Mass Media

For too long, the immensity of Islamic State’s propaganda machine has obscured a rational understanding of it. The organisation’s media strategists are producing high-definition depictions of the most abhorrent brutality on an industrial scale, ensuring that jihadism is digitalised and brought firmly into the 21st century. The days when we saw grainy video footage played ...

In this report a team of scholars critically assesses both the “cyberutopian” and “cyberskeptic” perspectives on the impact of new media on political movements. The authors propose a more complex approach that looks at the role of new media in contentious politics from five interlocking levels of analysis: individual transformation, intergroup relations, collective action, regime ...

Advertising, business, community, privacy concerns, politics, sex, love – these are issues that are associated with the term social networking platforms in popular media clippings, such as the ones just cited. The examples, which certainly have differing depth, character, and quality, show that social networking sites (SNS) and what many term “Web 2.0” have become ...

On how participation via Internet and social media transform cultural production ...

Analysis of President Obama’s Counter-terrorism strategy ...

The global war on terror (“GWOT”) is being fought on many levels. In addition to traditional terror and counterterror activity, both sides are engaged in a public relations and propaganda war, employing the media, willingly and unwillingly, to support their positions. Hovering over these war campaigns are information technologies, which include the Internet. This article ...

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Al-Qaeda’s media strategy in 2009 reflected the group’s attempts to meet the triple challenge of a shifting media landscape, its enmeshment in the Afghanistan-Pakistan nexus, and the global jihadist movement’s failures over the last several years. The results are ambiguous. Al-Qaeda appears to be holding the attention of the faithful, but it faces a rising ...

The centrality of Arab mass media to Al-Qaeda’s political strategy has long been evident. From spectacular terror attacks designed for maximal media exposure, to carefully timed videos from Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman al- Zawahiri, to the burgeoning realm of jihadi Internet forums, Al-Qaeda the organisation has increasingly become indistinguishable from Al-Qaeda the ...