RESULTS:

The article presents a recently developed typology of the diversity of online media practices in and by Belgian civil society organizations (CSOs) to enhance social engagement. Framed by the ambition to move away from utopian (and dystopian) discourses of certainty and potentiality the article’s objective is to access the enormous diversity of ways the online is put to use without imposing normative expectations about for instance participatory intensities. To generate this overview the structuring logic of the typology is used despite the loss of detail and nuance caused by the use of this bird’s-eye view-generating method. The construction of this particular typology took place in different iterative phases each with its own methodological approach. These were a theoretical phase a case study phase and a CSO survey phase. Through these iterations a two-dimensional typology was constructed grounded in the distinctions between internal internalexternal and external use and between access interaction and participation. Showing the vast diversity of civil society’s online media practices not only increases our understanding of their online use but also facilitates a more nuanced discussion of the use and importance of participatory online practices that will move away from exclusively utopian approaches or discourses of potentiality.

Review of: In Between Communication Theories through One Hundred Questions Tomas Kačerauskas and Algis Mickūnas (2020)

Cham: Springer 278 pp.

ISBN 978-3-03041-105-3 h/bk EUR 98.09

ISBN 978-3-03041-108-4 p/bk EUR 98.09

ISBN 978-3-03041-106-0 e-book EUR 74.89

Community media organisations are famously difficult to define as this media field is highly elusive and diverse even if there is a certain degree of consensus about a series of basic characteristics. One key defining component is the objective to serve its community by allowing its members to participate in self-representational processes. Yet this component raises questions about what ‘community’ means and how the community that is being served relates to other parts of society. This article studies a particular social reality – Israel – where community television is the dominant model community television production groups are separated from the actual distribution of the produced content and different configurations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ characterise political reality. Following the methodological procedures outlined in Voniati et al. (2018) a mapping of 83 Israeli community broadcasting groups was organised allowing us to flesh out the different ways in which these community broadcasting groups deal with their community/ies and the ‘other’. The analysis shows that many of these Israeli community broadcasting groups have fairly closed singular-community articulations of ‘their’ communities. They rarely engage in interactions with other communities (limiting internal diversity) and their external diversity is even more restricted with only one Arab–Israeli community broadcasting group able to be identified. The analysis did however identify a dozen groups with more open approaches towards their outer worlds and thus the potential to assume a more conflict-transformatory role.