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Open Access to Article Featured in the International Journal of E-Politics

“The Politics of Watching: Visuality and the New Media Economy”

By IGI Global on Jul 31, 2013
Contributed by Myla Merkel, Editorial Communications Coordinator

The Politics of Watching: Visuality and the New Media Economy We live in a world of digital imagery and instant news. With the ease of digital platforms, we are able to gather and circulate images immediately, empowering the world of media on another level. Gone are the times of print demand; these days we do not read our news, we watch our news.

The growth of digital technologies over the years has offered not only the ability to record and store images, but also the capability to instantly upload them to the internet; allowing nearly everyone to become image creators and news broadcasters when events occur around the world.

The most recent media frenzy was over the birth of the royal baby in England. Reporters from around the globe flocked to St. Mary’s Hospital (and camped out for days) to get the first picture of the new heir to the throne; journalists using mobile device to instantly upload pictures to related news blogs, social media, and websites. According to journalism.co.uk, BBC.com reported that the first picture of the royal baby posted on Twitter by @BBCBreaking had received more than 10,000 retweets. The Sun (a British tabloid newspaper) had 2.47 million visitors to its website on Monday as the birth was announced. The Sun’s digital editor, Derek Brown, told Journalism.co.uk:

"Our big success story though was our Baby Monitor, which was a camera fixed on the door of the Lindo Wing [in St. Mary’s Hospital] over the last week.”

The open availability of information streaming online from across the globe proposes the necessity of regulatory standards and examination of the consequences of such circumstances. In the recently released IGI Global journal article, “The Politics of Watching: Visuality and the New Media Economy”, Professor Yasmin Ibrahim of the University of London, UK states:

“The convergence of technologies and the embedding of video and audio recording devices on mobile telephony and the ability to share and publish them on a globally-connected digital platform in our everyday lives have facilitated the circulation of images on private and public spaces on the internet.”

Though a bit obsessive, the royal birth was a celebratory occasion that the public simply wanted to be a part of. Often, however, the exploited event is something more serious in nature. Ibrahim introduces his research article with an example of the media coverage of the US military killing of Osama bin Laden; he states:

“No images of the gory killing were released to the public even though images of his hiding place, his compound and bedroom were circulated widely. Mediated visuality is an intrinsic component of postmodernity where the manipulation of the image mediates our notions of reality and truth. This mediated visuality in the digital age has become even more complex in the new media environment where image capture, production and circulation have become more prevalent, pervasive, and open-ended.”

This article examines the notion of visuality in digital platforms and its consequences for postmodernity in terms of subjectivity, new forms of engagement, and disenfranchisement. In continuous support of this timely research, IGI Global is offering open access to “The Politics of Watching: Visuality and the New Media Economy”. To access the free download, please visit: https://www.igi-global.com/free-content/63031.

The article was published in the International Journal of E-Politics which establishes the foundations of e-politics as an emerging interdisciplinary area of research and practice. Edited by Dr. Celia Romm Livermore of Wayne State University, this journal offers a venue for publications that focus on theories and empirical research on the manifestations of e-politics in various contexts and environments.

Individual journal articles are also available for purchase through IGI Global's InfoSci®-OnDemand, which allows full-text searching through our entire collection of thousands of research articles, book chapters, and teaching cases.

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