Andrew White

REVIEWS

"White has provided a ground-breaking examination of the implications of digital media for the fundamental workings of society. Its international perspective makes this new classic required reading for any serious student of media in the age of global and digital communication." - John Pavlik, Rutgers, USA   

"In his new book, Andrew White takes the bird's eye view of digital media. He carefully guides us through the theoretical minefields opened up by the networked world: identity politics, the distinction between private/public, the democratic state, economics, surveillance, and other key concepts. White appears a reliable guide who knows how to strike a balance between complexity and elucidation, between argument and exposition, between summary and probe. I am confident this book will be very useful for students and faculty alike. It addresses poignant issues in a clear voice." - José van Dijck, University of Amsterdam, and author of The Culture of Connectivity (2013)

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This paper analyses the Department of Digital, Culture, Media & Sport committee’s inquiry into the economics of music streaming. The scrutiny of the committee’s oral and written evidence, and final report is placed within the context of the music industry’s significance to UK cultural policy since the late 1990s. The perspectives of the UK’s musicians and song-writers are a focal point of the analysis of the inquiry’s published documentation, as they are when discussing the committee’s recommendations released in July 2021.

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The attempted over-turning of the result of the 2020 US presidential election involved the proliferation of multiple online conspiracy theories and fake stories, and culminated in the assault on the US Congress while it was in the process of validating the electoral college count on 6 January 2021. This represented the apotheosis of the growth of misinformation and disinformation in the USA from around the middle of the previous decade. Social media is commonly assumed to be culpable for this growth, with ‘the news’ and current affairs deemed the epicentre of the battle for information credibility. This review begins by explaining the key definitions and discussions of the subject of fake news, and online misinformation and disinformation with the aid of each book in turn. It then moves on to focus on the following themes common to all three books as a means of attempting to provide a comprehensive analysis of the subject at hand: the use of memes and ironic content; the globalisation of misinformation, disinformation and fake news, and the impact on democratic societies; the limitations of media literacy approaches.

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Discussions on media and fakery are usually premised on the general public being manipulated by mainstream media bias or fabrications emanating from the Internet. It is less common in the discipline of media and communication to speculate about users’ reasons for accepting what appear to be basic untruths: I will suggest here that discussions about users’ complicity must become more central to our attempts to understand media and fakery. Rather than a simple rebuttal of the ‘facts’ or the promotion of big data methodologies, this paper will suggest that deploying convincing counter-narratives are a better means of convincing those we suspect of being susceptible to confirmation bias and conspiratorial types of thinking that there are better ways of understanding contemporary politics.

An analysis of the UK's Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport's select committee report on music streaming released on 15 July 2021. The main music streaming platforms benefit the already popular mainstream songwriters and musicians at the expense of those not so well established. The long term implications of this for the UK music industry should concern those who want to continue listening to a wide diversity of music. The analysis of the select committee’s recommendations is written with those general concerns in mind. Where appropriate, important technical terms, like “Equitable Remuneration”, “Making Available” and “Communication to the Public”, are explained to the readership as a means of illustrating their significance to debates about equity in the music streaming industry.

The relationship between online media platforms in China and fan groups is a dynamic one when it comes to the distribution of international TV series and other media content, as media platforms incorporate user-generated content to encourage or foster audience engagement. Through a series of case studies, this article investigates how international TV series are acquired, distributed, marketed and curated on Chinese online video platforms. This helps to identify specific strategies and themes used by these platforms to promote international content and engage users. These marketing techniques, however, are not always as successful as expected, suggesting the need for a closer examination of the types of engagement sought by media platforms, and the ways in which Chinese audiences have responded within their cultural context.

This chapter is based on primary research in the form of semi-structured interviews with Chinese photographers whose object of study is urban scenes in the city of Shanghai. These creatives tend to view themselves within China’s long-established literati tradition, which contains both marginal positions and positions affiliated with centralized power (historically associated with the Southern and Northern Song periods respectively).The concept of Chinese creatives as literati will be linked to philosophical discussions on the nature of Chinese creativity and related discussions on China’s place in the global knowledge economy. By self-identifying as literati, our interviewees embody the intertwining of state-sanctioned attempts at exploiting China’s history and traditional culture, critical resistance towards rampant modernization, and attempts at finding Chinese ways of "becoming contemporary", as one interviewee puts it. These creatives are comfortable with ambiguity, and thus offer an alternative philosophy to Western understandings of creative practice.

This book brings together leading scholars to analyze political marketing in the context of the UK 2015 General Election. Election campaigns represent a time of intense marketing, including: the communication of party, party leader and candidate brands; the design and dissemination of key messages and policy proposals; identification of target voters; setting out strategies for the campaign; and translating strategies into specific communication tactics. Each chapter of this book has been specifically commissioned to focus on one of these aspects of the campaign (targeted campaigning, branding, core messages, advertising, media management, online campaigning and the campaign in the marginal seats). The collection offers insights into the most interesting and innovative aspects of the 2015 election campaign, determining how levels parties with differing resource approach elections and with what impacts, as well as what we can learn more broadly about marketing at general elections. The chapters are developed to make the topic accessible to non-scholars and to have real-world relevance.

In the late nineteenth century western circumnavigation of the globe and ever more accurate cartography shifted the utopian genre from the spatial to the temporal – humans’ mastery of place and space developed in contradistinction to their inability to control time, a phenomena that has become seemingly more pronounced in our modern networked societies. But does this increasing temporal instability contain utopian possibilities as well as dystopian threat? This paper will engage with ideas in contemporary sociology on the nature of time to identify its potential for utopian thinking and whether this can be realised through global information networks.

