[ecrea] CFP: Disintermediation Processes and New Media

> Italian Political Science Association (SISP)
> Annual meeting, Luiss University, Rome, 17-19 September 2009
>
> Panel on Disintermediation Processes and New Media
> Section of Political Communication
> Convenors: Lorenzo Mosca and Cristian Vaccari
> Discussant: Sara Bentivegna
>
> By promoting processes of disintermediation, the 
> new media stimulate the production of autonomous 
> information flows, which bypass gate-keeping 
> practices by both political actors and 
> traditional mass media. While journalists 
> maintain an important filtering function between 
> society and the mediated public sphere, they 
> have to face a double challenge. On the one 
> hand, they are by-passed by the proliferation of 
> alternative media, especially online (web 
> radios, portals, blogs, forum, street 
> televisions, and so forth). On the other hand, 
> they have to deal with the possibility for 
> political and social actors to autonomously 
> represent themselves via the new media, not 
> least through social networking tools (Facebook, 
> MySpace, Twitter, etc.). In turn, these new 
> communication arenas enable actors that are 
> outsiders in the institutional political sphere 
> to autonomously organize themselves and, in some 
> cases, to incisively participate to public life. 
> How does, then, the functioning of the public 
> sphere and political communication change as a 
> result? How does the relationship between 
> communication producers and receivers change 
> when disintermediation processes occur? Under 
> which conditions can effective participatory 
> spaces be opened up for actors excluded from the 
> institutional sphere? Which strategies do 
> political actors devise to take advantage of 
> these opportunities, and to what extent are they motivated to doing so?
>
> During the last decade, the scientific 
> literature on these issues has produced 
> comparative analyses on the online presence of 
> political parties, unions, representative 
> institutions, civil society actors and groups, 
> or of some combinations of these different 
> actors. Most of these studies have utilized 
> standardized codebooks for website analysis. 
> Other studies, however, have developed 
> insightful qualitative analysis, while at the 
> same time being limited by their focus on single case-studies.
>
> While this line of research has mostly focused 
> on the organizational (meso) level, research on 
> the individual (micro) level has only 
> episodically relied on fully representative 
> surveys capable of solid generalizations. The 
> surveys conducted so far have often been based 
> either on samples representative of the whole 
> population ? where, as a consequence, a limited 
> amount of items focused on internet usage ? and 
> surveys on self-selected samples of internet 
> users, which in some cases featured articulated 
> sets of indicators on information consumption 
> and production online, but offered little in 
> terms of generalizability. Moreover, to date the 
> literature does not feature any longitudinal study of internet users.
>
> This panel aims at collecting contributions 
> focusing on processes of disintermediation 
> enabled by new media, focusing on both 
> individuals and organizations. We particularly 
> welcome proposals that integrate quantitative 
> and qualitative methods and that shed light on 
> the role of contextual factors in these 
> participatory practices, thus illuminating the 
> nexus between online and offline environments.
>
> SUBMISSION PROCEDURE
>
> Please send a title and an abstract of up to 250 
> words to 
> <mailto:(lmosca /at/ uniroma3.it)>(lmosca /at/ uniroma3.it) or 
> <mailto:(cristian.vaccari /at/ unibo.it)>(cristian.vaccari /at/ unibo.it) 
> by June 15, 2009. Proposals and papers can be 
> submitted either in English or Italian. A 
> decision about which contributions to include 
> will be made by June, 20 2009. See 
> <http://www.sisp.it/convegno>http://www.sisp.it/convegno 
> for rurther details on the meeting.

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Nico Carpentier (Phd)
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Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO)
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.56
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.36.84
Office: 5B.401a
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European Communication Research and Education Association
Web: http://www.ecrea.eu
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E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
Web: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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