Fredrik Stiernstedt
Biographic Data
| ID | 375426 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fredrik Stiernstedt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fredrik |
| FAMILY NAME | Stiernstedt |
| SIGNATURE | STIERNSTEDT F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Södertörn University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5247-8212 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 135 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Expressive distrust
This article introduces the concept of expressive distrust to address persistent puzzles in media trust research. Drawing on a qualitative interview study with Swedish audience members who publicly criticize news media, we argue that distrust is not only an attitudinal stance but also a performative practice shaped by identity, group belonging, and political strategy. Expressive distrust refers to signals of distrust that serve purposes beyond ev…
Vanishing act
Although it has been said for some decades that printed newspapers are dying, they are still in existence; however, Swedish newspapers have entered a new era. Throughout the country, the distribution of printed newspapers is slowly ceasing. In this article, we trace the process of the disappearance of printed news through ethnographic field work engaging with the perspectives of the newspaper industry, readers, and civil society. Conceptualizing …
‘A love for the people’
Public service media (PSM) across Europe face ongoing challenges related to declining audience use, particularly among younger generations, who increasingly turn to social media platforms and commercial media. These developments have often been interpreted as signalling a crisis of legitimacy of PSM and their public value. This paper explores such assumptions by examining how young people themselves understand, experience, and articulate the valu…
Digital vulnerabilities
Recent global events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, wars and migration streams, have highlighted the promise of digital infrastructures while also showcasing how dependent we are on digital systems for accessing welfare services such as healthcare, social services and education, as well as for accessing public service media. Notably, in the context of welfare provision, different people and social groups are affected in distinct ways by such d…
What Do Media Audiences Mean When They Talk About Media Trust? An Open-ended Approach to How Audiences Interpret the “Trust-question
While studies of media trust that rely on survey data and statistical analysis give us valuable information, there is some uncertainty about what exactly is being measured with these study designs. There is a need for more inductive and qualitative studies that can help us develop our understanding of the concept and phenomena of trust as such. In this article, we present an analysis of a qualitative interview study (N = 97) with open-ended quest…
Conceptualisations and analyses of distrust and mistrust in news media
This article provides a comprehensive review of research on distrust towards news media and journalism, a topic that has gained significant attention in recent years due to declining institutional trust and the rise of political disinformation. We analyse existing literature focusing on how media distrust has been studied and conceptualised, its explanations, and its consequences. We highlight the conceptual diversity and methodological plurality…
Classics in Media Theory
Does it Make a Difference
Previous research has concluded that the working-class is largely invisible on television. When the working-class is displayed; however, common frames highlight moral shortcomings and lack of responsibility. This study asks what difference such representations make. The study relies on cultivation analysis and a survey of the adult Swedish population to understand the extent to which heavy television viewers provide “television answers” in their …
The Messenger is the Medium
In this article, we explore the history of Swedish newspaper carriers through the lens of the union struggles within the Swedish Transport Workers’ Union. This focus allows us to make visible the influence of a profession that has largely been overlooked in media history. Mobilizing around working conditions, the workers put pressure on the newspapers in terms of the size and weight of the papers with consequences for the editorial work. There wa…
Media resentment
Building on an interview study from Sweden (n = 80), this article develops the concept of media resentment as a tool for understanding contemporary developments such as the diminished trust in news media and journalism. We view media resentment as a complex of feelings and ideas that are both individual and social, embodied, and ideal. Media resentment is defined as the feeling that the media – intentionally or unintentionally – are denying you o…
Women’s struggle and media reform
This article contributes to a social history of Swedish broadcasting through an analysis of a movement for media reform: the Swedish Women’s Associations’ Radio Committee, formed in 1933 and operating until 1940. The committee was a joint effort by many established women’s organisations in Sweden, formed with the goal of strengthening the role of women in the developing public service radio, and especially providing a platform for women to raise …