Murals have figured as a prominent feature of the visual environment of Northern Ireland since the early twentieth century, developing, during the Troubles, into one of the best-known examples of political art in the world. This article examines the position occupied by these murals in the period (since 1994) of the peace process. It focuses on the multi-government-agency Re-imaging Communities programme (launched in 2006) and its attempt to intervene in the visual environment and steer the Northern Ireland muralscape away from expressions of sectarianism towards more ‘positive’ themes. The aims and achievements of this programme (to date) are assessed, along with the issues the programme and related initiatives raise with regard to the governance of the visual environment. The article moves on to examine a further means by which murals have been repositioned in the period since 1994 – the attempt to present them as tourist attractions – and closes by discussing the issues raised for remembering the Troubles by these interventions in and attempts to reconfigure Northern Ireland's murals.

This paper analyses the development of China’s creative and cultural industries using the city of Shanghai as a case study. The authors argue that while the difficulty of applying a uniform policy to the whole of China has created ambiguities which creative workers can exploit for their own ends, the opportunities that these afford are more economic in orientation as creativity still takes place within the parameters laid down by the Chinese government.

This paper analyses the UK’s approach to the digitisation of its cultural heritage during the New Labour administration from 1997 to 2010, with a specific emphasis on academic texts and archival documents. Focusing on the identification of common areas of concern across a range of programmes, the paper asks whether a national digitisation strategy is needed and, if so, what form it should take. It concludes with three recommendations for improving the coordination and practice of the digitisation of the UK’s cultural heritage.

This is a review of the DCMS's annual estimates of the size, scope and activities of the UK's creative industries, with a particular focus on the latest publication in January 2009. Running parallel to these estimates is a research programme, latterly codified as the Creative Economy Programme (CEP), which constantly assesses and periodically modifies the methodologies used for collating statistics. This programme is also reviewed, primarily through two 2007 documents: a report commissioned from Frontier Economics and a DCMS overview of all the CEP's work in 2006–2007. The review also draws on primary sources in the form of national and international reports on methodologies for classifying and measuring the creative industries, as well as appropriate academic literature.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of the development of large-scale digital libraries within the context of ancient and Enlightenment ideas about the ‘universal library’ and its association with the promotion of universal knowledge.

In the spring of 2002 Israeli flags began to appear in loyalist communities in Northern Ireland. The appearance of these flags was in one respect explained as a response to the increased prevalence of Palestinian flags in nationalist neighbourhoods. However, the appearance and continued display of the Israeli flag can be seen to extend beyond a “wholly relational” dynamic to encompass the connotations this flag has come to possess for those who fly it in regard to the contemporary political situation within Northern Ireland and events on the international stage in the context of the United States' post-September 11 “War on Terror.” At the same time, the flying of the Israeli flag in Northern Ireland provides a graphic demonstration of the increased prevalence of political symbolism in the post-Troubles era and the way in which groups in Northern Ireland have sought to reference and draw upon similar conflict situations for their own agendas.

"This paper addresses the way in which the Northern Ireland
Peace Process has impacted on unionist identity. In particular, it offers a
critique of the three constituent philosophies of unionism – cultural unionism,
liberal unionism and economic unionism – and suggests that a new
form of unionism that reflects the altered polity of Northern Ireland must be
constructed."

This paper uses literature on hypertext theory to evaluate our reading strategies in an online environment. Assessing the impact of digital technology on our educational environment and culture, the paper recommends a new form of pedagogy for hypertexts based on Walter Ong’s concept of ‘secondary orality’.

This paper investigates the way in which the European Union's ‘Television Without Frontiers’ directive (recently re-named the ‘Audio-Visual Media Services’ directive, AVMS) was implemented by two neighbouring states, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Focusing on the broadcasting rights for live international cricket matches in England and the rights for the live coverage of the Republic of Ireland soccer team's competitive home matches, the paper will highlight each state's approach to marrying the cultural rights of its citizens with the demands of the free market. The article locates the response of each state within the wider framework of the development of European media markets and their respective industrial/cultural policy therein.

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the potential uses of CD-ROMs in multicultural education through an analysis of the development of a digital archive of political posters relating to the Northern Irish conflict.

Design/methodology/approach – The author draws on literature on the relationship between new media platforms and the construction of knowledge to make some observations about the way in which different forms of media can enable us to think in different ways.

Findings – As a pedagogical tool, CD-ROMs strike a good balance between the limitations of the codex book and the anarchic nature of the world wide web.

Research limitations/implications – This paper illustrates the importance of distinguishing between different forms of new media.

Originality/value – Most analyses of digitisation tend to conflate CD-ROMs and the world wide web. This paper argues that a clear distinction should be made between the two media platforms, the value of which is to illustrate the extent to which the former avoids some of the weaknesses that abound in the latter.

"Purpose – This paper aims to use two case studies of digital archives designed by library and information professionals and historians to highlight the twin issues of academic authenticity and accuracy of digital representations.

Design/methodology/approach – Using secondary literature, the author established a hypothesis about the way in which academic researchers engage with electronic texts. It is argued that academics are often distrustful of the authenticity of much that appears in digital form and doubtful as to its accuracy. The case studies are used as a means to demonstrate the measures that library and information professionals can take to assuage these concerns.

Findings – Given reasonable financial resources and staff, it is relatively easy to adopt a transparently academic approach. Accuracy is much more problematic, and is often compromised by the unwieldy nature of these types of projects.

Originality/value – Most evaluations of digitisation projects have not focused on the issues of academic authenticity and textual accuracy; indeed, the latter is difficult to gauge when the ASCII text is hidden and where there is little incentive for designers to be honest about the potential flaws in their search engines. Also, there has been little discussion in academic literature on the distribution of staff and financial resources within projects."