5 - Constituents of a theory of the media

Originally published in 1970, the article “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” shows an author already worried about how electronic media was influencing not only people’s consciousness but social and political structures as well. Hans Magnus Enzenberger points to the mobilizing power of the electronic media considering the way they are being used. For him, media apparatus were working to prevent communication rather stimulate it. The polarization between transmitter and receiver reflects the opposition among producers and consumers (15). The latter is unable to express their opinions since media is controlled by the consciousness industry. 

4 - Re-constructing digital democracy: An outline of four ‘positions’

Source: Banco Mundial

Currently, a lot of definitions of what digital democracy means are being adopted. What Lincoln Dahlberg attempt to do in his article is to outline this diversity in four different positions.  For Dahlberg, a position means the particular positions of people or groups considering some features; rhetoric, practices, identities, and institutions (2). The author made a critical-interpretative approach based on his understandings of digital democracy and drew upon his knowledge the following four concepts; liberal-individualist, deliberative, counter-publics, and autonomist Marxist.

3 - Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri built a genealogy of modern resistance gathering the forms of insurgency and revolt present in recent history. For them, what we have seen over the last few decades is that the legitimation of the global order is based ultimately on war and the efforts made to understand the counterinsurgency to date pose the insurgency responding to it in our understanding of war. We were looking from the counterinsurgency perspective, but for the authors, we should change this logic to recognize the powerful and wanted forms of rebellion and revolution; they proposed to look for resistance first (64). They argue that the understanding of the genealogy of resistance will provide us a new vision of the world and its subjectivities.

2 - How to resume the task of tracing associations

Bruno Latour starts his book with his concerns about the use of ‘social’ as an adjective to nominate assumptions about the nature of what compose social assembling.  Comparable to adjectives like wooden, biological and mental, the social is being used to designate something material, a kind of ingredient within social domain (1). His proposal is to reconstruct the meaning of social by revisiting the roots of this concept.

1 - Williams x McLuhan

Raymond Williams was a scholar, professor, and a prolific writer. Engaged to the challenges of his time, he collaborated in newspapers and magazines, including the influential New Left Review. He wrote influents books that remain references in the areas of history and the sociology of culture. One of his principal works, “Television: Technology and Cultural Form,” was firstly published in 1974. Despite being printed more than 40 years ago, the book is a necessary classic for anyone seeking to understand and study the effects of the media. The text helps to remove the impoverished political-cultural debate on technological determinism from the commonplace and attempts to discuss television by considering the diversity of factors influencing it.