Göran Bolin
Biographic Data
| ID | 170944 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Göran Bolin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Göran |
| FAMILY NAME | Bolin |
| SIGNATURE | BOLIN G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Södertörn University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0216-8862 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 123 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Critical Perspectives on Communicative Ai
Current media coverage surrounding ChatGPT, LaMDA, and Luminous has brought questions about the automation of communication into the mainstream. Artificially intelligent media are no longer merely mediating instances of communication but are themselves becoming communicative participants. This has generated broad public discussion about these systems and others and the challenges they bring to domains such as education, public discourse, and jour…
The Surveillance Survival Paradox: Experiences and Imaginaries of Surveillance in a Generational and Cross-Cultural Perspective
Most previous studies on online surveillance have been conducted in long-time liberal democracies with limited experiences of explicit and intrusive state surveillance. This article explores the role of the historical legacy of totalitarianism or authoritarianism, embodied in generational experiences, in the formation of imaginaries of, and attitudes toward, contemporary state and corporate surveillance. We propose a theoretical hypothesis of the…
Communicative AI and Techno-Semiotic Mediatization: Understanding the Communicative Role of the Machine
Mediatization discourse has so far mainly been centered on media from institutional or social-constructionist approaches. The technological developments within communications industries coupled with the wider societal process of datafication might, however, beg for dusting off the smaller, although the long-time existing, technological approach to mediatization as a complement to the two other approaches, in order to understand aspects of automat…
Mediatization and Human-Machine Communication: Trajectories, Discussions, Perspectives
As research fields, mediatization and Human-Machine Communication (HMC) have distinct historical trajectories. While mediatization research is concerned with the fundamental interrelation between the transformation of media and communications and cultural and societal changes, the much younger field of HMC delves into human meaning-making in interactions with machines. However, the recent wave of “deep mediatization,” characterized by an increasi…
Toward a Datafied Mindset: Conceptualizing Digital Dynamics and Analogue Resilience
This article explores the ways in which what we call the analogue and the datafied mindsets perceive the functioning of the datafied world. Based on a qualitative interview study of two generations of media users in Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden, we present and analyze underlying patterns in participants' media attitudes and related practices. We show that belonging to a media generation does not always produce a homogeneous mindset or a uniform …
Conducting Cross-Cultural Online Audience Research With Two Generations: Methodological Experiences and Reflections From the Pandemic Context
This paper discusses methodological, ethical, and empirical problematics related to forced changes in the research design of a comparative project during the Covid-19 pandemic, and its wider implications for future online audience research. The larger project aims to understand media users’ attitudes towards corporate and state surveillance in countries with different historical surveillance regimes: Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden. In a mixed-meth…
Contemporary Challenges in Mediatisation Research
The return of propaganda: Historical legacies and contemporary conceptualisations
In this introductory article, we discuss the rise of the “classical” theories of propaganda, starting with an historical exposé of the concept, which traces its roots and trajectory through the field of academic analysis. Propaganda is then discussed in relation to other adjacent concepts such as soft power, public diplomacy, nation branding, fake news, and so on. In a third section, the concept of propaganda is discussed in relation to the prese…
Managing Meaning in Ukraine: Information, Communication, and Narration since the Euromaidan Revolution
Conducting Online Focus Group Interviews With Two Generations: Methodological Experiences and Reflections From the Pandemic Context
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, many research projects were forced to adapt their design and conduct interviews online. This paper discusses the benefits and challenges of using online focus groups with participants representing different generations and cultural and social backgrounds. Based on the researchers' experiences and field notes from a three-country comparative project, aiming at analysing the extent to which previous experience …
The Value Dynamics of Data Capitalism: Cultural Production and Consumption in a Datafied World
