CALL FOR SPECIAL ISSUE: Democracy in the age of hyper television / Comunicación y Medios Journal N°51 (2025)

Start: April 2024

Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2024

Publication date: July 2025

Guests Editors:

Loreto Montero, Universidad de California San Diego, lomonter@ucsd.edu https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2434-614X

Juan Pablo Sánchez, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, sanchezsepulvedajp@gmail.com

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0972-9642 

Consuelo Ábalos, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, cdabalos@uc.cl, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0883-6200

 

Scope

The media not only provides representations of social diversity allowing us to see our differences while, at the same time, making us feel part of our communities. They also account for the different discourses and content fueling public debate, generating consensus (or disagreements) and narratives regarding topics of public interest (Hall & Morley, 2019). Thanks to the media, citizens across societies have access to the information they need to make decisions about their futures and their communities. Without the media and the professionals who work on it, public scrutiny of power in contemporary democracies, and the dispute over its performance in favor of weak or subordinated audiences would be impossible (Barboza, 2015).

 

Currently, the trend towards liberalization based upon a heavy commercialization of the media system, self-regulated or non-institutionalized professionalization, and political parallelism at the center, dominates the media industry. Such a model, traditionally linked to the American media system, has permeated the industry over the globe, including countries such as China, which, although far from markets as the American one, show a growing influence of ideas associated with the independence and impartiality in journalism, typical of this model (Hallin & Mancini, 2012; de Albuquerque, 2012). Latin America has not been an exception to this trend.

 

Until 2017, Latin America had one of the highest levels of media ownership concentration in the world, with four main conglomerates, O’Globo (Brazil), Televisa (Mexico), Clarín (Argentina), and Cisneros (Venezuela), representing 80 percent of the market. Likewise, the experience in this region indicates that the commercial logic that dominates the sector forcing media to depend heavily on advertising as the main funding source has consistently failed to support democratic practices and discourses (Márquez Ramirez & Guerrero, 2014). In other words, there seems to be a fundamental incompatibility between the commercial media system and the democratic ideal that we all born equal (Croteau & Hoynes, 2001), as well as permanent tension between television as a social and cultural institution that contributes to fuel identity and a sense of belonging in a community (Martín-Barbero, 2001), on the one hand, and a funding model that conceives their audiences according to their purchasing power, on the other. Unfortunately, recent attempts to update media regulations in countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Bolivia, among others, have not necessarily had positive effects on pluralism since they have operated, in many cases, as ways of disputing control over media content and ownership considered biased or unfavorable to the governments in power (Marquez Ramírez and Guerrero, 2014).

 

Within an international context in which citizens are increasingly less engaged with the way democracy works (Pew Research Center, 2019; Open Society Foundations, 2023), it becomes urgent to explore the role played by television in supporting and reforming democracies, especially considering that the democratization wave of the 1990s has not followed a linear path, as many authors expected (Voltmer, 2012; Roudakova, 2012). Several countries “transitioning to democracy” during that period seem stuck in that stage and even show signs of authoritarianism. Indeed, support for democracy as a system of government has been on a downward trend in the last thirteen years. For instance, 54 percent of Latin Americans would not mind if a non-democratic regime came to power as long as their problems were solved (Corporación Latinobarómetro, 2023). In this sense, there is no natural path to political and social development and hybrid forms of democracy should not be considered transitory states anymore (Voltmer, 2012).

 

In Chile, trust in democratic institutions has significantly declined since the return to democracy (CERC-MORI, 2023). The trend sharpened after the social uprising of October 2019. This episode was preceded by several student protests, as well as environmental conflicts, and feminist mobilizations since early 2010 in Chile. But such local social movements are part of a broader trend of contemporary social upheavals across the world, including pro-democracy movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, protests in Greece, and the Indignados Movement in Spain in 2011 (Castells, 2015; Harlow & Johnson, 2011), as well as the #MeToo in 2017, the strikes against climate change, and the 2019-2021 protests in Hong Kong, to name a few. The media have been key in representing these movements and disseminating their demands. Particularly, the internet and social media have played a crucial role, not only by complementing the narratives developed by traditional mass media, but also by giving citizens the chance to self-organizing, take their messages to the streets, and promote fundamental social changes (Lee, 2014; Kyriakidou & Olivas Osuna, 2017; Castells, 2010).