Prison Media
How prisoners serve as media laborers, while the prison serves as a testing ground for new media technologies. Prisons are not typically known for cutting-edge media technologies. Yet from photography in the nineteenth century to AI-enhanced tracking cameras today, there is a long history of prisons being used as a testing ground for technologies that are later adopted by the general public. If we recognize the prison as a central site for the de…
Trust and the Media
This article provides a discussion of some of the recent research on media trust focusing on arguments for why media trust matters. What are the arguments for why trust is important? Are there reasons to accept these arguments? We identify three distinct arguments in the literature. First, that it is important for media organizations and for the media as an industry. Secondly, that media trust is essential for democratic citizenship and for bring…
Normative foundations of media welfare
What does media welfare mean from a normative perspective? The notion of media welfare and “the media welfare state” has mainly been used descriptively, to depict the particular way in which the media are organized in the Nordic welfare states. In this article, we explore media welfare from a normative perspective. Our intention is to open up a discussion about the normative and political implications of the notion of media welfare and to bring t…
Media policy attitudes and political attitudes
Previous research has neglected media audiences’ and citizens’ opinions on how the media should be organized, how they should function in society and what individual, corporate and state responsibilities should be in regard to these questions. In an attempt to understand the relationship between citizens’ broader political attitudes and their attitudes on media-related politics and responsibilities, this study uses a survey (n = 2003) of the adul…
The media welfare state
During the last decades the Nordic media model has been challenged by neoliberal policy and welfare retrenchment. This study asks about the extent to which the values, functions and institutions of the “media welfare state” are supported by the adult Swedish citizenry, despite political mobilization against it. Drawing on a national survey ( n = 2003) this study shows that the media welfare state is generally well-supported by the population. Usi…
Prison papers
This article engages with the history of Swedish prison papers, situating them as alternative media within the broader media landscape shaped by the emergence and dismantling of the welfare state. The article not only aims to give a descriptive account of the history of Swedish prison papers but also builds and further develops theorizations of alternative media by constructing them not in opposition to established media but as in dialogue and ex…
The Prison Media Complex
Prisons are a recurring topic and backdrop in the popular culture of the Global North. They often serve as spectacular environments that seem far removed from most people’s everyday lives. This article develops the notion of the prison media complex and discusses material entanglements between prisons and private media industries via the production of media technologies, consumption of communication, and technology development in the prison secto…
Prison Tech
This article explores the ways in which prisons are imagined as sites of technology development. By attending to expos that showcase prison technologies and constitute “live theatres of technology” (L. Cornfeld, 2018), we carve out ambivalent sociotechnical imaginaries of technological backwardness that are combined with the idea of radical technological innovation to reform the justice system. In doing so, we highlight the prison as one site of …
The voices we trust
This article explores the question of trust in news and information about the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus of the article is on trust in radio news and the data are collected in Sweden during spring 2020. Two questions are asked: (1) to what extent do people in Sweden express trust in the radio as a medium, and radio news and information as a form of content? (2) How do people themselves explain and discuss their trust in the radio as a medium an…
Free Churches of the Air
Swedish community radio started in 1979 and was the first type of broadcast to be organised outside of the public service monopoly that had been in operation since 1924. This article unveils some of the aspects of the history of Swedish community radio. Through analysis of first-hand sources from the period between 1979 and 1985, the article sheds new light on the history of Swedish community radio by using the archives from the parliamentary com…
A Neoliberal Media Welfare State? The Swedish Media System in Transformation
The concept of the Media Welfare State describes Nordic specificity in how media are organised and how they serve a lively and inclusive democracy. This article engages in a dialogue in regards to the contention that this media system has persisted in the midst of rapid social change. We synthesise previous research and documented changes in media policy in Sweden, covering the last three decades, to show the ways in which the Swedish media syste…
In the Shadows of the Digital Economy
