It is with great pleasure that this volume Opportunities for Media and Information Literacy in the Middle East and North Africa is presented as Yearbook 2016 from the International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media, at Nordicom. The Yearbook is published in cooperation with UNESCO and UNAOC. Opportunities for Media and Information Literacy in the Middle East and North Africa is the seventeenth Yearbook published by the Clearinghouse and fills a gap in the existing body of literature about the progress of media and information literacy work in different parts of the world. We believe it is of particular interest to shed light on a region, the MENA region, where young citizens’ engagement with media has been in focus in news reporting all over the world in recent years and awareness of MIL competencies is gaining ground.

In this chapter, I propose that the concept of affective dissonance is theoretically helpful to account for young people’s sentiments of digital disconnection. This proposal is empirically substantiated through an analysis of qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 17 Norwegian youths, based on the following question: How do young people react to invasive connected media? The findings illustrate that affective reactions to digital impulses appear to be an integrated part of young people’s daily management of digital connectivity. Although these experiences may lead to negative experiences, they do not necessarily lead to disconnection practices. From young people’s perspectives, digital disconnection not only involves being physically separated from connectivity but also encapsulates attitudinal shifts and mental distancing. Based on these findings, this chapter posits that disconnection is also an affective state that does not necessarily transform into action or practice, but is as much about the potentiality to act. This chapter thus recognises digital disconnection as a process based on youths’ perspectives, acknowledging its affective facet, and contributing to a broader conceptualisation of disconnectivity beyond acts and practices.

Hvilke fællestræk har skandinaviske krimier? Hvorfor er de interessante både for et nordisk publikum og for et internationalt? Er der bestemte, typiske træk i deres samfundsforståelse, deres fremstilling af mandlige og kvindelige karakterer, i deres reception og funktion? Den skandinaviske krimi er bredt eksponeret via flere medier – som bog, på film, som tv-serie, som computerspil og på diverse hjemmesider på internettet. Tilstedeværelsen i det ene medie forstærker interessen i det andet. Nordiske krimier oversættes og eksporteres som aldrig før, og en hel turistindustri udfolder sig med krimier som omdrejningspunkt. Antologien stiller skarpt på karakterer, steder og genrer. På film- og tv-produktion. På tværmedialitet og oplevelsesøkonomi. Det sker ud fra konkrete eksempler - fra Henning Mankell og Stieg Larsson til Torpedo, Anna Pihl og Forbrydelsen.

Finnish Yleisradio (Yle) has been one of the most innovative public service broadcasters in Europe. The new tax-based funding system and broad remit have allowed the company to shift its focus from broadcast television and radio to online services without jeopardising its relevance or resources. Now Yle has set preconditions for the future availability of its online television in case digital terrestrial television (DTT) would be switched off and all ultra high frequencies reallocated. This is not because Yle would want to focus only on growing video audiences online, but because the Finnish spectrum policy favouring mobile industries could endanger Yle’s capability to fulfil its public service remit. We argue that Yle’s conditions for abandoning television broadcasting on DTT are so tight they might never be met by the Ministry of Transport and Communications. In this chapter, we also examine what consequences public service without broadcasting could have.

What we in this volume call the “the digital backlash” covers a range of social and cultural practices of digital disconnection, as well as critiques of the impact of digital technologies and platforms in the world today. It thus includes a variety of overlapping and multifaceted changes and tendencies across societies, including digital disconnection, digital detox, the right to disconnect, media refusal, and what has been called “the techlash”. Hence, it can best be described as a kind of zeitgeist: a period in history in which the norms about digital behaviour, consumption, and habits are being questioned, and where the hype of the early digital era beginning in the 1990s is being challenged. In this introduction, we set the scene of the book by giving an overview of these tendencies and the history of digital critiques, serving to provide a framing for the chapters in the book. 

