This paper problematises ideological assumptions about journalism's epistemic authority among Swedish media professionals in relation to notions of post-truth. The study is based on qualitative interviews with journalists who are active in the Swedish news industry. The concept of discursive logics is applied to showcase how journalism is understood and experienced by journalists themselves during an alleged truth crisis. This paper analyses how journalistic practices and ideals are perceived to be disrupted by an ongoing truth crisis and how such practices are envisioned in the future. This paper identifies two major discursive logics in which these disruptions are manifested. The journalists conceived of new techno-political infrastructures in the media as a horrific fantasy threatening their work practices. The second logic is the beatific fantasy of truth-seeking journalism in current times. Post-truth represents a threat against journalism in a double-edged way: first by creating mistrust in established media, and second because, when attempting to counteract fake news through fact checking, the journalist is instead positioned as an activist or a debater.

The last decades have witnessed a widespread rise in populist, right-wing, anti-gender movements targeting gender-equality politics and gender studies throughout Europe. While the situation for Swedish gender studies remains relatively stable, with institutionalized gender departments, this paper focuses on how Swedish gender studies scholars conceive of their situation and the status of gender studies in the current era. Through an interview study drawing on the concept of "affective atmosphere", the article explores how the anti-gender discourse induces a precarious situation that produces a sense of apocalypse and a crisis of hope for gender studies. As such, the anti-gender discourse calls upon scholars to react and engage. In the interviews, the future of gender studies was discussed as being at risk, while at the same time the interviewees described gender studies as an academic success story. However, to avoid falling into the trap of being either too optimistic or too pessimistic about the current state of the art, the authors argue that the knowledge production of gender studies as such can be reconfigured as a site for resistance, for detecting openings and creating possible pathways into the future that extend beyond the hegemonic neoliberal, authoritarian one.

In this paper, we engage with five Swedish universities’ discursive articulation of, and responses to, an alleged post-truth crisis in communication, aimed at the public. Taking discourse theory as our point of departure, the aim is to analyse how universities are trying to maintain or restore trustworthiness against a backdrop of problems with fact resistance, fake news, and mistrust in academic institutions. The dilemma for universities is how to counteract post-truth without falling into the trap of returning to a realist paradigm, with its strict notions of truth and objectivity. The paper shows how public events are characterised by a crisis rhetoric, a dislocation, together with imaginaries of both external and internal threats of disorder, which convey a narrow and simplified understanding of scientific knowledge as objective and neutral. ‘Defenders of truth’ seem to foreclose any discussion by deeming knowledge relativism an irrational and dangerous position that fuels arguments claiming a truth crisis. A conclusion is that universities risk increasing polarisation, rather than trying to tackle problems of trustworthiness. The authors argue that, instead, universities need to be attentive to matters of democracy, power, and privilege, as well as a plurality of epistemological ideals, when discussing the so-called post-truth crisis.

The use of healthcare apps for medical advice is becoming increasingly common. This paper explores apps that offer interaction with medical experts. Working from the supposition that digital technologies are intimately entangled in their cultural context, we argue that the apps do more than just neutrally mediate contacts and offer medical and psychological advice. The article addresses the cultural dimensions of healthcare apps and answers questions about the ways in which such apps contribute to forming changing notions of what “healthcare” and being a “patient” entail. Three popular Swedish apps and their marketing material is studied using a discursive interface analysis of the apps’ affordances. The results show that the apps significantly contribute to producing a marketable narrative about app health care that includes accessibility, security/safety and personalisation, and which is partly produced as an alternative to what is offered by Swedish public health care. The results further show that this narrative primarily represents and addresses users who are young, busy, urban consumers of care – partly contrasting policy expectations and hopes.

Digitaliseringen av svensk sjukvård har debatterats mycket i Sverige de senaste åren. Syftet med artikeln är att undersöka hur e-hälsa som begrepp tillskrivs mening i svensk medicinsk fackpress samt analysera de konfliktlinjer som formar denna betydelsebildning. Genom diskursanalys av 328 artiklar i tidningarna Dagens Medicin och Läkartidningen har tre organiserade metaforer identifierats. Dessa är e-hälsa som tävling, e-hälsa och ekonomi samt marknadifiering av e-hälsa som ett etiskt problem. Artikeln synliggör med hjälp av diskursanalys dominerande sätt att förstå och gestalta den förändring av svensk sjukvård som digitaliseringen har fört med sig. Den visar att e-hälsa ses både som en stor möjlighet för vården och som ett stort problem genom att teknologin och avregleringen av vården leder till stora kostnader för skattebetalare samt riskerar att förändra vad det innebär att vara både vårdgivare och patient.