What does digital piecework have in common with laboring in the warehouse of a large online shopping platform? How is data cleaning related to digitization work and AI training in prisons? This panel suggests bringing these diverse ways of laboring in the digital economies together by considering these practices as infrastructural labor that takes the shape of shadow work (Illich, 1981) and ghost labor (Gray & Suri, 2019). Work and labor in moder…
Doing time, the smart way? Temporalities of the smart prison
The article engages with the notion of the smart prison to develop an understanding of emerging temporalities of digital technologies. The prison context serves here as a magnifying glass that makes certain contradictions and paradoxes of the digital imperative visible. Starting with a brief discussion of smart technology discourses, the article explores the temporalities of real-timeness, prediction and pre-emption that are entangled with digita…
Prison media work
Incarcerated individuals have long contributed to crucial societal infrastructures. From being leased work force building the railway in the United States to constructing canal systems in Sweden, prisoners’ labor has been widespread as an important part of value production. Part of the labor conducted by incarcerated people is related to the production, repair, and maintenance of media devices and media infrastructures constituting what we call p…
Facebook time
People are spending increasingly more time on social media platforms, with Facebook being the biggest and most successful. Historically, media technologies have for long been considered of importance for the structuration and the experience of time in general. In this article, we investigate the technological affordances of Facebook for the temporal experiences of its users. Relying on a case study of a Facebook page dedicated to media memories, …
Watching reality from a distance
The cultural significance of reality television is based on its claim to represent social reality. On the level of genre, we might argue that reality television constructs a modern day panorama of the social world and its inhabitants and that it thus makes populations appear. This article presents a class analysis of the population of reality television in which 1 year of television programming and over 1000 participants have been analysed. The p…
A Neoliberal Media Welfare State? The Swedish Media System in Transformation
The concept of the Media Welfare State describes Nordic specificity in how media are organised and how they serve a lively and inclusive democracy. This article engages in a dialogue in regards to the contention that this media system has persisted in the midst of rapid social change. We synthesise previous research and documented changes in media policy in Sweden, covering the last three decades, to show the ways in which the Swedish media syste…
Doing time, the smart way? Temporalities of the smart prison
The article engages with the notion of the smart prison to develop an understanding of emerging temporalities of digital technologies. The prison context serves here as a magnifying glass that makes certain contradictions and paradoxes of the digital imperative visible. Starting with a brief discussion of smart technology discourses, the article explores the temporalities of real-timeness, prediction and pre-emption that are entangled with digita…
Trust and the Media
This article provides a discussion of some of the recent research on media trust focusing on arguments for why media trust matters. What are the arguments for why trust is important? Are there reasons to accept these arguments? We identify three distinct arguments in the literature. First, that it is important for media organizations and for the media as an industry. Secondly, that media trust is essential for democratic citizenship and for bring…
Media policy attitudes and political attitudes
Previous research has neglected media audiences’ and citizens’ opinions on how the media should be organized, how they should function in society and what individual, corporate and state responsibilities should be in regard to these questions. In an attempt to understand the relationship between citizens’ broader political attitudes and their attitudes on media-related politics and responsibilities, this study uses a survey (n = 2003) of the adul…
Prison media work
Incarcerated individuals have long contributed to crucial societal infrastructures. From being leased work force building the railway in the United States to constructing canal systems in Sweden, prisoners’ labor has been widespread as an important part of value production. Part of the labor conducted by incarcerated people is related to the production, repair, and maintenance of media devices and media infrastructures constituting what we call p…
Swedish Media Research in the Service of Psychological Defence During the Cold War
In this article, we address the history of Nordic media research through a case study of the formation of media research in Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s and the role that The Board for Psychological Defence played in the formation of Swedish academic media research during the Cold War era. Based on archival research, we find that the impact of the psychological defence on Swedish media research was mainly concentrated to one Swedish university, …
Maximizing the power of entertainment. The audience commodity in contemporary radio
