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1

Franczak, Karol. "“Germany in ruins”. Framing new political movements in Germany in the Polish opinion-forming press." Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 15, no. 1 (July 26, 2019): 97–119. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/lpp-2019-0006.

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Abstract One of the main goals of contemporary media, along with the experts and professionals, who speak in them, has been to explain complex issues and provide the audience with clear descriptions of social reality. This is mostly achieved by the production of ideologically useful interpretative schemes that facilitate understanding of the issues present on the media agenda. An important strategy of shaping the public opinion in the way in which public affairs and the activity of social life participants is framed. Analyses of such practices have been conducted for over thirty years within various research approaches collectively referred to as framing analysis. This research provides several arguments helping one to develop a more critical perspective on the representations of social phenomena dominant in the media and discourses of symbolic elites (e.g. opinion writers, academics, experts, journalists, politicians), along with the analyses of the origin of such phenomena, moral judgements and preferred "corrective policies". One of the phenomena defined by the media in Europe as the most important one for the past several years, is the so-called "New Right". The aim of the paper is to analyse the interpretative schemes used by the journalists of four Polish opinion-forming weeklies and to describe the activity of its German manifestation – the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident (Pegida) social movement and the Alternative for Germany party (AfD).
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Haris, Munawir. "Jurnalis Sebagai Dai di Media." TASAMUH: Jurnal Studi Islam 12, no. 1 (April 6, 2020): 149–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.47945/tasamuh.v12i1.241.

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In the current reformation era marked by the rise of mass media as a means of mass communication and a means of forming public opinion, preachers, missionary activists, and Muslims. A journalist should be able to use the mass media to do da'wah as a worship field. A journalist who utilizes the mass media, especially printed media, carries out his da'wah that can be called a preacher 'who preaches bil qalam. This da'wah is called the da'wah bil qalam which basically conveys information about God, about nature and about the hereafter, and the value of eternity of life. Da'wah bil qalam is da'wah through printed media. Given the advances in information technology that enable a person to communicate intensely and cause the message of preaching to spread as widely as possible, preaching through writing, absolutely makes use of advances in information technology. This is where the role of Muslim Journalists takes place of a preacher who spreads goodness to humans.
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Dziubiński, Zbigniew, Natalia Organista, and Zuzanna Mazur. "O męskości konstruowanej medialnie: zarys zagadnień teoretycznych i przykład analizy empirycznej." Kultura i Społeczeństwo 61, no. 2 (April 24, 2017): 85–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.35757/kis.2017.61.2.5.

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This article analyzes how the category of masculinity is constructed in sports writing. It uses texts on sports that appeared in Gazeta Wyborcza, an opinion-forming Polish newspaper. The number of such articles was calculated, with distinctions between men’s and women’s sports, and the gender of the journalists or experts involved. Qualitative analysis showed which disciplines are presented and in what manner, and how the roles of male and female participants are characterized. It emerges that the media message varies in regard to the type of sport and manner of describing the participants. It is shown that the texts in Gazeta Wyborcza reproduce hegemonic masculinity.
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Ozyumenko, Vladimir. "Social Reality Formation in Media Discourse: Information Ambiguity Strategy." Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Serija 2. Jazykoznanije, no. 3 (November 2019): 64–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2019.3.5.

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Modern media have become an important ideological tool in conveying and forming a certain view of the world and attitude towards it. While complying with the interests of the power structures, they shape public opinion by means of increasingly sophisticated media technologies and techniques. The article introduces multilevel means of creating ambiguity of a media text: verbs with the semantic component 'without proof', lexical units with semantics of uncertainty, means of expressing epistemic modality, interrogative headings, etc. The regular use of these means observed in the media enables the author to consider ambiguity as one efficient strategy of public opinion manipulation. The data for the study were obtained from quality British and American newspapers and news websites that cover events related to Russia. By using the methods of linguistic pragmatics and sociolinguistics as well as critical discourse analysis, it was proved that the ambiguity is a widely spread method in modern media, it enables journalists to write about unconfirmed facts and introduce a certain attitude towards them into the minds of the audience without bearing any responsibility for unsubstantiated information.
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Krawczyk, Dariusz. "Communication Tools in Obtaining Information by the Media Based on the Opinion Poll of Press Spokesman of Local Government Units." Zarządzanie Mediami 9, no. 1 (January 11, 2020): 37–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/23540214zm.21.001.13049.

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Presentation of the methods of staying in touch with journalists that are preferred by media relations specialists is the aim of the paper. The opinion survey dedicated to this issue was carried out in 2020 among all spokespersons for the municipalities forming the statutory separated Upper Silesian and Zagłębie Metropolis (Metropolis GZM). It was found that personalized communication tools such as e.g. personal e-mail (40%) or telephone conversations (22%) are most commonly used. Obtained results were compared with the results of analysis with 94% share of Silesian police officers authorized to provide information to the media. An assessment of social reach of disinformation and verification of perception of the effectiveness of publishing the corrections, as a way of responding to distortions in press materials, were also subject of the study.
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Veg, Sebastian. "Creating Public Opinion, Advancing Knowledge, Engaging in Politics: The Local Public Sphere in Chengdu, 1898–1921." China Quarterly 246 (April 26, 2021): 331–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305741021000217.

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AbstractSituated far from coastal cities and foreign concessions, Chengdu yields insights into the role of the local press and its specific publics in the political evolution of the late Qing and early Republic. Despite its remote location, Chengdu developed its own modern press in the late Qing, relying on print entrepreneurs and modern journalists recruited from the ranks of the local literati and traditional sociability, in particular teahouses. They all played a role in forming a modern reading public which came to understand itself as a distinct local political community in dynamic interaction with national politics and transnational networks. The local press evinced three successive but intertwined ideals of publicness: as a link between the state and the people and a vector of enlightenment, as a professional forum for public opinion and as a tool for political mobilization. In solidifying public opinion around the local community, the press served as a forum and catalyst for political activism in the 1911 Railroad Protection movement and the 1919 May Fourth movement, events which were shaped as much by local dynamics as they were by national developments.
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Szylko-Kwas, Joanna, Katarzyna Gajlewicz-Korab, Anna Grutza, and Anna Jupowicz-Ginalska. "Immigrants in Polish and German Online Media: A Comparative Analysis." Žurnalistikos Tyrimai 12, no. 12 (May 29, 2018): 39–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/zt/jr.2017.12.11785.

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In this article, the authors present the results of their research conducted in Polish and German online media in 2016. The major topic of the abovementioned research was the European refugee crisis in Poland and Germany and its representation in websites of four quality newspapers: Wyborcza.pl, Rp.pl, Faz.net and Sz.de. The aim of this article is to analize the role of media in public opinion-shaping in both countries. Through a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the data, the authors answered the following questions: 1) Are the media narratives of both countries different from each other? b) If so, how is the migration problem presented in Poland and in Germany? c) What are their most noticeable features? Among the most important conclusions are the following: 1) The media coverage of both countries is highly politicized; 2) Neither German nor Polish journalists of the opinion-forming quality newspapers did measurably support an isolationist policy. The research has been conducted within the scope of an International project called LEMEL (L’Europe dans les médias en ligne). This program was initiated by Cergy-Pontoise University and is now held annually. Several European countries participate in it (scientists from France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Romania are permanent members of the project’s research group). The aim of the project is a synchronous and diachronic comparative analysis of the content presented in their respective national online media. The analysis focuses on the way Europe and its problems are presented in the abovementioned media content.
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Fadli, A. Muh, and Risma Niswaty. "Analysis of Political Broadcasting and Application Of P3SPS Broadcasting In Local Television and Network Station Systems an Makassar City." Jurnal Ad'ministrare 6, no. 2 (February 4, 2020): 115. http://dx.doi.org/10.26858/ja.v6i2.12066.

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In mass communication, one of the most influential media in forming public opinion is television. This study aims to determine and analyze: the form of political broadcasts on local television and network station systems in Makassar City; and the application of P3SPS in political broadcasts on local television and network systems in Makassar City. The assessment approach uses media studies, research studies focus more on the phenomenon of online media with a focus on the application of values and ethics of journalists, also related to the process of making news, disseminating news and performance, access to news and practice in dismissing hoax news. Informants involved in this study, such as: Television Media workers in Makassar City; Experts or Media Practitioners in Makassar City; and government authorities such as the KPID of Makassar City. The form of political broadcasts on local television and the network station system in Makassar City consists of three, namely political news, political dialogue and political advertising. The application of P3SPS in political broadcasts on local television and network systems in Makassar City is carried out according to procedure. During the open campaign process in broadcasting, there were violations that were violated by broadcasters.
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9

Chwastyk-Kowalczyk, Jolanta. "Lviv in the U.S. Polish Emigrants’ Press after World War II." Respectus Philologicus 23, no. 28 (April 25, 2013): 151–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/respectus.2013.23.28.13.

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The article discusses occurrences of topics related to Lviv in Polish opinion-forming newspapers in exile in the United States after World War II. The author followed the New Diaryin the years 1971–1999, together with its appendices, Polish Week (1971–1981) and Polish Review (1981–1999), published in New York. These titles had a wide scope of influence. The analysis of the newspapers’ contents revealed that a small, dispersed community from Lviv, who emigrated to the United States and centered around the Lviv Circle, made their works public regularly in the pages of the New Diary. However, compared with the incidence of the same themes in the Polish emigrants’ press in Western Europe during the same period, it was a marginal phenomenon about accidental topics. The texts mainly focused on unmasking the Soviet authorities’ actions to eliminate traces of Polish culture from Lviv, the devastation of the Lviv Eaglets Cemetery. Additionally, they posted pictures of the Poltva, poems devoted to the city, and anniversary reminiscences of the Lviv defense of 1918. Topics related to Lviv abroad were mostly the domain of its former citizens, who had been forced to leave the city without possibility of return (thanks to the provisions of the Yalta Conference)—journalists, academics, and activists in exile, regularly associated with magazines from the British Isles (the White Eagle, News, Polish Diary, and Soldier’s Diary) as well as Culture from Paris.
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10

Kholod, Ganna. "Psycholinguistic Potential «Caps» «Kino- Gazeta» (1928–1932)." PSYCHOLINGUISTICS 27, no. 2 (April 12, 2020): 290–313. http://dx.doi.org/10.31470/2309-1797-2020-27-2-290-313.

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The relevance of the study is to clarify the psycholinguistic potential of the «caps» of «Kino-Gazeta» (1928-1932), which will allow not only to expand the range of knowledge about the specific use of verbal and paralinguistic means of designing «caps» of a particular historical period, which, having an ideological color, outlined the vectors of forming public opinion, but also to reveal the peculiarities of the influence of the aforementioned means of design of «caps» on a specific audience. The purpose of the study was to find out the psycholinguistic potential of the «caps» of «Kino-Gazeta» (1928-1932). To achieve this goal the following methods were used: analysis, synthesis, descriptive, comparative, method of quantitative-qualitative analysis, epistemic-perceptual, method of epistemic intent-analysis, experiment. The research methodology was to select incentive material according to the criterion of having the maximum number of paralinguistic means of designing «caps» in accordance with the specifics inherent in each year of issue of the aforementioned newspaper, and conducting an experiment, during which 29 participants of the experiment, higher education graduates by specialty «Journalists», had to complete seven tasks. The use of the epistemic-perceptual method (working name) allowed the participants of the experiment, who had a general background knowledge of the episteme of the late 20's - early 30’s of the twentieth century, assuming the position of the recipient at the time, to assume the specific influence of «caps» on him. The use of epistemic intent-analysis allowed the participants of the experiment, taking into account the episteme of a specific period (late 20’s – early 30’s of the twentieth century), to make assumptions about the intents of using different font sizes, decorative elements, non-standard recording of words in the «caps» of «Kino-gazeta» of the aforementioned period. Conclusion. Thus, the large volume of caps, their saturation with paralinguistic means of complication, complicating perception, do not motivate the participants of the experiment to thoroughly familiarize themselves with the contents of «caps». As a result of the experiment, it was found out that the psycholinguistic potential of the «Kino-gazeta» «hats» (1928–1932) arises from the interaction of verbal and paralinguistic means of hat design, which, by creating new meanings, give rise to different variants of perception and interpretation.
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11

Krycka-Michnowska, Iwona. "EMIGRACJA ROSYJSKA W MIĘDZYWOJENNEJ WARSZAWIE: ALEKSANDR CHIRIAKOW." Acta Neophilologica 1, no. XX (June 1, 2018): 187–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.31648/an.2695.

