Session 4 communication, power and technology

Communication, Power and Technology

Dr. Juan Luis Manfredi SánchezCorreo-e: [email protected]

[email protected]: @juanmanfredi

http://ciberdemocracia.blogspot.com

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

2Juan Luis Manfredi, Ph.D @juanmanfredi

1. The Power

Throughout history communication and information have been fundamental sources of power and counter-power, of domination and social change This is the battle over the hearts and minds of the people Why? The way people think determines the fate of norms and values on which societies are constructed Because communication, and particularly socialized communication, the one that exists in the public realm, provides the support for the social production of meaning

What’s the difference?The pervasiveness of communication networks in a multimodal hypertext


1. The Power

The digital age extends the reach of communication media to all domains of social life in a network that is at the same time global and local, generic and customized in an ever-changing pattern This is challenging institutionalized power relations Power:

The structural capacity of a social actor to impose its will over other social actor(s). All institutional systems reflect power relations, as well as the limits to these power relations as negotiated by a historical process of domination and counter-domination.


1. The Power

Manuel Castells Anthony Giddens

The relational capacity to influence asymmetrically

One empowers the wills, the interests and the values

Usually, it is associated with (potential) coercion, domination or violence

The networks aggregates social and technological power

Structuration power Transformative capacity: the capacity to intervene in a given set of events so as in some way to alter them (p.7)

The effectively decide about course of events, even where others might contest such decisions (p.9)

Not necessarily coercitive, violent or asymmetrically distributed


1. The PowerJürgen Habermas Michel Foucault

1. Political power: legitimating process must pass through a public sphere that has the capacity to foster considered public opinions

2. Social power: the status one occupies within a stratified society

3. Economic power: it must not bypass the channels of the public sphere

4. Media power: based on the technology of mass communications + agenda setting

Political groups do not possess power in the strict sense but derive public influence from the social and cultural capital they have accumulated in terms of visibility, prominence, reputation, or moral status.

Two dimensions1. Power inheres in institutions

themselves 2. Power in the individuals that make

those institutions function

Panopticon is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power.Bureaucracies, like disciplines, contribute to the process of disindividuation Power is a question of government: political structures + management of states + the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed

Milgram & Zimbardo


1. The Power

Power in organizations is a complex questionThe capacity to influence the thought and behavior of other people or organizations

Seven dimensions1. Legitimate Power2. Reward Power3. Coercive Power

4. Connection Power5. Information Power6. Expert Power7. Referent Power

Position Power

Personal Power


1. The Power

Four types of power in the network society

1. Networking power: The power of inclusion and exclusion from a network.

2. Network power: Whoever sets the standards/rules has power over those usign the network.

3. Networked power: Some actors (nodes) work harder than others and have more connections and more scope to impose their opinion, but under the constraints of network power).

4. Network-making power: People (although more usually networks of people) who can program the creation and joining of networks in order to augment information sharing.


1. The Power

Network-making power: “paramount form of power in the network society”

Who? 1. Programmers: the power to constitute networks and to

program/reprogram the networks in terms of the goals assigned to the network

2. Switchers: the power to connect and ensure the cooperation of different networks by sharing common goals and combining resources, while fending off competition from other networks by setting up strategic cooperation


1. The Power

Malcolm Gladwell’s Three Laws on social networks

Tipping Point

The law of the few

The stickiness

factorThe law of

context


1. The PowerNetworks became the most efficient organizational form as a result of three major features of networks which benefited from the new technological environment: flexibility, scalability and survivability. Flexibility is the ability to reconfigure according to changing environments and retain their goals while changing their components, sometimes bypassing blocking points of communication channels to find new connections. Scalability is the ability to expand or shrink in size with little disruption. Survivability is the ability of networks, because they have no single centre and can operate in a wide range of configurations, to withstand attacks on their nodes and codes because the codes of the network are contained in multiple nodes that can reproduce the instructions and find a new way to perform. (p23)

Flexibility Scalability Survivability


1. The Power

Counter-power:

The capacity of a social actor to resist and challenge power relations that are institutionalized. Indeed, power relations are by nature conflictive, as societies are diverse and contradictory. Therefore, the relationship between technology, communication, and power reflects opposing values and interests, and engages a plurality of social actors in conflict.

We face a new technological framework → this has consequences for the ways, means, and goals of their conflictive practice


1. The Power

Why?1. The predominant role of media politics and its interaction with the

crisis of political legitimacy in most countries around the world

2. The key role of segmented, customized mass media in the production of culture

3. The emergence of horizontal networks of communication: mass selfcommunication

4. The uses of both one-directional mass communication and mass self-communication in the relationship between power and counter-power, in formal politics, in insurgent politics, and in the new manifestations of social movements


2. The Communication in the Digital Age

1. Organizational transformation: The transformation of media to the current multi-media business model represents the heart of the system. These corporations have an incredible level of resources, capital and power but are also decentralized to fit into the diverse world that they inform.

2. Technological transformation: The digitalization of communication, through elements such as internet and wireless has led to the rise in mass-communication, including mass-self-communication moving the communication paradigm from one to many, to many to many.

3. Cultural Transformation: The audience has developed out of being a passive object, content to receive information, to intervening in the relationship with the media.

4. The New Creative Audience: An audience which creates and controls what it wants to see through interaction with the mass-media system.


2. The Communication in the Digital Age

Isaac Mao & Sharism

• Video

• Who is?

