reflected and conceptualized. In the analysis of the research participants’ stories on the memories and experiences of Soviet television, we tried to avoid naive explanations that suggest that people basically recall what was happening in the past, and the only distorting factor is natural oblivion caused by the passing of more than 20 years. On the one hand, we apply critical theory to address the potential impact of social structures and dominant discourses on the individual consciousness and possible individual memory formations in the context of different memory politics. On the other hand, the study is aimed at identifying the informants’ perceived relationship with and their attitudes towards the dominant discourses of the time and any potential manipulation of the past and the present.

Research findings: critical interpretations of the Soviet and contemporary media One major finding is that interviews with people of different generations reveal varying critical assessments of the Soviet television propaganda. Research participants underline television propaganda, one-sidedness, political engagement, exaltation of the Soviet reality. The main evening news programs, reiterated by the informants, included “Panorama” aired on the Lithuanian television CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 79–104 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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and “Vremya”, broadcasted on the Central television of the USSR, in Russian. Both were full of major events, achievements, and positive news from the entire Soviet Union. Communist party congresses, the five-year plans and their achievements, were part of the standardized daily coverage. Soviet propaganda eliminated any form of critique of the Soviet system and communist ideology, and therefore, no accidents, human losses, or social and environmental issues could be part of the news. The following extracts from the interviews articulate the role of propaganda in the Soviet television broadcastings: The Soviet spirit was everywhere and every time. What kind of meaning had broadcasts of the Communist Party congresses that were broadcasted by all the channels and radio stations? None of the news program could avoid praising party leaders, downplaying capitalism and glorifying the socialist ideas. Even children’s movies were about good policemen, who always help a person and so on. Well in general, it were broadcasts about life of those days, as well as the past imbued with the spirit of communism. Even in evening movies were usually some terrible nightmares of World War II, where heroic communist characters were fighting against bad fascists and perished before pronouncing that they serve their country, and the Communist Party. Soviet propaganda on television is criticized by research participants for the inadequate depiction and falsification of reality, and for the lack of diversity and pluralism on television representations. Despite the officially represented picture of the Soviet life, people would identify the gap between depicted reality and the signs of everyday life. Particularly relevant here is that the critical readings, based on the confrontation of different knowledge systems, are themselves situated in the past, and are not articulated as an interpretation that was only added at a later stage. For instance, it was published that there were no deaths in the Afghanistan war, even though everyone knew about the returning galvanized steel coffins. Exaltation of the Soviet reality is perceived as an outcome of a wide censorship that affected almost all spheres of public life, as well as falsification used for propaganda purposes. For instance, positive reporting on the Soviet Union is usually contrasted with the critique or silencing of the Western society. People would learn about the poor life of the workers in the West, their strikes, 92




accidents, social issues. Critical accounts of the Soviet propaganda are often followed by ridicule and irony rather than condemnation: ...all shows and concerts, and some kind of information programs were more of a propaganda nature, that we have a very good life here, that we produce a lot: harvesting a lot of potatoes, producing a lot of sugar, and that, say, we are the best and, well, only positive to say it again. If there were any news from abroad, it was just that foreign countries were too bad, the West was a “rotten” West. We were pumped by this information, and we, of course, holy believed in that. Broadcasts of the major ideological celebrations were an important part of the Soviet propaganda. May 1st – Labour day of human solidarity, November 7th – October Revolution Day with a gala parade broadcasted live from Vilnius or Moscow, May 9th – Victory Day with the live broadcast of the military parade in Moscow. Apart from the annual celebrations and demonstrations, there were other events that would make citizens be proud of the Soviet regime, e.g. the 1st human spaceflight by Gagarin, the Moscow Olympics in 1980, etc. These citations also illustrate the seductive and mobilizing strength of these representations, and here we see the distancing critical operation taking place ex-post. Of course, television shows reflected the ideology of those times. I remember the slogans of the five-year plan achievement within four years, about labour gifts for any party or Komsomol Congress, Stakhanovites’ work. Congresses and plenums were continuously broadcasted, the communist worldview installed into the viewers’ consciousness. I remember May 1st, Victory Day, the October Revolution, the demonstrations, the atmosphere – party leaders worships, thunderous “Ura”, party leaders portraits, flags, slogans. Well, everything was fine: we go forward, we implement plans and we have the best athletes, the best culture professionals. We felt that here, wow, we can conquer the whole world. When invited to evaluate Soviet television, informants would emphasize that they were missing diversity, pluralism, also Western movies; the Russian ones were seen as having a very clear ideological discourse on class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the poor: “Soviet television – restricted, censored, and predictable”.


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In the Soviet times, those who were not interested in politics and swam downstream, television would provide some kind of information and entertainment. For those interested in politics and foreign life, information was only one-sided. So television acted as a propaganda tool and a source of entertainment. The reconstruction of the Soviet television also reflects clear signs of conflicting processes of identity construction, which again show the critical actions and readings of the research participants. In their narratives we recognize tensions between identity constructs created by the mediated Soviet ideology and national identity construction processes in the past and in the present. In other words, the relationship between memory and national identity construction processes, as well as the role of media (Soviet television) are vital in construction of identity. In the Soviet Union one of the political goals was to develop existing nationalities into a united new nation, the Soviet people (sovetskij narod) as a supra-nationality. There was the ambition to establish a new human community, sharing a common territory, state, economic system, and culture, striving to build communism and a common language (Grenoble, 2003). Specific language policy was employed for this goal. It sought to make Russian the common international language – lingua franca – for the emerging supra-nation. Using policies of bilingualism and russification, Russian was promoted as a “second mother tongue” in many Soviet republics and regions. This language policy was developed through the school curriculum and media (television and cinema). In 1989 fluent knowledge of Russian among ethnic Lithuanians was 37.4 percents (compared to ethnic Estonians in Estonia – 33.6 percents; ethnic Latvians in Latvia – 65.7 percents; ethnic Kazakhs in Kazakhstan – 62.8 percents) (Dietrich, 2005). In Lithuania there was opposition to the language policy of russification. That is why, when recounting of television content in the Soviet times, informants identify the relationship and confrontation between two different social identity construction processes – one constructed by the contents of the Moscow broadcasts (mainly Russian) and the Lithuanian identity constructed by the national Lithuanian television. First of all, many people recall that Lithuanian television production had limited live broadcasts, and was of poor quality and rather boring, while Russian television channels had longer airtime and offered a larger choice in terms of different educational and entertainment programs. Nonetheless, local language and ethnic culture were strongly supported 94




and appreciated by our research participants. An example of the confrontation of the two identities was sports and basketball in particular. Informants remember watching a basketball game between the Soviet team “CSKA” and the Lithuanian team “Žalgiris” as watching a struggle between two countries, different cultures and identities. The “Žalgiris” victory meant not only winning a sports competition, but also some kind of resistance to the Soviet ideology. The research participants remember mainly the Lithuanian broadcasts, television anchors and actors, and almost do not mention non-Lithuanian hosts and actors who appeared on the Moscow television broadcasted in Russian. This reveals how important the role of the Lithuanian television was in resisting the russification policy at that time. When remembering the past the research participants also highlight the role of alternative media resources, which emphasizes their critical resistance even more. In the Soviet system, the official media were strongly controlled by the state apparatus seeking to shape a loyal, obedient and passive media consumer. On the other hand, such a strong censorship encouraged active resistance against power structures and the development of alternative media consumption, including local underground press and foreign media channels. In order to fill the information gap and have access to more diverse representations of the Soviet and Western world, people used alternative media sources, such as the radio channels “Voice of America”, “Radio Free Europe”, and the Polish television channels. This made a huge difference in the content and the scope of information received. For instance, Western movies, pop music, the Pope’s visit to Poland, the Solidarność movement, and the strikes of the workers in Gdansk were only visible on the Polish television channel, which was available in the border areas of Lithuania and provided the viewers with a more open window to the world. As illegal, but widely used media content, Polish television, as well as other foreign media use became some kind of silent resistance and rebellion against the official order. These memories and recognition of the role of alternative resources are again signs of critical media literacy. Citizens perceive the significance of resistance against the authoritarian regime through access and use of alternative means and resources of communication. The critical mode was not the exclusive and dominant one used in describing media practices from the Soviet past. The research also showed the presence of a nostalgia towards the past, the limits of propaganda critique and a certain CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 79–104 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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lack of critical media skills while remembering and reconstructing lived experiences of childhood. Life stories, recalled by the participants, reveal people’s childhoods, youth and professional careers in the Soviet period, in relationship to their media use and practices. It appears that television accounted for only a small part of the everyday world. Many other things were important, but also other media were important, in particular national and regional newspapers, specialized magazines for women, youth and children, science, culture, literature. For children, there was a half-an-hour daily children’s program and special weekend programs for children and youth. Television still had its definite place in the general daily routine – for decades children’s programs broadcasted at the same time with the same hosts created a sense of stability and sustainability. Though television played a minor role in terms of weekly hours in young people’s lives, we find a more general description of what their childhood and daily routine was – school, playing games, non-formal educational and sports activities, reading books, and so forth. We find a very clear separation between the worlds of children and parents-adults in terms of television. Our informants state that at their young age they were interested in watching children’s cartoons, children’s movies, while their parents looked for political information programs and entertainment. People’s childhood experiences are described with certain nostalgia, which usually takes place when people are telling about their childhood, parents’ family and other early memories. At the same time, in this existential childhood nostalgia we can also recognize some kind of political nostalgia. Our informants are missing the Soviet mass mediated images of the world. The vast majority of informants are sentimental and nostalgic about the ideal social world constructed by the television – a world without poverty, injustice, disasters, crimes, violence or profanity. One of the main themes of the Soviet television that the research participants focus on a lot is animation. It is not surprising that this theme dominates the narrative – the majority of our research participants were children in the Soviet times. Therefore, Soviet cartoons are among the most distinct childhood memories. Recalling and reflecting on childhood opens the door to the people’s lived world with the heroes from the tales – hares, bears, wolfs, foxes, good and bad characters, representing a moral struggle between good and evil. On the other hand, as stated by the Soviet propaganda researcher Gintautas Mažeikis (2010), propaganda concealed an important area of ideological persuasion in 96




animation. Propaganda in animation prepared children for future more serious persuasion campaigns. Subject formation via persuasion and propaganda took place in hidden ways through attractive forms, with pleasure and charm. Many hidden curriculum items were used. According to Mažeikis (2010), there were several types of animation: first, those with open models of heroic class behaviour, and secondly the covert way to represent classes and political figures in the form of animals, Cinderella, little shepherds, and so on. In a metaphorical form, animated characters represented the class struggle as the struggle between the good and the evil. However, the majority of the informants did not identify propaganda content in the children’s cartoons, on the contrary, they felt nostalgic about their positive nature, and consider them as a merit of Soviet television and society. This inability to recognize propaganda within children’s cartoons is an indication of its success Finally, the research also reveals interconnections between the critical evaluations of the past and present. Participants demonstrate critical media literacy while evaluating the media of today and expressing their critique of the contemporary media landscape. Remembering the past allows individuals not only to retrace memories on past experiences, but also to negotiate daily contemporary practices. Pluralism and the abolishment of censorship are among the most frequently mentioned positive aspects in regard to contemporary television. However, our research participants share lots of criticism towards current television production and its content. Anger, violence, aggression, polarization, bad taste, poor language, lack of quality standards, as well as lack of decent, respectful attitude towards human dignity, all illustrate people’s disappointment. The research participants argue that most entertainment programs and shows are market-oriented products created to attract audiences and usually have no long-term value. In the context of dominant negative discourses about television, people express some kind of longing for Soviet television, as well as for the Soviet epoch, when television and media generally were more positive and tried to calm and educate people rather than frighten and humiliate them. Thus, people experience two types of transformations: on the one hand, the political and economic systems have changed, while on the other hand, there has been a clear shift in cultural policy, one that can be described as moving from modernism towards postmodernism.