The metaphor that ‘data is the new oil’ points to the perception of data as a valuable resource in the form of raw material for algorithmic processing at the centre of data capitalism and its underlying process of datafication. While many point to broader consequences of datafication for social life there is still a need for analytical models to understand the complexity, scale, and dynamics behind these transformations. To focus on data as value…
Who is afraid of dataveillance? Attitudes toward online surveillance in a cross-cultural and generational perspective
This article compares surveillance-related experiences and attitudes of two generations of media users in countries with different historical surveillance regimes (Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden) and analyzes the predictors of the attitudes toward contemporary surveillance. A large-scale online survey ( N = 3221) reveals that attitudes toward online state and corporate surveillance are interrelated; the two attitudinal components are, however, gen…
Disruption and transformation in media events theory: The case of the Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine
Media events, Dayan and Katz argue, compose a narrative genre that follows specific structural principles and narrative tropes and that works toward societal integration. However, a specific subset of media events is labelled transformative, and these work towards societal change. In this article, we point to an unresolved tension between transformative events and what has subsequently been introduced as disruptive events. Our discussion builds o…
The PowerPoint Nation: Branding an Imagined Commodity
In the formation of the modern nation state and the social imaginary of nationalism in the nineteenth century, the media and representational practices have, among most scholars, been ascribed a prominent position. The question is, however, how have changes in media technologies, from mass media to digital and interactive personal media, impacted on the national imaginaries over the past few decades? This article discusses what happens with the s…
Audience-metric continuity? Approaching the meaning of measurement in the digital everyday
This article argues for an expansion of existing studies on the meaning of metrics in digital environments by evaluating a methodology tested in a pilot study to analyse audience responses to metrics of social media profiles. The pilot study used the software tool Facebook Demetricator by artist Ben Grosser in combination with follow-up interviews. In line with Grosser’s intentions, the software indeed provoked reflection among the users. In this…
Making Media: Production, Practices, and Professions
Generational “we-sense”, “they-sense” and narrative: An epistemological approach to media and social change
A classic epistemological problem in the social sciences is how to analyse and understand social change. In media and communication studies, for example, the concept of mediatisation has sparked off such a debate, since one of the main criticisms against the approach is that researchers rather take change for granted without being able to empirically establish if and how change has occurred. In this article is suggested a model for analysing soci…
Media and Communications
Developments in digital technologies over the last 30 years have expanded massively human beings' capacity to communicate across time and space (Section 13.1).Media infrastructures have simultaneously acquired huge complexity.By "media" we mean technologies for the production, dissemination, and reception of communication, but also the contents distributed through those technologies and the institutions associated with their production, dissemina…
Media, communication and the struggle for social progress
This article discusses the role of media and communications in contributing to social progress, as elaborated in a landmark international project – the International Panel on Social Progress. First, it analyses how media and digital platforms have contributed to global inequality by examining media access and infrastructure across world regions. Second, it looks at media governance and the different mechanisms of corporatized control over media p…
The soft power of commercialised nationalist symbols: Using media analysis to understand nation branding campaigns
Since the late 1990s, nation branding has attracted a lot of attention from academics, professional consultants and government actors. The ideas and practices of nation branding are frequently presented by branding advocates as necessary and even inevitable in the light of changing dynamics of political power and influence in a globalised and media-saturated world. In this context, some have argued that nation branding is a way to reduce internat…
Dynamics Of Mediatization: Institutional Change and Everyday Transformations in a Digital Age
Structure
This entry describes the various ways in which structure either has been theorized or has been an ontological assumption underlying the analysis of communication. Six approaches to structure are accounted for: economic (or political economic), social structures, system theory and theories of network societies as theorized from within the social sciences, and linguistic and cultural structures, emanating from the humanities. The entry ends with an…
Media Generations: Experience, Identity and Mediatised Social Change
