

Your Attention Please? Human-Rights NGOs and Global Communication [pdf] - jcr
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dominik_Stecula/publication/261870894_May_We_Have_Your_Attention_Please_Human-Rights_NGOs_and_the_Problem_of_Global_Communication/file/9c960535aa8056ac53.pdf

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jcr
Though the title of the paper was shortened by yours truly to fit on HN, the
paper is actually about tech rather than politics.

    
    
      Hypothesis 1: Global news media attention will be heavily concentrated
      on a few NGOs.
    
      Hypothesis 2: The distribution of global news media attention among
      NGOs will correlate closely with the distribution of organizational
      resources among NGOs.
    
      Hypotheses Three and Four make the same predictions but with respect
      to getting the attention of individual citizens via the Web and social
      media:
    
      Hypothesis 3: Global public attention on the Web and in social media
      will be heavily concentrated on a few NGOs.
    
      Hypothesis 4: The distribution of global public attention will
      correlate closely with the distribution of organizational resources
      among NGOs.
    
      Hypotheses Three and Four lie at the crux of the current debate.
      Though many observers would acknowledge that Hypotheses One and Two
      are likely to be true, the premise recent enthusiasm about the Web and
      social media is the supposed democratization of communications. If the
      Internet is indeed democratizing NGO communications, then Hypotheses
      Three and Four must be false. If they are true, on the other hand,
      then the promise of the Web and social media to provide improved
      access to the global public for all groups especially the less wealthy
      and powerful in society  may turn out to have been an appealing
      illusion.
    

Abstract

 _" Historically, NGOs have relied on mainstream news media to expose human
rights violations and encourage governments to pressure the per- petrators.
Thanks to the Internet, NGOs are crafting new strategies for conducting
information politics. Despite the obvious democratization of access to the
means of communication, however, the new media may in fact represent a more
challenging environment in which to be heard for some groups seeking global
attention. We draw on agenda setting research to develop a theory of global
attention competition and use it to explain the success of 257 transnational
human rights groups at generating at- tention in both international mainstream
news media and social media outlets. We conclude that most NGOs lack the
organizational resources to compete effectively for either traditional news
coverage or for public attention and that the Internet is unlikely to resolve
the problem of global communication."_