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Indeed we grew up in that culture rather than the Western culture, and sometimes for us what you do not understand now – some sort of humor, those hints we actually understand better. And sometimes you stop at the channel that is showing an old movie, which has been precious to you, interesting, or there is a really talented and fun actor, or some kind of comedy which has become classic. I watch the actors that have already become classic, some of them no longer alive. You stop and remember how it was actually. Never, at no time, it was just bad, and when today some people are erasing those days because of the Soviet times, it gets sometimes disgusting and I feel bad, because we simply do not have the right to ignore the people who were created in those days. It can be said that when criticizing the current “trash-television” and entertainment industry, as well as comparing it to the already described and more positively remembered Soviet television (and the Soviet cultural policy), they clearly express a cultural criticism of the postmodern capitalist society. This criticism in principle (in its main intention) coincides with the one described by a number of critical theory authors (e.g. the Frankfurt School, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord). In the narratives of the research participants on television, there is a strong critical element towards consumer society, commodity fetishism, flatness and vanity, immorality, promotion of bad feelings and instincts, lack of intellectual and analytical activities. Some evaluations of the past also demonstrate a moderate critique of existing politics of memory in Lithuania. As discussed above, two main trajectories of memory politics can be identified. First we have the dominant national identity discourse, promoting desovietization and derussification. Secondly, there is the dominant discourse as manifested through the condemnation of the Soviet past, which are silencing and forgetting strategies. Meanwhile, research participants distinguish positive features of the Soviet television that they miss in modern television. They stress high culture traits that were exhibited in the Soviet era – intellectual and educational content, including programs about science, travel, animals, analytical programs about politics. The research participants praise the clear moral values represented in good quality films and animation, mentioning also the romanticism and sincerity of feature films, and movie production of high aesthetic quality, such as by Tarkovsky. These expressed positive assessments of the Soviet television, on the one hand, are indirect confirmations that the Soviet regime was based on a clear and strongly regulated 98




cultural policy (in particular through censorship). In order to put those ideals into practice, moral ideals are emphasized, good against evil prevails, and high art is considered as the outstanding Soviet culture and a way of life. However, here we also notice some kind of nostalgia for ideals in the modern times – a clear divide between good and evil, high culture and arts, one dominant discourse and narrative, rather than several competing ones. The fact that people develop positive discourses of the Soviet ideology may also demonstrate some kind of critical thinking, as one understands that talking positively and being nostalgic of the Soviet era is deviating from the dominant discourse in Lithuania for the last 20 years of policy criticizing the Soviet past.

Discussion and conclusions Before, we mentioned the idea that the lack of sustainability of democratic habitus and fragility of democratic participation in the post-Soviet society are both linked to the history of having been part of an authoritarian regime and its paternalistic culture. However, the empirical research shows that citizens express a well-defined critique of the power manipulation and propaganda persuasion in the Soviet media. When assessing Soviet television, research participants provide clear identifications and articulations of the Soviet television propaganda that citizens were exposed to – research participants identify in detail visual images, strategies, methods, techniques of the propaganda effect. They point out such traits of the Soviet television as the glorification of the Soviet society achievements, the politicization of television content, the one-sidedness of news coverage, including positive images of the Soviet regime, the silencing of critical issues, and the criticism of the “rotten” West and capitalist society. Our research participants demonstrate skills of critical thinking by revealing their perception of the relationship between power, dominant discourses and affected citizens. They understand the nature and mechanisms of propaganda persuasion in the non-democratic state machinery. At the same time, critical evaluations are a feature of collective subjectivity, a result of both the silent resistance in the Soviet times and the official criticism of the Soviet regime in the public sphere since the beginning of 1990s. Informants acknowledge that they – to some extent – may have been affected by the Soviet propaganda discourse, however their expressed criticism of the propaganda and personal encounter with the Soviet propaganda machine discourses, as well as their reconstruction CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 79–104 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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of their experience, imply that we are dealing with a critical literacy practice, which we see as a condition for democratic participation. By recalling and evaluating the past, the audiences in the dispositions they cultivate towards the media manifest not only a form of general critical thinking skills, but also enact critical media literacy. In the memories about the Soviet television, we can acknowledge audience competences to critically analyze, process and understand the principles and techniques of media content production, and their abilities to access and use different information sources, including alternative media. Our research participants also emphasized their understanding of how alternative tools operated. The analysis demonstrates the role of Western channels programming as an important alternative information tool and education strategy. It can be seen that in reconstruction of the past, the process of remembering may easily transform into a critical analysis of the present. In such a way we see that the past, the present and the future are interrelated in the citizens’ historical consciousness and memory. The criticism of contemporary television is an indication of citizens’ moral values, critical stance, and their aesthetic dissociation from unacceptable content. We cannot deny that such neo-Marxist critique of the capitalist society’s cultural production does not have certain roots in the previous civic indoctrination, which was carried out during the Soviet era. In other words, citizens developed a certain habitus to recognize and criticize the capitalist and decadent, bourgeois West, with its culture and life styles. Despite this fact, the cultural critique of modern society (distinguishing the positive and negative aspects) shows again the capacity for critical media literacy, which supports their democratic citizenship. The analysis confirms our assumption about the relationship between memory practices revealed through the oral history approach, and the conditions for participation (such as reflexive agency and critical thinking), as well as the role of discourse in shaping subjects through propaganda, persuasion and different politics of memory. Media, and especially television, play an important role in this process. The informants’ critical assessments regarding the Soviet past and their relationship with it indicates that civic engagement takes place not only through transformations of the subject shaped by propaganda and persuasion technologies, but also through resistance to the dominant discourses of memory and communication distortions. The research findings also illuminate 100




ongoing memory games and memory battles in the democratic society outside and inside different social groups, as well as on the level of individual lifeworlds. It requires significant efforts to reconcile the different memories and conflicting experiences by critically reviewing the past and the present. Such intellectual and emotional experience of openness to diversity becomes an important prerequisite of democratic participation. The positive treatment of certain aspects of the Soviet past and the willingness to disclose it reveal some kind of resistance to the dominant discourse and prevailing mnemonic strategies to portray the Soviet period as purely negative experience and to remove it from the individual and collective memory. Such a position shows a tendency of citizens to democratize memory, to practice the multivocality of memory, and to sustain the heterogeneity and diversity of interpretations of the past. However, the study also shows the obvious, namely that to exercise one’s democratic rights and responsibilities by genuinely participating, interacting and creating in the Soviet media environment was rarely done, and if it was, the risks were considerable. Apart from reflexive agency, the most active phase of the media literacy (the communicative action itself ) is underrepresented in the public accounts of the past, but also in those of the present. Challenging dominant discourses and transforming social practices in the Habermasian sense of communicative action are weak. Nonetheless, the critical media literacy skills identified in the research study are still an important prerequisite for democratic participation, even if they only cover the first stages of participation in post-Soviet Lithuania – perception and criticism.


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The tales of the three digital cities of Amsterdam: The application of ICT for social and political participation Dennis Beckers1 Peter van den Besselaar

Department of Organization Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

doi:10.5937/comman1430115B Summary: During the last decade, many European digital cities applied ICT to improve the local public sphere, reinforce local democracy, support local communities and increase social participation. Different policies of a variety of stakeholders led to a wide variation of designs and functionality, content, main actors, aims and philosophy, organization, and use and users. To build a useful and sustainable online environment (digital city) proved to be difficult. Political changes, economic cycles or changing priorities of funders threatened the existence of digital cities. This article gives an historical overview of the development process of digital cities during the last fifteen years in Amsterdam to get a better understanding of this variation. It tells the stories of three Amsterdam digital cities, identifies the main actors, tries to explain the observed variations and discusses the role of these digital cities for social and political participation. Keywords: digital cities, civic networks, public sphere, digital democracy, social cohesion

Introduction Before the rise of social media as Facebook and LinkedIn, and other social media, online local initiatives were, and still are, connecting inhabitants of cities. Technological innovations as the personal computer, the modem and 1

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The tales of the three digital cities of Amsterdam:

Dennis Beckers Peter van den Besselaar

the Internet created in the 1980s and 90s a new digital infrastructure that influenced the dynamics of urban life. They changed the nature of interpersonal relations and communications and the form and substance of participation and cohesion in society. During the first decade of public Internet, many European cities build a digital equivalent of their urban space. Several historical, political and technological developments converged and gave birth to a new social and technological constitution: the digital city, broadly described as an on-line platform associated with a city or region for citizens, businesses and visitors. The urban dynamics resulting from the innovations in ICT were not uniform and homogeneous among cities. As with previous technological innovations, there were many variations in the implementation and use and the way they are institutionally embedded. This diversity shows the effect of the process of social shaping of technological systems. It means that the roles and policies of the many stakeholders in the city are important (however not determining) in shaping the processes of change and their outcomes. The diversity resulted in many kinds of digital cities that differ in their features, appearance and organizational form: community networks and grassroots communities (Schuler, 1996), municipal information and communication networks, online communities (Beamish, 1995; Preece, 2000), multimedia technologies for public services (Williams, Slack and Stewart, 2000), virtual communities (Rheingold, 1993), tele-community systems, civic networking (London, 1997), public electronic networks (Harrison, 1995; Schmidt, 1997), cyber-communities (Kollock and Smith, 1998), city oriented commercial web sites, portals and many other forms. The expectations of the effects on social and political participation of these forms of community informatics were high. These forms of locally grounded social media would not replace but augment the old ways of communication and the transportation of information, and the resulting complex dynamics would change the constitution of the communities of inhabitants and the relationship between local governments and citizens. While some researches in community informatics showed a positive tendency on the results of ICT in a community, see for example Schuler (1996), Foth (2011) and Longford (2006), others concluded that community networks in general were seemingly unable to become recognized players in the decision106




making process at the local level and that the impact of digital cities on the life of citizens was limited. Many digital cities eventually became stagnant or closed down, or evolved into a web site of a local institution with only a marginal role for citizens (De Cindio and Schuler, 2012). This article provides a history of Amsterdam’s digital cities. It discusses the development process of these three digital cities during the last fifteen years: DDS, the former digital city of Amsterdam (2000-2004), Cyburg, an online system for a city district (2006-2008) and Buurtleven (‘neighborhood life’) (20082010). We try to explain the observed differences and discuss their capacity to allow for participation within their websites, and their role in strengthening social cohesion and political participation in Amsterdam.

Methodology The broad methodological approach reflected in this paper is that of community informatics (Longford, 2005). The topic of this interdisciplinary research field is the study of uses of ICT in communities and the impact of ICT on a community’s social, economic, cultural and political goals (Gurstein, 2000). Community informatics brings together the perspectives of stakeholders as citizens, community activists and groups, policymakers together with a range of academics working across disciplines (communication studies, cultural studies, computer science, information studies, sociology, political science and urban studies). Community informatics research and practice are also linked to the theoretical understanding of the development of technology that recognizes the social shaping of technology. Theories of the social shaping or social construction of technology reject technological determinism, which tends to treat technology as an autonomous force acting on society in a one-way relationship, in favor of the view that society and technology are mutually conditioning (Bijker, 1995; Longford, 2005; Wyatt, 1998). For this article, we follow the following narrative of the pattern of development of technologies: Technologies are social constructions, the outcome of negotiation between relevant social groups. To explain technological developments we need to identify who is involved and what their interests are. In any innovative effort, actors form alliances. A project often has certain interpretative CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 105–130 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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flexibility, when there exist competing meanings. The selection of one of many possible solutions is also a social process. Often there is a key actor/ entrepreneur who is instrumental in enrolling other actors and defining the scope of the technological frame. A successful mobilization of arguments, interests or resources may result in closure: the artifacts become stable and enter a wider world. But users of technical artifacts and systems also possess a degree of what could be described as interpretative flexibility: malleability. New artifacts may or may not work, and may or may not be used. Some might fail or be used in unforeseen ways. If the technology fits within the technological frame of its wider community of users, it might acquire momentum. In this way, successful technologies give appearance of autonomy. (Wyatt, 1998: 17) To investigate the phenomena of the digital city and its context, we conducted 18 interviews with the main actors at each digital city, buttressed by other sources of information as memos and minutes or other forms of `hard’ evidence. For gathering characteristics of the users, we conducted online surveys with users of DDS (1,300 respondents in 1996 and 700 in 1998) and Cyburg (502 respondents in 2003), containing questions on social demographical characteristics (gender, age, area of residence, education, main occupation, income, political preference, active in political or social organizations) and ICT related questions (experience with the Internet, connection with the Internet (from where and speed), Internet provider, start date using the Internet and start using the digital city). To get insight in the usage of the digital city, the survey for the users also contained questions about how often, how long, and what parts of the digital city the respondent used. Also, for DDS and Buurtleven a log-file analysis was conducted where we categorized the content of the digital cities and counted how often users visited content in these categories. The first main section of this article describes themes emerging from the literature on the relationship between the technological innovations in ICT and its effects on social and political participation in urban areas. The second section presents the empirical findings of the research. For three digital cities of Amsterdam the network of actors is mapped and their roles for the organization and goals are described. Also, we describe the organizational structures, the way the digital cities were funded and the user population and their use of the digital city. In the conclusion we try to explain the observed differences 108




and describe the role of the digital cities for social and political participation in Amsterdam.

