Especially in situations of crisis and rapid change in people’s everyday lives, the role played by economic, political, and cultural powers – along with the functioning of communication as mediating our access to social reality – is fundamental both at the level of sociological research and in the lived experiences of individuals. How can power as multiple dimension use communication and specifically the social media, in order to reproduce its mechanisms and structures? What are online strategies of cultivating its values? How can new communication technologies in turn be able to provide the public with useful platforms for escaping from power’s symbolic field? More specifically, to what extent do political satire and cultural taste actualize a critique of power, and to what extent do they reproduce and legitimize the framework of power?
The time we are living in is historically unprecedented period, not least taking in account the context of increasingly complex globalization and the evolution of communication technology that together make identity processes and individual patterns for understanding social reality rather fluid. Against the backdrop of these circumstances, economic, political and cultural powers are spread across many environments, and mainly neoliberalism succeeded in shaping values, social relationships and in colonizing the lifeworld by dissimulating market and economic logic. At issue is the role played by communication, that on the one hand keeps being an ideal terrain for citizens/users in order to build their symbolic identity and to affirm one’s self, and on the other hand it runs the risk of reproducing essential structures of power. In this regard, by focusing on digital platforms of social media, more generally this call for papers seeks to understand under what circumstances power’s strategies take place on the web. Sustaining that power is ubiquitous and pervasive is not enough, but there needs more detailed analytical approach. Proposals containing theoretical reflections, empirical analysis, and updating of previous theories can focus on those online environments where power is more widespread and where users practices are able to contest power through satire and irony by making it an object of derision. In fact playing with power is a very significant communication behavior allowing us to understand the logics of embodying and contesting power’s values and norms. At the same time, online cultural taste as strategy and action model allowing the individual to express his/her symbolic self, manifests the ways in which one legitimates the dominating values of power and conversely escapes from its enclosures.
This Research Stream focuses on the interplay between power and communication, especially on the cultivation process engendered by power on the web, the patterns of embodying its values and norms, and the contesting strategy actualized by users through political satire and cultural taste. We welcome proposals for papers on these and other issues mainly concerning the analysis of relationship between power and communication in time of crisis.