This article explores the reconfigurations of the control and monitoring of the audience that take place in concert with the digitalization that characterize contemporary radio broadcasting. Three technologies for the automation of audience research and consumer monitoring are analyzed: MediaScore, used for online media research (in this case music tests); the iSelector for customizing music streams online, and the Personal People Meter (PPM) for…
Normative foundations of media welfare
What does media welfare mean from a normative perspective? The notion of media welfare and “the media welfare state” has mainly been used descriptively, to depict the particular way in which the media are organized in the Nordic welfare states. In this article, we explore media welfare from a normative perspective. Our intention is to open up a discussion about the normative and political implications of the notion of media welfare and to bring t…
Prison Tech
This article explores the ways in which prisons are imagined as sites of technology development. By attending to expos that showcase prison technologies and constitute “live theatres of technology” (L. Cornfeld, 2018), we carve out ambivalent sociotechnical imaginaries of technological backwardness that are combined with the idea of radical technological innovation to reform the justice system. In doing so, we highlight the prison as one site of …
The field of television production
Pieces of Sound
Review of] Gilfillan, Daniel: Pieces of Sound : German experimental radio, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press 2009 ISBN: 978081664771, eISBN: 9780816667840
Conceptualisations and analyses of distrust and mistrust in news media
This article provides a comprehensive review of research on distrust towards news media and journalism, a topic that has gained significant attention in recent years due to declining institutional trust and the rise of political disinformation. We analyse existing literature focusing on how media distrust has been studied and conceptualised, its explanations, and its consequences. We highlight the conceptual diversity and methodological plurality…
Media resentment
Building on an interview study from Sweden (n = 80), this article develops the concept of media resentment as a tool for understanding contemporary developments such as the diminished trust in news media and journalism. We view media resentment as a complex of feelings and ideas that are both individual and social, embodied, and ideal. Media resentment is defined as the feeling that the media – intentionally or unintentionally – are denying you o…
The voices we trust
This article explores the question of trust in news and information about the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus of the article is on trust in radio news and the data are collected in Sweden during spring 2020. Two questions are asked: (1) to what extent do people in Sweden express trust in the radio as a medium, and radio news and information as a form of content? (2) How do people themselves explain and discuss their trust in the radio as a medium an…
Free Churches of the Air
Swedish community radio started in 1979 and was the first type of broadcast to be organised outside of the public service monopoly that had been in operation since 1924. This article unveils some of the aspects of the history of Swedish community radio. Through analysis of first-hand sources from the period between 1979 and 1985, the article sheds new light on the history of Swedish community radio by using the archives from the parliamentary com…
Defusing the male working class
This article presents an analysis of the makeover reality show Real Men, which was broadcast on Swedish television in 2016. The analysis shows that Real Men – like other shows of its genre – functions as a form of ‘governmentality’ through which forms of neoliberal subjectivity are propagated and pedagogically enforced on ‘bad subjects’. However, the show surpasses the genre conventions by questioning the authority of the norms and values (i.e. m…
Radio formats and social media use in Europe – 28 case studies of public service practice
The aim of this article is to report, summarize and spread the results of a largescale European research project funded by EBU Radio in 2011 to map best practices in social media and European public radio, focusing on the way successful public service radio formats have incorporated social media in their production flow. The programmes have been selected for one of the following reasons: programmes that are audience leaders in their country, use …
Maximizing the power of entertainment. The audience commodity in contemporary radio
This article explores the reconfigurations of the control and monitoring of the audience that take place in concert with the digitalization that characterize contemporary radio broadcasting. Three technologies for the automation of audience research and consumer monitoring are analyzed: MediaScore, used for online media research (in this case music tests); the iSelector for customizing music streams online, and the Personal People Meter (PPM) for…
Pirates of Silicon Valley