Digital cities and participation The sociotechnical environment of digital cities is complex and dynamic. The systems were not grafted onto the existing cities, but being integrated in existing social structures (Shuler and Day, 2004). It is therefore necessary to discuss some literature to place the phenomenon of digital cities in their context and to investigate the socio-technological processes that substantiate its development. The next sections discuss some issues political and scholarly debates have brought up in the debate on the effects of ICT on social participation, as the social participation in the community (section 1.1) and in local political participation (section 1.2). ICT and social participation in the local community The rise of new technologies impacts the constitution of local communities. Tönnies (2002) saw a connection between modernity and the on-going degeneration of social structures. Industrialization caused a trend from Gemeinshaft to Gesellschaft, from social relations between people based on specific ethnic, religious, linguistic or geographical borders, to a form of strong individualism where relations are mechanical, transitory and contractually oriented. In this way the process of industrialization and urbanization would lead to the decline of the community and thus of the traditional safety and intimacy of the traditional community. Putnam (2000) showed how participation in social activities in the US grew steadily from the early part of the century until the 1960s, with a dip during the depression, and then has steadily declined ever since. Americans have become disconnected from one another and spend less time together, both formally and informally. Putnam presents a number of reasons for this decline of participation in social activities: television, the entry of women in the workforce (since women do a lot more organizing of social events than men), and urban sprawl, since it takes a lot more time and effort to see friends or attend events. Although Putnam’s observations are focused on the US, and issues as urban sprawl are less relevant for the situation in Europe, in all Western CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 105–130 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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countries a steady decline in civic engagement has been observed. According to Putman, one of the most pressing questions for the future is how to reverse this decline in social capital and restore civic engagement as this decline is correlated with lower trust, higher crime and higher stress levels among individuals. The emergence of the Internet resulted in the rise of new patterns of social interaction (Castells, 2001). ICT provided the possibilities for an online platform to re-strengthen local communities. Communities became able to organize themselves online and citizens could online participate in activities in the (broader) community. The hopes of these kinds of platforms were high. Kling (1996) coined the term “cyber utopia” to describe the utopian visions of communities whose members interact primarily on-line. These visions were often based on simple technological determinism and utopianism, and tend to evangelize and hype up the transformative powers of telematics (Kling, 1996). Others were less enthusiastic, and pointed out that online communication reduced real-time sociability and entices individuals to live their own fantasies online, thereby escaping the real world, thereby contributing to the further decline of social and political participation. Hampton and Wellman (2002) concluded that, based on their analysis of networks, a trend is visible that transforms the social surrounding of people from the tradition geographically based community into a diffuse network. In modern cities people still share proximity, but they are often atomized and do not necessary form a community. Instead, people live in loosely connected and often changing networks. Still, for the local level, Hampton concluded that, as home-computers and residential networks became prevalent, the Internet was increasingly used to expand neighborhood social capital and therefore actually could serve to reverse the decline of social capital as it enhanced sociability both at distance and in local communities (Hampton and Wellman, 2002). ICT and political participation Nearly thirty years before the rise of the public Internet, Habermas (1962) described the public sphere, a model where individuals are able to freely share their views with one another outside of the realm of government and the economy. Since then, Habermas’s coffeehouse discourse has evolved in the direction of online communication. While radio and television tended to be closed to 110




critical and oppositional voices, both in systems controlled by the state and by private corporations, the rise of the Internet expands the realm for democratic participation and debate and creates new public spaces for political intervention, thereby expanding and redefining the public sphere. Some hoped that the rules of Habermas’s “ideal speech situation” could be transferred to electronic networks so the (local) democracy could truly represent both citizen and community interests. During the early 1990s, authors as Rheingold (1993) saw great possibilities in the use of ICT to improve (local) democratic processes. The openness of expression which “the ideal speech situation” demands can be applied to Internet, where rapid exchange of dialogue and production of information take place unchecked, thus providing an virtual online public sphere what reactivated the grassroots of an egalitarian public of writers and readers (Boeder, 2005). Around the world there have been many initiatives to utilize ICT to underpin the creation of a more participatory and democratic vision of the network society. Digital cites could enhancing democratic processes by increasing public participation in the decision making processes, providing access to government information, increasing transparency and accountability of (local) politics and keeping the government closer to the consent of the public. Central to the notion of Habermas’s public sphere is the notion of participation, as within the public sphere citizens participate in the formation of public opinion, which in turn can impact upon the realm of politics. During the first ten years, the discussion on online participation and the digital divide focused mainly on access to online environments. As after the turn of the millennium in Europe access is nearly universal, Gurstein (2007) went beyond this issue and introduced the concept of “effective use”, pointing at how ICT could be used for implementing applications and services in support of local communities. For the local application of ICT, participation has to be bolstered across demographic areas, specifically amongst those groups that are socially and economically vulnerable – as (ethnical) minorities, unemployed, elderly and handicapped, as information illiteracy might result in the lack of political power to enact the necessary changes to their condition. There are positive reports about the application of ICT for transforming and strengthen local politics (DIAC, 2004). There are also critical results. Laffin and Ormston (2013) conclude that ICT applications have limited capacity CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 105–130 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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to radically transform the public policy process and the delivery of complex public services. For Europe, the results of De Cindio and Schuler (2012) offer some explanations, as the conceptualization or framing by politicians, the lack of political will as local governments in Europe were far from being aware of the importance of listening, interacting and involving citizens. Although the awareness and even usefulness for the possibility of citizen participation became stronger, it is still more a good intention and an electoral promise than an actual policy implemented with concrete actions. But also the community networks bear some responsibility: discussions were often dysfunctional and rarely ended with some an explicit and agreed-upon conclusion.

Three Amsterdam Digital cities The previous section described some common principles and a theoretical background of digital cities for the participation within the digital cities, social cohesion and political participation. The next section tells the stories of three digital cities in Amsterdam: (DDS, 1994-2000), the former digital city of Amsterdam, Cyburg (2000-2003), an online system for a city district and Buurtleven (“neighborhood life”, 2009-2011). DDS (1994-2000) On 15th January 1994 many Dutch people heard for the first time about the Internet. At that day the digital city (DDS2) opened its doors. From the beginning on it was highly successful, both in number of users as in media attention. On its heydays DDS claimed to have over 180,000 members and it was one of the most well-known digital cities in Europe. Not only in the Netherlands, but also in other countries, DDS has been very influential in the way people think about what a digital city was. During its lifetime, DDS has known three major organizational forms. It started as a bottom-up experiment, became a non-profit organization and changed in 2000 into a commercial organization, until eventually in the beginning of 2001 the online environment was closed down. During those years, the Internet and the market for Internet applications changed dramatically. 2

DDS is the abbreviation of “De Digitale Stad”, Dutch for The Digital City.

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Funding, or the lack thereof, has been an important reason for the changes; in the first stage of the project DDS relied on grants from the municipality and national ministry, while later DDS had to provide its own funding by consulting and building web sites for other organizations. With this shift in funding, also the allocation of resources changed from the digital city towards the commercial projects. Figure 1 shows the first and third version of the interface of DDS. In the interfaces, the metaphor of the city was used to help inexperienced users and to convey the sense being in a city. Figure 1: The first and third interface of DDS

The network of actors of DDS consisted of a diverse group of organizations and individuals, as by enrolling the HackTic Network, cultural center “de Balie”, the municipality of Amsterdam and volunteers of various cultural organizations. The number of involved organizations decreased soon after the end of the experimental period. In the second year the structure of the actor network changed, but also the role of the individual actors changes. The initiators started a loose and informally bound group focused on the virtual space. This changed into a foundation with a management-team and employees. After the breaking up of the actor-network, financially DDS was mainly on its own. Although during its lifetime much changed in and around DDS, the management has been remarkably constant. While the group of actors involved with DDS, the organizational structure and the political and technical context changed over time, only two persons have been in charge of DDS. Until 1995 Stikker performed this role and since then Flint was managing director, during CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 105–130 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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the last years assisted by Göbel. In interviews, Stikker and Flint both agreed that their personal influence on DDS has been large, and that the history of DDS is in part also their personal story. This implies that when other persons might have been in that position, the history of DDS could have been very different. User participation has never played important role at DDS. During the experimental phase, the division of ‘users’ and ‘developers’ was not strict. This changed after the end of the experimental phase, when the coalition of actors broke up and the initiators of DDS were forced to shift the allocation of resources from the digital city towards commercial projects. The goals of DDS were a hotchpotch of the interests of the participating organizations. The designers of DDS shared a fascination with new technologies and an interest in politics. There interests are reflected in the technological and political goals of DDS. The main reason for the hackers to participate were their goals of social participation, freedom of expression and the engagement with rules and regulation of the virtual public space. The cultural center “de Balie” was visible in the goal to support cultural organizations and the willingness to experiment with technological innovations for new media. Last, the government was visible in the goals on participation, democracy, knowledge development and transfer and economic development. At the end of the first phase and after the actor-network dissolved, the goals of DDS changed. When HackTic terminated its involvement, providing access was no longer a priority for DDS. The goal of providing an online public space got less attention, while developing (commercial) projects became the main focus. For the municipality it was a deliberate choice not to be responsible for a virtual public domain and to stop the cooperation with DDS. With their departure, the priorities for political goals were lowered. In order to be able to attract investors and to make the structure of the organization more clear, the organizational structure of DDS changed again in March 2000. At the peak of the Internet hype, DDS changed from a foundation into a holding company. The shares came into the hands of the management. The holding company contained four independent companies of which one focused exclusively on the digital city as an infrastructure for communities and sheltered all semi-public activities. Some expected there would be more resources for maintenance and further development as funding would be pro114




vided by the three other Ltd’s and DDS would retain its idealistic character. However, this optimism proved to be ungrounded. In the course of the year 2000 the ‘internet bubble’ burst and many potential investors suffered from the sudden deteriorated financial climate for Internet companies. To cope with the continuing problems of funding, at the end of the year 2000 the board of DDS announced that editorial activities were discontinued and three editors were laid off. One month later, the complete holding DDS services Ltd was sold to a big telecom and Internet service provider. On the beginning of 2001 the digital city was closed down and DDS City Ltd. was reduced to a regular Internet Service Provider. Cyburg (2000-2003) Nearly ten years after the start of DDS, Amsterdam got another digital city: Cyburg, aimed at the residents and organizations in the city district Zeeburg. In contrast to many other digital cities, Cyburg had a professional staff working exclusively on the system. In 1999 a nationwide contest was called for to elect a city for experimenting with various ICT-innovation. Although Amsterdam did not win, it decided to persevere the plans to build a ‘knowledge neighborhood’. This project got funds from the European Union, the national government, the province of North Holland and the Amsterdam municipality. The goal of Cyburg was to build an online platform and to serve as an experimental area for research on the development and application of ICT for individuals, companies and local authorities in urban districts. In the long run, those applications and concepts that proved their worth should become available for other city districts. Within the Cyburg project a number of focus areas were formulated, including the social participation of citizens. One goal of the project was to improve quality of life by stimulating social contacts between citizens by means of ICT. Other priority areas of the Cyburg project were to bring politics closer to citizens, to stimulate local companies and to improve municipality services. Cyburg hired professional journalists who edited the news bulletins on events in Zeeburg, as the website of Cyburg consisted among others of a portal for the neighborhood, see Figure 2. CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 105–130 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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Figure 2: Interface of Cyburg

