Vol. 7 No. 13 (2020): Critical and active audiences. From consumers to citizens
Coordinators: Mònica Figueras Maz (lecturer at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and director of the Audience and Reception Studies section of the AE-IC); Iolanda Tortajada (lecturer at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili and coordinator of the Audience and Reception Studies section of the AE-IC) and Alejandro Barranquero (lecturer at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and director of the Communication and Citizenship Thematic Group of the AE-IC)
In recent years, the rapid expansion of information technologies and the reorganisation of civil society provide a new context of opportunities for the construction of critical processes of citizen media reception and appropriation. The new socio-political and info-technological situation favours a new framework of opportunities for traditional audiences, formerly passive actors in the information process, to become active audiences that reinterpret, monitor, negotiate and even appropriate the technologies at their disposal to provide feedback to the media or to build autonomous stories around their imaginaries, values and lifestyles.
If the mass media, advertising and cultural industries market leads to a conception of citizenship as a mere passive consumer of information, today more and more individuals, collectives, social movements and civil society associations are organising themselves and demanding active participation in the media system. From these instances it is therefore possible to re-dimension the work of media that have traditionally been limited to the merely representative and that are gradually moving, or must move, towards greater quotas of participation, quality and public service. We are therefore talking about new practices of media production, distribution and reception that contribute to citizens' self-representation, writing their own stories and demanding rights, needs and demands that are not always met by the generalist media.
Today there are many media and technological potentialities that favour the articulation of an informed, critical and independent citizenship. Public, commercial and community media offer mechanisms (more or less unidirectional or horizontal) for individuals and communities to express themselves, no longer as mere spectators or consumers, but as subjects who claim their citizenship through the use and appropriation of the word, sound or image. Often, these productions are born in non-hegemonic spaces. At other times, audiences manage to open up participative gaps in the mainstream media in order to circulate their messages and imagery among mainstream audiences.
This special issue constitutes a necessary space for reflection, dialogue and problematisation about the profound changes that the study of audiences and receptions is undergoing today from the perspective of the right to communication and from values such as democracy, the objectives of sustainable development or social and ecological justice.