 

Questioning the role of television in democracy becomes crucial in light of the technological changes that this format  has experienced and how, as a constantly evolving medium, television has represented and redefined the political, social, economic, and cultural shifts in contemporary societies. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people turned to television again, challenging the trend of the decline in ratings that several authors have previously stated as irreversible. Along with this, the widespread use of digital devices and the normalization of media content consumption at every time, every day (Arana et al., 2020) push us to rethink the loss of centrality of television as a medium in the current media landscape. Indeed, television went from being a mass medium to a digital platform (Santa Cruz, 2017), experiencing a fragmentation of screens and an acceleration of the pace of the content displayed (Scolari, 2008; Miranda & Fernández, 2019). Along with this phenomenon, audiences moved from a traditional reception experience of viewing and consuming information to an experience of becoming a social audience in which interaction and switching roles make people actively participate in producing, broadcasting, and circulating content across platforms and screens (Quintas-Froufe & González-Neira, 2014; Orozco, 2020). 

 

In various contexts, television has been studied not only as a social institution but also from a systemic perspective, paying attention to its role and its relationship with other players and social phenomena in contemporary media ecosystems. Consequently, research in Latin America and Spain, for instance, has addressed the process of TV’s adoption between free-to-air broadcasting and VoD and streaming, (Atarama-Rojas et al., 2017); the importance of local television stations and their role in giving visibility to their local communities (Rodríguez-Malebran & Mohammadi, 2022), or the development and decline of public media due to public policy mistakes and the lack of a journalistic management model (Sánchez & Punín, 2021), to name a few examples. 

 

The present CFP aims to encourage perspectives addressing problems as those mentioned here and to address television considering its multi-platform, multi-screens, and convergent contemporary characteristics. We hope to spark research that engages with the complexities that TV content adopts in the interplay between various power structures within social dynamics in which citizens, audiences, and different players navigate in. We acknowledge that individuals, communities, and societies at large are immersed in a communication ecosystem undergoing radical transformations that imply significant challenges to democracy, such as information overload and information disorders (Casero-Ripollés et al., 2023; Romero-Rodríguez et al., 2016; Vila de Prado, 2018), among others. Having said that, this CFP invites scholars, researchers, activists, to explore what television tells us about democracy in contemporary societies, understanding television in a broad and complex sense: free-to-air TV, TV cable, satellite, digital, community TV, or streaming platforms. We call for submissions that address such questions also considering different dimensions of the media message: from the players and structures behind production to those who disseminate and decode them, and to audiences and other stakeholders influencing the social meaning of TV.

 

Contributions to the special issue “Democracy in the Age of Hyper Television” may include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

 

• Hyper Television: television audiences in the multiplatform and social media era.
• Information dynamics and disorders around political and social changes and crises: democracy, screen fragmentation, and new uses.
• Television, reception, and appropriation: perceptions, representativeness, and audiences political participation.
• Representations, fiction, and the collective: fiction series, reality shows, documentaries, and docudramas and their connection with democratic debates.
• Pluralism in television: communication institutions, regulation and public policies.
• Media literacy and public pedagogy around political and social processes.

Articles in English and Spanish, resulting from theoretical reflections or original research, are accepted. See Guidelines for Authors at www.comunicacionymedios.uchile.cl

 

Comunicación y Medios is indexed in Scopus; Web of Science (WoS) - ESCI; SciELO-Chile; DOAJ; ERIH PLUS; Latindex; Dialnet; REDIB; CLASE; MIAR; Latinoamericana; LatinREV

 

* We remind you that Comunicación y Medios permanently receives articles of free subject matter for its Miscellaneous section.