“The digital backlash” covers a range of social and cultural practices of digital disconnection, as well as critiques of the impact of digital technologies and platforms in the world today. Through calls for more restrictive, or more “mindful”, uses of digital technologies, “mobile-free” schools, work regulations along the lines of a “right to disconnect” framework, the rise of new entrepreneurs in the growing “digital detox” industry, as well as critiques of the role of Big Tech – society is deliberating on the stakes of the digital for the human condition.  The digital backlash can best be described as a kind of zeitgeist: a moment in history in which the norms about digital behaviour, consumption, and habits are being questioned, and where the early hype of the digital era beginning in the 1990s is being challenged. This edited volume offers a collection of empirical and theoretical analyses of the digital backlash as it manifests across national, institutional, and everyday contexts.  The  contributions span analyses of discourses and public debates around disconnection and the so-called techlash, the ambiguities and tensions of digital connectivity for work, labour, and productivity, the reordering of family and school life along with the perceived negative consequences of digital connectivity for the well-being of children and young people, as well as the playful and sometimes subversive recreational practices that people reinvent in search of authenticity as a response to all things digital. A distinct focus is placed on social practices and dilemmas related to new ways that people adapt to, appropriate, and push back against digital technologies in everyday life. 

The objective of this chapter is to describe and discuss some important political journalism development trends in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The term political journalism traditionally refers to news, commentaries, and other genres related to the coverage of political processes, institutions, and policy questions. It is, however, difficult to draw a clear dividing line between political news and other types of current affairs coverage. While political logic once dominated the discourses of political journalism, the emergence of the news media as an independent institution gave journalists a substantial definitional power and an ability to define the communicative rules of the game, but professional political sources quickly learned to exploit news media logics for their own aims and objectives. During the last decade, the growth of social media networks and the relative weakening of the legacy media has created a less stable situation for the negotiation of control between journalists and their sources.

The purpose of this book is to spotlight the way in which political scandals in four Nordic countries have been launched, directed, dramatized and interpreted through different genres of journalism – in an interactive tug-of-war between editors and various political actors. News institutions help to build political careers – and to tear them down. A mediated scandalization process can make the path from power to powerlessness, from a top position to exclusion, very short. A number of questions are discussed: How important are the norm violations that have led to political scandals? Have the types of scandals changed over time? How may rivals and political opponents use mediated scandals? Are character assassination and demonization typical traits of a scandalization process? Are male and female politicians treated differently? Scandalous! is based on case studies and content analyses of mediated political scandals in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, including an analysis of the frequencies, types, characteristics and consequences of national political scandals during the period 1980–2010.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, public campaigns were an important part of the Scandinavian health authorities’ strategies to combat the spread of the virus. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden had different strategies to manage the crisis: Denmark had the most political crisis management, Sweden the most informational, and Norway was placed somewhere in between. This chapter examines how public risk and crisis communication during a pandemic was handled in these campaigns in the Scandinavian countries, how they function as a governance technology, and how this was carried out rhetorically. We show how indirect, governmental steering dominated the campaign rhetoric in Scandinavia, through a focus on the culturally decided aspects of purity and danger, and through appeal to a sense of personal responsibility and willingness to avoid taking risks among the citizenry. Furthermore, we find that the campaigns are representative for the crisis management strategy in each country.

This article explores how media teachers’ self-images, positionings and interpretative rep-ertoires inform educational practices in media education. Media education is viewed as a critical element of 21st century learning. However, we have very little knowledge of the im-plementers of this critical element, the media teachers. Based on a thematic literature review of historical positions of the Nordic media teacher, and supported by national survey data on the media teachers’ backgrounds, motivations and practices (n=383), the subject is explored through focus groups and individual interviews with media teachers at two case schools in upper secondary media education in Norway. The findings suggest that there are different and conflicting understandings about being media teachers, resulting in different educational practices with wider implications for the future implementation of media education.

