The rise of 'sharing' in communication and media studies

In May 2014, a group of scholars came together to discuss sharing and its meanings in the digital era. Some of these scholars had been enquiring into the meaning of sharing for some time; others saw the call for papers for a conference on the topic of sharing as an opportunity to frame their work in terms of a concept that offered the potential for new insights and fresh paths of analysis. All of them presented rich analyses and critiques of practices of sharing and of the rhetoric of the word "sharing." These analyses sometimes overlapped in their conceptualizations of sharing, and sometimes they complemented or even challenged one another. Taken together, though, they all showed that there is a need—and a desire—to get to grips with sharing, if only because of the word's seeming omnipresence in a wide range of digital and non-digital contexts. This special issue showcases some of the work presented at the ICA pre-conference, Sharing: A Keyword for the Digital Age

Visibility as a key concept in communication and media studies

The concept of visibility has become a problematic one as hypervisibility gave rise to new forms of opacity that are formed not through secrecy but by its opposite, pan-visibility. Paradoxically, by amplifying visibility, media create new forms of invisibility. An analysis of visibility will provide us with a precise perspective how these processes occur. In this paper, we suggest three lines of empirical and theoretical investigation in the topic of visibility: a sociological (symbolic) axis; a collective (publicness) axis; and a technological (media) axis. Since the social category of visibility is a central aspect of communication and media studies, we will be interrogating it through three distinct ways: visibility as a field whose symbolic determination results in the constitution of different regimes of visibility; visibility as a pivot-concept of publicness since it is this public quality that transforms proto-visibility into a full accomplished visibility; and, third, the transmutations and dangers stemmed from media’s production of visibility. Each one of these principles highlights different concepts: in the field of visibility we need to address inter-visibilities; in public visibilities we need to address proto-visibilities in verge of becoming full-visibilities through the synchrony of collective attention; and in mediated visibility it is imperative to deal with super-visibility as an extreme effect of an intense modulation perpetrated by communication technologies.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Topic 6. Introduction to New Media

Material de la asignatura "Introduction to Communication and Media Studies"