Residents of Zeeburg could also place their messages on the website, add their comments to already placed bulletins, or react to the comments of others. Another important part of Cyburg.nl was the ‘email book’, allowing users of Cyburg to contact their neighbors and form online groups. The email book could be used anonymously and users got a Cyburg email address so their own email address remains invisible. Cyburg also offered mailing lists, the functionality for sharing documents and pictures and a forum for group discussions. Finally, users could place small ads. In addition to the website, the Cyburg organization supported various projects for groups of citizens and companies. The focus of these projects was on social surroundings, stimulating economic innovations and experiments for improving municipality and non-profit services for citizens. Cyburg also tried to be actively involved in the discussion on the application of broadband Internet. Another goal of Cyburg was to facilitate initiatives from the neighborhood. Although at the start there were some contacts with inhabitants, in the end there was little cooperation between Cyburg and local initiatives. According to those initiatives, they felt Cyburg was a cumbersome and slow organization. It often took a long time before decisions were made. Also, for the respondents it was sometimes unclear who in the or116




ganization should be contacted, or they had the feeling to be sent from pillar to post. Respondents were also surprised about the redundant work Cyburg did. For example, there were already various web sites that provided news about the neighborhood before Cyburg started to do the same. Finally, Cyburg was experienced as ‘top-down’ instead of being part of the neighborhood. Halfway the experiment, this was also realized by the Cyburg organization. The new slogan became “high interaction, low tech” to indicate that interaction with the neighborhood had become more important than technology. The results of our telephonic survey among 500 inhabitants of the city districts showed half of the residents were aware of Cyburg, but only four percent actually used it. Reasons for this low usage were the unclear goals of the website, the complicated structure and technological problems. The survey among users shows Cyburg.nl was mainly used by highly educated Dutch males with a lot of online experience, quite similar to the characteristics of the user population found at DDS. Other groups, who could benefit more from the websites compared to those who already have a head start because of their background, hardly use the website. Ten years after DDS, the case of Cyburg showed it was not easy to get residents involved with a website aimed at the neighborhood. The Cyburg project ended at the end of 2003, but some projects continued for some time. In terms of numbers of users and usage, and increasing social participation in the city district, Cyburg was not a great success. While other local websites in the same district were successful in providing a useful platform for (future) residents of Zeeburg, Cyburg was not. The organization presented the system as an online environment for residents and local organizations. However, especially during the first year, the focus of the organization was more on technical issues than on bonding to already existing social networks and relevant organizations in Zeeburg. As a result, most citizens did not know about Cyburg, and those who did saw little use in it. In terms of the actor network, the foundation responsible for Cyburg failed to see the importance of enrolling other partners into their actor-network. Local organizations perceived Cyburg as a product of a typical top-down approach by the municipality, and were therefore not very interested in cooperation. By not enrolling other groups, Cyburg became isolated. This, in combination with some technical problems and the, for residents


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and organizations unclear purpose of Cyburg, resulted in the low usage of the system. Buurtleven (2009-2011) Buurtleven.nl was, after DDS and Cyburg, the third major online initiative in Amsterdam. The project would exist for five years, but was cancelled after only two. The initiative for Buurtleven came from four Amsterdam building cooperatives that invested in a fiberglass network in parts of Amsterdam. This raised the question what services they could provide over this network that would connect with the societal goals of the cooperatives. The idea came up to provide every home with a private e-mail address and to provide all 80,000 homes in four districts of Amsterdam with a digital mailbox. The cooperatives could use it for their communication to their tenants, and residents and local organizations could use these addresses to get in contact with each other. In this way Buurtleven.nl would promote social cohesion (Schüller, 2008). A project group presented a business case in February 2007, and a few months later a project was established to draft a functional and technical design and an extensive business plan. In March 2008 the project group presented the final business plan. The idea of the electronic mailbox was extended: the system, now called “Buurtleven.nl” (neighborhood life), would also present neighborhood news and provide a stage for individuals and local organizations. The aim was to improve the livability of neighborhoods, by facilitating contact between residents. Also Buurtleven provide housing associations and their tenants with a new way of communication. Tenants would find information about their living situation, report complaints and online contact the caretaker. Buurtleven would also provide a platform for communication between residents committees and their members. The cooperations would finance Buurtleven for five years. After those years, the organization should be financially independent by advertising revenue and agreements with partners. It was decided to start only in the areas were the fiberglass infrastructure was installed: 77,000 households, of which 47,000 rented from the cooperatives. Of the residents, more than half (52%) are first or second generation immigrants. 118




In February 2009 Job Cohen, the former mayor of Amsterdam, opened Buurtleven.nl. On behalf of the mayor, 100,000 invitations were sent to residents to participate in Buurtleven. After half a year, ten percent of the residents had registered. In order to persuade the residents to use Buurtleven. nl, the team decided to start providing news on the local neighborhood. Buurtleven.nl got a professional editor and a network of freelance neighborhood correspondents. The decision to only be active in the area with fiberglass was found to be a hindrance, as only part of the audience and organizations in the city could use Buurtleven and it was of little interest for advertisers and sponsors. Late 2009 it was decided to make Buurtleven.nl accessible for all Amsterdam residents. To cover the whole city, extra news editors were employed. The participation of local organizations (welfare organizations, community directors, tenants’ organizations, cultural institutions, schools, local businesses and health centers) was low. Local organizations did see the potential of Buurtleven.nl, but often used it only for posting messages. In this way Buurtleven.nl was only used as a transmission channel, instead of an interactive medium. Also the participation of the cooperatives was disappointing. When Buurtleven was contrived, the cooperatives benefited from the economic boom. Around the launch of Buurtleven the economy turned and the cooperatives got financial problems, resulting in reorganizations and dissolving attention for Buurtleven. At management level cooperation was promised, but at the implementation level the interest to work with Buurtleven was very low. The original plan of the cooperatives to communicate with the residents via Buurtleven.nl was barely working. For tenants, there was therefore no need to use Buurtleven.nl. The users’ levels of activity and the interaction between users of Buurtleven. nl was low. The site provided little reason and limited opportunities for interaction, the procedure for registering was complicated, the user friendliness of the interface was not optimal and the information residents could put in their profiles was limited. The goal of Buurtleven.nl for contributing to social participation proved to be infeasible as the effects on social cohesion remained unclear and could not be demonstrated. The awareness of Buurtleven was low among the residents (even comparable with Cyburg.nl) and relative few inhabitants activated their access code. During the two years the number of users increased CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 105–130 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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slowly but steadily, but involvement of inhabitants was limited and no online community developed. Eventually Buurtleven.nl was hardly an online community for neighbors but was regarded by the users as local news website. Figure 3: Interface Buurtleven

In the business plan and long-term budget of 2008 it was assumed that Buurtleven would generate enough revenues to sustain itself, by providing services to other local organizations. But due to lack of interest it became clear soon that Buurtleven would not become self-financing. 120




In June 2010, the cooperatives let know to have little faith in the survival of Buurtleven. A trial period was agreed until November 2010. The project manager was replaced and the Buurtleven-team was expanded with a community manager. A second version of the site was presented in April. The interface was more user friendly and the registration procedure simplified. The team felt that with these measures Buurtleven would become a success. At the end of the trial the cooperatives concluded positive trends were visible, but the effects of Buurtleven.nl on the community were not substantial enough to continue. When an external consultant concluded that the business model of Buurtleven was not viable and advised to discontinue the site in its current form, the cooperatives decided to cancel Buurtleven. The official reason was that social media like Facebook overtook it. But before this conclusion was reached the cooperatives already lost their trust in Buurtleven. On 1st January 2011 the server went offline. Although there was pronounced that the cooperatives would continue to explore the possibilities for other initiatives, after closing Buurtleven the actor-network disintegrated.

Conclusions Digital cities, on-line platforms associated with a city or region for citizens, businesses and visitors, took the application of computers for communication from fantasies portrayed in movies3 to the living room. Since the proliferation of PC’s and the Internet, many cities experimented with the application of ICT for increasing social and political participation to soften or remedy problems as declining social cohesion and civic engagement. As such, digital cities have been the object of enormous hope and considerable disappointment. This article provides an historical overview of the development processes of these three digital cities, focusing on the participation of various actors in the organization of the digital cities, and the role of these digital cities for social and political participation. For many European citizens, digital cities provided the first opportunity to explore an online environment. The metaphor of the city and the enthusiastic coverage of the media helped to familiarize the general public with terms as electronic bulletin boards, e-mail and the World Wide Web. 3

Among others “Tron” (1982), “War games” (1983), and “The Lawnmower Man” (1992)


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In Amsterdam, between 1994 and 2010 three digital cities were built. The characteristics of digital cities discussed were not uniform and homogeneous, but differed according to design and functionality, content, main actors, aims and philosophy, organization, use and users. The case studies show that digital cities were products of the technological and prevailing socio-political climate. To build a useful and sustainable digital city proved to be difficult. Political changes, economic cycles or changing priorities of funders make that digital cities were never sure of their income. In order to provide an information and communication service to the users, there were substantial costs that must be financed. Besides the cost to keep the service up and running, competition with other alternatives made innovation, or at least keeping up with technical development, necessary and for that funds were needed. All three digital cities employed a considerable professional staff, so a steady income was required. Cyburg was paid for by European and local governments, so here funding was a smaller issue. Finding a suitable model for sustainable funding proved to be difficult. The digital cities tried several funding models. For DDS generating income from advertising proved to be very difficult, especially after the burst of the Internet bubble in 2000. Gradually the focus of DDS shifted from the digital city towards the projects, spending less time and energy on the online community, resulting in technical problems, slower innovations and eventually abandoning users. Years later, Buurtleven also found out that its business model based on advertisement revenues and providing services for other organizations was not feasible. A purely commercial business model for digital cities seems to be very difficult. Another cause for the hard time many digital cities experience was the increased number of available alternatives. When DDS started in 1994, there was no public access to the Internet in the Netherlands yet, let alone a place to build an own web site. During the next years free e-mail and home pages were no longer unique (although often with advertisement) and the portal function of digital cities got competition from other search engines and commercial indexes. Various free Internet Service Providers offer free access to the Internet and schools and universities offer access for their students. The notion of ‘community’ became hype and many competitors started to offer free infrastructure for online communities and digital cities. However, besides offering informa122




tion about tourist attractions and a chat box, these commercial digital cities did little for the original goals of most digital cities such as education, rebuilding democratic processes in the city by providing a digital public space and reinforcing the local community by stimulating social participation. Eventually, none of the digital cities proved durable. DDS existed for six years, Cyburg and Buurtleven for two. Problems with funding, difficulties in building a critical mass of users, technological problems and increasing competition of other social media made that all three digital cities eventually closed down.

Participation within digital cities Many different types of actors were involved in the digital cities such as a cultural center, (local) government institutions, housing cooperations, hackers, et cetera. The same technology (the digital city) meant different things for different actors. Also, the life story of a digital city was often connected to the personal history of one person (in terms of STS, the ‘translator’) and his or hers ideas, emotions, goals and opinions. For nearly every digital city there was a person who was strongly connected to the development process of the digital city and who has great influence on crucial decisions and characteristics of the digital city. The goals of a digital city should be interpreted in the specific time and stage of development of ICT and were related to the characteristics of the main actors, as every member of the alliances had its own interpretation of what a digital city could mean. All actors have their own agenda, so keeping the alliance of actors together proved to be an on-going process. Conflicts of interests, disagreements and changing interests resulted in stagnation, organizations dropping out or eventually the breaking up of the alliance and the closure of digital cities. DDS was an experiment in every respect. It was an experiment with new technology, with social aspects of being online and with the organizational structure. During the first experimental phase of DDS, Stikker engaged a cultural center, local government, group of hackers and many social organizations to cooperate and provide content and services to DDS. For the cultural center DDS was an experiment with new forms of communication, while the local government saw DDS as a way to experiment with new forms of democracy. For the hackers it was an opportunity to build an infrastructure and show their capabilities. CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 105–130 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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Six years later, when Cyburg started in 2000, technology had developed fast and the Internet was established. Cyburg was also experimental, but in their publications could have focused more on the social applications than on the technological aspects. In reality, the organization focused, especially during the first year, strongly on the development of their website, while building connections with the neighborhood got less attention. Founded in 2009, Buurtleven was not experimental, but had practical goals, closely related to those of the housing cooperations. While there was a link between the kind of actors involved and the features and goals of the digital city, this was not a direct link, as economic, social and political contexts were also important. Table 1 provides an overview of the main actors and their interests and goals of the three digital cities. Table 1: Digital cities, main actors and their interests and goals

DDS

Cyburg

Buurtleven

Alliance members

Interests and goals

Local government

Experimenting with new forms of democracy

Cultural center

Experiment with new medium

Hackers

Proving to be able to be constructive, experiment, educate

Foundation Amsterdam Knowledge city Cyburg

To serve as an experimental area for research on the development and application of ICT for individuals, companies and local authorities

Four Amsterdam housing cooperations

To improve livability of neighborhoods, by facilitating contact between residents To provide housing associations and their tenants with a new way of communication

Users are noticeably absent as main actors, this in contrast to the dominant idea of community networks as grassroots activities, as is the case in US-based Freenets and civic networks. The three cases in Amsterdam all had a top-down organizational structure, without the possibility for the users to influence the policy of the organizations. In all three cases there was a strict distinction be124




tween staff and users. Users were seen as consumers rather than participating actors. They could provide content but could not participate in decisions at board level. It is remarkable that the (future) users of these three digital cities were not or hardly involved during their development processes. For the first iteration of DDS, a reason for this might have been that there were only few users experienced with online systems. DDS after the experimental phase, Cyburg and Buurtleven might have benefited from a more bottom-up approach and more user involvement.

