Stockholm 2008 - Digital Divide Working Group Call for Papers

EXTENDED DEADLINE: 15 FEBRUARY 2008!

In modern societies the role of media is getting more crucial. Our
political life and national economy, professional career and leisure
time are increasingly been shaped by the media in various respects. The
idea of a mass mediated society is getting more popular. However, the
process of media being increasingly digitized there is a clear need to
ask how different media consumption and media performance become in
different national digital environments.

Still one of the key questions for media scholars would be the question of media-rich and media-poor segments of audiences, their interaction and opposition in conditions of digital democracy. Social and cultural cohesion of a modern society is impossible without digital cohesion as an opposite of digital divide which is still an unsolved problem for many countries.

These issues might have different implications in various national contexts, and subsequently they should be discussed from different national and research perspectives.

The topics around which the working group should organize the discussion might be grouped as following:

• emerging imbalances within media systems between digital and non-digital segments and their consequences for democracy and access to information,
• new forms of social inequality and exclusion based on uneven access to digital media,
• regional misbalances in a global information society as instigate by digital divide,
• unequal access to digital media as a consequence of sociopolitical barriers to digital media as created by race, gender, generation, revenues, etc.,
• ways to empower digitally disempowered in various national media contexts,
• media literacy as a tool to overcome digital divide,
• the role of active audiences in promoting policies of digital cohesion.

The papers using frameworks of comparative approaches, historic perspectives and statistical methodology are invited.

Deadlines:

• Deadline for call for papers is February, 15.
• Section and working group heads will announce the screening process by March, 31.
• Notifications for the participants will be posted same day (March, 31).

Answers to this call should include an English abstract:

• title of paper,
• name(s) of author(s) including name of institution, postal address, telephone, fax and e-mail addresses,
• length – 500 words, Times New Roman type, 1,5 line space,
• the title of the presentation,
• name, and
• address and details of affiliation of the sender. 

If a proposal is accepted, the sender must fulfill two requirements. First, the presenter must e-mail a full paper until July, 15th,. Second, she or he must registrate her- or himself for participation in the Congress.

Submission:

Each abstract may be presented in only one Section of the IAMCR Conference. Offering duplicates of the same paper to different Sections of the Association is likely to result in elimination of the duplicate abstract.  

Abstracts and/or papers can be submitted to:

 and to:

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