Nordicom ReviewPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.2478/nor-2021-0022
Sofie Flensburg
{"title":"Over-the-top and under the radarAn analysis of Internet distribution and its structural consequences in Denmark","authors":"Sofie Flensburg","doi":"10.2478/nor-2021-0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2021-0022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The article traces the evolution of over-the-top (OTT) services in order to analyse how the growing use of Internet distribution influences the structural conditions and institutional arrangements in Denmark. This story is told in four parts: first, I outline how the shift from postal services to e-mail restructured the conditions for asynchronous one-to-one communication; second, I examine the introduction of web-based services and the declining role of the press as gatekeeper for asynchronous one-to-many communication; third, I focus on the impact of mobile broadband and smartphones on synchronous one-to-one communication and the telecommunications sector; and fourth, I analyse the emergence of streaming technologies and the reorganisation of synchronous one-to-many communication and broadcasting. Building on these examples, I argue that key welfare state principles have come under pressure and that research tends to underestimate the fundamental transformations of the institutional order.","PeriodicalId":45517,"journal":{"name":"Nordicom Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48227810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Towards streaming as a dominant mode of media use?A user typology approach to music and television streaming","authors":"Marika Lüders, Vilde Schanke Sundet, Terje Colbjørnsen","doi":"10.2478/nor-2021-0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2021-0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Music and television streaming services present users with abundant catalogues of content available on demand. We investigate whether users respond by narrowing or widening the diversity of content they consume. Further, we examine how the different logics characterising music and television streaming are mirrored in the number of streaming services people use. To do so, we compare non-, sporadic, regular, and frequent users of television and music streaming services. Findings from a cross-sectional survey in Norway show that frequent streamers consume a wider variety of genres and rely on more services. Our results also indicate that streaming has gone from a first-mover activity to a standard consumer mode. This study indicates that we can expect continued growth in television streamers, whereas the music streaming industry seems more consolidated.","PeriodicalId":45517,"journal":{"name":"Nordicom Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41558003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nordicom ReviewPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.2478/nor-2021-0012
Joel Frykholm
{"title":"Renegotiating quality TV in the Swedish pressAmerican serial television and Sweden's post-monopoly television landscape","authors":"Joel Frykholm","doi":"10.2478/nor-2021-0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2021-0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this article, I explore the reception of American “quality” serial television in Sweden from 1999 to the mid-2010s. My analysis includes how cultural critics and journalists writing for Sweden's leading newspapers conceptualised American serial television as “quality TV” and as legitimate “art”, and it charts the ways in which these discourses relate to the reconfiguration of Swedish television from public service monopoly to niche-oriented multichannel system. The analysis uncovers a process of cultural consecration that was based on comparisons with already consecrated art forms, applications of authorship discourses that promote certain individuals as genius television auteurs, and deployment of critical protocols borrowed from literary criticism – all in service of pre-established cultural hierarchy and “good taste”. This article also highlights the ubiquity of American quality serial television across the Swedish television landscape, which suggests that such programmes represent both a niche product and a mass phenomenon with extensive reach and multidimensional appeal.","PeriodicalId":45517,"journal":{"name":"Nordicom Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44855599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nordicom ReviewPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.2478/nor-2021-0001
Helle Sjøvaag, T. Owren
{"title":"The non-substitutability of local news?Advertising and the decline of journalism's umbrella market model","authors":"Helle Sjøvaag, T. Owren","doi":"10.2478/nor-2021-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2021-0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article addresses the challenges facing local newspapers as the digital economy transitions to artificial intelligence (AI). We interview five CEOs of Scandinavian newspaper corporations, representing small, mid-sized, and large newspaper chains. The analysis focuses on three main factors emerging from the interviews – technological transformations, digital advertising markets, and corporate enrolment – and how they relate to business model disruption and the non-substitutability of local news. The analysis is set within the framework of the digital transformation, which, for the purpose of this study, we argue consists of two phases: getting online (until about 2014), and algorithmic adaptation (the introduction of programmatic advertising and audience metrics from about 2014). The analysis concludes that as non-substitutability is lost on the advertising side of the market, this challenges the umbrella model of newspaper publishing.","PeriodicalId":45517,"journal":{"name":"Nordicom Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49244560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nordicom ReviewPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.2478/nor-2021-0032
Ernesto Abalo, Johan Nilsson
{"title":"Fostering the truthful individualCommunicating media literacy in the comic Bamse","authors":"Ernesto Abalo, Johan Nilsson","doi":"10.2478/nor-2021-0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2021-0032","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study examines the construction of media literacy in a special issue on source criticism of the Swedish children's comic Bamse – Världens Starkaste Björn [Bamse – The World's Strongest Bear]. This is done with the purpose of understanding what values, perspectives, and practices are promoted when media literacy is communicated via children's edutainment media. Using narrative and discourse analysis, we problematise how notions of truth (such as post-truth) guide much of the discourse on digital media in today's post-political society, and how that and individualisation shape notions of media literacy. This is visible in the analysed case in how source criticism is constructed in relation to notions of truth and falsehood, and as moral lessons aimed at the individual media user. We argue that such an individualised, decontextualised, and depoliticised take on media literacy is problematic and an expression of neoliberalism and a middle-class gaze.","PeriodicalId":45517,"journal":{"name":"Nordicom Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43714595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nordicom ReviewPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.2478/nor-2020-0016
