Call for papers Vol. 20 / N° 1

InMediaciones de la Comunicación

Volume 20 / N° 1 (January-June 2025)

We are pleased to inform that the call for papers is open to publish articles and/or reviews in the Volume 20 / N° 1 (January-June 2025 of InMediaciones de la Comunicación), academic journal published since 1998 by Universidad ORT Uruguay.

The purpose is focused on the publication of original and unpublished articles and/or reviews and the dissemination of interviews, essays and research reports that take place in the field of communication and its related disciplines, with special attention to the processes of social mediatization and the study of contemporary media phenomena. Its content is aimed at researchers, professors, undergraduate and postgraduate students and people with an interest in all areas of communication. Before publication, the manuscripts are reviewed, in the first instance, by the Associate Editors and the Academic Committee, made up of experts from different countries, the Guest Editor of each number, and then they are evaluated through the double-blind system with the intervention of external referees.

The journal carries out an open access policy, receives contributions written in Spanish, English and Portuguese and the authors do not have to pay any cost for the processing or publication of the manuscripts. InMediaciones de la Comunicación is published in digital format and carries out an editorial policy that conforms to international standards for academic journals. From the beginning, Inmediaciones de la Comunicación assumed the commitment to stimulate the open publication of manuscripts derived from quality research and promoted the approach of the most diverse topics and problems that cross the field of communication. Over the years, it has had the contribution of researchers and academic referents with a recognized professional track record, who provide their views on the debates raised by the permanent renewal of the communication phenomena in Latin America and the world.

Thematic of Volume 20 / N° 1 (January-June 2025)

 TWENTY YEARS LATER

Mediatizations and ecological mutations of the public: digital platforms as markets and as public spaces

FUNDAMENTALS OF THE CALL

About two decades ago, the possibilities opened by the interconnection of computer networks, increasingly ubiquitous, and a series of technological developments at the software level, began to configure one of the salient features of current societies: life in platforms. Gradually, in a more or less surreptitious way, using interconnected devices, we begin to build and manage our social relationships. Originally conceived as social networking services (and, therefore, surfaces from which and in which to network online in a decentralized way, under the command of users), the exponential demographic growth and the massification of smart phones opened the door to an era of social media services and the economy of the general public in the same place that had originally been imagined as a space for relatively horizontal exchanges. Twenty years later, the scene, without being homogeneous, is qualitatively and quantitatively different: hence the datafication, commodification, consumption and sociality organized by algorithms, the centralization of control over information flows, and an entire economy based on creating content guided by the capturing of attention.

We say twenty years because round numbers always work as a good excuse for balance. And although the notions of social-networks and social media, as well as the applications that embodied these functions, are emerging from the second half of the 1990s (Aicher et al., 2021), we can well take the creation of Facebook in 2004, and use it as a paradigmatic example to reflect on the transformation of platforms and, fundamentally, on how they have impacted the construction of the public space experienced today. In this period, the company created by Mark Zuckerberg and his collaborators has evolved from a site that promoted communication between American university students to a complex platform, establishing itself as the most popular social network in the world. And like Facebook, the other platforms also experienced intense changes; some merged, others disappeared and many more emerged, as part of a universe in constant mutation.

Many theorists have reflected on the transformations that have occurred in the context of platforms and those offered by the Internet as a whole. The first decade was characterized by studies on collective intelligence (Lévy, 2003) and participatory culture (Jenkins, 2009; Shirky, 2011). Despite their conceptual distinctions, a group of authors celebrated what was glimpsed in social networks at that time: their possibility of interconnecting participants and encompassing an entire emerging collaborative culture. Hence, these new possibilities were welcomed as decentralizing communicative processes and as a new horizon for democracy.

Some time later, however, approximately from 2010 (a moment that coincides, and not casually, with the proliferation of the term social media (Aichner et al, 2021), the vast majority of researchers found themselves in the need to reflect on the negative horizon that arose from characteristics that were incorporated into these networks, mainly due to the influence of capital coming from new business models that were consolidated through them (Kapoor et al., 2018) and that have structured a capitalism of surveillance (Zuboff, 2019). Thus, the studies were redirected towards misinformation, polarization and hate speech, phenomena that showed the impact of platformization on society (van Dijck, Poell & de Waal, 2018). The Cambridge Analytica “scandal” is an exemplary case in this context, given that the complaint about the political use of Facebook users data pointed out the impact of the platforms in defining democratic paths.

