Series Editor’s Preface [full prev.]

Simon Cottle, Series Editor

We live in a global age. We inhabit a world that has become radically interconnected, interdependent, and communicated in the formations and flows of the media. This same world also spawns proliferating, often interpenetrating, “global crises”.

From climate change to the war on terror, financial meltdowns to forced migrations, pandemics to world poverty and humanitarian disasters to the denial of human rights, these and other crises represent the dark side of our globalized planet. Their origins and outcomes are not confined behind national borders and they are not best conceived through national prisms of understanding. The impacts of global crises register across ‘sovereign’ national territories, surrounding regions and beyond and they can also become subject to systems of governance and forms of civil society response that are no less encompassing or transnational in scope. In today’s interdependent world, global crises cannot be regarded as exceptional or aberrant events only, erupting without rhyme or reason or dislocated from the contemporary world (dis)order. They are endemic to the contemporary global world, deeply enmeshed within it. And so too are they highly dependent on the world’s media.

How global crises become signaled and defined, staged and elaborated in the world’s media proves critical to wider processes of recognition and response, and can enter into their future course and conduct. In exercising their symbolic and communicative power the world’s media variously inform processes of public understanding, but so too can they dissimulate the nature of the threats that confront us and marginalize those voices that seek to mobilize forces for change. The scale of death and destruction involved in different global crises or the potentially catastrophic nature of different global threats are no guarantee that they will register prominently, if at all, in the world’s media, much less that they will be defined therein as “global crises.” So-called “hidden wars” and “forgotten disasters” still abound in the world today and because of their media invisibility can go unnoticed, commanding neither recognition nor wider response.

The series Global Crises and the Media sets out, therefore, to examine not only the media’s role in the communication of global threats and crises but also how the media today complexly enter into their very constitution, enacting them on the public stage and shaping their course around the world. More specifically, the volumes in this series seek to: 1) contextualize the study of global crisis reporting in relation to wider debates about the changing flows and formations of world media communication; 2) address how global crises become variously communicated and contested in the media around the world; 3) consider the possible impacts of media global crisis reporting on public awareness, political action and policy responses; 4) showcase the very latest research findings and discussion from leading authorities in their respective fields of inquiry; and 5) contribute to the development of positions of theory and debate that deliberately move beyond national parochialisms and/or geographically disaggregated research agendas. In these ways the specially commissioned books in the Global Crises and the Media series aim to provide a sophisticated and empirically engaged understanding of the media’s role in global crises and thereby contribute to academic and public debate about some of the most significant global threats, conflicts and contentions in the world today.

Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, edited by Stuart Allan and Einar Thorsen, chimes well with these stated aims. Their collection of chapters written by academics working in this field contributes new global perspectives on the rise of citizen journalism around the world, exploring its diverse expressions and emphasizing its close affinity with crises, catastrophes, and contemporary struggles for justice. As the editors observe at the outset, there has long been a close association between citizen journalism and the reporting of crises for it is in situations of crises, they suggest, that ordinary people are often “compelled to adopt the role of a reporter” and “bear witness to crisis events unfolding around them.” This collection builds on these claims—empirically, conceptually and theoretically—when examining diverse situations of crisis. Whether, for example, eyewitness accounts and the critical responses of ordinary people to Hurricane Katrina in the US and the Wenchuan earthquake in China; the use of warblogs and the hybrid links between civil society and news social movements in protests against the political, legal, and humanitarian crisis of the Iraq war; the role of citizen journalism in the fight for human rights, democracy and dignity across regions and inside different countries, including Brazil, India, Iran, Palestine, China, and Vietnam; the online promotion of awareness and action in Antarctica about climate change; or the part played by citizen media in recent political crises and contests including violent elections in Kenya, the amplification of contentious campaign remarks in Barack Obama’s US electoral campaign, and the role of social networking and citizen-sourced content in Australia’s federal elections.

