Public sphere as a specific sphere, domain, an imagined space of communicatively mediated social life, or a discursively constructed social space between the state and civil (initially bourgeois) society represents the infrastructure for social integration through public discourse. It is taken for granted that no specific social norms (e.g., privacy, ownership) and regulatory rules (e.g., formal membership) limit citizens' access to the public sphere, and no specific knowledge and competences are needed to make them able to participate in it. A public sphere could either be (1) the sphere of publicity, i.e., communication spaces created and maintained by the media, which involve relations of power and dominance ("public space") or (2) the sphere of the public/s consisting of free and equal citizens participating in public reasoning. In either case, the principle of publicness represents the very heart of the concept of the public sphere. In empirical terms, the public sphere is often conceived of as a kind of "compromise" of these two "ideal types." The concept of the public sphere largely refers to the role of the media and public opinion in modern representative democracies; the normative conceptualization of the media comes to the forefront in the idea of public service media.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33308765
“Publicness” has been considered one of the fundamental principles of democratic governance by normative theories of public opinion since the late 18th century. The idea of publicness arose in the context of the interaction of civil society and the state. As an ethical principle referring to discursive visibility, publicness was central to the critical concept of public opinion from its very first conceptualizations. In contemporary democracies, the idea of publicness primarily refers to the public sphere, where the right of “public use of reason” or “public deliberation” of free and equal citizens can—or ought to—take place, and where public opinion is formed and expressed.
COBISS.SI-ID: 34535261
The commodity-form played an important, if often overlooked, role in the studies of capitalism. The chapter deals with commodification of communication by analysing it from a theoretical, conceptual and historical point of view. Commodification of communication and information is analysed in deeply historical manner by looking at how these resources have been subjugated to market since capitalism first emerged. It is claimed that political interventions led to the increasing social, economic and political significance of the information and communication we have been witnessing in the recent decades.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33589085
The article reflects on contemporary processes of de-professionalisation of journalism, its consequences for democratic processes and challenges to citizen journalism. It is argued that both the dilemmas of mainstream journalism and the emergence of citizen journalism are consequences of an array of evolving factors having to do with complex transformations in the media landscape and its industries, professional and 'leisured' content creation, employment and technologies, shifting patterns of media use among citizens, as well as broader permutations in social and cultural patterns. The first section addresses the long-term historical decline of professional journalism; the second section addresses some of the attributes of the current crisis; the third section probes some of the key features of what has come to be called citizen journalism, a development that is contradictorily entwined with both the de-professionalisation and the democratisation of journalism. In the conclusion, some paths for future research are discussed.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33870941
This study explores the notion of the "tyranny of the empty frame" within the online departments of the two leading Slovenian newspapers, Delo and Dnevnik, where online journalists newsworkers with little or no training or experience in photojournalism are required to provide each news item with at least one photograph. By adopting newsroom observation and in-depth interviews with online journalists working for Delo and Dnevnik, we investigate paradoxes associated with this imperative. Despite often being faced with a desperate search for "any image", online journalists at both institutions are reluctant to use citizen-produced photographs their use appears to be an aberration rather than a norm. Instead, they frequently resort to using what they refer to as a symbolic photograph to overcome the lack of visual material originating from the reported event. This move from indexical iconic nexus to metaphoric visual communication signals challenges to the dominant paradigm of press photography. At the same time, we suggest that we should not view the phenomena of citizen photojournalism as a radical break with the past but as the latest development in a series of interrelated processes, intellectual projects of modernity, such as ocularcentrism, journalism, capitalism and the nation state.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33335389