Between the network function (a latent inactive system) and the social medium function (a hyperactive system for putting goods and discourses into circulation, with the consequent revitalization of broadcasting), digital platforms were becoming markets and public spaces. We could say that on the platforms we exist as subjects, and among the predominant forms of subjectivity that are configured there, there are two that are interesting to investigate, particularly in this issue of InMediaciones de la Comunicación: that of citizens (inhabitants of the city, linked to their community destiny) and that of consumers (market inhabitants, sellers, buyers and merchandise at the same time). All within the framework of a media ecosystem based on platforms that does not cease to contain paradoxes: a concentrated and hierarchical political economy, in which it is still possible to build and share horizontally; an ecosystem dominated by corporations, but in which public goods are discussed and configured; a centralized data collection structure, with an apparent capacity for subjective control – “the platforms know more about us than we do ourselves” – that, even so, is full of unforeseen uses.

***

The proposal of this call of InMediaciones de la Comunicación is to open a space for reflection on life on platforms based on two central driving ideas: public space and market.

It is then about giving centrality to studies focused on the transformations of the public, that is, that area of social life in which institutions and individuals cohabit and become mutually visible to each other. As that order is primarily a “byproduct of technological arrangements” (Calhoun, 2013), the place of the media was and remains a central issue. However, the advance of theoretical and applied reflection shows that the institutional technological complex of the mass media was also subjected to the transformations of the new mediatizations characterized, in the last twenty years, by the deployment of the Internet and, mainly, by the expansion of platforms.

Mediatizations are inherent to modern public space and, at least since the 18th century, they have participated in the transformation of the structuring of the public – or, what is the same, of the relationships of institutional systems: politics and the market, with their environments. Platforms function as media supra-spaces in which collective life unfolds. For this reason we characterize this approach as ecologic. At the level of institutional functioning – which is the level of politics – mediatization introduces the problem of the relationships between the system and its environments. Hence, precisely, general ecology is the reflection on the system/environment difference and its transformations: the environment, from this perspective, is a multifaceted and flexible reference that changes according to the way in which it is observed and with the observer's perspective (Espósito, 2017).

If you like, we are facing a phenomenon of duplicate ecology: platforms are environments (Scolari, 2015) or ecosystems (Fernández, 2021) in which social life unfolds, but they also raise the question of how to look outside, where “the social” also unfolds and lives. In this way we are faced with a cognitive and epistemological problem, which is expressed both at the individual level and at the institutional and organizational level: How do individuals, groups, institutions, companies, know and produce knowledge about their worlds of reference? On platforms, institutions can observe how socio-individual systems (Verón, 2013) observe society, a fragment of reality, other socio-individual systems – and even themselves and how they are observed.

This game of crossed observations and permanent metonymic displacement between the inside and the outside of online life also applies to the commercial dimension of the social. When thought about in relation to platform society, the notion of market not only refers to the image of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2018) as a macro description of the economy based on data extractivism and derived “knowledge”, but also to a meeting point in which imaginaries, fantasies, desires, and needs are deployed: that is, an entire sociology on the surface – given that we are already classified, clustered, located in communities of tastes, interests and possibilities–, in addition to an entire universe of discourse whose configuration has a strong semiotic dimension – that is, beyond the influencer ethos, the landscape of the platforms is saturated by variations of the advertising discourse of large, medium and small merchants and entrepreneurs. This non-corporate social life also deserves to be investigated, analyzed, and understood.

In this sense, and as expressed in the axes of the call that appear below, in this issue of InMediaciones de la Comunicación preference will be given to the nomination of articles that reflect on the processes described above and that manage to articulate their analysis approaches. with some of the proposed axes, within the context of transformations that have occurred in the last twenty years.

GENERAL THEMATIC AXES

• Networks or systems? Divergent conceptual approaches to the problem of relationships between the inside and the outside of life on platforms.
• How do platforms “read” their audiences? Studies on the relationships between organizations, agents and media institutions and their audiences.
• Infrastructures of public life: spatiality and sociability on platforms.

Specific axis: Platforms as markets

• Platforms as markets: infrastructures and political economy of networks.
• Metamorphosis of advertising discourse: genres, styles and enunciative strategies of advertising on platforms.
• Ethos and function of the influencer: from functional goods to symbolic goods, between the value of the individual and the construction of audiences.
• Case study on small-scale commercial uses on platforms.