In this chapter, I examine how digital (dis)connection intertwines with andrelates to care in the practices of parents living in Denmark. I ask the following questions: How do parents strive to care for their children with and without digital technologies? And what can feminist care perspectives do for theories of disconnection? This chapter is based on 20 in-depth interviews with parents of children aged 0–12. Parents’ experiences demonstrate how digital technologies can help create both the preconditions and the context for care. The use of technology does not come without tension, however, as parents perceive that it can also interfere with an active good life and compete for their attention. Taken together, parents’ practices and discourses of (dis)connection offer insight into the moral imperatives surrounding digital media use in the family.

This chapter introduces rurality-TV as a genre, and we discuss how public service media, through this genre, contributes to symbolically resolving tensions between the rural and the urban, and we address processes of mobility and urbanisation in the Nordics. Three popular reality-TV programmes depicting rural life are analysed: Bonderøven [loosely translated as The Hillbilly], later known as Frank & Kastaniegaarden (DR), Hjälp vi har köpt en bondgård! [Help we have bought a farm!] (SVT), and Oppfinneren [The Inventor] (NRK). These are approached through three questions: What constitutes public service rurality-TV as a genre in terms of form and content? What values are negotiated in the programmes? How can we understand rurality-TV in the context of public service broadcasting in the media welfare state?

Ongoing digitalization has fundamentally transformed the entire media landscape, not least the domain of news. The blurring of previously sharp distinctions between production, distribution and consumption have challenged the established news industry and brought into question long-held assumptions of what journalism is or should be, who is a journalist and how we define, consume and use “news”. This anthology aims to shed light on the implications of these transformations for young people in the Nordic and Baltic countries. It focuses on three themes: youth participating in news and information production; news production by established media organizations and novel information providers aimed at children and youth; news use among youth. Taken together, the chapters illustrate the complexity of news use among youth and offer some rather different examples of strategies that news organizations might consider for reaching young people with news – or involving them in the production of news. Furthermore, the book might serve as a basis for reflecting on the urgent, but cumbersome, area of media and information literacy in these media saturated times.  

Youth and News in a Digital Media Environment consists of contributions from Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Estonia, written by scholars and people working in the media industry. The target audience of this book is students, professionals and researchers working in the field of journalism, media and communication studies, children and youth studies, media and information literacy and digital civic literacy.

The focal point of this chapter is surveillance practices in relation to social media influencers and digital marketing. The aim is to examine how the idea of surveillance can be expanded to include both social and technological aspects that work at individual, peer, and top-down levels. Drawing on examples from the Swedish influencer industry, we discuss and problematise how surveillance can be understood in such a context and how different dimensions of surveillance are manifested, exploited, and contested. The chapter concludes that participatory and gendered peer- and self-surveillance are an inherent part of influencer culture, and that the commercial success of influencers depends upon these practices. Similarly, platform surveillance and data mining connected to digital advertising can be understood as part of a contemporary commercialised surveillance culture that is closely related to both digital technology and the political economy of the influencer industry.  

Den digitalisering som mediebranschen just nu genomgår har musikindustrin redan överlevt. Denna artikel handlar därför om den svenska musikindustrins utveckling från dess tillkomst 1903 fram till idag och hur man har hanterat förändringar orsakade av bl.a. ny teknik genom åren. Nya aktörer har kommit med lösningarna och tagit en betydande roll i branschen. När de gamla aktörerna anpassat sig har de lyckats bevakasina revir men med begränsad dominans. Eller sagt med en kunglig parafras; musikindustrin är död, länge leve musikindustrin.

Viral false information, siloed information habits, and growing distrust in the media are amongst today’s most alarming challenges to digital media markets. These phenomena impact trust in media at all societal levels – global, regional, national, and local. They are enabled by economic, sociocultural, and technological transformations that have destabilised media systems and involve commercial, governmental, and civic stakeholders. The consequences significantly impact the lives of ordinary citizens. In today’s context, the ability of public service media organisations to fulfill a mandated universalism mission and counter these trends requires a new approach that prioritises and operationalises collaborative efforts.

