*CFP* "MASS MEDIA POLITICAL INFORMATION USES AND CONSUMPTION: ACTORS, CONDITIONS AND CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES", VOL 35, CONTRATEXTO JOURNAL

The 35th edition of Contratexto will address the issue of selectivity in the media use or consumption of political information as a persistently paradigmatic issue on the study of audiences’ behaviors and attitudes. The large majority of studies on the uses of devices follow on the empirical North American tradition, the reception cultural studies or French sociology, indicating that, since the eighties, media use and consumption has become a matter of increasing personalization. Long before that, Herbert Blumer highlighted the effects of individual and social experiences of interpreting media messages. 

On one hand, the analysis of the audiences’ personal selectivity filter shows its multivariate configuration based on several dispositional factors (temperament, personality, gender, values, beliefs or motivations). However, it is also noticed a resignificance of those factors with the contribution of experiential and contextual studies that allow the location of specific appropriation routines and practices of specific audiences coming from different influence areas. On the other hand, the accelerated technological changes of the last decades reveal a power shift in the audiences’ position, as a result of their higher level of control and preference for a mainly self-referent exposition.

This resonates with the consistency between political discourses and one’s own opinions, frequently radicalizing behaviors and causing social polarization. With the evident preeminence of social networks, the “partisan-like” behaviors of consumption, systematically self-referent independently of the political information quality itself, are emphasized based on the trust and credibility put in familiar sources. In practice, the verification of the authenticity of a news piece frequently reaches less emotional power than its circulation.

In this number, we encourage interdisciplinary works (communication, sociology, political science, anthropology, etc.) that question this double condition (personal- attitudinal-motivational/socio-structural-and-ideological) of consumption and media uses, in political acts in specific cultural contexts. We aim to put out up-to-date research studies that do not neglect the reciprocal intelligibility of both dimensions, contextualizing their reflections and results in the framework of their unavoidable relationship.


Thematic Focus

• Ideological consumption routines of political information: profiles and practices of audiences identified in partisan terms as non-politicized, indicators, variables and descriptive and/or explicative categories of quotidian preferences and media elections.
• Familiarity relations with informative sources and contents: trust and credibility as indicators of journalistic veracity for audiences and producers of political information, mediation and distancing mechanisms regarding valid themes, agendas and interlocutors.
• Social networks: cultures of use and consumption, phenomena of discomfort versus virtuous circles around agendas, people and political contexts, social and personal effects of fake news, post-truth politics recognizable and arguable in digital informative practices.
• Experiences of the contemporary prosumer: construction of collective spaces (for the resistance or the creation, or the reformulation of quotidian social, political and cultural practices) by users, capital exposure, new and old communities, balance or diagnosis of documented experiences made viable by the collective action of people or groups.
• Media-user interaction: participation of the user in the selection, production and spreading of news (journalistic routines); public and media agendas: coincidences and divorces; new channels and forms in media interaction; relations of collaboration between users and journalists.

Other Sections

Besides the dossier, Contratexto has the following permanent sections:

• Trends. This section compiles collaborations linked to current topics such as peace culture, semiotic analysis, intercultural studies, or any other topic where communication is a central component.
• Reviews. Bibliographical commentary of a recent publication, including a critical and scientific analysis regarding its contribution to communication studies.

Submit your paper before November 15th 2020 here. Contact for assistance: contratexto@ulima.edu.pe