Rethinking Media Pluralism : A Critique of Theories and Policy Discourses

This study examines different ways in which the concept of media pluralism has been theorized and used in contemporary media policy debates. Access to a broad range of different political views and cultural expressions is often regarded as a self-evident value in both theoretical and political debates on media and democracy. Opinions on the meaning and nature of media pluralism as a theoretical, political or empirical concept, however, are many, and it can easily be adjusted to different political purposes. The study aims to analyse the ambiguities surrounding the concept of media pluralism in two ways: by deconstructing its normative roots from the perspective of democratic theory, and by examining its different uses, definitions and underlying rationalities in current European media policy debates. The first part of the study examines the values and assumptions behind the notion of media pluralism in the context of different theories of democracy and the public sphere. The second part then analyses and assesses the deployment of the concept in contemporary European policy debates on media ownership and public service media. Finally, the study critically evaluates various attempts to create empirical indicators for measuring media pluralism and discusses their normative implications and underlying rationalities. The analysis of contemporary policy debates indicates that the notion of media pluralism has been too readily reduced to an empty catchphrase or conflated with consumer choice and market competition. In this narrow technocratic logic, pluralism is often unreflectively associated with quantitative data in a way that leaves unexamined key questions about social and political values, democracy, and citizenship. The basic argument advanced in the study is that media pluralism needs to be rescued from its depoliticized uses and re-imagined more broadly as a normative value that refers to the distribution of communicative power in the public sphere. Instead of something that could simply be measured through the number of media outlets available, the study argues that media pluralism should be understood in terms of its ability to challenge inequalities in communicative power and create a more democratic public sphere.

Ajan sisäkkäiset tilat. Arkkitehtuuri, valokuva ja menneisyyden esittäminen W. G. Sebaldin romaanissa Austerlitz

In her thesis, Kaisa Kaakinen analyzes how the German emigrant author W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) uses architecture and photography in his last novel "Austerlitz" to represent time, history and remembering. Sebald describes time in spatial terms: it is like a building, the rooms and chambers of which are connected to each other. The poetics of spatial time manifests itself on multiple levels of the text. Kaakinen traces it in architectural representations, photographic images, intertextuality, as well as in the form of the text, using the concept of spatial form by Joseph Frank. Architectural and photographic representations serve as meeting points for different aspects and angles of the novel and illustrate the idea of a layered present that has multiple connections to the past. The novel tells a story of Jacques Austerlitz, who as a small child was sent from Prague to Britain in one of the so-called Kindertransports that saved children from Central Europe occupied by the National Socialists. Only gradually he remembers his Jewish parents, who have most likely perished in Nazi concentration camps. The novel brings the problematic of writing about another person's past to the fore by the fact that Austerlitz's story is told by an anonymous narrator, Austerlitz's interlocutor, who listens to and writes down Austerlitz's story. Kaakinen devotes the final part of her thesis to study the demands of representing a historical trauma, drawing on authors such as Dominick LaCapra and Michael Rothberg. Through the analysis of architectural and photographic representations in the novel, she demonstrates how Austerlitz highlights the sense of singularity and inaccessibility of memories of an individual, while also stressing the necessity - and therefore a certain kind of possibility - of passing these memories to another person. The coexistence of traumatic narrowness and of the infinity of history is reflected in ambivalent buildings. Some buildings in the novel resemble reversible figures: they can be perceived simultaneously as ruins and as construction sites. Buildings are also shown to be able to both cover and preserve memories - an idea that also is repeated in the use of photography, which tends to both replace memories and cause an experience of the presence of an absent thing. Commenting and critisizing some recent studies on Sebald, the author develops a reading which stresses the ambivalence inherent in Sebald's view on history and historiography. Austerlitz shows the need to recognize the inevitable absence of the past as well as the distance from the experiences of others. Equally important, however, is the refusal to give up narrating the past: Sebald's novel stresses the necessity to preserve the sites of the past, which carry silent traces of vanished life. The poetics of Austerlitz reflects the paradox of the simultaneous impossibility and indispensability of writing history.

