Archives
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60th Anniversary of the Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit
No. 14 (2022)2022 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), a seminal work in 20th-century social sciences which even today is still the subject of intense reflection. Authored by Jürgen Habermas, it has greatly influenced his extensive work, as the author himself stated in the famous preface to the 17th German edition of the book (1990), recognising that his theory was developed “less according to its fundamental features than to its degree of complexity”.
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Representations of Journalism and Journalists
No. 13 (2021)Being often the object of social criticism, journalism is generally recognized as an activity that is essential for the promotion of high quality information, committed to factual truth and the public interest. This idea of its virtues is also associated with a romanticized view of the journalist as a professional at the service of a principle of revelation, discovery and exposure. Hence, journalism is often described as a vocation that requires specific abilities, such as inquisitiveness, critical thinking, accuracy and rigour, integrity, sharpness and tenacity in the task of observing and interpreting current events.
However, the social representation of journalism and journalists has been relatively ambiguous throughout history. For some 18th and 19th century intellectuals, journalism was a kind of subliterature. Balzac, for example, referred to them as “scribblers”, and in Eça de Queirós’s Os Maias, the character João da Ega called them “the scum of society”. With the expansion of the media and the professionalization of journalism, the public scrutiny of journalists became even more exacting. In a text published in 2003 in the journal Hermès, Dominique Wolton considered them as “frail heroes of modernity.”
The way in which we represent journalism is the result of a complex social construction in which journalists, media organizations, society in general, audiences in particular, and social, political cultural and economic institutions are involved. Over the last two decades, there has been a weakening of the pivotal role played by journalism in the mediation of public communication. Today, journalists fight for social recognition in the midst of social contexts and powers that either praise them or seek to be taken for them, to compete with their media power, and sometimes even to destroy them through discredit.
What image do we actually have of journalism and journalists? In a context of global information flows, what is our understanding of the function(s) of journalism? How has the status of journalists been interpreted in legal and social terms? What representations of journalism and journalists are produced or reproduced by other media such as cinema? How do journalists see themselves and how do they represent themselves in social terms? What view does journalism convey of itself and of journalists when the activity and its professionals are the object of the news or of opinion?
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50 Years of Scheduling Studies
No. 10 (2020)Com o presente número da revista Mediapolis pretendemos marcar os 50 anos decorridos sobre o seminal estudo de Chapel Hill, que deu origem a uma das áreas mais consistentes de estudos das Ciências da Comunicação, realizados sobre os media: a teoria do agenda setting ou do agendamento. O início desta história teve origem quando Maxwel McCombs e Donald Shaw, então dois jovens investigadores, decidiram analisar como, a propósito das eleições presidenciais norte-americanas de 1968, que opuseram Hubert Humphrey e Richard Nixon, os media poderiam, de algum modo, influenciar a opinião pública. Para o efeito, realizaram um estudo tendo por base 100 eleitores indecisos, residentes em Chapel Hill, na Carolina do Norte, acabando por encontrar um coeficiente muito forte de correlação entre a agenda mediática e a agenda dos eleitores. A agenda setting, numa fase inicial, começou por afirmar que pessoas acabam por conhecer determinados assuntos pelo efeito da seleção realizada pelos media que, deste modo, transforma temas, pessoas e acontecimentos em matéria privilegiada do debate público, marcando um paralelismo entre a agenda dos media e a agenda da opinião pública.
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Reinventing Global Pacts for Communication and Journalism Ethics
No. 9 (2019)É uma evidência que as tecnologias da era digital estão ainda longe de ter cumprido as suas melhores promessas, sobretudo agora que dela já conhecemos alguns dos seus efeitos perversos. A tal ponto esta realidade se coloca nos nossos dias que, por vezes, parece que a reflexão acerca dos desafios do jornalismo, da comunicação e da esfera pública no mundo contemporâneo mais não faz do que revisitar paradigmas do passado, numa espécie de passeio teórico-saudosista. O equívoco suscitado por esta primeira observação resulta, em grande medida, da constatação das rápidas transformações que as tecnologias de comunicação e da informação estão a produzir nas sociedades e à escala global, não obstante as suas diferentes e paradoxais formas de recetividade, de utilização e de apropriação.