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This paper is devoted to the cultural activity of the Russian emigrant, writer, journalist, critic and author of the memoirs – Aleksandr Khiryakov (1863-1940)in interwar Warsaw. His activity proves that he was an important representative of the diaspora, however he was marginalized by literary scholars. Khiryakov was involved in the life of the emigration community as a member of numerous literary groups and social committees. He initiated significant projects, voiced important ideas and actively cooperated with opinion-forming Russian newspapers, which propagated among their readers the conviction of their responsibility for the fate of Russia as well as its political and cultural missions.
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12

Kindley, Evan. "Growing Up in Public: Academia, Journalism, and the New Public Intellectual." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 130, no. 2 (March 2015): 467–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2015.130.2.467.

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When I was in graduate school ten years ago, we were discouraged from writing book reviews. The professional rationales behind this advice were sound enough: book reviewing, whether for a scholarly journal or a mass-market publication, requires a considerable investment of time and a public statement of position. Neither venture was a risk that budding graduate students could afford: you don't want to make enemies in your field too soon, especially inadvertently, and you don't want to waste precious time forming an opinion before you've proved your entitlement to one, or so our professors' argument ran. We were advised, sensibly enough, to focus on our coursework and our own progress as scholars.
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13

Kalsin, Berrin. "Use Of New Media In The Local Press: Comparative Analysis Of Local Newspapers Websites In İzmir, Adana and Bursa." International Journal of Research in Business and Social Science (2147-4478) 3, no. 4 (October 22, 2014): 14–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.20525/ijrbs.v3i4.114.

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Local press is defined as a press that serves to introduce and train the public and to provide the public opinion. Local press gives information about the cases happen around the region that it is published and it forms public opinion about the problems of that region. New communication technologies havehave an important role in the forming and enhancing the news contents in the media. Changeovers have occurred in the production, process and distributiondistribution of the news by developing the new media. On the other hand, Internet journalism used by many press institutions is occurredoccurred as a new concept in mass communication. National and local newspapers do not remain insensitive to this new mass communication and it attempts the Internet journalism. Firstly, pressed newspaper had been turned into Web sites as similar but later new application about the transferring the news to the reader have occurred when we look at this application about the transferring of the pressed newspaper to the Internet environment. In this study, the Internet websites if Adanaher from Adana, Olay from Bursa and Ege'nin Sesi from Izmir have been compared with each other. The form, content and interaction of these three newspapers have been discussed and the usage of social media and importance given to the local news have been analyzed.
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Lapenkov, Denis, Olga Oleinik, and Olga Utkina. "The images of politicians in the language consciousness performed in the English and German newspaper and journalistic discourses." SHS Web of Conferences 72 (2019): 03022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20197203022.

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In the modern era of mass politicization of the public consciousness of the media, in addition to forming an opinion on political events, it also performs the function of manipulating the public consciousness. Of particular interest in this influence are the images of leading politicians. Images of politicians in the media influence the formation of opinions about the political situation in the country and in the world as a whole. In order to analyze the images of politicians in the media and to identify the deep meaning in the presentation of images of politicians, the authors of the article turn to text materials of electronic versions of social and political newspapers and magazines (The Guardian, Daily Mail, Telegraph, Focus, Zeit, Spiegel), using the conceptual method analysis and contextual analysis method. The presentation of images of politicians reveals value meanings of sympathy and antipathy. The authors of the article attempt to identify moments in the representation of the images of politicians, where they generate additional meaning that has an emotional impact on public opinion.
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Volkova, Irina, and Haya Ashour. "Media Image of Jordan in Runet Media: Specifics of Non Personification." Theoretical and Practical Issues of Journalism 10, no. 1 (March 24, 2021): 39–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.17150/2308-6203.2021.10(1).39-50.

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The article is a response to the discussion between Russian media researchers concerning the notion and meaning of media image. It outlines the key directions in the studies of the image of a state as media product, which influences the public opinion, social values and assumptions about the politics, economy and culture. Acknowledging the interdependence of a media image on stereotypes and archetypes, the authors put forward and test a hypothesis of effectiveness of forming a media image in the context of weakening this interdependence. They study the possibilities of forming a media image («by the media — for the society») in a reverse way, when the binary opposition of stereotyping could be destroyed via personification, and a socio-image («by the society — for the media») could be formed. In respect of a particular country, this procedure helps to realize and estimate the opportunities and contradictions of the digital media environment which is formed individually («journalist as subject») and institutionally («journalist as agent»). The research involved studying the media image of Jordan in web-based media publications in The Kommersant, The RBK, and The Rossiiskaya Gazeta in 2019. The choice of the country is explained by the fact that the King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein, by his actions on the world stage and life style, weakens the archetypal inertia in the perception of the Arab state, which is a potential for forming a socio-image. The results of the study show that this potential is not utilized. The media image of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Ru-Net is formed institutionally to the benefit of Russia and is related to some stereotypes of the Arabs, and therefore, may be characterized as non personification.
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Topa-Bryniarska, Dominika. "Stratégies discursives et communicationnelles de persuasion dans les genres journalistiques d'opinion: le cas des critiques de cinéma." Cognitive Studies | Études cognitives, no. 15 (December 31, 2015): 413–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.11649/cs.2015.029.

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Discursive and communicative strategies of persuasion in opinion forming media: the case of film reviewsThis study aims at analysing the discourse as a way of using language for specific purposes. On the basis of a corpus consisting of forty reviews of the French comedy Intouchables (2011) selected from various film magazines and web pages, the author offers a reflection on the nature and functions of the genre “film review”. Thus, different invariant elements of the mentioned genre can be established in the light of discursive and communicative strategies whose persuasive dimension is connected both with the presence of informative and evaluative elements about the film and the situation of the participants. Thanks to the described strategies, activating various kinds of hidden and connotative meaning i.e. implications, presuppositions, cultural associations, the journalist contributes to the co-creation of human perception.
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Krakowiak, Małgorzata. "Edukacja akademicka kobiet w przekazie prasy społeczno-kulturalnej i pedagogicznej Królestwa Polskiego na przełomie XIX i XX wieku." Biuletyn Historii Wychowania, no. 42 (March 15, 2020): 61–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/bhw.2020.42.4.

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The purpose of the article is to present a journalistic description of the issue of academic education of women in selected periodicals of the Kingdom of Poland in the years 1894–1914. The issue of women’s academic education was described in various ways, which depended on the profile of individual periodicals. The publications had mainly an opinion-forming and informative function. Critical opinions were published in the conservative press, they showed study abroad as a danger. Progressive magazines described women’s studies as a chance for girls development. Periodicals were a source of information about the number of women undertaking academic education abroad, selected faculties and student societies. The frequency of publications depended on legislative changes and events related to academic life that aroused public and public interest. This article looked for answers to the question of how the issue of academic education of women from the Kingdom of Poland was problematized in selected press? In the article uses the methods of historical and pedagogical research and press research (text analysis). Research on the journalistic description of women’s academic education should be continued based on other categories of periodicals, including women’s press.
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Oleynikov, Alexander. "Methods of Forming a Media Image of Russia in Contemporary Spanish Newspapers 'El Pais' and 'El Mundo'." Theoretical and Practical Issues of Journalism 8, no. 1 (January 31, 2019): 195–205. http://dx.doi.org/10.17150/2308-6203.2019.8(1).195-205.

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The article reviews the materials of the electronic editions of the largest Spanish newspapers El Pais, El Mundo, containing publications about Russia. These periodicals relate to quality press and have the greatest influence on the public opinion of the Spanish population. The scope of the study includes the period from 2014 to 2018 and covers all major topics related to the political, economic and cultural life of Russia. As a fragment of the world image in the media space there is an image of the country, which is largely formed by the presentation of the media, is created on the basis of current events of the surrounding reality, includes their dynamics, is an expression of public consciousness and its influence on it. The article aims to determine whether the image of modern Russia in the Spanish press is predominantly positive or negative, and also to analyze the specifics of the Russian political media's formation in the Spanish print media by using stylistic, semantic and syntactic techniques. In the press, journalists often use such methods as metaphor, hyperbole, irony, comparison, and others to create a media image of a country. The article presents examples of translation into Russian from the newspapers El Pais and El Mundo, showing the use of these techniques. Thus, editorial teams of newspapers can act as manipulators who are directly involved in shaping a certain view of Russia from the Spanish public.
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Tokareva, E. A. "The Space of Contemporary Public History: From Viewer’s Attention to Political Discourse." Prepodavatel XXI vek, no. 2, 2020 (2020): 255–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.31862/2073-9613-2020-2-255-265.

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The subject of the article is the culture of historical memory in Russian society. This is true in the context of the past, and in the light of modern formation of recent history. The specificity of Russian social structure is that cultural and historical formation aspects as well as problems of historical memory are discussed by politicians, rather than society and historians. The new millennium began with the advent of alternative communication via Internet platforms and blogs that gained popularity. The rapid dissemination and popularization of this sphere resulted in manipulations with the public opinion through messages on social networks, which became alternative to the impact of television and newspapers. The purpose of the article is to examine blogging as a phenomenon of a new interactive political culture and their role in shaping the new history of Russia. The study uses information and analytical approaches to investigate the development path of blogging platforms as a ground for public journalism. The synthesis method was used to summarize the knowledge of the matter, generalize findings, and to identify prospects for further research. Textual and visual materials were exposed to discourse and content analyses, constituting the standard methodological toolkit for working with the blogging content. The authority of academic knowledge of history decreases, assuming the gradual formation of a new style of historical thinking and new analytical approaches. This new configuration is commonly called the “social form of knowledge” about history. We are witnessing the legitimization of these sources of information that are new to historians. A special place among them belongs to materials emerging and found within the blogosphere, where opinion leaders are representatives of a particular sector of the blogosphere raising important philosophical and socio-cultural questions and forming the audience’s opinion on them.
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Davydova, Marina. "Formation and Normalization of Legal Terminology in the Field of Digital Technologies." Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Serija 2. Jazykoznanije, no. 4 (December 2020): 52–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2020.4.5.

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Based on the latest legal texts, the article examines the process of forming the terminology of legal acts used in the digital technology field. The empirical base of the study consists of two blocks of legal texts: acts of strategic planning (strategies, national programs, passports of federal projects, etc.) and regulatory legal acts (federal laws and their projects) published in the period from 2016 to 2019. The peculiarities of lexical representation of the first group of documents (unsystematic use of terms, the use of metaphors and many words in quotation marks, excessive definitions and explanations, erosion of terminological apparatus of jurisprudence) indicate, in the author's opinion, two main features of the language of programmatic and strategic documents related to the field of digital technologies: 1) the declarative nature of the text, a large number of journalistic expressions have an emotional rather than rational effect; 2) there is no established scientific terminology and professional language which one can use in order to speak about digital legal relations. The second group of texts is now small in number but allows us to conclude that a much more careful approach to the terminological apparatus is taken. In general, the process of forming a legal terminological system in the field of digital technologies goes through several stages: the formation of the terminology of information technology field (largely due to borrowings from the English language); the inclusion of term-like units in the language of programmatic and strategic documents; development of legal terms proper, enshrined in the texts of regulatory legal acts.
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Imzi, Husnul Hakim. "Prinsip-Prinsip Komunikasi dan Informasi dalam Perspektif Al-Qur’an: Membangun Komunikasi Beradab." Dakwah: Jurnal Kajian Dakwah dan Kemasyarakatan 24, no. 1 (October 26, 2020): 13–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.15408/dakwah.v24i1.17808.

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Abstract Communication is not only informative but also persuasive. Moreover, the mass communcation which could be effective in forming public opinion. Therefore, it is necessary to apply the principles of communication that are mutually agreed consistently and responsibly. Because the error especially the mass communication will cause a great impact on society. There is a need for correction about the cognitive understanding of the public on terms that are known especially in the world of journalism, such as check and recheck, fairness, accuracy, free and responsible, and others. Do not let these principles actually gave birth to a new arrogance in communicating. This article tries to correct the understanding of the society based on the Qur’an and as-Sunnah. AbstrakKomunikasi tidak hanya bersifat informatif tetapi juga persuasif. Apalagi komunikasi massa yang dapat efektif membentuk opini publik. Oleh karena itu, prinsip komunikasi yang disepakati bersama harus diterapkan secara konsisten dan bertanggung jawab. Karena kesalahan khususnya dalam komunikasi massa akan menimbulkan dampak yang besar di masyarakat. Perlu ada koreksi terkait pemahaman kognitif masyarakat terhadap istilah-istilah yang dikenal khususnya dalam dunia jurnalistik, seperti check and recheck, fairness, akurasi, bebas dan bertanggung jawab, dan lain-lain. Jangan sampai prinsip tersebut justru melahirkan keangkuhan baru dalam berkomunikasi. Artikel ini mencoba meluruskan pemahaman masyarakat berdasarkan Al-Qur'an dan As-Sunnah.
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Rusakova, Olga, and Ekaterina Gribovod. "Mediatization of Anti-Corruption Policy: a Theoretical Analysis." Theoretical and Practical Issues of Journalism 9, no. 1 (March 23, 2020): 123–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.17150/2308-6203.2020.9(1).123-135.