Specific axis: Platforms as public spaces

• Public spheres and networked publics: contemporary ways of creating collectives. Studies on activism and mobilizations.
• Platforms and politics: campaigns, disinformation, fake-news.
• The professional practice of journalism and digital platforms.
• Social networks: the effect of scale on interpersonal ties.

GUEST EDITORS

Mariano Fernández. Postdoctoral Degree in Sociology, Université de Lausanne (Suiza). Doctor in Social Sciences, Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina). Research assistant, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET-Argentina). Undergraduate and postgraduate professor, Universidad Nacional de La Plata and Universidad Nacional de las Artes de Buenos Aires (Argentina). He works on three lines of research: ecological transformations of public space, mediatization processes and the study of political discourses. He published the books – together with Matías López – Lo público en el umbral. Los espacios y los tiempos, los territorios y los medios (2014, Universidad Nacional de La Plata) and –together with Gastón Cingolani– Cristina, un espectáculo político. Cuerpos, colectivos y relatos en la última presidencia televisiva (2019, Prometeo). Email address: marianofc81@gmail.com

Aline Roes Dalmolin. Doctor and Master in Communication Sciences, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Brasil). Postdoctoral studies, Universidad Nacional de Rosario (Argentina) and Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (Brasil). Undergraduate and postgraduate professor, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (/Brasil). She was a visiting professor, Södertörn University (Suecia), project scholarship CAPES-STINT (Brasil). Her lines of research cover social networks, the media and religion, in addition to being interested in journalism, media discourse and biopolitics. Currently, she directs the research project titled: “Circulação Midiática e Estratégias Comunicacionais”, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (Brasil). Email address: aline.dalmolin@ufsm.br

DEADLINE FOR ARTICLE SUBMISSION: September 30, 2024

DATE FOR VOLUME PUBLICATION: Continued publication - January-June 2025

Journal website – registration and submission of the application through the platform: https://revistas.ort.edu.uy/inmediaciones-de-la-comunicacion

Characteristics that the postulated articles must present:

https://revistas.ort.edu.uy/inmediaciones-de-la-comunicacion/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

Contact emails:

cossia@ort.edu.uy / inmediaciones@ort.edu.uy / lcossia@yahoo.com.ar /

Academic Committee

InMediaciones de la Comunicación

Universidad ORT Uruguay

 

Cited Bibliography:

Aichner, T., Grünfelder, M., M. Oswin & Jegeni, D. (2021). Twenty-Five Years of Social Media: A Review of Social Media Applications and Definitions from 1994 to 2019. Cyberpsychology, Beheavior and Social Networking, 24(4), pp. 215-222. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2020.0134

Calhoun, C. (2013). The problematic Public: revisiting Dewey, Arendt and Habermas. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

Espósito, E. (2017). An ecology of differences. Communication, the Web and the question of the borders. In Hörl, E. & Burton, J. (Ed.), General Ecology. The new ecological paradigm (pp. 283-301). London: Bloomsbury Academics.

Fernández, J. L. (2021). Vidas mediáticas. Entre lo masivo y lo individual. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: La Crujía.

Jenkins, H. (2009). Cultura da convergência. São Paulo: Aleph.

Kapoor, K., Tamilmani, K., Rana, N., Patil, P. P., Dwivedi, Y. K. & Nerur, S. (2018). Advances in Social Media Research: Past, Present and Future. Information Systems Frontiers, 20(4), pp 531-558. DOI: https://doi.org/ :10.1007/s10796-017-9810-y

Lévy, P. (2003). A inteligência coletiva: por uma antropologia do ciberespaço. São Paulo: Loyola.

Scolari, C. (2015). Ecología de los medios. Entornos, evoluciones e interpretaciones. Barcelona: Gedisa.

Shirky, C. (2011). A cultura da participação: criatividade e generosidade no mundo conectado. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.

Srnicek, Nick (2018). Capitalismo de plataformas. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Caja Negra.

van Dijck, J., Poell, T. & de Waal, M. (2018). The Platform Society. Public values in a connective world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Verón, E. (2013). La semiosis social 2. Ideas, momentos, interpretantes. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Paidós.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. New York: Public Affairs.