Social cohesion The three digital cities all facilitate online communication in various ways and there are many anecdotes of individuals who found meaningful relationships in digital cities. Still for these three cases it is hard to find evidence for the claim that a digital city improves social cohesion for the city as a whole. For DDS, improving social cohesion was not a specific goal. The user population was too skewed towards the young and technology savvy. It might be that DDS connected individuals or interest groups, but not the scale of the city. For Cyburg, the number of users was simply too low to have a significant effect. The effects found could also be attributed to other variables as education, age and household income. Finally, Buurtleven, the number of users was also relatively low, and the system was more used as a local news site than an online public space.

Political participation through the digital cities All three digital cities did provided a platform for discussion. However, the impact of these discussions were very limited. These were not outside of the realm of government and the economy, as Habermas’s public sphere was supposed to be, as these digital cities were depending on other institutions for funding and other support. Therefore these platforms were not ‘public spheres’ in the strict sense of this term. Besides this more theoretical viewpoint, the results of the surveys show the digital cities were mainly used by high-educated males, while less educated, elderly and immigrants were underrepresented. The same critique on Habermas’s public sphere therefore also applies to digital cities: only a small group of elite CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 105–130 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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is using the possibilities to discuss local politics, while most of the others spend their time online chatting on more ‘trivial’ subjects and online games. Moreover, the translation of (elitist) public opinion into the realm of politics remains difficult anyhow. The results of the content analysis and interviews shows that the level of political discussion and its impact were limited. The case of DDS illustrates this. Although in DDS, over a third of the newsgroups were focused on social and political issues, soon doubts about the level of the discussion were expressed (Besselaar and Beckers, 2004). And although an aim was to improve communication between residents and local politicians, hardly any politician participated.

Postscript While DDS introduced many Amsterdam citizens to life online, the next two digital cities were not the success hoped for. In the meantime Amsterdam residents found other online platforms to get together, play together and discuss politics. Technological progress during the last decade made it relatively easy to build a location based online community, with or without the use of platforms as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Recently there have been several examples of successful hyperlocals in Amsterdam, bottom up blogs or sites aimed at a small geographical area as a district, neighborhood or street. These hyperlocals, became possible since platforms for blogging became easy to set up and maintain by volunteers. Although beyond the scope of this article, it is the question if these hyperlocals will follow the pattern of DDS and eventually become institutions, or that this is the start of a new phenomenon with its own dynamics.

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Historicising the journalist–audience relationships in the internet era: A case study of the Slovenian newspaper Delo

Igor Vobič1

Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

doi:10.5937/comman1430141V Summary: The study’s aim is to reveal how tensions between continuity and change in journalist–audience relationship evolved with the rise of the internet in the news industry and how journalists working in specific institutional settings have conceived audience members and negotiated their online connections with them in the last two decades. Previous scholarly works indicate historical diversity in articulations of the concepts of access, interaction and participation in mediatized political life, which are reflected in the complex dynamics of journalists’ conceiving of audiences based on quantifiable and generative sources. The research objective is addressed in the context of Slovenian journalism in the internet era, more specifically the leading Slovenian newspaper Delo, and aims to offer insights into diachronic diversity within journalist-audience relationship from the setting up of Delo.si website in late-1990s, opening up weblogs to audience members online in mid-2000s, to journalists’ move to Facebook and Twitter in recent years. Despite this case study’s limited scope historical analysis of the journalistaudience relationship at Delo reflects a silhouette of journalism’s Janus face – on the one side, the newspaper is adopting technological changes to envision a better future through various online interactive forms, but on the other side Delo is looking back and leaning on journalists’ traditional communication privileges downsizing participation in news and established corporate logics of the news industry in order to retain the top-down character of the journalist-audience relationship. Keywords: journalist-audience relationship, audience conceiving, the internet, historicizing, Slovenia 1

[email protected]


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Historicising the journalist–audience relationships in the internet era

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Introduction Through the societal consolidation of the internet as a relevant communication environment the journalist-audience relationship has transformed substantially in the last two decades (see Allan and Thorsen, 2009; Rosenberry and St. John III, 2010; Tunney and Monaghan, 2010; Singer et al., 2011). Namely, media and journalism scholars identify different modes of audience engagement in the news making processes (e.g., Deuze, 2007; Nip, 2010; Jones and Salter, 2012), find patterns of changes in the established notion of news toward multi-perspectivity (e.g., Himelboim and McCreery, 2012; Hermida, 2013; Barkho, 2013), and question the boundaries between conventional roles of journalists as authors and audiences as recipients (Bruns, 2009; Heinonen, 2011; Vobič and Dahlgren, 2013). These works signify a power struggle within the journalist-audience relationship, a struggle that pivots on the degrees of participation in respect to particular social, technological, and institutional settings – some newsrooms have been more open to changes, others more reluctant (e.g., Dahlgren, 2009; Thurman and Hermida, 2010; Robinson, 2010; Paulussen, 2011). Despite the great attention for changes in the journalist-audience relationship in the internet era, there appears to be a research void in exploring discontinuities in these relational dynamics, as only few studies have historicised contemporary audiences’ connections to news, more precisely citizen journalism (i.e. Ryfe and Mensing, 2010; Allan, 2009). As critical history shows, journalism’s development has not manifested itself as a progressive evolution determined by technological innovation, but as a flow of discontinuities and beginnings, where journalistic tradition is reinvented (Hardt, 2008). In the context of “the dramatic change”, as Hardt (2008: 5) writes, when journalism’s autonomy is being embedded in politics and commerce, and where uncertainty, flux, change and conflict are permanent everyday conditions, the analytic need to historicise becomes important. In this sense, scholarly works indicate historical diversity in the articulation of the concepts of access, interaction and participation in mediatized political life (see Carpentier et al., 2014), which are reflected in the complex dynamics of journalists’ audience conceptions based on quantifiable and generative sources (see Vobič, 2014). Yet, there is little knowledge of how the struggle between minimalist and maximalist articulations of audience participation has developed within the journalist-audience 132


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relationship since the early years of the internet and how journalists’ audience conceptions has shifted within socially and technologically different contexts. Thus, this study’s aim is to reveal how tensions between continuity and change in the journalist–audience relationship evolved with the rise of the internet in the news industry and how journalists working in specific institutional settings have conceived audience members and negotiated their online connections with them in the last two decades. It can be argued that a study with such focus is relevant, because it aims to investigate normative-empirical tensions within the journalist-audience relationship in respect to the concepts of access, interaction and participation in the contemporary multi-perspective communication environment, and to look into the journalists’ non-exclusive position as information and interpretation providers. This research objective is addressed in the context of Slovenian journalism in the internet era, more specifically the leading Slovenian print medium Delo, and aims to offer insights into the diachronic diversity within journalist-audience relationship from the setting up of Delo.si website in late-1990s, the opening up of weblogs for audience members in mid-2000s, to the journalists’ move to Facebook and Twitter in recent years. The analysis is based on data gathered through in-depth interviews with Delo journalists, editors and other newsroom staffers who have made news for the internet – from those who worked as one-man bands in 1990s, through the members of the separated online department in 2000s, to cross-media journalists publishing in print, online and social media in early 2010s.

Conceptual background: Considering journalistsaudiences online relationships Between access, interaction and participation Media and journalism scholars acknowledge that with the advent of the web and more recently social media networks, journalism is much more likely to give feedback and provide easy access to the newsroom, getting members of the audience involved in interaction with journalists, and bringing non-press actors closer to the news making process through different participatory practices (see Deuze, 2007; Allan and Thorsen, 2009; Rosenberry and St. John III, 2010; Tunney and Monaghan, 2010; Singer et al., 2011; Dahlgren, 2013). In CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 131–156 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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this context, the authors of the longitudinal project State of the Media (2006) stress that journalism has been going through “a seismic transformation” as power is moving away from journalists while “the people formerly known as the audience” (Rosen, 2008) are assuming a more active, even participatory role as gatherers, assemblers and creators of news. While the news industry desperately tries to enhance classical principles and practices of journalism (Hermida and Thurman, 2008; Domingo et al., 2008; Deuze, 2009; Nip, 2010; Jones and Salter, 2012; Hermida, 2013), research identifies a serious disruption of power in the journalist-audience relationship, even to the extent that Jones and Salter (2012: 119) identify “the people formerly known as the journalists”. The tensions between inclusive and exclusive forces in journalism indicate that the power struggle is indeed taking place within the relationship. Thus, it appears to be useful in this context to reconsider the notions of access, interaction and participation which are at the heart of the debates on people’s linkage with the media sphere and also participation in political life (see Carpentier et al., 2014). The concept of access is articulated as “presence” of news relevant for political life as well as presence of technological and institutional infrastructure to produce news and enable feedback (Carpentier, 2011: 30). From a historical perspective, as is acknowledged by Splichal (2003), societal conditions that would allow for the idea of access have never fully materialized because of the unequal possibilities of entry into the media field, the uneven distribution of communication competences, and the reduction of public debates to the legitimization of dominant opinions created by political-economic power elites. With the rise of online communication systems, the visions of “computopia” (Masuda, 1980/1983) argued for a progressive conceptual transition towards the idea of the right to access as a normative model for the future. Yet, later works refuted utopian (as well as dystopian) visions as they identified the “digital divide” (Servon, 2002) and acknowledged the trend of the “normalization of the cyberspace” (Margolis and Resnick, 2000) where “old” political power structures and corporate logics limit the “new” character of presence in societal life. Nevertheless, as far as the journalist-audience relationship is concerned, more complex articulations of access can be identified than in the mass media world (see Rosenberry and St. John III, 2010; Tunney and Monaghan, 2010; Singer et al., 2011). Yet, what appears as journalism’s struggle to regain political relevance by bringing audience members closer to the news (Gitlin, 2009), a 134


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clear commercial motive is often at work, such as recruiting audience members as free labour, getting income from targeted advertising, and setting up online projects for niche audiences (Jones and Salter, 2012). The notion of interaction refers to the establishment of “socio-communicative relationships” within the social, technological and institutional predispositions that enable collective production and mutual reception in the media sphere (Carpentier, 2011, 30). Historically, as Hardt (1998) argues in his book Interactions, the roles of individuals – “consumers” as well as “newsworkers” – are embedded in hegemonic relations between media and society where journalism’s connection with its audience members is subordinated to the “ferocious appetite” for commercial gains that limit public interests (Hardt, 1998: 191). Interactional features of the digital communication environment open up the potential for structural disruption and for “new relationships” between journalists and audience members (Dahlgren, 1996: 65). In this context, Joyce Y. M. Nip (2006: 216) discusses the agency of “interactive journalism”, that is, mediated interpersonal communication between journalists and audience members prior to, or after, news publication. Despite many interactive modes that engage audiences in news, such as the “customization” of news relay (e.g., Jones and Salter, 2012), audience members’ “gatewatching” practices (e.g., Bruns, 2009), or institutionalized “user-generated content” contributions (e.g., Singer and Ashman, 2009), journalists tend to retain control on the news production in order to maintain their power of primary negotiators of social reality (see Nip, 2010). The concept of participation refers to “co-deciding” and differs from access and interaction in respect to the “equal(ized)” power relations in decisionmaking (Carpentier, 2011: 29). Through the historical prism, as Carpentier et al. (2014: 132) stress, participation within and through the media has mostly been marginal from a society-wide perspective, but far from insignificant when alternative, community and radical “small media” are concerned. The popularization of the internet and particularly web 2.0 has significantly facilitated possibilities for what Carpentier (2011: 29) calls participation in the media (here news) (“content-related participation”) and in organizational decision-making (“structural participation”). There have been attempts to stimulate content-related participation in the news industry, for instance, by the “public journalism movement” in mid-1990s in the United States, but ideas of providing accessible CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 131–156 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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news so that audience members would impact on news coverage and engage in larger problem-solving behaviour, have fallen short within the established corporate logics (Rosenberry and St. John III, 2010). Yet, outside the mainstream news institutions there are numerous examples of not only content-related, but also structural participation in the shape of what Jones and Salter (2012: 60) call “multiperspectival journalism”. For instance, Wikinews, developed between 2003 and 2005, stimulates collaborative news making and open editing after publication, on the one hand, and is organized on the basis of horizontal structure in which formal hierarchy is rejected, on the other. (Jones and Salter, 2012) Despite substantial attention to the concepts of access, interaction and participation in studies concerning journalism and audiences, there appears to be a void in diachronic investigations of journalist-audience online encounters in respect to presence, their socio-communicative relationships, and co-deciding processes. Media and journalism research in Slovenia has dealt with the concepts of access, interaction and participation foremost in its theoretical investigations of public opinion (e.g., Splichal, 1999) and the public sphere (e.g., Splichal, 2012). Empirical research on the journalist-audience relationship have explored these notions only superficially when dealing with other issues, such as the “normalization of the blog” (Vobič, 2007), “pseudo-citizen journalism” (Poler Kovačič and Erjavec, 2008), and “offensive speech on news websites” (Erjavec and Poler Kovačič, 2012). Nevertheless, these studies suggest that while access to the news is technologically enabled through the strong internet penetration in Slovenia, and transition of the leading media online, interactive (let alone participative) journalist-audience online relationships are limited to narrow corporate interests reflecting an “unusual connection between the past socialist and contemporary profits-oriented journalistic practices and behaviour patterns” (Poler Kovačič and Erjavec, 2008: 874). Thus, this study attempts to provide more insights in the dynamic journalist-audience relationship in order to better understand the struggle between the “minimalist” and “maximalist” articulations of participation (Carpentier, 2011: 28) in Slovenian online journalism from its beginnings. The first research question then becomes: RQ1: H ow have concepts of access, interaction and participation manifested through the journalist-audience relationship with the rise of the internet within Slovenian news institutions? 136


