Exploring the Mediascape from the Epistemologies of the South

• Autor(a) principal: Carvalho, Alexandre de Sousa
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Santos, Sofia José, Houart, Carlota
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10316/92374; https://doi.org/10.25267/COMMONS.2020.v9.i2.07
• topic: Media; Voice; Epistemologies of the South; Communication grammars; Ecologies of communication; Media; Voz; Epistemologías del Sur; Gramáticas de comunicación; Ecologías de comunicación

Dominant literature on media and communication studies has insistently equated mediascape and high technology media as interchangeable concepts and realities instead of high technological media as part of a broader and more dynamic media pallet. By subscribing to this “technology-driven Darwinism”, we argue that existing dominant literature explicitly and implicitly excludes forms of mass communication that go beyond the media in its Western liberal form and procedures and, consequently, other voices, knowledge and messages. This article analyses the modern conception of media by exploring the “abyssal exclusions” (Santos, 2007) it creates. To illustrate this further, we have selected the top five 2018 SCOPUS-indexed journals, from which we gathered a sample of 116 research articles that were published between 2016-2018, to shed light on some of the most recent research trends in media studies. The definition of media used by the articles contained in our sample shows that there is a technological and modernity-driven spectrum which is fundamental in defining what is and what progressively is no longer labelled, and hence considered, media. This understanding of the media fails to include forms of mass communication that go beyond the media in its western liberal form and, consequently, exclude subaltern voices, knowledges and messages.