PUBLICATIONS

This article discusses how Shosana Zuboff’s critical theory of surveillance capitalism may help to understand and underpin responsible practice and innovation in mobile journalism. Zuboff conceptualizes surveillance capitalism as a new economic logic made possible by ICT and its architecture for extracting and trading data products of user behavior and preferences. In Europe, the framework of responsible research and innovation is promoted as an approach that should inform practice and policy for research and innovation to align with societal values and democratic principles. While the adoption of smartphones as a key tool for producing and consuming news has great potential for innovation, it can also feed behavioral data into the supply chain of surveillance capitalism. The article discusses how potentially harmful implications can be met on an individual and organizational level to contribute to a more responsible adoption of mobile technologies in journalism.

Salzmann, Anja; Frode Guribye and Astrid Gynnild. 2021. “Mobile Journalists as Traceable Data Objects: Surveillance Capitalism and Responsible Innovation in Mobile Journalism” Media and Communication 9 (2) In press.

The classic grounded theory of remote female fixation provides new knowledge on the illegal sharing of sexualized images of young girls in networked online communities. This sharing occurs without consent and usually without the girls knowing about it. The data were gathered from 20 different online comment sections of the Norwegian branch of a global, anonymous community with a reputation for extensive sharing of nude images of young women. It emerged from the data that the forum's users had an ongoing need to master their own female fixations, which they satisfied through the process of remote female fixation. In this process, forum users engaged in four interdependent strategies: continuous competing, loyal including, irregular rewarding,and tactical negotiating. By identifying the forum users' shared concern, this study may help explain the increasing presence of sexual abuse in digital environments.

Otteren, Hilde and Astrid Gynnild. 2021. “Remote Female Fixation—A Grounded Theory on Illegal Sharing of Nude Imagery Online” FQS: Forum Qualitative Social Research, 22 (2) in press.

Due to the visual turn in journalism and the emergence of mobile journalism, many newspaper journalists have had to change the way they work. News organizations apply different strategies to increase staff competencies in using new production tools and creating innovative content in new formats. In this paper, we investigate how such a training was experienced by 40 print editors and journalists in a German publishing house. The journalists were introduced to audio-visual storytelling and reporting with smartphones in a 2-week training course. The training arrangements were studied using participant observation and in-depth interviews, followed by a thematic analysis of the data. The study indicates that for print journalists and editors, the transition from the print to the mojo mindset depends on three dimensions: (i) mastering mojo skills, (ii) adopting visual thinking and (iii) integrating ethical and legal awareness.

Salzmann, Anja; Frode Guribye and Astrid Gynnild

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884921996284.

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Synthetic media technologies are rapidly advancing, making it easier to generate nonveridical media that look and sound increasingly realistic. So-called "deepfakes" (owing to their reliance on deep learning) often present a person saying or doing something they have not said or done. The proliferation of deepfakes creates a new challenge to the trustworthiness of visual experience and has already created negative consequences such as nonconsensual pornography, political disinformation, and financial fraud. Deepfakes can harm viewers by deceiving or intimidating, harm subjects by causing reputational damage, and harm society by undermining societal values such as trust in institutions. What can be done to mitigate these harms? It will take the efforts of many different stakeholders including platforms, journalists, and policymakers to counteract the negative effects of deepfakes. Technical experts can and should play an active role, the authors point out.

Johnson, Deborah G. and Nicholas Diakopoulos. 2021. “Communications of the ACM” 64 (3), 33-35 DOI: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3447255

Deborah G. Johnson has written the first engineering ethics textbook to use debates as the framework for presenting engineering ethics topics, this engaging, accessible survey explores the most difficult and controversial issues that engineers face in daily practice. Written by a leading scholar in the field of engineering and computer ethics, Johnson approaches engineering ethics with the premise that engineering is both a technical and a social endeavor and that ethical issues arise in the social practices of the profession that are often intertwined with technical decision making.

Johnson, Deborah G. 2020. Engineering Ethics: Contemporary and Enduring Debates. New Haven, London, Yale University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv10sm953

This book sets out cutting-edge new research and examines future prospects on 360-degree video, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) in journalism, analyzing and discussing virtual world experiments from a range of perspectives.Featuring contributions from the ViSmedia team and a diverse range of scholars, Immersive Journalism as Storytelling highlights both the opportunities and the challenges presented by this form of storytelling. The book discusses how immersive journalism has the potential to reach new audiences, change the way stories are told, and provide more interactivity within the news industry.

