NEMPI – NEW MEDIA AND POLITICS: Citizens’ participation in the Portuguese political parties websites

Mill and Public Opinion, Today - António Rosas

Citizen’s agenda: Journalism and civic participation in Portuguese media

Digital democracy and electronic surveillance: the krathos of the power and the cyber panopticon - Hélder Prior

Novos Jornalismos e Deliberação: devolver a voz aos cidadãos - João Canavilhas

2º Encontro da Montanha "Comunicação e Deliberação"

2º Encontro da Montanha - Comunicação e Deliberação

Internet, Democracia e Comunicação: O Futuro da Pesquisa/Internet, Democracy and Communication Studies: the future of research

Tamara Witschge (General Secretary of ECREA, Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies)

Nico Carpentier(VUB - Free University of Brussels - Vice President of ECREA)

2º Encontro da Montanha - Comunicação e Deliberação

Painel Democracia Digital e Deliberação: Internet como actor cívico/Digital democracy and deliberation: Internet as civic actor

Francisco Seoane Pérez (Universidade de Leeds)

João Carlos Correia (University of Beira Interior)

2º Encontro da Montanha - Comunicação e Deliberação

Painel Comunicação Estratégica e Deliberação

Mafalda Eiró Gomes (Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa - Escola Superior de Comunicação Social/Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon - College of Social Communication)

Virgílio Nogueira (Câmara de Aveiro/University of Beira Interior)

2º Encontro da Montanha - Comunicação e Deliberação

Conferência Novos Jornalismos e Deliberação/New Journalism and deliberation

João Canavilhas (University of Beira Interior)

Marcos Palácios (UFBA- Universidade Federal da Bahia/Federal University of Bahia - Brazil)

Paulo Nuno Vicente (Antena 1, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences - New University of Lisbon)

2º Encontro da Montanha - Comunicação e Deliberação

Neste momento a Professora Rousiley Maia (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais) apresenta a sua comunicação intitulada "Media e Deliberação: perspectivas teóricas e metodológicas/Media and deliberation: theoretical and methodological perspectives". Transmissão em directo em http://www.encontros.ubi.pt/contents/streaming.php

2º Encontro da Montanha - Comunicação e Deliberação

Neste momento o Professor Paulo Serra (Universidade da Beira Interior) apresenta a sua comunicação intitulada "Novos Media e Participação Política/New Media and Political Participation".

2º Encontro da Montanha - Comunicação e Deliberação

Segundo dia do 2º Encontro da Montanha subordinado ao tema "Comunicação e Deliberação". Transmissão em directo em http://encontros.ubi.pt/contents/streaming.php

2º Encontro da Montanha - Comunicação e Deliberação

2º Encontro da Montanha "Comunicação e Deliberação" na Pousada da Juventude das Penhas da Saúde. Transmissão em directo a partir de http://www.encontros.ubi.pt/contents/streaming.php

Comunicar a voz dos cidadãos

A segunda edição dos Encontros da Montanha vai analisar a “Comunicação e Deliberação”. Três dias de trabalho para debater a temática da participação cívica e decisões colectivas, quer nos media, quer em organismos sociais. Um evento que terá lugar nas Penhas da Saúde.

É crescente a tendência de ouvir os cidadãos, a opinião das pessoas, quando se tomam decisões que têm impacto na vida colectiva. Desde câmaras municipais que promovem consultas públicas sobre orçamentos, ou até, alterações dos planos de construção, passando pelos meios de comunicação que fomentam a participam das pessoas através de várias formas e para um alargado leque de assuntos, há de tudo um pouco.

O meio académico e os agentes de comunicação estão atentos ao fenómeno criando já correntes de estudo e formas de maior interactividade. Estudar este assunto é o principal objectivo dos segundos encontros da montanha. Uma jornada de três dias que terá lugar entre 14 e 16 de Maio, na Pousada da Juventude, nas Penhas da Saúde, vai servir também para fazer um balanço do estado actual deste tema.

Diversos investigadores vão debater a “Comunicação e deliberação”, num evento promovido pelo Laboratório de Comunicação e Conteúdos Online (Labcom) da UBI. Para João Correia, docente na Faculdade de Artes e Letras e um dos organizadores do evento, “neste momento, há uma grande tendência a nível internacional, não apenas nas academias, mas nos jornais e no aspecto prático da questão, de querer ouvir os cidadãos em processos de decisão colectiva”. Para o docente e investigador “há uma tendência muito grande para tentar, em questões que não são meramente científicas ou técnicas, tentar escutar o que os cidadãos têm para dizer, na perspectiva de que uma decisão pode ganhar mais consistência com este processo deliberativo prévio”.

Nesse sentido os media acabam por jogar um papel fundamental “porque ajudam a disseminar informação e a incentivar alguns processos de debate e de assuntos colectivos, como sejam estes tipos de decisões que sejam necessários tomar”.

