Samuel Mateus

Metacommunication as Second Order Communication

By giving full emphasis to the impossibility of not to communicate, the first axiom of communication stresses how communication is an event not subject to cessation. It is this never-ending characteristic that impels us to the need to ponder on metacommunication as “communication about communication”. By taking a philosophically informed and pragmatic stance, this paper deals with the concept of “metacommunication” and tries to incorporate it in the theory of communication. It posits communication is a multilevel dialectical happening in which metacommunication presents itself a kind of second order communication. The paper describes communication as an ad infinitum process in which every communication supposes always more communication. Metacommunication is the answer to the relationship level of communication and that’s why we postulate metacommunication as a re-communicating communication.

Pode uma imagem ser um argumento

Em sociedades dotadas de uma forte cultura visual, urge interrogar a legitimidade de estender a nocao classica e logocentrica de “argumento”, ate dominios nao discursivos ou linguisticos, como e o caso dos fenomenos visuais. Contribuindo para discussao lusofona acerca do potencial argumentativo das imagens, este artigo argui que, embora nem todas as imagens possuam uma forma argumentativa, tal nao nos leva necessariamente a supor que nenhum argumento pode ser apresentado sob a forma visual. Admitindo a perspectiva verbalista do argumento visual, segundo a qual os argumentos visuais possuem uma natureza discursiva, salienta-se a importância das proposicoes visuais para a apresentacao de conclusoes e razoes que as sustentem. A analise de um cartoon e o isolamento das suas proposicoes visuais fornece a oportunidade de demonstrar como, na vida quotidiana, podemos observar o funcionamento de um argumento visual.

A Psico-morfologia da Experiência Social: da atomização da privacidade à intimidade pública

Personality, privacy and intimacy are vital notions of social experience. Examining these concepts over the past centuries, this paper seeks to analyze the psychological investment on privacy of modern individualization, and compares it to contemporary experience. It will be argued that, given the centrality of media, especially online social networks, contemporary individualization is based on a personal investment that no longer makes the intimacy and privacy its fundamental dimensions, but that it is precisely a certain publicization of privacy, and a certain display of intimacy that constitute its main attributes.

Popular Television in Authoritarian Europe

influence on televisual style’ (p. 142). Indeed, Cooke draws mainly on the production conditions, touching at the same time on elements of the specified milestones in technological progress, not without setting these into a considered dramaturgical context on the basis of meaningfully selected examples. On the edge of what is feasible, manual craft behaves like art, and innovation is a variety of instrumentation, like the people who work with it. This is as true for television as it is for any new medium. By this example Cooke refutes the director Don Taylor: ‘Instead, he [Taylor] believed television needed to draw on the forms of drama developed for the stage, rather than make a radical departure from those traditions’ (p. 140). Relying on the previous media and its contents is however only the first step for a new medium. A medium needs to evolve the possibilities—mechanical as well as human—to find itself. If we take Cooke’s results on balance, we can state that television has achieved this step with high quality serial storytelling. What remains in the background of the aforementioned triad, is the reception side, which Cooke rather succinctly describes as ‘(...) with a fragmenting television audience demanding different kinds of drama, with different styles’ (p. 142). Cooke’s book is by no means a study of reception. This lack indicates further opportunities for research, since the described artistic-aesthetic climax of television is almost paradoxically appearing in the face of the Internet, social networks and ‘second screen.’ Perhaps scholarship can provide further partial answers, such as those that can be maintained and developed regarding the decades-long—as thoroughly presented by Cooke—expertise of television in the age of ‘streaming,’ ‘sharing’ and ‘downloading,’ and of an increasingly diversified audience.

O arquétipo publicitário

Looking to extend the idea of a principle of publicity beyond its strict critical-political model, commonly referred by the Public Sphere, this paper considers the public quality as a universal constant of social life. It is precisely because publicness is a fundamental communicational dimension of society’s organization that it shall be here considered as an archetype. The archetypal publicness suggests that it should be conceived not only according to its historical insights (for example, the Bourgeois Public Sphere) but also according to a major socio-anthropological operation that different societies, in each time, operationalize.

A Comunicação Cindida

Etimologicamente “comunicacao” significa o acto pelo qual algo se torna comum. O problema da comunicacao reside no modo como e partilhada e nos objectivos com que e utilizada. A teoria da comunicacao surge na modernidade justamente quando o conceito sofre uma ruptura e se divide em dois paradigmas de compreensao: por um lado, um paradigma relacional, substantivo, socio-antropologico; por outro lado, um paradigma transmissivo advindo da tecnologizacao. Entre um e outro sobrepoe-se a distância que vai da mediacao a mediatizacao. Este artigo procura identificar e caracterizar os dois paradigmas historicos de entendimento da comunicacao com vista a separar uma teoria da informacao de uma teoria da comunicacao.