Parents sharing happy family moments on their Facebook or Instagram profiles, and thus publish private scenes of their children’s lives to an extended personal networked public (so called sharenting) have been a huge issue in recent times. The chapter presents findings of a national funded research project at the University of Basel with the title Picturing Family in the Social Web. Central aspects of the chapter are: What kind of risks do parents see when sharing pictures of their children in online environments? How do they deal with those risks and arousing ambivalences? In what ways are social norms affected and adapted in parental peer groups? And what kind of new photo practices do emerge as a consequence? Furthermore, a family online photo guide will be introduced, which supports families in discussing these issues.

The outcome of an audience study supports theories stating that stories are a primarymeans by which we make sense of our experiences over time. Empirical examples ofnarrative impact are presented in which specific fiction film scenes condense spectators’lives, identities, and beliefs. One conclusion is that spectators test the emotional realismof the narrative for greater significance, connecting diegetic fiction experiences with theirextra-diegetic world in their quest for meaning, self and identity. The ‘banal’ notion of themediatization of religion theory is questioned as unsatisfactory in the theoretical context ofindividualized meaning-making processes. As a semantically negatively charged concept, itis problematic when analyzing empirical examples of spectators’ use of fictional narratives,especially when trying to characterize the idiosyncratic and complex interplay betweenspectators’ fiction emotions and their testing of mediated narratives in an exercise to findmoral significance in extra-filmic life. Instead, vernacular meaning-making is proposed.

This chapter investigates how vulnerable language minorities in Finland, Norway, and Sweden experienced communication from authorities during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Disadvantaged language minorities have been shown to have a higher risk of pandemic-related health issues, and information from authorities about the crisis is typically mainly focused on the majority of the population. This chapter builds on secondary analysis of existing research and uses the communication ecology framework to study how language minorities experienced information about the Covid-19 pandemic, and which information strategies they experienced as in need of improvement. Furthermore, expert suggestions of best practices for reaching vulnerable language minorities with communication about the pandemic are investigated. The results show that while mediated information channels are important, for vulnerable language minorities, interpersonal discussions and local, context-bound activities become central for efficient communication from authorities in times of complex societal crisis.

The backlash against digital media usage has manifested in everyday practices of digital disconnection, or deliberate non-use of media. This chapter provides an overview of the last decade of empirical disconnection research, tracing both its overarching tendencies and its boundaries. This is done through an analysis of 346 empirical studies on digital disconnection. For the purposes of this chapter, digital disconnection research is defined by a research ethos which does not consider the act of media non-use or restricted media use as something to be remedied. In review, the typical interest of the research has been in studying the disconnection of relatively young and individualised agents from social media, a disconnection which is often temporary or partial. Therefore, in the discussion portion of the chapter, I consider the opportunity for the openness of digital disconnection studies to extend even further, with particular emphasis on structures and contexts where disconnection may not only be problematised by the imperatives of “always on” communication, specifically in working life and other organised contexts. 

This chapter investigates how self-regulation could counter inequality of access to the media as a channel for information and expression in the context of the former state-socialist countries. It describes the Anglo-American self-regulatory model that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe attempted to adopt after the political transformations in 1989-1991, observes the failure of the implementation of this model and – through a case study of Hungary – describes some of the dysfunctions of the news media in the region. Further, it suggests that ethical journalism is the highest level of the “Maslow pyramid” of journalistic needs, preceded by acceptable work conditions, job security, a functional market and media freedom, and hence that ethical journalism cannot be pursued as long as the other conditions are not met. More particularly, it argues that the reasons for the failure of the self-regulatory mechanisms in these new democracies to be efficient concern the distortion of the media markets and the deficit of media freedom, among other factors.