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Audience conceiving in online news making As discussed above, in the last two decades considerable scholarly attention has been put to changes in the journalist-audience relationship, but there are only a few accounts on how contemporary journalists conceive the presumably empowered audience members and how generative and quantifiable sources on audiences are articulated in the newsrooms (i.e., MacGregor, 2007; Hujanen, 2008; Anderson, 2011). Scholarship dealing with these issues acknowledges them, but only as secondary as it primarily concentrates on other matters (MacGregor, 2007: 280): studies of journalists’ attitudes towards their audience, investigations into market pressures in journalism and the industrial construction of audience perspectives, and explorations dealing with news values. The rare accounts that primarily focus on audience conception among journalists re-emerged only in the last two decades. In this sense, two waves of research on audience conception among journalists can be identified (see Vobič, 2014): first, newsroom-centric studies from a socio-organizational approach conducted between 1960s and 1980s, second, recent newsroom ethnographies from a cultural analysis perspective since the early 2000s. The first wave of research, falling within what Barbie Zelizer (2004) calls “the golden age” of newsroom studies, argues that journalists know little about their audience members and perceive their relationship with them “as an understanding grounded in ignorance and filtered through a lens of professional judgment” (Anderson, 2011: 553). For instance, Atkin et al. (1983: 60) stress that in the newsrooms a “patronizing and unflattering view” of the audiences prevail, making readers, listeners and viewers distant and anonymous. Similarly, to be able to cope with the “uncertainty” of news making (McQuail, 1969), journalists construct their audiences by themselves while taking “the congruence of their own and the audience’s feelings for granted” (Gans, 1979: 237). Additionally, Schlesinger (1978/1987) identifies a “missing link” between journalists and audience members, saying that “journalists write for other journalists, their bosses, their sources or highly interested audiences” (107), whereas “the total audience remains an abstraction” (109). In their observational study, Flegel and Chaffee (1971: 649) note that from the standpoint of journalists, “readers’ opinions are even less important” than “their own opinions”. A review of the second wave studies indicates a shift from inquiries of the first wave, suggesting that audience conception in news making has changed. CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 131–156 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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The inquiries from the early 2000s onwards (Boczkowski, 2004; 2010; Hujanen, 2008; Lowrey and Latta, 2008; MacGregor, 2007; Robinson, 2010; Anderson, 2011) indicate that audience conception among journalists and its implications for news making have gained in complexity with “new” communication technologies enabling easier access to media, and also interactive, even participatory journalist–audience connections as well as quantifiable metrics of audience news engagement. On the one hand, research shows that diversity in audience conception significantly shapes attitudes toward audience engagement in the news. For instance, Boczkowski (2004: 175) reveals that the more journalists describe online audience members as technologically unsavvy, the more they rely on one-way communication. The more journalists conceive audience members as technologically savvy, the more they interact with them. Additionally, Robinson (2010: 125) identifies a “significant internal conflict” between journalists that are “traditionalists” and want to maintain a hierarchal, top-down relationships, and “convergers”, who would like to see audiences closer to the news making. On the other side, Anderson (2011) points out the “growth in audience quantification”, in the sense of a quantifiable and largely consumptive aggregate, indicating the progressive quantification of audience understandings in the news industry. These findings differ from some other inquiries (Boczkowski, 2010; Hujanen, 2008; MacGregor, 2007) into the connection between audience metrics, audience conceptions, and news making routines that suggest a persistence of ideal-typical principles among journalists, such as impartiality in relation to the social world and detachment from the people they are primarily accountable to. As discussed in more detail elsewhere (see Vobič, 2014), the studies in these two waves adopted different analytical standpoints – the social-organizational approach and the cultural analysis are the two most common – but what appears to be missing are historical insights how different social, technological and institutional contexts actually shape audience conceptions among journalists. Despite rare accounts dealing with audience conceptions among journalists (Vobič, 2013; 2014), media and journalism scholars in Slovenia have neglected the issue. Nevertheless, one can identify a historical trajectory of the audience concept within the dynamic media–people relationship. In this sense, it has been reconstructed in accordance of prevailing conceptualizations of communication, power and history – that is, through the notions of social class in so138


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cialism (e.g., Splichal and Vreg, 1986), after the transition to the Western type of democracy through the notions of the public and the mass (e.g., Splichal, 1999), and in recent years as the community and citizenry (e.g., Oblak Črnič, 2010). The most recent examples dealing with people’s participation in the news indicate that Slovenian online journalists in some institutional settings can be divided between “progressive enthusiasts” and “reserved pragmatists” in their narrations of audiences’ engagement in online news (Vobič, 2013). At the same time, according to journalists’ narratives in some Slovenian newsrooms, they appear to be somehow at the intersection of insights originating from generative sources, such as users’ comments and social media activities, and quantifiable sources, such as various audience analytics, when it comes to conceiving their audience members (Vobič, 2014). This study tries to add to this debate by diachronically dissecting audience conceptions among Slovenian journalists operating online in order to know how different historical contexts shape the journalist-audience relationship and what implications these changing arrangements bring to the participation in the news making since mid-1990s, when traditional Slovenian news institutions started moving towards the online. Thus the second research question is: RQ2: How have journalists of Slovenian traditional news institutions conceived their audiences since the rise of the internet?

Methodology The goal of this study is to answer both research questions by first investigating how the concepts of access, interaction and participation have been articulated in the changing journalist-audience online relationship since the Slovenian traditional news institutions’ transition to the internet, and secondly, by exploring how journalists operating online have conceived their audience in changing social, technological and institutional settings from the mid-1990s onwards. As in previous studies mapping the journalist-audience relationship and identifying audience conceptions among journalists (see Allan and Thorsen, 2009; Rosenberry and St. John III, 2010; Tunney and Monaghan, 2010; Singer et al., 2011; Patriarch et al., 2014) this analysis takes a case study approach to investigate the phenomena in the socially, technologically and inCM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 131–156 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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stitutionally shifting contexts of the last two decades. The aim is to explore how the journalist-audience relationship evolved through time and how journalists’ conceptions of their audiences have been shifting. This case study is qualitative as it probes a particular case rather than providing vast generalizations (see Yin, 2003). In this research, the author deals with the research questions in respect to the major Slovenian print media institution Delo. The case subjects of this study are former and current editors and journalists operating online at Delo. Delo is the leading Slovenian print media institution in regards to the size of the circulation of its dailies (RPN, 2013), the number of readers of their print outlets (NRB, 2013), and the number of unique visitors to their news website (MOSS, 2013). Delo, self-proclaimed as “the main Slovenian daily”, was established as a “societally owned” newspaper in 1958 (see Splichal, 1995) and went through the privatization process in early 1990s significantly reshaping news making processes and outputs (see Erjavec and Poler Kovačič, 2004). Previous research (Vobič, 2012) shows that the URL Delo.si was registered in 1996 with one journalist taking care of online news making. The newspaper set up its organizationally separated online department in 2004, and in recent years started the process of newsroom convergence, shifting some print and online journalists to cross-platform staffers. Simultaneously, in the last decade, a trend of growing online unique users is clearly visible (MOSS, 2013), whereas the reach and circulation of quality (print) newspapers have considerably shrunk by about 40 % (NRB, 2013; RPN, 2013). Previous studies concerning Delo’s relationship with its online audiences show that the newspaper adopted interactive online technologies, whereas the journalistaudience relationship appeared to be “unidirectional” and “monological” in character (Vobič, 2010). One recent example (Oblak Črnič and Vobič, 2013) also acknowledges that the news production culture at Delo (and other Slovenian print media) develops foremost with the aim of retaining control over the process of information delivery rather than creating a new space of dialogue. Between 2007 and 2013 the author conducted semi-structured interviews with online staffers who established online relationships with Delo audience members in the last two decades years: (1) with the only online journalist and technical editor in the early years of Delo.si [mid-1990s–early-2000s], (2) with two print editors-in chief, three online executive editors, three online editors, and eight online journalists working for a separated online department [mid140


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2000s–late-2000s], and (3) with a social media editor and five cross-platform journalists from Delo’s integrated newsroom in the recent years [early-2010s]. In the interview conversations, the author adopted a ‘heuristic interviewing’ (Legard et al., 2003, 140) approach, which emphasises the personal approach of the interviewer and sees the process of interviewing as a collaboration between the researcher and the participant, where both partners share reflections and information. The interview guide was structured, but not fixed – the author adopted it as a tool for a theoretically informed and contextually grounded conversation. The interview conversations appeared as what Hermanns (2004: 212) calls “an evolving drama”, in which the interviewer’s task is to facilitate the drama’s development. Thus, the conversations were steered by the rather flexible application of the guide and the active involvement of the interviewer. The author combined three types of questions, each of which was a distinct stimulus used for a particular purpose in a certain stage of the conversation. First, ‘open’ (Flick, 2006: 156), ‘content-mapping’ (Legard et al., 2003, 148) or ‘non-directive’ questions (Lindlof and Taylor, 2002: 195) were used in order to get the conversation on the topic started; they were answered on the basis of the knowledge the interviewee had at hand (for instance, Why do you use Twitter?). Then, the interviewer asked ‘theory-driven’ (Flick, 2006: 156) questions based on the literature review and the theoretical framework of the study (for instance, What are the basic characteristics of Twitter communication with the audience members?). Finally, the third type of questions – ‘confrontational’ questions (Flick, 2006: 157) or ‘content-mining’ questions (Legard et al., 2003: 150) – responded to the notions the interviewee had presented up to that point in order to critically re-examine them (e.g. for instance, How do you explain differences in communication patterns in letters to the editor, users’ comments under news items and on social media?). The interview conversations had a length between forty minutes to hour and a half. They were recorded and transcribed in full. The author then used Grant McCracken’s (1988) 5-step process for analysis qualitative interviews. Based on careful reading, preliminary descriptive and interpretative categories were made based on the set conceptual framework. Later these preliminary codes were thoroughly examined in order to identify connections and patterns in journalists’ talk. From there the analysis involved a determination of basic themes by examining clusters of comments made by the interviewed. In the last CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 131–156 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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step the author examined themes from all interviews across such groupings in order to delineate predominant ones in relation to the two research questions.