Pietismin kuva - ikkuna yksityiseen hengellisyyteen : Johann Arndtin opetukset pietistisen embleemin perustana

The image of Pietism a window to personal spirituality. The teachings of Johann Arndt as the basis of Pietist emblems The Pietist effect on spiritual images has to be scrutinised as a continuum initiating from the teachings of Johann Arndt who created a protestant iconography that defended the status of pictures and images as the foundation of divine revelation. Pietist artworks reveal Arndtian part of secret, eternal world, and God. Even though modern scholars do not regarded him as a founding father of Pietism anymore, his works have been essential for the development of iconography, and the themes of the Pietist images are linked with his works. For Arndt, the starting point is in the affecting love for Christ who suffered for the humankind. The reading experience is personal and the words point directly at the reader and thus appear as evidence of the guilt of the reader as well as of the love of God. Arndt uses bounteous and descriptive language which has partially affected promoting and picturing of many themes. Like Arndt, Philipp Jakob Spener also emphasised the heart that believes. The Pietist movement was born to oppose detached faith and the lack of the Holy Ghost. Christians touched by the teachings of Arndt and Spener began to create images out of metaphors presented by Arndt. As those people were part of the intelligentsia, it was natural that the fashionable emblematics of the 17th century was moulded for the personal needs. For Arndt, the human heart is manifested as a symbol of soul, personal faith or unbelief as well as an allegory of the burning love for Jesus. Due to this fact, heart emblems were gradually widely used and linked with the love of Christ. In the Nordic countries, the introduction of emblems emanated from the gentry s connections to the Central Europe where emblems were exploited in order to decorate books, artefacts, interiors, and buildings as well as visual/literal trademarks of the intelligentsia. Emblematic paintings in the churches of the castles of Venngarn (1665) and Läckö (1668), owned by Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, are one of the most central interior paintings preserved in the Nordic countries, and they emphasise personal righteous life. Nonetheless, it was the books by Arndt and the Poet s Society in Nurnberg that bound the Swedish gentry and the scholars of the Pietist movement together. The Finnish gentry had no castles or castle churches so they supported county churches, both in building and in maintenance. As the churches were not private, their iconography could not be private either. Instead, people used Pietist symbols such as Agnus Dei, Cor ardens, an open book, beams, king David, frankincense, wood themes and Virtues. In the Pietist images made for public spaces, the attention is focused on pedagogical, metaphorical, and meaningful presentation as well as concealed statements.

Honey flows through fertile valleys : The cognitive and evolutionary foundations of paradise representations

The aim of the study is to explain how paradise beliefs are born from the viewpoint of mental functions of the human mind. The focus is on the observation that paradise beliefs across the world are mutually more similar than dissimilar. By using recent theories and results from the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion as well as from studies of environmental preferences, I suggest that this is because pan-human unconscious motivations, the architecture of mind, and the way the human mind processes information constrain the possible repertoire of paradise beliefs. The study is divided into two parts, theoretical and empirical. The arguments in the theoretical part are tested with data in the empirical part with two data sets. The first data set was collected using an Internet survey. The second data set was derived from literary sources. The first data test the assumption that intuitive conceptions of an environment of dreams generally follow the outlines set by evolved environmental preferences, but that they can be tweaked by modifying the presence of desirable elements. The second data test the assumption that familiarity is a dominant factor determining the content of paradise beliefs. The results of the study show that in addition to the widely studied belief in supernatural agents, belief in supernatural environments wells from the natural functioning of the human mind attesting the view that religious thinking and ideas are natural for human species and are produced by the same mental mechanisms as other cultural information. The results also help us to understand that the mental structures behind the belief in the supernatural have a wider scope than has been previously acknowledged.

