Betto Van Waarden
Biographic Data
| ID | 3043232 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Betto Van Waarden |
| GIVEN NAMES | Betto |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Waarden |
| SIGNATURE | VAN WAARDEN B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Maastricht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0923-4706 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 11 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Technological alienation and how networked digitality constitutes a map for understanding the complexity of individual and collective consciousness
Technology is feared to foster alienation, and may even come to control us through superintelligence. Yet this fear is exacerbated by a reductionist assumption that humans are defined mentally by their intelligence. Human consciousness is broader than intelligence, but how does it actually function? This article will suggest that these two problems of technological alienation and consciousness can actually help inform each other. Going beyond the…
Politicians and Mass Media in the Age of Empire
How did politicians deal with mass communication in a rapidly changing society? And how did the performance of public politics both help and hinder democratization? In this innovative study, Betto van Waarden explores the emergence of a new type of politician within a system of transnational media politics between 1890 and the onset of the First World War. These politicians situated media management at the centre of their work, as print culture r…
Transnational Parliamentary Learning
Britain pioneered parliamentarism and public broadcasting, yet for a long time this broadcasting revealed little about parliament. Parliament and its reporting have occupied a place of prominence in British historiography, yet this historiography still misses a crucial transnational piece of the puzzle. Comparison highlights similarities and differences between the UK Parliament and its foreign counterparts, but does not yet reveal how these simi…
Structural reading
To analyze large, digitized corpora, we introduce the new approach of “structural reading”, which combines the abstraction of distant reading with the nuance of close reading. We do so by developing the method of “structural collocation analysis” (SCA) that uses metadata categories to investigate how research topics behave across texts belonging to different categories. The method combines the robustness of traditional collocation analysis with t…
Democracy (Not) on Display
Why was the British Parliament so late in broadcasting its debates? Scholars have made recommendations on parliamentary communication, analysed its effects, and described the debates and arguments on broadcasting parliament. But who was making these arguments, and what role did parliamentarians’ identities play in these debates? We show the crucial role that partisanship—but also the distinctions between government and opposition, senior and juni…
The concept of an 'anticelebrity
Twenty-first-century politics have been defined by celebrity leaders such as Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, and Barack Obama. How have ‘traditional’ politicians like ‘Mutti Merkel’, who embody the opposite of star status, still managed to compete with these celebrity politicians in an attention economy in which politicians continuously vie for media exposure? Scholarship on concepts such as ‘mediatisation’, ‘personalisation’, and ‘celebritisation’…
His Political Life Story Told in Pictures’
This article argues that the increasing use of press images around 1900 contributed to the construction of the political persona of the British Statesman Joseph Chamberlain. These images fused scenes from his public and private life and, paradoxically, the new focus on his private characteristics reinforced his public role. His private life did not replace his public side, nor was the private unrelated to politics as celebrity scholarship suggest…
A Colonial Celebrity in the New Attention Economy
In 1899, the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes went to Berlin to negotiate about his fantastical ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ telegraph and railway scheme with his former nemesis, the German emperor Wilhelm II. Why did this initiative of Rhodes, who was held responsible for the disastrous Jameson Raid and no longer occupied any official position, receive so much coverage and legitimacy in the international press? Despite the vast scholarship on Rhodes, there i…
The Mediatization of Political Personae, 1880s–1930s
status: Published
Demands of a transnational public sphere
Scholarship on media and politics presumes a ‘mediatization’ of politics over time, which overlooks the evolution of a mediatized public sphere that shaped people’s understandings of what actually constituted politics. This article investigates the public sphere to demonstrate how it created expectations for politicians and journalists within the process of the mediatization of politics. To understand how political behaviour changed as a result o…
John Stuart Mill on Civil Service Recruitment and the Relation between Bureaucracy and Democracy
As a civil servant in the East India Company and witness to government expansion and reorganization in the mid-nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill developed an interest in civil service reform. In an essay supporting the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report and his later political treatises, Mill argued for competitive civil service recruitment. These writings have been relatively neglected by Mill scholars, but I posit that they elucidate a conteste…
The Mediatization of Political Personae, 1880s–1930s
status: Published
Demands of a transnational public sphere
Scholarship on media and politics presumes a ‘mediatization’ of politics over time, which overlooks the evolution of a mediatized public sphere that shaped people’s understandings of what actually constituted politics. This article investigates the public sphere to demonstrate how it created expectations for politicians and journalists within the process of the mediatization of politics. To understand how political behaviour changed as a result o…
John Stuart Mill on Civil Service Recruitment and the Relation between Bureaucracy and Democracy
