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challenges the notion of nation branding. RT seems to be successful in striking a chord with a globalising audience and ascertaining itself amongst a num‑
ber of established competitors. On a content-related level RT’s coverage blurs the boundaries of nation-branding and calls for an inclusion of cosmopolitan
components reverberating with a globalised prosumer. On a more practical level, it experiments with repackaging its nation-branding for the contem‑
porary networked cross-media practices. The paper starts by critically analyzing the concept of soft power (Nye, 2004) and its applicability to RT’s remit.
Then it moves to the spread of digitally networked systems (Ahy 2014; Doorn 2009; Marwick et al. 2014), also often labelled as ‘new media’, ‘social media’
‘interactive media’, which have re-shaped the media landscape by transcending national boundaries, media channels, communication platforms, and types
of authorship as pertaining to the post-broadcast era. Using the media events within the production team of RT (e.g. a number of recent scandals triggered
by events in Ukraine such as ‘resignation’ of some of its staff on and off air) and examples of prominent RT’s presence in social media the paper questions
the transformation of phenomena of nation branding in a post-broadcast era. It also considers how RT accommodates its broadcasting for an audience more
and more embedded in the transmedia storytelling via online news pages, Twitter, online TV streaming, YouTube presence (storytelling is understood in
a broader sense to encompass all forms of narrativity).
PN 165
Nation Branding’s Governing Aspects: Empowerment, Discipline, Surveillance
C. Cassinger
1
, J. Pamment
1
1
Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Recent research suggests that nation branding strategies increasingly rely on citizens to participate in building and creating the value of the brand (Volcic
& Andrejevic 2011). This paper provides additional insights into such participatory nation branding strategies by examining their different parameters for
autonomous action. To this end we analyse recent examples of nation branding in Northern Europe that involve user-generated content in social media and
citizen journalism, as well as the management of personal profiles and reputations via engagement with the nation brand (cf. Volcic & Andrejevic 2011).
Three techniques for monitoring are identified in such branding strategies: from above (surveillance), below (sousveillance), and of the mediated self
(interveillance) (Deuze 2006; Hansen et al 2015; Christensen & Jansson 2014; Pamment 2015).The ability of brand managers to remove or edit participant’s
contributions (surveillance) may be contrasted with the responses of other content generators (sousveillance), as well as the efforts of participants to
manage their own profiles and reputations via engagement with the brand (interveillance). These three techniques for monitoring, discipline and empow‑
erment help to unpack strategies for contesting, appropriating and rearticulating the national brand via online discussion forums, social media, and citizen
journalism (cf.Volic & Andrejevic 2011). Nation branding here becomes an ambivalent process where ideas of the old and new, future and past, identity and
difference, nationalism and commercial nationalism are simultaneously confronted, reinforced and/or redefined.
PN 166
Branding as a Medium in the Hybrid Media System
K. Valaskivi
1
1
Tampere Universtity, Tampere, Finland
Like other systems of belief and knowledge, nationalism is formed through the circulation of ideas, values and practices. Circulation can be seen as the prac‑
tices via which shared social imaginaries, value systems and beliefs are formed and sustained (Valaskivi and Sumiala 2014; cf. Taylor 2002). Nation brand‑
ing can be analyzed as a particular culture of circulation involving particular actors and sets of practices that produce a particular type of understanding
of the nation as a competitive, contemporary and commodifiable entity rather than—or in addition to—a sovereign nation state. Cultures of circulation
develop in relation to the media available: the nation imagined through newspaper journalism, for instance, is different from the nation imagined through
the ‘media manifold’(Couldry 2012) or the ‘hybrid media system’(Chadwick 2013) where the ‘old’media are intertwined with various social media outlets
(cf. Mihelj 2011). In other words, nation branding is not just a reaction to the perceived competition among nations, it is also a reaction to the rapidly
changing media environment. The multiplicity of circulating messages and decline of institutional authorities to control the flow of information have,
thus, created an ever-growing need to influence the circulation of attention and social imaginaries created within (cf. Taylor 2002, Valaskivi & Sumiala
2013). In these circumstances, the abundance of media messages has created an austerity of attention. It is those who claim they can create, direct and
sustain attention who have achieved the strongest positions of power, thus providing branding consultants new avenues for their business, and created
an expansion of what I – inspired by Bourdieu – call ‘the promotional field’. Nation branding can thus be perceived as a contemporary form of imagining
the nation and discussing national identity, a medium and a set of practices for building and sustaining nationhood ‘2.0’. While branding appears to bolster
competitiveness, it also accelerates competition, for not everyone can be cool and fashionable at the same time. My main theoretical argument is that
with the growing influence of the promotional field, branding and other promotional techniques have challenged earlier forms of imagining the nation in
today’s globalized world and hybrid media system. Branding as a medium produces a different way of perceiving the relationship between the individual
and the nation than journalism or literature. Its emphasis is on affective attachments. The aim is to create positive emotions towards the branded country
from the outside in order to create competitiveness, and at the same time to create internal loyalty and willingness ‘to live the brand’ within the country
(Anholt 2007). For these means different kind of media strategies are employed. Empirically the paper explores nation branding efforts in Japan, Finland
and in Sweden, and focus on how nation branding is used as a medium to imagine the nation in the so called hybrid media system formed in the interplay
between the mainstream media and social media.