Pekka Himanen

• Lesson at USC

• Documentary about Hackers’ Ethics

http://www.casaasia.eu/noticia/detalle?id=201253

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/05/blogging.digitalmedia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HH_B7C7eqs&feature=related


3. Mass Communication and Media Politics

Politics is based on socialized communication, on the capacity to influence people’s mindsThe voter as a consumer in a free marketplace of ideas The main channel of communication between the political system and citizens is the mass media system Until recently, and even nowadays to a large extent, the media constitute an articulated system, in which, usually, the print press produces original information, TV diffuses to a mass audience, and radio customizes the interaction


Political Actors

AudienceMedia



Process of events-driven reportingWhat does not exist in the media does not exist in the public mind, even if it could have a fragmented presence in individual minds The medium is not only the messageHowever it has substantial influence on the form and effect of the messageThe TV leads the process Media constitutes by and large the space where power is decidedPolitics is dependent on media politics: image, PR and political marketing

Here, again, is a matter of trust in the candidate, the political party and the system

Politics of scandal?

Political Events &

Actors



George Lakoff:

Issues are real, as are the facts of the matter. But issues are also symbolic of values and of trustworthiness.Effective campaigns must communicate the candidates values and use issues symbolically, as indicative of their moral values and their trustworthiness

Political Events & Actors



Media Business? • Increasing economic concentration• The usage of a diversity of platforms• The customization and segmentation of audiences• Economies of scale, of scope and synergies

However, more questions than answer…

• The rise of mobile media• Social media and user generated contents• Applications world• Engaging Audiences• From free to paid content

Media

How to monetize

these networks of

mass self-comm in terms of

advertising?


3. Mass Communication and Media PoliticsMedia

Media Manipulatio

n?

Framing

Agenda setting

Priming and

Indexing


4. The rise of mass self-communication

What?The development of horizontal networks of interactive communication thatconnect local and global in chosen timeThe global web of horizontal communication includes the multimodal exchange of interactive messages from many to many both synchronous and asynchronous

“Web 2.0 technologies empowered consumers to produce and distribute their own content. The viral success of these technologies propelled media organizations to harness the production power of traditional consumers” (p.87)

The majors try to figure out how to re-commodify Internet-based autonomous mass self-communicationExamples: pay sites, advertising, premium, freemium



Why?The diffusion of Internet, mobile communication, digital media, and a variety of tools of social software

With the convergence between Internet and mobile communication and the gradual diffusion of broadband capacity, the communicating power of the Internet is being distributed in all realms of social life, as the electrical grid and the electrical engine distributed energy in the industrial society

“This gives rise to unprecedented autonomy for communicative subjects to communicate at large” (p.136) challenging corporate media concentration and cultural hegemony

People can create autonomous spaces both from capital and state powers

Blocking Internet access is the exception (p.204)



Umberto Eco’s semiotic model of communication

The creative audience:Engages the interactive production of meaningThe figure of sender and addresseeItalian professor explains that the power groups, politicians, educators, rescuers, utopians, scientists and journalists have been content to master two of the most important processes communication: the source and channel. To change the power relation among actors, Eco proposed a silent revolution, which took place just at the time and place that comes communication. The powers could control the source and the channel, but the reception of the message and its interpretation is absolutely free. The “semiological guerrilla” would aim to complement the communication processes and discuss the message with the audienceAlong with the reinterpretation, appear non-industrial forms of communication that would not be contaminated by political corruption



The guerrilla strategy is valid as long as the communication was vertical and hierarchical, but the globalization of information and telecommunications has substantially changed the pictureThe new guerrilla 2.0. is not only a reinterpretation of the messages, but in the self development of informational messagesBlogs, mailing lists, magazines alternative change the paradigm of communication, to the extent that for the first time in history, senders do not need intermediaries to recover the conversationMainstream media has less market valueSpecial mention of Wikipedia, open-access encyclopedia written and updated by internet users who give their time writing articles from altruistic. There is no editor (although one reviewer of texts) to indicate the timing and direction of the collaboration, but that everyone writes about what he knows and his way



Three final remarks:1. It reaches potentially a global audience through the p2p networks

and Internet connection

2. It is multimodal, as the digitization of content and advanced social software, allows the reformatting of almost any content in almost any form, increasingly distributed via wireless networks

3. It is self-generated in content, self-directed in emission, and self-selected in reception by many that communicate with many



Jürgen Habermas critiques this theory based on what democracy means

Public sphere is still dominated by mediated communication 1. The power of the agenda setting function2. The power of framing

Do Internet and New Media counterbalance the current deficit in democracy and technology? Internet reactivates the grassroots of an egalitarian publicInternet as a danger of the “fragmentation of large but politically focused mass audience into a huge number o isolated issue publics” (p.423) Moreover, the web is mediated communicationMost of political discussion is around the focal points of the quality press

http://archivos.brunner.cl/jjbrunner/archives/1-Habermas_Deliberation2006.pdf





Frank Webster sees more problems on apathy and civic disengagement

ICT are not the primary solution to the problem of disillusion with democratic politics

Social information is a prerequisite of democracy + access to knowledge

Technology on its own is never sufficient to improve things when it comes to informational matters

Why? There are too much information-gathering activities of state agenciesExample: libraries and public service television

http://www.city.ac.uk/sociology/staffdetails/Webster.html


5. Conclusions Power relations in the new communication space

1. Business Media Strategies

2. Electoral Politics in the Age of the Multimodal Internet

3. GrassRoots Politics and the New Media: more civic engagement

Session 4 communication, power and technology

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Transcript of Session 4 communication, power and technology