S. Ratilainen
{"title":"Norway ReimaginedPopular geopolitics and the Russophone fans of Skam","authors":"S. Ratilainen","doi":"10.2478/nor-2020-0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2020-0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this article, I discuss the geopolitical underpinnings of Russophone fans’ response to the Norwegian hit teen series Skam [Shame]. Starting from the wide-spread distribution of Skam through informal horizontal networks, my article highlights the context specificity of fan participation in meaning-making around global television. Employing multimodal discourse analysis to the social media platform VKontakte, I examine how Russophone audiences of global television imagine the country of origin of their object of fandom, and how spatial imaginations embedded in this process contribute to popular geopolitics of Norden – that is, to geopolitical reasoning of narratives and representations of Nordic countries available through popular culture. My analysis shows how Norway and its positioning in the world provides an important symbolic resource for further discussions on identity and belonging. A close examination of mediated transnational cultural exchange through fan communities advances our understanding of the meaning of popular geopolitics in the age of global television.","PeriodicalId":45517,"journal":{"name":"Nordicom Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43826250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nordicom ReviewPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.2478/NOR-2020-0012
Hansen Toft Kim
{"title":"Nordic Noir from Within and Beyond: Negotiating geopolitical regionalisation through SVoD crime narratives","authors":"Hansen Toft Kim","doi":"10.2478/NOR-2020-0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/NOR-2020-0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this article, I show how a vision for the Nordic region exists as a banal Nordism, based on years of content exchange, Nordic co-production models, and public funding opportunities. I document how new commercial players have been able to gain a very large market share in only a few years, significantly disrupting the reach of public service broadcasters in the Nordic region. The three largest contemporary commercial players on the Nordic market – Viaplay, HBO, and Netflix – have been able to, in very different ways, tap into the ideology of banal Nordism and the geopolitical unity of the Nordic region, and they have done so by producing and acquiring content that has deep associations with one of the Nordic region's main international brands: Scandinavian crime fiction and Nordic Noir.","PeriodicalId":45517,"journal":{"name":"Nordicom Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47287136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nordicom ReviewPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.2478/nor-2020-0006
R. Saunders
{"title":"Landscape, Geopolitics, and National Identity in the Norwegian Thrillers Occupied and Nobel","authors":"R. Saunders","doi":"10.2478/nor-2020-0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2020-0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Focusing on the use of landscape in the Norwegian series Occupied (2015–2020) and Nobel (2016), this article examines the ways in which cityscapes and panoramas of the natural environment are employed as affective, as well as aesthetic tools for storytelling within a geopolitically inflected framework. Drawing on literature from popular geopolitics, geocriticism, and visual politics, my analysis interrogates the ways in which geopolitical codes and visions manifest via televisual fiction, reflecting a variety of insecurities associated with Norway's current position in world affairs, as well as contemporary challenges to Norwegian national identity. This article also discusses how these two series have adapted key geovisual elements of the what I deem the “near Nordic Noir” style to focus more explicitly on geopolitical questions, linking Occupied and Nobel to other geopolitically inflected series from Nordic Europe.","PeriodicalId":45517,"journal":{"name":"Nordicom Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42993446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nordicom ReviewPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.2478/nor-2020-0013
P. Chow, Anne Marit Waade, R. Saunders
{"title":"Geopolitical Television Drama Within and Beyond the Nordic Region","authors":"P. Chow, Anne Marit Waade, R. Saunders","doi":"10.2478/nor-2020-0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2020-0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article presents a framework for thinking about the intersections between geopolitics and Northern European television drama by examining the contemporary Nordic Noir genre of crime drama. Nordic Noir features not only the double plot that combines sociopolitical critique with crime drama, but also a third “gaze” that engages aesthetics and territorial features that further individual series’ geopolitical critique. Nordic Noir has become especially attuned to contemporary geopolitical issues specific to its setting (climate change, East-West rivalries, etc.), through which viewers engage with region-specific geopolitical codes and visions. However, what happens when Nordic geopolitical television drama series are exported and transculturally adapted to different geopolitical and cultural realities? By examining the Southeast Asian localisation of The Bridge (Viu/HBO Asia, 2018–) that transforms Nordic Noir into “tropical noir”, this article critically reflects on the geopolitical power and societal engagement of the Nordic Noir template both within and beyond the Nordic region.","PeriodicalId":45517,"journal":{"name":"Nordicom Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45559083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nordicom ReviewPub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.2478/nor-2020-0018
A. Mrozewicz
{"title":"The Landscapes of Eco-NoirReimagining Norwegian eco-exceptionalism in Occupied","authors":"A. Mrozewicz","doi":"10.2478/nor-2020-0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2020-0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the Norwegian climate fiction television series Okkupert [Occupied] (2015–), focusing on the ways in which it reveals the complicity of Nordic subjects in an ecological dystopia. I argue that in illuminating this complicity, the series reimagines the Norwegian national self-conception rooted in a discourse of Norway's exceptionalist relation to nature. I show how Norway's green (self-)image is expressed through what I call “white ecology” – an aesthetics of whiteness encoded in neoromantic mountainous winter landscapes widely associated with the North, but also in the figure of the Norwegian white male polar explorer. I argue in this article that Occupied challenges this white-ecological masculine discourse through “dark ecology” (Morton, 2007), embodied by Russia and expressed by the avoidance of spectacular landscape aesthetics as well as by the strategy of “enmeshment”, facilitated by the medium of televisual long-form storytelling and the eco-noir aesthetics.","PeriodicalId":45517,"journal":{"name":"Nordicom Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48437267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}