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Media, communication and sport
No. 8 (2019)Sport is still hostage to several stigmas and suffers from a certain degree of academic isolation when it intersects with Social and Human Sciences. To dedicate a Mediapolis edition to the relationship between sport, media and communication is a bold step, especially in the Portuguese academic context. Our academy is still inherits from the Anglo-Saxon sport studies, crystallized in the sixties, seventies and eighties of the twentieth century, accustomed to associate sport with concepts of order, discipline and alienation of the masses. In this sense, sport would be epistemologically fixed in the field of leisure time, understood as a marginal theme, away from important issues that rule human life. On the other hand, in the field of media, journalism and communication, we see an exponential growth throughout the twenty and twenty-first centuries, although we continue to see sport as a minor issue in informative terms when compared with those subjects considered "more relevant", such as politics, economics or diplomacy, for example. The large audiences generated by sport – and the massification (popular and by the media) associated thereto – led to the removal of a part of the intellectual community, hostile to this kind of popular phenomena, often pejoratively dubbed as "mass culture" and "low culture".
The challenge of this Mediapolis edition is to precisely demonstrate, once again, how sport can and should be the subject of research in the academic and scientific sphere, given its social plasticity and appeal to interdisciplinary and/or multidisciplinary approaches. Appearing in the ninetieth century and popularized in the twentieth century, the sport phenomenon has reached the new millennium as a creator of behaviors at a global scale, assuming itself as a "total social fact", worthy of profound reflection by the Social, Human and Communication Sciences. -
Media, communication and gender
No. 7 (2018)Never before have the interdisciplinary territories of communication, media and gender research intersected in such a meaningful and fruitful way. With roots outside academia, investment in understanding and overcoming gender inequalities coexists, influences and is influenced by academic work in the field of sexual minorities. This in turn brings to the fore the claims of political movements which, like the feminist, are concerned with the implications of difference in the daily lives of individuals. The recognition of gender as a dynamic social construction immersed in power relations (e.g. Butler, 1990, 2004), as opposed to the essentialism of biological and watertight conceptions of identity, has made it possible to question how gender is represented, lived and experienced in very diverse ways. Questions are formulated both from positions committed to the dissolution and denaturalization of the rigidity of culturally imposed social categories, as do queer studies (e.g. Warner, 1993), and from the search for models and schemes capable of leading to a more just policy of identity representation. It is under this horizon that the conditions of access to the media and to the wider public space for women and other groups with lower status are questioned (e.g. Alwood, 1996; Gross, 2001; Carter, Steiner & McLaughlin, 2014; Lind, 2017).
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Media characters: theory, problems, analyses
No. 6 (2018)The development that narrative studies have known in recent years has been based on relevant theoretical contributions, proposals for analytical work and epistemological and operative mutations that have recovered, to the centre of the analysis, a category neglected for decades: the character.
It is mainly from the end of the 90s, when the field of narrative studies departs from the structuralist matrix of narratology, that a significant production around the character begins. Since then, the disciplinary area of Narrative Studies has gradually opened its field of study, following the technological evolution of narrative production modes as well as changes in cultural consumption habits. If, for decades and under the regency of Gérard Genette, literary narrative has been the main object of narratology, with the valorisation of other narrative forms and languages, the research has been dedicated to these new cultural phenomena: from cinema to digital literature, from video games to multimedia reports, from radionovelas to photography, from telenovelas to transmedia narratives. These new perspectives, especially emerging at the end of the 20th century, are seen as "the narrative turning point of the humanities" by such reference authors as Martin Kreiswirth (1994).
