Academic literature on the topic 'Mass media – Moral and ethical aspects – Zimbabwe'

Media is the collective communication outlets or tools that are used to store and deliver information or data. Media means technology that is intended to reach a mass audience. Ethics is the branch of knowledge that tests with moral principles. Ethics is a system of the ethics is concerned with what is good for individuals and society and is also described as moral philosophy. Media ethics are a complex topic because they deal with an institution that must do things that generally people in ordinary circumstances would not do, those communication ethics focuses on moral characters, social values related to the women protection the significant segment of the society. Women play on important role in reforming the society. The media has a critical role to play in shaping people’s opinion and perceptions through the way it reports the news of women issues. There are some important ethical considerations which the media should take into account before reporting on women’s problems. The media also needs to focus on different aspects of the society at large to gradually bring awareness regarding the status of women and change orthodox mindsets which are based against women. This article discusses ethical consideration of media regarding women issues.

Of the goal of this study is to Educate the abstract concept as : Post-truth and Post modernism. Post-truth as a social phenomenon has put scientific discourse into polemic discussions in connection with an acute public request for the restoration of the Truth. Postmodernism, the previous era that gave rise to the problems of moral devaluation, is regarded as a cynical environment that produced these problems. Postmodernism has softened up the ground for radical openness of the public to the requests for the Truth, which can no longer be ignored in the last decade. The research considers modern sources of the formation of socio-ethical phenomena, which are the main life criteria in developed countries. Politics, media and culture are the core of any state and the entire global space. It is in the time of globalization, interstate interdependence, information wars and global warming that these aspects have attracted increased public interest. We provide a comparative argumentation of postmodernism and post-truth proving that the request for the Truth has become a new reality factor due to the mass public demand. The morality and ethics of the Truth have regained their classical forms and escaped from mass manipulation. Consequently, the issues of morality and values have become relevant. Ideologically, the world community demonstrates a genuine desire to restore the socio-ethical mission of the Truth. This statement is proved in our research.

The article deals with four aspects of the problem of truth in journalism of the Soviet era and their consequences in post-Soviet times: the problem of understanding the essence of the phenomenon, finding the truth in concrete situations, truth-telling by mass media to society, perception of the truth by the audience and social reflection. The methods, forms and means of the influence of Soviet journalism on the society are analyzed. The general scientific methods (analysis, deduction, induction, generalization) and the strategy of the substantiated theory are used. The results of the research have scientific and practical significance, they reveal the causes of certain social and communicative consequences of the controlled interaction of the society with the media, transformation of moral and ethical values and concepts, and provide research material on the methodology and technology of mass communication impacts. The author concludes about the need to return society as a whole, and journalism in particular, to understanding, perception of the essential meanings of the truth, in particular its metaphysical nature, and the formation of truth-centered socially responsible position of the journalist.

Son muchas las películas del llamado cine independiente que denuncian la era de la globalización, el consumismo, la irracionalidad de los nacionalismos exacerbados, el papel preponderante de los medios de comunicación, la xenofobia. Me he tenido que ceñir a tres películas que por su similitud me facilitan el estudio de los signos lingüísticos –cinematográficos– cuyos componentes semánticos tienen como finalidad la denuncia de estos aspectos que constituyen la llamada era de la globalización. Denuncia que no se realiza desde el compromiso ideológico sino desde el compromiso ético, como única vía de regeneración histórica. La estructura épico-lírica de estas películas, semejante a la del romance castellano, centra su atención en el héroe existencial enfrentado al destino adverso de un pueblo. Todos los elementos narratológicos –lenguaje, estructura, punto de vista– convergen en el determinismo histórico de los personajes, en la denuncia del drama histórico de los pueblos tercermundistas, y en el nihilismo desde el punto de vista filosófico. Frente a esta denuncia ideológica que se enmarca dentro de la estructura épica, aparece el compromiso ético de los personajes, tal vez del propio director, que confiere al texto el carácter lírico. La solidaridad de unos con otros rescata al hombre de la miseria moral en la que se ve inmerso tras siglos de lucha fratricida y de pobreza frente a la llamada sociedad de consumo, que sólo conoce esta situación a través de los medios de comunicación. There are many films from the so-called independent cinema that denounce the age of globalization, consumerism, the irrationality of the irritating nationalisms, the predominant role of mass media, xenophobia. I had to restrict myself to three films that due to their similarities helped me to study the linguistic film signs, whose semantic constituents aim to condemn these aspects that are part of the so-called age of globalization. The denunciation is not made from the ideological commitment but from the ethical commitment, as the only way towards historical regeneration. The epic and lyrical structure of these films, similar to the Castilian ballad, focuses on the existencial hero facins people’s bad fate. All the narrative elements – language, structura, point of view– are directed towards the historical determinism of the characters, towards the denunciation of the historical drama of the under-developed countries, and towards nihilism from a philosophical point of view. In front of this ideological denunciation, which is part of the epic existence, the ethical commitment of the characters appears, maybe from the director himself, and which gives the lyrical character to the text. The solidarity among each other rescues mankind from the moral poverty in which he is immersed from centuries of fratricidal fight and from poverty facing the so-called consumer society, which only knows this situation from mass media

Background: Abortion was legalized in Nepal in September 2002 by the amendment to the “Muluki Ain”. Legal, moral and ethical issues surrounding abortion make research on all aspects of abortion difficult to undertake. The objective of this study is to assess knowledge and attitude regarding abortion among women of reproductive age group (15-45 years). Methods: This study was a descriptive and conducted in Manipal Teaching Hospital (MTH), Pokhara, Nepal. The tools were demographic proforma, knowledge questionnaire and attitude scale on abortion. Data was collected by asking questions regarding abortion. The total sample was 100 and the sampling technique was purposive. The data were analyzed using Excel 2007, SPSS for Windows Version 16.0 Results: The majority (83%) of the participant were of age group 15-30years, most (70%) of them were married, most (82%) of them were Hindu. The majority of the participants (95%) had heard regarding Abortion. About half (55%) got information from mass media. Most (58%) of the women are having average knowledge regarding Abortion, and the remaining 4% is having poor knowledge. The majority (90%) of the women have a good attitude and no one is having an unfavorable attitude. There is a significant association between knowledge and level of education. There is a positive correlation between knowledge and attitude. Conclusion: Though the majority of the women had a good attitude regarding abortion, still few women i.e. 4% attending MTH don’t have good knowledge. Key Words: Abortion, Attitude, knowledge, Reproductive Age

Nowadays changes’ vector related to the information and technological novelties presently shifts: from technical, economic and legal fields - to the socio-cultural dimension. Following the production sectors, other areas of life became the objects of conscious and deliberate innovative activities, that allow us to fix the transition towards an innovative model of social and cultural development, and the corresponding increase in the value of Intellectual Property institutions in today’s post-industrial world. This is why the innovation has become one of the main types of nowadays practical activity with intellectual or creative content, and it’s perceived as an essential precondition for further civilized development. The intellectual property may be considered as a specific kind of original information, objectified in appropriate form. The core of any intellectual property object is innovation. The latter may even be understood as its inner substance. And the knowledge should be esteemed as a prelude to innovative or creative process. In the article, the main attention was focused on the dialectics of development of our Information reality that is changing gradually, but inevitably. The most controversial point is to keep the balance between the principle of Freedom of information (including free Internet, independent mass-media, privacy on the Web, anonymous sources for press and journalism activity), on the one hand, and the principle of informational safety and public security (i.e. the possibility of state power to resist an external informational aggression, to block disinformation attempts, to prevent manipulations with information that may be really dangerous or harmful to the society in different aspects), on the other hand. The general vision of today’s Information space evolution is expressed as an ambiguous process, which implies both the advantages and disadvantages of this new kind of reality. Eventually, this means the existence of the dark side of mentioned processes, and the bright one. It all depends on how people will actually use these technological tools. That’s why the state should always remain the sentinel of this fragile balance between the Freedom of Information in all possible ways, and the Censorship that may be expressed in soft or hard forms. The other matter is an Intellectual Property protection mechanism in this new information reality, including international and local legislation, judicial practice, as well as mental, moral and ethical, sociocultural, economic and even geopolitical aspects of IP protection. Everyone should respect the related Laws, and individual commercial & noncommercial rights of authors or possessors. But, simultaneously, this realm of social-economic and legal relations - called "intellectual property" - should be reconsidered deeply, as technological and sociocultural conditions have changed substantially. That’s why we consider the current global IP protection system as the olden one. It must be modernized, and this modernization should be definitely commenced by its liberalization.