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The article deals with the phenomenon of mediatization of anti-corruption policies. The authors study theoretical treatment of the role of the mass media in anti-corruption practices and analyze methodological approaches to interpretation of the mediatization. These include discourse-linguistic, cratologic, and resource-communication approaches. The discourse-linguistic approach involves mainly an analysis of the contents of media texts and images that generate a required public opinion and form stable cognitive matrices of peoples anti-corruption thinking. The cratologic approach regards mediacracy as both government institution and a subject of an anti-corruption policy. It also helps to find a number of information techniques (like agenda-setting, priming, framing, etc.) aimed at forming a legal anti-corruption culture. The resource-communication approach describes mediatization of anti-corruption policies by means of citizen journalism, new media and a vast range of mass communication media. The authors make an attempt to identify key features of the process of mediatization of anti-corruption policy at different stages of its development. The term «mediatization of anti-corruption policy» is defined as a system of measures to provide information support for anti-corruption activities. It is inferred that, overall, the contemporary mass media are successfully accumulating a required technological, organizational and communicative potential for information warfare against corruption. However, extra efforts and the national will would sufficiently add to the efficiency of this potential.
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Rizun, Volodymyr, Yurii Havrylets, Alla Petrenko-Lysak, Sergii Tukaiev, Anton Popov, Daryna Ivaskevych, and Yuliia Yachnik. "Stressogenic Elements of the Latent Impact of Real Media Reports on the COVID-19 Pandemic on Social Groups (Reporting the Methodology and Research Planning)." Current Issues of Mass Communication, no. 28 (2020): 10–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/2312-5160.2020.28.10-27.

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This article reveals the preparation for the investigation of the latent impact of media reports about COVID-19 on social groups. The research project of the Institute of Journalism, funded by the National Research Foundation of Ukraine, shows how to use media monitoring to form an experimental sample of media reports on COVID-19 as well as how to make a sociological and psychological description of the method of forming experimental groups. The purpose of this study is to form a methodological basis for experiments. We will use all this as a proven tool for organizing experiments in the subsequent stages of research. Accordingly, the search for media messages on the topic of COVID-19 by the LOOQME service showed the existence of an information boom in the media (this does not take into account the flow of messages on social networks), measured daily by tens of thousands of media messages. Undoubtedly, each person does not “digest” so much information, respectively, is not affected by it in full. Therefore, the question arises about the functioning of a human being as an interpreter of specific messages available to them, but taking into account public opinion as an interpretive filter: what people are saying and how they relate to COVID. All this is the filter that sets the vector of perception and understanding. This factor we will take into account in the following stages of the project.
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Gadini, Sérgio Luiz, and Thaís Helena Ferreira Neto Oliveira. "O Projeto Eleições Limpas e a reforma política na perspectiva de Teorias do Jornalismo: interface com a ‘Ciência dos Jornais’, Agendamento e Gatekeeper." Revista Observatório 1, no. 2 (December 8, 2015): 62. http://dx.doi.org/10.20873/uft.2447-4266.2015v1n2p62.

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Através da Ciência periodística de Otto Groth (2011), da Teoria da Agenda e da Teoria do Gatekeeper, o trabalho traz reflexões conceituais do Jornalismo, dialogando com a proposta do Projeto Eleições Limpas e reforma política, apresentada pelo Movimento de Combate à Corrupção Eleitoral (MCCE). O estudo faz o diálogo através da perspectiva de formação da opinião pública do Eleições Limpas, que prevê coleta de assinaturas ao projeto de iniciativa popular, com algumas Teorias do Jornalismo, destacando as características da ‘Ciência dos Jornais', do agendamento temático (público, político e midiático) e dos processos de seleção através da metáfora das forças. A proposta é analisar a tematização jornalística do projeto com interface a algumas Teorias do Jornalismo.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Teorias do Jornalismo; Ciência dos Jornais; Agendamento Temático; Teoria do Gatekeeper; Projeto Eleições Limpas ABSTRACTThrough periodistica Science Otto Groth (2011), the Agenda Theory and Gatekeeper theory, the paper presents conceptual Journalism reflections, dialoguing with the proposal of the Clean Elections Project and policy reform presented by the Movement Against Corruption electoral (MCCE). The study is the dialogue by forming perspective of public opinion in the Clean Elections, which provides for collection of signatures to the popular initiative project with some theories of journalism, highlighting the characteristics of the 'Science of Newspapers' Theme scheduling (public, political and media) and of the selection process through the metaphor of forces. The goal is to analyze the journalistic project theming interface to some theories of journalism.KEYWORDS: Journalism Theories; Science of Newspapers; Theme scheduling; Gatekeeper theory; Clean Elections Project. RESUMENA través periodística Ciencia Otto Groth (2011), la teoría de la Agenda Teoría y Gatekeeper, el artículo presenta reflexiones Periodismo conceptuales, dialogando con la propuesta del Proyecto de Elecciones Limpias y la reforma política presentada por el Movimiento contra la Corrupción Electoral (MCCE). El estudio es el diálogo mediante la formación de perspectiva de la opinión pública de las Elecciones Limpias, que proporciona para la recolección de firmas para el proyecto de iniciativa popular con algunas teorías de periodismo, destacando las características de la "Ciencia de la Prensa 'programación temático (público, política y medios de comunicación) y del proceso de selección a través de la metáfora de las fuerzas. El objetivo es analizar la interfaz tematización proyecto periodístico algunas teorías del periodismo.PALABRAS CLAVE: Teorías Periodismo; Ciencia de la Prensa; Programación temático; Teoría Gatekeeper; Elecciones Limpias Proyecto. Referências ALSINA, Miquel R. A construção da notícia. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2009.CORREIA, João Carlos. Novos jornalismos e vida cívica: limites e possibilidades do "jornalismo deliberativo". In: MORGADO, Isabel Salema; ROSAS, António. Cidade digital. Covilhã: LabCom, 2010. Disponível em: www.academia.edu/385865/Novos_Jornalismos_e_vida_c%C3%ADvica_limites_e_possibilidadesMC COMBS, Maxwel. A teoria da agenda: A mídia e a opinião pública. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2009.MC COMBS, "Um panorama da Teoria do Agendamento, 35 anos depois de sua formulação". In: Revista INTERCOM. São Paulo, v.31, n.2, jul./dez. 2008. Disponível em: http://portcom.intercom.org.br/revistas/index.php/revistaintercom/article/viewFile/176/169GAMSON, William. Falando de política. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2011.GROTH, Otto. O Poder Cultural Desconhecido: Fundamentos da Ciência dos Jornais. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2011.PRADO, Marco Aurélio Máximo. Movimentos sociais e massa: identidades coletivas no espaço público contemporâneo. In: MAYA, Rousiley; CASTRO, Maria Céres Pimenta Spínola (orgs.). Mídia, esfera pública e identidades coletivas. Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2006.REIS, Márlon. Entrevista exclusiva. Concedida à jornalista Thaís Helena Ferreira Neto Oliveira. Ponta Grossa: 26 de maio de 2015.SERRA, Sonia. Relendo o gatekeeper. Notas sobre condicionantes do jornalismo. 2004. Disponível em: http://comunicacaoeesporte.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/relendo-o-gatekeeper_sonia-serra1.pdfSHOEMAKER, Pamela. Teoria do Gatekeeping: Seleção e construção da notícia. Porto Alegre: Penso, 2011.TRAQUINA, Nelson. Poder do Jornalismo. Análise e textos da Teoria do Agendamento. Coimbra: Minerva, 2000.ELEIÇÕES LIMPAS. Disponível em: www.facebook.com/queroeleicoeslimpas?fref=ts. Acesso em 02 de agosto de 2015.MOVIMENTO DE COMBATE À CORRUPÇÃO ELEITORAL. Disponível em: www.mcce.org.br. Acesso em 02 de agosto de 2015.REFORMA POLÍTICA DEMOCRÁTICA E ELEIÇÕES LIMPAS. Disponível em: www.reformapoliticademcratica.org.br. Acesso em 02 de agosto de 2015. Disponível em:Url: http://opendepot.org/2684/ Abrir em (para melhor visualização em dispositivos móveis - Formato Flipbooks):Issuu / Calameo
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Tedtoeva, Zinaida, and Madina Tsalikova. "Reflection of the Gender Problems of Society in Russian Journalism at the Turn of the 20th and 21st Centuries." Theoretical and Practical Issues of Journalism 7, no. 4 (October 15, 2018): 672–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.17150/2308-6203.2018.7(4).672-690.

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The aim of the research was to analyze the stylistic tonality of the texts of mass media devoted to gender issues at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The article reveals the results of the research, which testify to the peculiarities of images of men and women in Russian mass media, and the data obtained during the analysis of journalistic texts published between 1990 and 2010 became indicators of the sample of the material. Some existing and emerging gender stereotypes are being established, namely cultural and socially conditioned ideas, opinions on the qualities, attributes and norms of behavior of men and women issued in journalistic texts. The linguistic means of expressing gender stereotypes in the mass media are analyzed. The article analyzes the linguistic tools used in the mass media to evaluate men and women. An attempt is made to compare the linguistic means used in the formation of images of women in the men's magazines. The research methodology is based on understanding the mass media mission as an effective means of forming public opinion; depending on the tasks to be solved, a set of methods used: synchronous-descriptive, synchronous-comparative, content-analysis. The method of textual and discursive analysis with the use of cognitive-pragmatic methodology and functional-stylistic analysis of the text are also used. Today it is the media that become a special agent of gender socialization, actively promoting gender stereotypes formed in society, exploiting them endlessly, often with their modification, which also contributes to the creation of new stereotypes. For modern mass media research, it is becoming increasingly important to take into account concepts, stereotypes as the basis for creating ideology in the modern media space. The latter ones presuppose a targeted influence on the recipient's consciousness from the addressee's side with the help of a pre-defined idea that has a generalized character that orient mass consciousness in the given direction through stereotyped nominations. The conclusions, which were made with the help of this research, are reduced to the statement of the tendentiousness of presenting gender issues in modern Russian mass media. The publications are mainly conducted in a key, far from respectful for both men and women. Moreover, in the mass media, stereotypes of men and women that do not correspond to the true state of affairs in Russia and are not capable of creating tolerant relations between the sexes that are not capable of asserting the idea of equal rights and equal responsibility to the society of all Russian citizens outside the public are exploited, generated and replicated in the mass media depending on their gender. A well-thought-out media policy in covering gender issues is needed, aimed at the formation of healthy humane relations in the society.
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Kozyryatska, Svetlana. "Hate speech in Ukrainian internet space: religious context." Obraz 3, no. 32 (2019): 87–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.21272/obraz.2019.3(32)-87-97.

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Introduction. Recently in the Ukrainian media space, there are a lot of info texts on religious topics; however, special attention should be given to the problem of hate speech used in such texts, as a repetition of certain messages that employ negatively colored or offensive lexis in relation to denominations is an indicator of influence on public opinion which can provoke the aggressive public mood. The relevance of the study. The aim of this paper is to study the peculiarities of using hate speech in info texts on religious topics represented in the Ukrainian online space. It includes, in particular, monitoring of the Internet in order to detect those secular and denominational resources that employ expressive means of hate speech in headlines or info texts on religious topics, as well as the study of lexical, stylistic, structural, and other peculiarities of hate speech and discovery of reasons for using it. Research methods. The research is grounded on the information approach; the method of academic literature analysis was used for general exploration of the subject, for defining the level of the theoretical study of such aspect of religious journalism as the use of hate speech by secular and denominational mass-media in reports on religious topics; methods of analysis and generalization – to distinguish the expressive means of hate speech that are used in the religious segment of the Internet space, and to determine the causes of their application. Results. The following reasons for hate speech use have been defined: 1) with the aim of influencing public opinion, i.e. forming a negative image of a confession, and humiliating its status; 2) with the aim of making web headlines more ardent by means of expressive lexis use, which, in its turn, is capable of provoking readers’ interest and attracting new visitors to the website. There are such particularly the appeal to political stereotypes, as well as the use of politically-marked words and political slang, jargonisms, vulgarisms, dysphemisms, stylistic lowering that secure the desired expressive effect. The importance of a communicator’s status, which gives more value to a message, has been highlighted. Usually, the use of hate speech is grounded on binary opposition ‘friend-or-foe’. Conclusions. The academic novelty of this research is determined by singling out the peculiarities (lexical, stylistic, structural, etc.) of hate speech in the religious segment of the Ukrainian online space and by discovering the reasons for using it. A prospect for further research is the study of communication between church and state in the Ukrainian media. Keywords: mass media, religious topics, Internet resources, hate speech, information confrontation, stereotypes.
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Mullins, Kimberley. "The Voting Audience." M/C Journal 11, no. 1 (April 1, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.23.

