[ecrea] Call for Papers for the Second Issue of the journal Communication and Culture Review published by Pondicherry University, India

Theme of the Second Issue: Researching Political Communication and 
Citizenship in the Digital Age

http://www.communicationandculturereview.in/

Digital media enable individuals to share knowledge, experiences, 
opinions, and ideas among each other. The means of participation that 
social media afford has significantly enhanced democratic ideals by way 
of allowing citizens to articulate their voices impacting political 
structures. Globally, an estimated 2.5 billion people use social 
networks on a daily basis. With their tremendous growth, social media 
have become an indispensable space modern political campaigning 
leverages for propaganda. It has created new ways of mobilizing public 
opinion and inspiring participation in political and civic activities. 
While public addresses by politicians mobilise citizens as a collective 
around a specific location, the networked architecture of the digital 
space produces congeries of fragmented yet networked collectives across 
varied spatio-temporal dimensions uniting on issue-based political 
ideologies.

Politicians have begun to appropriate these media spaces as it is easy 
to govern the target audiences by calibrating and crafting propaganda 
messages through quantitative metrics. The abundance of digital tools 
has ensured that citizens as data bodies could be tracked, measured, 
quantified and reached more effectively. The rise of algorithms, what 
Napoli (2014) identifies as 'algorithmic turn', inflects political 
communication altering the situated practices of poll campaigning into a 
public relations endeavour. For instance, the use of bots to facilitate 
interaction between candidates and citizens instantiates the fusion of 
human and nonhuman agents posing critical questions to understanding the 
domain of political communication.

Further, platforms like Facebook and Twitter enable candidates to 
directly reach out to voters, mobilize supporters, and influence the 
public agenda. These fundamental changes in political communication 
therefore present election candidates with a widened range of strategic 
choices. Over the last decade, changes in the communication environment 
due to innovations in digital technologies (Castells, 2009; Chadwick, 
2014), which themselves accompanied a process of modernisation and 
professionalisation of electoral competition have forced political 
parties to adopt and integrate in their campaigns increasingly 
sophisticated digital communication practices. Although academic 
research on digital media campaigning has flourished in the past several 
years, the scenario is still unclear and deeper insights are necessary 
to understand how political communication is shaped by digital media. 
Research has extensively documented the integration of new media tools, 
and Twitter and Facebook specifically, in election campaigns held in 
Western democracies (see Gibson, 2013; Jungherr, 2015), whereas the 
underpinnings of digital technologies in elections could be captured 
quite profoundly in the Indian and other democracies.

Researchers have an important opportunity to contribute to 
theory-building and revisit underlying key questions such as: How has 
social media and other forms of digital media use by political 
candidates evolved over time? Is there any conclusive evidence that 
politicians’ use of these tools increases their favourability or 
strengthens citizen engagement? What are the key factors that may 
mitigate the effects of social media on voters? Do these effects hold 
true in different contexts and for different platforms? Most 
importantly, does stronger reliance on social media/digital media 
motivate voters to retain higher levels of political knowledge or 
political participation, and if so, what are the underlying mechanisms?

Given the evolution of social media/digital media use over time and 
their growing importance for political communication, this issue of 
Communication and Culture Review seeks empirical research articles as 
well as theoretical reviews that will strengthen and add to the 
knowledge base of political communication literature. Combining a number 
of articles under this research umbrella could lead to important 
theoretical and methodological contributions, and also bridge several 
disciplinary domains including journalism, mass communication, new 
media, sociology and political science.

The forthcoming issue welcomes papers on topics including but not 
limited to:

Digital media/social media and democracy
Digital media/social media and citizen participation
Digital media/social media and the (im)possibility of public sphere
Algorithms and political communication
Factors impacting poll campaigning strategies in the digital age
New media technologies and their effects on socio-political matters
Articulation and shaping of ideologies by political parties through 
digital media
Memes as visual tools for activism and propaganda in modern politics
Platforms, algorithms and their role in shaping public attention
Democratic subjectivity and the politics of digital space
Subaltern voices and political participation in digital media

References
Castells, M. (2013). Communication power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chadwick, A. (2017). The hybrid media system: Politics and power. New 
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Gibson, R. K. (2013). Party change, social media and the rise of 
‘citizen-initiated’ campaigning. Party Politics, 21(2), 183-197.
Jungherr, A. (2015). E-campaigning in Germany: A net revolution? Essex: 
Routledge.
Napoli, P. M. (2014). Automated media: An institutional theory 
perspective on algorithmic media production and consumption. 
Communication Theory 24(3), 340-360.

Important dates

Full Paper submission: January 3, 2019 (Full paper should not exceed 
8000 words)
Notification of selected papers for peer review: January, 15, 2019
Intimation of final acceptance/correction/rejection: March 5, 2019
Publication of the issue: March 30, 2019

Contact:
M. Shuaib Mohamed Haneef, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor and Head i/c
Department of Electronic Media and Mass Communication
Pondicherry University
Puducherry, India - 605014
Visit the journal on: http://communicationandculturereview.in


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