While the analysis of generations has been central in the sociological understanding of social change, the role of the media in this process has only been acknowledged as an important feature during the last couple of decades. Building on quantitative and qualitative comparative research, Media Generations analyses the role of the media in the formation of generational experience, identity and habitus, and how mediated nostalgia is an important p…
Value and the Media: Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets
Value is seldom discussed in its own right, though it is of utmost importance to our relations with media texts and cultural objects, as we constantly make judgements of various kinds with respect to them. This book focuses on how value - aesthetic, political and social and economic value - is produced in contemporary media and cultural production. Contending that value is not constituted by the essence of a thing, but is rather produced in socia…
Media Generations: Experience, Identity and Mediatized Social Change
The soft power of commercialised nationalist symbols: Using media analysis to understand nation branding campaigns
Since the late 1990s, nation branding has attracted a lot of attention from academics, professional consultants and government actors. The ideas and practices of nation branding are frequently presented by branding advocates as necessary and even inevitable in the light of changing dynamics of political power and influence in a globalised and media-saturated world. In this context, some have argued that nation branding is a way to reduce internat…
Passion and nostalgia in generational media experiences
One component in the generational experience strongly related to media is the intimate and often passionate relation that is developed towards media technologies and content from one’s formative youth period: musical genres and stars, as well as reproduction technologies such as the vinyl record, music cassette tapes, comics and other now dead media forms. Passion, however, is a dialectic concept that not only refers to the joyful desire and inte…
Visions of Europe: Cultural technologies of nation-states
With the expansion of the European Union eastwards, nations have adopted various strategies for being included in the European community. This article discusses examples of cultural technologies used by post-communist countries in aligning with Western Europe. It is argued that the phenomenon is in fact not new, as the marketing of nations has occurred since at least the World’s Fairs of the 19th century. However, while the World’s Fairs addresse…
Conducting Online Focus Group Interviews With Two Generations: Methodological Experiences and Reflections From the Pandemic Context
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, many research projects were forced to adapt their design and conduct interviews online. This paper discusses the benefits and challenges of using online focus groups with participants representing different generations and cultural and social backgrounds. Based on the researchers' experiences and field notes from a three-country comparative project, aiming at analysing the extent to which previous experience …
Heuristics of the algorithm: Big Data, user interpretation and institutional translation
Intelligence on mass media audiences was founded on representative statistical samples, analysed by statisticians at the market departments of media corporations. The techniques for aggregating user data in the age of pervasive and ubiquitous personal media (e.g. laptops, smartphones, credit cards/swipe cards and radio-frequency identification) build on large aggregates of information (Big Data) analysed by algorithms that transform data into com…
Television Journalism, Politics, and Entertainment: Power and Autonomy in the Field of Television Journalism
This article discusses two trends in the debates about contemporary television journalism. First, journalism is said to be increasingly subsumed an economic logic, privileging entertainment before serious journalistic practices. Most often, this is framed as if entertainment is eating its way into serious journalism, affecting it negatively and thus being detrimental for the political public sphere and political reasoning. Second, it is often poi…
Having a soul or choosing a face? Nation branding, identity and cosmopolitan imagination
If nation branding is about constructing and promoting national identity, what kind of ‘identity’ could it possibly be? This article analyses how the branded nation qualitatively differs from earlier forms of imagined communities by focusing on the tension between inward- and outward-directed dimensions of nation branding. A particular focus is placed on the concept of ‘identity’, which, it is argued, is insufficiently problematized in previous r…
Notes From Inside the Factory: The Production and Consumption of Signs and Sign Value in Media Industries
This article aims at giving some theoretical reflections and possible clarifications to theories on production and consumption of symbolic goods and commodities. It is argued that the production of sign commodities generate various kinds of values, which also differ from those produced in material commodity production. With the example of the television audience this article puts forth the idea of the audience as a pure sign commodity, a commodit…
Domesticating the mobile in Estonia
