Critical Perspectives on Media, Power and Change

This book aims to feed into the critical debates about media, power and change through the respectful inclusion of a wide variety of critical approaches and traditions. This diversity is simultaneously structured and balanced by a deeply shared set of concerns, that are mobilised to defend core societal values including social justice, equality, fairness, care for the other and humanity. Critical Perspectives on Media, Power and Change raises questions about how the omnipresent media can contribute to the materialisation of these core values, and how it sometimes works against them. Rethinking social change, mediatisation and regulations are thus significant issues – explicitly addressed in this book. In addition the authors show how the role of the critical media and communication scholar merits and requires (self-)reflection; critical voices matter, but they also face structural limitations. This book was originally published as two special issues of Javnost – The Public.

Part I: Communication power and inequality 1. Inequality and Digitally Mediated Communication: Divides, Contradictions and Consequences 2. The New Spirit of Capitalism, Innovation Fetishism and New Information and Communication Technologies 3. Inequality and Liberal Democracy: A Critical Take on Economic and Political Power Aspects 4. For Public Communication 5. Beyond the Ladder of Participation: An Analytical Toolkit for the Critical Analysis of Participatory Media Processes Part II: Mediatisation and change 6. Explaining the Mediatisation Approach 7. Mediatisation and the Transformation of Capitalism: The Elephant in the Room 8. Changes in Contemporary Communication Ecosystems Ask for a ‘New Look’ at the Concept of Mediatisation Part III: Media, change and regulation 9. Particularistic and Universalistic Media Policies 10. A Radical Democratic Reform of Media Regulation in Response to Three Levels of Crisis Part IV: Critical scholarship in media and communication studies 11. Put a Ring on It! Why We Need More Commitment in Media Scholarship 12. Being (Truly) Critical in Media and Communication Studies: Reflections of a Media Scholar Between Science and Politics 13. Grounding Communication Studies in Enlightenment Criticality: Scaling Up Theoretical and Dialectical Ambition

Ilija Tomanic Trivundža is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and President of the European Communication Research and Education Association.Hannu Nieminen is Professor of Media and Communications Policy, and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, at the University of Helsinki, Finland.Nico Carpentier is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. He also holds part-time positions at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, and Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. Josef Trappel is Professor of Media Policy and Media Economics, and Head of the Department of Communication Studies, at the University of Salzburg, Austria.