Nico Carpentier

Jan Servaes

The Information Society is one of the recurrent imaginaries to describe present-day structures, discourses and practices. Within its meaning is enshrined the promise of a better world, sometimes naively assuming a technological deus ex machina, in other cases hoping for the creation of policy tools that will overcome a diversity of societal divides. With the two-phased World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the United Nations attempted to stimulate the development of such tools. Simultaneously, the WSIS is a large-scale experiment in multistakeholderism. The objective was to create a more balanced decision-making process that would allow the voices of civil society and business actors to be heard in international politics. This book aims to evaluate the potentialities of both the Information Society, and the WSIS in supporting and constructing more democratic, just and developed societies. It is the second book arising from the intellectual work of European Consortium for Communications Research members.

Deconstructing WSIS

Towards a Sustainable Information Society

Benjamin De Cleen

In an era when (especially new) media are celebrated for their participatory potential, questions about the nature and intensity of these participatory processes seem to be superfluous. But raising these questions pushes us into a critical mode towards the changes that have lead to the present-day media landscape. This volume's authors aim to activate this critical mode and reflect on the participatory nature of contemporary media organizations and products. In order to stand even a remote chance to realize this objective, and to critically unravel the societal role of participation, we need to acknowledge that participation is a complex and contested notion, covering a wide variety of meanings and practices that are converging into a hybrid of technologies, genres, and formats. At the same time, prudence is required, as many of the empowering and transformative opportunities cover-up a multitude of restrictions that deal with muting voices, appropriations, techniques of surveillance, inequalities, and exclusions. This volume thus provides its readership with a set of analyses that reconcile the appreciation for the analogue and digital empowerment and emancipation with the critical analysis of their boundaries.Participation and Media Production is the result of the intellectual work of the participants of the 2007 San Francisco Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA).

Critical Reflections on Content Creation

Participation and Media Production

Leen Van Brussel

Chapter 12 of this book is open access under a CC BY license. Well-established scholars from a variety of disciplines - including sociology, anthropology, media and cultural studies, and political sciences – use the social construction of death and dying to analyse a wide variety of meaning-making practices in societal fields such as ethics, politics, media, medicine and family.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

The Social Construction of Death

Bart Cammaerts

Olga Bailey

What are alternative media? What roles do alternative media play in pluralistic, democratic societies? What are the similarities and differences between alternative media, community media, civil society media and rhizomatic media? How do alternative media work in practice? This clear and concise text offers a one-stop guide through the complex political, social and economic debates that surround alternative media and provides a fresh and insightful look at the renewed importance of this form of communication. Combing diverse case studies from countries including the UK, North America and Brazil, the authors propose an original theoretical framework to help understand the subject. Looking at both ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, the book argues for the importance of an alternative media and suggests a political agenda as a way of broadening its scope. Understanding Alternative Media is valuable reading for students in media, journalism and communications studies, researchers, academics, and journalists.

EBOOK: Understanding Alternative Media

Discusses participatory processes within the media. By looking at a diversity of media (television, radio, print, web, photography, but also museums), this book focuses on the process of participation itself, and shows how complex and difficult it is for media organisations to uphold their democratic-communicative role.

A Site of Ideological-democratic Struggle

Media and Participation

Pascal Gielen

Helen Hahmann

Briony Campbell

Loes Witteveen and Jacomien den Boer

Vaia Doudaki

Helene Black and Yiannis Colakides

Nicos Trimikliniotis

Hazal Yolga

Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman

Labor Neunzehn

Johannes Gerard

Yiannis Christidis

Vuk Ćosić

Liza Philosof

Nance Davies

Will Kendrick

Olga Yegorova

Respublika!: Experiments in the performance of participation and democracy

Benjamin de Cleen

This volume gathers the work of the Brussels group of critical media and communication scholars that deploy discourse theory as theoretical backbone and analytical research perspective. The book seeks to show the value and applicability of discourse-theoretical analysis (DTA) within the field of media and communication studies, through a variety of case studies that highlight both the radical contingent nature and the hegemonic workings of media and communication practices.

Communication and Discourse Theory

Participation has become fashionable again, but at the same time it has always played a crucial role in our contemporary societies, and it has been omnipresent in a surprisingly large number of societal fields. In the case of the media sphere, the present-day media conjuncture is now considered to be the most participatory ever, but media participation has had a long and intense history. To deal with these paradoxes, this book looks at participation as a structurally unstable concept and as the object of a political-ideological struggle that makes it oscillate between minimalist and maximalist versions. This struggle is analysed in theoretical reflections in five fields (democracy, arts, development, spatial planning and media) and in eight different cases of media practice. These case studies also show participation’s close connection to power, identity, organization, technology and quality.

A site of ideological-democratic struggle

Erik Spinoy

This book fills the gap between discourse theory and cultural approaches and provides an innovative and interdisciplinary contribution to areas such as cultural studies; political science; literary, art, communication, and media studies; the Internet; and film studies. By strictly focusing on the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, the authors have distilled a coherent volume out of a diversity of perspectives that offer important contributions to a wide range of academic discussions, fields, and disciplines.

Media, Arts and Literature

Discourse Theory and Cultural Analysis

Kim Christian Schrøder

Lawrie Hallett

The concept of the audience is changing. In the twenty-first century there are novel configurations of user practices and technological capabilities that are altering the way we understand and trust media organizations and representations, how we participate in society, and how we construct our social relations. This book embeds these transformations in a societal, cultural, technological, ideological, economic and historical context, avoiding a naive privileging of technology as the main societal driving force, but also avoiding the media-centric reduction of society to the audiences that are situated within. Audience Transformations provides a platform for a nuanced and careful analysis of the main changes in European communicational practices, and their social, cultural and technological affordances.

Shifting Audience Positions in Late Modernity

Audience Transformations

The book addresses whether the contemporary media conjuncture offers enough to our democracies, how their democratic investment can be deepened and how our communication rights can be expanded.

Communication Rights and Democratic Media Roles

Reclaiming the Media

Nico Carpentier

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