A Media Citizenry and Communication Policies: The Challenges of Information Democracy

Abstract

As shown by public opinion studies since the 1930s, modern public information and communication are destined to play an essential role in the shaping of a common space for political deliberation and representation. Since then it has been generally recognised that without information or access to the communication space, freedom of expression and other social rights tend to be violated. Indeed, the current quality of the democratic life of a society can be measured in terms of the vitality and diversity of its information system, even more so with the spread of what some authors call “media democracy”. The desire to become familiar with the conditions and parameters of the democratic organisation of mediation in theory and, above all, in empirical analysis, has been widely cultivated. To the point that political communication can be regarded as one of the most popular disciplines and objects of study in communicology research. As could not be otherwise, it has also been the persistent target of scathing criticism and academic debate, above all in relation to normative problems deriving from the need for social regulation and to the existing relationships of mutual dependence, directly or indirectly, between the social system and the public communication system. The ample scientific production in this respect has resulted in the observation of the different realities of political communication in terms of the effects, negative consequences and institutional dimensions of the phenomenology of mediatised democratic culture. While it has sidelined significant aspects such as emotions, imaginaries and representations of public culture and, for that matter, participation that facilitates or restricts the mediations of the cultural industries. In the digital age, this neglect of the subjective, experiential and reconstructionist aspects of mediation is currently highlighting the need for another approach. One that critically and specifically considers the aspects of reception, consumption and political production of the mediatised social realm and attempts to identify, in the broadest cultural sense of the word, the structural mutations that the communication industries promote in organisational models and contemporary forms of collective action, which, among other processes, make it easier to embark on new processes of participation.