Beyond clickbait and commerce

and/or distributed by ENGOs to mobilise members and publics
and often also to challenge institutional knowledge. This material
may reach its primary audience via an ENGO’s websites or social
media. Simultaneously or alternatively, however, it may find its way
into participatory or mainstream media as a result of traditional
news investigation or ENGO public relations, or through direct
contribution by an ENGO activist (for example, opinion pieces, or
material uploaded to a participatory media site). In mainstream
media it might also take the form of overt advocacy journalism (see
Fisher 2015). When I write of mainstream media in this paper, I am
referring primarily to commercial digital or non-digital mass media,
while also recognising that a non-profit media organisation may be
high-profile, mainstream and mass media; social media has been
described as ‘many-to-many broadcasting’ (DeLuca et al. 2011:
149); and a media worker who publishes in mainstream outlets
may also be an activist or advocate (McGaurr 2015).
RESEARCH
PAPER
In the following sections I discuss the roles of images, spectacle,
NGOs, desire and publicity in the public sphere, and introduce the
concepts of the public screen (DeLuca and Peeples 2002; DeLuca
et al. 2011) and re-mediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999). After
describing my qualitative approach, I then present and discuss
my case study. My examination of the Great Bear Rainforest
RAVE – in particular image re-mediation, which is defined as ‘the
representation of one medium in another’ (ibid: 45) – reveals
some of the benefits and risks for the public sphere and ENGOs
of combining activist and mainstream media in environmental
campaigns. In my case study, a partnership with the National
Geographic Society helped the iLCP and other ENGOs to gain
publicity in mainstream media for themselves, the environmental
issues they supported, and the images they curated on their own
websites. However, because the narrative of an iLCP photographer
on assignment for National Geographic was integral to the image
event, re-mediation resulted not only in opportunities for raising
awareness of the issue and challenging institutional knowledge but
also, on occasion, decontextualisation in the interests of sometimes
misaligned consumerism.
Images in the public sphere
The public sphere, as conceived of by Jürgen Habermas (1989),
is a metaphorical space in which individuals come together in
person as equals to engage in rational-critical debate about their
common affairs. Finnegan and Kang (2004: 380) posit that, in
The structural transformation of the public sphere, Habermas
demonstrates ‘gross iconoclasm’ – ‘a blunt, general critique that
argues that images are dangerous to the practice of healthy public
communication’, although they also find that in his later work
he assigns ‘appropriate’ forms of visuality such as bourgeois art
a role in rescuing the public sphere from ‘the feudalizing force of
Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016 19