Social Justice as an Organizing Principle for Contemporary Media Policy

Media policy developed along a linear understanding of the mediated communication process. The building blocks of the communicative activity were clear: senders and receivers, encoders and decoders, channels and noise. Even the later addition of a feedback channel to the process did not change the model’s linear form except for the fact that now the receiver/decoder could become a sender/encoder in due time. As mass communication systems developed, the single communicator model gave way to an understanding of a process involving an asymmetrical relationship between a large corporation with technological capabilities and its diffused audiences, whose feedback is either belated and passive (mostly measured through technological means), or merely non-existent. This process too was described in linear terms, perhaps even more unidirectional than before. The media system that emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century – the Internet, a global network of computers, and the World Wide Web, the most popular means by which information is shared over this network – defies these traditional models. Perhaps the most succinct description it has evoked is of “mass self communication” (Castells, 2006, p. 239). Information policies and governance systems emerging are based on new models that arise from the features of these contemporary media, but so far are not radically different from their predecessors. Perhaps the most perceptive has been the “layered model,” however it too is rooted in a linear (though bi-dimensional) understanding of the communication process. The latest development of media technology, an enhanced interactive form of the Web known as Web 2.0, brought about the proliferation of a new media form more often than not dubbed as “social media.” Metaphors and images have a major influence on the way policy, and in particular information policy, is designed, however the catchy “social media” descriptor has not been helpful in surfacing the challenges this new media form raises for regulators. In this study we try to tackle that difficulty by addressing the impact of the four characteristics that we have previously established as making contemporary media stand out from the mass media that preceded them should have on media policy: abundance (of content), mobility, interactivity, and technological convergence. We first define what is “new” about contemporary media and what “social” means, and as a result what makes media “social,” and we critique the popular tendency to label contemporary media as either “new media” or “social media,” since these labels do not help distinguish them from their predecessors, and are not useful for the development of an effective system of governance. Following this critique we propose the term “multi-discoursial media,” and we explain its roots and why it is a good descriptor for the emerging formats of media. We then propose to adopt the framework of “social justice” to the governance of multi-discoursial media. In order to do so we describe the philosophy of utilitarianism and its effect on media policy in the twentieth century as well as the competing twentieth century philosophies of John Rawls and Amartya Sen. Describing the need to focus on fair distribution of opportunities to communicate within the emerging media scene, we debate whether the principles of justice developed by Rawls or rather those developed by Sen should replace utilitarianism and be applied to contemporary communication policy or whether elements of the two can be combined. We end this journey by introducing a conceptual structure for multi-discoursial media governance based on this updated descriptor of the contemporary communication process that corresponds to the characteristics we identified of these media and apply it to three burning issues of information policy currently being debated: access, neutrality, and participation.