Abstract This article develops Structural Media Capture (SMC) as a theoretical framework for rethinking media power in postcolonial settings. Challenging the universalization of liberal-democratic normative models of the press, it advances a de-Westernizing approach that situates media development within historically specific institutional trajectories rather than universal ideals. The article theorizes from Morocco, with comparative reference to the Arab media context, and identifies three overlapping configurations of capture: post-independence state consolidation, market-driven economic dependency, and platform-based infrastructural control. Its central claim is that these configurations interact and accumulate, producing a layered architecture of media constraint. SMC does more than aggregate accounts of political, economic, or platform domination. It reconceptualizes media capture as a path-dependent and multi-level formation through which older regimes of control persist within newer institutional arrangements. In doing so, the article offers a historically grounded grammar for comparative media theory and proposes a framework for analysis across Global South contexts.
This article advances a cultural perspective that reconceptualizes online self-disclosure as a communicative process. Rather than viewing it as merely individual psychological acts, the framework situates disclosure practices as deeply embedded in broader social and cultural frameworks. Extending Markus and Kitayama's (1991, 2010) theory, this article presents a mutually constitutive dynamic in which cultural orientations configure disclosure motivations and content, adaptation processes enable situated negotiation of norm variations, and individual practices continuously reproduce and reshape collective norms in digitally mediated spaces. Unlike traditional cross-cultural approaches that treat cultural orientations as static national predictors, the model integrates hybridity, multi-level cultural influences, as well as platform architectures as active cultural systems. This perspective reveals how online self-disclosure both reflects and actively reshapes culturally differentiated selves over time and fosters more inclusive theories of online self-disclosure across diverse mediated contexts.
Strategic communication has long treated trust as both a prerequisite for success and a goal in itself. This article challenges that assumption by introducing Trustless Strategic Communication: a framework for achieving reliance when strategic trust is low or contested. Drawing on blockchain-inspired design and philosophical distinctions between trust and reliance, the article specifies core constructs, theoretical propositions, and a mechanism logic. Trust is treated as graded, and "trustlessness" as an ideal type. The framework explains how communicators can reduce trust-dependence through three routes: epistemic, structural, and procedural. A theory-guided qualitative demonstration (seven semi-structured interviews) shows how these mechanisms appear in practice, often in combination, and highlights boundary conditions and ethical risks. Rather than rejecting trust altogether, the "trustless" approach reframes strategic trust as one tool among others. This framework expands the theoretical boundaries of strategic communication and offers guidance for a variety of communication activities in environments shaped by skepticism.
This article presents the concept of hyper-mediatization of politics as a domain-specific refinement of mediatization theory within platformization studies. It argues that digital platforms no longer merely intensify media influence but reorder how political communication and information are produced, distributed, and consumed. Defined as a layered, second-order process, hyper-mediatization unfolds across infrastructural, procedural, and symbolic levels, embedding digital logics-algorithmic curation, data extraction, emotional resonance, modularity, and monetization-into political communication. Hyper-mediatization narrows the analytical lens to politics, clarifying how platform capitalism reconfigures political visibility, autonomy, and participation. Revisiting Str & ouml;mb & auml;ck and Esser's four dimensions of mediatization of politics, this article shows their transformation under platform dependence and hyper-mediatization. It proposes the concept as a testable hypothesis, open to comparison across media systems, political regimes, and regulatory contexts. By bridging institutionalist and constructivist approaches, it refines mediatization theory, providing a precise, context-sensitive model for analyzing conditions of political communication under platformization.
Performance Studies in Communication (PSC) is a vibrant, vital subfield of the communication discipline that suffers from an urgent illegibility problem due to a long-time lack of an explicit theoretical connection between the field and broader communication theories and practices. This article addresses PSC's illegibility problem by extending Robert Craig's (1999) metamodel to articulate an Aesthetic Tradition of communication theory. To ground the Aesthetic Tradition and demonstrate PSC's unique approach to it, this article offers a systematic reframing the Performance Studies Paradigm (Pelias & VanOosting, 1987) through a constitutive lens. The article concludes by demonstrating the utility of an aesthetic analytic across various communication subfields, including public speaking, Interpersonal and Family Communication (IFC), organizational communication, and arts-based research. Ultimately, this articulation secures PSC's theoretical home while enriching the broader discipline's capacity to understand how communication makes worlds.
Numerous stakeholders, including critical scholars, and digital-rights NGOs, contend that social media platforms operate as sites where the libertarian goal is illusory (the "false consciousness thesis"). However, I show that libertarian promises and corporate-algorithmic control coexist as a double ideological strata, wherein freedom and autonomy are articulated on the surface while governance operates underneath. Moreover, although the majority of libertarian voices criticize political initiatives that interfere with digital conversations between users, they make no mention of similar control exerted through corporate-algorithmic mechanisms. By emphasizing relevant Gramscian and Althusserian tensions regarding the techno-material role of ideology, I use Meta's ambivalent rhetoric and TikTok's algorithmic personalization as case studies to discuss the existence of a double ideological strata, which highlights the coexistence of an ambivalent framework: an explicit endorsement of user autonomy and free flow of information and an implicit framework that legitimizes corporate sovereignty and algorithmic control, thereby limiting user freedom.