Estes segundos encontros reúnem um conjunto de investigadores que apresentam os seus mais recentes trabalhos. O destaque vai para as intervenções de Rousiley Maia, da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, no Brasil, que é “uma das maiores autoridades mundiais das ligações entre os media e os processos de ligação cívica com os cidadãos”. Também a presença de Nico Carpentier, da Universidade Livre de Bruxelas, que para além de um especialista nesta matéria é também o vice-presidente da Associação Europeia da Comunicação (ECREA) e da secretária geral da ECREA, que vem da Escola de Jornalismo de Cardiff, Tâmara Witschge.

João Carlos Correia espera que desta iniciativa resultem “novos caminhos de investigação”. Na óptica do docente “Portugal está um pouco atrasado nestas questões, não tanto quanto se pensa”, isto porque, este processo ainda não tem, em solo luso, “o impacto que tem noutros países”. Criar novas oportunidades de estudo e desenvolver caminhos de intercâmbios com as empresas e com as instituições são também metas para estas jornadas que começam no próximo dia 14 de Maio, pelas 14 horas e terminam, domingo, 16, durante a manhã.

Eduardo Alves
Quarta, 12 de Maio de 2010
UrbietOrbi
http://www.urbi.ubi.pt/

Dr Tamara Witschge

Curriculum

Tamara Witschge (PhD) is a lecturer at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. She obtained her PhD degree from the Amsterdam School of Communications Research, University of Amsterdam in May 2007.

Tamara's main research interests are media and democracy, changes in the journalistic field, equality and diversity in the public sphere, and the public debate on immigration. Her PhD thesis '(In)difference Online' focused on online discussions of contested issues. From 2007-2009 she was a research associate at the Media and Communications Department and worked on the Leverhulme Trust funded project 'Spaces of News'. This project aimed to explore the ways in which technological, economic and social change is reconfiguring news journalism and shaping the dynamics of the public sphere and public culture.

Tamara is the General Secretary of European Communication Research and Education Association (since 2008). She was one of the main organizers of the First European Communication Conference (ECC), held in November 2005 in Amsterdam and is part of ECC's organizing committee (Barcelona and Hamburg). She was the Secretary of the Board of ECREA (2007-2008) and the chair of the Young Scholars Network of ECREA from 2008-2009. She is a member of the editorial board of the international journal New Media and Society, as well as of PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication.

For more informations:

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/contactsandpeople/profiles/witschge-tamara.html

Abstract

The development of the Internet as a communication medium for the masses has rekindled interest in the democratic debate. The Internet’s features are deemed ideal for enabling the type of communication that should take place in the public sphere. This has motivated a number of scholars to examine the extent to which the Internet actually enables democratic discussion, as well as democratise journalistic practices. Dominant modes of communication are said to be altered, allowing for more inclusive forms of participation in public discussion and journalism. In this contribution I will critically interrogate both the expectations that surround new media’s role in enhancing the voice of the citizen in the public domain as well as new media’s assumed democratising nature.

I will address the themes central to the conference by examining to what extent new media have altered the relationship between the constituents of the public domain: political actors, journalism and the public. I will focus on the latter two and ask 1) whether new media technologies (specifically the internet) provide a greater and altered role for citizens in the public domain, and what type of political interactions we can find in this online sphere (public deliberation being one of the main themes of the conference); 2) whether, and, if so, how the role of journalists as gatekeepers of information in the public domain has been impacted by the introduction of the new media technologies in the newsroom. The latter question relates to the widespread expectation that online access provides citizens with tools to contribute to journalism in news ways. From this new forms of more participatory journalism are said to develop (connecting to the second theme of the conference: journalism and civic participation).

In examining these questions I will draw from research conducted in the Netherlands and the UK into the plurality of voices in the online public domain. This will include research into the online interactions between citizens, the role of citizens in online journalism, and the possibilities of alternative journalism online. The theme that runs through these interrogations is whether we can see a greater diversity in the public domain as a result of the virtually unlimited space available for communication in the online media landscape.

Dra. Rousiley C. M. Maia

Curriculum

Rousiley C. M Maia got her Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Nottingham, U.K, and is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. She is the author of “Media e Deliberação” (FGV, 2008), the co-author of “Comunicação e Democracia – Problemas e Perspectivas” (Paulus, 2008) and the editor of “Mídia, espaço público e identidades coletivas (Editora UFMG, 2006), among other articles on the mass media, internet, democracy and civil society. She directs the Research Group in Media and Public Sphere at UFMG and is currently working in the book “Media, deliberation and political talk” (Hampton Press).