This chapter employs the idea of “inequality in agency” and examines it in the context of representation studies. With the help of the European Social Survey data from 2016,1 the chapter claims that, across Europe, individuals are confronted with dissimilar contextual conditions (political cultures and media functioning habits and traditions, socio-economic environments and social norms) and express different feelings and individual capacities (such as self-confidence and social trust as well as personal and social capital endowments) to pursue and appreciate societal well-being in its fullest sense. As suggested here, “inequality in agency” arises as a result of “inequality in representation”, which is linked with underlying differences between the dominant political and media systems, on the one hand, and the civil society structures, on the other. This study predominantly considers public perceptions of political and social inclusiveness and representation and examines them in connection with the media and digital information environments existing in different European countries.

This chapter discusses how media and political information sources navigate change and adjust their needs-oriented behaviour to changing conditions. The results presented are based on 20 qualitative interviews with leading political journalists as well as government advisors and spokespersons in Lithuania. Although media and political sources gain power in different situations, both sides function in reciprocal interconnectedness. Formal contacts are quite consistent and professionalised, but they continue to work in the shadow of informal social networks, which create their own power relationships, dynamics and hierarchical structures. Though the findings are contextually fashioned, the views regarding the interaction indicate broader trends of communication professionalisation identified also in other cultures and political conditions.

This chapter compares the political cultures in the four countries analysed in this volume. Based on an inductive qualitative approach that singles out specificities in how political communication advisors and journalists interact within historical/institutional and professionalist/normative conditions and related constraints, the findings challenge earlier research on political communication culture. The chapter shows how political communication culture may act as a modifying factor in times of systemic change. It also reveals differences between and within countries that are often seen as forming distinct groups: Finland and Sweden as Nordic countries and Lithuania and Poland as Central European countries that have undergone recent fundamental system changes. The chapter ends with a discussion of how changes in the technological communication environment may affect political communication culture simultaneously in all four countries.

The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 marked the birth of the digitods – a new generation of children born with ready access to the digital devices. Little is known, however, about the development of infants’ and toddlers’ digital habits and how the parents and the family environment in general affect this process. The present study makes an initial attempt to fill this gap by using a combination of ethnographic methods in the case study of one child (Jonathan) from 6 to 27 months of age. During the fieldwork, we sought to examine how Jonathan’s media uses are shaped and changed over a two-year period and to identify the different family and parent-related factors determining this process. The study’s findings support the claim that use of digital media has become a normative behaviour among very young children and emphasize how deeply it is integrated into the daily parenting practices.

This article explores the relationship between parents’ digital practices and the production of children’s data traces and argues that the multiple variety of data traces that are produced daily about children can be used to profile them as citizen subjects. Drawing on the findings of the Child Data Citizen project, a qualitative and ethnographically informed research which explores the impact of big data on family life, the chapter however deconstructs theories of panopticon surveillance or quantified selves. Instead it sheds light on the fact that the datafication of family life is a complex and messy process, which leads to the production of imprecise, fragmented and inaccurate data. The paper, therefore, argues that we need to start asking critical questions about the relationship between the datafication of children, algorithmic inaccuracies and data justice.

In this article we explore young Brazilians’ reinforcement of gender-stereotypical and gender non-conforming expressions on social media, to see how Brazilian teenagers reproduce or contest the hyper-sexualized, heteronormative discourses around femininity and masculinity. Three models inspired the theoretical frameworks, namely the Butlerian discoursive subjectivity and performativity, Karen Barad’s model of posthuman materialism and the concept of intra-action of non-human agents, and Sonia Livingstone’s concept of social media literacy. The sample consists of 12 focus groups (60 respondents, 11 to 17 years old) conducted in metropolitan area of São Paulo in September 2016. Overall, our study showed a reinforcement of the heterosexual matrix, with some notable exceptions of contestation from both boys and girls. Our article offers a contribution to the research on young people and social media in South America through taking into account both local contexts and dominant discourses around gender and sexuality.