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Political activity is expected to be of interest to a knowledgeable electorate, citizenry or ‘public’. Performance and entertainment have, on the other hand, been considered the domain of the ‘audience’. The line between active electorate and passive audience has been continually blurred, and as more political communication is designed along the lines of entertainment, the less likely it seems that the distinction will become clearer any time soon. The following article will attempt to thoroughly evaluate the contemporary implications of terms related to ‘public’ and ‘audience’, and to suggest a path forward in understanding the now intertwined roles of these two entities. In political commentary of all kinds, the term ‘audience’ has come to be regularly used in place of the more traditionally political terms ‘public’, ‘electorate’, ‘constituency’ or even ‘mass’, ‘mob’ and ‘multitude’. (Bratich 249) This slight alteration of language would seem to suggest an ongoing, and occasionally unintentional debate as to whether or not our increasingly mediated society has become incapable of true political discourse – an audience to be courted and won solely on the basis of visual and aural stimulation. In some instances, the debate goes unacknowledged, with authors using the term interchangeably with that of voter or public. Others seem to be making a more definite statement, as do the authors of Campaign Craft, wherein the term ‘audience’ is often used to refer to the voting population. (Shea and Burton) In either case, it is clear that the ‘public’ and the ‘audience’ are no longer to be considered two entirely separate entities. To understand the significance of this shift, it is necessary to identify the traditional distinctions of these sometimes problematic terms. To do so we must look briefly at how the original and contemporary meanings have developed. Herbert Blau writes that “audiences, such as they are, are nothing like a public, certainly nothing like the capitalised Public of another time” (Blau 22). That “capitalised Public” he refers to is perhaps the ideal state envisioned by Greek and Roman philosophers in which the community, as a whole, is maintained by and for its own members, and each individual plays a significant and specific role in its maintenance. The “audiences”, however, can be popularly defined as “the assembled spectators or listeners at a public event such as a play, film, concert, or meeting” or “the people giving attention to something”. (Soanes & Stevenson) The difference is subtle but significant. The public is expected to take some active interest in its own maintenance and growth, while the audience is not expected to offer action, just attention. The authors of Soundbite Culture, who would seem to see the blurring between audience and public as a negative side effect of mass media, offer this description of the differences between these two entities: Audiences are talked to; publics are talked with. Audiences are entertained; publics are engaged. Audiences live in the moment; publics have both memory and dreams. Audiences have opinions, publics have thoughts. (Slayden & Whillock 7) A ‘public’ is joined by more than their attendance at or attention to a single performance and responsible for more than just the experience of that performance. While an audience is expected to do little more than consume the performance before them, a public must respond to an experience with appropriate action. A public is a community, bound together by activity and mutual concerns. An audience is joined together only by their mutual interest in, or presence at, a performance. Carpini and Williams note that the term ‘public’ is no longer an adequate way to describe the complex levels of interaction that form contemporary political discourse: “people, politics, and the media are far more complex than this. Individuals are simultaneously citizens, consumers, audiences…and so forth” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 161). Marshall sees the audience as both a derivative of and a factor in the larger, more political popular body called the “masses”. These masses define the population largely as an unorganised political power, while audiences emerge in relation to consumer products, as rationalised and therefore somewhat subdued categories within that scope. He notes that although the audience, in the twentieth century, has emerged as a “social category” of its own, it has developed as such in relation to both the unharnessed political power of the masses and the active political power of the public (Marshall 61-70). The audience, then, can be said to be a separate but overlapping state that rationalises and segments the potential of the masses, but also informs the subsequent actions of the public. An audience without some degree of action or involvement is not a public. Such a definition provides important insights into the debate from the perspective of political communication. The cohesiveness of the group that is to define the public can be undermined by mass media. It has been argued that mass media, in particular the internet, have removed all sense of local community and instead provided an information outlet that denies individual response. (Franklin 23; Postman 67-69) It can certainly be argued that with media available on such an instant and individual basis, the necessity of group gathering for information and action has been greatly reduced. Thus, one of the primary functions of the public is eliminated, that of joining together for information. This lack of communal information gathering can eliminate the most important functions of the public: debate and personal action. Those who tune-in to national broadcasts or even read national newspapers to receive political information are generally not invited to debate and pose solutions to the problems that are introduced to them, or to take immediate steps to resolve the conflicts addressed. Instead, they are asked only to fulfill that traditional function of the audience, to receive the information and either absorb or dismiss it. Media also blur the audience/public divide by making it necessary to change the means of political communication. Previous to the advent of mass media, political communication was separated from entertainment by its emphasis on debate and information. Television has led a turn toward more ‘emotion’ and image-based campaigning both for election and for support of a particular political agenda. This subsequently implies that this public has increasingly become primarily an audience. Although this attitude is one that has been adopted by many critics and observers, it is not entirely correct to say that there are no longer any opportunities for the audience to regain their function as a public. On a local level, town hall meetings, public consultations and rallies still exist and provide an opportunity for concerned citizens to voice their opinions and assist in forming local policy. Media, often accused of orchestrating the elimination of the active public, occasionally provide opportunities for more traditional public debate. In both Canada and the US, leaders are invited to participate in ‘town hall’ style television debates in which audience members are invited to ask questions. In the UK, both print media and television tend to offer opportunities for leaders to respond to the questions and concerns of individuals. Many newspapers publish responses and letters from many different readers, allowing for public debate and interaction. (McNair 13) In addition, newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail operate Websites that allow the public to comment on articles published in the paper text. In Canada, radio is often used as a forum for public debate and comment. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s Cross Country Check Up and Cross Talk allows mediated debate between citizens across the country. Regional stations offer similar programming. Local television news programmes often include ‘person on the street’ interviews on current issues and opportunities for the audience to voice their arguments on-air. Of course, in most of these instances, the information received from the audience is moderated, and shared selectively. This does not, however, negate the fact that there is interaction between that audience and the media. Perhaps the greatest challenge to traditional interpretations of media-audience response is the proliferation of the internet. As McNair observes, “the emergence of the internet has provided new opportunities for public participation in political debate, such as blogging and ‘citizen journalism’. Websites such as YouTube permit marginal political groups to make statements with global reach” (McNair 13). These ‘inter-networks’ not only provide alternative information for audiences to seek out, but also give audience members the ability to respond to any communication in an immediate and public way. Therefore, the audience member can exert potentially wide reaching influence on the public agenda and dialogue, clearly altering the accept-or-refuse model often applied to mediated communication. Opinion polls provide us with an opportunity to verify this shift away from the ‘hypodermic needle’ approach to communication theory (Sanderson King 61). Just as an audience can be responsible for the success of a theatre or television show based on attendance or viewing numbers, so too have public opinion polls been designed to measure, without nuance, only whether the audience accepts or dismisses what is presented to them through the media. There is little place for any measure of actual thought or opinion. The first indications of an upset in this balance resulted in tremendous surprise, as was the case during the US Clinton/Lewinsky scandal (Lawrence & Bennett 425). Stephanopoulos writes that after a full year of coverage of the Monica Lewinsky ‘scandal’, Clinton’s public approval poll numbers were “higher than ever” while the Republican leaders who had initiated the inquiry were suffering from a serious lack of public support (Stephanopoulos 442). Carpini and Williams also observed that public opinion polls taken during the media frenzy showed very little change of any kind, although the movement that did occur was in the direction of increased support for Clinton. This was in direct contrast to what “…traditional agenda-setting, framing, and priming theory would predict” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 177). Zaller confirms that the expectation among news organisations, journalists, and political scientists was never realised; despite being cast by the media in a negative role, and despite the consumption of that negative media, the audience refused to judge the President solely on his framed persona (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 255). It was clear that the majority of the population in the US, and in other countries, were exposed to the information regarding the Clinton scandal. At the height of the scandal, it was almost unavoidable (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 254). Therefore it cannot be said that the information the media provided was not being consumed. Rather, the audience did not agree with the media’s attempts to persuade them, and communicated this through opinion polls, creating something resembling a mass political dialogue. As Lawrence and Bennett discuss in their article regarding the Lewinsky/Clinton public opinion “phenomenon”, it should not be assumed by polling institutions or public opinion watchers that the projected angle of the media will be immediately adopted by the public (Lawerence & Bennett 425). Although the media presented a preferred reading of the text, it could not ensure that the audience would interpret that meaning (Hall in Curran, Gurevitch & Harris 343). The audience’s decoding of the media’s message would have to depend on each audience member’s personal experiences and their impression of the media that was presenting the communication. This kind of response is, in fact, encouraging. If the audience relies on mainstream media to provide a frame and context to all political communication, then they are giving up their civic responsibility and placing complete authority in the hands of those actively involved in the process of communicating events. It could be suggested that the reported increase in the perceived reliabilty of internet news sources (Kinsella 251) can be at least partially attributed to the audience’s increasing awareness of these frames and limitations on mainstream media presentation. With the increase in ‘backstage’ reporting, the audience has become hyper-aware of the use of these strategies in communications. The audience is now using its knowledge and media access to decipher information, as it is presented to them, for authenticity and context. While there are those who would lament the fact that the community driven public is largely in the past and focus their attention on finding ways to see the old methods of communication revived, others argue that the way to move forward is not to regret the existence of an audience, but to alter our ideas about how to understand it. It has been suggested that in order to become a more democratic society we must now “re-conceive audiences as citizens” (Golding in Ferguson 98). And despite Blau’s pronouncement that audiences are “nothing like a public”, he later points out that there is still the possibility of unity even in the most diverse of audiences. “The presence of an audience is in itself a sign of coherence”(Blau 23). As Rothenbuhler writes: There is too much casualness in the use of the word spectator…A spectator is almost never simply looking at something. On the contrary, most forms of spectatorship are socially prescribed and performed roles and forms of communication…the spectator, then, is not simply a viewer but a participant in a larger system. (Rothenbuhler 65) We cannot regress to a time when audiences are reserved for the theatre and publics for civic matters. In a highly networked world that relies on communicating via the methods and media of entertainment, it is impossible to remove the role of the audience member from the role of citizen. This does not necessarily need to be a negative aspect of democracy, but instead a step in its constant evolution. There are positive aspects to the audience/public as well as potential negatives. McNair equates the increase in mediated communication with an increase in political knowledge and involvement, particularly for those on the margins of society who are unlikely to be exposed to national political activity in person. He notes that the advent of television may have limited political discourse to a media-friendly sound bite, but that it still increases the information dispensed to the majority of the population. Despite the ideals of democracy, the majority of the voting population is not extremely well informed as to political issues, and prior to the advent of mass media, were very unlikely to have an opportunity to become immersed in the details of policy. Media have increased the amount of political information the average citizen will be exposed to in their lifetime (McNair 41). With this in mind, it is possible to equate the faults of mass media not with their continued growth, but with society’s inability to recognise the effects of the media as technologies and to adjust education accordingly. While the quality of information and understanding regarding the actions and ideals of national political leaders may be disputed, the fact that they are more widely distributed than ever before is not. They have an audience at all times, and though that audience may receive information via a filtered medium, they are still present and active. As McNair notes, if the purpose of democracy is to increase the number of people participating in the political process, then mass media have clearly served to promote the democratic ideal (McNair 204). However, these positives are qualified by the fact that audiences must also possess the skills, the interests and the knowledge of a public, or else risk isolation that limits their power to contribute to public discourse in a meaningful way. The need for an accountable, educated audience has not gone unnoticed throughout the history of mass media. Cultural observers such as Postman, McLuhan, John Kennedy, and even Pope Pius XII have cited the need for education in media. As McLuhan aptly noted, “to the student of media, it is difficult to explain the human indifference to the social effect of these radical forces”(McLuhan 304). In 1964, McLuhan wrote that, “education will become recognised as civil defence against media fallout. The only medium for which our education now offers some civil defence is the print medium”(McLuhan 305). Unfortunately, it is only gradually and usually at an advanced level of higher education that the study and analysis of media has developed to any degree. The mass audiences, those who control the powers of the public, often remain formally uneducated as to the influence that the mediating factors of television have on the distribution of information. Although the audience may have developed a level of sophistication in their awareness of media frames, the public has not been taught how to translate this awareness into any real political or social understanding. The result is a community susceptible to being overtaken by manipulations of any medium. Those who attempt to convey political messages have only added to that confusion by being unclear as to whether or not they are attempting to address an audience or engage a public. In some instances, politicians and their teams focus their sole attention on the public, not taking into consideration the necessities of communicating with an audience, often to the detriment of political success. On the other hand, some focus their attentions on attracting and maintaining an audience, often to the detriment of the political process. This confusion may be a symptom of the mixed messages regarding the appropriate attitude toward performance that is generated by western culture. In an environment where open attention to performance is both demanded and distained, communication choices can be difficult. Instead we are likely to blindly observe the steady increase in the entertainment style packaging of our national politics. Until the audience fully incorporates itself with the public, we will see an absence of action, and excess of confused consumption (Kraus 18). Contemporary society has moved far beyond the traditional concepts of exclusive audience or public domains, and yet we have not fully articulated or defined what this change in structure really means. Although this review does suggest that contemporary citizens are both audience and public simultaneously, it is also clear that further discussion needs to occur before either of those roles can be fully understood in a contemporary communications context. References Bennett, Lance C., and Robert M. Entman. Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Bratich, Jack Z. “Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies”. Communication Theory 15 (2005): 242-65. Curran, J., M. Gurevitch, and D. Janet Harris, eds. Mass Communication and Society. Beverley Hills: Sage, 1977. DeLuca, T., and J. Buell. Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics. New York: New York UP, 2005. Ferguson, Marjorie, ed. Public Communication: The New Imperatives. London: Sage, 1990. Franklin, Bob. Packaging Politics. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Keown, Leslie-Anne. “Keeping Up with the Times: Canadians and Their News Media Diets.” Canadian Social Trends June 2007. Government of Canada. Kinsella, Warren. The War Room. Toronto: Dunduran Group, 2007. Kraus, Sidney. Televised Presidential Debates and Public Policy. New Jersey: Lawerence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. Lawrence, Regina, and Lance Bennett. “Rethinking Media Politics and Public Opinion: Reactions to the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal”. Political Science Quarterly 116 (Fall 2001): 425-46. Marland, Alex. Political Marketing in Modern Canadian Federal Elections. Dalhousie University: Canadian Political Science Association Conference, 2003. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New ed. London: ARK Paperbacks, 1987 [1964]. McNair, Brian. An Introduction to Political Communication. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2007. The Oxford Dictionary of English. Eds. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Rev. ed. Oxford UP, 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford UP. 1 Mar. 2008. < http://www.oxfordreference.com.qe2aproxy.mun.ca/views/ ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t140.e4525 >. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin, 1985. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. Ritual Communication. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1998. Sanderson King, Sarah. Human Communication as a Field of Study. New York: State U of New York P, 1990. Schultz, David A., ed. It’s Show Time! Media, Politics and Popular Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Shea, Daniel, and Michael John Burton. Campaign Craft. 3rd ed. Westport: Praeger, 2006. Slayden, D., and R.K. Whillock. Soundbite Culture: The Death of Discourse in a Wired World. London: Sage, 1999. Stephanopoulos, George. All Too Human. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1999. Webster, James C. “Beneath the Veneer of Fragmentation: Television Audience Polarization in a Multichannel World.” Journal of Communication 55 (June 2005): 366-82. Woodward, Gary C. Center Stage: Media and the Performance of American Politics. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Xenos, Michael, and Kirsten Foot. “Not Your Father’s Internet: The Generation Gap in Online Politics.” Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth. Cambridge: MIT P, 2008.
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28

