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Abstract
Despite being highly ambiguous, the vocabulary of empowerment has been used recurrently since the early 2000s for celebrating the emancipatory potential of digital technologies. Indeed, these have been repeatedly described as having the power of bypassing the controls that authoritarian governments exert on the circulation of news, but also of circumventing the domination that corporate actors exercise in this field.
Basing this article on a discussion of the literature on news transnationalisation and adopting a historical perspective, we try here to critically assess these technology-deterministic perspectives. We show that they emphasise the virtues of the new digital platforms without taking into account the constraints of the political economy that still play a great role in shaping the circulation of news at an international scale.
Notes
1. This article is based on the Keynote Speech given by the author at the 5th European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) conference conference “Communication for Empowerment: Citizens, Markets, Innovations”, Lisbon, 13 November 2014.
Additional information
Tristan Mattelart (corresponding author) is Professor of International Communication in the Department of Culture and Communication, University of Paris 8, Paris, France.