This case study acknowledges that militarization on digital media is inadequately studied. A research contribution is therefore created through a narrative textual analysis method informed by strategic narrative theory and research on multimodal meaning-making. The method is then applied qualitatively to a previously neglected empirical material, the Swedish Armed Forces' digital documentary series called “The Veteran’s Portrait”. Using narrative textual analysis, the study interprets that militarizing strategic narratives appear in the documentary series. Thus, the study contributes with needed insight into how militarization as a process occurs on digital media, while at the same time suggesting pathways for future research to further develop this body of research.

Several discussions rose in western media when Swedish high-jumper Emma Green Tregaro competed with her nails painted in the colors of the rainbow during the athletic world championship in Moscow, in August 2013. This was meant to show her support for the gay movement, but was viewed as a protest against the new Russian law which forbids gay propaganda.  Western media critizised Russian media for failing to report the incident to their readers and that is where we got interested in making this research. We got the idea of comparing a Swedish newspaper with a Russian one, to observe differences in how they chose to report the event.  Due to lack of knowledge of the Russian language and the kyrillic alphabet we had to turn to an English-speaking newspaper based in Russia: The Moscow Times.  We compared the Moscow Times with the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, to see their differences in terms of: How they chose to cover the event, from a gender perspective; what structures of power can be found, how Emma Green Tregaro and Yelena Isinbayeva are portrayed and what meaning the protest is given by the narrators. We achieved our results through narrative analysis, a qualitative method. We applied theories such as gender theory and media logic in order to obtain answers to our questions.   We came to the conclusion that there are great differences in how much attention the protest achieved in the two newspapers. From the Swedish perspective, more focus were put on Emma Green Tregaro where she is a brave messenger of love, while in the Russian, more emphasis lays on Yelena Isinbayeva as a defender of the Russian stance. While Dagens Nyheter has put resources into sending journalists to Moscow, The Moscow Times has used a lot of material from news bureaus such as Reuters and The Associated Press instead of covering the event themselves.  Another interesting fact is that the institutions presented in the news flow such as the IAAF, IOC and the Swedish Sports Confederation are only represented by men, and through the power structural dimension of gender theory we can see tendencies of control or influence over the female sports profiles’ actions.

Today, the mass media is playing a key role in reinforcing globalisation, providing people with information that can make them more enlightened about the world. But apart from being an efficient tool for spreading information and a possible ”window on the world” the media can also produce preconceptions and create distance between people and places. This is a study on how African countries are portrayed in the Swedish Television news. The aim of the study is to describe, analyse and compare how Africa was described in 2003 and how it is described ten years later, in 2013. The analysis is based on foreign news reports in one of the main Swedish public service broadcasters, Sveriges Television (SVT). The theoretical framework primarily consists of theories on media logic and news values, representation, identification, globalisation and cosmopolitanism. One of the main conclusions is that although the amount of news on Africa has increased, the character of the news reports is still dominated by negative events such as wars, conflicts and suffering. Alongside this stereotypical and highly negative portrayal of Africa exists another story that focuses on economic development and success – An image that both brings new insights and creates new stereotypes.

Showing grief and loss over deceased musicians is something people have been doing on forums and online webshrines since home computers and the internet became part of our daily lives. Studies of this phenomenon have shown that grievers did so as a process of being in a state of disenfranchised grief, meaning that their grief wasn’t seen as legitimate or genuine, since they didn’t have a personal relationship with the deceased musician. Grief on the internet as an unidentifiable avatar on forums and shrines was a possibility many took hold of. Since the entrance of social media however, this notion of keeping grief over famous musicians (or other celebrities) private have changed. Whenever a famous person dies it is hard to miss Facebook statuses and comments written in sorrow and grief. This essay studies grief ridden comments on three different deceased musicians official Facebook profiles, how they are written, how personal they are, and how they relate to the musician. The essay also gets into a discussion how other users in grief effects the expressions of grief and how the medium and infrastructure of Facebook itself is contributing to the expressions.