Mullins, Kimberley. "The Voting Audience." M/C Journal 10, no. 6 (April 1, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2716.

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Political activity is expected to be of interest to a knowledgeable electorate, citizenry or ‘public’. Performance and entertainment have, on the other hand, been considered the domain of the ‘audience’. The line between active electorate and passive audience has been continually blurred, and as more political communication is designed along the lines of entertainment, the less likely it seems that the distinction will become clearer any time soon. The following article will attempt to thoroughly evaluate the contemporary implications of terms related to ‘public’ and ‘audience’, and to suggest a path forward in understanding the now intertwined roles of these two entities. In political commentary of all kinds, the term ‘audience’ has come to be regularly used in place of the more traditionally political terms ‘public’, ‘electorate’, ‘constituency’ or even ‘mass’, ‘mob’ and ‘multitude’. (Bratich 249) This slight alteration of language would seem to suggest an ongoing, and occasionally unintentional debate as to whether or not our increasingly mediated society has become incapable of true political discourse – an audience to be courted and won solely on the basis of visual and aural stimulation. In some instances, the debate goes unacknowledged, with authors using the term interchangeably with that of voter or public. Others seem to be making a more definite statement, as do the authors of Campaign Craft, wherein the term ‘audience’ is often used to refer to the voting population. (Shea and Burton) In either case, it is clear that the ‘public’ and the ‘audience’ are no longer to be considered two entirely separate entities. To understand the significance of this shift, it is necessary to identify the traditional distinctions of these sometimes problematic terms. To do so we must look briefly at how the original and contemporary meanings have developed. Herbert Blau writes that “audiences, such as they are, are nothing like a public, certainly nothing like the capitalised Public of another time” (Blau 22). That “capitalised Public” he refers to is perhaps the ideal state envisioned by Greek and Roman philosophers in which the community, as a whole, is maintained by and for its own members, and each individual plays a significant and specific role in its maintenance. The “audiences”, however, can be popularly defined as “the assembled spectators or listeners at a public event such as a play, film, concert, or meeting” or “the people giving attention to something”. (Soanes & Stevenson) The difference is subtle but significant. The public is expected to take some active interest in its own maintenance and growth, while the audience is not expected to offer action, just attention. The authors of Soundbite Culture, who would seem to see the blurring between audience and public as a negative side effect of mass media, offer this description of the differences between these two entities: Audiences are talked to; publics are talked with. Audiences are entertained; publics are engaged. Audiences live in the moment; publics have both memory and dreams. Audiences have opinions, publics have thoughts. (Slayden & Whillock 7) A ‘public’ is joined by more than their attendance at or attention to a single performance and responsible for more than just the experience of that performance. While an audience is expected to do little more than consume the performance before them, a public must respond to an experience with appropriate action. A public is a community, bound together by activity and mutual concerns. An audience is joined together only by their mutual interest in, or presence at, a performance. Carpini and Williams note that the term ‘public’ is no longer an adequate way to describe the complex levels of interaction that form contemporary political discourse: “people, politics, and the media are far more complex than this. Individuals are simultaneously citizens, consumers, audiences…and so forth” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 161). Marshall sees the audience as both a derivative of and a factor in the larger, more political popular body called the “masses”. These masses define the population largely as an unorganised political power, while audiences emerge in relation to consumer products, as rationalised and therefore somewhat subdued categories within that scope. He notes that although the audience, in the twentieth century, has emerged as a “social category” of its own, it has developed as such in relation to both the unharnessed political power of the masses and the active political power of the public (Marshall 61-70). The audience, then, can be said to be a separate but overlapping state that rationalises and segments the potential of the masses, but also informs the subsequent actions of the public. An audience without some degree of action or involvement is not a public. Such a definition provides important insights into the debate from the perspective of political communication. The cohesiveness of the group that is to define the public can be undermined by mass media. It has been argued that mass media, in particular the internet, have removed all sense of local community and instead provided an information outlet that denies individual response. (Franklin 23; Postman 67-69) It can certainly be argued that with media available on such an instant and individual basis, the necessity of group gathering for information and action has been greatly reduced. Thus, one of the primary functions of the public is eliminated, that of joining together for information. This lack of communal information gathering can eliminate the most important functions of the public: debate and personal action. Those who tune-in to national broadcasts or even read national newspapers to receive political information are generally not invited to debate and pose solutions to the problems that are introduced to them, or to take immediate steps to resolve the conflicts addressed. Instead, they are asked only to fulfill that traditional function of the audience, to receive the information and either absorb or dismiss it. Media also blur the audience/public divide by making it necessary to change the means of political communication. Previous to the advent of mass media, political communication was separated from entertainment by its emphasis on debate and information. Television has led a turn toward more ‘emotion’ and image-based campaigning both for election and for support of a particular political agenda. This subsequently implies that this public has increasingly become primarily an audience. Although this attitude is one that has been adopted by many critics and observers, it is not entirely correct to say that there are no longer any opportunities for the audience to regain their function as a public. On a local level, town hall meetings, public consultations and rallies still exist and provide an opportunity for concerned citizens to voice their opinions and assist in forming local policy. Media, often accused of orchestrating the elimination of the active public, occasionally provide opportunities for more traditional public debate. In both Canada and the US, leaders are invited to participate in ‘town hall’ style television debates in which audience members are invited to ask questions. In the UK, both print media and television tend to offer opportunities for leaders to respond to the questions and concerns of individuals. Many newspapers publish responses and letters from many different readers, allowing for public debate and interaction. (McNair 13) In addition, newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail operate Websites that allow the public to comment on articles published in the paper text. In Canada, radio is often used as a forum for public debate and comment. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s Cross Country Check Up and Cross Talk allows mediated debate between citizens across the country. Regional stations offer similar programming. Local television news programmes often include ‘person on the street’ interviews on current issues and opportunities for the audience to voice their arguments on-air. Of course, in most of these instances, the information received from the audience is moderated, and shared selectively. This does not, however, negate the fact that there is interaction between that audience and the media. Perhaps the greatest challenge to traditional interpretations of media-audience response is the proliferation of the internet. As McNair observes, “the emergence of the internet has provided new opportunities for public participation in political debate, such as blogging and ‘citizen journalism’. Websites such as YouTube permit marginal political groups to make statements with global reach” (McNair 13). These ‘inter-networks’ not only provide alternative information for audiences to seek out, but also give audience members the ability to respond to any communication in an immediate and public way. Therefore, the audience member can exert potentially wide reaching influence on the public agenda and dialogue, clearly altering the accept-or-refuse model often applied to mediated communication. Opinion polls provide us with an opportunity to verify this shift away from the ‘hypodermic needle’ approach to communication theory (Sanderson King 61). Just as an audience can be responsible for the success of a theatre or television show based on attendance or viewing numbers, so too have public opinion polls been designed to measure, without nuance, only whether the audience accepts or dismisses what is presented to them through the media. There is little place for any measure of actual thought or opinion. The first indications of an upset in this balance resulted in tremendous surprise, as was the case during the US Clinton/Lewinsky scandal (Lawrence & Bennett 425). Stephanopoulos writes that after a full year of coverage of the Monica Lewinsky ‘scandal’, Clinton’s public approval poll numbers were “higher than ever” while the Republican leaders who had initiated the inquiry were suffering from a serious lack of public support (Stephanopoulos 442). Carpini and Williams also observed that public opinion polls taken during the media frenzy showed very little change of any kind, although the movement that did occur was in the direction of increased support for Clinton. This was in direct contrast to what “…traditional agenda-setting, framing, and priming theory would predict” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 177). Zaller confirms that the expectation among news organisations, journalists, and political scientists was never realised; despite being cast by the media in a negative role, and despite the consumption of that negative media, the audience refused to judge the President solely on his framed persona (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 255). It was clear that the majority of the population in the US, and in other countries, were exposed to the information regarding the Clinton scandal. At the height of the scandal, it was almost unavoidable (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 254). Therefore it cannot be said that the information the media provided was not being consumed. Rather, the audience did not agree with the media’s attempts to persuade them, and communicated this through opinion polls, creating something resembling a mass political dialogue. As Lawrence and Bennett discuss in their article regarding the Lewinsky/Clinton public opinion “phenomenon”, it should not be assumed by polling institutions or public opinion watchers that the projected angle of the media will be immediately adopted by the public (Lawerence & Bennett 425). Although the media presented a preferred reading of the text, it could not ensure that the audience would interpret that meaning (Hall in Curran, Gurevitch & Harris 343). The audience’s decoding of the media’s message would have to depend on each audience member’s personal experiences and their impression of the media that was presenting the communication. This kind of response is, in fact, encouraging. If the audience relies on mainstream media to provide a frame and context to all political communication, then they are giving up their civic responsibility and placing complete authority in the hands of those actively involved in the process of communicating events. It could be suggested that the reported increase in the perceived reliabilty of internet news sources (Kinsella 251) can be at least partially attributed to the audience’s increasing awareness of these frames and limitations on mainstream media presentation. With the increase in ‘backstage’ reporting, the audience has become hyper-aware of the use of these strategies in communications. The audience is now using its knowledge and media access to decipher information, as it is presented to them, for authenticity and context. While there are those who would lament the fact that the community driven public is largely in the past and focus their attention on finding ways to see the old methods of communication revived, others argue that the way to move forward is not to regret the existence of an audience, but to alter our ideas about how to understand it. It has been suggested that in order to become a more democratic society we must now “re-conceive audiences as citizens” (Golding in Ferguson 98). And despite Blau’s pronouncement that audiences are “nothing like a public”, he later points out that there is still the possibility of unity even in the most diverse of audiences. “The presence of an audience is in itself a sign of coherence”(Blau 23). As Rothenbuhler writes: There is too much casualness in the use of the word spectator…A spectator is almost never simply looking at something. On the contrary, most forms of spectatorship are socially prescribed and performed roles and forms of communication…the spectator, then, is not simply a viewer but a participant in a larger system. (Rothenbuhler 65) We cannot regress to a time when audiences are reserved for the theatre and publics for civic matters. In a highly networked world that relies on communicating via the methods and media of entertainment, it is impossible to remove the role of the audience member from the role of citizen. This does not necessarily need to be a negative aspect of democracy, but instead a step in its constant evolution. There are positive aspects to the audience/public as well as potential negatives. McNair equates the increase in mediated communication with an increase in political knowledge and involvement, particularly for those on the margins of society who are unlikely to be exposed to national political activity in person. He notes that the advent of television may have limited political discourse to a media-friendly sound bite, but that it still increases the information dispensed to the majority of the population. Despite the ideals of democracy, the majority of the voting population is not extremely well informed as to political issues, and prior to the advent of mass media, were very unlikely to have an opportunity to become immersed in the details of policy. Media have increased the amount of political information the average citizen will be exposed to in their lifetime (McNair 41). With this in mind, it is possible to equate the faults of mass media not with their continued growth, but with society’s inability to recognise the effects of the media as technologies and to adjust education accordingly. While the quality of information and understanding regarding the actions and ideals of national political leaders may be disputed, the fact that they are more widely distributed than ever before is not. They have an audience at all times, and though that audience may receive information via a filtered medium, they are still present and active. As McNair notes, if the purpose of democracy is to increase the number of people participating in the political process, then mass media have clearly served to promote the democratic ideal (McNair 204). However, these positives are qualified by the fact that audiences must also possess the skills, the interests and the knowledge of a public, or else risk isolation that limits their power to contribute to public discourse in a meaningful way. The need for an accountable, educated audience has not gone unnoticed throughout the history of mass media. Cultural observers such as Postman, McLuhan, John Kennedy, and even Pope Pius XII have cited the need for education in media. As McLuhan aptly noted, “to the student of media, it is difficult to explain the human indifference to the social effect of these radical forces”(McLuhan 304). In 1964, McLuhan wrote that, “education will become recognised as civil defence against media fallout. The only medium for which our education now offers some civil defence is the print medium”(McLuhan 305). Unfortunately, it is only gradually and usually at an advanced level of higher education that the study and analysis of media has developed to any degree. The mass audiences, those who control the powers of the public, often remain formally uneducated as to the influence that the mediating factors of television have on the distribution of information. Although the audience may have developed a level of sophistication in their awareness of media frames, the public has not been taught how to translate this awareness into any real political or social understanding. The result is a community susceptible to being overtaken by manipulations of any medium. Those who attempt to convey political messages have only added to that confusion by being unclear as to whether or not they are attempting to address an audience or engage a public. In some instances, politicians and their teams focus their sole attention on the public, not taking into consideration the necessities of communicating with an audience, often to the detriment of political success. On the other hand, some focus their attentions on attracting and maintaining an audience, often to the detriment of the political process. This confusion may be a symptom of the mixed messages regarding the appropriate attitude toward performance that is generated by western culture. In an environment where open attention to performance is both demanded and distained, communication choices can be difficult. Instead we are likely to blindly observe the steady increase in the entertainment style packaging of our national politics. Until the audience fully incorporates itself with the public, we will see an absence of action, and excess of confused consumption (Kraus 18). Contemporary society has moved far beyond the traditional concepts of exclusive audience or public domains, and yet we have not fully articulated or defined what this change in structure really means. Although this review does suggest that contemporary citizens are both audience and public simultaneously, it is also clear that further discussion needs to occur before either of those roles can be fully understood in a contemporary communications context. References Bennett, Lance C., and Robert M. Entman. Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Bratich, Jack Z. “Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies”. Communication Theory 15 (2005): 242-65. Curran, J., M. Gurevitch, and D. Janet Harris, eds. Mass Communication and Society. Beverley Hills: Sage, 1977. DeLuca, T., and J. Buell. Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics. New York: New York UP, 2005. Ferguson, Marjorie, ed. Public Communication: The New Imperatives. London: Sage, 1990. Franklin, Bob. Packaging Politics. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Keown, Leslie-Anne. “Keeping Up with the Times: Canadians and Their News Media Diets.” Canadian Social Trends June 2007. Government of Canada. Kinsella, Warren. The War Room. Toronto: Dunduran Group, 2007. Kraus, Sidney. Televised Presidential Debates and Public Policy. New Jersey: Lawerence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. Lawrence, Regina, and Lance Bennett. “Rethinking Media Politics and Public Opinion: Reactions to the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal”. Political Science Quarterly 116 (Fall 2001): 425-46. Marland, Alex. Political Marketing in Modern Canadian Federal Elections. Dalhousie University: Canadian Political Science Association Conference, 2003. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New ed. London: ARK Paperbacks, 1987 [1964]. McNair, Brian. An Introduction to Political Communication. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2007. The Oxford Dictionary of English. Eds. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Rev. ed. Oxford UP, 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford UP. 1 Mar. 2008. http://www.oxfordreference.com.qe2aproxy.mun.ca/views/ ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t140.e4525>. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin, 1985. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. Ritual Communication. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1998. Sanderson King, Sarah. Human Communication as a Field of Study. New York: State U of New York P, 1990. Schultz, David A., ed. It’s Show Time! Media, Politics and Popular Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Shea, Daniel, and Michael John Burton. Campaign Craft. 3rd ed. Westport: Praeger, 2006. Slayden, D., and R.K. Whillock. Soundbite Culture: The Death of Discourse in a Wired World. London: Sage, 1999. Stephanopoulos, George. All Too Human. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1999. Webster, James C. “Beneath the Veneer of Fragmentation: Television Audience Polarization in a Multichannel World.” Journal of Communication 55 (June 2005): 366-82. Woodward, Gary C. Center Stage: Media and the Performance of American Politics. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Xenos, Michael, and Kirsten Foot. “Not Your Father’s Internet: The Generation Gap in Online Politics.” Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth. Cambridge: MIT P, 2008. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mullins, Kimberley. "The Voting Audience." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/03-mullins.php>. APA Style Mullins, K. (Apr. 2008) "The Voting Audience," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/03-mullins.php>.
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29

