International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on Media Technologies and Epistemologies: The Platforming of Everything
Following a prolonged period of disruption, the concept of legacy media now points to the establishment of new modes of communication and global media systems. As previous structures and players dissolve into forms of social memory and heritage, what effects do emerging technologies and user behaviors have on shaping the new norms characterizing online culture?
Guest editors Sara Monaci and Sean Maher have brought together seven articles for the Special Section on Media Technologies and Epistemologies: The Platforming of Everything, examining how user behaviors and emerging technologies negotiate the increasingly structural role of platforms and processes of platformization.
Providing a multi-disciplinary perspective on new communications systems and participatory behaviors, the collection shifts focus from the many unknowns posed by the phenomena of Artificial Intelligence to other media technologies and what is currently unfolding on established platforms.
Critical perspectives from 11 international contributors provide insights on the prevailing order online issuing from born digital players. The analyses cover specific user behaviors from peer-to-peer co-creation models to news verification practices. Each article demonstrates considered negotiations of the structural role of platforms amidst the organizing logics of web-based media and communication.
The seven articles provide a timely critique on the tensions fueling old media style, top-down compliance sought by platform providers against participatory culture’s predisposition for agility and bottom-up innovation. Presenting a combination of adaptations and counter measures, users constantly adapt to a fluctuating media ecology. Rather than disruption, these shifts signal states of perpetual emergence that dislocate traditional epistemological perspectives on communication and media industries.
With a future comprised by so many unknowns and a present characterized by so much uncertainty, perspectives on past media histories also inevitably change. Grasping how these challenges pose opportunities for contemporary understandings begins with epistemologically informed thinking.
To this end, we invite you to read these articles published in the International Journal of Communication on September 27, 2024.
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Media Technologies and Epistemologies: The Platforming of Everything—Editorial Introduction
Sean Maher, Sara Monaci
Haptic Holograms: The Liminal Communication of Emerging Visio-Haptic Apparatuses
Jason Edward Archer, Thomas Conner
Roblox and the Pervasiveness of Play: What Game-Making Communities Can Teach Us About Participatory Practices in Affinity Spaces
Domenico Morreale, Alessia Rosa
What Prompts Suspicions About Information Integrity? Motives for Fact-Checking Suspect Content
Erik P. Bucy, Duncan V. Prettyman
The Governance of Disinformation: Everyday Practices of Platform Sovereignty
Sara Monaci
Economics of Educational Content Creators on Social Media
Gabriella Taddeo, Jessica Diaferia
A “French Touch” to the Political Economy of Communication? A Critical Epistemology of the “Cultural Industries” School
Christophe Magis
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Silvio Waisbord, Editor
Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Mark Mangoba-Agustin, Webmaster
Sara Monaci, Sean Maher, Guest Editors
Please note that according to the latest Google Scholar statistics, IJoC ranks 7th among all Humanities journals and 9th among all Communications journals in the world — demonstrating the viability of open access scholarly publication at the highest level.
USC Annenberg Press 