Nenad Senic

Bio: Nenad Senic is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 2 citations.

The Form of News: A History

Abstract: cation. He describes their position in society as suppliers of a background reality, without being subject to any consensus, from which to enter into distinct personal (or individual) opinions and positions with mistrust, to be sure, but also with sufficient knowledge about the media to sustain the conditions for further communication. Indeed, Luhmann theorizes media not in terms of their truthful representations of the day’s events, fairness, or objectivity but in terms of the workings of their internally operating information/noninformation code. Stripped to their functions in a selfreproducing society, the mass media are reduced to information technologies that dominate the public discourse and generate the conditions for social and political survival. The resulting image is that of a powerful media model whose continuous references to the individual reproduce “the myth of service to the person” (p. 75), a medium that must be informed constantly and guided adequately to function accordingly in contemporary society. Therefore, Luhmann’s work adds an alternative explanation to traditional understandings of media effects. By shifting to the consequences of reality construction, the notion of “effects” emerges as an inherent quality, which is the difference mass media make in the course of observing the world and producing information. Media are their effects, and their pervasiveness in turn shapes the image of self and others and maintains the signs of culture. Without the mass media, culture is not recognizable as culture. In either case, Luhmann confirms the centrality of the mass media in the selfreproduction of society and the perpetuation of a reflexive culture in particular. His book is an exercise in theorizing mass media and communication that subsumes issues of culture, ideology, freedom, power, and domination under the technical considerations of a systemic worldview. Despite his differentiated theoretical position, however, the resulting observations regarding media in society cannot but reinforce the work of critical communication studies that responds to the ideological nature of the media and their institutional power and argues for their surveillance and control to protect a democratic order.

The Visual Boundaries of Journalism: Native Advertising and the Convergence of Editorial and Commercial Content

Abstract: This study investigates the visual objects that are used to either disclose or disguise the commercial nature of native advertising as news articles. We adopt a “material object” approach to explor...

"What News must think when pondering": Emily Dickinson, the Springfield Daily Republican, and the Poetics of Mass Communication

Abstract: This essay explores the ways in which Dickinson's local newspaper, the Springfield Daily Republican , informs the subject and form of her poetry. From her daily reading, Dickinson responded to a variety of unusual and seemingly uninteresting components of the newspaper: from a mundane medical advertisement to routine stock and weather reports, and from the Republican 's frequent mission statements to its commentary on the developing technology of the telegraph. By considering the ways Dickinson's poetry addresses the Republican , in content as well as form, we can observe the ways the newspaper gave Dickinson occasion to contemplate the larger issue of the nature of mass communication. This article argues that, in poems such as "Would you like Summer? Taste of our's - " (Fr272), "Myself can read the Telegrams" (Fr1049), and "How News must feel when travelling" (Fr1379), Dickinson envisions mass communication as diminishing the importance of the individual by treating readers as an undefined mass and thus forcing the reader into a single, predefined role. In response to this unnatural homogenization, Dickinson's poems model the ways in which the individual, specifically the artist, can prosper in the era of mass communication by taking what is produced for an undefined vast readership and crafting individualized works of art.