Citizen journalism though certainly not without historical precedents, has evolved rapidly across recent years and is expressive of the surrounding culture, organizational structures, and politics of civil societies. Much hangs, clearly, on what exactly is meant by “citizenship” and also “journalism” and the plural meanings and projects now pursued in respect of both. More generally, citizen journalism has proved to be creatively adept at putting to work the now constantly updating and superseding communication technologies that have become widely available. These highly portable, low-cost, discreet, digitized communication technologies that are easily plugged into and uploaded to the world wide web have become for many an integral part of everyday life and medium for the conduct of social relations. Animated by differing conceptions of both “citizenship” and “journalism,” and practiced under very different political regimes around the world, “citizen journalism(s)” now assert their presence outside, through, and within today’s mainstream news media.

Citizen journalism variously enters into and informs today’s world news ecology with its overlapping formations and flows of news, mainstream and alternative news media, and new interactive technologies of news dissemination and user-generated content. Though still in large part structured in dominance by Western news corporations and news flows from the “West to the rest,” today’s world news ecology also incorporates established and emergent non-Western news formations and a plethora of alternative news forms and outlets generating news contra-flows and/or circulating oppositional views and voices—from the “rest to the West”, the local to the global. Mainstream newspapers and broadcasting news services have become surrounded by and wired into the world wide web, where most also seek a virtual news presence of their own and negotiate as they do so the internet’s enhanced connectivity, interactivity, and cacophony of voices that now emanate from the exponentially expanding blogosphere(s).

Mainstream news organizations for the most part, however, decline to surrender their traditional editorial control, agenda-setting functions or gatekeeper authority when deciding who is permitted to enter “their” news domain, under what conditions, when and how. But all are nonetheless cognizant of the added value that forms of citizen journalism can now bring when packaged inside their own news presentations—especially when reporting crises and catastrophes. Here first-hand testimonies, visceral accounts, and graphic images help to dramatize and humanize stories, injecting emotion, and urgency into the stories of people’s plight and pain. And, possibly, such raw images and graphic accounts can also sometimes help to undergird a mediated ethics of care or even the necessary politics of what should be done.

While corporate news organizations seek to expand market share and colonize communications space around the globe, citizen journalism it seems has managed to insinuate itself inside corporate news packages while simultaneously staking out independent platforms of news delivery and world-wide dissemination. As citizen journalism progressively ingratiates itself into today’s differentiated news ecology so inevitably it unsettles, reconfigures, or simply bypasses traditional hierarchies and relations of communicative power. At least that’s the democratic promise and often heard claim of citizen journalism. But how accurate are these claims when
approached in global context?

Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives digs expertly beneath the rhetorical veneer of citizen journalism whether glossed in celebratory or cynical terms and does so in twenty-one focused and tightly argued chapters. Together these help to document, analyze, conceptualize, and theorize the richly differentiated forms and expressions of citizen journalism in the world today—and the part they perform within diverse crisis situations. The collection examines the fast-developing rise of citizen journalism in diverse countries and political contexts around the world but the “global” is more than the aggregation of different countries and national perspectives of course, and here the collection also includes discussion and analysis of how citizen journalism originated in particular national contexts, crises, and contests intervenes across countries and continents and secures a transnational or even global presence within the “global news arena.”

In these and other ways, the chapters in this book help to illustrate the increasingly complex flows and formations of today’s world news ecology and how citizen journalism enters within them to communicate and condition the course of different crises and political contests around the globe. Stuart Allan and Einar Thorsen’s Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, then, offers a timely, authoritative and cutting-edge collection that should be of interest to all those interested in looking behind the inflated claims and undue cynicism that too often surround the rise of citizen journalism in the world today. The authors in this volume offer by far a more grounded, more measured, and more nuanced appreciation of citizen journalism, its diverse forms and political expressions and contribution to shifting relations of communicative power—especially in situations of crisis.