European Journal of Communication

■ Since its earliest conceptualizations, publicity was believed to contribute significantly to the democratic social order; it normatively legitimized the press and other media as constitutive of the public and public opinion. Yet all the ‘old’ mass media rooted in the property rights of their owners failed to enhance and complement the corporate freedom of the press with technologically-feasible actions towards equalizing citizens’ opportunities to participate in public debates. The most recent technological advances in communication do not seem to resolve this age-old controversy. Rather, an attempt is needed to change the media in the way that would allow of publicity in its original three-dimensional design: personal right to communicate in public, surveillance of the public over government (governance), and mediation between the state and civil society. ■

■ The popularization of ‘new’ Internet-based media has generated much optimism about the social and participatory-democratic potentialities of these media, leading to predictions about the demise of the mass communication paradigm, and its replacement by a many-to-many communicative paradigm. But as happened before, the reappraisal of participation also produced a number of theoretical, conceptual and empirical problems. Participation became (at least partially) an object of celebration, trapped in a reductionist discourse of novelty, detached from the reception of its audiences and decontextualized from its political-ideological, communicative-cultural and communicative-structural contexts. These celebratory perspectives on participation cover how some of the basic concepts of the mass communication paradigm are still very much alive, providing the discursive frameworks for the reception of old and new media products. This article aims to show the persistence of (a number of components of) the mass communication paradigm through an analysis of the reception of two north Belgian participatory media products. One of these case studies is based on the ‘new’ world of a YouTube-like online platform called 16plus; the second case study is based on the ‘old’ concept of access television in a 2002 TV programme called Barometer. Through an analysis of these multilayered audience receptions, this article shows that participatory practices are not unconditionally appreciated by audience members, but are subject to specific conditions of possibility that are still embedded within the mass communication paradigm. Albeit in different degrees, these case studies show the importance of two ‘old’ key concepts — professional quality and social relevance — for these audiences’ evaluation of participatory practices. ■

■ Questions of change have always been at the forefront of the social sciences. The article addresses the question of the adequacy of media and communication studies theories through looking at change in both a concrete environment and more generally in terms of linking this example with wider debates concerning social changes in the world of work. The example stems from a study on Wi-Fi cafe environments, in which work does play an important role. To introduce this topic, the article begins by discussing cafe environments overall and Wi-Fi cafes in particular, as well as the seemingly old-fashioned concept of telework. It then briefly presents the study as such, before discussing possible frameworks: the question of the public sphere on the one hand and of concpets such as ‘digital bohème’ to describe emerging work forms on the other hand. The latter is taken to be the more appropriate framework. This is also the answer to the question of which media and communication studies theories appear to be adequate for analysing such changes. ■

■ Media-related practices have so long been configured in a particular one-to-many pattern that the mass communication paradigm has seemed automatic as both frame for research and fact of social life. The paradigm is summed up in the English term ‘ the media’. But what if the very idea of ‘the media’ is also imploding, as the interfaces we call media are transformed? Does the implosion of ‘the media’ generate a crisis of appearances for government and other institutions? Three dynamics are considered here — technological, social and political — that are potentially undermining our idea of ‘the media’ as a privileged site for accessing a common world. The article concludes that, instead of collapsing, the social construction of ‘the media’ will become a site of intensified struggle for competing forces: market-based fragmentation vs continued pressures of centralization that draw on new media-related myths and rituals. ■

■ This article discusses the ways in which social media help us craft the narratives of our lives. Many discussions of social media look at self-presentation and the construction of identity on social network sites in particular and the Internet in general. This article switches the focus from the moment of self-construction and instead looks at ways in which social media represent our lives by filtering the data we feed into them through templates and by displaying simplified patterns, visualizations and narratives back to us. The article argues that social media help users to see themselves by taking their raw data and representing them in structured form, and gives examples of different ways in which this data is presented. ■

■ Convergence culture, as a concept, articulates a shift in the way global media industries operate, and how people as audiences interact with them. It recognizes contemporary media culture as a primarily participatory culture. In turn, this assumption renders notions of production and consumption of (mass, mediated) culture not just theoretically problematic — as has been established earlier in disciplines as varied as communication studies, cultural geography and media anthropology — but also less than useful on a practical level when making sense of the role media play in people’s everyday lives. This paper explores the practical applications of convergence culture from the perspectives of media workers, suggesting not so much the use of ‘new’ categories, but rather an alignment of production, mediation and consumption as constituent practices in all experience of (in) media life. ■

■ Exploring the vote-in formats Strictly Come Dancing and Britain’s Got Talent, this article examines how mass communication is changing as a result of audience involvement via digital platforms. The central argument is that feedback opportunities provided by new technology represents new ways of connecting with the audience, and thus new challenges for the TV industry. ■