Media research centres
and cultural meaning – as being in a constant
process of interaction with the mediasphere
and public sphere. He images the relationship as
resembling Russian dolls: the public sphere fi ts
within the mediasphere, which in turn fi ts within
the semiosphere.
The most salient feature of these interlock-
ing spheres, argues Hartley, is journalism. It
was journalism that originated and nurtured
concepts of freedom, of human rights, within
societies. It served a key function in, and in turn
was served by, the success of the American and
French revolutions. The public sphere of the
nineteenth century was created by journalism.
Hartley believes ‘there would be no public’ and
consequently no progress towards the sover-
eignty of the people without the aid of journal-
istic writing. Th is served, and continues to serve,
as a counterforce to subordination; indeed it is
‘the mechanism for making these [democratic]
discourses generally available, and also for
articulating the diff erent forms of resistance’.
Ultimately, though, journalism’s power to
defi ne and further the public sphere depends on
readership. Th e changing nature of readership
also alters the nature of the public and private
spheres. Hartley believes that we have moved
from the traditional adversarial mode of jour-
nalism, with its public, political and masculine
bias, to a postmodernist phase, driven in
particular by popular journalism (described by
Hartley as ‘the textual system of modernity’).
Th is gives emphasis not to public life ‘but to
private meaning’. He identifies the following
shifts in the nature of readership: from male
to female; from old to young; from militant
to meditative; from public to private; from
governmental to consumerist; and from law-
making to identity-forming. Hartley describes
the mediasphere as ‘suff used with images and
issues which connect popular readerships and
popular meanings together ... the mainstream
of contemporary journalism is fashion, gossip,
lifestyle, consumerism and celebrity, and “news”
is private, visual, narrativized and personalized’.
It follows that the icon of the contemporary
mediasphere is ‘not the superpower but the
supermodel’.
Th e shifts mentioned here are not, however, to
be seen as having become disengaged from the
past of journalism/readership: modern journal-
ism is, populist, yes. Yet it remains in the tradi-
tion of the radical journalism that helped give
birth to the American and French revolutions.
See democracy and the media.
Media Studies: the internationalization ofof state’, and ideally contribute, together, to
decision-making.
Roger Silverstone in Media and Morality: On
the Rise of the Mediapolis (Polity, 2007) describes
the mediapolis as ‘a site for the construction of
a moral order ... commensurate with the scope
and scale of global interdependence’. It is an ideal
founded in the principle of one world based upon
equality and civility; a very diff erent scenario
from that which currently exists.
Silverstone sees ‘no integrity within the
contemporary midiapolis. The public space
which it constitutes’, he believes, ‘is fractured by
cultural diff erence and the absence of commu-
nication, as much as it is by the homogenization
of global television and genuine, if only momen-
tary, collective attention to global events, crises
and catastrophes’. What we have is something
‘manifestly ... embryonic and imperfect; and
even in its potential can never be imagined as
fully realizable’. However, ‘it has to be seen as
a necessary starting point for the creation of a
more eff ective global space’.
What Silverstone is suggesting is a new moral
order, one that challenges ‘the inequities of
representation and persistence of exclusion’
characteristic of the exercise of media power
‘both by capital and the state, and within the
ideological and prejudiced frames of unrefl exive
reporting and storytelling’. Key is ‘our relation-
ship to the other, to the stranger’; our obligation
‘to welcome the stranger ... to listen and to
hear’, and thus to acknowledge the need for the
creation of ‘space for eff ective communication’.
See accessed voices; democracy and the
media; emancipatory use of the media;
empowerment; globalization (and the
media); information gaps; open source;
people’s communication charter; public
sphere; wedom, theydom.
▶Shuang Liu, Introducing Intercultural Communica-
tion: Global Cultures and Contexts (Sage, 2010);
Alexander G. Nicolaev, ed., Ethical Issues in Interna-
tional Communication (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Media research centres See research
centres.
Mediasphere Term posed and defi ned by John
Hartley in Popular Reality: Journalism, Moder-
nity, Popular Culture (Arnold, 1996) to describe
the positioning of media, its range and breadth
of influence, in relationship to the public
sphere, and the notion of the Semiosphere put
forward by Yuri Lotman in Th e Universe of the
Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Univer-
sity of Indiana Press, 1990). Hartley sees the
semiosphere – the sphere of cultural expression