Communication and the Public

This essay revisits the controversy between Louis Althusser’s Marxist structuralism and Edward P. Thompson’s Marxist humanism. It draws conclusions from this controversy for the foundations of the Marxist theory of communication. The controversy’s key disagreements concern the questions of how the economic and the non-economic (the base/superstructure problem), as well as structures and agency are related. Whereas Althusser focuses on articulation and over-determination, Thompson stresses the role of experience in society in general, and class societies in particular. This essay reflects on how both these approaches relate to the role of communication in society and capitalism. Communication is a process in which humans produce and reproduce social relations in manners that mediate not just understanding the world and other humans, but also the dialectic of structure and agency and the dialectic of society’s realms. For a Marxist theory of society, also the forgotten meaning of communication as commoning is of crucial importance.

As a recently emerged information service on the Chinese Internet, online public opinion analysis (网络舆情分析) is a type of service to monitor, assess, and synthesize online public communication through automated software and trained individuals. This article provides an industry overview of the rise of online public opinion in China and examines the political economy of the People’s Public Opinion Office. Second, this article looks at the marketing of the profession in news coverage, training materials, as well as published interviews with People’s Public Opinion Office’s managers and experts. Through a close reading of People’s Public Opinion Office’s published annual reports from 2007 to 2016 focusing on the issue of online rumor, this article delineates how the identification and prognostics of online rumor evolves with the State’s anti-rumor campaign that aims to forestall or pacify collective action. In sum, this article sets to examine the professionalization and industrialization of online public opinion analysis as a part of the co-evolutionary dynamics between the state and civil society in China. Using the government’s anti-rumor campaign as an example, this article critically investigates the mediating role online public opinion analysis plays in the “sausage factory” of public opinion gauging and monitoring, which sets the basis upon which policymaking process is guided and justified.

This study examines how media use for news can relate to expressive and collective participation through the mediating role of political talk and internal and external political efficacy. Based on two cross-sectional analyses and one autoregressive analyses of the data obtained from a two-wave panel survey during the 2012 presidential campaign in South Korea, this study finds that political talk and internal political efficacy mediate the association between news attention and expressive participation, while external political efficacy does not. Political talk and internal political efficacy jointly mediate the impact of news attention on expressive participation. The analysis also reveals that social media news attention and internal political efficacy play a bigger role in connecting news attention and political participation than traditional news attention, external political efficacy, and political talk.

The media plays a crucial role in contemporary conflicts because an image war is occurring alongside the military confrontation. The Islamic state of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) sets a prime example for the usage of image as part of its fighting strategy, using various platforms to communicate its narrative. This study evaluates ISIS’s image front by analyzing its messages promoted through various online communication platforms: audio statements made by ISIS leaders, official videos, Dabiq and Rumiyah magazines, Islamic chants (nasheeds), and Amaq news reports. The findings indicate that ISIS uses messages strategically in an attempt to create and maintain its image as a powerful organization. The three main themes are power projection, violence, and Islamic religious messages (while different emphases are placed on various platforms). Most messages target Muslims, while others (usually threats) target the organization’s various enemies. It appears that ISIS invests considerable resources and efforts into promoting its narrative as part of the image war—projecting its power, based on religious arguments, on one hand, and demonizing and threatening its enemies on the other, using repeated themes, descriptions, metaphors, and visual images (videos, pictures, and infographics). The study’s analysis indicates that ISIS puts a lot of emphasis on the media/image aspects of its battle, and uses all of the tools in its tool box in an attempt to succeed in the image war, a central front in contemporary conflicts.