As a civil servant in the East India Company and witness to government expansion and reorganization in the mid-nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill developed an interest in civil service reform. In an essay supporting the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report and his later political treatises, Mill argued for competitive civil service recruitment. These writings have been relatively neglected by Mill scholars, but I posit that they elucidate a conteste…
The concept of an 'anticelebrity
Twenty-first-century politics have been defined by celebrity leaders such as Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, and Barack Obama. How have ‘traditional’ politicians like ‘Mutti Merkel’, who embody the opposite of star status, still managed to compete with these celebrity politicians in an attention economy in which politicians continuously vie for media exposure? Scholarship on concepts such as ‘mediatisation’, ‘personalisation’, and ‘celebritisation’…
John Stuart Mill on Civil Service Recruitment and the Relation between Bureaucracy and Democracy
As a civil servant in the East India Company and witness to government expansion and reorganization in the mid-nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill developed an interest in civil service reform. In an essay supporting the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report and his later political treatises, Mill argued for competitive civil service recruitment. These writings have been relatively neglected by Mill scholars, but I posit that they elucidate a conteste…
Demands of a transnational public sphere
Scholarship on media and politics presumes a ‘mediatization’ of politics over time, which overlooks the evolution of a mediatized public sphere that shaped people’s understandings of what actually constituted politics. This article investigates the public sphere to demonstrate how it created expectations for politicians and journalists within the process of the mediatization of politics. To understand how political behaviour changed as a result o…
His Political Life Story Told in Pictures’
This article argues that the increasing use of press images around 1900 contributed to the construction of the political persona of the British Statesman Joseph Chamberlain. These images fused scenes from his public and private life and, paradoxically, the new focus on his private characteristics reinforced his public role. His private life did not replace his public side, nor was the private unrelated to politics as celebrity scholarship suggest…
A Colonial Celebrity in the New Attention Economy
In 1899, the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes went to Berlin to negotiate about his fantastical ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ telegraph and railway scheme with his former nemesis, the German emperor Wilhelm II. Why did this initiative of Rhodes, who was held responsible for the disastrous Jameson Raid and no longer occupied any official position, receive so much coverage and legitimacy in the international press? Despite the vast scholarship on Rhodes, there i…
The Mediatization of Political Personae, 1880s–1930s
status: Published
The concept of an 'anticelebrity
Twenty-first-century politics have been defined by celebrity leaders such as Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, and Barack Obama. How have ‘traditional’ politicians like ‘Mutti Merkel’, who embody the opposite of star status, still managed to compete with these celebrity politicians in an attention economy in which politicians continuously vie for media exposure? Scholarship on concepts such as ‘mediatisation’, ‘personalisation’, and ‘celebritisation’…
Structural reading
To analyze large, digitized corpora, we introduce the new approach of “structural reading”, which combines the abstraction of distant reading with the nuance of close reading. We do so by developing the method of “structural collocation analysis” (SCA) that uses metadata categories to investigate how research topics behave across texts belonging to different categories. The method combines the robustness of traditional collocation analysis with t…
Democracy (Not) on Display
Why was the British Parliament so late in broadcasting its debates? Scholars have made recommendations on parliamentary communication, analysed its effects, and described the debates and arguments on broadcasting parliament. But who was making these arguments, and what role did parliamentarians’ identities play in these debates? We show the crucial role that partisanship—but also the distinctions between government and opposition, senior and juni…
Politicians and Mass Media in the Age of Empire
How did politicians deal with mass communication in a rapidly changing society? And how did the performance of public politics both help and hinder democratization? In this innovative study, Betto van Waarden explores the emergence of a new type of politician within a system of transnational media politics between 1890 and the onset of the First World War. These politicians situated media management at the centre of their work, as print culture r…
Transnational Parliamentary Learning
Britain pioneered parliamentarism and public broadcasting, yet for a long time this broadcasting revealed little about parliament. Parliament and its reporting have occupied a place of prominence in British historiography, yet this historiography still misses a crucial transnational piece of the puzzle. Comparison highlights similarities and differences between the UK Parliament and its foreign counterparts, but does not yet reveal how these simi…
Technological alienation and how networked digitality constitutes a map for understanding the complexity of individual and collective consciousness
Technology is feared to foster alienation, and may even come to control us through superintelligence. Yet this fear is exacerbated by a reductionist assumption that humans are defined mentally by their intelligence. Human consciousness is broader than intelligence, but how does it actually function? This article will suggest that these two problems of technological alienation and consciousness can actually help inform each other. Going beyond the…
Law (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Media studies (6 works) · Political economy (5 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · History (3 works) · History (3 works)