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THE CREATION OF NEW GLOBAL COMMUNICATION INFRASTRUCTURES AND FORMS OF ONLINE INTERACTION

GEORGE LZROIU george.lazaroiu@spiruharet.ro Associate Professor, Spiru Haret University

ABSTRACT. The objective of this paper is to emphasize the importance of the participatory media culture of Internet, the networked individualist and personalized information space, the behavior of the citizen in our contemporary mediapolis, the creation of a multimedia newsroom, and the continuous instantaneity in the way people interact and communicate with the world. The mainstay of the paper is formed by an analysis of business constraints within a news organization, todays competitive media market, core features and structures of media discourse, and forms of online interaction. Keywords: creation of content on the Internet, collective workspaces, communication infrastructures

1. Introduction The main objective of this paper is to explore and describe the co-creative and collaborative potential of the new digital and networked media ecology, the tools and techniques of contemporary digital and networked media, the interactive opportunities and networking abilities provided by the online medium, the routines of newsgathering, and the creation of new global communication infrastructures. Scholarly research reveals strong correlations between the similarities and differences between collaborative workspaces and social network sites, user behavior within a privacy lifecycle, the creation of content on the Internet, the strength of the business model of social networking sites, the particular features of collective workspaces and social network sites, and the mass increase of citizens privacy-awareness. 2. Media Effects in the Context of Ethics According to Cenite and Zhang, ethics grounded in discourse builds upon existing practice and experience, and is potentially local and contingent. Ethics emerging from discourse is grounded in existing institutions and social movements. Journalists should develop policies about online accountability tools, and decide how to respond to comments in ways that fulfill their journalistic obligations.1 Whitehouse writes that the nature and purpose of blogs are ever-evolving, but ethics codes should clarify what constitutes the ethically private in them. Citizen journalists, bloggers, and even those making comments on mainstream news pages do not have the same expectation to follow journalism ethics codes. However, if these standards can be imbedded into journalism practice, then expectations about privacy and nonmainstream digital forums might be strengthened.2 Ward and Wasserman argue that citizen participation in media is transforming the ethics of journalism: global online media are developing an open ethics. An open approach to journalism ethics regards the code of ethics as intended for professionals and for anyone who uses media to do journalism. The evaluation of an open ethics is based on who participates and on the quality and meaningfulness of that participation. New forms of communication are encouraging open media ethics, while citizen-based new media are reshaping media ethics.
With respect to intended users, the fact that citizens now act, at least some of the time, as journalists means the intended users of ethics broadens to all users of media insofar as their tweets, blog comments, and social media sites affect others. No longer is ethics just about the behavior of them journalists inside newsrooms. [] New media communication alters notions of meaningful participation and content control. In a global media world, citizens do not need an invitation to discuses media ethics, to critique journalism practice, or to suggest revisions and new norms. Discussing media normatively is a natural part of producing media. Ethical questions arise irresistibly when media activity is weaved into almost every aspect of ones life. Moreover, the culture of new

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media favors transparency and interactivity. This culture expects the editorial process of mainstream and nonmainstream media to be open to public scrutiny.3

