[Air-L] CFP: Disintermediation Processes and New Media

[Cristian Vaccari]

Italian Political Science Association (SISP)
Annual meeting, Luiss University, Rome, 17-19 September 2009

Panel on Disintermediation Processes and New Media
Section of Political Communication
Convenors: Lorenzo Mosca and Cristian Vaccari
Discussant: Sara Bentivegna

By promoting processes of disintermediation, the new media stimulate the
production of autonomous information flows, which bypass gate-keeping
practices by both political actors and traditional mass media. While
journalists maintain an important filtering function between society and the
mediated public sphere, they have to face a double challenge. On the one
hand, they are by-passed by the proliferation of alternative media,
especially online (web radios, portals, blogs, forum, street televisions,
and so forth). On the other hand, they have to deal with the possibility for
political and social actors to autonomously represent themselves via the new
media, not least through social networking tools (Facebook, MySpace,
Twitter, etc.). In turn, these new communication arenas enable actors that
are outsiders in the institutional political sphere to autonomously organize
themselves and, in some cases, to incisively participate to public life. How
does, then, the functioning of the public sphere and political communication
change as a result? How does the relationship between communication
producers and receivers change when disintermediation processes occur? Under
which conditions can effective participatory spaces be opened up for actors
excluded from the institutional sphere? Which strategies do political actors
devise to take advantage of these opportunities, and to what extent are they
motivated to doing so?

During the last decade, the scientific literature on these issues has
produced comparative analyses on the online presence of political parties,
unions, representative institutions, civil society actors and groups, or of
some combinations of these different actors. Most of these studies have
utilized standardized codebooks for website analysis. Other studies,
however, have developed insightful qualitative analysis, while at the same
time being limited by their focus on single case-studies.

While this line of research has mostly focused on the organizational (meso)
level, research on the individual (micro) level has only episodically relied
on fully representative surveys capable of solid generalizations. The
surveys conducted so far have often been based either on samples
representative of the whole population – where, as a consequence, a limited
amount of items focused on internet usage – and surveys on self-selected
samples of internet users, which in some cases featured articulated sets of
indicators on information consumption and production online, but offered
little in terms of generalizability. Moreover, to date the literature does
not feature any longitudinal study of internet users.

This panel aims at collecting contributions focusing on processes of
disintermediation enabled by new media, focusing on both individuals and
organizations. We particularly welcome proposals that integrate quantitative
and qualitative methods and that shed light on the role of contextual
factors in these participatory practices, thus illuminating the nexus
between online and offline environments.

*SUBMISSION PROCEDURE*

Please send a title and an abstract of up to 250 words to lmosca at uniroma3.itor
cristian.vaccari at unibo.it by June 15, 2009. Proposals and papers can be
submitted either in English or Italian. A decision about which contributions
to include will be made by June, 20 2009. See
http://www.sisp.it/convegnofor rurther details on the meeting.