Anchoring the Critical in Media Research, Vol. 23 - 2016, No. 1
Guest Edited by Ilija Tomanić Trivundža and Nico Carpentier
Grounding Communication Studies in Enlightenment Criticality: Scaling Up Theoretical and Dialectical Ambition
The Enlightenment produced theories of great ambition that aimed to break from dogma, to put reason in the hands of humanity and to imagine possible futures and then pursue them. The Enlightenment also brought devastation to humanity in connection with research practices that grew both abstract and narrow. Communication and media studies developed largely outside theoretical debates surrounding restricted ambitions for the scale of conceptual work, settling research into enclaved practices. This article argues for a critical return to Enlightenment criticality where an evolutionary perspective meets other ambitious attempts to reach the scale of a philosophical anthropology in which “theory” aims beyond the particular and the present. Three exemplars that lead to a convergence of that aim are discussed, by characterising the work of Jürgen Habermas, Harold Adams Innis and Thomas Piketty.
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The New Spirit of Capitalism, Innovation Fetishism and New Information and Communication Technologies
The neoliberal developments over the past 30 years have received much support from a set of ideas that can be defined as “the new spirit of capitalism”. These ideas have offered powerful legitimisations of neoliberalism, conceived as a progressive force that has replaced the supposedly bureaucratic structures of earlier Keynesian welfare states with market-driven network structures that allow innovations, creativity and entrepreneurship to flourish. In this article, I will critically examine the constituents of the new spirit of capitalism, in particular its intimate association with liberal discourses of innovation. I will then focus on how such ideas have come forward in recent information society thinking via a discussion of Manuel Castells's influential network society theory. This is followed by a critique of mainstream understandings of innovation from a neo-Marxist perspective, with an eye towards new information and communication technology and critical media research in times of a growing contestation of neoliberal hegemony.
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Inequality and Liberal Democracy: A Critical Take on Economic and Political Power Aspects
After decades of benign neglect, the issues of economic and social inequalities have re-entered the stage of mainstream political attention and debate in the western heartlands of the capitalist system over the past couple of years. On the face of it, this is no accident or surprise. The renewed attention on economic and social inequality unfolds against a background of very slow, partial and highly uneven “recovery” from a major financial crash which emerged in the north-Atlantic core in 2007–2008. In this setting we observe that the growing attention to issues of inequality in recent times is not unrelated to the manifest amplification of the longer-term trend towards increased economic inequalities that has become more evident in the period since 2008. This article will draw on (engage with) recent work and debates in neighbouring academic fields (political economy, economic sociology, political studies) concerning the sources, meaning and implications of growing economic inequalities. It pays particular attention to the high-profile work of Thomas Piketty on inequality trends. The article will consider the implications of such research and inequality trends for what now passes as liberal economic and political theory and also for the study, forms, conceptualisations and practice of political communication.
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A Radical Democratic Reform of Media Regulation in Response to Three Levels of Crisis
In the development of modern states, the media’s role has been fundamental, as the organisation of national interests was their central function. From this viewpoint, the media and its pivotal role in the construction of “imagined communities” can be compared with other major nation-building institutions, such as the education system, churches, national army and civil service. These can be characterised as epistemic institutions, creating and reproducing a form of knowledge that is centrally constructed around national concepts and symbols. When thinking how to revitalise democracy and create conditions for a new, transnational political agency, we have to address the ways and means by which the media are regulated today. If we accept the idea that informed and active citizenship is at the core of functioning democracy, we need to ask the role of the media in its production. The problem is that all criteria promoting and providing democratic citizenship are already stipulated in a number of international agreements and conventions as well as in national constitutions; what is missing is a binding global regulatory framework that would guarantee that they are not only formally adapted to national and international laws, but also enforced in practice.
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Beyond the Ladder of Participation: An Analytical Toolkit for the Critical Analysis of Participatory Media Processes
Participatory research is facing three challenges—how to deal with the theoretisation and conceptualisation of participation; how to support the research with analytical models; and how the evaluate the research outcomes. This article aims to address these three problems by distinguishing two main approaches (a sociological and a political) in participatory theory and developing a four-level and 12-step analytical model that functions within the political approach. In this analytical model, a series of key concepts are used: process, field, actor, decision-making moment and power. The normative-evaluative problem is addressed by reverting to the critical perspective to evaluate the societal desirability of particular participatory intensities. This critical perspective—potentially—adds a 13th and final normative layer to the analytical model.
Being (Truly) Critical in Media and Communication Studies: Reflections of a Media Scholar Between Science and Politics
This article is based on the author's contribution to the 2014 EURICOM Colloquium with its call for “reflections about critique and its conditions of possibility in the academic field of media and communication studies”. The article intends to review the context and nature of critical media and communication studies, seen through the author's personal experience in national as well as international spheres. While the testimony is autobiographical, an attempt is made to contemplate career development from the outside unlike in conventional memoires. This article is a prelude to a reflective review of the author's professional and political life story, forthcoming as a book in Finnish. The introduction gives examples of the use of the term “critical” in the field of media and communication studies, followed by a review of different ways in which the critical concept is used in the literature of the field, leading to a reflection on the precarious relationship between the intellectual and the political. A personal testimony by the author then provides a case illustrating how a scholar becomes critical under the influence of philosophical, political and international factors. The discussion at the end offers some concluding reflections.
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