CALL FOR PAPERS: "SPECIAL ISSUE": Digital culture: mediatization, surveillance and public space

2024-02-26

Editors:

Silvia Valencich Frota (Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa) and

Nuno Medeiros (Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa)


Languages: Portuguese; English; Spanish


DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: 7 July 2024

 

Abstract
The transformation in culture, promoted by both the digital technology and the development of media, information, and communication systems, represents one of the greatest challenges of modern societies. Understanding such profound changes and their impacts becomes part of the everyday life of communication professionals and citizens in general. In this context, what challenges, risks and opportunities arise? What new public spaces for interaction and socialization are being promoted?
Using a transdisciplinary approach, the objective of this special issue is to reflect on the impact of the new technologies in a society based on the abundance of information and data, that coexists with the potential of rupture and instability, with a deep and widespread crisis of confidence as a result.


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Description and Framework

When thinking about contemporary societies, it is implied, to some extent, the mapping, understanding and analyzing of complex information and communication systems, which simultaneously structure them and are structured by them. This tangle of networks, with its multiple nodes and connections, enables and stimulates the circulation of data, ideas, objects, and people, transforming the notion of space and time, while overlapping and challenging them (Castells, 2009).
Communication becomes increasingly ubiquitous, reaching the smallest spaces and practices of life in society, from the most intimate sphere to the most visible and publicly disseminated ones. In this sense, the concept of mediatization, as proposed by Hjarvard (2013), seems relevant in highlighting the capacity for transformation of social institutions promoted by (but also promoting) the development of the media, which, in turn, come to be constituted as an institution per se.
The accelerated and, despite the so-called digital fracture (Furtado, 2012), presumably irreversible digitalization process is a relevant part of this scenario. Digital culture conquers territories and minds, but we need to think beyond the concept. It is important to know, analyze and reflect on digital culture, namely, on the new values, world views, forms of relationships and processes of construction of meanings promoted directly and indirectly by the digital, as well as on the plural ways in which they are inscribed in (and inscribe) social, cultural, economic and political structures of human existence and interaction (Arditi e Miller, 2019).
This double inscription creates a space of tension between the cultures and structures of freedom, and the cultures and structures of surveillance, both anchored in a current scenario marked, among other defining features, by hyperconnection, superdiversity and centrality of data in contemporary life, as well as the problems that arise from them, particularly in the context of their public expressions. What new public spaces are possible? How are they characterized? What new opportunities and risks emerge? Which new agents participate in them? What new power relations are established?
The power, and the corresponding responsibility, of large technology platforms has been widely questioned, especially in the context of debates about disinformation and regulation. But there are many other emerging themes, such as the risks associated with the development of artificial intelligence, new forms of asymmetry and inequality and/or polarization and violence promoted by the logic of algorithms that govern social networks, social dislocation  and the weakening of the effectiveness of relationships in fields such as work or education, among many others.

Objectives and approaches

Using, as a starting point, an interdisciplinary dialogue based on the articulation of areas as diverse as culture and communication studies, sociology, literary studies, anthropology, political studies, economics, editorial studies, among others, the objective of this special issue is to promote reflection on the impact of new information and communication systems in a society marked, on the one hand, by an abundance of information and data, and, on the other hand, by a deep and widespread crisis of confidence, with all the potential of disruption and instability associated with such a scenario.

List of possible subtopics:

  • Hyperconnection, superdiversity and citizenship in the age of networks
  • Digital memory, the right to be forgotten and the role of the media
  • Artificial intelligence, post-humanism, and technology
  • Surveillance, discrimination, and algorithms
  • Nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and globalization in/from the media
  • Nationalisms, identities, and citizenship in the digital age
  • Decolonialism, alternative media and representation
  • Media, citizenship, and cultural production
  • Trust, post-truth, and disinformation
  • Infocracy, surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism
  • Hyperculture, cyberculture and the virtualization of reality
  • Convergence, disjunction and overlap between digital and print
  • Transmediatization, intermediality, and media transposition of the work

 

References

Arditi, D., Miller, J. (eds.) (2019). The Dialectic of Digital Culture. Lexington Books.

Castells, M. (2009). The Communication Power. Oxford University Press.

Couldry, N. (2012). Media, society, world: social theory and digital media practice. Polity Press.

Furtado, J.A. (2012). Uma Cultura de Informação para o Universo Digital. Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos.

Han, B.C. (2022). Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Polity Press.

Hjarvard, S. (2013). The Mediatization of Culture and Society. Routledge.

Lemos, A. (2023). Cibercultura. Tecnologia e vida social na cultura contemporânea. Editora
Sulina.

Rabinovitz, L., Geil, A. (eds.). (2004). Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture.
Duke University Press.

Santaella, L. (2022). Neo-Humano: a Sétima Revolução Cognitiva do Sapiens. Paulus.

Zuboff, S. (2019). Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of
Power. PublicAffairs.

 

KEY DATES

1st Call for Papers: 26 February 2024

Deadline for Submissions: 7 July 2024

Publication date: 15 December 2024

 

Submission guidelines:

Articles must be submitted online via https://journals.ipl.pt/cpublica/index . Authors are required to register in the system before submitting an article; if you have already registered, simply log into the system and start the 5-step submission process.

Articles must be submitted using the pre-formatted  template of Comunicação Pública. For more information on submission, please read Information for Authors and Guidelines for Authors.