This paper investigates a paradox in the reception of Web 2.0. While some of its services are seen as creators of a new informational economy and are hence publicly legitimized, other features are increasingly under surveillance and policed, although in reality the differences between these services is far from obvious. Our thesis is that we are currently experiencing a temporary postponement of the law, in the context of Web 2.0. Agamben’s work …
Pieces of Sound
Review of] Gilfillan, Daniel: Pieces of Sound : German experimental radio, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press 2009 ISBN: 978081664771, eISBN: 9780816667840
Klonerna anfaller? Exporten av svensk musikradio till Estland och Lettland
Attack of the clones? Exporting Swedish format radio to Estonia and Latvia Th e purpose of this article is to contribute to a better understanding of the internatio- nalization of the media landscapes around the Baltic Sea, and to analyse how the inter- national dissemination of format radio is organized. Th e article presents results from a study of how radio formats, as modes of production and cultural forms, move between cultural and national …
Reinforcing Property by Strengthening the Commons
In much scholarly writing and in many leftist and activist accounts the enclosures of the cultural commons have been fiercely critiqued. However, during the last years, new media business models, that challenge the notion of the cultural industries as “copyright industries”, has been taking shape. A new class of entrepreneurs is instead working to expand the commons as part of their businesses. Accordingly, representatives from these new media in…
Radio Propaganda and the Broadcasting of Hatred
[Book Review:] Keith Sommerville. Radio Propaganda and the Broadcasting of Hatred: Historical Development and Definitions
Radio formats and social media use in Europe – 28 case studies of public service practice
The aim of this article is to report, summarize and spread the results of a largescale European research project funded by EBU Radio in 2011 to map best practices in social media and European public radio, focusing on the way successful public service radio formats have incorporated social media in their production flow. The programmes have been selected for one of the following reasons: programmes that are audience leaders in their country, use …
Facebook time
People are spending increasingly more time on social media platforms, with Facebook being the biggest and most successful. Historically, media technologies have for long been considered of importance for the structuration and the experience of time in general. In this article, we investigate the technological affordances of Facebook for the temporal experiences of its users. Relying on a case study of a Facebook page dedicated to media memories, …
Watching reality from a distance
The cultural significance of reality television is based on its claim to represent social reality. On the level of genre, we might argue that reality television constructs a modern day panorama of the social world and its inhabitants and that it thus makes populations appear. This article presents a class analysis of the population of reality television in which 1 year of television programming and over 1000 participants have been analysed. The p…
Defusing the male working class
This article presents an analysis of the makeover reality show Real Men, which was broadcast on Swedish television in 2016. The analysis shows that Real Men – like other shows of its genre – functions as a form of ‘governmentality’ through which forms of neoliberal subjectivity are propagated and pedagogically enforced on ‘bad subjects’. However, the show surpasses the genre conventions by questioning the authority of the norms and values (i.e. m…
Voice, silence and social class on television
The question of voice is a central and timeless political issue. Who gets to speak? Who is silenced? Who is listening? One of the main arenas for voice in modern, advanced democracies is the media. Media infrastructures, technologies, institutions and organizations are a precondition for political voice in large-scale societies, but are also an important factor in distributing the possibilities for voice among different groups and sectors of the …
Volunteering as Media Work
This article explores volunteering in relation to the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), which took place in Stockholm in 2016 and in Kyiv in 2017, with the aim of shedding light on volunteering as a form of “media work”. Following from this, the article aims to problematize the theoretical concept of free labour and analyse the symbolic exchanges and currencies involved in employing a “free” labour force. Through interviews with volunteers, this art…
In the Shadows of the Digital Economy
What does digital piecework have in common with laboring in the warehouse of a large online shopping platform? How is data cleaning related to digitization work and AI training in prisons? This panel suggests bringing these diverse ways of laboring in the digital economies together by considering these practices as infrastructural labor that takes the shape of shadow work (Illich, 1981) and ghost labor (Gray & Suri, 2019). Work and labor in moder…
Doing time, the smart way? Temporalities of the smart prison
The article engages with the notion of the smart prison to develop an understanding of emerging temporalities of digital technologies. The prison context serves here as a magnifying glass that makes certain contradictions and paradoxes of the digital imperative visible. Starting with a brief discussion of smart technology discourses, the article explores the temporalities of real-timeness, prediction and pre-emption that are entangled with digita…