Recently, the problem with fake news, fact resistance and the growing digital, global circulation of disinformation have caused debates and worries, and posed a challenge for several institutions of knowledge in society. In this article, we discuss how the news industry, museums and higher education confront the challenges of the ‘post truth’ era. We can see a mobilization by these institutions in Sweden: The news industry has initiated so-called fact checking sites, the major museums create exhibitions about false news and educate youth in digital literacy and many universities have launched initiatives to legitimize scientific knowledge production, thereby safeguarding professional authority. However, these initiatives are faced with dilemmas concerning how concepts of knowledge, truth and facts are negotiated and understood. This article discusses such epistemological issues in general, and focuses in particular on the risk of falling into the trap of so called neorigorism.

Abstract The aim of this article is to analyse and compare how technologies of media monitoring have been imagined as seeing devices at two turning points in media history – around 1900 and in the 2000s. The press-cutting agencies that were established during the late nineteenth century, depending on human eyes and scissors, were said to deliver customized news updates, business data and information on public opinion. As seeing devices, they took names such as Argus, Observer and Atlas. These agencies made it possible to see the world on paper. Today, media monitoring depends on automatic processes rather than human eyes. Yet, digital technologies are usually represented by images of old media devices such as magnifying glasses, binoculars, telescopes and watchtowers. These well-known and transparent technologies make the black boxes of digital media seem less strange, but they might also mask the assumptions and complexities that are built into them.

E-halsa sags av manga kunna forbattra sjukvarden. I den har artikeln undersoker vi forestallningar och ideer om e-halsa for aldre i glesbygden med sar-skilt fokus pa virtuella halsorum. Vi lyfter f ...

From realism to post truth? News, museums and higher education against fake news and fact resistanceRecently, the problem with fake news, fact resistance and the growing digital, global circulation ...

This article explores how different meanings of participation' are developed in the intersection between local journalism and social media. The study is based on qualitative interviews with media professionals working in community media organisations in northern Sweden. Three key themes are identified: participation as marketisation, participation and production, and participation and democracy. This article discusses how these three different forms of participation contribute to the constitution of journalistic identities in a local context and to its meanings within the media sphere in general. This article argues that the emergence of new digital media has not so much renewed the role of the media professional as it has led to a cementing of their professional identity. Social media are a necessity for the development of journalism and are celebrated for their potential to include audiences; yet journalists paradoxically seem to consider these same technologies of participation as a threat, not only to journalism but also to democracy.

Den har boken handlar om hur sociala medier kan fungera politiskt i manniskors vardag. Digitaliseringen av samhallet har starkt aktualiserat fragan om forhallandet mellan medier och deltagande. I S ...

The empirical material of this article consists of interviews with politicians in Västerbotten, an area in the north of Sweden. The aim of the article is to identify and analyse how these politicians relate to digital information technology and new media. What democratic opportunities and risks of information technology and new media are reflected in interviews with the politicians? What does this technology and these media mean for politicians’ political strategies and for their identity production as professional politicians? We argue that the interview data reflect two partly contradictory political identities: on the one side a progressive and modern political identity, and on the other a ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ political identity. However, both identities are consistent with a digital discourse and are populist due to their pro-technological character.

The Media's Use of CCTV-images of DeathThis article discusses the construction of death in popular media's use of surveillance footage, and more specifically images depicting the time before death ...

This article discusses the construction of death in popular media’s use of surveillance footage, and more specifically images depicting the time before death occurs. There are many explanations why these kinds of images of death seem to fit the media format: They are assumed to be authentic, they potentially produces a point of identification for spectators, and finally they represent the time before it is all too late – before death occurs. Hence, they paradoxically represent also hope.

Medan sociala medier sags utlosa demokratiska revolutioner utanfor Europas granser utformas lagar som inskranker elektronisk kommunikation pa hemmaplan. Eric Carlsson och Bo Nilsson blottlagger en ...