This article provides a discussion of some of the recent research on media trust focusing on arguments for why media trust matters. What are the arguments for why trust is important? Are there reasons to accept these arguments? We identify three distinct arguments in the literature. First, that it is important for media organizations and for the media as an industry. Secondly, that media trust is essential for democratic citizenship and for bringing forth informed individuals with the capacity for political engagement. Lastly, that media trust is similar to other forms of (social) trust and connected to a wider existential discussion on ontological security. None of these arguments are totally convincing when inspected more closely and in light of empirical research. The article thus concludes that there is a lack of strong arguments for why falling levels of trust in the news media are legitimately described as a crisis or a problem. A supposed “trust crisis” mainly exists when viewed from what must be described as a rather narrow ideological and normative perspective.

Over recent decades several competing descriptions of the media and cultural industries have been put forward. The media and cultural industries have been described as creative industries, copyright industries, and as constitutive of an experience economy. One key element in these descriptions has been the importance of copyright law in a postindustrial economy.

The present study is an analysis of an emerging idea of an industry that functions, in part, outside of the market created by copyright law, and by exploiting, or by building markets on top of, digital, cultural and informational commons. The study is about how this idea is expressed in various forms by business organisations, companies, consultants and policymakers. I have invented the concept of the openness industry to denote the businesses that these organisations and policy makers claim are forerunners and promoters of the idea of ‘openness’ as a business model for the media industry. The purpose of the thesis is to analyse the governmentality and ideology of the openness industry.

A key element in the idea of the openness industry is that internet users can be persuaded to produce symbolic products for it by other means than the economic incentives provided by copyright. Another key element is the high value placed on single individuals in the creation of economic value; but in contrast to how the copyright industries are thought to be dependent on ‘authors’, the openness industry relies on the ‘entrepreneur’. Previous notions of the media and cultural industries have given publishers and producers of film, music and games a central role.The companies that are seminal to the idea of the openness industry are internet and technology companies.

The concept of the Media Welfare State describes Nordic specificity in how media are organised and how they serve a lively and inclusive democracy. This article engages in a dialogue in regards to the contention that this media system has persisted in the midst of rapid social change. We synthesise previous research and documented changes in media policy in Sweden, covering the last three decades, to show the ways in which the Swedish media system has undergone significant transformations. Media use is becoming more polarised and connected to social class. The state is retreating from its involvement in media policy; consequently, the press and public service media are facing unprecedented challenges. Finally, the "consensual" relation between media companies and the state, which is said to be typical for the media welfare state, no longer characterises the media market. While some of the features of the media welfare state system remain in Sweden, the current media system is best characterised as a neoliberal media welfare state. The article discusses tensions and conflicts in the existing model and possible future developments.

Previous research has neglected media audiences' and citizens' opinions on how the media should be organized, how they should function in society and what individual, corporate and state responsibilities should be in regard to these questions. In an attempt to understand the relationship between citizens' broader political attitudes and their attitudes on media-related politics and responsibilities, this study uses a survey (n = 2003) of the adult Swedish population to investigate the distribution of a range of media political attitudes in the contemporary space of political positions. The results reveal overlaps between the space of media political attitudes and the broader political space, where support for a Nordic 'media welfare state' corresponds to leftist and GAL-oriented values, while TAN-oriented and right-wing attitudes link to scepticism towards state interventionism in the media landscape. A small but highly opinionated right-wing and TAN-oriented segment displays laissez-faire views on media policy that are reflected in current policy propositions from right-wing political parties in parliament.

What does media welfare mean from a normative perspective? The notion of media welfare and "the media welfare state" has mainly been used descriptively, to depict the particular way in which the media are organized in the Nordic welfare states. In this article, we explore media welfare from a normative perspective. Our intention is to open up a discussion about the normative and political implications of the notion of media welfare and to bring the concept into the contemporary discussion on normative perspectives regarding the media.

This paper presents the concept of a “black box” as a tool for analyzing virtual worlds. The concept comes from the field of Science & Technology Studies (STS) and we employ it here more specifically to study one such virtual world in particular, Project Entropia. The concept of a “black box” is used to describe the developers’ efforts to hide or to build certain assumptions into the very fabric of the virtual world in order to get the players to perform certain prescribed roles. The concept is also used to describe players’ efforts to open up this black box in order to get access to and play other roles – roles not prescribed by the game publisher and that in some cases function as a threat to the publisher’s business model. The focus of the analysis is on the imperative to “pay to play”. This imperative is essential to the developers of the game since Project Entropia does not employ the usual subscription-based revenue model that most other Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) use

