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.

Chapter Six explains how Rogers contributed greatly to a media revolution that reshaped American culture in the early 1900s. Beginning in 1922, he reached a vast new popular audience by becoming a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist (first with a weekly column, then a shorter daily one), writing regulary for magazines, making advertisements, cutting phonograph records, and making sporadic appearances in the new medium of radio. He also updated the old tradition of the lecture,regularly traveling throughout the nation to appear before audiences in town halls, lyceums, and churches. Throughout, Rogers deployed his talents as a cracker-barrel philosopher and down-home wit to interrogate America’s move to embrace a new consumer, urban, leisure-oriented culture.

Scholars have long understood Manuel Puig’s work as embedded in media history, as he reinvented the novel by adapting techniques from film, radio-novelas, and soap operas. Critics like Alan Pauls linked gossip to the media circuitry of Puig’s first novel, while Josefina Ludmer wrote of how radio-novelas pertain to the “justice of the kitchen knife” in Boquitas Pintadas, and Francine Masiello discussed the relationship between invertido and inversión that Puig plots in entangling sexuality, media, and neoliberal capital. This chapter deepens Puig’s media history with special attention to sound across Puig’s novels, but with a particular focus on El beso de la mujer araña (1976). That novel has been hailed for its cinematic flair, but critics have tended to ignore the importance of listening in the book: from Puig’s own tape-recorded interviews in preparing the manuscript to Molina’s listening as an agent of the state to the shared listening that brings the characters together. Drawing from work on “aurality” by Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Jonathan Sterne, and others, this chapter explains and analyzes how listening became Puig’s queer response to authoritarian power and the media technologies of his day.

Australians visiting Europe often complain about how little they see or hear of their own country in the European media. On the face of it, there is much to justify these reactions. It is exasperating to turn the pages of British newspapers and read the trivia they contain when one knows of the much more reportable, entertaining or significant stories they could print about other parts of the world. But is the situation much better when viewed in reverse? Are not the Australian media as guilty of parochialism when it comes to coverage of the outside world? The sad but very basic fact of the matter is that all politics are local politics. All of us who specialise in international affairs have been frustrated by the leverage of local issues on the attention of politicians, journalists, other academics and public opinion. We, when all is said and done, focus on issues such as whether certain countries will continue to exist, or whether the world will be at peace or war in months or years ahead. Sadly, these topics compete poorly with less vital topics such as the love lives of the Royal family or tales of petty corruption, both in Britain and in Australia.

Chapter 1 establishes the contours of the Irish Revival and revivalism as we have come to understand both today. Understood as a constellation of movements, discourses, and practices, the Revival was a modernizing force in a media environment that encouraged multiple visions of Ireland’s past and its future. My discussion of the Irish Revival and revivalism situates Yeats’s literary revivalism within a broader cultural context. I argue that the Revival’s message was often constructed in a modern media environment as part of a process of remediation, whereby revivalist texts, often first published in the daily newspapers, were republished and recontextualized so that they might be recognized anew and with greater understanding. These texts also served a remedial function – that is, they were part of revivalist emphasis on self-improvement. Yeats, in concert with revivalists across a wide political spectrum, helped forge the idea of a national consciousness and a modern national literature in which the legends of ancient Ireland would find a place.

Short of war, public interest in foreign policy would seem negligible. A national poll taken in October 1980 found that only 3 per cent of those surveyed viewed foreign policy as a major issue. Of course, had the term foreign policy been substituted with overseas debt, Japanese investment, Asian immigration, the greenhouse effect or disarmament, the response may well have been different. On the whole the media, too, has adopted an uneven approach to foreign policy. ABC television and radio and most of the so-called quality newspapers have specialist reporters covering the area. However, tabloid papers, commercial television and commercial radio devote little attention to serious foreign policy analysis. Aside from periods of major international crises, such as the war in the Persian Gulf, even a cursory glance at the Australian media’s daily output shows foreign policy coverage very much lagging behind domestic politics, sport and entertainment.

This chapter samples signs of various cultural institutions, entertainment venues and media.

Chapter 4 introduces the main empirical case of the book, The Direct Line with Vladimir Putin, and documents its progression from 2001 to 2022, a key period of autocratization in Russia. This chapter details how participatory technologies can be positioned as a credible form of voice and the strategies used to increase the Direct Line’s credibility while still maintaining control.

The promotion of suicide and description of suicide methods on the Internet have led to widespread concern that legal control is mandated. Apart from value concerns pertaining to attitudes about suicide, the guarantee of freedom of expression presents a serious challenge to the introduction of restrictive laws. Recent developments in Australia and Europe are presented, noting jurisdictional complexity as an obstacle to effective application. Scientific data of an epidemiological nature are revealed to be insufficient to warrant making causal assertions about the Internet and its relation to suicidal acts, including those of vulnerable populations. Regardless of restrictions, the uncontrolled Darknet hosts suicide encouragement and information on methods to kill oneself. Recommendations are made with respect to public education, suicide prevention and future research.

This chapter lays further conceptual foundation for the book’s proposed trust-based framework. It applies to the citizen-government relationship what I call the ‘network conception of trust’ from the social science scholarship. In doing so, it makes a claim of how trust functions in the social rights context. According to this conception, trust arises in, and depends on, complex structures or networks of relationships. Applying this conception to the citizen-government relationship, the chapter argues that in contemporary democracies, the citizen-government relationship arises in a network of relationships and that trust in the citizen-government relationship depends on the relationships that constitute the network – including, importantly, the relationship between citizens and the courts that arises out of the adjudication of social rights by courts. This argument adds nuance to our understanding of trust and lays foundation for my contention in Chapter 4 that the courts, via their enforcement of social rights, can foster citizens’ trust in the elected branches.

To ask ‘how do you do what you do?’ is both a technical and personal question. Brandi Wilkins Cantanese, Nicola Mārie Hyland, and Ben Spatz complicate the idea that methods are separable from researchers’ lives, while advocating for decolonizing research. Methods implicate both what and when: they are immanent in everything the scholar does. Exploring methods that gather information in relational and communal ways, the conversants reflect on how using various media in performance research (re-)contextualizes methods and the binary between bodily presence and recorded acts. They conclude that interdisciplinary research should invest in decolonizing methodologies as an ethical practice that both augments and challenges academic training.