Irwin, Hannah. "Not of This Earth: Jack the Ripper and the Development of Gothic Whitechapel." M/C Journal 17, no. 4 (July 24, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.845.

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Abstract:
On the night of 31 August, 1888, Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols was found murdered in Buck’s Row, her throat slashed and her body mutilated. She was followed by Annie Chapman on 8 September in the year of 29 Hanbury Street, Elizabeth Stride in Dutfield’s Yard and Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square on 30 September, and finally Mary Jane Kelly in Miller’s Court, on 9 November. These five women, all prostitutes, were victims of an unknown assailant commonly referred to by the epithet ‘Jack the Ripper’, forming an official canon which excludes at least thirteen other cases around the same time. As the Ripper was never identified or caught, he has attained an almost supernatural status in London’s history and literature, immortalised alongside other iconic figures such as Sherlock Holmes. And his killing ground, the East End suburb of Whitechapel, has become notorious in its own right. In this article, I will discuss how Whitechapel developed as a Gothic location through the body of literature devoted to the Whitechapel murders of 1888, known as 'Ripperature'. I will begin by speaking to the turn of Gothic literature towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space, before arguing that Whitechapel's development into a Gothic location may be attributed to the threat of the Ripper and the literature which emerged during and after his crimes. As a working class slum with high rates of crime and poverty, Whitechapel already enjoyed an evil reputation in the London press. However, it was the presence of Jack that would make the suburb infamous into contemporary times. The Gothic Space of the City In the nineteenth century, there was a shift in the representation of space in Gothic literature. From the depiction of the wilderness and ancient buildings such as castles as essentially Gothic, there was a turn towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space. David Punter attributes this turn to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The wild landscape is no longer considered as dangerous as the savage city of London, and evil no longer confined only to those of working-class status (Punter 191). However, it has been argued by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard that Charles Dickens may have been the first author to present London as a Gothic city, in particular his description of Seven Dials in Bell’s Life in London, 1837, where the anxiety and unease of the narrator is associated with place (11). Furthermore, Thomas de Quincey uses Gothic imagery in his descriptions of London in his 1821 book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, calling the city a “vast centre of mystery” (217). This was followed in 1840 with Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd, in which the narrator follows a stranger through the labyrinthine streets of London, experiencing its poorest and most dangerous areas. At the end of the story, Poe calls the stranger “the type and the genius of deep crime (...) He is the man of the crowd” (n. p). This association of crowds with crime is also used by Jack London in his book The People of the Abyss, published in 1905, where the author spent time living in the slums of the East End. Even William Blake could be considered to have used Gothic imagery in his description of the city in his poem London, written in 1794. The Gothic city became a recognisable and popular trope in the fin-de-siècle, or end-of-century Gothic literature, in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. This fin-de-siècle literature reflected the anxieties inherent in increasing urbanisation, wherein individuals lose their identity through their relationship with the city. Examples of fin-de-siècle Gothic literature include The Beetle by Richard Marsh, published in 1897, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in the same year. Evil is no longer restricted to foreign countries in these stories, but infects familiar city streets with terror, in a technique that is described as ‘everyday Gothic’ (Paulden 245). The Gothic city “is constructed by man, and yet its labyrinthine alleys remain unknowable (...) evil is not externalized elsewhere, but rather literally exists within” (Woodford n.p). The London Press and Whitechapel Prior to the Ripper murders of 1888, Whitechapel had already been given an evil reputation in the London press, heavily influenced by W.T. Stead’s reports for The Pall Mall Gazette, entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, in 1885. In these reports, Stead revealed how women and children were being sold into prostitution in suburbs such as Whitechapel. Stead used extensive Gothic imagery in his writing, one of the most enduring being the image of London as a labyrinth with a monstrous Minotaur at its centre, swallowing up his helpless victims. Counter-narratives about Whitechapel do exist, an example being Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, who attempted to demystify the East End by walking the streets of Whitechapel and interviewing its inhabitants in the 1860’s. Another is Arthur G. Morrison, who in 1889 dismissed the graphic descriptions of Whitechapel by other reporters as amusing to those who actually knew the area as a commercially respectable place. However, the Ripper murders in the autumn of 1888 ensured that the Gothic image of the East End would become the dominant image in journalism and literature for centuries to come. Whitechapel was a working-class slum, associated with poverty and crime, and had a large Jewish and migrant population. Indeed the claim was made that “had Whitechapel not existed, according to the rationalist, then Jack the Ripper would not have marched against civilization” (Phillips 157). Whitechapel was known as London’s “heart of darkness (…) the ultimate threat and the ultimate mystery” (Ackroyd 679). Therefore, the reporters of the London press who visited Whitechapel during and immediately following the murders understandably imbued the suburb with a Gothic atmosphere in their articles. One such newspaper article, An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel, released in November of 1888, demonstrates these characteristics in its description of Whitechapel. The anonymous reporter, writing during the Ripper murders, describes the suburb as a terrible dark ocean in which there are human monsters, where a man might get a sense of what humanity can sink to in areas of poverty. This view was shared by many, including author Margaret Harkness, whose 1889 book In Darkest London described Whitechapel as a monstrous living entity, and as a place of vice and depravity. Gothic literary tropes were also already widely used in print media to describe murders and other crimes that happened in London, such as in the sensationalist newspaper The Illustrated Police News. An example of this is an illustration published in this newspaper after the murder of Mary Kelly, showing the woman letting the Ripper into her lodgings, with the caption ‘Opening the door to admit death’. Jack is depicted as a manifestation of Death itself, with a grinning skull for a head and clutching a doctor’s bag filled with surgical instruments with which to perform his crimes (Johnston n.p.). In the magazine Punch, Jack was depicted as a phantom, the ‘Nemesis of Neglect’, representing the poverty of the East End, floating down an alleyway with his knife looking for more victims. The Ripper murders were explained by London newspapers as “the product of a diseased environment where ‘neglected human refuse’ bred crime” (Walkowitz 194). Whitechapel became a Gothic space upon which civilisation projected their inadequacies and fears, as if “it had become a microcosm of London’s own dark life” (Ackroyd 678). And in the wake of Jack the Ripper, this writing of Whitechapel as a Gothic space would only continue, with the birth of ‘Ripperature’, the body of fictional and non-fiction literature devoted to the murders. The Birth of Ripperature: The Curse upon Mitre Square and Leather Apron John Francis Brewer wrote the first known text about the Ripper murders in October of 1888, a sensational horror monograph entitled The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer made use of well-known Gothic tropes, such as the trans-generational curse, the inclusion of a ghost and the setting of an old church for the murder of an innocent woman. Brewer blended fact and fiction, making the Whitechapel murderer the inheritor, or even perhaps the victim of an ancient curse that hung over Mitre Square, where the second murdered prostitute, Catherine Eddowes, had been found the month before. According to Brewer, the curse originated from the murder of a woman in 1530 by her brother, a ‘mad monk’, on the steps of the high altar of the Holy Trinity Church in Aldgate. The monk, Martin, committed suicide, realising what he had done, and his ghost now appears pointing to the place where the murder occurred, promising that other killings will follow. Whitechapel is written as both a cursed and haunted Gothic space in The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer’s description of the area reflected the contemporary public opinion, describing the Whitechapel Road as a “portal to the filth and squalor of the East” (66). However, Mitre Square is the former location of a monastery torn down by a corrupt politician; this place, which should have been holy ground, is cursed. Mitre Square’s atmosphere ensures the continuation of violent acts in the vicinity; indeed, it seems to exude a self-aware and malevolent force that results in the death of Catherine Eddowes centuries later. This idea of Whitechapel as somehow complicit in or even directing the acts of the Ripper will later become a popular trope of Ripperature. Brewer’s work was advertised in London on posters splashed with red, a reminder of the blood spilled by the Ripper’s victims only weeks earlier. It was also widely promoted by the media and reissued in New York in 1889. It is likely that a ‘suggestion effect’ took place during the telegraph-hastened, press-driven coverage of the Jack the Ripper story, including Brewer’s monograph, spreading the image of Gothic Whitechapel as fact to the world (Dimolianis 63). Samuel E. Hudson’s account of the Ripper murders differs in style from Brewer’s because of his attempt to engage critically with issues such as the failure of the police force to find the murderer and the true identity of Jack. His book Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel, London, was published in December of 1888. Hudson described the five murders canonically attributed to Jack, wrote an analysis of the police investigation that followed, and speculated as to the Ripper’s motivations. Despite his intention to examine the case objectively, Hudson writes Jack as a Gothic monster, an atavistic and savage creature prowling Whitechapel to satisfy his bloodlust. Jack is associated with several Gothic tropes in Hudson’s work, and described as different types of monsters. He is called: a “fiend bearing a charmed and supernatural existence,” a “human vampire”, an “incarnate monster” and even, like Brewer, the perpetrator of “ghoulish butchery” (Hudson 40). Hudson describes Whitechapel as “the worst place in London (...) with innumerable foul and pest-ridden alleys” (9). Whitechapel becomes implicated in the Ripper murders because of its previously established reputation as a crime-ridden slum. Poverty forced women into prostitution, meaning they were often out alone late at night, and its many courts and alleyways allowed the Ripper an easy escape from his pursuers after each murder (Warwick 560). The aspect of Whitechapel that Hudson emphasises the most is its darkness; “off the boulevard, away from the streaming gas-jets (...) the knave ran but slight chance of interruption” (40). Whitechapel is a place of shadows, its darkest places negotiated only by ‘fallen women’ and their clients, and Jack himself. Hudson’s casting of Jack as a vampire makes his preference for the night, and his ability to skilfully disembowel prostitutes and disappear without a trace, intelligible to his readers as the attributes of a Gothic monster. Significantly, Hudson’s London is personified as female, the same sex as the Ripper victims, evoking a sense of passive vulnerability against the acts of the masculine and predatory Jack, Hudson writing that “it was not until four Whitechapel women had perished (...) that London awoke to the startling fact that a monster was at work upon her streets” (8). The Complicity of Gothic Whitechapel in the Ripper Murders This seeming complicity of Whitechapel as a Gothic space in the Ripper murders, which Brewer and Hudson suggest in their work, can be seen to have influenced subsequent representations of Whitechapel in Ripperature. Whitechapel is no longer simply the location in which these terrible events take place; they happen because of Whitechapel itself, the space exerting a self-conscious malevolence and kinship with Jack. Historically, the murders forced Queen Victoria to call for redevelopment in Spitalfields, the improvement of living conditions for the working class, and for a better police force to patrol the East End to prevent similar crimes (Sugden 2). The fact that Jack was never captured “seemed only to confirm the impression that the bloodshed was created by the foul streets themselves: that the East End was the true Ripper,” (Ackroyd 678) using the murderer as a way to emerge into the public consciousness. In Ripperature, this idea was further developed by the now popular image of Jack “stalking the black alleyways [in] thick swirling fog” (Jones 15). This otherworldly fog seems to imply a mystical relationship between Jack and Whitechapel, shielding him from view and disorientating his victims. Whitechapel shares the guilt of the murders as a malevolent and essentially pagan space. The notion of Whitechapel as being inscribed with paganism and magic has become an enduring and popular trope of Ripperature. It relates to an obscure theory that drawing lines between the locations of the first four Ripper murders created Satanic and profane religious symbols, suggesting that they were predetermined locations for a black magic ritual (Odell 217). This theory was expanded upon most extensively in Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell, published in 1999. In From Hell, Jack connects several important historical and religious sites around London by drawing a pentacle on a map of the city. He explains the murders as a reinforcement of the pentacle’s “lines of power and meaning (...) this pentacle of sun gods, obelisks and rational male fire, within unconsciousness, the moon and womanhood are chained” (Moore 4.37). London becomes a ‘textbook’, a “literature of stone, of place-names and associations,” stretching back to the Romans and their pagan gods (Moore 4.9). Buck’s Row, the real location of the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, is pagan in origin; named for the deer that were sacrificed on the goddess Diana’s altars. However, Moore’s Whitechapel is also Hell itself, the result of Jack slipping further into insanity as the murders continue. From Hell is illustrated in black and white, which emphasises the shadows and darkness of Whitechapel. The buildings are indistinct scrawls of shadow, Jack often nothing more than a silhouette, forcing the reader to occupy the same “murky moral and spiritual darkness” that the Ripper does (Ferguson 58). Artist Eddie Campbell’s use of shade and shadow in his illustrations also contribute to the image of Whitechapel-as-Hell as a subterranean place. Therefore, in tracing the representations of Whitechapel in the London press and in Ripperature from 1888 onwards, the development of Whitechapel as a Gothic location becomes clear. From the geographical setting of the Ripper murders, Whitechapel has become a Gothic space, complicit in Jack’s work if not actively inspiring the murders. Whitechapel, although known to the public before the Ripper as a crime-ridden slum, developed into a Gothic space because of the murders, and continues to be associated with the Gothic in contemporary Ripperature as an uncanny and malevolent space “which seems to compel recognition as not of this earth" (Ackroyd 581). References Anonymous. “An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel.” Littell’s Living Age, 3 Nov. 1888. Anonymous. “The Nemesis of Neglect.” Punch, or the London Charivari, 29 Sep. 1888. Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001. Brewer, John Francis. The Curse upon Mitre Square. London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co, 1888. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850. Dimolianis, Spiro. Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and the Supernatural Mystique of the Whitechapel Murders. North Carolina: McFarland and Co, 2011. Ferguson, Christine. “Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance in Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Alan Moore’s From Hell.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 20.1-2 (2009): 58. Harkness, Mary, In Darkest London. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1889. Hudson, Samuel E. Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel. London, Philadelphia, 1888. Johnstone, Lisa. “Rippercussions: Public Reactions to the Ripper Murders in the Victorian Press.” Casebook 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/rippercussions.html›. London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1905. Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 1. London: Griffin, Bohn and Co, 1861. Moore, Alan, Campbell, Eddie. From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts. London: Knockabout Limited, 1999. Morrison, Arthur G. “Whitechapel.” The Palace Journal. 24 Apr. 1889. Odell, Robin. Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon. Michigan: Sheridan Books, 2006. Paulden, Arthur. “Sensationalism and the City: An Explanation of the Ways in Which Locality Is Defined and Represented through Sensationalist Techniques in the Gothic Novels The Beetle and Dracula.” Innervate: Leading Undergraduate Work in English Studies 1 (2008-2009): 245. Phillips, Lawrence, and Anne Witchard. London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination. London: Continuum International, 2010. Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Man of the Crowd.” The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. Vol. 5. Raven ed. 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2151/2151-h/2151-h.htm›. Punter, David. A New Companion to the Gothic. Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2012. Stead, William Thomas. “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The Pall Mall Gazette, 6 July 1885. Sugden, Peter. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. London: Robinson Publishing, 2002. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, London: Virago, 1998. Woodford, Elizabeth. “Gothic City.” 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.nus.edu.au/sg/ellgohbh/gothickeywords.html›.
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Brien, Donna Lee. "Forging Continuing Bonds from the Dead to the Living: Gothic Commemorative Practices along Australia’s Leichhardt Highway." M/C Journal 17, no. 4 (July 24, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.858.