This article draws attention to the emergence of African liberal democracies as a challenge to the existing ontological assumptions within comparative media studies. Using Ghana as an illustrative case, the article argues that the widely understood bifurcation of African media systems can be better construed in the new context of African liberal democracies as a dualism of accommodation of liberal and communitarian normative spheres. This dualism of accommodation becomes a theoretical paradox, when contrasted with ontological assumptions within African media system scholarship that portray liberal and communitarian normative spheres of journalism as incompatible. To resolve this paradox, the article advances "New Dualism" as a new theoretical framework for ontologically incorporating the coexistence of liberal and communitarian journalism institutions in a single media system. The goal is to advance a framework and set a research agenda for conceptualizing the media systems of consolidated democracies in Africa.
Communication constitutes organizing (CCO) theorizing offers compelling explanations of how organizations are constituted through communication, yet CCO is often criticized for paying scant attention to issues of power. This article draws upon communicative relationality and the recent Deleuzian inspired techniques and forces (T&F) framework to investigate how power materializes in the relations/links/connections communicatively constituting a fluid social movement aimed at stopping construction of a police training facility. Through interviews, observation, and social media analysis, I theorize how diverse multimodal communication by activists and the state materialize links constituting the movement. This article contributes to T&F by empirically specifying a boundary condition of techniques, adding the concept of substantiating to describe fleeting materializations, and revealing how relations constituting fluid organizing coalesce around identity, geography, temporality, and civic issues. Ultimately, the article deepens CCO theorizing of power and shows how T&F and relationality offer broader theorizing of communicative constitution of organizing.
The "generalist turn," where different disciplines are recently discovering the merits of knowledge breadth, is a favorable zeitgeist for journalism to turn an alleged weakness, its generalism, into an epistemic strength. However, to become "synthesizing minds" and integrators of knowledge in an era of siloization and hyper-specialization, journalism needs more robust generalism. The current article suggests that journalists are a unique type of "reactive generalists" who face asymmetric pressures toward excessive breadth and scarcity of depth. This mechanism shapes not only the weaknesses of their knowledge but also some of its potential strengths. An initial framework for a generalist epistemology in journalism is presented, where all journalists are placed on the generalist spectrum. The article offers specific measures required to develop an epistemically defensible generalism, learning mainly from two role-models: general practitioners in medicine and "neo-generalists."
Individuals increasingly express thoughts by clicking "likes," following groups, and leaving comments. These communicative acts not only express individual preferences but also convey signals to important curators such as algorithms, advertisers, friends, and journalists, which jointly shape social media feeds. In a word, people consume what they curate. Despite its significance, current theories lack clarity on the concept explication of personal curation. This paper addresses this gap by examining the types, motivations, and impacts of personal curation on users' information intake. Importantly, as individuals engage in curation not from a single reason or convey a single message, this study theorizes personal curation into five dimensions based on platform features (expansiveness), content (heterogeneity), subjects (news attentiveness), sources (belongingness), and the number of platforms involved (multiplatform connectedness). This theorization provides a conceptual framework for understanding how seemingly mundane social media behaviors convey communicative meaning and exert significant influence in daily life.
Chicago School ecology, with its emphasis on diverse sets of interacting actors, unanticipated outcomes, and ongoing adaptation to shifting environments, offers a helpful lens for examining a disrupted, changing journalism and its existential challenges. Drawing from the Chicago School tradition, we generate a framework for conceptualizing the ecological study of local-level journalism and journalistic change in a more coherent, systematic way. The framework is visualized in a matrix with two dimensions: levels of analysis (systemic and interactionist), and logics of adaptation (transactional and cognitive-cultural). On the matrix we situate middle-range ecological approaches from journalism studies that have roots in this tradition. Our aim is to provide more theoretical context, clarity and intentionality for scholars in their use of ecological approaches and concepts in the study of journalism and its uncertainties.
The article explores the social role and implications of large language models (LLMs) through the lens of media theory. Rather than considering LLMs as advanced forms of artificial intelligence, I argue that a communication-focused perspective provides a more effective way to interpret their impact on information management in contemporary society and to address the associated ethical and operational challenges. Supported by information management tools such as archives, catalogs, and later search engines, previous communication media expanded the scope of communication, making it possible to reach more, distant, diverse, and possibly anonymous communication partners. LLMs now signify a new phase in the evolution of communication, as they function themselves as communication partners capable of responding autonomously to user queries in a personalized manner. This perspective highlights and explains the capabilities and limitations of various LLM-based chatbots and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models, while also addressing issues such as misalignment and hallucinations.
