This chapter discusses how AI technologies permeate the media sector. It sketches opportunities and benefits of the use of AI in media content gathering and production, media content distribution, fact-checking, and content moderation. The chapter then zooms in on ethical and legal risks raised by AI-driven media applications: lack of data availability, poor data quality, and bias in training datasets, lack of transparency, risks for the right to freedom of expression, threats to media freedom and pluralism online, and threats to media independence. Finally, the chapter introduces the relevant elements of the EU legal framework which aim to mitigate these risks, such as the Digital Services Act, the European Media Freedom Act, and the AI Act.

This chapter provides a practitioner’s point of view on diplomatic images. The author is positioned to give a unique perspective as a freelance photographer who is currently based in Singapore, which has recently become a significant city-state for major global diplomatic events. Through his first-hand experiences of covering high-profile international diplomatic events, such as the 2018 Trump-Kim Summit held in Singapore, the author takes us backstage and demonstrates how famous diplomatic images are produced to represent the affective register of the moment. In so doing, the chapter illuminates the situational context of the photographer in taking diplomatic images, offering insight into the editorial process in which diplomatic images are produced by the media.

Taking the nationalisation of the telegraph in 1870 as a starting point, this chapter considers how information was understood as immaterial yet depended upon a complex material infrastructure. The first section addresses telegraphy as a technology of the present, enabling people to experience new kinds of contemporaneity, while, at the same time, ensuring that it remained stubbornly uneven. The second turns to text, exploring how it was made suitable for transmission by new information technologies and the new kinds of workers employed to process it. The third looks at the print archive. To ensure the right information could be readily retrieved, systems of bibliographic control were developed to manage the material from which it derived. Throughout, I return to Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875). Trollope’s novel is deeply interested in the contemporary, attending to the technologies that structure the moment and those that make that moment pass.

This chapter examines the effect of external forces on courts. It surveys developments relating to codes of judicial ethics, including recent revelations concerning Supreme Court Justices. It examines judicial selection processes and the ways in which they have come to increasingly be driven by ideological considerations. Finally, it discusses recent work concerning changes in the nature of media coverage of the judiciary.

The chapter examines the role of causality in politics, demonstrating how democratic politics shifted from a top-down causality, from divinity to monarchy, to a bottom-up causality, from the public to its representatives. This shift is evident in the establishment of periodic elections and democratic institutions, which are designed to legitimize causality derived from human agency. Concurrently, horizontal causality emerged through entities like political parties, civil society, and social media. However, this democratic causality has been weakening over recent decades due to several factors: the diminished capacity of political institutions to represent political causality, the illusion of a direct link between politicians and the public, particularly through mass media and social networks, and the erosion of the concept of “the public” as a democratic entity. In recent years, the public has experienced political fragmentation and lacks unifying forces like ideologies, parties, and labor unions. Another contributing factor to the weakening of causality is the declining faith in science and expertise, which are now associated with elitism. This has led to a weakening of quasi-scientific causality in politics and a rise of the “charisma of ignorance.”

In this chapter, we examine the public’s understanding of implicit bias, a topic that has only recently caught the public’s attention. Given that political elites often set the contours of debate on political issues, we begin by conducting a systematic content analysis of newspaper headlines and cable news transcripts to assess the prevalence and nature of media coverage of implicit bias. We find that partisan media utilize starkly different frames regarding the scientific validity of the concept of implicit bias, the political intentions of those who use the phrase, and the requisite political recourses (if any). We then utilize two individual-level datasets to examine the mass public’s understanding of implicit bias. An original survey reveals a stark gulf in partisan understandings of implicit bias and an analysis of Project Implicit data highlights the interplay between personalized feedback from the IAT and ideology in shaping evaluations of the IAT. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges of science communication, particularly on issues relating to race, in a politically polarized age.

Chapter 4 examines in detail a Christian crusade called Rwanda Shima Imana or Rwanda Thanksgiving Day. It explores the controversies that arose from it, in particular a conflict between a well-known Pentecostal pastor and the Catholic singer Kizito Mihigo. The conflict was in part about power: who has the right, ability, and authority to interpret the Bible and, by extension, Rwanda’s history and collective memory. This chapter also complicates the process of transformation, as some hearts were considered unable to transform, a situation which was often related to ethnic identity.