I denna rapport redovisas resultat från den existerande forskningen – både i Sverige och internationellt – kring relationerna mellan samhällsklass och medier. Bland annat ser vi att arbetarklassen är kraftigt underrepresenterad och osynliggjord – den undanhålls både röst och erkännande – i svenska medier och att avsaknaden av representation i medierna kan leda till en (berättigad) känsla av osynliggörande som i sin tur kan ligga till grund för ett avståndstagande från medierna. Vidare ser vi att klasserna är betydligt mer ”segregerade” i televisionens genresystem i dag än vad som var fallet för 35 år sedan; arbetarklassen har i det närmaste försvunnit från nyheter och faktaprogram och återfinns istället huvudsakligen i film, drama och reality-program. Just reality-tv ger dramatisk form till dominerande ideologier som på samma gång exploaterar klass – för att skapa narrativ dramatik – och förnekar eller undertrycker frågan om klass och klasskonflikter. Inte minst gestaltas personer från arbetarklassen på ett stereotypt, nedsättande och hånfullt sätt. Avsaknad av röst och erkännande kan blockera formeringen av klassidentitet och minska arbetarrörelsens möjligheter att organisera sig och formera sig för politisk kamp. Vad gör dagens svenska arbetarrörelse på detta område?

Den tionde april 2019 fyllde professor Göran Bolin 60 år. Vänner och kollegor inom medie- och kommunikationsvetenskapen i Sverige och utomlands tog tillfället i akt och förärade honom denna bok.

Bidragen i boken tar upp en rad olika teman och ämnen som på olika sätt anknyter till Görans gärning: Här återfinns texter om mediegenerationer, medialisering, fält och kulturell produktion och vår förhoppning är att den återger något av den spännvidd som finns i dagens medievetenskapliga forskning. Vi hoppas också att bokens kapitel i någon mening fångar den slags medievetenskap som vi uppfattar att Göran står för: En medievetenskap som kombinerar samhällsvetenskapliga och humanistiska traditioner, en empirisk, kritisk forskning som närmar sig tidens stora frågor med ett historiskt grundat och teoretiskt välinformerat perspektiv.

Building on an interview study from Sweden (n = 80), this article develops the concept of media resentment as a tool for understanding contemporary developments such as the diminished trust in news media and journalism. We view media resentment as a complex of feelings and ideas that are both individual and social, embodied, and ideal. Media resentment is defined as the feeling that the media – intentionally or unintentionally – are denying you or endangering what you have rightfully earned, whether by not giving it to you, by directly telling you to abstain from it or by intervening in social processes so that your enjoyment of what you have earned becomes impossible.

This paper presents an analysis of how social class is constructed as a moral category on Swedish mainstream television. Practices of categorisation by the media is an important area of study since these practices are part of a process of co-construction of social categories that are offered to media users as cognitive tools and frames for navigating the social landscape. Based on a content analysis of television in Sweden, we show that the medium of television categorises people appearing on television along the social divisions of class and constructs class as a moral category, with a lower moral value assigned to the working class in comparison to the middle and upper class

This article investigates a paradox in the reception of Web 2.0. While some of its services are seen as creators of a new informational economy and are hence publicly legitimized, other features are increasingly under surveillance and policed, although in reality the differences between these services is far from obvious. Our thesis is that we are currently experiencing a temporary postponement of the law, in the context of Web 2.0. Agamben’s work on the state of exception is here used to theorize the informational economy as an ongoing dispossession, under the guise of ‘networked production’. This dispossession is seen as a parallel to the concept of ‘primitive accumulation’, as a means of moving things from the exterior to the interior of the capitalist economy. This theory lets us problematize the concept of free labor, the metaphor of the enclosure, and puts into question the dichotomy between copyright and cultural commons.

In much scholarly writing and in many leftist and activist accounts the enclosures of the cultural commons have been fiercely critiqued. However, during the last years, new media business models, that challenge the notion of the cultural industries as “copyright industries”, has been taking shape. A new class of entrepreneurs is instead working to expand the commons as part of their businesses. Accordingly, representatives from these new media industries, policy makers, and politicians have joined the academic and political critique of the “enclosures of the cultural common”. The paper argues that this is a shift within the dominant media policy paradigm and an attempt to integrate existing practices on the Internet, based on cooperation and sharing, into the market. By relocating the struggle from “intellectual property” to “platform economics”, the media industry can exploit the productivity of the commons while holding on to the power that comes with ownership and property.

This chapter explores the production of representations of classed identities and of the consequences of social inequalities on Reality Television. Although misrepresentations and shaming of working-class persons on Reality Television have been analysed in previous research, there is a lack of attempts at trying to understand and explain the existence of these representations within the genre, especially through research on the production of Reality Television. This chapter employs a socio-cognitive perspective on media production through which we seek to explain how the socially situated perspective of media producers is translated into the products that come out of media institutions.

