Scotland’s distinctive public sphere: a media policy roundtable
This roundtable will explore Scotland’s distinctive media and public sphere, with a particular focus on questions of sustainability in respect of funding, trust and the changing regulatory landscape. It contextualises these questions in a turbulent political environment, in which the constitutional question continues to dominate, and the radical changes brought by digital technologies.
Devolution in 1999 significantly shifted Scotland’s political landscape, and 2014’s referendum illuminated the way in which Scotland’s public sphere has developed in parallel as an often uncomfortable hybrid of UK-rooted institutions and emerging Scottish players. Analysis of media structures in the devolved state have however often been subsumed under UK-wide research which can fail to fully illuminate Scotland’s distinct challenges and nature.
This roundtable draws on a recent stakeholder report produced by academics at Glasgow University. Speakers will share insights on a set of key themes including sustainable funding and support for Scotland’s media and how it works in other small countries, digital regulation and competition, holding power to account in Scotland, and the impacts of global digital media on engagement with local issues. It will then invite contributions from the panel speakers and audiences about the future trajectory of Scotland’s media in the next decade.
Participants will include:
Dr Paul Reilly, Senior Lecturer, Politics Dr Catherine Happer, Director of Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG), Sociology Professor Philip Schlesinger, Professor in Cultural Theory, and Dr Dominic Hinde, Lecturer, Sociology.
Tomorrow (5 September), I will be presenting a paper based on a project that explored social media, sectarianism and football in Scotland. The panel, entitled Scottish Media and Culture, place at 9am in Room W010B (Annie Lennox Building). The abstract can be read below.
#ScotlandsShame: Twitter, affective publics and football-related sectarianism in Scotland
Social media have frequently been identified as a significant contributing factor to sectarianism in contemporary Scotland. What is typically absent from these debates is empirical evidence showing the prevalence of sectarianism on online platforms in relation to football, and specifically how the rivalry between Celtic and Rangers fans is contested online. This paper sets out to address this gap through a qualitative study of tweets (N=84,028) posted during the disorder that followed the Rangers ‘title celebrations’ in Glasgow city centre on 15 May 2021. Results indicate that there was much evidence of dehumanising and sectarian language being used to ‘other’ Rangers supporters. Hashtags like #ScotlandsShame were used by citizens to document their experiences of what they perceived as the ‘anti-Catholic bigotry’ on display in the city centre that evening. The Scottish establishment was criticised for not doing enough to eliminate this bigotry, whether it be in the form of banning contentious Orange Order marches or abolishing segregation within schools. In response, Rangers supporters accused the Scottish Government of having an agenda against their club, as demonstrated by its failure to condemn the anti-deportation protests at Kenmure Street a few days earlier. In this way, social media afforded these affective publics opportunities to contest the dominant media narratives on both the Celtic-Rangers rivalry and football-related sectarianism in Scotland. The paper concludes by considering whether the sectarianism visible on online platforms during such contentious events is reflective of broader societal trends.
For further information on the study, please feel free to contact us.
The abstract can be read below:
Where exactly is the Global South? Exploring Northern visibilities in digital activism research
The seemingly global nature of hashtag activism makes it difficult to assess what regions are being studied in digital activism research and the extent to which this scholarship is subject to ‘digital bias’ (Marres, 2017). This is of particular concern to scholars who have problematised the dominance of ‘Western’, Global North actors in digital media research whilst also calling for internet research methods to become de-westernised, internationalised, or decolonised (e.g. Badr & Ganter, 2021; Bosch, 2022; Milan & Treré, 2019; Karam & Mutsvairo, 2022; Mutsvairo, 2019; Schoon et al., 2020). While some argue that a ‘decolonial turn’ in digital media research is belatedly occurring (Couldry and Mejia, 2021), questions remain about whether similar trends are evident in digital activism research.
In response to this issue, this paper explores geographic representation in digital activism research. The corpus for the systematic review was created by running queries spanning 21 relevant keywords describing digitally enabled activism on the Scopus database. The final corpus consisted of 315 articles published between 2011 and 2018, which was tested on a range of attributes including methodological approaches and factors for evaluating regionality with a focus on regionally disadvantaged communities (towards capturing “Global South” and semi-periphery regions), incl.: case study origin and location, author affiliation, regional foci of the publishing journals, and researched digital/ social media platform (as tied to specific user demographics).
Results indicate that Global North and non-region specific campaigns dominated digital activism research during this period, particularly in articles featuring digital data. As such, extant research in the field has disproportionately produced what we term Northern Visibilities – privileged demographics & popular platforms of the “Global Majority” (i.e. Global North and privileged economies), above all in research applying software-based approaches.
The paper concludes by outlining a number of epistemological provocations around the extent to which the methods and methodological instruments researchers choose affect which social groups they capture or potentially omit as demographics may become diffused over multiple spaces and language contexts. Challenges in capturing Global South and semi-periphery communities apply, above all, in computational approaches as these are often based on high visibility as well as the API access options platforms provide. This means that researchers may need to rethink (a) where (e.g. which platform spaces) and how disadvantaged and less visible social groups are represented online, (b) which precise social groups digital social research is meant to capture, (c) gaps in digital activism research, above all in relation to “unheard” groups, as well as (d) what these skewed representations mean for inclusive research practice.
Bosch, T. (2022). Decolonizing Digital Methods. Communication Theory, 32(2), 298-302.
Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2021). The decolonial turn in data and technology research: what is at stake and where is it heading?. Information, Communication & Society, 1-17.
Karam, B., & Mutsvairo, B. (2022). Decolonising Political Communication in Africa: Reframing Ontologies (p. 254). Taylor & Francis.
Marres, N. (2017). Digital sociology: The Reinvention of Social Research. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Milan, S., & Treré, E. (2019). Big data from the South (s): Beyond data universalism. Television & New Media, 20(4), 319-335.
Mutsvairo, B. (2019). Challenges facing development of data journalism in non-western societies. Digital Journalism, 7(9), 1289-1294.
Schoon, A., Mabweazara, H. M., Bosch, T., & Dugmore, H. (2020). Decolonising digital media research methods: Positioning African digital experiences as epistemic sites of knowledge production. African Journalism Studies, 41(4), 1-15.
Dr Paul Reilly 