Prison media work
Incarcerated individuals have long contributed to crucial societal infrastructures. From being leased work force building the railway in the United States to constructing canal systems in Sweden, prisoners’ labor has been widespread as an important part of value production. Part of the labor conducted by incarcerated people is related to the production, repair, and maintenance of media devices and media infrastructures constituting what we call p…
Swedish Media Research in the Service of Psychological Defence During the Cold War
In this article, we address the history of Nordic media research through a case study of the formation of media research in Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s and the role that The Board for Psychological Defence played in the formation of Swedish academic media research during the Cold War era. Based on archival research, we find that the impact of the psychological defence on Swedish media research was mainly concentrated to one Swedish university, …
The field of television production
Prison papers
This article engages with the history of Swedish prison papers, situating them as alternative media within the broader media landscape shaped by the emergence and dismantling of the welfare state. The article not only aims to give a descriptive account of the history of Swedish prison papers but also builds and further develops theorizations of alternative media by constructing them not in opposition to established media but as in dialogue and ex…
The Prison Media Complex
Prisons are a recurring topic and backdrop in the popular culture of the Global North. They often serve as spectacular environments that seem far removed from most people’s everyday lives. This article develops the notion of the prison media complex and discusses material entanglements between prisons and private media industries via the production of media technologies, consumption of communication, and technology development in the prison secto…
Prison Tech
This article explores the ways in which prisons are imagined as sites of technology development. By attending to expos that showcase prison technologies and constitute “live theatres of technology” (L. Cornfeld, 2018), we carve out ambivalent sociotechnical imaginaries of technological backwardness that are combined with the idea of radical technological innovation to reform the justice system. In doing so, we highlight the prison as one site of …
The voices we trust
This article explores the question of trust in news and information about the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus of the article is on trust in radio news and the data are collected in Sweden during spring 2020. Two questions are asked: (1) to what extent do people in Sweden express trust in the radio as a medium, and radio news and information as a form of content? (2) How do people themselves explain and discuss their trust in the radio as a medium an…
Free Churches of the Air
Swedish community radio started in 1979 and was the first type of broadcast to be organised outside of the public service monopoly that had been in operation since 1924. This article unveils some of the aspects of the history of Swedish community radio. Through analysis of first-hand sources from the period between 1979 and 1985, the article sheds new light on the history of Swedish community radio by using the archives from the parliamentary com…
A Neoliberal Media Welfare State? The Swedish Media System in Transformation
The concept of the Media Welfare State describes Nordic specificity in how media are organised and how they serve a lively and inclusive democracy. This article engages in a dialogue in regards to the contention that this media system has persisted in the midst of rapid social change. We synthesise previous research and documented changes in media policy in Sweden, covering the last three decades, to show the ways in which the Swedish media syste…
Media policy attitudes and political attitudes
Previous research has neglected media audiences’ and citizens’ opinions on how the media should be organized, how they should function in society and what individual, corporate and state responsibilities should be in regard to these questions. In an attempt to understand the relationship between citizens’ broader political attitudes and their attitudes on media-related politics and responsibilities, this study uses a survey (n = 2003) of the adul…
The media welfare state
During the last decades the Nordic media model has been challenged by neoliberal policy and welfare retrenchment. This study asks about the extent to which the values, functions and institutions of the “media welfare state” are supported by the adult Swedish citizenry, despite political mobilization against it. Drawing on a national survey ( n = 2003) this study shows that the media welfare state is generally well-supported by the population. Usi…
Political science (32 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Law (22 works) · Social Media and Politics (19 works) · Media Studies and Communication (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Media studies (15 works) · Public relations (13 works) · Computer Science (10 works)