The role of Syrian diaspora activists has been identified as key to both supporting and shaping the world's image of the Syrian uprising. This article examines the multifaceted media work of Syrian diaspora activists, conceptualized as cultural brokerage in a global and national setting. Based on personal interviews with activists in exile in five countries, this study identifies and analyzes three main aspects of brokerage: (a) linking the voices of protesters inside the country to the outside world, (b) managing messages to bridge the gap between social media and mainstream media, and (c) collaborating with professional journalists and translating messages to fit the contexts and understandings of foreign publics.

A decade after the outbreak of the Arab revolutions, what remains of the political promise of cameras everywhere to permit activists and protesters in the region revived forms of agency, self-expression, and connectivity? This Special Section aims to provide a better understanding of what the opportunities and constraints are for practices of grassroots digital image activism within today's political struggles in the Arab world. Together, the articles track the current conditions of possibility for Arab digital image activism to actualize counterdominant practices of capturing, mobilizing, and archiving visual documentation of people's struggles for justice in the region. Where traditional media studies tend to focus on insurgent image making as content rather than as embodied and embedded practices, the contributions here feature a range of concrete, contextual, and innovative repertoires of activist video and photography practices. They specifically detail the struggle between resistance and control, between efforts to maintain the radical potential of grassroots forms and practices image- making in the region, and the renewed hegemonic threats and pressures of co-optation, commodification, and censorship.

My study brings a practice perspective to the study of video activism, specifically seeking to bridge a focus on activist agency with attention to structure. Hence, it provides a critical lens on new economies of image developing in relation to the post-2011 Syrian conflict, to theorize both the agency-the practices, aspirations, and need-of local Syrian videographers and how it is challenged and restricted by structure: that is, the dynamics of ruling perpetrated both by commercial platforms (particularly YouTube), that are now stepping up censorship of video, and by the international justice movement, that is now rushing to harness the probative power of online eyewitness video for grave crimes investigations and prosecutions. Based on semi- structured interviews with four key actors in the international justice movement and 15 Syrian videographers, the study advances our conception of the potentials and challenges of digital camera-practices for civic agency and activism within a contested global media space of ever-increasing exploitation, commodification, and censorship.

In this essay, the author considers not only what is shown in the WikiLeaks Collateral Murder video but reflects upon what the act of uploading this video symbolized and continues to symbolize and how the multifaceted symbolic value of the video has led to its steady inscription and reinscription into the public consciousness during a wide variety of popular and political debates. Apart from the disturbing content of the film, showing a potentially criminal act, the author argues that the uploading of the film was itself an act of dissent and, thus, a challenge to U.S. power. This combination of content and context makes the WikiLeaks Collateral Murder video an interesting case study that touches upon several key areas within academic study.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir is currently a member of the Icelandic Parliament, where she represents the Pirate Party. Jónsdóttir was an early WikiLeaks volunteer and was one of the key members of the team in Iceland that put together the famous Collateral Murder video. In this wide-ranging discussion with Christian Christensen, Jónsdóttir talks about her work with WikiLeaks, politics, and her ideas about technology, transparency, and privacy. She also discusses how she has been placed under surveillance because of her work with WikiLeaks and other organizations.

Globalization and media flows have been scrutinized extensively in media and communication studies. Compared to the totalizing discourse of globalization, the scope of transnationalism offers a more tangible entry point for studying both the cohesive elements brought about by virtual and material flows and the social and cultural tension fields that arise between the varied scales of the national and the transnational. Departing from the theme of this special issue, and based upon both geopolitical and cultural considerations concerning mediation, this article aims to survey some of the material and symbolic implications of contemporary media flows. Theoretically, it draws upon two tropes, geopolitics and cosmopolitanism, which provide paradigmatic tools to reflect upon technological, spatial, and cultural dimensions of flows.

In his study of nationalism, Benedict Anderson famously identified a notion of simultaneity across homogeneous, empty time as the temporal structure underpinning nationness as imagined community. Since the 18th century, Anderson argued, time was spatialized as newspapers and novels were the prime cultural forms of imagining a community across space. In the era of televisual nation-building, another kind of temporality has emerged as a form for thinking about and feeling the nation. Archival aesthetics, it is argued, is a mode of affective historiography that mobilizes a double temporality: While constructing chronologies in its remixing of archive footage, reproducing conventional narratives of epochs and events, it also engenders, via reappropriations of popular music and cinema, a transhistorical, even mythical notion of the nation as a community of feeling across time. Through a discussion of Finnish TV documentaries by Peter von Bagh, this article returns to Homi K. Bhabha's theorizing of the pedagogical and the performative as the two, intertwined modes of narrating the nation.

Practicing network hospitality—that is, taking part in the processes wherein users of hospitality exchange services, connect, and interact with one another online and off-line—is commonly approached as a dyadic interaction between a host and a guest. In contrast, this article elaborates on communication privacy management theory in the context of network hospitality based on an interview study of how multiperson households regulate access to their domestic sphere as they welcome visitors via Couchsurfing, an online hospitality exchange service. The findings depict how multiperson households (1) establish privacy rules related to hosting, (2) cooperate to control interior and exterior privacy boundaries, and (3) manage privacy with the help of physical and temporal boundaries. The study contributes to communication privacy management theory by applying it to the study of network hospitality and providing insight into how privacy management unfolds as a cooperative process within multiperson households in settings where networked media are used to arrange social encounters that raise questions of physical space and territoriality.

