In his foreword to Robert A. Brady's canonical text, Business as a System of Power (1943), Brady's colleague, Robert Lynd, questions-"will democratic political power absorb and use economic resources, bigness and all, to serve its ends, or will big economic power take over state power?" This far-fetched proposition guided Brady's projects and inspired a new class of critical political economics, many of whom applied their analyses to the field of communication. Bradys' expansive contributions to the field of communication are perhaps best understood through the context in which he conducted research and his web of influence in the academy. Bradys' musings reveal forgotten-or ostensibly omitted-revelations about how businesses wield power over social, technological, political, and cultural transformations. This investigation traces how Robert A. Brady's social and political history, fiercely democratic ideology, and scathing critique of business and state coordination prove significant to the history of political economy of communication.
There are many approaches and ideas to democratically transform social media. These perspectives range from better and more sophisticated regulation, reforming the design of social media platforms, better education of users and social ownership of social media platforms themselves. Following in this tradition, this article offers a novel point of democratic transformation of social media platforms: the subscription user. The introduction of subscription packages by Meta and Snapchat indicates a changing economic logic within social media platforms that situates subscription users with a newfound economic and political power to leverage against social media platforms. Through the works of Erik Olin Wright and Bonnie Honig, subscription users embody a point of democratic transformation as the fee (or the willingness to pay the fee) can be utilised as a collective form of social power, which enables public oversight of social media platforms.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, the "foreign agent" legislation is one example of the further tightening of restrictive discriminatory legislation of Putins' regime in attempts to restrain, silence and criminalise opposition and dissenting views from the public sphere and discourse. Starting from the multidisciplinary approach of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study investigates the construction of media discourse on "foreign agents" by two state-affiliated outlets (Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda) and one independent, alternative (Meduza) during three subsequent time frames from February 2022 to March 2024. The dominant discourse in state-owned and affiliated media signifies compliance and governmental alignment aimed at delegitimisation, stigmatisation and exclusion of "foreign agents". Meduza challenges the dominant discourse and aims to (re)define the prevailing narratives, expose injustice, and contest the current socio-political conjuncture, ultimately urging for civic engagement and change. The paper concludes by reflecting on the dual use of language in authoritarian contexts as both a mechanism of control and repression and an instrument of resistance and contestation at the same time.
Communication is fundamental to democracy, although this importance varies according to the different models of democracy. In deliberative and participatory democracy models, citizen participation and engagement and the discursive dimension exponentially increase the role of information and communication. Democratic innovations, emerging from these deliberative and participatory traditions, correspond to the type of initiative in which communication plays an essential role. However, communication processes in democratic innovations are still understudied. The scarce research in the field reveals difficulties in reaching the citizens and increasing public awareness. This study analyses communication in three different institution-led democratic innovations, namely the Conference on the Future of Europe, the Bologna Citizens' Assembly, and the Spanish Citizens' Climate Assembly. The case studies provide examples of local, national, and transnational initiatives at the European level. The qualitative approach to the three case studies was based on 30 interviews with participants and organisers of the initiatives, complemented by the consultation of documents. The findings are integrated into an analytical framework to approach the communication of democratic innovations, resulting from the triangulation of the results.
This article examines how platform infrastructures reshape the experiential and normative foundations of publicness as a principle of collective orientation. It argues that contemporary digital environments organise visibility, attention and affect through an algorithmic organisation of the sensible that aligns perception with data extraction, behavioural prediction and episodic intensification, thereby reconfiguring the conditions under which public experience acquires epistemic and democratic significance. To conceptualise this condition, the article develops the notion of aesthetic colonisation as the process through which platforms reorganise sensibility, temporal rhythm and the experienceability of publics. In dialogue with Dewey's account of aesthetic experience, Benjamin's analysis of shock and the dissolution of Erfahrung, Rosas' theory of social acceleration and Splichal's reconceptualisation of publicness, the article shows how contractual publics stabilise the procedural conditions of participation and how gig publics materialise collectivity through rhythmic peaks of circulation and performative visibility. The final sections outline an aesthetics of formation grounded in aesthetic literacy, democratic infrastructures and public-service communication models oriented to reflective publicity. The renewal of democratic publicness depends on environments capable of sustaining shared attention, temporal depth and the experiential resources required for collective understanding.
