Book Review | The Öyhökratia non-fiction book could be a report commissioned by the Ministry – A consultancy-like book is a picture of a structural problem in the Finnish media field

Culture|Book review

Nonfiction book

Johannes Koponen, Minea Koskinen, Jussi Pillinen: Öyhökratia – who is listened to when everyone is talking. Gummerus. 261 s.

Famine is a swinging word. However, like a typical buzzword, it means very little to nothing.

Doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki Johannes Koposenfree supplier Minea Koskisen and the head of politics and finance for Helsingin Sanomat Jussi Pullinen Nightingale – who is listened to when everyone is talking presents a bunch of rhetorical tools as well as case studies and builds on them to create a lightweight theory of cross-stakes between decision makers, news media and social media.

The book’s argument is that social media changes the power relations of society, which has its pros and cons. Unfortunately, it feels more like a big money report commissioned by the ministry than an attempt to come up with new ideas.

There has been a shortage of sensible in-depth analyzes on the subject in Finland. By far the best performance has been released in 2018 After the truth book, which also primarily bought the concept of the “truthfulness” of the buzzword of its time.

Instead, in the English-speaking world, the world changed by social media has been written endlessly. Indeed, there would be enough material from which to pick raisins and build on top of ingenious synthesis – Andrew Marantzin Antisocial, Angela Naglen Kill All Normies, Ezra Kleinin Why We’re Polarizedto name a few successes in recent years.

Famine ignores the recent international debate and is content to apply the basics of communication theory to Twitter.

The book the effort is sublime: “We want to find out how power is actually exercised on social media.”

The book is going to get it in the right direction: Kirsi Pihan abstention from the Helsinki Mayor’s Competition, Central Chamber of Commerce Juho Romakkaniemen trolling strategies, the relationship between online activists and the media … The main method is interviews with twenty social media power users, the “poor man”.

But whenever the interviews get close to the exercise of power, the analysis ends and the book looks elsewhere.

Personally, I wonder how hysterically at the heart of power in the Prime Minister’s Office there are fears of “tidal waves” caused by a couple of three people and possibly the afternoon newspaper publicity that will follow.

From the news media, the book leaves a passive picture: it does not leave the editorial office, but gets its only contact on the “pulse of the people” from the social media.

Social media is often thought to strengthen civil society. It is good to consider whether its intensification may make it more difficult for economists to stay afloat Daron Acemoğlun and James A. Robinson describing a “narrow corridor” of successful states with a balance of state control and individual freedoms.

Smooth readable Famine is, as editors’ books often are. The third part of the book, which introduces theory, is more academic, and its Finnish is sadly corrupted by English.

The genre is familiar from many workshops: there are unnecessarily few conclusions of its own, the theory is condensed into triangles and arrows, and the choice of source seems random: suddenly a long description may appear in front of you. Galtungin and Rugen old news criteria.

The report nature is explained by the fact that the book is the final report of a research project carried out by Johannes Koponen for the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation.

The project, commissioned for 76,000 euros, reveals the consulting taste of the Finnish media field. There is a problem if doing journalism itself is less financially profitable than reporting on it.

In recent years, for example, studies related to student magazines have been funded with sums that have been larger than the magazine’s content budgets.

His newspapers in recent years, carefully read hardly get About hunger very much new.

The impression left by the book is that the authors feel that they are on the verge of something new and revolutionary, with the result that it is unhistorical. The book, for example, says right-wing television channels are “a kind of Twitter on television” – as if there had been no political media before.

Influenza Jenni Rotonen summarizes in the book the relationship between traditional media and social media: “It is not followed, it is not understood. Let’s come from somewhere outside like a boomer in Tiktok. “

As a book Famine is, above all, a product of the society it describes. In a world where expertise has become a matter of revelation and substance an elitist, the most typical way to replace critical thinking is to call for constructiveness. That is why this work also replenishes its superficiality by ending with a “series of corrections to the heredity,” that is, the seven tricks of how people can better listen to each other.