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Abstract:
The Leichhardt Highway is a six hundred-kilometre stretch of sealed inland road that joins the Australian Queensland border town of Goondiwindi with the Capricorn Highway, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Named after the young Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, part of this roadway follows the route his party took as they crossed northern Australia from Morton Bay (Brisbane) to Port Essington (near Darwin). Ignoring the usual colonial practice of honouring the powerful and aristocratic, Leichhardt named the noteworthy features along this route after his supporters and fellow expeditioners. Many of these names are still in use and a series of public monuments have also been erected in the intervening century and a half to commemorate this journey. Unlike Leichhardt, who survived his epic trip, some contemporary travellers who navigate the remote roadway named in his honour do not arrive at their final destinations. Memorials to these violently interrupted lives line the highway, many enigmatically located in places where there is no obvious explanation for the lethal violence that occurred there. This examination profiles the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. All humans know that death awaits them (Morell). Yet, despite this, and the unprecedented torrent of images of death and dying saturating news, television, and social media (Duwe; Sumiala; Bisceglio), Gorer’s mid-century ideas about the denial of death and Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer prize-winning description of the purpose of human civilization as a defence against this knowledge remains current in the contemporary trope that individuals (at least in the West) deny their mortality. Contributing to this enigmatic situation is how many deny the realities of aging and bodily decay—the promise of the “life extension” industries (Hall)—and are shielded from death by hospitals, palliative care providers, and the multimillion dollar funeral industry (Kiernan). Drawing on Piatti-Farnell’s concept of popular culture artefacts as “haunted/haunting” texts, the below describes how memorials to the dead can powerfully reconnect those who experience them with death’s reality, by providing an “encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience” (Piatti-Farnell). While certainly very different to the “sublime” iconic Gothic structure, the Gothic ruin that Summers argued could be seen as “a sacred relic, a memorial, a symbol of infinite sadness, of tenderest sensibility and regret” (407), these memorials do function in both this way as melancholy/regret-inducing relics as well as in Piatti-Farnell’s sense of bringing the dead into everyday consciousness. Such memorialising activity also evokes one of Spooner’s features of the Gothic, by acknowledging “the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present” (8).Ludwig Leichhardt and His HighwayWhen Leichhardt returned to Sydney in 1846 from his 18-month journey across northern Australia, he was greeted with surprise and then acclaim. Having mounted his expedition without any backing from influential figures in the colony, his party was presumed lost only weeks after its departure. Yet, once Leichhardt and almost all his expedition returned, he was hailed “Prince of Explorers” (Erdos). When awarding him a significant purse raised by public subscription, then Speaker of the Legislative Council voiced what he believed would be the explorer’s lasting memorial —the public memory of his achievement: “the undying glory of having your name enrolled amongst those of the great men whose genius and enterprise have impelled them to seek for fame in the prosecution of geographical science” (ctd. Leichhardt 539). Despite this acclaim, Leichhardt was a controversial figure in his day; his future prestige not enhanced by his Prussian/Germanic background or his disappearance two years later attempting to cross the continent. What troubled the colonial political class, however, was his transgressive act of naming features along his route after commoners rather than the colony’s aristocrats. Today, the Leichhardt Highway closely follows Leichhardt’s 1844-45 route for some 130 kilometres from Miles, north through Wandoan to Taroom. In the first weeks of his journey, Leichhardt named 16 features in this area: 6 of the more major of these after the men in his party—including the Aboriginal man ‘Charley’ and boy John Murphy—4 more after the tradesmen and other non-aristocratic sponsors of his venture, and the remainder either in memory of the journey’s quotidian events or natural features there found. What we now accept as traditional memorialising practice could in this case be termed as Gothic, in that it upset the rational, normal order of its day, and by honouring humble shopkeepers, blacksmiths and Indigenous individuals, revealed the “disturbance and ambivalence” (Botting 4) that underlay colonial class relations (Macintyre). On 1 December 1844, Leichhardt also memorialised his own past, referencing the Gothic in naming a watercourse The Creek of the Ruined Castles due to the “high sandstone rocks, fissured and broken like pillars and walls and the high gates of the ruined castles of Germany” (57). Leichhardt also disturbed and disfigured the nature he so admired, famously carving his initials deep into trees along his route—a number of which still exist, including the so-called Leichhardt Tree, a large coolibah in Taroom’s main street. Leichhardt also wrote his own memorial, keeping detailed records of his experiences—both good and more regretful—in the form of field books, notebooks and letters, with his major volume about this expedition published in London in 1847. Leichhardt’s journey has since been memorialised in various ways along the route. The Leichhardt Tree has been further defaced with numerous plaques nailed into its ancient bark, and the town’s federal government-funded Bicentennial project raised a formal memorial—a large sandstone slab laid with three bronze plaques—in the newly-named Ludwig Leichhardt Park. Leichhardt’s name also adorns many sites both along, and outside, the routes of his expeditions. While these fittingly include natural features such as the Leichhardt River in north-west Queensland (named in 1856 by Augustus Gregory who crossed it by searching for traces of the explorer’s ill-fated 1848 expedition), there are also many businesses across Queensland and the Northern Territory less appropriately carrying his name. More somber monuments to Leichhardt’s legacy also resulted from this journey. The first of these was the white settlement that followed his declaration that the countryside he moved through was well endowed with fertile soils. With squatters and settlers moving in and land taken up before Leichhardt had even arrived back in Sydney, the local Yeeman people were displaced, mistreated and completely eradicated within a decade (Elder). Mid-twentieth century, Patrick White’s literary reincarnation, Voss of the eponymous novel, and paintings by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker have enshrined in popular memory not only the difficult (and often described as Gothic) nature of the landscape through which Leichhardt travelled (Adams; Mollinson, and Bonham), but also the distinctive and contrary blend of intelligence, spiritual mysticism, recklessness, and stoicism Leichhardt brought to his task. Roadside Memorials Today, the Leichhardt Highway is also lined with a series of roadside shrines to those who have died much more recently. While, like centotaphs, tombstones, and cemeteries, these memorialise the dead, they differ in usually marking the exact location that death occurred. In 43 BC, Cicero articulated the idea of the dead living in memory, “The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living” (93), yet Nelson is one of very few contemporary writers to link roadside memorials to elements of Gothic sensibility. Such constructions can, however, be described as Gothic, in that they make the roadway unfamiliar by inscribing onto it the memory of corporeal trauma and, in the process, re-creating their locations as vivid sites of pain and suffering. These are also enigmatic sites. Traffic levels are generally low along the flat or gently undulating terrain and many of these memorials are located in locations where there is no obvious explanation for the violence that occurred there. They are loci of contradictions, in that they are both more private than other memorials, in being designed, and often made and erected, by family and friends of the deceased, and yet more public, visible to all who pass by (Campbell). Cemeteries are set apart from their surroundings; the roadside memorial is, in contrast, usually in open view along a thoroughfare. In further contrast to cemeteries, which contain many relatively standardised gravesites, individual roadside memorials encapsulate and express not only the vivid grief of family and friends but also—when they include vehicle wreckage or personal artefacts from the fatal incident—provide concrete evidence of the trauma that occurred. While the majority of individuals interned in cemeteries are long dead, roadside memorials mark relatively contemporary deaths, some so recent that there may still be tyre marks, debris and bloodstains marking the scene. In 2008, when I was regularly travelling this roadway, I documented, and researched, the six then extant memorial sites that marked the locations of ten fatalities from 1999 to 2006. (These were all still in place in mid-2014.) The fatal incidents are very diverse. While half involved trucks and/or road trains, at least three were single vehicle incidents, and the deceased ranged from 13 to 84 years of age. Excell argues that scholarship on roadside memorials should focus on “addressing the diversity of the material culture” (‘Contemporary Deathscapes’) and, in these terms, the Leichhardt Highway memorials vary from simple crosses to complex installations. All include crosses (mostly, but not exclusively, white), and almost all are inscribed with the name and birth/death dates of the deceased. Most include flowers or other plants (sometimes fresh but more often plastic), but sometimes also a range of relics from the crash and/or