This chapter focuses on the new sound economy that Pentecostalism brought to Rwanda after the genocide. It considers a wide range of Pentecostal sound practices – from noise-making to praise and worship to Pentecostal radio – and shows how sound was understood to be key to inner and outer transformation. Pentecostals drew a distinction between ‘godly’ and ‘secular’ media, which allowed some young singers to become ‘gospel stars’. This chapter equally focuses on the materiality of Pentecostal sounds – the work that sound does outside of its discursive properties – and places this within the wider sonic context of post-genocide Rwanda. The RPF state has increasingly cracked down on noise – associated both with the new churches and nightclubs – and in 2018 closed thousands of chruches across the country. Perhaps ironically, despite their differences, the new Pentecostal churches and the RPF state share a conviction of sound’s transformative power.

In this chapter we focus on associations between intrusive parenting, the parent–adolescent relationship, and adolescents’ information management strategies. Theoretically, parenting that threatens adolescents’ autonomy leads to suboptimal adolescent adjustment. We discuss when overprotective parenting, psychological control, behavioral control, and helicopter parenting may be intrusive and how they are associated with the parent–adolescent relationship and adolescent information management. We also consider parental intrusiveness and adolescents’ information management in two specific contexts, namely in relation to adolescents’ sexuality and media use. We suggest that an intrusive parenting environment is not the optimal way to promote healthy adolescent information management.

The growing field of legal design has largely adopted a design-thinking approach. Whilst this has improved efficiency and usability within legal systems, it has insufficiently addressed its systemic issues and in some cases has further entrenched such issues. Critical Design opposes the affirmative approach of design-thinking; it uses design as a method for finding and expanding problems rather than solving them quickly and discreetly. A Critical Design perspective applied to legal issues has the potential to more fundamentally interrogate systemic legal issues, which is necessary for creating a fairer legal system. The project James v Birnmann illustrates the capacity for Critical Design to contend with legal issues. Through utilising popular aesthetics and media, James v Birnmann engages the public with the negative impacts of the growing mediatisation of courtroom trials and the use of AI within legal processes. Challenging the public’s perception of law in this way is a useful step towards legal reform in-unto-itself, whilst this problem-finding approach could also work alongside and enrich the more solution-driven legal design as it is currently practised.

The notion of identity plays a central role in contemporary culture, both as the core of individualism and as the proclaimed principle of nationalist populist movements – and thus also of Brexit ideology. To have a national identity implies being different from other persons, groups, nations and, in Brexitspeak, the EU. This means that Brexitism is not just a British phenomenon, but part of the wave of national populism that has swept across Europe and the Americas. This chapter includes a survey of European identitarian movements and of the far-right writers whose ideas were in tune with them. It was immigrants that were made into a threatening ‘other’ in the pro-Brexit campaigns, and the EU was blamed for increased immigration. While other factors, such as economic deprivations, levels of immigration in particular locations are part of the story, it can be argued, as this book does, that it was demagoguery targeting immigrants – loudly amplified by the popular press – that sufficiently persuaded voters to vote Leave.

Climate change is the most serious challenge of the Anthropocene, and so climate change communication needs to be taken suitably seriously, enriched with new ways of conceptualising, understanding and imaging the world and its transformations. The lack of understanding and seeing the gravity of the crisis has been increasingly identified as the ‘crisis of the imagination’. Over the centuries, telling stories was used to confront the unknown, encourage thinking about solutions, illuminate opportunities and give hope. Stories and storytelling allow space for interpretation and agency to think critically and, most importantly, act imaginatively. They encourage inter- and transdisciplinarity and thus novel perspectives, stressing the fact that, ultimately, discussions on climate change are discussions about who we are. In this sense, storytelling has a great potential to motivate individuals, communities and policy-makers to act on climate change.

Open-source intelligence is readily available and inexpensive. Hamas collected a lot of information from open sources, mainly the Israeli press. In this case, Hamas exploited the fact that Israel is a democratic state with a relatively free press to get valuable information for its operations. This sort of collection activity became more organized after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip and was Hamas’s main source for strategic analysis. This chapter describes the intelligence content Hamas gathered from open sources and that content’s contribution to its activities.

What is a book, really? In tracing the passage of a single work from the alleys of Lahore to online retail and the author’s bookshelf, this chapter argues against idealism. In transmission, ideational content sediments within specific material contexts. In this way, ideas become objects. Consequently, the same idea can take shape by drastically different forms, affecting the practice of interpretation. The affordances of the object – what can be done with it, how, and where – affect our practices of interpretation.