Tekstreklame var konflikten som startet diskusjonene om presseetikk for over 100 år siden. I dag reduserer digitaliseringen journalistikkens fortrinn som annonsekanal og medienes inntekter krymper. Konkurransen i digitale mediemarkeder krever også mer publisering enn tidligere, og med færre ressurser. Slik åpnes dørene til redaksjonelle spalter for eksterne bidrag. Denne artikkel påviser og drøfter hvordan den digitaleutviklingen påvirker gamle og nye forretningsmodeller for journalistikk, og hvordandet skaper konflikter om tekstreklame.

This chapter sheds light on the economic resilience of Norwegian news media during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a particular focus on the shifts in revenues within the newspaper industry amidst the crisis. The business disruptions caused by the pandemic inevitably impacted the revenue streams of news media organisations. By analysing revenue data from the Norwegian Media Authority and officially published reports, combined with expert interviews, our study unveils the diverse impact the pandemic had on news media in Norway. The findings reveal that while some outlets encountered cash-flow problems, others successfully navigated digital markets, leveraging the accelerated digital shift in media consumption and advertising during this period. Additionally, the study highlights that only a fraction of the extra funds granted by the state to assist the news business through the crisis was utilised.

There is a quickly increasing body of studies and reports on harassment and intimidation of journalists around the world. These series of acts have a chilling effect on media freedom and journalists’ freedom of expression. The research literature on the topic has mostly focused on intimidation and harassment of journalists – particularly sexual harassment of women journalists – or journalists’ experiences of online harassment, and the impact on press censorship. In this chapter, we contribute to the debate by exploring the nexus between the harassment of journalists and the protection mechanisms adopted by leading news media organisations, professional journalism associations and other institutions, and national governments. We then discuss the effects on democracy in the 18 countries participating in the 2021 Media for Democracy Monitor (MDM). Our findings indicate how legal support and protection mechanisms might enhance journalists’ capacity to realise the news media’s democratic role in practice.

The present article discusses the importance of the early years of mass communications in order to understand the shaping of them – the power of creating mass media for whole nations. It begins with references to scholars studying large nations and asks whether their results can be generalized to smaller countries. Therefore, it uses Norway as a case study. To what degree were Norway’s four major mass media – press, film, radio and television – formed institutionally in their early years? And if they were formed in this way, how long did the consequences of such a formation last? These questions have been neglected topics in research, so in order to answer them we also need to rethink the connections between the different media.

The Cold War between the East and West during the period 1945-1991 was a rivalry where the world’s doom constantly emerged as a possible result. The Cold War was global and included northern European countries like Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway in different ways. Historians are still discussing how Cold War history should be understood in these countries, but they have rarely been concerned about mass media and communications. Meanwhile, many media scholars have neglected the theme entirely. In this book, these two areas of knowledge are combined in new research on the Nordic mass media, and its significance during the Cold War. A number of controversial topics are covered. Nineteen Nordic scholars sheds new light on Nordic print media in all four countries, but also write about radio and the television broadcasting. Extending the traditional Cold War research on media and communication to include sport, magazines for men, political cartoons, and films, the book lays the foundation for Cold War studies to become an integrated interdisciplinary field of knowledge, and a more central part of the Nordic media research than before - with countless opportunities for exciting new research, with high relevance to world conflicts in our own time.

This chapter examines some normative regulatory aspects of furthering equality in the media. From the perspective of legal regulation, equality is a normative concept that is dependent on many social and economic factors. Legal regulation alone may achieve only limited results in this area. This chapter focuses on various aspects of pluralism and diversity as factors that have the potential to advance equality in the media. To approximate this ideal, the efforts of all actors in society are needed, including the users themselves,1 journalists, state regulators and international policy makers. A new set of actors emerged in the era of Web 2.0 media: platform providers as facilitators and gatekeepers of spontaneous citizen communication. Equality in publishing and accessing information online raises issues regarding the rights and responsibilities of gatekeepers. The roles and responsibilities of these actors have not been crystallized yet.