ABSTRACT

In our opening chapter we set out the context for our investigation into the relationship between media and radicalisation, namely the new media ecology. It would be misleading to think the development of this mediatised environment as a shift from so-called ‘old’ to ‘new’ media. These categories do not serve an understanding of the dynamics of our new media ecology but rather serve to obfuscate the connectivities through which media content and forms are ‘remediated’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999) through both established and emergent media, and through what Hoskins and O’Loughlin (2007) conceive of as a ‘renewal’ of mainstream media. Indeed, that which Dan Gillmor (2006) calls ‘Big Media’ such as the BBC, CNN, New York Times or Le Monde, remain dominant and all have invested significantly in their digital and online presence. Instead, the new media ecology involves a struggle between the established and relatively ordered regime of mainstream news – particularly television news – and an ‘ordered disorder’ of information that is potentially much more diffused. Part of the new equilibrium of this ecology is the ways in which the Internet and other digital media are both conceived of and inhabited by increasingly entrenched ‘mainstream’ news cultures. Entrenched, that is, as they are often demarcated and defined in contradistinction with that which is ‘outside’ or beyond the mainstream, the alternative, the unregulated and limitless domains of the Internet. And it is precisely the uninhabited (by those in the mainstream) zones of the new media ecology that are often represented (in mainstream news discourses) as the central incubator and harbinger of the evils of the digital: radicalisation, terrorism, and paedophilia, for example. Moreover, across our projects exploring radicalisation and language of extremism, consumers of mainstream news consistently saw themselves as exempt from or immune to the influences or ‘effects’ of such evils, whether more ‘directly’ consumed via unofficial, amateur or ‘radical’ sources or as mediated through and translated by Big Media. In terms of the potential of any media to radicalise or to promote extremist views and violence, we found a clear disjuncture between a perception of the vulnerability to persuasion of ‘other’ individuals and groups, against a sense that the individual self being interviewed is impervious. In this way, we can map a mainstream/non-mainstream distinction as one of the critical characteristics of the new media ecology, operating in at least two

key dimensions. The first is the multiple ways in which mainstream news media represent, translate and remediate that which it takes or constructs as inhabiting media-in-the-wild: all that which is amateur, unofficial, unregulated, and especially that which it self-censors as not being appropriate for its imagined mainstream audience (too explicit, graphic or violent, for example). For the purposes of this chapter, we will mostly refer to this dimension in terms of ‘translation’ and also take it at its literal meaning in relation to the extraction and translation of online extremist texts in Arabic into Western English mainstream news. The second dimension is the distinction routinely made by mainstream news consumers that they individually possess a particular reflexive awareness (as noted above), such that they are not vulnerable to mainstream or non-mainstream media influences. This awareness extends to a capacity to identify mainstream or non-mainstream audience ‘types’ that were vulnerable. We call this the ‘othering’ of the mainstream. Both of these mainstream/non-mainstream distinctions, developed partly in response to the rapid emergence of the Internet, have been vehicles for the comprehension or otherwise of the discourses of radicalisation in our new media ecology. In this chapter we use some examples of translation and othering drawn from different contexts to illuminate the significance of the mainstream in the mediatisation of radicalisation.