Divinatio Asks: Is Democracy Sick of Its Own Media?

I usually point out Penn or open access resources but here's a rare exception.  A recent issue of Divinatio: Studia Culturologica Series (Volume 35, Spring-Summer 2012) poses the question: Is Democracy Sick of Its Own Media? 

The following scholars weigh in:

Ivaylo Znepolski: The Soft Dictatorship of the Media (Introductory essay by the issue's editor)
Elihu Katz: Back to the Street: When Media and Opinion Leave Home
Jeffrey Goldfarb: "The Politics of Small Things" Meets "Monstration:" On Fox News, Occupy Wall Street and Beyond
Nick Couldry: Relegitimation Crisis: Beyond the Dull Compulsion of Media-Saturated Life
Helge Ronning: The Social or the Interpersonal? New and Old Public Spheres
Georgi Lozanov: The Media Start Talking in Mother Tongue 
Paul Frosh: The Showing of Sharedness: Monstration, Media and Social Life  
Jaeho Kang: Digital Constellations: Social Media and the Crisis of (Old) Democracy in South Korea

It's a weighty issue, definitely worth checking out. Divinatio: Studia Culturologica Series currently does not have a website but if you want to pursue any of these articles it shouldn't be hard to get your hands on them thanks to trusty interlibrary loan services available in most libraries. While not many US libraries carry this journal (published in Sophia, Bulgaria), Stanford, Yale, Penn State, University of Virginia, University of California at Berkeley and some others have bragging rights. Seek and ye shall find. 

Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA)

The Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) works to strengthen the support, raise the visibility, and improve the effectiveness of media assistance programs throughout the world. The Center approaches its mission by providing information, building networks, conducting research, and highlighting the indispensable role independent media play in the creation and development of sustainable democracies around the world.

CIMA's website qualifies it for this resource blog because it hosts free research reports and its own bibliographic database of international media assistance resources. it's useful to search such topics such as media and conflict, media and democracy, media development, new media, and sustainability by region.

Recent research reports include:

Media Codes of Ethics: The Difficulty of Defining Standards
Codes of Ethics incorporate best practices that may go beyond the laws of libel, defamation, and privacy. In the not-so-free world, these codes are not always the products of a self-regulating free press. They may represent a cultural and political compromise with a society or government that holds a more restrictive view of what journalists should and should not report.

News on the Go: How Mobile Devices Are Changing the World's Information Ecosystem
Mobile devices now reach the farthest corners of the world. By the end of 2011, about 5 billion mobile phones will be in service in a world with 7 billion people. The implications–for politics, for education, for economies, for civil society, and for news and information–are profound.

Matching the Market and the Model: The Business of Independent News Media explains how lack of management skills and inexperience in developing effective business models poses a significant risk to the sustainability of independent news media. It explores a variety of different business models for media in several countries around the world and examines what lessons can be learned from those experiences.

Media and the Law: An Overview of Legal Issues and Challenges examines the different kinds of laws that affect the media and explains how they are used in many countries to influence the operations of news outlets and the information they offer. It primarily focuses on restrictive laws and legal challenges faced by journalists in developing countries, although laws in developed countries dealing with issues such as libel and terrorism are also considered.

Berkeley China Internet Project

The Berkeley China Internet Project of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is a good project for students of Chinese Media to keep an eye on. It's stated goals are ambitious:

"To explore interactive digital media and communication technologies in order to advance the world's understanding of China, and to promote the knowledge, culture and social practices of those technologies which will facilitate China's democratic transition, sustainable development and peaceful emergence in the global community." (website)

The activities of BCIP are centered around the development of a participatory media website, China Digital Times, a collaborative news website covering China’s social and political issues. It aggregates up-to-the-minute news and analysis about China from around the Web, in addition to providing independent reporting, translations from Chinese cyberspace, and perspectives from around the world.

BCIP focuses on two other initiatives, China Digital Pulse, which publishes on, among other subjects, the rise of participatory media in Chinese cyberspace and its effects on politics, and politics, and China Digital Future which offers "classes, forecasting exercises and a virtual community focusing on the interplay of participatory media, collective action and China's democratic transition." (website)

Global Civil Society 2007/8

The annual Global Civil Society Yearbooks are indispensable guides to civic participation and action around the world. This year's Yearbook focuses on Communicative Power and Democracy, investigating the relationship between communication, democracy and media.

Monroe Price serves as one of the editors of the volume as well as the author of Chapter 3: Civil Society and the Global Market for Loyalties. And Vincent Price leads off with Chapter 1: Democracy, Global Publics and World Opinion.

What I love about these Yearbooks are the cool Indicator Suites that comprise a third of their contents--graphic illustrations on globalization, population migration, social and economic rights, comparative laws, the environment, global values and attitudes, press and political freedom and, saving the best for last, Suite 3: Media and Communication (global comparisons of telephone mainlines, cellular lines, PCs per 1000, internet usage and penetration, WiFi service, top website genres, internet languages, and blog usage and penetration.)

The Global Civil Society Yearbook is a collaboration between LSE's Centre for the Study of Global Governance, UCLA's Center for Civil Society and for 2007/8, the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.