Rita Figueiras

Paula do Espírito Santo

The western economic and financial crisis began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and led the European Union countries into recession. After this, governments started to implement austerity measures, such as cuts in public spending, including public subsidies and jobs, and rising prices. In this context, Europe started to experience a wave of protest movements. Individuals started to use the manifold interactive digital media environment to both fight against the austerity measures and find alternative ways of claiming their democratic rights. Inspired by the 2011 Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York (USA), the Occupy LSX encampment in Central London (UK), The Outraged (Los Indignados)/ 15M encampment in Central Madrid (Spain), the Syntagma Square’s Outraged movement in Athens (Greece) and the March 12th Movement in Lisbon (Portugal), although short-lived, epitomize an emerging alternative politics and participation via the media. This wave has promoted a debate on how the realm of politics is changing, as citizens broaden their ideas of what political issues and participation mean. Beyond the Internet examines the technological dimension of the recent wave of protest movements in the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland. Offering an opportunity to achieve a better understanding of the dynamics between society, politics and technology, this volume questions the essentialist attributes of the Internet that fuel the techno-centric discourse. The contributors illustrate how all these protest movements were active in the social media and garnered high levels of media attention and public visibility, in spite of their failure to achieve their political goals. As intra-elite dissent was pivotal in understanding the Arab uprisings, the coalition of national ruling elites with European institutions in terms of austerity strategy is essential in understanding the limits of media/technology power and, therefore, the dissociation between communication and representative power.

Unplugging the Protest Movement Wave

Beyond the Internet

Paula Espírito Santo

Isabel Ferin Cunha

Democracy at Work: Pressure and Propaganda in Portugal and Brazil addresses democracy both as an institutional value system and as a practice. How are the media exerting their mediation role? How are the media re-(a)presenting the political world to society? Are different media voices offering diversified and complementary perspectives on politics? How is propaganda perceived within different democratic and economic contexts? Is political trust and mistrust shaping the strategy of propaganda? These questions are addressed in theoretical and empirical chapters in a book that addresses problems which are in need of urgent discussion, as their impact and consequences are deeply transforming politics and the way politics is communicated, lived and understood by its main actors. Within this framework, Political Communication Studies has a major role in identifying and urging new diagnosis of, and insights into, the political and the media systems, and, above all, how both the people and political institutions can both survive crisis and improve democracy in the Lusophone world. This book aims at making a contribution to that acknowledgment.

Democracy at work: pressure and propaganda in Portugal and Brazil

Ilya Kiriya

Muniz Sodré

Jairo Ferreira

José Luiz Braga

Pedro Gilberto Gomes

Antonio Fausto Neto

Ana Paula da Rosa 

Wilson Gomes

Vera V. França

Göran Bolin

Magali do Nascimento Cunha

Ada C. Machado da Silveira

Mario Carlón

This book is one of the results of the II International Seminar on Research on Mediatization and Social Processes. The II International Seminar on Research on Mediatization and Social Processes had a program developed at two levels: Debate panels, with invited researchers – five tables with the participation of researchers from Sweden (1), Russia (1), Portugal (1), Argentina (1), and Brazil (6). The schedule of the II Seminar and its structure are available at https://www.midiaticom.org/seminario-midiatizacao/grade-de-programacao-2018/. Intotal, there were 15 hours of debates at the five debate panels. This second event gave continuity to the first International Seminar on Research on Mediatization and Social Processes, which also had guest researchers. In the first seminar, the five panels were attended by researchers from France (3), Denmark (1), Argentina (2), and Brazil (4). See: http://www.midiaticom.org/seminariointernacional/programacao-2016/. Therefore, methodologically, the Seminar takes place in the articulation of debate panels with international guests and working groups, with the presence of researchers, doctors, doctoral students, Masters, and master’s degree students. We emphasize that, still in the scope of training processes, master’s and doctoral students, masters and doctors, post-doctoral students and post-doctors, and members of the organizing Research Group take part in them as reviewers, in a blind evaluation, of the expanded abstracts submitted by graduates with lower titles – under the coordination of researchers/professors of the Research Group on Mediatization and Social Processes. They evaluated (in a group of more than three dozen reviewers) each of the works submitted by colleagues with training at a lower level, with classification grades, which resulted in the approved papers. Then, they were grouped by the organizing committee, successively, until the event’s working groups were formed. A total of 237 abstracts were submitted. They were selected in the following proportion of participants: 21% of professors/researchers; 33% doctors and doctoral students; 33% masters and master’s students; 13% graduates and undergraduate students, linked to scientific initiation research project and/or with research results of a senior research project. In the first seminar, in 2016, there were 250 submissions by authors and 217 expanded abstracts. Out of these, around 188 works were selected. At both events, half of the participants were from universities in other states (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais, mainly). Among its results, in addition to the training processes in the course of its realization, we emphasize its consolidation in a library of reflections, in the form of complete articles of the presentations in Working Groups and books published in e-book format (with chapters produced by the participants of the debate panels). The expanded abstracts of the event are available at https://midiaticom.org/anais/index.php/seminario-midiatizacao-resumos. The full articles are available at https://midiaticom.org/anais/index.php/seminario-midiatizacao-artigos. This book of the Debate Panels of the II Seminar, in this e-book edition, is available not only in the project collection (https://www.midiaticom.org/e-books/) but also at FACOS UFSM (https: / /www.ufsm.br/editoras/facos/publicacoes/). We reiterate our thanks to CAPES and FAPERGS for the financial support, which is essential for to enable this proposal of conversation via research, both theoretical and empirical, carried out by its participants.

Networks, society, and polis: epistemological approaches on mediatization

Rita Figueiras

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