Tom 36 (2015): Zeszyt 2 (October 2015)

The present article analyses the mediatization of the brand and celebrity Zlatan Ibrahimović using the reception and marketing of the footballer’s life story and autobiography as its main case. It is shown that the construction of a myth such as Ibrahimović transcends the materiality of the book as well as geographical, vernacular and media boundaries, as it is constituted as content in a digital network that produces signification. This ‘Zlatan content’ is framed by national Swedish values and a traditional Western myth of individual masculine excellence. It is also marked by emotions, class and race, telling a tale about the marginalized emotive immigrant becoming both a national icon and part of an imaginary Western ghetto experience and global literary canon formation. It is argued that the performance of excitable speech acts is crucial in the mediatization and branding of mass market literature and celebrities such as Ibrahimović.

This article presents a quantitative and comparative content analysis of four Norwegian regional newspapers owned by the Schibsted Media Group. The aim of the analysis is to establish levels of localism in the online and printed editions of the newspapers and to discuss the relation between the local, regional, metropolitan and national news levels on two publishing platforms. Results show that the local profile is increasingly becoming the defining feature of these regional newspapers, even more so online than in print. As the analysis shows an increase in the amount of everyday life-related stories in the local news content, this study finds that Norwegian regional newspapers are moving towards a more metropolitan profile.

“Polymedia”, a concept introduced by Madianou and Miller (2012), refers to the everyday conditions of abundant media resources. Whereas such conditions imply that the classificatory processes concerning media as cultural properties become increasingly complex, few studies have tried to produce a general picture of how interpersonal media practices are part of sociocultural reproduction. This study is based on a nationwide survey conducted in Sweden in 2012 and focuses on mediated communication among “polymedia couples” (39 percent of all Swedish couples). The article demonstrates that sociocultural factors are important for explaining media uses, also when media accessibility is more or less unlimited, and pinpoints how preferences for certain modalities of communication are linked to other lifestyle practices as markers of taste. Most notably, email communication attains a higher sociocultural status than online chat functions and social media, testifying to the enduring significance of asynchronous, text-based communication in a longer format as a culturally distinctive mode of intimate communication.

In May 2010, the Best Party won the municipal elections in Reykjavik, and the party’s leading figure, comedian Jón Gnarr, was appointed Mayor of Reykjavik. During the election campaign, the party ‘performed democracy’ by playing with irrational, satirical discourses that challenged traditional discourses within political public spheres. Soon after his inauguration, Gnarr began a Facebook page called ‘The Mayor’s Diary’ on which he wrote openly about the challenges faced by a newcomer to politics. Approximately 10% of the Icelandic population follows his profile. This article presents an analysis of the communication conducted on the Mayor’s Diary, particularly of how Facebook as a media environment conditions the Mayor’s performative manoeuvres and, correspondingly, how the subversive discourses galvanised in the election campaign can begin ricocheting back when discussions move from cultural public spheres to political public spheres.

While observers have focused on the political use of social media when exploring their democratic potential, we know little about users’ perceptions of these media. These perceptions could well be important to understanding the political use of social media. In exploring users’ perceptions, the article asks whether politicians and voters view social media in a similar way, and to what extent they consider social media to be an apt arena for political communication. Within a Norwegian context, which may prove useful as a critical case, and using the technological frames model, we find that although voters’ and politicians’ opinions are not that dissimilar overall, politicians are more likely to recognize the political communicative role of social media. However, social media do indeed have the potential to become arenas for political mobilization among groups that traditionally are less visible in political arenas.

Degree of autonomy is one of the key dimensions of professionalization in journalism. However, the strive for autonomy looks different in different media systems, where pressure on autonomy can come from both political and commercial powers, outside and within the media. Media development also changes the conditions for professional autonomy for journalists, in both a positive and a negative sense. In the comparative research project “Journalism in change”, the journalistic cultures in Russia, Poland and Sweden are studied. In a survey involving 1500 journalists from the three countries, journalists report on their perceived autonomy in their daily work and in relation to different actors inside and outside the media. The survey covers how the work has been changed by media developments, and how these changes have affected journalists′perceived autonomy. The results show similarities in the strive for autonomy, but also clear differences in how autonomy is perceived by journalists in the three countries.

The present article examines cross-media use among 10- to 16-year-old Danish children and adolescents. Our research interest is in identifying and affirming patterns among media use, gender and age. Using a methodological design that combines qualitative and quantitative methods, we interviewed participants regarding their media use and paired our qualitative findings with quantitative rating inquiries generated from Danish commercial databases. Our results suggest that although cross-media use is complex and differs according to age and gender, media are often used for similar purposes, e.g., sustaining social relationships.

The present article analyses press coverage of the dramatic finance crisis and the ensuing European debt crisis in Europe, in three decisive periods. The authors conduct quantitative and qualitative content analyses of two major mainstream Norwegian newspapers, Aftenposten and Dagbladet, employing concepts and methods from framing theory, to analyse coverage in the framework of two contesting schools in economics.

The study finds traces of discussions of finance brokers’ ethics and some discussions of governmental regulations that made the 2008 crisis possible, but few indications of a basic discussion of the system as such. The authors conclude that the crisis was framed more as a superficial, short-term problem (as per a mainstream, neoliberal theory of economics) than as a deeper and long-term system problem (as a more critical ‘political economics’ theory would have held).

Due to the tradition of ‘Nordic openness’, and intensified by international trends, the norm of policy-making transparency is strong in Finland. Inspired by organizational institutionalism, the present article studies what this notion of transparency means in practice. A case study of a social security reform committee is presented. The consensus-building practices typical of Finnish corporatist policy-making significantly constrained the transparency of government communication during the lifetime of the committee. The government communicated actively in public to meet the demand for transparency; but in order to secure effective bargaining, the government communicated issues concerning the committee so vaguely that it did not inspire wide public discussion. Public discussion was instead mainly fuelled by leaks. These findings suggest that a strong norm of transparency can lead to ceremonial transparency, where government public communication is loosely coupled with policy-making practices. These ceremonies might strengthen the notion of Nordic openness.

The outcome of an audience study supports theories stating that stories are a primary means by which we make sense of our experiences over time. Empirical examples of narrative impact are presented in which specific fiction film scenes condense spectators’ lives, identities, and beliefs. One conclusion is that spectators test the emotional realism of the narrative for greater significance, connecting diegetic fiction experiences with their extra-diegetic world in their quest for meaning, self and identity. The ‘banal’ notion of the mediatization of religion theory is questioned as unsatisfactory in the theoretical context of individualized meaning-making processes. As a semantically negatively charged concept, it is problematic when analyzing empirical examples of spectators’ use of fictional narratives, especially when trying to characterize the idiosyncratic and complex interplay between spectators’ fiction emotions and their testing of mediated narratives in an exercise to find moral significance in extra-filmic life. Instead, vernacular meaning-making is proposed.

In popular science and technology writing, “boosterism” is prominent. Writers overwhelmingly describe science and technology in enthusiastic terms, thereby promoting the deficit or Public Appreciation of Science and Technology model (PAST). A crucial aspect of the PAST model is its pro-innovation bias: writers enroll chaperones in the texts, such as spokespersons, users, celebrities, witnesses, experts, and authorities, to support their claims. Both “boosterism” and pro-innovation bias constrain the public’s critical understanding of science and technology. This study includes a detailed exploration of pro-innovation bias in the popularization of the Internet in the Norwegian press and how journalists use chaperones to support their claims. The author demonstrates that, in popularizing the Internet, pro-innovation bias manifests several other biases, such as individual-praise, pro-technology, individual-blame, technology-blame, and source biases.