Traditional medicinal uses and biological activities of some plant extracts of African Combretum Loefl., Terminalia L. and Pteleopsis Engl. species

In Africa various species of Combretum, Terminalia and Pteleopsis are used in traditional medicine. Despite of this, some species of these genera have still not been studied for their biological effects to validate their traditional uses. The aim of this work has been to document the ethnomedicinal uses of several species of Combretum and Terminalia in Mbeya region, south-western Tanzania, and to use this information for finding species with good antimicrobial and cytotoxic potential. During a five weeks expedition to Tanzania in spring 1999 sixteen different species of Combretum and Terminalia, as well as Pteleopsis myrtifolia were collected from various locations in the districts of Mbeya, Iringa and Dar-es-Salaam. Traditional healers in seven different villages in the Mbeya region were interviewed in Swahili and Nyakyusa on the medicinal uses of Combretum and Terminalia species shown to them. A questionnaire was used during the interviews. The results of the interviews correlated well between different villages, the same species being used in similar ways in different villages. Of the ten species shown to the healers six were frequently used for treatment of skin diseases, bacterial infections, diarrhea, oedema and wounds. The dried plants were most commonly prepared into hot water decoctions or mixed into maize porridge, Ugali. Infusions made from dried or fresh plant material were also common. Wounds and topical infections were treated with ointments made from the dried plant material mixed with sheep fat. Twenty-one extracts of six species of Combretum and four of Terminalia, collected from Tanzania, were screened for their antibacterial effects against two gram-negative and five gram-positive bacteria, as well as the yeast, Candida albicans, using an agar diffusion method. Most of the screened plants showed substantial antimicrobial activity. A methanolic root extract of T. sambesiaca showed the most potent antibacterial effects of all the plant species screened, and gave a MIC value of 0.9 mg/ml against Enterobacter aerogenes. Also root extracts of T. sericea and T. kaiserana gave excellent antimicrobial effects, and notably a hot water extract of T. sericea was as potent as extracts of this species made from EtOH and MeOH. Thus, the traditional way of preparing T. sericea into hot water decoctions seems to extract antimicrobial compounds. Thirty-five extracts of five species of Terminalia, ten of Combretum and Pteleopsis myrtifolia were screened for their antifungal effects against five species of yeast (Candida spp.) and Cryptococcus neoformans. The species differed from each other to their antifungal effects, some being very effective whereas others showed no antifungal effects. The most effective extracts showed antifungal effects comparable to the standard antibiotics itraconazol and amphotericin B. Species of Terminalia gave in general stronger antifungal effects than those of Combretum. The best effects were obtained with methanolic root extracts of T. sambesiaca, T. sericea and T. kaiserana, and this investigation indicates that decoctions of these species might be used for treatment of HIV-related fungal infections. Twenty-seven crude extracts of eight species of Combretum, five of Terminalia and Pteleopsis myrtifolia were evaluated for their cytotoxic effects against human cancer cell lines (HeLa, cervical carcinoma; MCF 7, breast carcinoma, T 24 bladder carcinoma) and one endothelial cell line (BBCE, bovine brain capillary endothelial cells). The most outstanding effects were obtained with a leaf extract of Combretum fragrans, which nearly totally inhibited the proliferation of T 24 and HeLa cells at a concentration of 25 ug/ml and inhibited 60 % of the growth of the HeLa cells at a concentration of 4.3 ug/ml. The species of Terminalia were less cytotoxically potent than the Combretum species, although T. sericea and T. sambesiaca gave good cytotoxic effects (< 30 % proliferation). In summary this study indicates that some of the species of Terminalia, Combretum and Pteleopsis, used in Tanzanian traditional medicine, are powerful inhibitors of both microbial and cancer cell growth. In depth studies would be needed to find the active compounds behind these biological activities.

The Ecologic Foundations of Stylistics in Music and in Language

This contribution suggests that it is possible to describe the transformations of musical style in an analogous way to the transformations of style in language, and also that it can be explained how the ‘musics in contact’ behave in an analogous way to the ‘languages in contact’. According to this idea, the ‘evolution’ of styles in music and in language can be identified and studied as dynamic exchanges in ecological niches. It is suggested, also, that the idiolectic-ecolectic, and acrolectic-basilectic relationships in music and language are functions of cycles in several ‘layers’ and ‘rhythms’. The presence of stylistic varieties and influences in music and in language may imply that they are part of major sign systems within a more complex ecological relationship.