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Crisis and communicative process
No. 5 (2017)The late 2000s marked the beginning of a process of political, economic and social transformation and upheaval across borders. As a result of the collapse of the financial markets, a rapid profusion of scenarios of corporate bankruptcy, bankruptcy of countries and collective redundancies became clear throughout the world. In response, the contexts of social contestation multiplied, with new models of action and new actors. At the same time, in North Africa and the Middle East, the awakening of a spring of beliefs and ideals was accompanied by the awakening of new groups and the promotion of new tensions, the outcome of which is evident in the proliferation of contexts of conflict, the extermination of the cultural bases of their peoples and the genesis of a paradigmatic humanitarian crisis. As a corollary to the promotion of political tensions, South America has seen itself taken over by a series of political crises that persist today. Inserted in a framework of constant technological updating and, itself, hostage to a crisis situation, communication has taken on a central role in the unfolding of each of these processes. Assuming the central role of narrative of events, it has seen new models of journalism take place and the emergence of new sources and new practices, in the organization of different events; it has seen the emergence of new strategies and new means; and, in contingency and the resolution of risks and threats, it has seen the emergence of new tools and new problems.
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Communication and social transformations
No. 4 (2017)Socrates was concerned about the effects of the invention of writing on memory and dialogical discussion; Milton preferred individual reading of printed texts to preaching in closed circles; Mallesherbes stressed the inconsistency and counterproductive effects of previous censorship in the face of the press developments of his time; Victor Hugo asserted that the press would put an end to architecture ("Le livre va tuer l'édifice"); Walter Benjamin reflected on the changes in photography on our conception of art; McLuhan argued that the medium was the message; Debray and the Mediologues were concerned with the symbolic functions of mediations, paying particular attention to technical issues... The relationship between communication and social transformations has deep roots in the history of social thought, and developments in this field in recent decades have considerably expanded its importance and the need to continue this reflection. Today we experience profound transformations in our world and in our lives, on an unprecedented scale and at an unprecedented speed. From economics to politics, from technology to culture or organizations, from our habits to the way we relate to each other, all areas of social life today are marked by change.
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Journalism Education in the 21st Century
No. 3 (2016)The mission of the University and the exercise of Journalism intersect in a clear way in two moments: the research on Journalism and the training of journalists. Both take on a public dimension that calls for social co-responsibility that neither Journalism nor the University should duck. In the perspective with which we assume this discussion, the responsibility that the University and Journalism have towards their audiences, the responsibility towards democracy and the responsibility towards the exercise by citizens of their constitutionally enshrined Rights, Freedoms and Guarantees is at stake. If, in general, the Communication Sciences have seen their research constantly deepened and broadened, the same cannot be said about the studies on the training and teaching of Journalism which, as a result of their specificity and autonomy, tend to appear in more circumscribed contexts, more closed and not always sufficiently scrutinised. In addition to the scientific and pedagogical autonomy legitimately enjoyed by higher education systems, there is also the socio-professional autonomy of journalism. From the perspective we see it, the autonomy of these two fields is an essential condition of their freedom, but also a requirement for the development of their different normative presuppositions of social responsibility.
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The Challenges of Public Service Media
No. 2 (2016)Public Service Media tend to live in a state of cyclical crisis. Regardless of their different incidences and declinations, these crises develop against the background of a permanent questioning of their legitimacy. The reasons for this questioning lie in the changes in the media system that increasingly took place in the second half of the 20th century. Since that time, the assumptions of the State's role in the media sector have changed profoundly. These presuppositions begin to be of a technological, economic and political nature: 1) the scarcity of the radio spectrum; 2) the investments involved both in the creation of a radio and television system and in its regular activity; 3) and the responsibilities of the State to ensure a universal and regular service of communication and information, training and entertainment, as structural elements of the functioning of a participatory democracy and of national values and identity.
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Media and character building
No. 1 (2015)Mediapolis - Revista de Comunicação, Jornalismo e Espaço Público is a journal of the Communication, Journalism and Public Space Research Group (GICJEP), of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of the 20th Century (CEIS20), University of Coimbra. With this edition, we intend to give public relevance to a research project that brings together a group of researchers from various disciplinary areas, but who find in Communication Sciences their common pole of study and research.
