The Asia-Pacific faces a security dilemma due to crises in this region that have escalated and intensified such as Sino-Indian border crisis, South China Sea disputes, North Korea nuclear crisis and the Senkaku (Diaoyu) islands disputes (Sun, 2015). Today the media have become integral to the planning and conduct of war and conflicts (Horten, 2011). This research monograph explores the changing relationship between media and conflict in the social media age through the lens of China. Inspired by the concepts of Arrested War in mediatisation of conflict and actor-network theory, this book centres on four main actors in the wars and conflicts: social media platform, the mainstream news organizations, online users and social media content. These four human and non-human actors associate, interact and negotiate with each other in the social media network surrounding specific issues.
This book examines and analyses the professional mediaâs news coverage and usersâ comments on social media platform Weibo in China, and discuss how the professional media and other actors interact with each other and use social media for their own ends. The central argument is that social media is playing an enabling role in contemporary wars and conflicts with limitations and constraints. Both professional media outlets and web users employ the functionalities of social media platforms to set, counter-set or expand the public agenda. Social media platform embodies a web of technological and human complexities with different actors, factors, interests, and power relations. These four actors and the macro social-political context are influential in the mediatisation of conflict in the social media era.
This introductory chapter is organized as follows: it starts with reviewing academic literatures and debates surrounding mediatization of conflict and social media to situate the current research in the context. It then proposes and theorizes a new analytical framework on the basis of Arrested War propositions and the actor-network theory (ANT) to study the media and conflict in the social media era. What follows are the significance of the research and research questions. After giving a methodological note on the use of mixed research methods, it ends with an outline of chapters in the book.
1.1 Mediatization of Conflict
Mediatization is about changes. It studies the roles of contemporary media and denotes the process of transformations driven by the communication technologies. Lundby (2014: 3) pointed out:
âMediatizationâ has become a much-used concept to characterize changes in practices, cultures, and institutions in media-saturated societies, thus denoting transformations of these societies themselves. Admittedly, mediatization is an awkward term, but one that has gained terrain in academic discourse through the second decade of the third millennium. It is a matter of communication â how changes occur when communication patterns are transformed due to new communication tools and technologies, or in short: the âmediaâ.
The concept of mediatization has been debated for long. Some scholars argued that mediatization describes a historical, ongoing and dynamic metaprocess, related to but distinct from globalization, that features the increased central role and influence of media in social life (e.g. Lundby, 2014; Hjarvard, 2013). Others pointed out that the metaprocess view is so broad that âthe concept of âmedatizationâ itself may not be suitable to contain the heterogeneity of the transformations in questionâ (Couldry, 2008). Mediatization is âbordering on hyperbole and marked by enormous theoretical heterogeneityâ (Adolf, 2011: 167). To move forward the debate on mediatizaiton, Waisbord (2013) called scholars to move beyond the media dominance paradigm to assess drivers and consequences, to understand better the factors that bind, steer, and shape mediatization.
The process of mediatization should be understood as a multidimensional concept that takes place on different levels of analysis (StrömbĂ€ck, 2008, 2011; Falasca, 2014). There are different approaches to study the various facets, dimensions and dynamics of mediatization. For instance, mediatization can be analysed on micro (individual actors), meso (organizations and institutions), or macro (culture and society) levels. But most importantly, research on contemporary mediatization must be able to handle change and networked communication with digital media (Lundby, 2014: 21â22).
Though mediatizaiton is a vague and contested term, there have been growing researches and literatures that adopt the concept of mediatization of conflicts/wars in recent years. In his book Mediatized Conflict, Simon Cottle (2006: 8â9) used the phrase âmediatized conflictâ to âemphasize the complex ways in which media are often implicated within conflicts while disseminating ideas and images about themâ. He argued that the media are capable of enacting and performing conflicts as well as reporting and representing them. The media-conflict relationship goes beyond the âreflectionâ and ârepresentationâ but focuses on âmedia doingâ or âmedia performativityâ. McQuail (2006), in a review article, pointed out that the historical conditions for war have changed. War is not primarily a struggle between armed and willing nation-states, but a series of conflicts in relation to global economic and strategic interests, between the haves and have-nots, or resources such as oil, minerals or other forms of property. Such new situation âdoes require a much higher degree of control of the information environment and, indirectly via this, the consent of relatively passive publics.â (ibid) In the new mediatized environment, the media performance is often inadequate: media reportage of war is typically thin on explanation, extremely selective, oversimplified, biased for or against one or other party, emphasizing spectacle and action, and so on (McQuail, 2006). Meanwhile, Morse (2017) argued that the study of mediatized war needs to extend beyond questions of control over information transmission and the military-media-audience power dynamics, and to include the moral orientation and ethical solicitation for spectators to reflect upon their responsibility to the suffering of distant others during wartime.
Other scholars studied media-conflict relationship from different perspectives. Maltby (2012) examined British armyâs media management strategies and argued that the military are increasingly âmediatizedâ. The military has integrated media in their operations and interacted with different actors based on the media and media logic. The militaryâs attempts to harness the power of media influence may be transforming the media-polity-military relationship. Horten (2011) compared the American and German coverage of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and argued that the mediatization of war has significantly accelerated over the past fifty years and has established the media as the âfourth branchâ of military operations beyond the army, air force, and navy. Meanwhile he emphasized the national particularities during the mediatization process as he wrote, âthe developments are neither uniform nor unidirectional, depending on the cultural and historical circumstancesâ (Horten, 2011). Kaempf (2013) argued that the rise of new media technology has led to a heteropolar global media environment in which the media-war relationship has been altered. Non-state actors and individuals contest the state-policed narratives and coverage of war whereas traditional media platforms converge with digital new media platforms. In a word, âdigital new media has introduced a wide range of voices into the mediatisation of warâ (Kaempf, 2013).
The most relevant work to this study is Hoskins and OâLoughlin (2015)âs âArrested war: the third phase of mediatizationâ. In this article, the two scholars took âmediatizationâ as the process by which warfare is increasingly embedded in and penetrated by media. The process of mediatization is uneven as different actors employ different media for their own ends. They divided the process into three phases: Broadcast War, Diffused War and Arrested War. While the first phase Broadcast War features the stability and certainty with discrete and mono-directional media (the Big Media) that elites use in their planning, waging and representing war, the second phase Diffused War refers to the Web 2.0 and new digital media ecology with connected, multi-directional media and chaotic dynamics. In the third phase, Arrested War is âcharacterized by the appropriation and control of previously chaotic dynamics by mainstream...