The notion of authorship is a core element in antipiracy campaigns accompanying an emerging copyright regime, worldwide. These campaigns are built on discourses that aim to ‘problematize’ the issues of ‘legality’ of content downloading practices, ‘protection’ for content creators and the alleged damage caused to creators’ livelihood by piracy. Under these tensions, fandom both subverts such discourses, through sharing and production practices, and legitimizes industry’s mythology of an ‘original’ author. However, how is the notion of authorship constructed in the cooperative spaces of fandom? The article explores the most popular fandom sites of A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series that inspires the TV-show Game of Thrones and argues that the notion of authorship is not one-dimensional, but rather consists of attributes that develop across three processes: community building, the creative and the industrial/production process. Here, fandom constructs a figure of the ‘author’ which, although more complex than the one presented by the industry in its copyright/anti-piracy campaigns, maintains the status quo of regulatory frameworks based on the idea of a ‘primary’ creator.

Crowdmapping and geolocated protests form complex multilayered systems of communicated spaces and places that can only be partially grasped by the available literature. This article responds to these limitations by presenting a model for the analysis of the composition of space and place in networked geolocated activities. The model identifies the several forms of expression, opens four modes of analysis (representations, textures, structures, and connections), and allows the consideration of the communication devices involved, while highlighting the forms of power behind the social and cultural practices of protests and crowdmapping. The model is applied to the case of Voces25s, a protest action against the Spanish government’s austerity measures in September 2012, which relied heavily on interactive, networked maps. Furthermore, the raised sensitivity for space and place as forms of social (in)justice opens a fertile empirical research agenda in the area of the governance of communicative spaces.

This document is the author deposited version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. Published versionSCOLARI, Carlos and RODRIGUEZ- AMAT, Joan (2018). A Latin American approach to mediatization: specificities and contributions to a global discussion about how the media shape contemporary societies. Communication Theory, 28 (2), 131-154. Copyright and re-use policySee http://shura.shu.ac.uk/information.html Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive http://shura.shu.ac.uk A LATIN AMERICAN APPROACH TO MEDIATIZATION. Specificities and contributions to a global discussion about how media are shaping contemporary societies Abstract Theories on mediatization have been developed in Latin America in parallel to those flourishing in the Global North production. This article analyzes the former while keeping an eye on the more available theoretical production in English speaking publications. The main part of the article covers from Eliseo Verón's initial reflections on the semantization of violence to his later development of an evolutionary approach to mediatization. The article then introduces the contributions made by Latin American researchers who have followed in Veron's wake during the last decade. The article concludes with an overview of the parallelisms between the two theoretical strands, and considers their complementarities as well as the possible exchanges between them. used the concept of medialisierung. For Lundby (2009, p. 12) mediatisierung refers to the process of change, while "medialisierung refers to the status of society as a media society and its consequences." 1.2. The English-speaking tradition Scholars like Lievrouw (2009) locate the origins of mediation in Lazarsfeld's two-step flow model. Indeed, the people's choice model of indirect effects represents a "touchstone among those advocating the convergence of interpersonal and mass communication theory" (Lievrouw, 2009, p. 306). That initial model then split into the traditions of decision studies and diffusion studies. With the theoretical challenge of the media in the digital environment, the awareness that media integrate interpersonal communication within a broader social-cultural context led to the emergence of a new framework. The concept of mediation then extended and populated the scholarly literature at the turn of the millennium. The Toronto School raised awareness about media as technologies. The materiality of media facilitates exploring the significance of the formats. Media are also shapers of everyday life. The technological environments of the medium theory (Lundby, 2009) or media ecologies (Altheide, 1995; Scolari, 2012) include a discussion about the interaction between media as technology devices and their integration in the social fabric. Media are also transforming forces of social institutions.

This article updates certain aspects of the normative notions of the public sphere. The complex ecosystem of social communications enhanced by mobile media platform activity has changed our perception of space. If the public sphere has to normatively assess the expected conditions for public debate and for democracy, the assemblage of devices, discourses, infrastructures, locations, and regulations must be considered together. The literature reviewed about the public sphere, spaces, and geographically-enabled mobile media leads this article to the formulation of a concept of the public sphere that considers such assemblage as an interface. As an empirically applicable update to the definition of the public sphere the text offers a model that helps analyze those factors considering how they shape the communicative space in four modes: representations, structures, textures, and connections. These modes consider the roles played by assemblages of devices, infrastructures, and content in delimiting the circulation of information. The second part of the article illustrates the model with examples from previous research, paying particular attention to the structures’ mode. The dissection of qualitative, quantitative, and geodata generated by digital and (visual) (n)ethnographic tools reveals three subcategories for the analysis of structures of space: barriers, shifts, and flows. The structures effectively enable/disable communication and define centers and peripheries in the activity flows. The contribution of this article is, thus, conceptual—it challenges and updates the notion of the public sphere; and methodological—it offers tools and outputs that align with the previously developed theoretical framework.

Exploring the idea of student protests as an autonomous object of research and discussion, this paper leads to the understanding that the transforming role of the university and its governance defines the possibilities for the political role of students. In this perspective, there is a particular constellation of the different forms of higher education governance that provides students with the right and even the responsibility of protesting as politically engaged citizens of the university and of the state. Approaching the transformation of the models of university governance as a set of archaeologically organised states this paper identifies the sequential roles provided to the students and the meaning of their protests and demonstrations. After visiting some antecedents of more contemporaneous student movements and protests, this paper focuses on the UK to explore three manifestations of university governance that can be roughly differentiated as the enduring democratic period that extends from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, the globalisation period that extends from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s and as the post-millennial turn. These periods, embodying three different styles of governance of higher education, not only demonstrate conformity with the political and economic contexts in which they are embeded, they also correspond to particular socio-technological and communicative ecosystems and determine the specificities of the role of the students and their capacity for political action.