IntroductionIn 2016, the online cause #Mission22 went viral on social media. Established to raise awareness about high suicide rates among US military veterans, the campaign involves users posting a video of themselves doing 22 push-ups for 22 days, and on some platforms, to donate and recruit others to do the same. Based on a ‘big data’ analysis of Twitter data (over 225,883 unique tweets) during the height of the campaign, this article uses #Mission22 as a site in which to analyse how people depict, self-represent and self-tell as moral subjects using social media campaigns. In addition to spotlighting how such movements are mobilised to portray moral selves in particular ways, the analysis focuses on how a specific online cause like #Mission22 becomes popularly supported from a plethora of possible causes and how this selection and support is shaped by online networks. We speculate that part of the reason why Mission22 went ‘viral’ in the highly competitive attention economies of social media environments was related to visual depictions of affective bodily, fitness and moral practices.Web 2.0 Culture: Self and Mass DepictionWeb 2.0 culture such as social networking sites (eg., Facebook; Instagram), the advent of video sharing technologies (eg., YouTube) and more recently, micro-blogging services like Twitter have created new and transformative spaces to create, depict and display identity. Web 2.0 is primarily defined by user-generated content and interaction, whereby users are positioned as both consumer and producers, or ‘produsers’ of Web content (Bruns and Schmidt). Challenging traditional “broadcast” media models, Web 2.0 gives users a platform to produce their own content and for “the many” to communicate “with the many” (Castells). The growth of mass self communication, supported by broadband and wireless technologies, gives unprecedented power to individuals and groups to depict and represent their identities and relationships to a potential global audience.The rise of user-generated communication technologies dovetails with broader analyses of the changing contours of self and identity in late-modern times. Individuals in the early decades of the 21st century must take charge for how they depict, portray and self-tell as distinctive, unique and individual subjects (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim; Giddens; Bauman). As contemporary lives become less bound to the strictures of tradition, community and religion, the self becomes a project to be worked out and developed. These theorists suggest that via processes of individualisation, detraditionalisation and globalisation, contemporary subjects have become disconnected from the traditional coordinates of community and are thus faced with the imperative of self-construction and reinvention (Elliott and Lemert).More recently, theoretical and empirical work has attempted to interpret and evaluate how networks of mass self-depiction powered by new digital and wireless technologies are reshaping identity practices. For some theorists, like Bauman (Consuming 2) and Turkle, Web 2.0 is a worrying trend. Bauman suggests in the “confessional society” – think reality TV, talk shows, social media – people are compelled to curate and reflect upon their lives in the public realm. These public acts of self-depiction are part of a move to treating the self as a brand to be consumed, “as products capable of drawing attention, and attracting demands and customers” (Bauman and Lyon 33). The consumer quality of new communications sees connections replace relationships as social bonds become short-term and brittle. Turkle makes a similar argument, suggesting that our preoccupation with online curation centres on controlling our identities and depicting “perfect” versions of ourselves. The result is diminished forms of intimacy and connection; we preach authenticity and realness but practice self-curation and self-stylisation.A more positive body of literature has examined how Web technologies work as tools for the formation of self. This literature is based on more close-up and detailed readings of particular platforms and practices rather than relying on sweeping claims about technology and social change. Following Foucault, Bakardjieva & Gaden argue that personal blogs and social networking site (SNS) profiles constitute a contemporary technology of the self, whereby users employ Web 2.0 technologies in everyday life as practices of self care and self-formation. In a similar way, Sauter argues that SNSs, and in particular Facebook, are tools for self-formation through the way in which status updates provide a contemporary form of self-writing. Eschewing the notion of social media activity as narcissistic or self-obsessive, Sauter argues that SNSs are a techno-social practice of self-writing that facilitate individuals to “form relations to self and others by exposing themselves to others and obtaining their feedback” (Sauter 836). Other research has explored young people’s sustained use of social media, particularly Facebook, and how these sites are used to tell and archive “growing up” narratives and key rites of passage (Robards and Lincoln).One area of research that has been overlooked is how people use social media to construct and depict moral identity. Following Sauter’s arguments about the self work that occurs through networked self-writing, we can extend this to include the ethical self work performed and produced through online depictions. One exception is work by Hookway which analyses how people use blogs – an earlier Web 2.0 form – to write and self-examine their moral experiences. This research shows how bloggers use blogging as a form of online self-writing to construct a do-it-yourself form of morality that emphasises the self, emotions, body and ideals of authenticity. Hookway highlights the idea that morality is less about obedience to a code of rules or following external laws to becoming a particular moral person through a set of self-practices. Paralleling broader shifts in identity construction, people are no longer bound to the inherited guidelines of the past, morality becomes a project to be worked out, designed and depicted in relation to Others (Hookway).In Foucault’s terms, morality involves a process of ethical self-stylisation – an “aesthetics of existence” – based on “the ethical work of the self on the self” (Foucault 91). “Care of the self” involves a “set of occupations” or “labours” that connect and link the self to the Other through guidance, counselling and communication (Foucault 50). For Foucault, self-creation and self-care imply “care for others” as individuals perform a mutual concern with achieving an “art of existence”. This is a reciprocated ethics that obligates the individual to care for others in order to help them care for themselves.This stylisation of the ethical self has been drastically reshaped by the new opportunities for self-expression, belonging and communication offered in our digitally networked society. Digital worlds and spaces create new multi-media modes for individuals and groups to depict, perform and communicate particular moral identities and positions. Web 2.0 technologies are seeing the boundaries between the private and public sphere collapse as more people are willing to share the most intimate part of their moral lives with a diverse mix of strangers, friends, family and associates.The confessional quality of online spaces provide a unique opportunity to analyse “lay morality” or everyday moral understandings, constructions and depictions and how this is co-produced in relation to new technological affordances. Following Sayer (951), morality is defined as “how people should treat others and be treated by them, which of course is crucial for their subjective and objective well-being”. Morality is understood as a relational and evaluative practice that involves being responsive to how people are faring and whether they are suffering or flourishing.In this article, we use the #Mission22 campaign – a campaign that went “viral” across multiple social media platforms – as a unique site to analyse and visualise lay moral depictions and constructions. Specifically, we analyse the #Mission22 campaign on Twitter using a big data analysis. Much of the empirical work on online self construction and depiction is either purely theoretical in the vein of Bauman, Turkle and Sauter or based on small qualitative samples such as the work by Lincoln and Robards and Author A. This article is unique not only in investigating the crafting of moral depictions in Web 2.0 forums but also in the scale of the textual and visual representation of mass moral self-depictions it captures and analyses. Big Data Analysis of #Mission22 on TwitterIn order to empirically examine the #Mission22 campaign on Twitter, we used the Twitter API to collect over three months of tweets that contained the campaign hashtag (from 20 Aug. 2016 to 1 Dec. 2016). This resulted in a dataset of 2,908,559 tweets, of which 225,883 were non-duplicated (i.e., some tweets were collected multiple times by the crawler).There were 3,230 user accounts participating during this period, with each user tweeting 70 times on average. As Figure 1 shows, a sizeable percentage of users were quite active at the height of the campaign, although there is clearly a number of users who only tweeted once or twice. More specifically, there were 1,232 users (or 38%) who tweeted at least 100 times, and on the other hand 1080 users (or 33%) who only tweeted two times or less. In addition, a tiny number of ‘power users’ (18 or 0.006%) tweeted more than 400 times during this period. Figure 1: Frequency distribution of #Mission22 tweets for each user in the datasetTo get a sense of what users were talking about during the campaign, we constructed a wordcloud out of the text data extracted from the tweets (see Figure 2). To provide more information and context, usernames (preceded with @) and hashtags (preceded with #) were included along with the words, providing a set of terms. As a result, the wordcloud also shows the user accounts and hashtags that were mentioned most often (note that #Mission22 was excluded from the data as it, by definition of the data collection process, has to occur in every tweet). In order to remove meaningless terms from the dataset we applied several text processing steps. First, all terms were converted to lowercase, such that “Veteran” and “veteran” are treated as the same term. Next, we applied a technique known as term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) to the tweet text data. Tf-idf effectively removes terms that occur so frequently that they provide no interesting information (e.g., the term “mission22”), and also terms that occur extremely infrequently. Finally, we removed English “stop words” from the text data, thereby eliminating common words such as “the” and “and”. Figure 2: Wordcloud of the #Mission22 tweet contentAs Figure 2 shows, the most frequent terms revolve around the campaign message and call-to-action for suicide awareness, including, for example, “day”, “veteran”, “support”, “push-ups”, “band”, “challenge”, “suicide”, “fight”, and “alone”. A number of user accounts are also frequently mentioned, which largely relate to the heavily retweeted users (discussed further below). Furthermore, alongside the central #mission22 hashtag, a number of other popular hashtags were in circulation during the campaign, including “#veteran”, “#americasmission”, “#22kill”, and “#22adayis22toomany”. Table 1 provides the top 50 most frequently occurring terms in decreasing order.Table 1: Top 50 words in the #Mission22 tweet content (decreasing order)1-1011-2021-3031-4041-50day@mrbernardedlong@uc_vetsnothingveteran#veteranbetter@kappasigmauceverysupporteverydaybelieve@ucthetachimissionpush-upschallengetodaytakehelp@sandratxassuicidehaulone#22kill@defensebaronveteransawarenessjustsay@the_usofightaccepted@piedmontlax#veterans@nbcnewsaloneptsdgoodweaknessbandvets22kwrong#nevertrumpcimmunity [sic]#americasmissionshoutoutgodwillA surprising finding of our study is that the vast majority of tweets are simply just retweets of other users. The number of retweets was 223,666, which accounts for about 99% of all tweets in the dataset. Even more surprising was that the vast majority of these retweets are from a single tweet. Indeed, 221,088 (or 98%) of all tweets in the dataset were retweets of the following tweet that was authored on 2 March 2015 by @SandraTXAS (see Figure 3). Clearly we can say that this tweet went ‘viral’ (Jenders et al) in the sense that it became frequently retweeted and gained an increasing amount of attention due to its cumulative popularity and visibility over time. Figure 3: #1 most retweeted #Mission22 tweet – @SandraTXAS (https://twitter.com/SandraTXAS)This highly retweeted or viral #Mission22 tweet provides a point of departure to examine what aspects of the tweet content influence the virality or popularity of #Mission22 tweets during the height of the campaign. To do this, we extracted the next nine most retweeted tweets from our dataset, providing an analysis of the “top 10” retweets (including the @SandraTXAS tweet above). Figure 4: #2 most retweeted - @mrbernarded (https://twitter.com/mrbernarded/status/776221040582295553)This tweet was retweeted 715 times in our dataset. Figure 5: #4 most retweeted - @Mission22 (https://twitter.com/Mission22/status/799872548863414272)This was retweeted 317 times in our dataset. Figure 6: #4 most retweeted - @UCThetaChi (https://twitter.com/UCThetaChi/status/784775641430384640)This was retweeted 180 times in our dataset. Figure 7: #5 most retweeted - @PamKeith2016 (https://twitter.com/PamKeith2016/status/782975576550305792)This was retweeted 121 times in our dataset. Figure 8: #6 most retweeted - @PiedmontLax (https://twitter.com/PiedmontLax/status/770749891698122752)This was retweeted 105 times in our dataset. Figure 9: #7 most retweeted - @PiedmontLax (https://twitter.com/PiedmontLax/status/771181070066692098) This was retweeted 78 times in our dataset. Figure 10: #8 most retweeted - @PatriotBrother (https://twitter.com/PatriotBrother/status/804387050728394752) This was retweeted 59 times in our dataset. Figure 11: #9 most retweeted - @alexgotayjr (https://twitter.com/alexgotayjr/status/787112936644849664) This was retweeted 49 times in our dataset. Figure 12: #10 most retweeted - @csjacobson89 (https://twitter.com/csjacobson89/status/772921614044233729) This was retweeted 45 times in our dataset.DiscussionThis article has provided the first “big data” analysis of the #Mission22 movement that went viral across multiple social media platforms in 2016. We began by arguing that Web 2.0 has ushered in profound changes to how people depict and construct identities that articulate with wider transformations in self and identity in conditions of late-modernity. The “confessional” quality of Web 2.0 means individuals and groups are presented with unprecedented opportunities to “mass self-depict” through new communication and Internet technologies. We suggest that the focus on how Web technologies are implicated in the formation of moral subjectivities is something that has been overlooked in the extant research on identity and Web 2.0 technologies.Filling this gap, we used the #Mission22 movement on Twitter as an empirical site to analyse how contemporary subjects construct and visually depict moral identities in online contexts. A central finding of our analysis of 225883 Twitter posts is that most engagement with #Mission22 was through retweeting. Our data show that retweets were by far the most popular way to interact and engage with the movement. In other words, most people were not producing original or new content in how they participated in the movement but were re-sharing – re-depicting – what others had shared. This finding highlights the importance of paying attention to the architectural affordances of social media platforms, in this case, the affordances of the ‘retweet’ button, and how they shape online identity practices and moral expression. We use moral expression here as a broad term to capture the different ways individuals and groups make moral evaluations based on a responsiveness to how people are faring and whether they are suffering or flourishing (Sayer). This approach provides an emic account of everyday morality and precludes, for example, wider philosophical debates about whether patriotism or nationalistic solidarity can be understood as moral values.The prominence of the retweet in driving the shape and nature of #Mission22 raises questions about the depth of moral engagement being communicated. Is the dominance of the retweet suggestive of a type of “moral slacktivism”? Like its online political equivalent, does the retweet highlight a shallow and cursory involvement with a cause or movement? Did online engagement translate to concrete moral actions such as making a donation to the cause or engaging in some other form of civic activity to draw attention to the movement? These questions are beyond the scope of this article but it is interesting to consider the link between the affordances of the platform, capacity for moral expression and how this translates to face-to-face moral action. Putting aside questions of depth, people are compelled not to ignore these posts, they move from “seeing” to “posting”, to taking action within the affordances of the architectural platform.What then is moving Twitter users to morally engage with this content? How did this movement go viral? What helped bust this movement out of the “long tail distribution” which characterises most movements – that is, few movements “take-off” and become durable within the congested attention economies of social media environments. The Top 10 most retweeted tweets provide powerful answers here. All of them feature highly emotive and affective visual depictions, either high impact photos and statements, or videos of people/groups doing pushups in solidarity together. The images and videos align affective, bodily and fitness practices with nationalistic and patriotic themes to produce a powerful and moving moral cocktail. The Top 50 words also capture the emotionally evocative use of moral language: words like: alone, fight, challenge, better, believe, good, wrong, god, help, mission, weakness and will.The emotional and embodied visual depictions that characterise the the Top 10 retweets and Top 50 words highlight how moral identity is not just a cerebral practice, but one that is fundamentally emotional and bodily. We do morality not just with our minds and heads but also with our bodies and our hearts. Part of the power of this movement, then, is the way it mobilises interest and involvement with the movement through a physical and embodied practice – doing push-ups. Visually depicting oneself doing push-ups online is a powerful display of morality identity. The “lay morality” being communicated is that not only are you somebody who cares about the flourishing and suffering of Others, you are also a fit, active and engaged citizen. And of course, the subject who actively takes responsibility for their health and well-being is highly valued in neoliberal risk contexts (Lupton).There is also a strong gendered dimensions to the visual depictions used in #Mission22. All of the Top 10 retweets feature images of men, mostly doing push-ups in groups. In the case of the second most popular retweet, it is two men in suits doing push-ups while three sexualised female singers “look-on” admiringly. Further analysis needs to be done to detail the gendered composition of movement participation, but it is interesting to speculate whether men were more likely to participate. The combination of demonstrating care for Other via a strong assertion of physical strength makes this a potentially more masculinised form of moral self-expression.Overall, Mission22 highlights how online self-work and cultivation can have a strong moral dimension. In Foucault’s language, the self-work involved in posting a video or image of yourself doing push-ups can be read as “an intensification of social relations”. It involves an ethics that is about self-creation through visual and textual depictions. Following the more pessimistic line of Bauman or Turkle, posting images of oneself doing push-ups might be seen as evidence of narcissism or a consumerist self-absorption. Rather than narcissism, we want to suggest that Mission22 highlights how a self-based moral practice – based on bodily, emotional and visual depictions – can extend to Others in an act of mutual care and exchange. Again Foucault helps clarify our argument: “the intensification of the concern for the self goes hand in hand with a valorisation of the Other”. What our work does, is show how this operates empirically on a large-scale in the new confessional contexts of Web 2.0 and its cultures of mass self-depiction. 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Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.Hookway, Nicholas. “The Moral Self: Class, Narcissism and the Problem of Do-It-Yourself Moralities.” The Sociological Review, 15 Mar. 2017. <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0038026117699540?journalCode=sora>.Jenders, Maximilian, et al. “Analyzing and Predicting Viral Tweets.” Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW). Rio de Janeiro, 13-17 May 2013.Kata, Anna. “Anti-Vaccine Activists, Web 2.0, and the Postmodern Paradigm: An Overview of Tactics and Tropes Used Online by the Anti-Vaccination Movement.” Vaccine 30.25 (2012): 3778–89.Lincoln, Sian, and Brady Robards. “Editing the Project of the Self: Sustained Facebook Use and Growing Up Online.” Journal of Youth Studies 20.4 (2017): 518–531.Lupton, Deborah. The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body. London: Sage, 1995.Sauter, Theresa. ‘“What's on Your Mind?’ Writing on Facebook as a Tool for Self-Formation.” New Media & Society 16.5 (2014): 823–839.Sayer, Andrew. Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Smith, Gavin J.D., and Pat O’Malley. “Driving Politics: Data-Driven Governance and Resistance.” The British Journal of Criminology 56.1 (2016): 1–24.Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin: New York, 2015.