Ward and Wasserman insist that new media allow citizens to engage in ethics discourse on all levels, and the rise of citizen journalism has blurred the line between producers and consumers of media. Ethics discourse about journalism has become a topic of debate on interconnected global networks. The potential of a collective viral response against unethical conduct may in the long run alter newsroom cultures. Online media may allow citizens and mainstream journalists to collaborate in support of ethical aims. In the online media environment, the primary relationship is no longer the vertical one of professional journalists to their audiences. Communication takes place along a rhizomatic network of professional journalists, responsive audiences, and citizen journalists, where ethical self-regulation takes place outside the professional realm between citizen journalists themselves.4 Ward and Wasserman argue that the Internet has vastly increased the reach of media representations, while new media technologies may bring more diverse, global perspectives to bear on media ethics. Online forums may create a sense of media citizenship among participants who feel excluded from mainstream media ethics discourse. We should construct an open media ethics based on the idea of meaningful participation as hospitable, sincere and truth-seeking; global, and accessible across material, social and national borders; and tolerant, respectful and self-reflective. Only when online interaction is infused with these principles, can a true, open ethics emerge.5 3. The Creation of New Global Communication Infrastructures Deuze maintains that the whole of the world is framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by pervasive and ubiquitous digitally networked media. Blogging is a fundamental expression of life in the contemporary mediapolis. Online, media participation is the defining characteristic of internet in terms of its hyperlinked, interactive and multiple-way networked infrastructure. A collaborative consumer is at the forefront of contemporary media management and policy. Consumers increasingly co-create, network and fragment across multiple media channels. Deuze points out that the emerging new media ecology gives users increasing control over the flow of media. People actively participate in the making and sharing of collective meaning. Consuming media increasingly includes some kind of producing media. Peoples media behavior involves some level of participation, co-creation and collaboration. Corporate appropriation of participatory culture contributes to reducing the advertisers anxieties, lack of knowledge and imagination regarding the consumer.6 Deuze says that journalists end up representing existing power formations and institutionalized relationships in society. The way people perceive and enact their role as citizens and consumers develops in the context of mediated and networked environments. Consumer culture and civic engagement seem to be interconnected and co-creative. Deuze claims that the output of the news industry contributes to an overall sense of disempowerment and disenchantment with traditional social institutions. Journalism has become what people all over the world engage in on a daily basis in order to survive. People empowered by cheap and easy-to-use technologies participate actively in their own news making. A future news system will be based on an interactive and connective mode of production where media makers and users will co-exist, collaborate, and thus effectively compete to play a part in the mutual construction of reality. The new media ecology contributes to a renewed form of citizenship, amplifying the act of consumption to a creative level. Consumerism turns citizens into more demanding and critical human beings. According to Deuze, journalism blames the commercial system within which it has always operated, laments the dominant role of technologies that it has contributed to, and accuses ubiquitous PR spokespeople and spin doctors whose jobs it demands in order to bring the flow of institutional news under control. Value attributed to media content will be increasingly determined by the interactions between users and producers. Deuze says that the key characteristics of current social trends (uncertainty, flux, change, and unpredictability) structurally define or determine the way people, media, and society interact. The emerging new media ecology is an endless resource for the generation of content and experiences by a growing number of people all around the world. Multiple, fragmented and overlapping topics are constantly setting the agenda.7

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4. The Rise of Transnational Informational Capitalism Peters and Bulut hold that the soft architecture of the network defines the nature of our institutions, our practices and our subjectivities. New forms of labor are developed by new technologies, and are enforced through intellectual property rights.
Cognitive capitalism focuses on the socio-economic changes ushered in with the Internet as platform and new Web 2.0 technologies that have impacted the mode of production and the nature of labor. The core of cognitive capitalism is centered on digital labor processes that produce digital products cheaply utilizing new information and communications technologies that are protected through intellectual property rights regimes, which are increasingly subjected to interventions and negotiations of the nation states around the world.8

Peters and Bulut write that the production processes are based on forms of networking that often require the individual freedom and consent of the workers. The new labor processes depend on language and communication that can be digitized.
Cognitive capitalism demonstrates characteristics as an emergent global economic system that depends upon the emergence of virtual (immaterial) economy (third capitalism) based on the increasing informatization (digitization) of production where there is an increasing formalization, mathematicization and digitization of language, communication, and knowledge systems. Cognitive capitalism as a global system is also associated with the emergence of social media, social networking and social mode of production enhanced by Web 2.0 technologies.9