Results The analysis of the in-depth interviews with Delo newsroom staffers reveals a series of discontinuities in the development of journalist-audience relationships during the last two decades, implying different degrees of participation in journalism. The diachronic and synchronic variety in journalists’ conceptions of audiences decisively shapes articulations of access, interaction and participation. The interviewees’ narrations are predominantly tied to different rather deterministic understandings of technologies that have evolved in the last two decades and are based on simplified generalizations of their social manifestations. For instance, interviews show that Delo’s staffers romanticize the offline past through the letters to the editor, and also imagine a bright online future through a variety of participatory forms. Yet, the interview analysis shows that the advent of the internet and the web does not by itself bring about the materialization of access and feedback, let alone interaction and participation. Namely, the contextual specificity of news making, defined by changing tensions between structure and agency, has played an important role in shaping the journalist-audience relationship and articulations of participation in journalism in the last two decades. At the same time, audience conceptions have not been monolithic, but rather spanned from contempt toward those audience members who comment on news stories, through indifference to Delo.si bloggers, to delight with those who send letters to the editor, respond with e-mails, or contribute on Twitter. The next six sections sketch technologically different modes of journalist-audience relationships reflecting different negotiations of presence, socio-communicative relationships, and also co-deciding, and show the complexity of audience conceptions among journalists and editors, mostly based on generative sources as there is a substantial lack of quantifiable insights, as is stressed by interviewees at Delo. Letters to the editor – “reasoned argumentation” Since 1950s Delo has continuously published letters to the editor, particularly in its Saturday supplement, where issues of concern are articulated by their 142


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audience members and where occasional journalist-audience interactions occur. On the one hand, interviewees from different time periods picture letters to the editor as a thing “from the past” that is “dying out” (cross-platform journalist A, interview, 1 October 2013), but at the same time they see this method as a communication form based on “reasoned argumentation and care” (former print editor-in-chief [2003–2004; 2006–2008], interview, 7 July 2009). In this sense, Delo provides an infrastructure to receive and distribute feedback on content, and to act as facilitators for debates on public issues. Yet, the newsroom remains fully in control in this particular connection: “The newsroom takes the privilege to publish or not publish the letter, and in accordance to the editorial policies and the layout of the newspaper the editor may shorten or revise the letters received” (Delo, 2013). With the letters to the editor Delo manifests the right to access, but at the same time retains control in selection and length of letters published. A former print editor-in-chief ([2003–2004; 2006–2008], interview, 7 July 2009) stresses that “each letter dealing with certain journalist’s work used to be a shock to him or her”. “Before the internet journalists were not used to readers’ reactions to their work – they got a phone call or a letter to the editor once in a while. They were worried only about the relationship with their editors; in recent years things have changed.” (former print editor in chief [2003–2004; 2006–2008], interview, 7 July 2009) In any case, interviewees conceive audience members who send letters to the editor as “respectful readers” who “take their time to write a letter of few thousand characters” and “usually built their letters on profound argumentation” (ibid.). Recent interviews, however, show that journalists rarely interact with audience members through the letters to the editor – the exceptions are concerned with “mistakes made in my conduct” (cross-platform journalist B, interview, 4 October 2013) or “professional matters” (cross-platform journalist C, interview, 2 October 2013). E-mail – “huge feedback” With Delo’s transition to the internet and setting up Delo.si, e-mail was adopted as a method of asynchronic exchanging digital messages between audience members and the newsroom. Indirect interaction, one-to-one or oneto-many, enabled unprecedented socio-communicative journalist-audience encounters, which did not affect the power balance too much. In the first years CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 131–156 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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of Delo.si, interactions among the only online journalist and audience members were not limited to public issues, but evolved into personal messages. “The feedback was huge back then. [...] E-mail was something new and I could not resist asking readers how they are doing. I was reading all sorts of stories – from depression to love. And with some I became a close friend” (former online journalist [1997–2004], interview, 9 February 2011). At the time online news was a one-man band operation where “one half of the time was spent for repurposing print news onto the portable document format and then delivering it via e-mail, and the other half was spent for answering to readers’ e-mails” (former online journalist [1997–2004], interview, 9 February 2011). After setting up a special online department in 2004, news making dynamics intensified. With speed becoming a primary imperative of editorial policy and with setting up always-on comments sections below online news items, e-mail evolved into a method of interaction with information sources and also an important tool for in-house communicative relations (former print editor-in-chief [2008–2012], 9 February 2011). However, despite the reduced intensity, some Delo staffers used e-mail to facilitate journalist-audience relationships. Namely, according to interviewees’ answers, the frequency and nature of e-mail interactions with audience members’ depended on staffers’ positions within the decision-making. Editors, on the one hand, received more e-mails mostly concerning already published content, print or online. For instance, “There are really a lot of e-mails. I answer to each and every message I get directly on my e-mail address. If other editors are more competent to answer I ask them to reply” (former print editor-inchief [2003–2004; 2006–2008], interview, 7 July 2009). On the other hand, journalists’ e-mail exchanges with Delo readers are rare, because they “just do not get them very often” (online journalist A, interview, 27 January 2011). The conceptions of audience members, interacting via e-mails, remained vague with Delo journalists, as it was limited to occasional instances, such as the following: “When I get an e-mail it is usually offensive and I do not reply” (cross-platform journalist C, interview, 2 October 2013). Audience members’ online comments – “ballast” In early 2000s Delo.si transformed “from a rather static website to a more dynamic one” (former online executive editor [2004–2008], interview, 5 Sep144


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tember 2008), that is, by continuously providing fresh online news and setting up comments sections below online news items. Despite the fact that the audience members’ comments provide transparent feedback that is easily enabled users to discuss the news, the journalist-audience relationship has not substantially changed. The interviewed journalists and editors similarly acknowledge the lack of motivation to interact, let alone participate with audience members in the comments sections. They saw them as “full of ballast” (former print editor-in-chief [2003–2004; 2006–2008], interview, 7 July 2009), “just disastrous” (online journalist B, interview, 25 February 2011), and “spittoons” (cross-platform journalist A, interview, 1 October 2013). In this sense, most of the interviewees fall within a group that could be labelled sceptics. They stress that the online comments sections contribute little to public debates, mostly due to the prevailing anonymity of commentators, which allows more easily for an aggressive and often offensive discourse. According to some interviewees, journalists’ involvement in such communication environments moves power away from the journalists towards the audience members. For instance, “The relationship is not fair. We are naked, readers are anonymous. Interaction in the comments section is for a journalist like running over the field naked and observers shoot at him or her. Journalists need to be protected” (former online executive editor [2004–2008], interview, 5 September 2008). Additionally, the sceptics see the journalist–audience relationship as “alienated” since the editors “care about the clicks and that’s all” (online journalist B, interview, 25 February 2011). Therefore they often relate to online audience members as “traffic” or “clicks” rather than as a social entity (former online editor [2009–2012], interview, 4 February 2011). There is also a much smaller group of enthusiasts that see the journalist-audience encounters within the comments sections as social-communicative relationships. For instance, a former print editor in chief [2003–2004; 2006–2008] (interview, 7 July 2009) is himself active in the comments sections’ discussions – not with his true name, but with a nickname, “We can easily throw 90% of all users’ comments away. Only a very small share of them is useful and gives a new perspective. [...] Useful responses help you to identify your flaws over time. For some it is painful, but in the long run it raises the quality level of journalism.”


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Blogs – “just a trend” In 2005, Delo became the first traditional news institution in Slovenia to invite members of the audience to visit Delo.si and open a blog. To attract audience members they used print and online ads, such as “Have One Too!”, “You, Too, Can Blog!” and “Famous Slovenes also Know How to Blog!”. “The goal was to integrate the community of the website and potentially stimulate interaction.” (former online editor [2004–2010], interview, 4 February 2011). With Delo Blogs section, where discussion or informational pages displayed posts in reverse chronological order, and allowed interactions, the newsroom (at least to a degree) facilitated possibilities for participation – in terms of content. However, a former online executive editor [2004–2008] (interview, 5 September 2008) revealed that a commercial imperative was behind the project as blogging was “trendy” and “useful to generate online traffic”. In 2008, a year before the blogs section was closed down she clearly acknowledged this position, “We still have this trendy rubric because it lives by itself without any editorial intervention and still loyal readers publish within it. Delo.si does not use any content from the blogs in journalistic reporting, because Delo is a serious newspaper concentrated on serious news.” (former online executive editor [2004–2008], interview, 5 September 2008) In the 2000s, the news making online department of Delo.se focused on continuous news making based on retro-fitting already published news by other media or news agencies. The editor thus noted that online news making is going through the process of “rationalization”, suggesting that online journalists did not have time for nurturing relationships with audience members, “Interactivity is not our focus – it does not popularize. Most of the visitors are attracted only by fresh news and journalists feel vulnerable responding to people’s content, because their identity is usually hidden.” (former online executive editor [2004–2008], interview, 5 September 2008) Delo wanted its journalists and editors to write blogs, but there was almost no response. “The sense of a blog is that it be written by people who can explain the background and other things that cannot be published in the print edition. At present it is very difficult to get in-house writers. If the work is not mentioned in the job assignments, and it is unpaid, there is no interest.” (former online executive editor [2004–2008], interview, 5 September 2008) As a response, in 2008, the online department created the Delo Opinions section 146


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where audience members could comment on and analyse articles from the print edition. “With Delo Opinions we want to expose leading Delo commentators and to praise them. The goal is to attract visitors and preserve the quality level. Responses from the commentators are not intended.” (ibid.) Delo closed down Delo Blogs and Delo Opinions in 2009, and in 2011 set up another a section with “invited bloggers” in order to “better control the filter” of information and opinions (online journalist C, interview, 20 January 2011). Social media – “valuable ambient” In late 2010, Delo opened corporate accounts on social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, which can be regarded as always-on and omnipresent means of interaction and participation among people, individuals and groups, in which they create, share, and exchange information and ideas. However, Delo has used its social media accounts foremost to promote its online and print editions, and not to facilitate journalist-audience interaction or participation that would disturb the established top-down relationship. “I have set up the accounts and taught online news staffers how to operate the corporate account. [...] Mostly we publish the most important and interesting stories, try to stimulate a debate among our friends or followers, and react only to those issues that are concerned with the production process” (social media editor, interview, 26 September 2013). Interviewed online staffers similarly describe their conduct: on Twitter and Facebook they post “the best of ” Delo.si (online journalist D, interview, 24 January 2011), their social media activities are “just about presence and not to miss out on anything” (former online editor [2009–2012], interview, 4 February 2011), and what is published are “links with short sentences” and “hardly any reactions” (online journalist B, interview, 25 February 2013). Delo’s journalists do not have their individual corporate Facebook accounts but print journalists, foremost foreign correspondents and national affairs reporters, who recently started making news for the online as well, set up corporate Twitter profiles. In the interviews they stress that Twitter is “valuable ambient to follow reactions and comments of active and demanding audience” (cross-platform journalist A, interview, 1 October 2013), enables them to “easily get involved with other actors in the public sphere” (cross-platform journalist B, interview, 4 October 2013), or it is “a tool for fast and short communicaCM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 131–156 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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tion with sources or readers” (cross-platform journalist D, interview, 4 October 2013). Some explicitly stress their relationship with audience members in terms of proximity and frequency. They say that “connections are stronger and more frequent” (cross-platform journalist C, interview, 2 October 2013), that the audience members are “a big challenge with their instant replies and constructive debates” (cross-platform journalist A, interview, 1 October 2013), and “a valuable source of ideas for new stories” (cross-platform journalist B, interview, 4 October 2013). Audience conceptions among cross-platform journalists are characterized by generalized sharp distinctions between “critical” and “younger” Twitter users that are “light years ahead of other audience members” (crossplatform journalist A, interview, 1 October 2013), “frustrated” and “offensive” online commentators (cross-platform journalist C, interview, 2 October 2013), and “older” and “better educated” printed newspaper readers (cross-platform journalist D, interview, 4 October 2013). Online participatory forms – “the future” The interviews conducted with Delo editors during the last six years clearly indicate that they imagine the future of the journalist-audience relationship as a proliferation of online participatory forms, which would disturb the power relations between journalists and audiences through content-related participation. For instance, in 2007, a Delo online executive editor [2004–2008] (interview, 17 January 2007) stressed that a “sort of citizen journalism would be welcomed”, “People like to communicate; they only need to be guided by someone who is full of ideas, is popular, good with words and has credibility – that’s journalists”. Further, in 2009, an online executive editor [2008–2010] (interview, 10 August 2009) stressed that she planned for a project called Your Delo, which was focused on local news generated by Delo’s readers: “People would send their stories and videos on topics they know. We would then select some of them and publish them online and in print. The best pieces will be awarded”. Additionally, in 2011, an online executive editor [2010–2011] (interview, 1 February 2011) said that she plans to build “Delo’s version of CNN’s iReport, Yes, indeed. We would get stories that we miss with our current team of journalists. Editorial control would be needed, of course.” None of these projects have been realised due to continuous changes in management and supervisory boards, and in chief editorial positions, where the online development of Delo was at best 148


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a secondary matter. “The biggest problem was that members of the board and the editor constantly changed and were preoccupied with other organisational problems. The internet was not their priority” (director of informatics, interview, 22 September 2011). In autumn 2012, during the weeks of mass protests against political and economic elites in Slovenia, rather paradoxically, the foreign affairs department set up a participatory online form, called Revolt and Alternatives. Audience members were invited to “search for alternatives for a better tomorrow” and to “attract the widest possible circle of politically conscious and active citizens” (Delo 2012). A rather small group of journalists took advantage of managerial and editorial disinterestedness and established an online participatory form “to bring together the social capital for change in Slovenia” and “to give voice to the people without a voice” (cross-media journalist E, interview, 6 October 2013). The editorially selected contributions were published at Delo.si and in Delo’s Saturday supplement. Recently an online survey Revolt Vox Populi is conducted every week among Delo.si visitors on different societal issues and “compilations” of responses are published in print and online (cross-media journalist E, interview, 6 October 2013). But the same reason that made it easier for the group of journalists to start the project, is now making Revolt and Alternatives weak. “We are mostly on our own. We do not have any institutional support. Revolt is not the prime project of Delo, therefore it has a marginal place on the website and in the newspaper. I do not know what the future will bring” (crossmedia journalist E, interview, 6 October 2013).

