Two CORDI researchers, Outi Puukko and Minna Horowitz, attended the Internet Governace Forum 2019 in Berlin, 25-29. November 2019. The theme of this year’s IGF was “One world. One Net. One Vision”.

Puukko conducted research interviews for her doctoral dissertation project “Civil society actors and the digital human rights discourse”. The project focuses on civil society actors role in the digital rights discourse, in particular, how civil society actors understand and define digital rights in their advocacy work on international arenas. The research data consists of thematic interviews with civil society representatives, participatory observation and document analysis.

Horowitz participated in in the panel Misinformation, Responsibilities & Trust. A short report of the panel can be found here.

The rights-based perspective on ethical and political questions presented by the new digital media has recently regained attention in academic and political debates. This conference will address the interplay of national and global (universal and specific) characteristics of communication rights: What are some definitions of communication rights? Who are the policy and other actors defining these rights? What are current core issues or cases that pertain to communication rights?

The international conference, Communication Rights in the Digital Age, 24-25 October 2019 in Helsinki, was organized by the Helsinki Media Policy Research Group, the University of Helsinki, the ECREA Communication Law and Policy Section and the Euromedia Research Group, and supported by the IAMCR Communication Policy & Technology Section. It was also supported by CORDI, and five of the project’s researchers presented their work in the conference.

The opening panel asked: What rights, whose rights, and who cares?

Communication rights…

One of the specific topics of Cordi is the role of public service media in safeguarding communication rights. A part of the related research takes place in collaboration with a new Research Network on Innovation in Public Service Media Policies (InnoPSM). The project is convened by Alessandro D’Arma of the University of Westminster (UK), Minna Aslama Horowitz of Cordi is the co-convener, and Hannu Nieminen of Cordi belongs to the project Steering Group, as well as members from from European Broadcasting Union – EBU, BBC, ORF, Yle and several other universities.

The main objectives of the Research Network are to facilitate exchange between academic experts and key PSM stakeholders and develop a research agenda across national and disciplinary boundaries with a view to advancing our thinking about innovative policy solutions and strategies to respond to the major digital challenges confronting PSM.

The Network starts by organizing four multi-stakeholder…

The conference Media in Transition 10 (#mit10) took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge on 17-18 May 2019, with the theme Democracy and Digital Media.

CORDI was represented in the panel Data, Democracy and the Public Interest: Approaches of Policy and Praxis, by Minna Horowitz, University of Helsinki and Marko Milosavljević, University of Ljubljana with the presentation Universality at Stake: Datafication and Legacy Public Service Media.

Here are the slides of the presentation:

[Image: The Dome at MIT. (CC BY 2.0)]

By Katja Lehtisaari

Discussing communication rights at the IAMCR 2019 conference

How are communication rights presented in different countries in Europe? A pilot study, titled “Communication for everyone: Communication rights and their differing contexts” was presented at the IAMCR 2019 conference in Madrid 10 July 2019.

This working paper presents a way to operationalize communication rights, including a systematic framework for analysis, and a pilot study of comparative application in several national contexts. The pilot study builds on operationalisation of communication rights, presented in the articleOperationalising communication rights: the case of a “digital welfare state”(Internet Policy Rewiev, 2019). For the pilot study concluded in spring 2019, five countries were selected for examination: Finland from Northern Europe, Germany and the United Kingdom from Western Europe, Italy from Southern Europe, and Slovakia from Central and Eastern Europe. The aim is to look at differing media systems in Europe and examine…