Increasingly, school settings are implementing digital technologies to coordinate teachers’ work. This article examines the role of these technologies in teachers’ boundary regulation processes through the lens of communication privacy management theory, and it provides empirical insight into the renegotiation of being a teacher in the presence of rules formalized in software code. The case of Finnish high school teachers exposed to the use of Wilma, a distributed computing system used to store, process, and transmit student data, revealed experiences of a need to renegotiate formalized and trackable work processes, faster and more colloquial communication, and intensified day-to-day work. These influence modes of accountability and the need to negotiate visibility, along with understandings of rules as a central coordination mechanism for interpersonal boundary regulation. The authors suggest in addition that these technologies inure various social stakeholders to constant technical monitoring and regular accounting, thereby advancing the normalization of surveillance practices. This creates good reason to pay closer attention to how rules of engagement may be coordinated.

The 2015 decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reclassify broadband Internet services and pass network neutrality rules marks a major media reform victory in the United States. Media and communications policy in the United States has traditionally been dominated by industry interests (Freedman, 2008; McChesney, 1990; Pickard, 2015), and this FCC decision put the public interest over that of major U.S. Internet service providers. While the victory is a testament to the advocacy efforts of U.S. media reform organizations, left unclear is the degree to which it will open up possibilities for greater structural reform, which, for the three books reviewed here, is of paramount concern.

These three books bridge critical perspectives on media and communications policy by investigating the labor of media reform advocates. The second edition of Misunderstanding the Internet, coauthored by James Curran, Natalie Fenton, and Des Freedman, demonstrates how the structural foundations of the Internet limit its capacity to be a transformative force and instead allow it to perpetuate existing power structures. The Contradictions of Media Powerby Des Freedman provides a theoretical lens for understanding media power in the UK and United States and illuminates how existing power structures can be challenged. Strategies for Media Reform: International Perspectives, edited by Des Freedman, Jonathan Obar, Cheryl Martens, and Robert W. McChesney, brings together chapters from 33 scholars and activists who provide contemporary examples of methods used for achieving media reform. These books share a common frame, drawing from Rosa Luxemburg’s distinction between reform versus revolution, and argue that shifting media power from commercial actors to the public interest requires structural reforms that address industry dominance of political process.

All political scandals trigger discussions of trust, but in a competitive commercial media climate, both important and minor legal offences and moral transgressions are regularly treated as scandalous media events. Today, actors in social media and mainstream media organizations can collaborate on cases that might develop into scandal news. In this article, which is based on an analysis of 101 political scandals in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden from 2010 to 2016-and a study of political scandals in the wake of the #MeToo movement in 2017-2018-we show that mediated scandals have become a standard feature of political life in Nordic countries. Compared with earlier decades, there has been an exponential rise in the number of scandals; at the same time, the rate of resignations and dismissals following scandals is lower than before. Offences related to economic affairs, including corruption, and personal behavior scandals, such as accusations of sexual harassment, constitute the most prominent scandal types. However, regarding sexually related behavior scandals, there are interesting differences between the Nordic countries.

This article discusses the ways television news media reinforce national perspectives incoverage of events outside their borders, and the potential consequences of this formainstream television news. International news, as it is seen on national television, isstill a rigid genre where people and events tend to be viewed either through nationalprisms or through generic characteristics common in hegemonic Anglo-American newssources. Globalization, in terms of the concentration of media ownership, and changingtelevision formats have done remarkably little to change agendas and narratives innational television news. Shifting geopolitical realities, the accessibility of different newssources, and the self-reflexivity of journalists due to changing industry demands shouldmake more of an impact on international news narratives. Some studies point to theexistence of narratives portraying other types of relationships than the national “we” andthe foreign “other,” but systematic studies are needed to see whether such stories haveincreased over time.

This article addresses the usefulness of the concepts public sphere, counterpublics, and cultural citizenship for understanding some of the most popular noncommercial Lebanese, Egyptian, and Kuwaiti bloggers in the period 2009–2010. It compares the political and media landscapes, drawing on semi-structured interviews and the most common blogging themes in these three contexts. While the notion of counterpublics was found useful for understanding some types of blogging community, cultural citizenship stands out as a more flexible, process-oriented concept capturing how bloggers acculturate information and entertainment as sources of empowerment, resistance, and community belonging. The popular bloggers can be characterized as having consumerist, civil society, or formal politics trajectories, each challenging traditional power structures in ways that can be traced to specific national contexts.

Cultural journalism is a unique and underresearched subfield of journalism. This article presents the first systematic study of Swedish cultural journalism, quantitatively mapping content from four decades, zooming in on the years 1985, 1995, 2005, and 2015. We study conceptions of the world outside Sweden during times marked by geopolitical turning points, globalization, and rapid structural transformations in the journalistic market. Employing content analysis of a representative sample from the press and public service radio, we explore geographical and scalar aspects, with a focus on political and global dimensions. Although we found evidence for Eurocentrism and domestication-staples of Western journalism overall-results show that Swedish cultural journalism was a steady conveyor of transnational narratives during all studied periods, which together with a primarily nonconflictual approach, sets cultural journalism apart from foreign news and decreases the risk of misframing in a globalized world.