Uskali, Turo, Astrid Gynnild, Sarah Jones and Esa Sirkkunen. 2020. Immersive Journalism as Storytelling: Ethics, Production and Design. Routledge. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429437748

This paper by Thomas Wold presents a quantitative analysis of the most shared news stories in on social media in Norway in 2017. Social media is an important platform for news consumption. By sharing links to news stories, the contact network on social media can create its own news agenda.

Wold, Thomas. 2020. “Have you shared the news today?”. Norsk Medietidsskrift 107 (1): 1-19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18261/ISSN.0805-9535-2020-01-04

Humanoid sex robots seem to challenge the human–machine distinction because one way to engage with them is to entertain the illusion that they are human and appropriate for intimacy. This inclination is intentionally induced by robot designers, and several narratives envision and claim that robots of the future will be indistinguishable from humans. In this article Deborah Johnson is taking an anticipatory ethics approach and using critical discourse analysis, to argue that current discourse about sex robots does not adequately recognize the sociotechnical nature of humanoid sex robot development.

Johnson, Deborah G., and Mario Verdicchio. 2019. “Constructing the Meaning of Humanoid Sex Robots”. Int J of Soc Robotics. 12: 415–424. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-019-00586-z

ViSmedia team member Øyvind Vågenes newest book Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture is filled with exiting essays that’s pioneering and revelatory the insights into the phenomenon of invisibility, forging new and multi-disciplinary approaches at the intersection of aesthetics, technology, representation and politics. The chapters reveal that the invisible affects many cultural domains, from digital communication and operative images to the activism of social movements, as well as to identity, race, gender and class issues. Whether the subject is comic books, photographic provocations, biometric and brainwave sensing technologies, letters, or a cinematic diary.

Grønstad, Asbjørn and Øyvind Vågenes. 2019. Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture. Edited book. Palgrave Macmillan

In this interview by Øyvind Vågnes, media scholar and MIT professor, Lisa Parks shares her reflections on a range of questions that remain central to her research. Including what television is at the present moment and might become in the future; how satellites could be treated as part of an integrated history of media; the compartmentalizations of academia; research on surveillance, and the relationship between surveillance and capitalism; the invisibility and materiality of infrastructure, and the significance of field-based research practices; the entanglement of scholarship and social engagement; the emerging Silicon Valley satellite industry, vertical mediation and political resistance; and the urgency of environmental media studies.

Parks, Lisa. “Televisual Epistemologies and Beyond.” Journal of Visual Culture 18 (2): 234–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412919864309.

Nicholas Diakopoulos and Deborah Johnson goals behind this article are to stimulate reflection on the ethics and governance of emerging technologies. Specifically, focused on the use of these technologies in the context of the 2020 U.S. election. With this article Diakopoulos and Johnson seeks to encourage debate about potential responses by various stakeholders, like: social media platforms, journalists, technology developers, and policymakers. To ensure that the outcomes of democratic processes aren’t negatively impacted by deepfakes.

Diakopoulos, Nicholas and Deborah Jonson. 2019. “How could deepfakes impact the 2020 U.S. elections?”. Available at: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/how-could-deepfakes-impact-the-2020-u-s-elections/

ViSmedia team member Nicholas Diakopoulos reveals how machine learning and data mining have transformed investigative journalism. Newsbots converse with social media audiences, distributing stories and receiving feedback. Online media has become a platform for A/B testing of content, helping journalists to better understand what moves audiences. Algorithms can even draft certain kinds of stories. These techniques enable media organizations to take advantage of experiments and economies of scale, enhancing the sustainability of the fourth estate. But they also place pressure on editorial decision-making, because they allow journalists to produce more stories, sometimes better ones, but rarely both. read more here.

Diakopoulos, Nicholas. 2019. Automating the News: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Media. Massachusetts, Harvard University Press

The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies is a unique reference guide and resource on the rapidly growing and evolving field of journalism scholarship, providing credible and timely information on its key concepts, theories, and methodologies. This invaluable text includes more than 250 entries that form a comprehensive overview of the study of journalism as a distinct field. Two of ViSmedia´s team members hav contributed to this Encyclopedia, Astrid Gynnild with a chapter on Visual Journalism and Turo Uskali with a chapter on Virtual Reality Journalism.

Vos, Tim, P., et.al. 2019. The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies. Wiley Blackwell.
ISBN-13: 978-1118841679
ISBN-10: 1118841670