Steve Rayson

Podcasting is a medium that is arguably going through a ‘golden age’ (Berry 2015; Ganesh 2016). The latest Reuters report (2019) has found that companies are planning to invest more in audio and podcasts in 2019. This rise in popularity is partly due to the ubiquity of smartphones making podcasts readily available. My personal interest in podcasting has grown from listening to an increasing number of political podcasts and this led me to read a recently published book  Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media 2018 edited by Llinares, Fox and Berry (2018). I have outlined below some of the key themes from the book.

A common misconception about the Trump campaign is that he used social media to bypass the mainstream media. In fact, the very opposite is true. Trump developed a hybrid media campaign to drive and frame mainstream media coverage using social media. This strategy relied on the interdependence between new and old media logics which Andrew Chadwick sets out in the revised edition of his book ' The Hybrid Media System' . In his book Chadwick argues that previous notions of new and old media, and of fragmentation and diversification, fail to pay attention to the importance of the interdependence between media. Heroic ideas of how political movements may bypass mainstream media gatekeepers miss the real opportunity, namely influencing, shaping and integrating mainstream media into the core of your campaign.

Commentators reflecting on why people voted for Brexit or Trump often say that emotion got the better of reasoned decision making. Former Prime Minister John Major talked of emotion trumping reality  in the Brexit debate. I have always felt that trying to separate the emotional from the rational in this way is a false dichotomy. So my interest was piqued when I listened to James Jasper talking about 'thinking feeling.' He argues that trying to separate thinking and feeling is unhelpful and says the cognitive development of ideas and decisions is the result of hundreds of processes of thinking feeling. In essence emotion is part of the decision making process. James Jasper has spent over twenty years researching the emotions of protest and has just published a new book ' The Emotions of Protests '.  I haven't read the book yet but this is what I took away from his recent interview with New Books in Psychology.

Politics is increasingly characterised as "us" versus "them". In her book Uncivil Agreement , Lilliana Mason uses social identity theory to analyse and understand the growing political polarisation in America. She argues changing social identities are changing the nature of politics and political discourse.

"Power is primarily exercised by the construction of meaning in the human mind through processes of communication enacted in global/local multimedia networks of mass communication." Manuel Castells, Communication Power, 2011. In the introduction to this book Castells outlines his attempts as a young student to engage citizens in Barcelona by leaving poorly printed leaflets in cinemas. I can emphasise with this, as a radical young student, I used a Gestetner duplicating machine to produce inky leaflets that I would distribute eagerly. Like Castells I knew communication was important and his personal introduction inspired me to dive deeper and understand more.

In their book ' The Internet and Democratic Citizenship ' (2009) Stephen Coleman and Jay G. Blumler argue that for democratic participation to be meaningful and shape political outcomes, there needs to be "a new space for consequential interaction between citizens and their elected representatives". They propose establishing a new civic commons on the internet that will encourage deliberation among citizens, as well as between citizens and governmental decision makers. 
 The book has three main arguments, namely: 
 The relations between members of the public and holders of political authority are in a period of transformative flux and there is a crisis of disengagement.  There is a relentless deterioration of mainstream political communication taking place and a deficit in political deliberation.   The internet has what the authors describe as 'the vulnerable potential' to improve public communications and enrich democracy

"It is the engagement of citizens that gives democracy its legitimacy as well as its vitality."   Peter Dahlgren. The social, cultural, political and technological conditions that underpin democracy are in transition. Dahlgren's book  Media and Political Engagement  provides a useful overview of the changes taking place. It also sets out a framework for understanding how the media influences and shapes political engagement. By taking a culturalist approach Dahlgren highlights the role of identity and emotion in political engagement. This contrasts with the vision of Habermas, and the advocates of deliberative democracy, where political deliberation is rational with impartial reasoning. In Dahlgren's view "to be engaged in something signals not just just cognitive engagement but affective investment. Engagement in politics involves some kind of passion." (p83).  This focus on identity and emotionality can provide insights into events such as Brexit ...

" Identity politics has become a master concept that explains much of what is going on in global affairs. " Francis Fukuyama's forthcoming book on Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition  (4th October 2018) will lay a lot of the blame for the current polarisation of society at the door of identity politics. Fukuyama makes his position clear in an essay published this week:  Against Identity Politics . He argues that identity politics threatens the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society. This new tribalism may lead to a crisis of democracy, state breakdown and, ultimately, failure. I suspect there will be quite a backlash against some of Fukuyama's ideas. Already people are arguing on Twitter that Fukuyama sees 'identity politics' as what discriminated against minorities do and 'politics' as what white men do. His book and ideas though will add to the debate around global politics, polarisation and th...

The most shared article on Harvard Business Review in the last five years was not about business strategy or leadership techniques. It was What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class . The post published immediately after the 2016 election of Donald Trump received over 750,000 likes and shares on Facebook. This was more than four times as much engagement as any other post on HBR ( BuzzSumo ). Many Americans could not understand why 68 million people had voted for Trump and were suddenly very interested in what was happening beyond their metropolitan, progressive neighbourhoods. The reaction was similar following the Brexit vote in the UK. How did Hampstead and Hull, who both shared political allegiance to the Labour Party, fracture so badly over Brexit? Three quarters of people voting in Hampstead backed Remain while two thirds of people in Hull backed Leave. In the following 2017 election just a third of working class voters backed Labour. The political shifts tak...

Winning elections is not just about persuading people to your point of view, to win elections you need to ensure: the people that support you register to vote, and your supporters actually get to the polling booth and vote Increasing the turnout of your supporters by just a few percent can be the difference between winning and losing an election. It can actually be more significant and critical than trying to persuade people about your policies. A meta-study in 2017 looked at 49 field experiments and concluded that campaign efforts to win over opposing supporters and undecided voters were largely unsuccessful. However, they found campaigns can mobilise your own supporters. In the  The Victory Lab  (2013) Sasha Issenberg reveals the thousands of experiments that have been conducted by political parties over the last 50 years to improve registration and turnout. This is an important area that has been under-reported by the media. Only the recent Cambridge Analy...

Does political marketing enhance or diminish democracy? This is one of the key questions that arises from Margaret Scammell's book:  Consumer Democracy: The Marketing of Politics . Elections are a zero sum game, where the aim of a campaign is to win and it is this competitive element that drives political marketing according to Scammell. Such marketing may be good for democracy for example by developing a deeper understanding of citizen concerns, improving the quality of information, increasing public knowledge, encouraging greater engagement and ensuring the responsiveness of politicians. Equally there are dangers such as manipulating emotions through the use of fear and negative messaging, distortion and misinformation, tribal polarisation and ruthless targeting which can reduce transparency and ignore large sections of the electorate. Scammell argues our task is to identify and promote political marketing that enhances democracy. She sets out a useful set of democratic ...

Tom Baldwin nails his colours to the mast with the sub-title of his new book Ctrl Alt Delete : How Politics and the Media Crashed Our Democracy. The basic premise of the book is that changes in politics and the media over recent years have led to "three severe shocks" namely the Brexit vote, Trump's election and Corbyn's 2017 election performance. According to Baldwin these three shocks have "left democracy itself hanging off its hinges." (p218) Baldwin's view is shared by many in the broadsheet press and at universities. For example Carole Cadwaller's article in the Guardian ' The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked .'  Another example is this 30th July 2019 post on the Journalism and Society Facebook page of the London School of Economics reviewing Baldwin's book.