Stream - Inspiring Critical Thought (E-Journal)
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The Maple Spring as the Background for the Flourishing of the Fifth Estate in Québec
Get PDFThe political disengagement of the Millennials has long been a subject of scholarly debate. Using ethnographic research methods, our lab conducted a multi-sited field study to investigate the digital practices of some of the community networks that have emerged or consolidated since the Maple Spring. Our field findings suggest that the Millennial student protesters – alongside citizens from all generations who have lent them their support – have actively engaged in their own forms of political participation and by doing so, have helped to firmly entrench the Fifth Estate in Québec society. In particular, we have found that these grassroots networks might have expanded Québec’s alternative press by using interactive technologies to self-publish, self-represent and self-document issues that are of great concern to them and have typically not been topics up for debate on the public agenda. Our analysis brings to the fore the fraught relationship between the Fifth Estate and the four traditional democratic institutions
Publicly Funding Journalism in an Age when Everyone is a Journalist
Get PDFWith access to a computer and an Internet connection, anyone can act as a journalist today. More than just acting as journalists however, people are acting as publishers, as curators of the news, as editors and as opinion leaders and they exist in addition to the legacy media organizations that provide news through more traditional mediums. The sheer volume of content now available is un-deniable. The question then is: Should government be involved in funding any of it
PHD Defence: “Consuming Communication: Promotion, Expertise, and Sustainability in an Age of Participatory Media†By Michael Felczak
Get PDFOur dear colleague, Michael Felczak, successfully defended his PHD dissertation on November 3, 2014. Here is the abstract of his dissertation “Consuming Communication: Promotion, Expertise, and Sustainability in an Age of Participatory Media”
Book Review: Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition
Get PDFRed Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition by Glen Sean Coulthard was launched on Oct. 22nd, 2014 at SFU Woodwards. For more information regarding the book launch and its panel discussion, please visit the event's page.The book examines anti-Ââ€colonial efforts of Indigenous resurgence in Canada from 1969 to the present and demonstrates the shift from tradition-Âbased assertions of land and title to negotiated claims for land and recognition. It strips the promise of emancipation from the pursuit of recognition and offers Five Theses on Indigenous Resurgence and Decolonization. READ a book review by Michelle Lorna Nahanee, a member of the Squamish Nation and MA student in Global Communications
The CRTC’s Market-driven De-regulation of Canadian television
Get PDFOver the past twenty years, the Canadian television landscape has come to increasingly resemble the market-driven television of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, to name only the other major English-language industries. Sports, reality TV, and sci-fi drama dominate, and the public elements of the system are increasingly under siege. How did this happen? A look back over the decisions of the past two decades makes it apparent that Canada’s regulatory agency the CRTC has repeatedly enabled the system we now see. These changes are the direct result of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Deal, signed in 1994), which drastically altered the cultural industries in Canada and led to an entrepreneurial approach to television. Since then, there has been a concerted shift toward an export-oriented industry, provoking a new emphasis on the global trade of cultural products (Edwardson 2008). In effect, even before the impact of the Internet, as the cable dial expanded, and sponsorship was diluted, production costs were pushed down and new, cheaper formats were created. At the same time, ownership became more consolidated and the telecommunication industry merged with the broadcast industry hoping to cash in on the promises of digital and wireless technologies. The CRTC enabled these shifts with the stated intention of increasing Canadian television’s competitiveness at an international level (CRTC 1999)
MA Defence: “Sub-elites as fiduciary gatekeepers of global elites: A fiscal anthropology of the Cayman Islands and offshore financial industry†By May Hen
Get PDFOur dear colleague, May Hen, successfully defended her MA thesis on November 25, 2014. Here is the abstract of her thesis “Sub-elites as fiduciary gatekeepers of global elites: A fiscal anthropology of the Cayman Islands and offshore financial industry”
The Managing of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Technologies’ Network Effect: An Adaptation of Actor-Network Theory
Get PDFPeer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing technologies have impacted the music industry, including its strategies for the distribution of the musical products, for more than a decade now. As a result, music labels have delayed full digitization of their industry in fear of “online music piracyâ€. The present paper reviews the historical context of the evolution of the music industry from 1999 to 2012. Using Actor-Network theory, the paper examines the strategies that helped the music industry to translate new actors’ effect in order to sustain music labels’ business on their path to digitize music distribution. I will discuss the impact of new digital policies and methods of governing online behavior including the business concept of “entrepreneurship†as they may potentially affect the future of public domain within the framework of consumer rights
The Potential Of Public Media: A Case Study of Reimagine CBC
Get PDFIn the spring of 2014, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) announced that it will cut 657 positions and get out of the business of airing professional sports, a pillar of its programming for more than 60 years. As part of a plan to confront a $130-million revenue shortfall projected for the 2014-15 broadcast year, the cuts represent about 8 per cent of the broadcaster’s total work force, compensating for lower ratings and an industry-wide slump in the TV ad market (Houpt & Simon, 2014). Viewed by some as a sign of the imminent collapse and possible restructuring of the CBC (Rowland, 2013), the sidelining of the public service mandate (in favor of the commercial mandate for ratings and profit) offers an opportunity to reimagine what public service media means
MA Defence: “Food Sovereignty as Multiple Resistances†By Heather Gies
Get PDFOur dear colleague, Heather Gies, successfully defended her MA thesis on September 19th, 2014. Here is the abstract of her thesis "Food Sovereignty as Multiple Resistances: The Honduran Movement in Global Context"
Corpus Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis: A Case Study on News Reports of the 2011 Libyan Civil War
Get PDFThis paper reports a comparative analysis of the news coverage of the 2011 Libyan civil war in two national media (China Daily and The New York Times). The 2011 Libyan civil war attracted wide attention and was extensively covered by various media around the world. However, news discourse regarding the war was constructed differently across various news agencies as a result of their clashing ideologies. Based on corpus linguistics methods, two small corpora with a total of 22,412 tokens were compiled and the comparative analyses of the two corpora revealed the following results. First, although the two corpora shared a lot of commonalities in word frequency, differences still exist in several high ranking lemmas. On the one hand, words such as “Qaddafi†and “war†ranked similarly in the two corpora’s lexical frequency lists; on the other hand, the frequencies of the lemma “rebel/rebels†were much higher in The New York Times corpus than in the China Daily corpus, which indicated that the image of the rebel received more attention in the reports by The New York Times than in those by China Daily. Second, although the word “Qaddafi†achieved similar frequencies in the two corpora, a follow-up collocation analysis showed that the images of “Qaddafi†contrasted with each other in the two corpora. In The New York Times corpus, the words and phrases collocating with “Qaddafi†were mainly negative descriptions and highlighted the pressure on Qaddafi whereas many neutral and even positive descriptions of Qaddafi appeared in the China Daily corpus. Based on these findings, the paper further discusses how discursive devices are applied in news coverage of warfare, as well as some methodological implications of the case study (Reprinted by Permission of Canadian Association for the Studies of Discourse and Writing)