The word ‘remix’ marks venerable and longstanding creative practices and embeds them in a particular aesthetic, social and technological conjuncture. This is both the strength and the weakness of the term: in foreshortening the histories of that which it now names, it highlights the relationship between the participatory affordances of contemporary media technologies and the sense of contemporary media flows as recombinant; as involving the distributed reassembly, reconfiguration and circulation of pre-existing cultural and material elements. Remix situates this work as both artefact and practice, noun and verb. The risk is that in doing so, it is both dehistoricizing, and oddly anachronistic and ‘analogue’. One is always somehow waiting for the post-remix, or the premix (the ‘mix’ itself implies a slippage, an acknowledgement of multiplicity at the site of origin). Remix suggests some kind of authoriality and semiotic differentiability and sequence, pace Baudrillardian fantasies about the digital labour, prosumer, cognitive capitalist, copypasta meme factory. Remix is on a continuum on this trajectory, but at a point where we feel we can still see fairly confidently in both directions. This is one of the features of the term that gives it its ‘stickiness’: it is used, as our contributors show, to describe a wide range of practices. In turn, this attribute highlights some of the varying moral work that remix does as a predicate, in relation to ideas around originality, authorship and plagiarism; ownership, permission, and the commons; the autonomy or otherwise of culture from commerce; the cultural and social importance of the archive and the best means of engaging with it; the roles and functions of capital and the law with respect to contemporary ‘folk’ artistic practices; and the affective significance of the past and the passage of time. Remix suggests a certain kind of commemorative honouring of the past and of what we find meaningful in our common culture, inflected and sometimes problematized by the broader structures which mediate that culture to us. It implies also a technologization of how this honouring is conducted, a two-way mediatization, the widespread enculturation of particular communicative and distributive technological systems for getting the remix done. It implies a specific sociocultural and techno-aesthetic grammar. Like the various materials that are subject to remix, the word itself then is promiscuous. As such, both specificity and scope in understanding what remix ‘means’ entail investigations around and into the word as a kind of heuristic or analytic. Remixes are often local artefacts, exhibiting family resemblances in terms of the uses to which their intertextuality is put. These resemblances point towards the meaning-making practices present in those semantic, discursive, and social webs through which these artefacts become sensible. Much of the current literature promotes the idea (notable, for example, in the work of Lessig), that remix is some kind of intervention in the cultural economy, whereby audiences become liberated into participation in cultural production. This participation in cultural dialogue through remix is heralded as a new era of democratized consumer activism. The converse argument suggests that remix is wholly incorporated as ‘playbour’: users generate content for free, used by others for profit. Remix as ‘resistance’ seems to occur solely at the level of the sign, overlooking the extent to which vernacular creative work is rendered an integrative cultural commodity. The logical conclusion of this kind of argument is an emphasis (such as that found in Adorno) on the extent to which cultural commodities have colonized the lifeworld. Without recourse to the cultural resources given by neoliberal capitalism, nothing at all can be said, even by nonconformists. There is nothing outside the desiring machine. Indeed, the very fact that dissent is so often expressed exactly through the means given by dominant cultural systems shows just how insidious they are. But both of these accounts only get us so far. Effectively, they leave us in a remix-good/remix-bad binary. One account is not really ‘deeper’ than the other, because in a sense both are missing the larger point. The early fixation on the remix as itself a laudable cultural intervention tends to exacerbate the tendency towards these either-or readings. Dominant meanings are demonstrably contestable, and contested every day. Of course, the semiotic meaning of particular remixes and the means by which these remixes operate within the discursive or semiotic field require attention and interrogation. But these meanings and the practices that give rise to them are also read off, given, and sanctioned within specific social and cultural contexts and specific ethical, interpretive, and legal frameworks. These contexts and frameworks and their social logics require explication. Our argument here is not precisely that we need anthropological, sociological, legal, etc. accounts as well as textual analyses and deconstructions of particular remixes and remix forms and genres. It is that remix, as a hybrid cultural form and practice, is literally neither quite here nor there. An adequate grasp of remix and its implications entails empirical work, showing and unpacking what it is that makes remix important to the various and diverse communities who sustain it and are sustained by it. A good way in to this issue is to reflect on the permissibility or otherwise of the use of particular resources within a specific remix subculture; the moral limits of the remixable. In the feature article, fan fiction scholars Kristina Busse and Shannon Farley discuss the implications of an incident within a particular fan fiction community, where an as-yet-unarticulated norm regarding the limits of textual appropriation - specifically, the use without permission of the work of other fan fiction writers - came abruptly to collective attention. Drawing out the distinctions and nuances from this incident and contextualising it in relation to broader fan fiction community opinion, Busse and Farley carefully differentiate this infraction from plagiarism and from copyright infringement in emic terms, showing how fan-fiction writers themselves articulate, invoke and enact community with respect to such norms. Ruth Walker further elaborates on the concept of plagiarism by analysing academic quotation as a form of remix. Rather than ascribing to the stringent rules of referencing, Walker suggests that framing academic and student writing as a form of remix allows for a playful re-use of scholarly conventions and a more creative use of existing academic work. In ‘Locating Anti-Fandom in Extratextual Mash-ups’, Bertha Chin examines how the remix video Buffy vs Edward demonstrates anti-fandom responses to the Twilight series. By placing the ‘empowered’ role model of Buffy in the position of Bella, the romantic hero of Edward is suddenly re-framed as a self-obsessed stalker. Chin argues that rather than demonstrating fannish love for the texts, Buffy vs Edward is an anti-fandom critique of the troubling aspects of a popular series. In his article on slash manips, Joseph Brennan discusses a case study of visual slash - the combinatory digital manipulation of images of characters from popular media and gay pornography. Attending particularly to compositional strategy and the physical and bodily syntax of this often overlooked form of remix, Brennan’s argument inflects the dominant scholarly understandings of slash as a genre coded as ‘female’. In ‘Taking This from This and That from That’, Phillip Cunningham and Melinda Lewis make a case for considering the role remix, and pastiche specifically as a variant of intertextual poaching, plays in the directorial styles of RZA and Quentin Tarantino, and in the ‘self-fashioning’ particularly of RZA. Remix is here not a democratizing, niche strategy, but something central to creative practice within the core of the contemporary mass-market cultural industries. Cunningham and Lewis argue that the work of RZA highlights hybridity in multiple ways, particularly across both media form and the tropes of genre. Following this, Rob Cover proposes a new framework for the analysis of the remix as a text in ‘Reading the Remix’. Using the language of ‘layering’ drawn from digital manipulation terminology, the remix can be understood as a type of layered intermedia. Cover provides a concrete process for teaching remix analysis in an undergraduate classroom, drawing on a rich variety of theoretical models and methodologies. Attention in current debates about remix is frequently drawn to the institutional structures that go to make the practice more or less easy - or more or less easy to block. Olivia Conti’s paper uses the idea of the dialectical vernacular to describe YouTube and similar sites, as mediators between vernacular and institutional discourses (in this instance, political remix video-makers, and rights holders). Her account of the technico-legal mechanics of Youtube takedowns highlights the paradoxical status of political remix video, as something which both draws its political potential from its infringement of base material (in terms of the process itself, and the altered meanings of the content), and is rendered vulnerable to takedown by the same token. ‘Musical Chameleons’, Maarten Michielse’s piece drawing on extensive research on the online music remix community Indaba Music, returns attention to the perspectives of remixers themselves, considering in this instance what they hold to be valuable attributes for a remixer to have. Michielse develops work around the concepts of flexibility and fluency as aspects of creative practice, to describe what it is that competitive digital music remix producers strive for with respect to the musical materials they work with and on. Jonathon Hutchinson then explores the relationship between remix and the institution of public service media in his piece on textual reappropriation within the ABC. While public service broadcasters like the ABC have sought to encourage audience participation through user-generated content, the content of remixes is often controversial and opens the institution to public criticism or lawsuits. Using a case study of how the ABC responded to complaints of a particular remixer, Hutchinson examines the limits of creative remix in an institutional setting. The ethics and aesthetics of remix are further situated and explored by Patrick West and Cher Coad in their paper, ‘Drawing the line’, which explores disjunctive Chinese and Western ideas of the materialism of writing practice, namely calligraphy, particularly in relation to the charges of plagiarism laid against Kathy Acker’s novel Blood and Guts in High School. West and Coad use Deleuzian notions of the line and of repetition to expose and problematize received ideas of authoriality and textuality. Last but by no means least, Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye round off the issue with a discussion of the Classical Gas project, where canonical works in media and cultural theory are mashed fannishly up into album covers from the days when album covers meant something. Tofts and Gye reflect on their practice in the work that goes into these hilarious and oddly moving images, returning us to the haunting delight of the old made strange and the novelty of the unexpectedly familiar new that is part of the visceral appeal of remix culture. AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank the contributing authors, the anonymous, thoughtful and diligent peer reviewers, Axel Bruns and the M/C team, and the remix artists and communities who drew us all variously to this endeavour.

