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A critical survey of the role of media and communication in capitalist societies.
Rethinking Media and Communication: A Critical Sociological Lens sets out to answer key questions about media and communication under capitalism. How do power structures shape communication processes? How are inequalities reinforced across different levels of society—micro, mezzo, and macro? Drawing on sociology, political economy, media studies and related fields, the book offers fresh insights into how communication supports capitalist domination, from media commodification to media concentration. It calls for a rethinking of how communication affects social relations and how social relations influence communication, exposing its deep connection to economic and political power. This book is essential for anyone seeking to understand the forces shaping today’s media landscape.
Paško Bilić is Chair of the Centre for Sociology of Media and Digital Society at IRMO in Zagreb, Croatia, and coordinator of the European Sociological Association's Research Network 18: Sociology of Communications and Media Research.
Thomas Allmer is a research associate at the Department of Media Studies at Paderborn University in Germany and a co-editor of the journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique.
Contents
List of Figures, Tables, and Diagrams
1 Introduction
Paško Bilić and Thomas Allmer
Part 1 Setting the Scene
2 Contested Legacies – Marxian Influences on the Sociology of Media and Communication
Sašo Slaček-Brlek and Boris Mance
Part 2 Abstraction and Fetish
3 Between Capital and the Lifeworld: Contradictions of Value-Regulated Social Interactions
Paško Bilić
4 Theorising a Multidimensional Model for Analysing Data Fetishism: Reconciling Marxist and Freudian Approaches to the ‘Split’
Andrea Miconi and Nico Carpentier
5 Actio in distans: a Critical Node of Technological and Social Mediation
Marco Briziarelli
Part 3 Dominance and Counter-Dominance
6 From the Iron Cage to the Silicon Cage: New Forms of Domination within Hypermediated Societies
Davide Lucantoni, Francesco Orazi and Federico Sofritti
7 Legal Determination of Forms in Software and Communication: between Public and Capital
Toni Prug and Mislav Žitko
Part 4 Public Opinion, Public Sphere and Communicative Activity
8 Fast and Shallow: towards a Critical Theory of Opinion
Eric-John Russell
9 Activity Theory in the Digital Age: Can Communication and Data Be Expropriated, Exploited, or Alienated?
Sebastian Sevignani
Part 5 Non-Western Directions in the Critical Sociology of Media and Communication
10 Ibn Khaldûn and the Political Economy of Communication in the Age of Digital Capitalism
Christian Fuchs
11 Ibn Khaldûn Revisited: Responding to Christian Fuchs
Graham Murdock
12 Ibn Khaldûn and the Political Economy of Communication: a Reply to Graham Murdock
Christian Fuchs
13 Re-reading Ibn Khaldûn in Critical Times
Graham Murdock
14 Critical Sociological and Media Studies: How Latin America Learned to Contest Power from the Periphery
Jairo Lugo-Ocando and Monica Marchesi
Part 6 Re-focusing the Sociology of Media and Communication Debate
15 Dialectics of the Symbolic: Michel Freitag and the Critique of Communication
Claude Leduc and Maxime Ouellet
16 Re-examining News Sources in the Sociology of the Media: a Political Economy of Communication Approach
Jernej A. Prodnik and Igor Vobič
17 Narrating the Field of Communication: Charting an Unstable Territory
Steven Maras
Index