Participation and Media Production: Critical Reflections on Content Creation
Editor: Nico Carpentier and Benjamin De Cleen
Date Of Publication: Feb 2008
Isbn13: 9781847184535
Isbn: 1-84718-453-7
In an era when (especially new) media are celebrated for their participatory potential, questions about the nature and intensity of these participatory processes seem to be superfluous. But raising these questions pushes us into a critical mode towards the changes that have lead to the present-day media landscape. This volume’s authors aim to activate this critical mode and reflect on the participatory nature of contemporary media organizations and products.

In order to stand even a remote chance to realize this objective, and to critically unravel the societal role of participation, we need to acknowledge that participation is a complex and contested notion, covering a wide variety of meanings and practices that are converging into a hybrid of technologies, genres, and formats. At the same time, prudence is required, as many of the empowering and transformative opportunities cover-up a multitude of restrictions that deal with muting voices, appropriations, techniques of surveillance, inequalities, and exclusions. This volume thus provides its readership with a set of analyses that reconcile the appreciation for the analogue and digital empowerment and emancipation with the critical analysis of their boundaries.

Participation and Media Production is the result of the intellectual work of the participants of the 2007 San Francisco Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA).

Nico Carpentier, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor at the Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB–Free University of Brussels). He also teaches a number of media studies courses at two other Brussels universities, the KUB and the FUSL. He is co-director of the VUB research centre CEMESO and a board member of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA).

Benjamin De Cleen is a Ph.D. student working at the Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB–Free University of Brussels). His research deals with the Flemish extreme right and focuses on the ideological struggle in the realm of culture and language.

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