In this article, we address the history of Nordic media research through a case study of the formation of media research in Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s and the role that The Board for Psychological Defence played in the formation of Swedish academic media re-search during the Cold War era. Based on archival research, we find that the impact of the psychological defence on Swedish media research was mainly concentrated to one Swedish university, and that the impact on the theoretical and methodological development of the discipline has been rather limited. This distinguishes the Swedish case from what has been argued in historical research on the development of media and communication research in the US.

The information society, as an ideological formation, has previously been identified as celebrating speed and ephemerality: overcoming of boundaries, destabilization of identities and the dissapearance of distance (Mosco 2004). This paper however analyzes an ideological shift within digital culture. The paper identifies this shift as accompanying new business models, associated with what is often referred to as cloud computing. The success of this computing paradigm, we claim, is dependent on the construction of a new ideology, in which information is not only identified with speed and ephemerality but also stability and durability.

Empirically the paper concerns data centers: large, dedicated buildings in which interconnected servers are used to store and process digital information, utilized for commercial or administrative purposes by governments, organizations, and companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Data-centres are what Lisa Parks have called “obscure objects of media studies” (Parks 2009:101). They are hidden, out of sight, inconspicuous and often placed far from population centres. But at the same time they are “material imaginaries” comparable to the houses of large media corporations (cf. Ericson & Riegert 2010). They are conciously inscribed in a number of symbolic and ephemeral geographies. They are discursively – and not only materially – constructed as stabile, durable, lasting and safe. The purpose of the paper is to analyse how, by whom and with what purposes.

The question of voice is a central and timeless political issue. Who gets to speak? Who is silenced? Who is listening? One of the main arenas for voice in modern, advanced democracies is the media. Media infrastructures, technologies, institutions and organizations are a precondition for political voice in large-scale societies, but are also an important factor in distributing the possibilities for voice among different groups and sectors of the population. In this article, we take on the question of voice in relation to social class and aim to analyse how the medium of television gives voice to people from different social classes. This study operationalizes the theoretical notion of voice by asking the following questions: who has the opportunity to appear and speak on television, to whom do they speak and under what circumstances does this communication occur? Based on a content analysis of television in Sweden, the results from this study show that voice is distributed in a highly unequal manner. It also shows that the relations enacted by television appearances conform to the social hierarchy. Whereas people from the ruling class frequently speak to people from the working and middle classes, they are rarely spoken to by members of a class that is positioned below their own. Television thus constructs a social hierarchy of voice and authority that reproduces and legitimizes already existing social hierarchies.

Samhälleliga kriser som Corona-pandemin är, i det det moderna mediesamhället, också medie- ochinformationskriser. En central fråga är medborgarnas tillit och förtroende till medierna. Globalt sett har tilliten till medierna minskat under senare år. Sverige sticker ut med en högre grad av tillit (även på detta område) men vi ser också en ökad polarisering där utbildningsnivå och politisk åskådning samt medievanor tycks bidra till en sjunkande grad av tillit i vissa delar av befolkningen. Vid samhälleliga kriser finns ett omfattande behov av korrekt och fungerande informationsspridning, samtidigt som förekomsten av desinformation, “fake news” och ryktesspridning ökar kraftigt. Detta projekt syftar till att studera tilliten till medierna under Corona-krisen. Projektet erbjuder en unik forskningsdesign (med dagböcker och djupintervjuer) som möjliggör rikhaltig och nyanserad förståelse för hur tilliten till medier och samhällsinformation ser ut, hur den formas, vilka faktorer som påverkar den och hur den utvecklas under ett längre krisförlopp. Projektet bidrar till en teoretisk och metodologisk nyorientering inom tillitsforskningen samtidigt som vi genom projektet skapar kunskap som är direkt användbar för myndigheter och andra samhällsaktörer som vill stärka förtroendet för medierna och nå ut med relevant information till medborgarna under en samhällskris.

Previous research has concluded that the working-class is largely invisible on television. When the working-class is displayed; however, common frames highlight moral shortcomings and lack of responsibility. This study asks what difference such representations make. The study relies on cultivation analysis and a survey of the adult Swedish population to understand the extent to which heavy television viewers provide “television answers” in their descriptions of and attitudes toward the working-class. While some results are inconsistent, heavy television viewers seem more prone to view social inequalities as the result of working-class people's failure to take responsibility for their own well-being. 