Abstract

Mediated Deliberation: theoretical perspectives and methodological issues

The view of the news media as a forum for civic debate is familiar in political communication and public sphere studies. Researchers in this field assume basically that diverse problems and conflicts – and respective lines of inquiry, information, claims, and opinions – are made publicly available through different modes of representation by the media. Media content, particularly the news media, are seen as important resources for citizens to form their opinions and engage in discussions. In this paper, I explore more recent claims regarding the news media a locus of public deliberation. The premise here is that the news media can serve as a platform for dynamic exchange of “published opinions”, claims or justifications; and also for “contestation of discourses”. This approach is centrally concerned with the relationship between different speakers and their claims in the media arena. Versions of deliberative democracy for which the central feature are plurality of discourses or perspectives – and not individuals – offer a particularly compelling perspective for guiding an empirical research on mediated deliberation.
In part one of this paper, I begin by describing what I see as the fundamental characteristics of the concept of mediated deliberation. By examining previous studies on public debate in the media environment, I differentiate between studies grounded on discursive approach and those approach based on frame analysis, in order to clarify the main sources of theoretical diversity among researchers. In part two, I lay out what I see as the main variables to recognize mediated deliberation, along with their specificities in the mass media arena, and their implications for measurement. Based on Habermas’s discourse ethics and building on previous studies about public debate in mass communication, I propose the following variables for assessing mediated deliberation: (a) participant accessibility and characterization; (b) use of arguments; (c) reciprocity and responsiveness; and (d) reflexivity and reversibility of opinions. I argue that this set of minimal normative criteria should differentiate deliberation from other types of talk in political communication, and also provide guidance for measuring better and worse cases of the phenomenon. In part three, taking into consideration the main points mapped out, I briefly describe central strategies for measuring deliberativeness in print media.

Rosália Rodrigues

Curriculum

Rosália Duarte Isabel Rodrigues, is a doctoral student in Communication Sciences at the University of Beira Interior, she graduated in 2007 from the same institution. She investigates Interactive Communication on the Internet, especially the interactivity on the political sites existing in Portugal. She has taught the subject of Cyber-culture at the University of Beira Interior. She is also a Collaborator at LabCom (Laboratory of Communication and Content On-line).

Abstract

There are several ways to communicate the policy and in "The Age of Media'' the latest media coverage policy is made through new media such as Internet and mobile devices. The Internet allows interaction between the social actors, giving greater freedom of expression to citizens and other small political forces, which is not always the case in traditional media which often fail to convey their messages, since media are much more controlled by producers, who only have the power of the word, the power of access and use of the medium. In the last twenty years, since the proliferation of Personal Computers (PCs) and Internet for the masses, we find that political reality has changed a lot and today, the political strategies are also made to trace the paths of New Information Technologies (ICTs).

As a channel of communication, the Internet, can and should be, in our view, seen as a means of expression and an exercise of citizenship and electronic democracy, if their interactive potential is well harnessed.

We cannot close our eyes to new areas of discussion that have arisen, new ways of communicating and social organization that takes place in a ‘non-place’; Cyberspace. The transformation of the world into a global village, with Mcluhan view was never as real as today. The dematerialization of social relations allows a devastating cultural miscegenation. The individual and collective identities are much more heterogeneous than they were before. The speed with which we exchange a message, anywhere in the world, has changed completely the social, economic and political outlook.

If before, only the visionaries foresaw the changes brought about by the Internet, which were feared and even discredited by many, today it is undeniable for anyone of us to say that the Internet not only presages new forms of networks but also the transformation of society. As we experience this transformation, we become a part of it, and help it succeed.

In this paper, we speak of the changes that cyber-culture and cyberspace have brought to the social and political organization of societies, particularly in the Portuguese political scene, and how the democratic exercise has been enriched with the enlargement of the area of Internet discussion, particularly in sites of Portuguese parties during 2009 campaign. In this paper we present a case study, the site ``Movimento Sócrates, belonging to the party which won the elections. This site, like Barack Obama´s site, is very interactive. In Portugal the Americanization of political campaigns was noted in the two major parties: the Partido Socialista (PS) (www.socrates2009.pt) and Partido Social Democrata (PSD) www.politicadeverdade.

The party of Jose Socrates (www.socrates2009.pt) has hired the firm that prepared the site of Barack Obama, "Blue State Digital (BSD), which was responsible for the social networking strategies of the candidate. "Movement’’ is what characterizes the site of the PS and the online campaign involves people through various participatory movements, such as inclusion of multimedia content. This site is a case study of the beginning of a "2.0'' Political Communication in Portugal. Thus we consider the spaces that allow surfers to interact and we will analyze the universe of participants.

Dr. Paulo Serra

Curriculum

Joaquim Paulo Serra é Licenciado em Filosofia pela Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa e Mestre, Doutor e Agregado em Ciências da Comunicação pela Universidade da Beira Interior.