This article compares the dissemination and usage of mobile phones in post-Soviet, transitional Estonia with patterns in Sweden (a long-time Western democracy). Using a domestication perspective, the study examines the use of voice calls compared with texting by youths (aged 18—24) to probe the role of Estonia’s transition from a state-controlled to a market economy in shaping mobile usage. Results show that while the dissemination of mobiles amo…
Who is afraid of dataveillance? Attitudes toward online surveillance in a cross-cultural and generational perspective
This article compares surveillance-related experiences and attitudes of two generations of media users in countries with different historical surveillance regimes (Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden) and analyzes the predictors of the attitudes toward contemporary surveillance. A large-scale online survey ( N = 3221) reveals that attitudes toward online state and corporate surveillance are interrelated; the two attitudinal components are, however, gen…
Media, communication and the struggle for social progress
This article discusses the role of media and communications in contributing to social progress, as elaborated in a landmark international project – the International Panel on Social Progress. First, it analyses how media and digital platforms have contributed to global inequality by examining media access and infrastructure across world regions. Second, it looks at media governance and the different mechanisms of corporatized control over media p…
Symbolic Production and Value in Media Industries
This article discusses value creation within the fields of cultural production. It departs from Bourdieu's field model, and seeks to develop it to fit unrestricted cultural production, for example television production. Bourdieu for the most part discussed the production of value (or forms of capital) in relation to fields of restricted cultural production, that is, within the fine arts (e.g. art, literature). Although one of his best known works…
Digitization, Multiplatform Texts, and Audience Reception
This article reflects on the consequences of digitization for multiplatform television/media production, the ways in which it affects textual expressions, and how this might have a bearing on changing audience roles. It takes its departure empirically from two Swedish examples of multiplatform production: The Truth About Marika and Labyrint, produced by SVT and TV4, respectively. It is argued that multiplatform media texts challenge our conceptio…
The return of propaganda: Historical legacies and contemporary conceptualisations
In this introductory article, we discuss the rise of the “classical” theories of propaganda, starting with an historical exposé of the concept, which traces its roots and trajectory through the field of academic analysis. Propaganda is then discussed in relation to other adjacent concepts such as soft power, public diplomacy, nation branding, fake news, and so on. In a third section, the concept of propaganda is discussed in relation to the prese…
Disruption and transformation in media events theory: The case of the Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine
Media events, Dayan and Katz argue, compose a narrative genre that follows specific structural principles and narrative tropes and that works toward societal integration. However, a specific subset of media events is labelled transformative, and these work towards societal change. In this article, we point to an unresolved tension between transformative events and what has subsequently been introduced as disruptive events. Our discussion builds o…
Audience-metric continuity? Approaching the meaning of measurement in the digital everyday
This article argues for an expansion of existing studies on the meaning of metrics in digital environments by evaluating a methodology tested in a pilot study to analyse audience responses to metrics of social media profiles. The pilot study used the software tool Facebook Demetricator by artist Ben Grosser in combination with follow-up interviews. In line with Grosser’s intentions, the software indeed provoked reflection among the users. In this…
Themed Section Introduction: Research on Youth and Youth Cultures
The Value of Being Public Service: The Shifting of Power Relations in Swedish Television Production
The value of being public service : The shifting of power relations in Swedish television production
Producing cultures - The construction of forms and contents of contemporary youth cultures
The Surveillance Survival Paradox: Experiences and Imaginaries of Surveillance in a Generational and Cross-Cultural Perspective
Most previous studies on online surveillance have been conducted in long-time liberal democracies with limited experiences of explicit and intrusive state surveillance. This article explores the role of the historical legacy of totalitarianism or authoritarianism, embodied in generational experiences, in the formation of imaginaries of, and attitudes toward, contemporary state and corporate surveillance. We propose a theoretical hypothesis of the…
The PowerPoint Nation: Branding an Imagined Commodity
