![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The book maps a new digital media landscape that features citizen journalism, The Daily Show, blogging, and alternative media. In Digital Media and Democracy, leading scholars in media and communication studies, media activists, journalists, and artists explore the contradiction at the heart of the relationship between truth and power today: the fact that the radical democratization of knowledge and multiplication of sources and voices made possible by digital media coexists with the blatant falsification of information by political and corporate powers. "In an age of proliferating media and news sources, who has the power to define reality? When the dominant media declared the existence of WMDs in Iraq, did that make it a fact? Today, the "social web" (sometimes known as Web 2.0, groupware, or the participatory Web)-epitomized by blogs, viral videos, and YouTube-creates new pathways for truths to emerge and makes possible new tactics for media activism. At the same time this appropriation can also lead to hegemony striking back, disciplining the blogosphere or including some and excluding others from the mainstream public space. Some blogs re-enforce hegemony, and others are appropriated within the mainstream precisely because of their personalised and distinct narrative. While blogs certainly provide an alternative space for the production of different and counter-hegemonic narratives of war, approaching these blogs as inherently alternative and counter-hegemonic is deemed too simplistic. In each case, the discourses being produced are analysed in terms of the extent to which they challenge the hegemony of mainstream journalism and of the ideological model of war. First, the Iraqi blogger Salam Pax second, the so-called mil-blogs and third the role of the internet in the distribution and archiving of the Abu Ghraib photographs. Theoretically centralizing the concept of hegemony (as a network of interlocking but still distinct hegemonies), it positions blogs as alternative media by contrasting them to mainstream journalistic routines in situations of war and the tendency of mainstream media to essentialise the other/the enemy. This article examines the role of the internet in 2003 Iraq war from the perspective of the challenges it poses to the practices and formats of mainstream journalism and to the hegemonic articulations of war. ![]()
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