Power and Media Systems

Welcome all to this new blog, made especially for my first course as a Lund exchange student: Power and Media Systems. During this time in Lund, I'm mostly here to learn about Swedish culture. I am currently studying Scandinavian Studies in Amsterdam and this exchange therefore mostly is focussed on acquiring knowledge from Sweden in the country itself. However, I have always liked to get into other areas of study as well. As various types of media got my interest, and the politic landscape has been getting rougher and rougher over the last couple of years, I am eager to find out what this course will teach me about the world of media which we live in.

During this first week, we read several pieces on the personalisation of politics. What I found especially helpful was the review paper written by Aelst et. al. In this paper, the main terminology of political media personalisation was explained.

The article differentiates between two types of personalisation: on the one side there is individualisation, where the attention of a political party is drawn onto one certain person in the political party. When a new president is chosen in the US, for example, the political party is less a deal than the person itself. In the current landscape however, it seems to me that it becomes less and less important what kind of political skills one person has, the personal identity is the most important. When politicians in the news are highlighted more because of whereabouts in their own personal lives as opposed to their political deeds, we call this media privatisation. 

I hope that in this course, I can learn more about these concepts of power and media, so that I can better understand my position in the world which I'm living in. I am excited to meet you all and work together in the group lectures.