On Wednesday 21 April the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts introduced a piece of legislation into the Australian Senate to regulate the way Australians use the Internet. This legislation is presented within Australia's existing system of content regulation, a scheme that the Minister describes is not censorship, but merely regulation (Alston 55). Underlying Senator Alston's rhetoric about the protection of children from snuff film makers, paedophiles, drug pushers and other criminals, this long anticipated bill is aimed at reducing the amount of pornographic materials available via computer networks, a censorship regime in an age when regulation and classification are the words we prefer to use when society draws the line under material we want to see, but dare not allow ourselves access to. Regardless of any noble aspirations expressed by free-speech organisations such as Electronic Frontiers Australia relating to the defence of personal liberty and freedom of expression, this legislation is about porn. Under the Bill, Australia would proscribe our citizens from accessing: explicit depictions of sexual acts between consenting adults; mild non-violent fetishes; depictions of sexual violence, coercion or non-consent of any kind; depictions of child sexual abuse, bestiality, sexual acts accompanied by offensive fetishes, or exploitative incest fantasies; unduly detailed and/or relished acts of extreme violence or cruelty; explicit or unjustifiable depictions of sexual violence against non-consenting persons; and detailed instruction or encouragement in matters of crime or violence or the abuse of proscribed drugs. (OFLC) The Australian public, as a whole, favour the availability of sexually explicit materials in some form, with OFLC data indicating a relatively high degree of public support for X rated videos, the "high end" of the porn market (Paterson et al.). In Australia strict regulation of X rated materials in conventional media has resulted in a larger illegal market for these materials than the legalised sex industries of the ACT and Northern Territory (while 1.2 million X rated videos are legally sold out of the territories, 2 million are sold illegally in other jurisdictions, according to Patten). In Australia, censorship of media content has traditionally been based on the principles of the protection of society from moral harm and individual degradation, with specific emphasis on the protection of innocents from material they are not old enough for, or mentally capable of dealing with (Joint Select Committee on Video Material). Even when governments distanced themselves from direct personal censorship (such as Don Chipp's approach to the censorship of films and books in the late 1960s and early 1970s) and shifted the rationale behind censorship from prohibition to classification, the publicly stated aims of these decisions have been the support of existing community standards, rather than the imposition of strict legalistic moral values upon an unwilling society. In the debates surrounding censorship, and especially the level of censorship applied (rather than censorship as a whole), the question "what is the community we are talking about here?" has been a recurring theme. The standards that are applied to the regulation of media content, both online and off, are often the focus of community debate (a pluralistic community that obviously lacks "standards" by definition of the word). In essence the problem of maintaining a single set of moral and ethical values for the treatment of media content is a true political dilemma: a problem that lacks any form of solution acceptable to all participants. Since the introduction of the Internet as a "mass" medium (or more appropriately, a "popular" one), government indecision about how best to treat this new technology has precluded any form or content regulation other than the ad hoc use of existing non-technologically specific law to deal with areas of criminal or legally sanctionable intent (such as the use of copyright law, or the powers under the Crimes Act relating to the improper use of telecommunications services). However, indecision in political life is often associated with political weakness, and in the face of pressure to act decisively (motivated again by "community concern"), the Federal government has decided to extend the role of the Australian Broadcasting Authority to regulate and impose a censorship regime on Australian access of morally harmful materials. It is important to note the government's intention to censor access, rather than content of the Internet. While material hosted in Australia (ignoring, of course, the "cyberspace" definitions of non-territorial existence of information stored in networks) will be censored (removed from Australia computers), the government, lacking extraterritorial powers to compel the owners of machines located offshore, intends to introduce of some form of refused access list to materials located in other nations. What is interesting to consider in this context is the way that slight shifts of definitional paradigm alter the way this legislation can be considered. If information flows (upon which late capitalism is becoming more dependent) were to be located within the context of international law governing the flow of waterways, does the decision to prevent travel of morally dubious material through Australia's informational waterways impinge upon the riparian rights of other nations (the doctrine of fair usage without impeding flow; Godana 50)? Similarly, if we take Smith's extended definition of community within electronic transactional spaces (the maintenance of members' commitment to the group, monitoring and sanctioning behaviour and the production and distribution of resources), then the current Bill proposes the regulation of the activities of one community by another (granted, a larger community that incorporates the former). Seen in this context, this legislation is the direct intervention in an established social order by a larger and less homogeneous group. It may be trite to quote the Prime Minister's view of community in this context, where he states ...It is free individuals, strong communities and the rule of law which are the best defence against the intrusive power of the state and against those who think they know what is best for everyone else. (Howard 21) possibly because the paradigm in which this new legislation is situated does not classify those Australians online (who number up to 3 million) as a community in their own right. In a way the Internet users of Australia have never identified themselves as a community, nor been asked to act in a communitarian manner. While discussions about the value of community models when applied to the Internet are still divided, there are those who argue that their use of networked services can be seen in this light (Worthington). What this new legislation does, however, is preclude the establishment of public communities in order to meet the desires of government for some limits to be placed on Internet content. The Bill does allow for the development of "restricted access systems" that would allow pluralistic communities to develop and engage in a limited amount of self-regulation. These systems include privately accessible Intranets, or sites that restrict access through passwords or some other form of age verification technique. Thus, ignoring the minimum standards that will be required for these communities to qualify for some measure of self-regulatory freedom, what is unspoken here is that specific subsections of the Internet population may exist, provided they keep well away from the public gaze. A ghetto without physical walls. Under the Bill, a co-regulatory approach is endorsed by the government, favouring the establishment of industry codes of practice by ISPs and (or) the establishment of a single code of practice by the content hosting industry (content developers are relegated to yet undetermined complementary state legislation). However, this section of the Bill, in mandating a range of minimum requirements for these codes of practice, and denying plurality to the content providers, places an administrative imperative above any communitarian spirit. That is, that the Internet should have no more than one community, it should be an entity bound by a single guiding set of principles and be therefore easier to administer by Australian censors. This administrative imperative re-encapsulates the dilemma faced by governments dealing with the Internet: that at heart, the broadcast and print press paradigms of existing censorship regimes face massive administrative problems when presented with a communications technology that allows for wholesale publication of materials by individuals. Whereas the limited numbers of broadcasters and publishers have allowed the development of Australia's system of classification of materials (on a sliding scale from G to RC classifications or the equivalent print press version), the new legislation introduced into the Senate uses the classification scheme simply as a censorship mechanism: Internet content is either "ok" or "not ok". From a public administration perspective, this allows government to drastically reduce the amount of work required by regulators and eases the burden of compliance costs by ISPs, by directing clear and unambiguous statements about the acceptability of existing materials placed online. However, as we have seen in other areas of social policy (such as the rationalisation of Social Security services or Health), administrative expedience is often antipathetic to small communities that have special needs, or cultural sensitivities outside of mainstream society. While it is not appropriate to argue that public administration creates negative social impacts through expedience, what can be presented is that, where expedience is a core aim of legislation, poor administration may result. For many Australian purveyors of pornography, my comments will be entirely unhelpful as they endeavour to find effective ways to spoof offshore hosts or bone up (no pun intended) on tunnelling techniques. Given the easy way in which material can be reconstituted and relocated on the Internet, it seems likely that some form of regulatory avoidance will occur by users determined not to have their content removed or blocked. For those regulators given the unenviable task of censoring Internet access it may be worthwhile quoting from Sexing the Cherry, in which Jeanette Winterson describes the town: whose inhabitants are so cunning that to escape the insistence of creditors they knock down their houses in a single night and rebuild them elsewhere. So the number of buildings in the city is always constant but they are never in the same place from one day to the next. (43) Thus, while Winterson saw this game as a "most fulfilling pastime", it is likely to present real administrative headaches to ABA regulators when attempting to enforce the Bill's anti-avoidance clauses. The Australian government, in adapting existing regulatory paradigms to the Internet, has overlooked the informal communities who live, work and play within the virtual world of cyberspace. In attempting to meet a perceived social need for regulation with political and administrative expedience, it has ignored the potentially cohesive role of government in developing self-regulating communities who need little government intervention to produce socially beneficial outcomes. In proscribing activity externally to the realm in which these communities reside, what we may see is a new type of community, one whose desire for a feast of flesh leads them to evade the activities of regulators who operate in the "meat" world. What this may show us is that in a virtual environment, the regulators' net is no match for a world wide web. References Alston, Richard. "Regulation is Not Censorship." The Australian 13 April 1999: 55. Paterson, K., et. al. Classification Issues: Film, Video and Television. Sydney: The Office of Film and Literature Classification, 1993. Patten, F. Personal interview. 9 Feb. 1999. Godana, B.A. Africa's Shared Water Resources: Legal and Institutional Aspects of the Nile, Niger and Senegal River Systems. London: Frances Pinter, 1985. Howard, John. The Australia I Believe In: The Values, Directions and Policy Priorities of a Coalition Government Outlined in 1995. Canberra: Liberal Party, 1995. Joint Select Committee On Video Material. Report of the Joint Select Committee On Video Material. Canberra: APGS, 1988. Office of Film and Literature Classification. Cinema & Video Ratings Guide. 1999. 1 May 1999 <http://www.oflc.gov.au/classinfo.php>. Smith, Marc A. "Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons." 1998. 2 Mar. 1999 <http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/csoc/papers/voices/Voices.htm>. Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry. New York: Vintage Books. 1991. Worthington, T. Testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Information Technologies. Unpublished, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Peter Chen. "Community without Flesh: First Thoughts on the New Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/bill.php>. Chicago style: Peter Chen, "Community without Flesh: First Thoughts on the New Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/bill.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Author. (1999) Community without flesh: first thoughts on the new broadcasting services amendment (online services) bill 1999. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/bill.php> ([your date of access]).

