Richard Rogers' Presentation on NGOs and the News
The next meeting of the ICR's project on Communications, Culture, and Policy, funded by the Ford Foundation, will be held on WEDNESDAY, May 19, at 1:30 p.m. in the Peterson Conference Room (231 Gregory Hall). The very distinguished speaker will be Richard Rogers, Professor in media studies at the University of Amsterdam, and Ford Foundation grantee. His talk is entitled, "Can we do without News? Networks and Old Media Dependencies."
ABSTRACT Professor Roger's talk is dedicated to understanding whether and when NGOs may operate effectively without a commercial press strategy. He asks: Do the rise of NGO Internet-based networks, in particular, imply an end to the reliance on the press to resonate the message? Can networks alone mobilize other organizations and key players to act on important social issues of the day? In short, can NGOs do without news? On the basis of issue mapping (using the issue crawler software) and news analysis (using techniques to capture and analyse Google News), Rogers displays infographics and discusses the main findings of a series of short research projects, including:
a) Network analysis of the media reform movement. Minority media ownership is not a media concentration issue from a network point of view.
b) Google News analysis of the North Korea issue. U.S. commercial media are not homogenous, but one needs to leave the U.S. media space to understand what is not covered, and especially what could be covered.
c) Analysis of the respective capacities of "Information Technology" (IT) and "Information Communication Technologies" (ICTs) to mobilize NGOs. ICTs - why the 'rest of the world' uses ICTs and not IT.
d) The Spectrum - Doing quite well without news. Analysis of an issue doing well with networks, and without (more) news and more press strategies.
e) When to stay at home. An analysis of media reform outside of the U.S., including whether and when U.S. NGOs should export their terms and expertise.
f) Bush lies defeat Bush? An analysis of the political Web space organized by moveon.org.
Background Reading:
Paper and presentation preview at http://www.issuenetwork.org/node.php?id=46
Richard Rogers is assistant professor in media studies at the University of Amsterdam, and visiting professor in the philosophy and social study of science at the University of Vienna. He holds a PhD in Science Dynamics from the University of Amsterdam. Previously he has worked at Harvard University, the Science Center (Berlin), and the Royal College of Art (London). He is editor of Preferred Placement: Knowledge Politics on the Web (Jan van Eyck Editions, 2000), and is author of the forthcoming book, Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004). He is also director of the Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam, dedicated to creating info-political tools for the Web, and supported by the Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation.