Discussion and conclusion The historical case study of the journalist-audience relationships indicates that this relational development is not a linear process, but rather a process shaped by discontinuities and non-progressive historical movements. From this perspective, the historical assessment reflects a diachronic variation in the evolution of journalist-audience relationships in respect to the complex articulations of access, interaction and participation in the internet era, as well as, a synchronic variation in audience conceptions among journalists and editors implying distinct perceptions of people’s potentials to participate in journalism in the last two decades. CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 131–156 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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The investigation of how these concepts of access, interaction and participation have manifested themselves through the journalist-audience relationship with the rise of the internet shows that Delo has followed a series of technological developments of interactive online tools, such as comments sections, blogs and social media. But journalists and editors have neglected the emergence of the “people formerly known as the audience” (Rosen, 2008), even if this metaphor is slightly utopian. At Delo, they have been primarily focused on remaining the central providers of information and interpretation in public life and on the media market, therefore journalists and editors have done little to respond to the difficulties of the rising “multi-epistemic order” (Dahlgren, 2009) grounded on late-modern concepts of individualization, heterogeneity and fragmentation. In this context, it appears that the people’s presence in the mediatized political life, interactive socio-communicative relationships between journalists and audiences, and participatory decision-making in news is usually manifested within the corporate logics where the communication rights of citizens, journalists and audience members remain subordinated to property rights of media owners (see Splichal, 1999). Only recently have some Delo journalists started to routinely engage in interactions with audience members outside Delo news website, that is, on Twitter, and set up participatory online forms within Delo.si when managerial and editorial decision-makers were focused on other matters than online content and online relationships decision-making. If such instances of adjusting journalist-audience relationships remain exceptions in the “ambient” communication environment (Herminda, 2013), where broad, asynchronous, lightweight and always-on information and interpretation streams create various kinds of relationships around and within the news, the future of journalism as a relevant social institution and cultural practice appears troubling. The case study’s exploration of how journalists of traditional news institutions have conceived their audiences in the internet age indicates that these perceptional dynamics are far from uniform, but heterogeneously based on particular technological and institutional settings. Various superficial generalizations in journalists’ audience conceptions that span a wide range of options, from the refusal of audience members’ relevance in news to the enthusiasm for closer journalist-audience encounters, indicates what Gitlin (2009) names journalism’s “crisis of authority” implying difficulties to bring people closer to the 150


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news through interactive, let alone participatory practices. Journalism‘s troubles of (re)engaging with the people they are primarily responsible to, is particularly evident in the contemporary communication environment where “customization” and “multiplication” of news appear as prevalent trends (see Jones and Salter, 2012). In this context, journalists of traditional news institutions appear in need to rethink the services they provide to their clients. For instance, Pöttker (2012) suggests that journalists should adopt a “curator” role in order to overcome the monolithic character of traditional news provision and adapt to multi-perspectivity of contemporary news environment. If journalism at Delo (and elsewhere) does not reshape the often detached journalist-audience relationship and start stimulating participation in journalism, mainstream as well as alternative news will have a difficult task of distinguishing themselves from political spin and entertainment (see Dahlgren, 2013). Now it seems that the trend of fragmentation of the common communicative ground, facilitated by political and commercial interests, will continue deepening the troubles of the public sphere (see Splichal, 2012). Despite this case study’s limited scope, the historical analysis of the journalist-audience relationships at Delo reflects a silhouette of journalism’s Janus face – it is adopting technological changes to envision a better future through various online interactive and participatory forms, but at the same time journalism is looking back and leaning on its traditional communication privileges and established corporate logics. As social communication is becoming inherently transgressive, boundary-breaking and all-eroding (see Singer et al., 2011; Jones and Salter, 2012; Dahlgren, 2013; Carpentier et al., 2014) the study indicates that the journalism does not provide proper answers, as it faces continuous structural challenges, organisational difficulties and identity uncertainties. Journalism is historically placed between its structural location and its individual aspect, de-emphasising structural determinism at least to a degree, where the journalists’ engagement of people in public life and the reasoning of social reality are concerned. Therefore, the future explorations of the journalist-audience relationships would not only benefit from transnational comparative historicizing, combined with qualitative and quantitative methodologies, but also from comprehensive analyses of the role of history and tradition in context-bound diachronic negotiations of the journalist-audience relationship and of civic participation in journalism. CM : Communication Management Quarterly : Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem 30 (2014) 131–156 © 2014 CDC and author(s)

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Splichal, S. & Vreg, F. (1986). Množično komuniciranje in razvoj demokracije [Mass communication of the development of democracy]. Ljubljana: Komunist. State of the Media. (2006). Project for excellence in journalism – State of the media 2006. Accessed 7. 10.2013. URL: http://stateofthemedia.org/2006/. Thurman, N. & Hermida, A. (2010). Gotcha: How newsroom norms are shaping participatory journalism online. In Tunney, S. & Monaghan, G. (eds.), Web journalism. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, pp. 31–47. Tunney, S. & Monaghan, G. (eds.) (2010). Web journalism. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Vobič, I. (2007). The normalization of the blog in journalism. Medijska istraživanja, 13(2), 59–83. Vobič, I. (2010). The blog in Slovenian traditional journalism: Gate-keeping, audience and citizenship. In Tunney, S. & Monaghan, G. (eds.), Web journalism. Bringhton: Sussex Academic Press, pp. 180–190. Vobič, I. (2012). Konvergenca novinarskih uredništev [Convergence of the newsroom]. Javnost/The Public, 19(Supplement), 49–66. Vobič, I. (2013). Practice of hypertext. Journalism practice. Accessed 7.10.2013. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2013.821325. Vobič, I. (2014). Audience conceiving among journalists. In Patriarche, G. et al. (eds.), Audience research methodologies. London: Routledge, pp. 19–36. Vobič, I. & Dahlgren, P. (2013, forthcoming). Reconsidering participatory journalism in the Internet age. Medijska istraživanja, 19(2). Yin, R. K. (2003). Case study research. 3rd Edition. London: Sage. Zelizer, B. (2004). Taking journalism seriously. London: Sage.

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Instructions for authors CM: Communication Management Quarterly: Časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem is a journal published by the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade and CDC d.o.o, Novi Sad that publishes theoretical articles, review articles and original research articles in scientific fields relevant for the area of communication management. CM also publishes professional articles, translated articles, thematic bibliographies, book reviews, case reports, professional information and professional news. The journal accepts for publishing only the original articles that have not been published elsewhere and that have not been submitted for publishing elsewhere. This is acknowledged by the author(s) by sending his/her paper. Each article submitted will receive anonymous review and after the review the editorial board will decide on the publishing and inform the author about the decision in three months period at latest. The articles should be sent by e-mail to [email protected]. If not differently noted in the previous edition deadlines for submission are the following: • • • •

For spring edition: 5th March For summer edition: 5th June For autumn edition: 5rd September For winter edition: 5rd December

In order to be reviewed, the article submitted for publishing should be prepared in accordance to the standards of the CM journal. Inadequately prepared articles will be returned to the author(s).

Manuscript submission guidelines Length and font. The article should be prepared in Microsoft Word programme, page format: A4, font: Times New Roman, font size: 11, line spacing: single. Theoretical articles, review articles and original research articles should not exceed 24 pages. Professional articles and translated articles should not exceed 6 pages. Thematic bibliographies, book reviews, case reports, professional information and professional news should not exceed 3 pages.


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Instructions for authors

Heading. Name(s) of the author(s) and institutional affiliation should be placed above the title, left alignment. Name of the author (first author) should be accompanied with a footnote containing authors e-mail address. If the article is an extract from the master or doctoral thesis, the footnote should be added containing title of the thesis, place and the faculty where the thesis has been defended. Articles prepared as a result of research projects should be accompanied with the name and the number of the project, financial supporters to the project and the institution of project realisation. Summary. Summary of between 150-300 words should be placed under the title and it should contain the aim of the paper, methods, main research results and conclusions. For the articles that are not prepared in English, summary in English should be placed at the end of the paper together with the title and keywords in English. Keywords. Not more than 10 keywords should be given after the summary. Keywords should be typed in small letters and separated by coma. Main text. The article should be written in concise and understandable style, in logical order that includes introductory part with a clear statement of aim and problem, description of methods, overview of results as well as discussion about the results with conclusions and implications. Text citations. The bibliography referred to within the text follows the style (author, date: page), for example (Bloomfield, 1933: 22). If there are source authors with the same surname, initials of the name should be used, for example (Hamilton, C. L., 1994), i.e. C. L. Hamilton (1994). If two or more authors are being referenced at the same place, they should be listed in alphabetical order, within the same reference, for example (Brown, 1991; Smith, 2003). If there are two authors of the same referenced source both surnames need to be provided. Where there are more than three authors, et al. should be used. Quotations. Quotations should be placed in the appropriate places in the text. All quotations should be followed by a reference containing page number(s) with obligatory quotation marks at the beginning and at the end of quotation. For all quotations longer than 350 characters, authors need to submit a written letter of approval by the owner of the authorship rights. Quotations should be 158



followed by the brackets in which surname of the author, year of publishing and page(s) are stated, in the letters of the original publication. Examples: (Veber, 1976: 341); (Weber, 1989: 59). Bibliographic references. List of references should contain only books, articles and other sources cited in the text. Bibliography/List of references is a list of all relevant sources or material for further reading. Sources should be given in the letter of the original publication. References should be ordered alphabetically. If no author is identified, use the first few words of the title in place of the author (Word: Format/paragraph/indentation/special: hanging). If there is up to 5 authors, all the surnames and initials of the authors’ name should be provided. If there is six or more authors, only surname and initials of the first author should be stated followed by et al. abbreviation. If the same author is referenced several times, sources should be given in accordance with the year of publishing. If there are sources of the same author published in the same year, references should contain letters together with the year of publishing, for example 1999a, 1999b. If necessary, references of the unpublished papers should contain as detailed information about the source as possible. Book references should contain: Surname, initials of the author / editor (year of publishing). Title. Place of publishing: Publisher. Examples: Bausch, P., Haughey, M. & Hourihan, M. (2004). We blog: Publishing online with weblogs. NY: L&A Associates. Conway, F. & Siegelman, J. (2005). Dark hero of the information age. New York: Perseus Group. Guerin, W. L. et al. (2005). A handbook of critical approaches to literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Луман, Н. (2001а). Друштвени системи: Основи опште теорије. Нови Сад: Издавачка књижарница Зорана Стојановића. Luhmann, N. (2001b). Znanost društva. Zagreb: Politička kultura.


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Makluanova galaksija, Zbornik (1971). Beograd: Narodni Univerzitet Braća Stamenković. Book chapter references should be provided in the following manner: Jensen, J. (1992). Fandom as pathology: The consequences of characterization. In Lewis, A. P. (ed.), The adoring audience – Fan culture and popular media. London: Routledge, pp. 9–29. Journal article references should contain the following information: Surname, initials of the author (year, date of publishing). Title. Title of the journal. No./Vol., page numbers Example: Luhmann, N. (1992). Autopoiesis: What is Communication?. Communication Theory, 2(3), 251–259. Web documents. Apart form all other data listed above, web documents should be accompanied with date of access, name of the data base or full web address (URL): Surname, initials of the author (year, date of publishing). Title. Date of access. URL. Examples: Degelman, D. (2000). APA Style Essentials. Accessed 18. 5. 2000. URL: http:// www.vanguard.edu/psychology/apa.pdf Sopensky, E. (2002). Ice rink becomes hot business. Austin Business Journal. Accessed 16. 10. 2002. URL: http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/ stories/2002/10/14/smallb1.html Tables and figures. Figures (graphs, photographs, or other illustrations) and tables should have number, title and legend. Tables and figures are submitted in a separate files, without pagination, classified according to type and numbered within its category (for example, Table 1, 2, 3, ... Figure 1, 2, 3,...). Presentation of the same data in table and in figure is not allowed. 160



Statistical data. Results of the statistical tests should be given in the following manner: F=25.35, df=1,9, p < .001 or F(1,9)=25,35, p < .001 and similar for other tests. For common statistical indicators, no formulae and references need to be provided. Footnotes and abbreviations. Content footnotes are occasionally used to support substantive information in the text. A content footnote should be placed at the bottom of the page on which it is discussed. Abbreviations should be avoided, except the ones widely known.


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