Babies and toddlers are amassing huge followings on social media, achieving microcelebrity status, and raking in five figure sums. In East Asia, many of these lucrative “micro­-microcelebrities” rise to fame by inheriting exposure and proximate microcelebrification from their social media Influencer mothers. Through self-branding techniques, Influencer mothers’ portrayals of their young’ children’s lives “as lived” are the canvas on which (baby) products and services are marketed to readers as “advertorials”. In turning to investigate this budding phenomenon, I draw on ethnographic case studies in Singapore to outline the career trajectory of these young children (under 4yo) including their social media presence, branding strategies, and engagement with their followers. The chapter closes with a brief discussion on some ethical considerations of such young children’s labour in the social media age.Influencer MothersTheresa Senft first coined the term “microcelebrity” in her work Camgirls as a burgeoning online trend, wherein people attempt to gain popularity by employing digital media technologies, such as videos, blogs, and social media. She describes microcelebrities as “non-actors as performers” whose narratives take place “without overt manipulation”, and who are “more ‘real’ than television personalities with ‘perfect hair, perfect friends and perfect lives’” (Senft 16), foregrounding their active response to their communities in the ways that maintain open channels of feedback on social media to engage with their following.Influencers – a vernacular industry term albeit inspired by Katz & Lazarsfeld’s notion of “personal influence” that predates Internet culture – are one type of microcelebrity; they are everyday, ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles, engage with their following in “digital” and “physical” spaces, and monetize their following by integrating “advertorials” into their blog or social media posts and making physical appearances at events. A pastiche of “advertisement” and “editorial”, advertorials in the Influencer industry are highly personalized, opinion-laden promotions of products/services that Influencers personally experience and endorse for a fee. Influencers in Singapore often brand themselves as having “relatability”, or the ability to persuade their followers to identify with them (Abidin). They do so by make consciously visible the backstage (Goffman) of the usually “inaccessible”, “personal”, and “private” aspects of mundane, everyday life to curate personae that feel “authentic” to fans (Marwick 114), and more accessible than traditional celebrity (Senft 16).Historically, the Influencer industry in Singapore can be traced back to the early beginnings of the “blogshop” industry from the mid-2000s and the “commercial blogging” industry. Influencers are predominantly young women, and market products and services from diverse industries, although the most popular have been fashion, beauty, F&B, travel, and electronics. Most prominent Influencers are contracted to management agencies who broker deals in exchange for commission and assist in the production of their vlogs. Since then, the industry has grown, matured, and expanded so rapidly that Influencers developed emergent models of advertorials, with the earliest cohorts moving into different life stages and monetizing several other aspects of their personal lives such as the “micro-microcelebrity” of their young children. What this paper provides is an important analysis of the genesis and normative practices of micro-microcelebrity commerce in Singapore from its earliest years, and future research trajectories in this field.Micro-Microcelebrity and Proximate MicrocelebrificationI define micro-microcelebrities as the children of Influencers who have themselves become proximate microcelebrities, having derived exposure and fame from their prominent Influencer mothers, usually through a more prolific, deliberate, and commercial form of what Blum-Ross defines as “sharenting”: the act of parents sharing images and stores about their children in digital spaces such as social networking sites and blogs. Marwick (116-117), drawing from Rojek’s work on types of celebrity – distinguishes between two types of microcelebrity: “ascribed microcelebrity” where the online personality is made recognizable through the “production of celebrity media” such as paparazzi shots and user-produced online memes, or “achieved microcelebrity” where users engage in “self-presentation strateg[ies]”, such as fostering the illusion of intimacy with fans, maintaining a persona, and selective disclosure about oneself.Micro-microcelebrities lie somewhere between the two: In a process I term “proximate microcelebrification”, micro-microcelebrities themselves inherit celebrity through the preemptive and continuous exposure from their Influencer mothers, many beginning even during the pre-birth pregnancy stages in the form of ultrasound scans, as a form of “achieved microcelebrity”. Influencer mothers whose “presentational strategies” (cf. Marshall, “Promotion” 45) are successful enough (as will be addressed later) gain traction among followers, who in turn further popularize the micro-microcelebrity by setting up fan accounts, tribute sites, and gossip forums through which fame is heightened in a feedback loop as a model of “ascribed microcelebrity”.Here, however, I refrain from conceptualizing these young stars as “micro-Influencers” for unlike Influencers, these children do not yet curate their self-presentation to command the attention of followers, but instead are used, framed, and appropriated by their mothers for advertorials. In other words, Influencer mothers “curate [micro-microcelebrities’] identities into being” (Leaver, “Birth”). Following this, many aspects of their micro-microcelebrities become rapidly commodified and commercialized, with advertisers clamoring to endorse anything from maternity hospital stays to nappy cream.Although children of mommybloggers have the prospect to become micro-microcelebrities, both groups are conceptually distinct. Friedman (200-201) argues that among mommybloggers arose a tension between those who adopt “the raw authenticity of nonmonetized blogging”, documenting the “unglamorous minutiae” of their daily lives and a “more authentic view of motherhood” and those who use mommyblogs “primarily as a source of extra income rather than as a site for memoir”, focusing on “parent-centered products” (cf. Mom Bloggers Club).In contrast, micro-microcelebrities and their digital presence are deliberately commercial, framed and staged by Influencer mothers in order to maximize their advertorial potential, and are often postured to market even non-baby/parenting products such as fast food and vehicles (see later). Because of the overt commerce, it is unclear if micro-microcelebrity displays constitute “intimate surveillance”, an “almost always well-intentioned surveillance of young people by parents” (Leaver, “Born” 4). Furthermore, children are generally peripheral to mommybloggers whose own parenting narratives take precedence as a way to connect with fellow mothers, while micro-microcelebrities are the primary feature whose everyday lives and digital presence enrapture followers.MethodologyThe analysis presented is informed by my original fieldwork with 125 Influencers and related actors among whom I conducted a mixture of physical and digital personal interviews, participant observation, web archaeology, and archival research between December 2011 and October 2014. However, the material presented here is based on my digital participant observation of publicly accessible and intentionally-public digital presence of the first four highly successful micro-microcelebrities in Singapore: “Baby Dash” (b.2013) is the son of Influencer xiaxue, “#HeYurou” (b.2011) is the niece of Influencer bongqiuqiu, “#BabyElroyE” (b.2014) is the son of Influencer ohsofickle, and “@MereGoRound” (b.2015) is the daughter of Influencer bongqiuqiu.The microcelebrity/social media handles of these children take different forms, following the platform on which their parent/aunt has exposed them on the most. Baby Dash appears in all of xiaxue’s digital platforms under a variety of over 30 indexical, ironic, or humourous hashtags (Leaver, “Birth”) including “#pointylipped”, #pineappledash”, and “#面包脸” (trans. “bread face”); “#HeYurou” appears on bongqiuqiu’s Instagram and Twitter; “#BabyElroyE” appears on ohsofickle’s Instagram and blog, and is the central figure of his mother’s new YouTube channel; and “@MereGoRound” appears on all of bongqiuqiu’s digital platforms but also has her own Instagram account and dedicated YouTube channel. The images reproduced here are screenshot from Influencer mothers’ highly public social media: xiaxue, bongqiuqiu, and ohsofickle boast 593k, 277k, and 124k followers on Instagram and 263k, 41k, and 17k followers on Twitter respectively at the time of writing.Anticipation and Digital EstatesIn an exclusive front-pager (Figure 1) on the day of his induced birth, it was announced that Baby Dash had already received up to SGD25,000 worth of endorsement deals brokered by his Influencer mother, xiaxue. As the first micro-microcelebrity in his cohort (his mother was among the pioneer Influencers), Baby Dash’s Caesarean section was even filmed and posted on xiaxue’s YouTube channel in three parts (Figure 2). xiaxue had announced her pregnancy on her blog while in her second trimester, following which she consistently posted mirror selfies of her baby bump.Figure 1 & 2, screenshot April 2013 from ‹instagram.com/xiaxue›In her successful attempt at generating anticipation, the “bump” itself seemed to garner its own following on Twitter and Instagram, with many followers discussing how the Influencer dressed “it”, and how “it” was evolving over the weeks. One follower even compiled a collage of xiaxue’s “bump” chronologically and gifted it to the Influencer as an art image via Twitter on the day she delivered Baby Dash (Figure 3 & 4). Followers also frequently speculated and bantered about how her baby would look, and mused about how much they were going to adore him. Figure 3 & 4, screenshot March 2013 from ‹twitter.com/xiaxue› While Lupton (42) has conceptualized the sharing of images that precede birth as a “rite of passage”, Influencer mothers who publish sonograms deliberately do so in order to claim digital estates for their to-be micro-microcelebrities in the form of “reserved” social media handles, blog URLs, and unique hashtags for self-branding. For instance, at the 3-month mark of her pregnancy, Influencer bongqiuqiu debuted her baby’s dedicated hashtag, “#MereGoRound” in a birth announcement on her on Instagram account. Shortly after, she started an Instagram account, “@MereGoRound”, for her baby, who amassed over 5.5k followers prior to her birth. Figure 5 & 6, screenshot March 2015 from instagram.com/meregoround and instagram.com/bongqiuqiuThe debut picture features a heavily pregnant belly shot of bongqiuqiu (Figure 5), creating much anticipation for the arrival of a new micro-microcelebrity: in the six months leading up to her birth, various family, friends, and fans shared Instagram images of their gifts and welcome party for @MereGoRound, and followers shared congratulations and fan art on the dedicated Instagram hashtag. During this time, bongqiuqiu also frequently updated followers on her pregnancy progress, not without advertising her (presumably sponsored) gynecologist and hospital stay in her pregnancy diaries (Figure 6) – like Baby Dash, even as a foetus @MereGoRound was accumulating advertorials. Presently at six months old, @MereGoRound boasts almost 40k followers on Instagram on which embedded in the narrative of her growth are sponsored products and services from various advertisers.Non-Baby-Related AdvertorialsPrior to her pregnancy, Influencer bongqiuqiu hopped onto the micro-microcelebrity bandwagon in the wake of Baby Dash’s birth, by using her niece “#HeYurou” in her advertorials. Many Influencers attempt to naturalize their advertorials by composing their post as if recounting a family event. With reference to a child, parent, or partner, they may muse or quip about a product being used or an experience being shared in a bid to mask the distinction between their personal and commercial material. bongqiuqiu frequently posted personal, non-sponsored images engaging in daily mundane activities under the dedicated hashtag “#HeYurou”.However, this was occasionally interspersed with pictures of her niece holding on to various products including storybooks (Figure 8) and shopping bags (Figure 9). At first glance, this might have seemed like any mundane daily update the Influencer often posts. However, a close inspection reveals the caption bearing sponsor hashtags, tags, and campaign information. For instance, one Instagram post shows #HeYurou casually holding on to and staring at a burger in KFC wrapping (Figure 7), but when read in tandem with bongqiuqiu’s other KFC-related posts published over a span of a few months, it becomes clear that #HeYurou was in fact advertising for KFC. Figure 7, 8, 9, screenshot December 2014 from ‹instagram.com/bongqiuqiu›Elsewhere, Baby Dash was incorporated into xiaxue’s car sponsorship with over 20 large decals of one of his viral photos – dubbed “pineapple Dash” among followers – plastered all over her vehicle (Figure 10). Followers who spot the car in public are encouraged to photograph and upload the image using its dedicated hashtag, “#xiaxuecar” as part of the Influencer’s car sponsorship – an engagement scarcely related to her young child. Since then, xiaxue has speculated producing offshoots of “pineapple Dash” products including smartphone casings. Figure 10, screenshot December 2014 from ‹instagram.com/xiaxue›Follower EngagementSponsors regularly organize fan meet-and-greets headlined by micro-microcelebrities in order to attract potential customers. Photo opportunities and the chance to see Baby Dash “in the flesh” frequently front press and promotional material of marketing campaigns. Elsewhere on social media, several Baby Dash fan and tribute accounts have also emerged on Instagram, reposting images and related media of the micro-microcelebrity with overt adoration, no doubt encouraged by xiaxue, who began crowdsourcing captions for Baby Dash’s photos.Influencer ohsofickle postures #BabyElroyE’s follower engagement in a more subtle way. In her YouTube channel that debut in the month of her baby’s birth, ohsofickle produces video diaries of being a young, single, mother who is raising a child (Figure 11). In each episode, #BabyElroyE is the main feature whose daily activities are documented, and while there is some advertising embedded, ohsofickle’s approach on YouTube is much less overt than others as it features much more non-monetized personal content (Figure 12). Her blog serves as a backchannel to her vlogs, in which she recounts her struggles with motherhood and explicitly solicits the advice of mothers. However, owing to her young age (she became an Influencer at 17 and gave birth at 24), many of her followers are teenagers and young women who respond to her solicitations by gushing over #BabyElroyE’s images on Instagram. Figure 11 & 12, screenshot September 2015 from ‹instagram.com/ohsofickle›PrivacyAs noted by Holloway et al. (23), children like micro-microcelebrities will be among the first cohorts to inherit “digital profiles” of their “whole lifetime” as a “work in progress”, from parents who habitually underestimate or discount the privacy and long term effects of publicizing information about their children at the time of posting. This matters in a climate where social media platforms can amend privacy policies without user consent (23), and is even more pressing for micro-microcelebrities whose followers store, republish, and recirculate information in fan networks, resulting in digital footprints with persistence, replicability, scalability, searchability (boyd), and extended longevity in public circulation which can be attributed back to the children indefinitely (Leaver, “Ends”).Despite minimum age restrictions and recent concerns with “digital kidnapping” where users steal images of other young children to be re-posted as their own (Whigham), some social media platforms rarely police the proliferation of accounts set up by parents on behalf of their underage children prominently displaying their legal names and life histories, citing differing jurisdictions in various countries (Facebook; Instagram), while others claim to disable accounts if users report an “incorrect birth date” (cf. Google for YouTube). In Singapore, the Media Development Authority (MDA) which governs all print and digital media has no firm regulations for this but suggests that the age of consent is 16 judging by their recommendation to parents with children aged below 16 to subscribe to Internet filtering services (Media Development Authority, “Regulatory” 1). Moreover, current initiatives have been focused on how parents can impart digital literacy to their children (Media Development Authority, “Empowered”; Media Literacy Council) as opposed to educating parents about the digital footprints they may be unwittingly leaving about their children.The digital lives of micro-microcelebrities pose new layers of concern given their publicness and deliberate publicity, specifically hinged on making visible the usually inaccessible, private aspects of everyday life (Marshall, “Persona” 5).Scholars note that celebrities are individuals for whom speculation of their private lives takes precedence over their actual public role or career (Geraghty 100-101; Turner 8). However, the personae of Influencers and their young children are shaped by ambiguously blurring the boundaries of privacy and publicness in order to bait followers’ attention, such that privacy and publicness are defined by being broadcast, circulated, and publicized (Warner 414). In other words, the publicness of micro-microcelebrities is premised on the extent of the intentional publicity rather than simply being in the public domain (Marwick 223-231, emphasis mine).Among Influencers privacy concerns have aroused awareness but not action – Baby Dash’s Influencer mother admitted in a national radio interview that he has received a death threat via Instagram but feels that her child is unlikely to be actually attacked (Channel News Asia) – because privacy is a commodity that is manipulated and performed to advance their micro-microcelebrities’ careers. As pioneer micro-microcelebrities are all under 2-years-old at present, future research warrants investigating “child-centred definitions” (Third et al.) of the transition in which they come of age, grow an awareness of their digital presence, respond to their Influencer mothers’ actions, and potentially take over their accounts.Young LabourThe Ministry of Manpower (MOM) in Singapore, which regulates the employment of children and young persons, states that children under the age of 13 may not legally work in non-industrial or industrial settings (Ministry of Manpower). However, the same document later ambiguously states underaged children who do work can only do so under strict work limits (Ministry of Manpower). Elsewhere (Chan), it is noted that national labour statistics have thus far only focused on those above the age of 15, thus neglecting a true reflection of underaged labour in Singapore. This is despite the prominence of micro-microcelebrities who are put in front of (video) cameras to build social media content. Additionally, the work of micro-microcelebrities on digital platforms has not yet been formally recognized as labour, and is not regulated by any authority including Influencer management firms, clients, the MDA, and the MOM. Brief snippets from my ethnographic fieldwork with Influencer management agencies in Singapore similarly reveal that micro-microcelebrities’ labour engagements and control of their earnings are entirely at their parents’ discretion.As models and actors, micro-microcelebrities are one form of entertainment workers who if between the ages of 15 days and 18 years in the state of California are required to obtain an Entertainment Work Permit to be gainfully employed, adhering to strict work, schooling, and rest hour quotas (Department of Industrial Relations). Furthermore, the Californian Coogan Law affirms that earnings by these minors are their own property and not their parents’, although they are not old enough to legally control their finances and rely on the state to govern their earnings with a legal guardian (Screen Actors Guild). However, this similarly excludes underaged children and micro-microcelebrities engaged in creative digital ecologies. Future research should look into safeguards and instruments among young child entertainers, especially for micro-micrcocelebrities’ among whom commercial work and personal documentation is not always distinct, and are in fact deliberately intertwined in order to better engage with followers for relatabilityGrowing Up BrandedIn the wake of moral panics over excessive surveillance technologies, children’s safety on the Internet, and data retention concerns, micro-microcelebrities and their Influencer mothers stand out for their deliberately personal and overtly commercial approach towards self-documenting, self-presenting, and self-publicizing from the moment of conception. As these debut micro-microcelebrities grow older and inherit digital publics, personae, and careers, future research should focus on the transition of their ownership, engagement, and reactions to a branded childhood in which babies were postured for an initimate public.ReferencesAbidin, Crystal. “Communicative Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, & Technology. Forthcoming, Nov 2015.Aiello, Marianne. “Mommy Blog Banner Ads Get Results.” Healthcare Marketing Advisor 17 Nov. 2010. HealthLeaders Media. 16 Aug. 2015 ‹http://healthleadersmedia.com/content/MAR-259215/Mommy-Blog-Banner-Ads-Get-Results›.Azzarone, Stephanie. “When Consumers Report: Mommy Blogging Your Way to Success.” Playthings 18 Feb. 2009. 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This research is premised on the understanding that media texts are discourses and that all discourses are functional, that is, they refer to things, issues and events, in meaningful and goal oriented ways. Nine articles are analysed to explicate the sorts of discourses that were promoted by The Chronicle during the Gukurahundi conflict in Zimbabwe between 1982 and 1986. It is argued that discourses in the news media are shaped by the role(s), the type(s) of journalism assumed by such media, and by the political environment in which the news media operate. The interplay between the roles, types of journalism practised, and the effect the political environment has on news discourses is assessed within the context of conflictual situations. This is done using insights from the theoretical position of peace journalism and its critique of professional or mainstream journalism as promoting war/violence journalism. Using the case of The Chronicle's reportage of the Gukurahundi conflict in Zimbabwe, it is concluded that, in performing the collaborative role, state owned/controlled media assume characteristics of war/violence journalism. On the other hand, it is concluded that The Chronicle developed practices consistent with peace journalism when it both espoused the facilitative role and journalistic objectivity. These findings undermine the conventional view among proponents of peace journalism that in times of conflict, the news media should be interventionist in favour of peace and that they should abandon the journalistic norm of objectivity which they argue, promotes war/violence journalism.

Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2004.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: According to recent research done in the field of media ethics, it seems that there is a need to complement studies on systematic normative ethics with more flexible theories such as those proposed by the field of Philosophy and Sociology. This assignment would like to prove that a more holistic model of moral reasoning should be considered based on the point of departure that the media and media practitioners find themselves in a postmodern world. The aim of this assignment is to examine the possibility of a postmodern ethics as a more authentic attempt by which the concept media ethics can be understood and applied. This assignment is a contribution towards the re-examination of media ethics in terms of a postmodern understanding of reality, truth and meaning, as well as an exploration of their practical implications in the context of a postmodern society such as South Africa and its media. According to the postmodern understanding of the concepts truth and meaning in relation to the postmodern understanding of reality, the postulated principles will define responsible journalism (media ethics) as journalistic action that takes into account how people (news consumers and sources of news) form their understanding of reality in a postmodern context. What purports to be reality in the news is inevitably a reconstruction of reality that fits the needs and requirements of journalistic practice. In this light, responsible journalism can be understood as journalistic action that creates a more holistic, authentic understanding of "reality" and how people understand themselves and others in the world they live in. Most people are informed by the media about themes such as the cloning of human beings, the war in Iraq, the attack on the World Trade Centre and genocide in Rwanda and not because of having been there themselves (direct experience). The way in which the media reports about events does influence the way in which media users make sense of the world in which they live.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Na aanleiding van onlangse navorsing gedoen in die gebied van media-etiek, blyk daar 'n behoefte te wees om sistematiese normatiewe etiek met meer omvattende teorieë aan te vul, soos voorgestel in die studie rigtings van Filosofie en Sosiologie. Hierdie werkopdrag wil bewys dat, indien in ag geneem word dat die perswese homself in 'n postmoderne wêreld bevind, 'n meer holistiese modeloorweeg kan word vir diskoerse in media-etiek. Die doel van die werkopdrag is om die moontlikheid van 'n postmoderne etiek te ondersoek as 'n meer outentieke benadering waarvolgens die konsep media-etiek verstaan en aangewend kan word. Die werkopdrag lewer 'n bydrae ten op sigte van 'n herevaluasie van media-etiek in terme van 'n postmodernistiese lees van realiteit, waarheid en betekenis. Die praktiese implikasies van 'n postmoderne media-etiek in die konteks van 'n postmoderne samelewing, soos dié van Suid-Afrika en die Suid-Afrikaanse media, salondersoek word. Na aanleiding van 'n postmoderne interpretasie van die konsepte waarheid, betekenis en realiteit, stel die werkopdrag 'n raamwerk voor waarbinne verantwoordelike joernalistiek op etiese wyse beoefen word en rekening hou met die postmoderne interpretasie van die samelewing. Dit is onvermydelik dat dit wat as werklikheid in die nuus daargestel word, 'n rekonstruksie van die werklikheid is om aan die behoeftes van joernalistieke praktyke te voldoen. In die lig van bogenoemde, kan verantwoordelike joernalistiek gedefinieer word as joernalistieke optrede wat 'n meer holistiese, outentieke interpretasie van die werklikheid en begrip van die leefwêreld oordra.

Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2003.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: When South Africa's President, Thabo Mbeki, began doubting that HfV was the cause of AIDS in the late nineties, the debate he introduced in his country was not new; it had raged in the United States as far back as a decade ago. But, even prior to that, there had been numerous controversies pertaining to the discovery of the Ill-virus. This thesis argues that those contentions created such a heated atmosphere that the causal debates that were to follow, however incredible they were, were largely unavoidable. In its coverage of the epidemic, the media were immersed in its own politics. During the early eighties, the gay newspapers in the US felt a personal responsibility to find the cause of a disease that was rapidly killing many of its readers. But, in the process, the often promoted unscientific and dangerous approaches. By the time the AIDS dissident debate had unraveled in the US, the gay media was so suspicious of the anti-gay Reagan government that they frequently advanced dissident arguments. The mainstream and scientific media, on the other hand, were perceived as rigidly supporting government institutions, excluding critical voices. When the dissident debate reached South Africa ten years later, the South African media was completely unprepared. Most journalists had never heard of AIDS dissidents; some had not even heard of HfV or the anti-AIDS drug AZT, that the President had labeled toxic. Begin a new democracy, with a history of white oppression, the black and white media differed immensely on how to cover 'the President's debate'. Criticism of the newly elected ANC government's arguments were often branded racist and unpatriotic, with journalists suffering regular intimidation at the hands of state officials and governmentaligned editors. This thesis examines the development of the politics surrounding the science of AIDS, from the discovery of'HfV up until Thabo Mbeki's controversial contentions. To an equal extent, it looks at the news media's coverage of the process, focusing on the approaches to the debate of various media outlets and individual journalists. It also raises ethical issues, particularly in South Africa, that emerged during one of the most widely reported debates in the country's history. It in no way attempts to provide a quantitative analysis of media coverage and, in the case of the US media, draws heavily on analytical studies conducted at the time. NOTE: In the analysis of the South African media's coverage of the AIDS dissident debate in Part Three: B, issues pertaining to the country's public broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), were not discussed The reason was that the author was the Corporation's Health Correspondent at the time, and therefore too closely involved in the institution in order to provide an objective perspective.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Toe Suid-Afrika se president, Thabo Mbeki, in die laat jare negentig begin het om die oorsaak van VIGS in twyfel te trek, was die debat wat hy in sy land ingelei het, nie nuut nie; dit reeds 'n dekade tevore in die VSA gewoed. Maar, selfs voor daardie debat, was daar 'n hewige omstredenheid wat met die ontdekking van die MI-virus verband gehou het. Hierdie tesis argumenteer dat daardie omstredenheid so 'n driftige atmosfeer geskep het, dat die debat oor die oorsaak van VIGS wat sou volg, hoe ongeloofwaardig ook al, grootliks onvermydelik was. Met die dekking van die epidemie was die media in hul eie politiek gedompel. Tydens die vroeë jare tagtig het gay-koerante in die VSA 'n persoonlike verantwoordelikheid gevoel om die oorsaak te vind van 'n siekte wat baie van hulle lesers vinnig laat sterfhet. Maar, in die proses het hulle dikwels onwetenskaplike en gevaarlike benaderings bevorder. Teen die tyd dat die 'oorsaak-debat' in die VSA begin posvat het, was gay-koerante so agterdogtig oor die anti-gay Reagan-regering dat hulle dikwels 'afvallige' argumente aangemoedig het. Die hoofstroommedia en wetenskaplike joernale is aan die ander kant weer gesien as rigiede ondersteuners van regeringsorganisasies, wat kritiese stemme wou stilmaak. Toe die 'oorsaak-debat' Suid-Afrika tien jaar later bereik het, het dit die plaaslike media geheel en alonkant betrap. Die meeste joernaliste het toe nog nooit van 'VIGS-afvalliges' gehoor nie; party nie eens van MIV of die teenvigsmiddel AZT, wat die president as giftig geëtiketteer het nie. Daarby was die land 'n jong demokrasie met 'n geskiedenis van wit onderdrukking, wat meegebring het dat wit en swart media-instansies grotendeels verskil het oor hoe die 'president se debat' gedek moes word. Kritiek teen die nuut verkose ANC-regering se argumente is dikwels as rassisties of onpatrioties afgemaak, en regeringsamptenare of regeringsgesinde redakteurs het gereeld probeer om joernaliste te intimideer. Hierdie proefskrif ondersoek die ontwikkeling van die politiek rondom die wetenskap van VIGS, van die ontdekking van MIV tot en met Thabo Mbeki se omstrede argumente. Dit kyk ook na die nuusdekking van die proses, deur op die benaderings van verskeie media-instansies asook individuele joernalistse te fokus. Dit bespreek ook etiese kwessies wat tydens nuusdekking na vore gekom het, veral in Suid-Afrika, waar hierdie debat van die wydste nuusdekking óóit in die geskiedenis van die land geniet het. Dit poog geensins om 'n kwantitatiewe analise van mediadekking te verskaf nie, en waar die Amerikaanse media beskou word, word daar sterk gesteun op analitiese studies wat tydens die duur van die debat uitgevoer is. NOTA: In die analise van die Suid-Afrikaanse media se dekking van die 'oorsaak-debat' in Deel 3:B word kwessies wat met die nuusdekking van die land se openbare uitsaaier, die Suid-Afrikaanse Uitsaaikorporasie (SA UK), verband hou, nie bespreek nie. Die rede is dat die outeur die korporasie se gesondheidskorrespondent was, en was daarom te nou verbind aan die korporasie om 'n objektiewe perspektiefte verseker.

Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2005.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis focuses on the representation of women in media aimed at women. A critical examination of visual communication (magazines, advertising and visual story-telling1) will demonstrate that the media may be regarded as highly influential in the way women perceive their bodies, reproduction and sexuality. I begin by examining the presentation of the ‘ideal’ woman as an instance of the Pygmalion complex. This reading of the media’s formulation of the female ideal aims to demonstrate the psychological effects of the Pygmalion complex on women, and illustrates how the resultant striving for perfection drives production and consumption. I shall demonstrate how the image of the ‘ideal’ woman is increasingly more sophisticated and convincingly portrayed through the use of digital manipulation, plastic surgery, excessive dieting and exercise regimes. I propose that the average woman is left feeling inadequate and is undermined by the voice of her own cultural representation. This thesis also investigates the persistence of the virgin / whore binary in the media’s depiction of female sexuality. I propose that this is an essentialist and dualistic presentation of female sexuality as either ‘good’ (surrendered, submissive and conforming – i.e. the virgin); or ‘bad’ (transgressive, explicit, dangerous and destructive – i.e. the whore). I further suggest that this polarised appropriation of women’s sexuality deprives women of ownership of their own sexuality. I also propose that the media’s treatment of female sexuality presents women as being in competition within one another for male attention and approval and that this representation damages female solidarity. Finally I demonstrate that pornography has infiltrated all aspects of popular culture, from magazines to music videos. My hypothesis is that this use of pornographic conventions depicts the rape and abuse of women as normative, commonplace and even entertaining, and that this has a detrimental effect on both women’s and men’s sexual and social wellbeing.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis is gerig op hoe vroue in die media wat op vroue gerig is, verbeeld word. 'n Kritiese ondersoek van visuele kommunikasie (in tydskrifte, reklame en visuele verhaling2) sal toon hoe die media as uiters invloedryk beskou kan word ten opsigte van hoe vroue hul eie liggame, voortplanting en seksualiteit beskou. Ek begin deur die voorstelling van die 'ideale' vrou as 'n voorbeeld van die Pygmalionkompleks te ondersoek. Hierdie beskouing van die media se formulering van die ideaal van vrouwees is daarop gerig om die sielkundige effek van die Pygmalion-kompleks op vroue te demonstreer en illustreer hoe produksie en verbruik deur die strewe na perfeksie wat as gevolg van hierdie formulering ontstaan, aangedryf word. Ek sal toon hoe die beeld van die 'ideale' vrou, as meer en meer gesofistikeerd, oortuigend weergegee word deur middel van digitale manipulasie, plastiese snykunde, oormatige volg van diëte en oefenprogramme. Ek voer aan dat die gemiddelde vrou hierdeur met die gevoel gelaat word dat sy tekortskiet en ondermyn word deur die boodskap van die publikasies wat haar eie kulturele beeld verwoord. Hierdie tesis ondersoek ook die volhardendheid van die tweeledige voorstelling van vroulike seksualiteit in die beelding van maagd en hoer wat in die media aangebied word. Ek voer aan dat dit 'n wesenlike en dualistiese voorstelling van vroulike seksualiteit as óf 'goed' (uitgelewer, gedwee en konformerend – d.w.s. die maagd), óf 'sleg' (oortredend/sondig, eksplisiet, gevaarlik en vernietigend – d.w.s. die hoer) is. Ek stel verder voor dat hierdie gepolariseerde toe-eiening van die vrou se seksualiteit vrouens van eienaarskap van hul eie seksualiteit ontneem. Ek stel ook voor dat die voorstelling van die vrou se seksualiteit soos dit in die media aangebied word, suggereer dat vrouens ter wille van die aandag van 'n man en om goedkeuring te wen met mekaar kompeteer en dat hierdie voorstelling skade doen aan die gevoel van solidariteit tussen vroue. Ten slotte demonstreer ek hoe pornografie reeds alle aspekte van die populêre kultuur vanaf tydskrifte tot musiekvideos binnegedring het. My hipotese is dat hierdie gebruik van pornografiese konvensies die verkragting en mishandeling van vroue as normatief, alledaags en selfs vermaaklik uitbeeld en dat dit 'n nadelige effek het op die seksuele en die sosiale welsyn van mans sowel as vroue.

Thesis (MPhil) -- University of Stellenbosch, 2004.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The advancement of news technology in the last few decades has lead to an information explosion of an unprecedented scope. Twenty-four hour a day news channels, electronic publications, the Internet, and a proliferation of print publications feed this media explosion. Coupled with this has been the growth of a celebrity culture, where the lives of the rich and famous have been placed under intense scrutiny. Commercial interests also have to be taken into account. It is conventional wisdom that sensational news sells newspapers. This news is not limited to celebrity news, but encompasses crime reporting as well as high profile scandals affecting ordinary people. As the news becomes more ubiquitous, the competition becomes tougher and the pressure to print what sells grows. The other commercial pressure is that of the marketers of the entertainment industry who have a vested interest in having the stars of their movies, music and television shows enjoy a high media profile. This study aims to determine whether the South Africa media has shown a trend towards reporting a more sensational and celebrity based form of news. It seeks to discover whether the South African news has become tabloidised. This will be done by analysing the content and presentation of the front page of The Cape Times, a Cape Town based broadsheet, over the period of several years. This will be used as a measure to determine whether or not the content and form of the South African media is following a trend to tabloidisation.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die vooruitgang in mediategnologie aan die einde van die twintigste eeu het tot 'n oorvloed van inligting gelei. Nuuskanale wat vier-en-twintig uur per dag uitsaai, elektroniese publikasies, asook die Internet en die groei van die drukmedia het hierdie verskynselondersteun. Tegelykertyd het die media in die jongste dekades meer begin fokus op die lewens van beroemdes. Kommersiële faktore moet ook in ag geneem word. Met die groei van die media is meer druk geplaas op individuele nuusorganisasies om winste te maak. Dit is alombekend dat sensasionele nuus verkoop. Hierdie soort nuus is nie net gefokus op beroemdes nie, maar ook op misdaad en skandale deur gewone mense. Bemarkingsamptenare van die vermaaklikheidsbedryf moedig nuus oor beroemdes aan, want dit help om hul produkte te verkoop as hul sterre dekking kry. Hierdie studie wil vasstelof die media in Suid Afrika wel meer fokus op sensasionele nuus, ten koste van meer ernstige nuus. Dit wil vasstelof die Suid- Afrikaanse media die kenmerke van poniekoerante begin toon. The Cape Times, 'n Kaapse koerant, se voorblad is ontleed oor 'n tydperk van enkele jare. Die nuusinhoud asook voorkoms van die koerant is bestudeer om vas te stelof die koerant in 'n poniekoerant ontwikkel. Hierdie koerant is gebruik as 'n voorbeeld van die Suid-Afrikaanse media.

The thesis “When birthing makes the news: the depiction of women as a newsworthy item in Die Burger (Oos-Kaap)” analyses a common, yet complex news topic in the South African print media due to the sensitive, often sensationalised, nature of the topic. The private experience of birthing is featured more and more in the public domain of newspapers because of widespread service delivery problems within the South African health department. Focussing on the Eastern Cape, I examine the representation of birthing in Die Burger (Oos-Kaap) in texts printed between 2005 and 2007, and scrutinise the media’s monitorial role of a self-appointed public hero acting on behalf of the women, to expose the poor conditions at government hospitals, specifically in the Nelson Mandela Bay region. How the women and their bodies are reported on, creates a discursive tension between the negative portrayals of the birthing women and the monitorial role of the media. The news values of sensationalism and profit are achieved with visceral representations of the reproductive functions of the birthing women. A poststructuralist feminist theoretical framework reveals discourses that perpetuate race, class and gender inequalities in the apparently socially-concerned sample of texts. A Critical discourse analysis (CDA) provides an approach and method to inform a close textual analysis of both the lexical and visual elements of the texts. The discourses in the sample differed from text to text. Despite these differences, the monitorial role of the media is still achieved. My research argues that acting in the public interest with sensationalist copy is still acting in the public interest. I conclude that it is not easy for newspapers to separate sensationalism from accountability. Media practitioners should be aware of their role in constructing women’s identities and be particularly thoughtful when reporting on birthing. In doing so, this research aims to improve the manner in which women and their bodies are reported on within the news industry.

The media, through development communication and edutainment, plays a critical role in the transformation of societies. In line with this, this thesis discusses the extent to which commercially driven prosocial soap operas can provide a platform for public health messaging, in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa, for antiretroviral treatment (ART) and for encouraging ART adherence to foster national development. Furthermore, this thesis examined the potential of celebrities as HIV/AIDS ambassadors and the potential of both fictional characters and ‘real-life’ celebrities to disseminate these health messages. Although the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa is stabilising, this is not the time to relax the communication around the disease, particularly regarding adherence to ARVs, considering that South Africa has the largest ARV rollout in the world. The qualitative methodological approach taken for this thesis is a three-step approach examining the intended message, the text and the appropriated message by viewers. Firstly, a thematic content analysis of an episode of Isidingo, that illustrated Nandipha as HIV-positive and the side-effects that came with her ART adherence, and the 3Talk interview with Lesego Motsepe, where she announced that she was weaning herself off ART, was done in order to understand the intended health messaging in the soap opera and the health message disseminated by an HIV-positive actress with regards to ART. Thereafter interview responses by the production team as well as by HIV-positive viewers, using ARVs, were thematised. In addition media texts which provided commentary on the use of a celebrity as a HIV-positive role model were examined. In doing this, this thesis has offered up the meanings of how HIV-positive women taking ARVs and living in Makana experience and understand the media, particularly health messaging relating to ARVs. The findings of this study suggest that commercial soap operas are the perfect platform to address HIV/AIDS and that prosocial health messaging regarding ARV adherence is still necessary in this country. Soap operas have the potential to have an educational angle. Although, HIV-positive individuals serve as better role models as they are authentic; given human nature, fictional characters, such as Nandipha Matabane in Isidingo, may be more sustainable role models as their message can be scientifically-based and well-researched. Realistic characters serve as role models whose behaviour is to be emulated. Soap operas appeal to a wide audience and so storylines can be tailor-made according to the times and the needs in terms of health issues and messaging. Thus, soap operas are not a single platform but rather one which can be exploited to maximum advantage for public health messaging.

This study was conducted to identify and analyse Mail and Guardian Online moderation outputs which contradicted the platform‟s own stated policy on hate speech and other forms of problematic speech. The moderation outputs considered were a battery of readers‟ comments that were posted in response to Thought Leader blogs on xenophobia published between May and June, 2008. This was the same period a series of xenophobic attacks was taking place in some parts of South Africa, leaving an estimated 62 people dead, more than 30,000 displaced, and countless victims injured and robbed of their property. The attacks were a catalytic moment that enabled a whole range of discursive positions to be articulated, defended, contested and given form in the media. They also made visible the potential tensions between free speech on the one hand, and hate and other problematic speech on the other. Using qualitative methods of thematic content analysis, document review, individual interviews, and an eclectic approach of framing analysis and rhetorical argumentation, this study found instances of divergence between the M&G policy and practice on User Generated Content. It found that some moderator-approved content advocated hate, hatred, hostility, incitement to violence and/or harm, and unfair discrimination against foreign residents, contrary to the M&G policy which is informed by the constitutional provisions in both section 16 of the Bill of Rights and section 10 of the Equality Act. Based on examples in the readers‟ comments of how „the foreigner‟ was made to signify unemployment, poverty, disease, unfair competition, and all manner of deprivation, and bearing in mind how such individuals have also become a site for the violent convergence of different unresolved tensions in the country, the study‟s findings argue that the M&G – a progressive paper dealing with a potentially xenophobic readership (at least a portion of it) – should have implemented its policy on acceptable speech more effectively. The study also argues that the unjustifiable reference to foreigners as makwerekwere, illegals, illegal aliens, parasites, invaders and border jumpers, among other terms, assigned them a diminished place – that of unwanted foreigner – thereby reproducing the order of discourse that utilises nationality as a space for the expurgation of the „other‟. The study argues that the use of bogus (inflated) immigration statistics and repeated reference to the foreigners‟ supposedly parasitic relationship to the country‟s resources also unfairly constructed them as the „threatening other‟ and potentially justified action against them.