[ecrea] [IJoC] New Special Section on the Digital Age Published

The International Journal of Communication has published a new Special
Section "The Management of Visibility in the Digital Age."

What we see, what we show and how we look are fundamental social concerns
made ever more salient by developments in digital technology. Contemporary
organizing practices are awash with material, mediated and managed
visibilities:  Organizations erect glass buildings with open and networked
office spaces to efficiently share information, purchase software to enable
deliberative decision making, respond to stakeholder demands by crafting
extensive transparency policies, and orchestrate massive flows of
information online in the name of accountability. Transparency is the
organizational buzzword for good governance and seen as a solution to many
societal ills.  But in the digital world, transparency does not simply
create insight and cleansing — it also has ominous and ambiguous effects.
The dynamics of digital visibility management are far more complicated than
suggested by both skeptics and celebrants.

In this Special Section on the Management of Visibility in the Digital Age,
edited by Mikkel Flyverbom, Paul Leonardi, Cynthia Stohl and Michael Stohl,
the tight bond between communication and the good life via “making
transparent” is loosened in a number of ways. The eight contributors each
question the presumed unvarnished value of transparency and/or the
denigration of secrecy and opacity in communicative acts. Collectively they
get to core features of communication: transmuting the hidden to the
visible, bringing the submerged to the surface, and turning the private into
the public. The contributors rethink transparency in the digital age in four
ways: they remind us that that transparency does not emerge sui generis—it
is managed visibility; they disentangle visibility from transparency; they
turn our attention to the variety of metaphors and mechanisms through which
we enact transparency; and they put transparency in a context of power
relations and asymmetrical capacities.

Taken together, these articles illustrate the need for further examination
of the technological and mediated foundations of transparency and the
dynamics of visibility practices resulting from efforts to make people,
objects and processes knowable, visible, and governable.

Articles for this Special Section are:

The Management of Visibilities in the Digital Age — Introduction
http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4841/1532
Mikkel Flyverbom, Paul Leonardi, Cynthia Stohl, Michael Stohl

Transparency: Mediation and the Management of Visibilities
http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4490/1531
Mikkel Flyverbom

Managing Opacity: Information Visibility and the Paradox of Transparency in
the Digital Age
http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4466/1530
Cynthia Stohl, Michael Stohl, Paul M. Leonardi

> From Radical Transparency to Radical Disclosure: Reconfiguring (In)Voluntary
Transparency Through the Management of Visibilities
http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4413/1529
Luke Heemsbergen

Managing Secrecy
http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4399/1528
Clare Birchall

Managing Surveillance: Surveillant Individualism in an Era of Relentless
Visibility
http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4544/1527
Shiv Ganesh

Occult(ing) Transparency: An Epilogue
http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4896/1526
Jack Bratich

We invite you to read these papers that published January 6, 2016 at
http://ijoc.org.

Larry Gross
Editor

Arlene Luck
Managing Editor
___________________________________________________
International Journal of Communication (IJoC)
USC Annenberg Press
University of Southern California
http://ijoc.org/



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