{"id":1577,"date":"2025-09-26T08:19:24","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T08:19:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.medemap.eu\/?page_id=1577"},"modified":"2025-12-03T16:03:43","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T16:03:43","slug":"conference","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.medemap.eu\/?page_id=1577","title":{"rendered":"Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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About<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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The MeDeMAP project consortium invites the academic community to submit papers for the conference \u201cBeyond the Audience: Rethinking Participation and Power in the Age of Data Capitalism,\u201d taking place on 15\u201316 January 2026 at IULM University in Rome. The conference invites critical reflections on how participation, power, and media are being reshaped in the context of data-driven societies. The event will feature several keynote speakers, including Tiziana Terranova (University of Naples \u2018L\u2019Orientale\u2019) and Sofie Van Bauwel (Ghent University). <\/b>Other keynotes will be presented in the upcoming months.
Read the full call for papers below.<\/p>\n

REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN FOR ALL THOSE WHO WILL ATTEND THE EVENT. REGISTER HERE<\/a>.<\/b><\/p>\n

ARE YOU ATTENDING THE CONFERENCE? YOU CAN NOW ACCESS THE PRACTICAL INFORMATION GUIDE HERE<\/a>.<\/b><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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About the event<\/strong><\/span><\/p>

The audience regards a \u201clarge number of unidentifiable people, usually united by their participation in media use\u201d (Hartley 2002, p. 11), yet it is always already plural, diverse, fragmented, fluid and in many ways \u201cungraspable\u201d, both everywhere and nowhere (Carpentier & Wimmer, 2023, p. 38). In the age of data capitalism, audiences become users and creators, seemingly blurring the division between the official and the vernacular, the elite and popular. Yet the vast majority of audiences remain in a subordinate position vis-\u00e0-vis the owners of the platform or elite audience members (e.g., influencers) insofar as platforms control their creativity, interaction, and usage. In this regard, although analytically helpful, terms such as \u201ccreators\u201d and \u201cusers\u201d may be romanticizing the division between the few and the many.<\/p>

The discussion above echoes tensions between two critical yet seemingly opposing, if not contradictory, audience roles discussed in critical media studies. The political economy approach, argues that by exploiting audience time, attention, data and sociality, digital media treat audiences as commodities (Smythe, 1977), labourers (Terranova, 2001) and subjectify them in the lifeworld of surveillance and platform capitalism (Zuboff, 2019; Andrejevich, 2020; Srnicek, 2017; Fuchs, 2015). Developed in the 1970s by Dallas Smythe and later guided critical political economy approaches in media and communication (e.g., Mosco, 2009), the audience-commodity thesis became again relevant after 2010s with the blatant commodification of media and the rise of smartphones and digital platforms; it has been reflected in critical works, including that of Evgeny Morozov (2020), Mark Andrejevic (2013), Jodi Dean (2010), Christian Fuchs (2015; 2020) and has been popularized beyond academic with the theses of \u201csurveillance capitalism\u201d (Zuboff, 2017) and platform capitalism (Sadowski, 2020). On the other hand, there is the \u201cactive audience\u201d, a figure clustered around cultural studies and ethnography, where audiences casually and routinely do things with social media, exercising their voice, agency and empowerment. The active audience prioritizes the uses of media over the structures determining usage (Ambercombie, 1998), partaking of the enthusiasm that characterized the early days of internet research in media and communication studies, including the idea of a new and booming participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006). There have been attempts to bridge these approaches, such as in Nick Couldry\u2019s concept of the \u201cmedia manifold\u201d (2016), Ytre-Arne\u2019s and Das\u2019 unpacking of \u201ccommunicative agency\u201d in datafication (2021) or the \u201cduality of media\u201d by James G. Webster (2011). The spread of deepfakes complicates this media landscape, contributing to a wider movement of communicative polarization and geopolitical deglobalization (D\u2019 Eramo, 2022).<\/p>

The shift from singular to plural, from top-down to bottom-up processes as well as the high customization of contents is then not necessarily a \u201cpositive\u201d or emancipating aspect. As a consequence of the postfordist organization, it represents a problematic transformation of power through a democratizing narrative.<\/p>

The concept of the \u201caudience\u201d is then useful for critical scholarship insofar as it intertwines concerns around participation and engagement with commodification and exploitation \u2014 yet to what extent are we also \u201cbeyond\u201d it? How can we think of concepts like participation and power in the context of data capitalism through and beyond the figure of the audience? How can in turn figures like users, participants and communities be thought within the critical tradition of both political economy and cultural studies in a landscape dominated by algorithmic data extraction?<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Topics of event<\/strong><\/span><\/p>

This conference invites contributions studying audiences through the lens of critical media research. The latter questions positivistic paradigms of social research, highlighting issues from commodification and exploitation to resistance and alternative forms of world-building. We look for abstracts thinking through agency, everyday contexts and socializations together with political economy, commodification and value creation. We welcome both theoretical and case studies driven papers and seek contributions in the following indicative topics:<\/p>