Tom 42 (2021): Zeszyt 1 (January 2021)

This article addresses the challenges facing local newspapers as the digital economy transitions to artificial intelligence (AI). We interview five CEOs of Scandinavian newspaper corporations, representing small, mid-sized, and large newspaper chains. The analysis focuses on three main factors emerging from the interviews – technological transformations, digital advertising markets, and corporate enrolment – and how they relate to business model disruption and the non-substitutability of local news. The analysis is set within the framework of the digital transformation, which, for the purpose of this study, we argue consists of two phases: getting online (until about 2014), and algorithmic adaptation (the introduction of programmatic advertising and audience metrics from about 2014). The analysis concludes that as non-substitutability is lost on the advertising side of the market, this challenges the umbrella model of newspaper publishing.

The new high-choice media environment has raised concerns that users of social networking sites primarily select political information that supports their political opinions and avoid information that challenges them. This behaviour is reinforced by personalisation algorithms that create filter bubbles and both narrow the available content and exclude challenging information over time. These concerns have, however, been contested. This article challenges the underlying theoretical assumptions about filter bubbles, and compares filter bubbles to what we already know about selective exposure and human psychology. The article lists nine counterarguments to the filter bubble thesis. In short, I argue that the assumptions of filter bubbles contradict many of the previous findings of selective exposure research. More specifically, when discussing filter bubbles there is a risk of confusing two arguments: one strong – but also trivial – that is about technology (e.g., personalisation leads to different information), and one weak and speculative – but also the most interesting – that is about society (e.g., personalisation increases political polarisation in society).

Music and television streaming services present users with abundant catalogues of content available on demand. We investigate whether users respond by narrowing or widening the diversity of content they consume. Further, we examine how the different logics characterising music and television streaming are mirrored in the number of streaming services people use. To do so, we compare non-, sporadic, regular, and frequent users of television and music streaming services. Findings from a cross-sectional survey in Norway show that frequent streamers consume a wider variety of genres and rely on more services. Our results also indicate that streaming has gone from a first-mover activity to a standard consumer mode. This study indicates that we can expect continued growth in television streamers, whereas the music streaming industry seems more consolidated.

In this article, I explore the reception of American “quality” serial television in Sweden from 1999 to the mid-2010s. My analysis includes how cultural critics and journalists writing for Sweden's leading newspapers conceptualised American serial television as “quality TV” and as legitimate “art”, and it charts the ways in which these discourses relate to the reconfiguration of Swedish television from public service monopoly to niche-oriented multichannel system. The analysis uncovers a process of cultural consecration that was based on comparisons with already consecrated art forms, applications of authorship discourses that promote certain individuals as genius television auteurs, and deployment of critical protocols borrowed from literary criticism – all in service of pre-established cultural hierarchy and “good taste”. This article also highlights the ubiquity of American quality serial television across the Swedish television landscape, which suggests that such programmes represent both a niche product and a mass phenomenon with extensive reach and multidimensional appeal.

This article attends to age stereotypes and ageism in contemporary tech. In academia, little attention has been devoted to this topic. Therefore, we intend to initiate a discussion around ageism in tech by studying perceptions of age in the tech industry. Our study is based on interviews with 18 tech workers around the world of varying age. According to our interviewees, tech workers over 35 are considered old in the tech industry. Older tech workers are expected to become managers, thought to become less interested in new technology, and expected to have more challenges when learning new software. We also look at how tech workers of different age groups experience entrepreneurial values of the company as a playground, staying hungry, and changing the future with technology, and how these values influence their professional careers. We conclude that ageism is reinforced in contemporary tech through several stereotypes related to age.

The article traces the evolution of over-the-top (OTT) services in order to analyse how the growing use of Internet distribution influences the structural conditions and institutional arrangements in Denmark. This story is told in four parts: first, I outline how the shift from postal services to e-mail restructured the conditions for asynchronous one-to-one communication; second, I examine the introduction of web-based services and the declining role of the press as gatekeeper for asynchronous one-to-many communication; third, I focus on the impact of mobile broadband and smartphones on synchronous one-to-one communication and the telecommunications sector; and fourth, I analyse the emergence of streaming technologies and the reorganisation of synchronous one-to-many communication and broadcasting. Building on these examples, I argue that key welfare state principles have come under pressure and that research tends to underestimate the fundamental transformations of the institutional order.

This study examines the construction of media literacy in a special issue on source criticism of the Swedish children's comic Bamse – Världens Starkaste Björn [Bamse – The World's Strongest Bear]. This is done with the purpose of understanding what values, perspectives, and practices are promoted when media literacy is communicated via children's edutainment media. Using narrative and discourse analysis, we problematise how notions of truth (such as post-truth) guide much of the discourse on digital media in today's post-political society, and how that and individualisation shape notions of media literacy. This is visible in the analysed case in how source criticism is constructed in relation to notions of truth and falsehood, and as moral lessons aimed at the individual media user. We argue that such an individualised, decontextualised, and depoliticised take on media literacy is problematic and an expression of neoliberalism and a middle-class gaze.

Google is the gateway to the Internet for billions of people. However, to use Google’s multiple platforms and services, users must accept Google’s terms. With the advent of the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), Google made significant changes to these terms. In this article, we scrutinise the intertextual relations between Google’s privacy policies and terms of service (ToS) and the GDPR – and the discursive co-constitutive complexity within and between these frameworks. We argue that the material and communicative articulation of Google’s privacy policies and ToS should be understood as deliberative data politics delimiting users’ agency, consent, and privacy. Furthermore, we emphasise complexity and the demands of reducing complexity as two opposing dynamics. While the GDPR required Google to make its terms and policies clearer and more understandable, ironically, in the process of accommodating GDPR’s demand of increased transparency, the discursive complexity of Google’s policies has in fact increased.

In this article, we comparatively explore Nordic journalists’ perceived roles and influences on their work using survey data from the Worlds of Journalism project (2012–2016). In a European context, a principal component analysis of 18 Western and Southern European countries (N = 10,254) finds that Nordic journalists generally resemble journalists in other democratic corporatist countries, particularly by their relatively low experience of political and economic influences. Restricting the analysis to the Nordic countries (N = 3,246) finds that Swedish and Danish journalists stand out by their stronger adherence to monitorial roles. By their weaker attachment to political roles and weaker experience of political influences, Icelanders differ from Finns, with Norwegians in an intermediate position. The large intranational variation in both analyses suggests that in addition to media systems and national contexts, the role of different beats and positions within news organisations is crucial for understanding journalists’ perceived roles and felt influences.