personal artefacts. These are, thus, unsettling sights, not least in the striking contrast they provide with the highway and surrounding road reserve. The specific location is a key component of their ability to re-sensitise viewers to the dangers of the route they are travelling. The first memorial travelling northwards, for instance, is situated at the very point at which the highway begins, some 18 kilometres from Goondiwindi. Two small white crosses decorated with plastic flowers are set poignantly close together. The inscriptions can also function as a means of mobilising connection with these dead strangers—a way of building Secomb’s “haunted community”, whereby community in the post-colonial age can only be built once past “murderous death” (131) is acknowledged. This memorial is inscribed with “Cec Hann 06 / A Good Bloke / A Good hoarseman [sic]” and “Pat Hann / A Good Woman” to tragically commemorate the deaths of an 84-year-old man and his 79-year-old wife from South Australia who died in the early afternoon of 5 June 2006 when their Ford Falcon, towing a caravan, pulled onto the highway and was hit by a prime mover pulling two trailers (Queensland Police, ‘Double Fatality’; Jones, and McColl). Further north along the highway are two memorials marking the most inexplicable of road deaths: the single vehicle fatality (Connolly, Cullen, and McTigue). Darren Ammenhauser, aged 29, is remembered with a single white cross with flowers and plaque attached to a post, inscribed hopefully, “Darren Ammenhauser 1971-2000 At Rest.” Further again, at Billa Billa Creek, a beautifully crafted metal cross attached to a fence is inscribed with the text, “Kenneth J. Forrester / RIP Jack / 21.10.25 – 27.4.05” marking the death of the 79-year-old driver whose vehicle veered off the highway to collide with a culvert on the creek. It was reported that the vehicle rolled over several times before coming to rest on its wheels and that Forrester was dead when the police arrived (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Traffic Incident’). More complex memorials recollect both single and multiple deaths. One, set on both sides of the road, maps the physical trajectory of the fatal smash. This memorial comprises white crosses on both sides of road, attached to a tree on one side, and a number of ancillary sites including damaged tyres with crosses placed inside them on both sides of the road. Simple inscriptions relay the inability of such words to express real grief: “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed” and “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed / Forever in our hearts.” The oldest and most complex memorial on the route, commemorating the death of four individuals on 18 June 1999, is also situated on both sides of the road, marking the collision of two vehicles travelling in opposite directions. One memorial to a 62-year-old man comprises a cross with flowers, personal and automotive relics, and a plaque set inside a wooden fence and simply inscribed “John Henry Keenan / 23-11-1936–18-06-1999”. The second memorial contains three white crosses set side-by-side, together with flowers and relics, and reveals that members of three generations of the same family died at this location: “Raymond Campbell ‘Butch’ / 26-3-67–18-6-99” (32 years of age), “Lorraine Margaret Campbell ‘Lloydie’ / 29-11-46–18-6-99” (53 years), and “Raymond Jon Campbell RJ / 28-1-86–18-6-99” (13 years). The final memorial on this stretch of highway is dedicated to Jason John Zupp of Toowoomba who died two weeks before Christmas 2005. This consists of a white cross, decorated with flowers and inscribed: “Jason John Zupp / Loved & missed by all”—a phrase echoed in his newspaper obituary. The police media statement noted that, “at 11.24pm a prime mover carrying four empty trailers [stacked two high] has rolled on the Leichhardt Highway 17km north of Taroom” (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Truck Accident’). The roadside memorial was placed alongside a ditch on a straight stretch of road where the body was found. The coroner’s report adds the following chilling information: “Mr Zupp was thrown out of the cabin and his body was found near the cabin. There is no evidence whatsoever that he had applied the brakes or in any way tried to prevent the crash … Jason was not wearing his seatbelt” (Cornack 5, 6). Cornack also remarked the truck was over length, the brakes had not been properly adjusted, and the trip that Zupp had undertaken could not been lawfully completed according to fatigue management regulations then in place (8). Although poignant and highly visible due to these memorials, these deaths form a small part of Australia’s road toll, and underscore our ambivalent relationship with the automobile, where road death is accepted as a necessary side-effect of the freedom of movement the technology offers (Ladd). These memorials thus animate highways as Gothic landscapes due to the “multifaceted” (Haider 56) nature of the fear, terror and horror their acknowledgement can bring. Since 1981, there have been, for instance, between some 1,600 and 3,300 road deaths each year in Australia and, while there is evidence of a long term downward trend, the number of deaths per annum has not changed markedly since 1991 (DITRDLG 1, 2), and has risen in some years since then. The U.S.A. marked its millionth road death in 1951 (Ladd) along the way to over 3,000,000 during the 20th century (Advocates). These deaths are far reaching, with U.K. research suggesting that each death there leaves an average of 6 people significantly affected, and that there are some 10 to 20 per cent of mourners who experience more complicated grief and longer term negative affects during this difficult time (‘Pathways Through Grief’). As the placing of roadside memorials has become a common occurrence the world over (Klaassens, Groote, and Vanclay; Grider; Cohen), these are now considered, in MacConville’s opinion, not only “an appropriate, but also an expected response to tragedy”. Hockey and Draper have explored the therapeutic value of the maintenance of “‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead” (3). This is, however, only one explanation for the reasons that individuals erect roadside memorials with research suggesting roadside memorials perform two main purposes in their linking of the past with the present—as not only sites of grieving and remembrance, but also of warning (Hartig, and Dunn; Everett; Excell, Roadside Memorials; MacConville). Clark adds that by “localis[ing] and personalis[ing] the road dead,” roadside memorials raise the profile of road trauma by connecting the emotionless statistics of road death directly to individual tragedy. They, thus, transform the highway into not only into a site of past horror, but one in which pain and terror could still happen, and happen at any moment. Despite their increasing commonality and their recognition as cultural artefacts, these memorials thus occupy “an uncomfortable place” both in terms of public policy and for some individuals (Lowe). While in some states of the U.S.A. and in Ireland the erection of such memorials is facilitated by local authorities as components of road safety campaigns, in the U.K. there appears to be “a growing official opposition to the erection of memorials” (MacConville). Criticism has focused on the dangers (of distraction and obstruction) these structures pose to passing traffic and pedestrians, while others protest their erection on aesthetic grounds and even claim memorials can lower property values (Everett). While many ascertain a sense of hope and purpose in the physical act of creating such shrines (see, for instance, Grider; Davies), they form an uncanny presence along the highway and can provide dangerous psychological territory for the viewer (Brien). Alongside the townships, tourist sites, motels, and petrol stations vying to attract customers, they stain the roadway with the unmistakable sign that a violent death has happened—bringing death, and the dead, to the fore as a component of these journeys, and destabilising prominent cultural narratives of technological progress and safety (Richter, Barach, Ben-Michael, and Berman).Conclusion This investigation has followed Goddu who proposes that a Gothic text “registers its culture’s contradictions” (3) and, in profiling these memorials as “intimately connected to the culture that produces them” (Goddu 3) has proposed memorials as Gothic artefacts that can both disturb and reveal. Roadside memorials are, indeed, so loaded with emotional content that their close contemplation can be traumatising (Brien), yet they are inescapable while navigating the roadway. Part of their power resides in their ability to re-animate those persons killed in these violent in the minds of those viewing these memorials. In this way, these individuals are reincarnated as ghostly presences along the highway, forming channels via which the traveller can not only make human contact with the dead, but also come to recognise and ponder their own sense of mortality. While roadside memorials are thus like civic war memorials in bringing untimely death to the forefront of public view, roadside memorials provide a much more raw expression of the chaotic, anarchic and traumatic moment that separates the world of the living from that of the dead. While traditional memorials—such as those dedicated by, and to, Leichhardt—moreover, pay homage to the vitality of the lives of those they commemorate, roadside memorials not only acknowledge the alarming circumstances of unexpected death but also stand testament to the power of the paradox of the incontrovertibility of sudden death versus our lack of ability to postpone it. In this way, further research into these and other examples of Gothic memorialising practice has much to offer various areas of cultural study in Australia.ReferencesAdams, Brian. Sidney Nolan: Such Is Life. Hawthorn, Vic.: Hutchinson, 1987. Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities & Fatality Rate: 1899-2003.” 2004. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Bisceglio, Paul. “How Social Media Is Changing the Way We Approach Death.” The Atlantic 20 Aug. 2013. Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. 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