Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change Faculty Publish Book

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Jan 29, 2015
by Salzburg Global Seminar
Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change Faculty Publish Book

Ten members of summer academy faculty co-author book Mediated Communities: Civic Voices, Empowerment and Belonging in the Digital Era 

Moses Shumow at the Media Academy 2013It is hard to imagine an area of modern life that is not in some way influenced, impacted or interrupted by the ubiquity of digital media.We are living in a time of rapid change — times shaped and molded by the influence and intrusion of digital media into nearly every facet of life. It is these rapidly changing times and how digital media has changed communities and people’s sense of belonging that is the subject of a new book Mediated Communities: Civic Voices, Empowerment and Belonging in the Digital Era. The book is a cross-continental collaboration between ten members of the faculty of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change, edited by three-time faculty member Moses Shumow, Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Florida International University, USA.According to Shumow, the explosive growth of digital forms of communication in the past 20 years has fundamentally altered the way we interact with one another: how politicians engage with their constituents, teachers with their students, parents with their children. Digital communications have shifted the ways in which we are informed, educated and entertained, and the ways in which we advocate, agitate, organize, fall in love, bully and just connect.  It is from the concept of community that civil society emerges. Mediated Communities: Civic Voices, Empowerment and Belonging in the Digital Era explores how the ways that people now communicate have changed this idea of community.  Communitarians and others have long envisioned that close bonds of communal living will foster and encourage the concern for others — a concern that leads ultimately to civic engagement. In an effort to update this concept for our times, Mediated Communities presents new iterations of social spaces that create transformative avenues for civic action and empowerment in the digital era. Drawing on a global cohort of academics, educators, and professionals, contributors to the book use the theoretical framework of media literacy as a heuristic tool to investigate how digital media are changing notions of community and belonging.  Contributors also trace the shifting role of the civic voice, in the midst of news forms of interconnectivity that are acting to both unite and fracture traditional social structures. 


The book is published by Peter Lang and available to purchase online. 
Editor: Moses Shumow, Assistant Professor School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Florida International UniversityAuthors:
  • Cornelia Bogen, Tsinghua University, China
  • May Farah, American University of Beruit, Lebanon
  • Megan Fromm, Independent Researcher, German
  • Roman Gerodimos, Bournemoth University, UK
  • Manuel Guerrero, Iberoamericana University, Mexico
  • Stephen Jukes, Bournemouth University, UK
  • Monica Lenguas, Iberoamericana University, Mexico
  • Paul Mihailidis, Emerson College, USA
  • Rosemary Nyaole-Kowuor, Daystar University, Kenya
  • Christian Schwartz, Pontífica Católica Universidad, Argentina