In the formation of the modern nation state and the social imaginary of nationalism in the nineteenth century, the media and representational practices have, among most scholars, been ascribed a prominent position. The question is, however, how have changes in media technologies, from mass media to digital and interactive personal media, impacted on the national imaginaries over the past few decades? This article discusses what happens with the s…
Beware! Rubbish! Popular culture and strategies of distinction
Medieetnografiska kulturstudier: Metodologiska problem inom medieforskningen
In his article Göran Bolin discusses the implications of introducing a specific concept of media ethnography as has been suggested by Kirsten Drotner. Against a historical background of audence studies within the field of (mass) communication studies and related disciplines he argues — against Drotner's and others' holistic demand for media ethnography to comprise all aspects of everyday life — that to make sense media ethnography has to be groun…
Beware! Rubbish! Popular culture and strategies of distinction
Readjusting the agenda: Reply to Jan Olsson
Journal Article Readjusting the agenda: reply to Jan Olsson Get access Goran Bolin, Goran Bolin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Michael Forsman Michael Forsman Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 39, Issue 1, Spring 1998, Pages 91–92, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/39.1.91 Published: 01 March 1998
Producing cultures - The construction of forms and contents of contemporary youth cultures
Themed Section Introduction: Research on Youth and Youth Cultures
The Value of Being Public Service: The Shifting of Power Relations in Swedish Television Production
The value of being public service : The shifting of power relations in Swedish television production
Notes From Inside the Factory: The Production and Consumption of Signs and Sign Value in Media Industries
This article aims at giving some theoretical reflections and possible clarifications to theories on production and consumption of symbolic goods and commodities. It is argued that the production of sign commodities generate various kinds of values, which also differ from those produced in material commodity production. With the example of the television audience this article puts forth the idea of the audience as a pure sign commodity, a commodit…
En form av television. Globaliseringen av nationell TV-kultur
Det populære svenske spil- og underholdningsprogram, Bingolotto, har været vist på national svensk tv lige så længe der har været kommer- ciel tv i Sverige. Programmet har haft skiftende succe siden starten i 1991 og havde på sit højdepunkt over 2 milllioner seere. Artiklen be- skriver Bingolotto som et særligt format inden for spil- og legeprogram- mer. Det sker gennem en diskussion af formatbegrebet i forhold til be- grebet genre, og gennem en …
Visions of Europe: Cultural technologies of nation-states
With the expansion of the European Union eastwards, nations have adopted various strategies for being included in the European community. This article discusses examples of cultural technologies used by post-communist countries in aligning with Western Europe. It is argued that the phenomenon is in fact not new, as the marketing of nations has occurred since at least the World’s Fairs of the 19th century. However, while the World’s Fairs addresse…
Symbolic Production and Value in Media Industries
This article discusses value creation within the fields of cultural production. It departs from Bourdieu's field model, and seeks to develop it to fit unrestricted cultural production, for example television production. Bourdieu for the most part discussed the production of value (or forms of capital) in relation to fields of restricted cultural production, that is, within the fine arts (e.g. art, literature). Although one of his best known works…
Digitization, Multiplatform Texts, and Audience Reception
This article reflects on the consequences of digitization for multiplatform television/media production, the ways in which it affects textual expressions, and how this might have a bearing on changing audience roles. It takes its departure empirically from two Swedish examples of multiplatform production: The Truth About Marika and Labyrint, produced by SVT and TV4, respectively. It is argued that multiplatform media texts challenge our conceptio…
Domesticating the mobile in Estonia
This article compares the dissemination and usage of mobile phones in post-Soviet, transitional Estonia with patterns in Sweden (a long-time Western democracy). Using a domestication perspective, the study examines the use of voice calls compared with texting by youths (aged 18—24) to probe the role of Estonia’s transition from a state-controlled to a market economy in shaping mobile usage. Results show that while the dissemination of mobiles amo…
The Forms of Value: Problems of Convertibility in Field Theory
Media production in late capitalism is often measured in terms of economic value. If value is defined as the worth of a thing, a standard or measure, being the result of social praxis and negotiation between producers and consumers in various combinations, it follows that this worth can be of other kinds than the mere economic. This is, for example, the reasoning behind field theory (Bourdieu), where the generation of field-specific capital (valu…
Introduction to the Special Section “Critical Theory and Political Economy of the Internet (Nordmedia 2011)”
