Search

That legacy media organisations are struggling in this era of global platformisation and datafication is well established. Yet, the power of platforms as well as critiques of them could be seen as being framed and facilitated by the prevailing forms of neoclassical economics. This paper addresses how analysis and planning of data-driven innovation in legacy media organisations could benefit from the perspectives deriving from heterodox economics. Using approaches within heterodox economics as a foundation, we build on two novel conceptual frameworks – innovation commons and cross-innovation systems, where decentralisation of media markets and collaboration between agents on different levels are central. Further, three tools – open data, blockchains and agent-based modelling (ABM) – offer ways to operationalise these frameworks. Central to these tools are further democratisation and growing complexity, openness and dynamism that enable media organisations to identify paths towards data-driven innovation that could improve the competitiveness of the legacy media industry in the platform economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how music-specific communities on Facebook self-organize in and respond to the digital music ecosystem dominated by streaming platforms such as Spotify and their algorithmic restructuring of music. By building on earlier work on digital platforms as archives, we differentiate between the "old" and "new" orders of music cultures. We also utilize Juri Lotman's cultural semiotics and his concepts of semiosphere and auto-communication to make sense of communicative self-ordering and memory work by music-related communities on Facebook in Estonia. Based on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with local music experts, we demonstrate how communities focused on record collecting, specific music genres or music quizzing work auto-communicatively, build shared memories, identities, and self-organize in order to resist the "new musical order" that has resulted from the datafication and platformization of music markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much writing on, first, analogue and, later, digital archives has focused on related power-dynamics and the structuring effects of archives and their technologies on discursive freedom and cultural dynamics. In recent years, however, work within the media archaeology domain, especially by Wolfgang Ernst, has addressed how the specific materialities of digital archives, and the nature of their algorithms and particular functions, could be seen to facilitate dynamics in cultures. This article sets this work in dialogue with the cultural semiotics of Juri Lotman, whose late work focused on how communicative processes between and within different subsystems of culture facilitate their dynamic change and the production of new forms and cultural systems. The article suggests further interdisciplinary dialogue between media archaeology and cultural semiotics in order to understand the role of archives in facilitating communicative processes and interlinking in culture and the emergence of novelties – that is, for understanding the 'creativity' of archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the 'wicked' problems met by contemporary public service media (PSM) institutions: to address the fragmentation of audiences across platforms; to have a positive impact on civil society and societal coherence; to facilitate cultural diversity; and to work with private creative industries and facilitate their growth. These objectives can be reduced to a conflict in producing both public and private value. In this article, we build on the combination of innovation systems theory and public value theory to investigate the interrelationships between the production of these different forms of value. Our case study is Estonia's national pre-selection competition for the Eurovision Song Contest, which is innovative in terms of its cross-media framing and its approach to working with private partners to facilitate the development of the Estonian popular music system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the phenomenon of power in the process of media evolution. It argues that Juri Lotman’s ‘semiotics of culture’ is not only useful for interpreting this complex process and the role societal power might have in this, but it might have a potential to innovate the mainstream of western media and cultural studies. The article demonstrates the way to apply Lotman’s framework to interpret the evolutionary dynamics of media and proposes how the textual dynamics of cultural change can be interpreted to contribute to the social dynamic – to the dynamics of social organisation and power relations among social agents. Lotman’s framework is put also into dialogue with the western path-breakers in de-ontologising societal power: Michel Foucault and Niklas Luhmann. The article puts a focus on Lotman’s core concepts such as auto-communication and dialogic communication, and demonstrates how these can be seen to facilitate the heterogeneity (divergence) of systems as well as their striving for homogeneity (convergence). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a special issue that is dedicated to the renowned Russian-Estonian scholar of semiotics and cultural theory – Juri Lotman (1922–93). The aim of the issue is not only to re-introduce Lotman’s work and his approach – the semiotics of culture – for the international community of cultural studies’ scholars, but also to demonstrate its ‘explosive’ potential and its contemporary momentum – its applicability and unique analytic affordances for interpreting the most modern phenomena of global digital cultures. In this introductory article we discuss Lotman’s original contribution regarding his conceptualizations of the evolutionary dynamics of culture and how his work could be potentially advancing the contemporary cultural studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]