Postindustrial societies have been witnessing shifts in citizenship styles that are marked by generational differences in approaching citizenship. Instead of subscribing to citizenship in the traditional context of obligations, especially younger generations position citizenship towards more (self)actualizing practices that favour non-institutional patterns of understanding and living politics. With developments of the Internet, citizen’s practices of participation changed and resulted in new patterns of communication – field of alternative media is one such example – while political agency is still relatively narrowly defined as the agency of institutional policy. This chapter responds to the need to articulate the relevance of new forms of political participation in their relation to alternative media for processes of democratization of societies for the present and the future. Discussing alternative media projects, with particular reference to developments in Central-Eastern Europe, we analyse their meaning and potential to generate (self)actualizing, autonomous actions of individuals and groups as members of polity. At the same time, the chapter provides critical evaluation of ‘mediatization of citizenship’ and warns against the libertarian discourses that deploys narrow understandings of citizenship picturing the digital citizen as a self-actualizing individual who creatively and freely chooses his or her likes - without any reflection on structural constraints, including those posed by institutionalized politics.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1072237
This article explores how digital communication platforms influence the everyday life of migrants in transnational milieus and how they shape the migrants’ sense of home. I analyze the role of information and communication technologies in forming relationships that are reproduced transnationally. The focus is on the analysis of migrant's understanding of home, belonging, and on possibilities of actualizing citizenship. The research is based on empirical material in the form of communication diaries that were completed by migrants living in Slovenia and interviews conducted with them. The article discusses the digitalized web of relations by exploring the who, when, how, where, and what of communication and analyzes how this influences the experiencing of home. The aim is to not only learn about belonging in contemporary mobility but understand how transnational communication is clustered along gender, ethnic, and class divides.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1060717
The article confronts theoretical predictions, according to which innovations of ICT will spur the media production towards greater diversity and variety, with basic contradictions of the currently-prevailing media economy. In actuality, the promise of the ubiquity of media content and plurality of possible mediated experiences is contested by the constraints that the production side has to meet in order to divert the trend of the rate of profit to fall – to alleviate the consequences of the law, with which Marx explained the circular movement of the economic activity in general. Critical scholars have been so far regularly demonstrating that investments in technology most often bring about increases in distribution capacities instead of fulfilling the promise to increase diversity of content and media, whereas the author of this article uses the classical tools and the basic laws of Marxian analysis in order to explain the internal drives and the contradictory forces that propel media supply towards the decisions to preserve the existing range of products and not to risk with the new ones.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1537704900