This paper is an introduction to tripleC’s special section “Critical Theory and Political Economy of the Internet” that presents papers from a session at the Nordmedia Conference 2011 (August 11-13, 2011, University of Akureyri, Iceland)
Television Journalism, Politics, and Entertainment: Power and Autonomy in the Field of Television Journalism
This article discusses two trends in the debates about contemporary television journalism. First, journalism is said to be increasingly subsumed an economic logic, privileging entertainment before serious journalistic practices. Most often, this is framed as if entertainment is eating its way into serious journalism, affecting it negatively and thus being detrimental for the political public sphere and political reasoning. Second, it is often poi…
Nationen som vara och gemenskap: Identitet, agens och publik inom nationsmarknadsföring
Nation-branding is a dynamic and rapidly developing practice promoting or readjustingimages of a nation-state for tourists or investors. New, postcolonial nation-statesseem to have a particular need to build new images of themselves in the eyes of thewider world. However, since they have a short history of sovereignty, these statessimultaneously need to build social solidarity and community at home if they are toform the basis needed for building…
Passion and nostalgia in generational media experiences
One component in the generational experience strongly related to media is the intimate and often passionate relation that is developed towards media technologies and content from one’s formative youth period: musical genres and stars, as well as reproduction technologies such as the vinyl record, music cassette tapes, comics and other now dead media forms. Passion, however, is a dialectic concept that not only refers to the joyful desire and inte…
Heuristics of the algorithm: Big Data, user interpretation and institutional translation
Intelligence on mass media audiences was founded on representative statistical samples, analysed by statisticians at the market departments of media corporations. The techniques for aggregating user data in the age of pervasive and ubiquitous personal media (e.g. laptops, smartphones, credit cards/swipe cards and radio-frequency identification) build on large aggregates of information (Big Data) analysed by algorithms that transform data into com…
Structure
This entry describes the various ways in which structure either has been theorized or has been an ontological assumption underlying the analysis of communication. Six approaches to structure are accounted for: economic (or political economic), social structures, system theory and theories of network societies as theorized from within the social sciences, and linguistic and cultural structures, emanating from the humanities. The entry ends with an…
Media Generations: Experience, Identity and Mediatised Social Change
While the analysis of generations has been central in the sociological understanding of social change, the role of the media in this process has only been acknowledged as an important feature during the last couple of decades. Building on quantitative and qualitative comparative research, Media Generations analyses the role of the media in the formation of generational experience, identity and habitus, and how mediated nostalgia is an important p…
Value and the Media: Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets
Value is seldom discussed in its own right, though it is of utmost importance to our relations with media texts and cultural objects, as we constantly make judgements of various kinds with respect to them. This book focuses on how value - aesthetic, political and social and economic value - is produced in contemporary media and cultural production. Contending that value is not constituted by the essence of a thing, but is rather produced in socia…
Media Generations: Experience, Identity and Mediatized Social Change
Having a soul or choosing a face? Nation branding, identity and cosmopolitan imagination
If nation branding is about constructing and promoting national identity, what kind of ‘identity’ could it possibly be? This article analyses how the branded nation qualitatively differs from earlier forms of imagined communities by focusing on the tension between inward- and outward-directed dimensions of nation branding. A particular focus is placed on the concept of ‘identity’, which, it is argued, is insufficiently problematized in previous r…
Dynamics Of Mediatization: Institutional Change and Everyday Transformations in a Digital Age
Media and Communications
Developments in digital technologies over the last 30 years have expanded massively human beings' capacity to communicate across time and space (Section 13.1).Media infrastructures have simultaneously acquired huge complexity.By "media" we mean technologies for the production, dissemination, and reception of communication, but also the contents distributed through those technologies and the institutions associated with their production, dissemina…
Sociology (34 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Political science (20 works) · Media studies (13 works) · Media Studies and Communication (12 works) · Social Media and Politics (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (9 works)