Political Economy of Communication

Telephone: 212/992-9490 Office Hours: Tuesdays 2-3 and Wednesdays 4-5

2014

Hospitality exchange (HospEx) networks – online platforms facilitating the connection between a traveler and a local resident – embody many of the cyber-utopian promises intrinsic to the Web as it started out 25 years ago. Such sites have often been conceptualized as a new and daring trend in a booming ‘sharing industry’ and have been researched for topics such as trust, reputation, and online identities. Yet, a more critical look uncovers that crucial issues of ownership, power, digital labour, and organizational structures have often been left out. To fill this gap, this thesis investigates upon the antagonistic struggle between the commons and processes of commodification in the light of critical theory and political economy. The research shows that examples with characteristics of both concepts are manifested in the niche social networking space of HospEx platforms. The biggest of those platforms, Couchsurfing.org, changed its organizational orientation from a non-profit, commons-based project towards a for-profit company in 2011 – an instance of commodification. An analysis of both quantitative and qualitative community data shows that the transformation consequently concerns a member on multiple levels. The structural change of ownership results in a loss of transparency and privacy, an alteration of the platform’s integrity, a sacrifice of the ‘uniqueness’ of the community, and a differing relationship between the user and the platform. To shed light on an antagonistic force and suggest an alternative, community-based governance approach, the work further explores the specifics of a platform guided by the logic of the commons. Interviews with volunteers of the non-commercial, non-profit HospEx platform BeWelcome.org helped to deepen an understanding of how a digital commons can be sustained and what challenges they face. The thesis concludes that the developments observed on Couchsurfing are not an exception but rather characteristic and part of a broader trend manifested in all areas of digital media, and indeed modern society in general: commodification processes frequently jeopardize the commons and incorporate them into the logic of capital.

International Journal of Communication, 2009

Elaborating on some of Edward Said's key theories on writing, this paper interrogates the historical periodizations that serve to constitute communication and antecedents of media reform. Critically examining the concept "critical juncture," a term utilized by Robert McChesney to describe a transformative moment in the history of communication in the United States, this paper explores the relationships between and among deployments of history, claims to democracy, and processes of agenda-setting in the media reform movement. I argue that many characterizations of communication, and the crucial historical moments that constitute it remain fundamentally partial in order to derive a necessary rhetorical force to support a media reform agenda that takes U.S. national policy as its primary focus. Particularly attentive to U.S. black racial formation and activism in the late 19 th to late 20 th centuries, this paper examines what may be some "critical disjunctures" between Africana studies and communication, racial justice and media reform. I first examine each of McChesney's critical junctures, paying particular attention to the specific sociohistorical processes that shape and construct black racial identities during these times. The second part of the paper considers the values of historical claims in the service of positioning democracy as a progressive social project in the United States. I conclude by offering several epistemological and practical changes that might serve to incorporate racial justice models in the media reform movement.

This paper argues that, contrary to received wisdom, political economy lay at the core of the project of communication study at its originating academic moment in North America. It makes that case by reconstructing persistent political economic dimensions in the work of Charles Horton Cooley, who more than anyone else deserves to be called the intellectual founder of communication study in the U.S. Drawing out previously neglected aspects of Cooley's thought, it sketches how his pragmatist, social democratic brand of political economics took a holistic, historically informed view of the communicative constitution and social organization of selves, institutions, and political cultures. Cooley provides a starting point for a revised understanding of the history of political economic thinking about communication and ways that it has intersected with sociology, cultural study, and democratic theory.

Scholarship of labour within political economy of communication attempts to address the question of how media and communication workers meet the challenges of the steady shift to informational capitalism – represented by the global phenomena of increased corporate media concentration, spread of global conglomerates and the proliferation of new communication and information technologies (Mosco, 2011). The attention to the issue of labour is pertinent to political economy's concern on the power relations that determine media production, distribution and consumption and also the democratic functioning of media. In line with the discipline's commitment to praxis, the labouring force, especially when linked to a labour movement, has been perceived as a challenge to the forces of capital in media production (McKercher & Mosco, 2008). This explains the scholarly discourse (Mosco, 2011) on the possibilities of global convergence of communication and media workers. In relation to a united labouring force's capacity to challenge capital, one needs to consider the dialectical relationship between capital and labour that is characterised by both cooperation and conflict (Gall, 2008). In this context, this paper considers the historic role of the national journalist unions of India (National Union Of Journalists, India and Indian Journalists' Union) in operating as central trade unions of journalists. Drawing attention to the unions' long-drawn struggle for statutory recommendations for structured pay (towards institution of pay recommendations by the statutory wage board constituted under the Working Journalists' Act) and their growing role in defending press freedom, protecting journalists' rights and safety and enhancing professional skill development, this paper defines the changing nature of journalists' trade unions' operations in India. The unions' affiliations to international organisations like International Federation of Journalists are also considered in this regard. The following research questions are raised: To what extent do journalist unions in India seek to challenge media capital (manifested in forms of concentrated ownership)? To what extent does global labour convergence help address the onslaught of capital in media? This paper argues that to address these questions, it would be essential to consider the specific nature of postcolonial modernity of India and consider the issue from one of the central perspectives of subaltern historiography that speaks for " a relative separation of the history of power from any universalist histories of capital " (Chakrabarty, 2002, p. 8). The understanding of Indian democracy (the fact that even though constitutionally a strong democracy, democratic transformation in social relations is yet to be thorough in India (Chakrabarty, 2002)), drawn from the expansive literature of subaltern studies, in this case offers a useful framework to explain the pertinent issues confronting the profession and journalists' rights in the country.

Democratic Communiqu??, 2007

This course will provide students with an understanding of the origins and nature of the nonprofit sector in the United States, the uses of nonprofit organizations in civil society particularly in their role as facilitating and intermediary organizations in public policy and decision-making, their use of social capital, and introduce class participants to a sampling of best practices in applied management of nonprofit organizations. The course will focus its examples and projects on smaller community-based and faithbased nonprofit organizations.

Manual Moderno, 1997

Libro de texto para profesionales en educación espcial