Nesta Universidade, é docente e investigador do Laboratório de Comunicação e Conteúdos On-line (LABCOM), integrando o Grupo de Investigação sobre Informação e Persuasão. Desempenha, actualmente, o cargo de Presidente da Faculdade de Artes e Letras.

É autor dos livros A Informação como Utopia (1998), Informação e Sentido (2003) e Manual de Teoria da Comunicação (2008), e co-organizador das obras Jornalismo Online (2003), Mundo Online da Vida (2003), Da comunicação da Fé à fé na Comunicação (2005), Ciências da Comunicação em Congresso na Covilhã (Actas, 2005), e Retórica e Mediatização (2008). Tem ensaios e artigos dispersos por várias outras obras colectivas e revistas. A sua investigação tem incidido, prioritariamente, nos processos de produção de sentido relativos à comunicação mediática, com especial ênfase na que se refere à Internet.

Resumo

Novos media e participação política

Qualquer que seja a nossa perspectiva sobre a democracia – liberal, republicana ou deliberativa -, é difícil não reconhecer que esta implica sempre uma ou outra forma de participação dos cidadãos. Nas sociedades mediatizadas, como é o caso das nossas, a participação política é indissociável dos meios de comunicação. Com os tradicionais meios de comunicação de massa, essa participação é limitada - em termos de protagonistas, de temas, de extensão. Com a Internet, esses limites à participação dos cidadãos são, pelo menos em potência, ultrapassados: todos e cada um podem falar, dos temas que quiserem, com a extensão que quiserem. No entanto, e como mostram vários estudos teóricos e/ou empíricos, essas potencialidades tecnológicas não são, na maior parte dos casos, aproveitadas pelos cidadãos e instituições. Esse desfasamento entre a disponibilização das tecnologias que permitem a participação política e a sua efectiva utilização tem a sua raiz em factores sociais e culturais sem cuja alteração ele não poderá ser reduzido. Para ilustramos esta tese, recorreremos aos dados resultantes quer de vários estudos internacionais, quer do estudo de alguns casos portugueses. Conclui-se, assim, que a questão do aumento da participação política dos cidadãos não é, na sua essência, uma questão tecnológica, mas política.

Palavras-chave: participação – política - Internet – factores sociais.

Dr Nico Carpentier

Curriculum

Nico Carpentier (PhD) is an assistant professor working at the Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB - Free University of Brussels). He is co-director of the VUB research centre CEMESO and vice-president of the European Communication Research and Education Association. His theoretical focus is on discourse theory, his research interests are situated in the relationship between media, journalism, politics and culture,
especially towards social domains as war & conflict, ideology, participation and democracy, both at the national and international level.

For more informations: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/

Abstract

If we want to think about the future of internet research, we have to go back to the past, in order to counter the enthusiastic and sometimes messianistic discourses of novelty that still engulf ‘new’ media technologies and practices. If we want to take the calls to re-articulate (or re-new) our present-day ideological and theoretical frameworks –to deepen democracy- seriously, we need to return to what has been said before. If we want to evaluate the democratic capacity of these so-called ‘new’ media practices, we need to contextualise them by confronting them with the media practices ‘from the past’ (which are -as always- still very present), we need to consider the applicability of the ‘old’ (so-called outdated) theoretical frameworks to make sense of the diversity of participatory practices that characterise the media configuration of today.

The starting point of this paper is audience theory, and more specifically, the structuring dimensions of audience theory: the active/passive, the interaction/participation and the micro/macro dimension. The strategy behind this starting point is to show that the signifier audience has not lost its conceptual strength, and can provide us with a well-functioning connection with past theoretisations of media use in order to counter the tabula rasa tendencies of (some) new media theory. Moreover, foregrounding the interaction/participation dimension of audience theory will allow me to show the diversity and complexity of audience activities, and open the discussion on the history of participation and on the differences in intensity of participatory practices.

This choice for audience theory as starting point implies that I do not subscribe to the idea that the signifier audience has become outdated and should be abandoned –a point of view that McQuail seems to have adopted –at least at certain moments in time- for instance when writing that: ‘there is no doubt that the audience concept is in many ways outdated and its traditional role in communication theory, models, and research has been called in to question. We can (and largely do) go on behaving as if the audience still exists “out there” somewhere, but we may be largely deceiving ourselves.’ (McQuail, 1997: 142) On the contrary, I want to argue that the signifier audience can provide us with a set of bridges with our intellectual traditions, allowing for the evaluation of the specificity of the claims made on behalf of the online active audience. In this paper, I first want to provide an overview of audience theory’s dimensions, which will provide me with the toolkit to examine three of these specificity claims: the shift from one-to-many to many-to-many communication; the re-articulation of the audience into the ‘produser’; and the convergence of top-down business with bottom-up production and consumption practices. Their problems will be discussed, each time with the support of a small case study.