Mediestudier vid Södertörns högskola – serie

Den tionde april 2019 fyllde professor Göran Bolin 60 år. Vänner och kollegor inom medie- och kommunikationsvetenskapen i Sverige och utomlands tog då tillfället i akt och förärade honom denna bok. Bidragen i boken tar upp en rad olika teman och ämnen som på olika sätt anknyter till Görans gärning: Här återfinns texter om mediegenerationer, medialisering, fält och kulturell produktion och vår förhoppning är att den återger något av den spännvidd som finns i dagens medievetenskapliga forskning. Vi hoppas också att bokens kapitel i någon mening fångar den slags medievetenskap som vi uppfattar att Göran står för: En medievetenskap som kombinerar samhällsvetenskapliga och humanistiska traditioner, en empirisk, kritisk forskning som närmar sig tidens stora frågor med ett historiskt grundat och teoretiskt välinformerat perspektiv. Boken innehåller 15 bidrag, av vilka sex är på svenska och nio på engelska.

What kind of routine media and communication practices do Estonian civil society organizations enact in their everyday work? What sort of symbolic and physical spaces are used, created, and accessed by Estonian civil society organizations and informal citizen groups when engaging internally and with their target groups? How do these spaces and practices evolve over time? These are the questions this dissertation addresses, with the aim of understanding the ways in which already-established and evolving civil society organizations navigate the highly-mediated everyday through their routine media practices and the spaces in which these practices are situated. Theoretically, this study takes a cultural approach to political participation with the concept of ‘civic cultures’ (Dahlgren 2009, p. 103) in the centrum. In this dissertation, the civic cultures framework is concentrated into a focus on the everyday, on media practices, and on communicative spaces. The concepts of ‘everyday’ and ‘spaces’ are empirically accessed through a practice approach. To distill and explore the role of media in the everyday work of civil society organizations, this thesis borrows from “activist media practices” (Mattoni 2012, p. 159) framework. The empirical study is grounded in the wider geopolitical context of Eastern Europe and in the historical context of post-Soviet Europe, and more specifically in Estonian civil society. Using a multi-methods approach based on media ethnography, this study includes a nationally-representative survey, in-depth interviews with civil society organizations, and a longitudinal study of the Estonian Forest Aid movement. This study found that parallel to striving towards episodic visibility in physical spaces, in mainstream media, and in decision making, civil society organizations worked on constant visibility in the social media space. The most used social media platform, Facebook, proved to be an important space for developing civic cultures on an everyday level: it was used for campaigns, opinion shaping, for disseminating news, and for civic talk. Everyday communication within the organizations was done using a mix of different media technologies and face-to-face meetings. Each media technology and communicative space had their own role and function in the everyday work of Estonian civil society organizations.

What are the attitudes of online media users to the vast collection of personal data held by commercial platform companies? Do previous experiences of state surveillance have an impact on these attitudes? Do they differ for those brought up in the surveillance regime of Estonia during the Soviet Union era, or who experienced the surveillance apparatus in Portugal under authoritarian dictatorship? Do Swedish media users without authoritarian surveillance experiences differ in their attitudes to commercial surveillance? These questions are discussed in this final report from the project Social Media Surveillance and Authoritarianism (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, 2020–2023), a three-country comparative study (Estonia, Portugal, Sweden). The project aimed to analyse the role of past experiences of state surveillance on attitudes to dataveillance, that is, the commercial surveillance stemming from online media that is at the heart of data capitalism. The report accounts for the aims, objectives, theoretical and methodological points of departure and and presents empirical examples of the results.

This volume contains adaptions of two excellent master theses that were written and defended within the international master’s programme media, communication, and cultural analysis at Södertörn University in 2023. Running since 2009, the programme has more than 100 alumni who are employed in the media, academic and education. In 2020, the programme coordinator together with the programme council and the department council, chose to distinguish the best theses in a printed volume. This is the fourth volume in the series. The contributions in this volume cover two very different topics: how social media and content streaming sites are used to shape relationships between K-pop superstars BTS and their fan base in Sweden and how vegans/vegetarians respectively meat eaters react to the use of shock advertisements by the organization for animal advocacy, PETA. Although stretching across two such different topics, the chapters share an interest in zooming in on how media can be understood in relation to engagement and emotions.