Peters and Bulut write that distributed knowledge and learning systems become part of the open science economy, and co-production of symbolic goods reshape the production processes. There is an increasing importance of post-human network knowledge and learning practices based on mega-data bases and global portals where notions of individual performance have become global networks of labor governance where the traditional divisions between capital and labor are blurred.10 Fuchs poses the question of class in the information age. Global informational network capitalism is a nomadic dynamic system. Informational productive forces involve both human knowledge and information technologies. Humans make use of technologies for diffusing, using, sharing, and storing data. Knowledge becomes networked with the help of technologies.11 Fuchs observes that information and networks transform the means of production and the relations of production. The notion of transnational informational capitalism conceptualizes contemporary capitalism based on the rise of cognitive, communicative, and cooperative labor that is interconnected with the rise of technologies of and goods that objectify human cognition, communication, and cooperation. Informational capitalism is based on the dialectical interconnection of subjective knowledge and knowledge objectified in information.12 According to Fuchs, the societal diffusion of computer technology and the Internet is due to the role they have played for the economic restructuration of capitalism. Network technologies like the Internet support communication and social relations across spatial and temporal distances. Information production, selling, and consumption becomes an important factor of the overall economy. Transnational informational capitalism is the result of the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity that shapes capitalist development. [] In the informational mode of development surplus value production and capital accumulation manifest themselves increasingly in symbolic, immaterial, informational commodities and cognitive, communicative, and cooperative labor. The accumulation of capital, power, and definition-capacities on a transnational scale is strongly mediated by new media.13 Fuchs insists that informational capitalism characterizes all those parts of the economy that create informational goods or services (knowledge has become a productive force). The production process of knowledge is a social, common process, in informational capitalism people have a fluid and transit class status, and new knowledge is in many cases produced cooperatively. Financialization, hyper-industrialism, and informatization characterize contemporary imperialist capitalism.14 Fuchs emphasizes that the consumer of knowledge has the potential to become its producer (users become producers of digital knowledge and technology). New media are used for the production, circulation, and consumption of knowledge, while produsers conduct surplus-generating labor (users are essential for generating profit in the new media economy).
In informational capitalism, the brain and its bodily mediations are enabled to engage in organic practices of economic production, surplus-value generation, co-production, communicative circulation, and productive consumption by new media. The production of knowledge is based on the prior

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consumption of the same, in co-production as well on communicative interchange as a coordinative mechanism. Consumption of knowledge produces individual meaning and incentives for further social production and communication. Circulation of knowledge is the consumption of bandwidth and technical resources and the production of connections.15

Fuchs claims that the decentralized structure of the Internet allows many-to-many communication (the audience commodity is a produser commodity). The category of the produser commodity signifies the total commodification of human creativity. The difference between the audience commodity on traditional mass media and on the Internet, is that in the latter case the users are also content producers, there is usergenerated content, the users engage in permanent creative activity, communication, community building, and content-production.16 Beller maintains that the commodity being sold in capitalist media is productive power itself. Moving images result in the continuous modification of a collective, variegated operating platform. From the practical function of cinema and allied visual technologies we may derive a mediatic model for the production and extraction of surplus value.17 5. Conclusions The purpose of this article is to gain a deeper understanding of the ethics of practice in journalism, the complexities of the new circumstances facing journalism, the emergence of Web-based journalism and citizen journalism, and the growth of a globalized infotainment media. This paper has provided a literature review on the practice of media ethics in a media-connected world, the moral responsibilities of journalists, the responsibility of media corporations to sustain good journalism, the role of the mass media in society, and the normative requirements for communication. The current study set out to identify the interaction of global technological systems, the communicative event of media interactions, the mediatic domination of social becoming, the use of ritual in mobile interaction, and the encroachment of information and communication technologies.
REFERENCES 1. Cenite, Mark, and Yu Zhang (2010), Recommendations for Hosting Audience Comments Based on Discourse Ethics, Journal of Mass Media Ethics 25(4): 293309. 2. Whitehouse, Ginny (2010), Newsgathering and Privacy: Expanding Ethics Codes to Reflect Change in the Digital Media Age, Journal of Mass Media Ethics 25(4): 324. 3. Ward, Stephen J.A., and Herman Wasserman (2010), Towards an Open Ethics: Implications of New Media Platforms for Global Ethics Discourse, Journal of Mass Media Ethics 25(4): 281. 4. Ibid., 286. 5. Ibid., 290. 6. Deuze, Mark (2008), Corporate Appropriation of Participatory Culture, in Nico Carpentier and Benjamin De Cleen (eds.), Participation and Media Production: Critical Reflections on Content Creation. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge SP, 2740. 7. Deuze, Mark (2008), The Changing Context of News Work: Liquid Journalism and Monitorial Citizenship, International Journal of Communication 2: 848865. 8. Peters, Michael A., and Ergin Bulut (2011), Introduction Cognitive Capitalism, Education and the Question of Immaterial Labor, in Michael A. Peters and Ergin Bulut (eds.), Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labor. New York: Peter Lang, xxv. 9. Ibid., xxxii. 10. Ibid., xxxiii. 11. Fuchs, Christian (2011), Cognitive Capitalism or Informational Capitalism? The Role of Class in the Information Economy, [8], 85. 12. Ibidem. 13. Ibid., 86. 14. Ibid., 90. 15. Ibid., 108. 16. Ibid., 110. 17. Beller, Jonathan (2011), Cognitive Capitalist Pedagogy and Its Discontents, [8], 125.

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