Month: November 2015

Next Club Critical Theory

On the day that the organisers of CCT (The Cultural Engine) bottled their first batch of Seacider, a timely reminder of our next event.

Media, Power and Politics

Friday, 04 December 8pm

Upstairs bar, Railway Hotel, Southend-on-Sea

Following the success of our election special, this CCT event explores how people make sense of the media they consume and how raising questions about the ownership and regulation of commercial and publicly-funded media can provide an insight into the agenda-setting processes they enact.

We ask whether the arrival of new forms of digital social media is a cause for optimism – because such forms appear to provide a genuine challenge to the vested interests of established media conglomerates – or merely provides an echo chamber for the already converted. Further, we consider these developments in relation to the history of alternative media forms and their deployment by…

There’s a fascinating virality related article looking at the 2014 student protests in Venezuela in the International Journal of Communication published here http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3416/1516

Social Media and Virality in the 2014 Student Protests in Venezuela: Rethinking Engagement and Dialogue in Times of Imitation by JAIRO LUGO-OCANDO, University of Leeds, UK, ALEXANDER HERNANDEZ, Universidad del Zulia, Venezuela, MONICA MARCHESI Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Catalonia, Spain.

“The authors ask whether these technologies were used by leaders and participants as a catalyst to trigger the protests and amplify them across the country or whether they were a galvanizing factor among more general conditions. Following similar research that claims that viral media have played a key role in Spain’s indignadosmovement (Postill, 2014), we use virality/contagion (Sampson, 2012) and cultural chaos (McNair, 2006) as theoretical approaches to analyze these events while examining their limitations and shortcomings in the context of the Venezuelan society.”

Although I’m not entire…