Communication, Culture & Critique 

About: Communication, Culture & Critique is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Poison control. It has an ISSN identifier of 1753-9137. Over the lifetime, 568 publications have been published receiving 7076 citations. The journal is also known as: Communication, culture and critique & CC&C.

Occupy Wall Street on the Public Screens of Social Media: The Many Framings of the Birth of a Protest Movement

Abstract: Amid a dizzying array of social media, the ground of activism has fractured into decentered knots creating a cacophony of panmediated worlds. Our analysis of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) offers a preliminary charting of the fragmenting of the old media world into a proliferation of social media worlds. On old media, OWS was stillborn, first neglected, and then frivolously framed. On social media, OWS's emergence was vibrant, its manifestations much discussed, celebrated, and attacked. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube create new contexts for activism that do not exist in old media. Plus, social media foster an ethic of individual and collective participation, thus creating a norm of perpetual participation. In OWS, that norm creates new expectations of being in the world.

Critical Media Industry Studies: A Research Approach

Abstract: This article identifies the primary features of what we term “critical media industry studies,” emphasizing midlevel fieldwork in examining media industries and delimiting new ways of understanding, conceiving, and studying media industries from a critical perspective. We provide a general framework for the nascent yet growing body of work that locates industry researh on particular organizations, agents, and practices within vast media conglomerates operating at a global level. We mark out the most general boundaries of such an endeavor by synthesizing the extant research in critical media industry studies, the ways in which concepts and methods of cultural studies have been adapted to the study of industry practices, and address the main gaps and trajectories of such research.

Critiques on the participatory potentials of Web 2.0

Abstract: The web log or blog is a recent and relatively popular phenomenon which is often deemed to have the potential to promote citizen participation in the media, and in particular in the production of (critical) media content by ‘netizens'. This paper considers whether this is in fact the case.

Regimes of Posttruth, Postpolitics, and Attention Economies

Abstract: Across multiple societies, we see a shift from regimes of truth (ROT) to “regimes of posttruth” (ROPT) characterized by proliferating “truth markets.” ROT corresponded to disciplinary society, tighter functioning between media/political/education apparatuses, scientific discourses, and dominant truth-arbiters. ROPT corresponds to societies of control, where power exploits new “freedoms” to participate/produce/express (as well as consume/diffuse/evaluate). These developments further correspond to postpolitics/postdemocracy, where issues, discourses, and agency for sociopolitical change remain constrained, despite the enabling of a new range of cultural and pseudopolitical participation around, among other things, truth. ROPT emerge out of postpolitical/postdemocratic strategies common to control societies where especially resource rich political actors attempt to use data-analytic knowledge to manage the field of appearance and participation, via attention and affect.

Engaging With Media—A Matter of Literacy?

Abstract: This article considers the continued relevance of critical research on audience reception and audience ethnography to today’s study of complex media and communications environment. Although much of the work addressing people’s engagement with new media is now framed not in terms of audiences but rather in terms of literacies, there are many parallels between the critical analysis of literacy and of audiences. Both examine the interface between the interpretative activities of ordinary people and the powerful institutions, texts and technologies they engage with. Both identify forms of stratification and exclusion while recognising the micro-tactics of marginalised audiences/ the digitally excluded. On the one hand, the notion of literacy offers some advantages over that of audiences, for it draws on a long history of theorising knowledge in relation to emancipation and democratisation. On the other hand, literacy occasions critical scrutiny, particularly when, as today, it is mobilised in support of by neo-liberal, deregulatory policies in the media and communications sector. Insofar as audience research directs its energies towards the analysis of new media literacies, it is vital to follow the principles of critical analysis, explicating research assumptions, scrutinising how our work is used, and asking whose interests are thereby served.