Rethinking Media and Communication

A critical survey of the role of media and communication in capitalist societies.

Rethinking Media and Communication: A Critical Sociological Lens sets out to answer key questions about media and communication under capitalism. How do power structures shape communication processes? How are inequalities reinforced across different levels of society—micro, mezzo, and macro? Drawing on sociology, political economy, media studies and related fields, the book offers fresh insights into how communication supports capitalist domination, from media commodification to media concentration. It calls for a rethinking of how communication affects social relations and how social relations influence communication, exposing its deep connection to economic and political power. This book is essential for anyone seeking to understand the forces shaping today’s media landscape.

Publication date: January 29, 2027

Contents
List of Figures, Tables, and Diagrams

1 Introduction
 Paško Bilić and Thomas Allmer

Part 1 Setting the Scene

2 Contested Legacies – Marxian Influences on the Sociology of Media and Communication
 Sašo Slaček-Brlek and Boris Mance

Part 2 Abstraction and Fetish

3 Between Capital and the Lifeworld: Contradictions of Value-Regulated Social Interactions
 Paško Bilić

4 Theorising a Multidimensional Model for Analysing Data Fetishism: Reconciling Marxist and Freudian Approaches to the ‘Split’
 Andrea Miconi and Nico Carpentier

5 Actio in distans: a Critical Node of Technological and Social Mediation
 Marco Briziarelli

Part 3 Dominance and Counter-Dominance

6 From the Iron Cage to the Silicon Cage: New Forms of Domination within Hypermediated Societies
 Davide Lucantoni, Francesco Orazi and Federico Sofritti

7 Legal Determination of Forms in Software and Communication: between Public and Capital
 Toni Prug and Mislav Žitko

Part 4 Public Opinion, Public Sphere and Communicative Activity

8 Fast and Shallow: towards a Critical Theory of Opinion
 Eric-John Russell

9 Activity Theory in the Digital Age: Can Communication and Data Be Expropriated, Exploited, or Alienated?
 Sebastian Sevignani

Part 5 Non-Western Directions in the Critical Sociology of Media and Communication

10 Ibn Khaldûn and the Political Economy of Communication in the Age of Digital Capitalism
 Christian Fuchs

11 Ibn Khaldûn Revisited: Responding to Christian Fuchs
 Graham Murdock

12 Ibn Khaldûn and the Political Economy of Communication: a Reply to Graham Murdock
 Christian Fuchs

13 Re-reading Ibn Khaldûn in Critical Times
 Graham Murdock

14 Critical Sociological and Media Studies: How Latin America Learned to Contest Power from the Periphery
 Jairo Lugo-Ocando and Monica Marchesi

Part 6 Re-focusing the Sociology of Media and Communication Debate

15 Dialectics of the Symbolic: Michel Freitag and the Critique of Communication
 Claude Leduc and Maxime Ouellet

16 Re-examining News Sources in the Sociology of the Media: a Political Economy of Communication Approach
 Jernej A. Prodnik and Igor Vobič

17 Narrating the Field of Communication: Charting an Unstable Territory
 Steven Maras

Index