As a leading scholar of the social conditions of cultural production, Pierre Bourdieu had little to say about large-scale media production. This study, however, brings the theoretical-empirical program that underpins studies of fields of cultural production within the Bourdieusian tradition to bear upon the Swedish field of television production. Two research questions are posed. First, what is the structure of the field of television production—what are the main hierarchies that divide agents in the field? Second, how do positions in the field correspond to agents’ ways of orienting themselves—how are various position-takings distributed in the field? These questions are answered with a multiple correspondence analysis with agents in the Swedish field of television production (n = 378). The field of television production is structured, first, along an incumbent-challenger axis; and second, according to an axis separating public service broadcasters and journalists rich on cultural capital from commercial broadcasters involved in drama and entertainment production. These dynamics, along with the position-takings assumed by agents in the field, are discussed.

During the last decades the Nordic media model has been challenged by neoliberal policy and welfare retrenchment. This study asks about the extent to which the values, functions and institutions of the "media welfare state" are supported by the adult Swedish citizenry, despite political mobilization against it. Drawing on a national survey (n = 2003) this study shows that the media welfare state is generally well-supported by the population. Using exploratory statistical analysis, we identify a media welfare state of mind. While widespread in the population, this attitudinal constellation is more common in older segments of the population, in the working-class, and by those who frequently use and trust public service media. The main conclusion is that support for the media welfare state primarily can be explained by political attitudes, where left-leaning and GAL-oriented individuals are more positive than people holding right-wing and TAN-attitudes.

This article presents an analysis of the makeover reality show Real Men, which was broadcast on Swedish television in 2016. The analysis shows that Real Men – like other shows of its genre – functions as a form of ‘governmentality’ through which forms of neoliberal subjectivity are propagated and pedagogically enforced on ‘bad subjects’. However, the show surpasses the genre conventions by questioning the authority of the norms and values (i.e. middle-class, cosmopolitan and urban values) that are being propagated and in letting the values held by the working-class men on the show eventually be victorious and accepted within the narrative. The purpose of this article is to try to make sense of a popular cultural artefact such as Real Men against the background of the crisis of legitimacy for the neoliberal ideology and the rise of (right-wing) populism, and to try to understand how the forms and genres of popular culture transform and respond to this changing political context. © The Author(s) 2018.

The cultural significance of reality television is based on its claim to represent social reality. On the level of genre, we might argue that reality television constructs a modern day panorama of the social world and its inhabitants and that it thus makes populations appear. This article presents a class analysis of the population of reality television in which 1 year of television programming and over 1000 participants have been analysed. The purpose of this analysis is to deepen our understanding of the cultural and ideological dimensions of reality television as a genre, and to give a more detailed picture of the imaginaries of class in this form of television. The results bring new knowledge about the reality television genre and modify or revise assumptions from previous studies. Most importantly, we show that upper-class people and people belonging to the social elite are strongly over-represented in the genre and appear much more commonly in reality television than in other genres. This result opens up a re-evaluation of the cultural and ideological dimensions of the reality television genre

This article explores the way in which producers of digital cultural commons use new production models based on openness and sharing to interact with and adapt to existing structures such as the capitalist market and the economies of public cultural funding. Through an ethnographic exploration of two cases of open-source animation film production – Gooseberry and Morevna, formed around the 3D graphics Blender and the 2D graphics Synfig communities – we explore how sharing and production of commons generates values and relationships which trigger the movement of producers, software and films between different fields of cultural production and different moral economies – those of the capitalist market, the institutions of public funding and the commons. Our theoretical approach expands the concept of ‘moral economies’ from critical political economy with ‘regimes of value’ from anthropological work on value production, which, we argue, is useful to overcome dichotomous representations of exploitation or romanticization of the commons.

The authors of this paper revitalize classic work on gift economies, exploring the ways in which the fiscal and moral economies are articulated together in commons-based production. Through a multi-sited ethnographic study of open source animation film-making communities tracing the movement between actors and objects across different regimes of value, the authors describe negotiated transitions from commons to commodity and back again. They argue that when engaging with producers’ own accounts of their community-based processes and the agonistic ethics holding sway there, we are better able to see the fluid dynamics of decommodification and recommodification taking place within commons production integrated into the commodity-based capitalist economic environment.

This paper explores the way in which producers of digital cultural commons use new production models based on openness and sharing to interact with and adapt to existing structures such as the capitalist market and the economies of public cultural funding. By an ethnographic exploration of two cases ofopen-source animation film production - Gooseberry and Morevna formed around the 3D graphics Blender and the 2D graphics Synfig communities we explore how sharing and production of commons generate values and relationships which trigger the move of producers, software and films between different fields of cultural production and different moral economies – those of the capitalist market, the institutions of public funding and the commons. Our theoretical approach expands the concept of 'moral economies' from critical political economy with 'regimes of value' from anthropological work on value production which we argue is useful to overcome dichotomous representations of exploitation or romanticisation of the commons.