Modern election campaigning is often described as "data-driven," but there are signs that data may not always inform decision-making. This article focuses on the decision-making component of campaigns and provides a new theorisation of this previously neglected component of data-driven campaigns. Arguing that decision-making is affected by a range of contextual, agential and organizational factors, I call for qualitative analysis of campaign practice that is needed to understand how decisions are made. Applying this theoretical account, I consider the likely future of election campaigning, reflecting particularly on the potential for automation. Specifically, I identify where automation is likely to emerge and conclude that rote-like decision-making is unlikely to entirely define the practices of future campaigns. Collectively this article offers new theoretical insight into an overlooked aspect of modern campaigning - decision-making - and provides offers a foundation for more accurate predictions about the future of campaigns.
Despite its crucial role in the epistemology of journalism, journalists' reliance on common- sense has received little and unsystematic scholarly attention. This conceptual paper calls for placing common-sense at the center of the epistemology of news, while underpinning it with a more systematic approach that draws not only from journalism studies but also from philosophy and political science. The paper discusses the conditions appropriate for the deployment of journalistic common-sense. We argue that journalists are well positioned to become custodians of common-sense, whose role is to develop higher commonsensical literacy among decision-makers and audiences, and to promote a more conscious, cautious, and reflective approach to this influential yet taken-for-granted concept. Finally, we offer two potential reasons why journalism studies have neglected common-sense as a research subject.
This article examines ways that politicians undermine democratic institutions and processes in the contemporary wave of democratic backsliding. Many scholars point to populism as the explanation, but we argue that populism is inadequate and that the study of democratic backsliding would benefit from analysis of campaign messaging. We offer rhetorical delegitimization to better identify arguments from elites that have the communicative force to fundamentally destabilize democratic institutions by changing the public imaginary about the philosophical ideal. We analyze social media messages by Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders during the 2020 U.S. presidential election campaign and their populist appeals. We demonstrate the limits of populism and justify the need for a concept to better capture systematic destructing arguments about democratic processes, institutions, and opponents. We draw connections between Trump's campaign messaging in 2020 and his acts once elected in 2024 to show that democratic backsliding can be predicted from campaign messaging.
The concept of the "fake expert" has been used as a label to delegitimize established expertise but also refers to experts that are invoked to support misinformation claims. This study examines how "fake experts" and their expertise are constructed in misinformation. Analyzing fact-checked misinformation on climate change and COVID-19, we investigate how sources are framed as experts (RQ1), how their expertise is linked to misinformation (RQ2), and to what extent these references are misleading or inaccurate (RQ3). Our findings show that expertise in misinformation is shaped more by content and communicative context than by credentials alone. Misinformation employs rhetorical strategies such as selective quoting and epistemic trespassing to create credibility. We propose a framework for identifying "illegitimate" expertise in misinformation, integrating content-and actor-based indicators. This framework offers a structured approach for analyzing how misinformation manipulates expert credibility and provides a foundation for future empirical research.
All actors engage in hybrid organizing. Grounded in constitutive approaches, this article reorients attention to hybridity by examining how actors combine multiple, often competing, constitutive elements in social impact organizing. Building on recent developments in communication research that challenge long-standing assumptions about organizing-and increased scholarly attention to social impact-we argue that hybrid stakeholders and hybrid processes play a central role in constructing social reality. To illustrate this argument, we draw on examples from three recently published studies to showcase hybrid organizing across diverse contexts. While this article focuses on hybridity of social impact organizing situated within organizational communication, we further discuss its relevance to diverse social phenomena and various subfields of communication (e.g., health, political, intercultural). We suggest that, given the prevalence of hybridity in social and organizational reality and its significance in shaping the future of work, a hybridity lens generates meaningful theoretical advancements and practical implications.
Communication skills do not have an agreed upon definition despite the importance contemporary communication culture attributes to them. Instead of asking what communication skills are, this study adopts a relational approach and asks how skills materialize as elements of the situation in and with which speakers interact. I review the sociopsychological theoretical tradition's conception of skills as typologies of skills and skill components, and the sociocultural tradition's conception of skills as discursive resources, to analyze and interpret practical metadiscourse about skills in a U.S. undergraduate public speaking course. I find that theorists and practitioners alike constitute communication skills as generic objects, that is, discrete but non-specific objects that encompass specific features and serve as templates for action. Further, the generic nature of skills allows them to circulate broadly. The constitution of skills as generic objects resolves the contradiction between the importance ascribed to them and their lack of specificity.
Social media have profoundly changed social communication practices across a vast range of contexts. To theorize these changes, numerous authors have proposed digital affordances as a conceptual lens. Yet, to date, most accounts of digital affordances either gloss broadly over cross-platform or use-dependent differences in practices; or they are highly context-specific, obstructing theoretical integration. In this article, we conceptualize social media affordances on an intermediate level of abstraction that foregrounds consequential differences in how digital social media platforms structure social communication practices. Focusing on the characteristic communication needs of social movements as an exemplary case, we identify how social media platforms present users with differential affordances for articulating public claims, building collective identities, and mobilizing contentious performances. We examine how key contextual conditions alter the value of differential affordances, potentially resulting in differential communication practices and platform preferences. We conclude by discussing key opportunities of our approach for comparative research and theory building.
