CFP for a special issue of Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture
Special Issue topic: Media’s toxic knowledge: How information (does not) shapes our perception of social uncertainty
Editors: Rita Figueiras, Catholic University of Portugal
Carla Ganito, Catholic University of Portugal
Bravely into the hotbed of uncertainties, as Zygmunt Bauman introduces his 2007 book: ‘Liquid Times. Living in an Age of Uncertainty’, is what this special issue aims to do by discussing social uncertainty and the media. What is here being entitled media’s toxic knowledge is related to what commonly is referred as (mis)information both produced by and circulating in the media. This is the starting point for a three-step approach. First by displacing ‘toxic knowledge’ from the media logic into media social setting; second by approaching social uncertainty as a self-fulfilling prophecy; and third, how this is a matter of democracy understood in its broader sense. In contemporary society, uncertainty has become a mechanism for organizing and understanding social experience (Mythen and Walklate, 2006). According to Giddens (1990), Luhmann (1998) and Bauman (2000), uncertainty, doubt, tension and liquidity are structural in our societies, which find expression through the media that are both an expression of de-contextualization and globalizing tendencies of modernity, as well as instruments of those trends. According to Luhmann (1992: 75), the media have the ‘ability to aggregate and disaggregate the environment’. The novelty and celerity by which themes continuously succeed them, in a ‘communicative network self-dynamically reproduced’, gives continuity to the ‘need for discontinuity’, means that thematization is a set of rules for attention and not for deciding or for taking action (Luhman, 2004). Therefore, the media de-characterization and continuous re-shaping of social problems reflect, first and foremost, modernity’s fluidity. And as Bauman says (2000: 1), descriptions of fluids are all snapshots that need a date at the bottom of the picture. Hence, speed, immediacy and treatment of social problems as de-contextualized epiphenomena, fragmented and rootless seem inevitable.
In this framework, this special issue aims at intertwining a set of diversified researches, regarding different cultural contexts; objects of analysis; news, entertainment, online forums, public opinion survey; media analyzed: radio, television, Internet, mobile phones; and methodological approaches: quantitative and qualitative.
Topics of interest for this special issue include but are not limited to:
– Media Economy;
– New Media;
– Health Communication;
– Media History;
– Political Communication
– Culture & Media
Timing, length, style
Please send articles by the 3rd of October 2011 to ritafigueiras@ucp.pt and carla.ganito@ucp.pt. Articles will be evaluated by the editorial committee and anonymously by external referees. The maximum length is around 6000 words.
About the journal
Interactions recognizes the interdisciplinary nature of the fields of media, communication and cultural studies and we therefore encourage diverse themes, subjects, contexts and approaches; empirical, theoretical and historical. Our objective is to engage readers and contributors from different parts of the world in a critical debate on the myriad interconnections and interactions between communication, culture and society at the outset of the twenty first century.
It is our intention to encourage the development of the widest possible scholarly community, both in terms of geographical location and intellectual scope and we will publish leading articles from both established scholars and those at the beginning of their careers.
Particular interests include, but are not limited to, work related to Popular Culture, Media Audiences, Political Economy, Political Communication, Media Institutions and Practices, Promotional Culture, New Media, Migration and Diasporic Studies.
More information is available at:
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/page/index,name=journalresources/
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-journal,id=165/
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