Table Of ContentGLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN
MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH
A PALGRAVE AND IAMCR SERIES
The Science
of the
Commons
A Note on
Communication Methodology
Muniz Sodré
Translated by David Hauss
IAMCR
AIECS
AIERI
Global Transformations in Media
and Communication Research - A Palgrave
and IAMCR Series
Series Editors
Marjan de Bruin
HARP, Mona Campus
The University of the West Indies HARP, Mona Campus
Mona, Jamaica
Claudia Padovani
SPGI
University of Padova
Padova, Padova, Italy
The International Association for Media and Communications Research
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Muniz Sodré
The Science
of the Commons
A Note on Communication Methodology
Muniz Sodré
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Translated by David Hauss
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and
IAMCR Series
ISBN 978-3-030-14496-8 ISBN 978-3-030-14497-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14497-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019936151
Translation from the Portuguese language edition: A Ciência do Comum: notas para
o método comunicacional by Sodré, M., © Editoria Vozes Ltda 2014. Published by
Petrópolis: Vozes. All Rights Reserved.
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For Raquel, with whom I share my life and ideas.
P
reface
The Science of the Commons is the continuation of a long, academic study.
Four decades ago, we expressed, through a book and in seminars, our
suspicion that the emerging media (principally television) would be
equivalent to a monopoly of speech, that is, to the impossibility of a strong,
symbolic response from the receiver. As in the example of the notifying
power of the process in Kafka’s fictional nightmare, there would be no
possible response to the unilateral nature of the messages. This could be
understood as an allusion to the economically monopolistic system of the
media corporations, which is always made present as a multifaceted real-
ity, heavily scrutinized, indeed, by analysts of various theoretical fields,
from economics to sociology.
In reality, we were not focused on the socioeconomic aspect of the
monopoly, but essentially on the semiotic or cultural aspects, in which
the decision-making power of the discourse is supported by one of the
poles of relation between speaker and listener, the transmitting pole. Not
the discourse of power, but the power of the monopolistic discourse.
The Internet age, however, initially seemed to demonstrate that
“interactivity” (a new word, invented to adjust to an emerging real-
ity) represented a solution to the problem: The generalized connection
between users of the electronic network would break the monopoly of
speech, and the media would become intercommunicative thanks to
unmediated feedback. The hypothesis of an electronic democracy arose
in the stew of this technological possibility of instantaneous, global com-
munication, supposedly capable of setting aside cultural differences in
vii
viii PREFACE
the dialogic game and, in the political arena, facilitating direct contact
between a transmitter and its receivers.
Now in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the situation
is clearly far more complex. In the growing sphere of mediatization
(the media’s structural articulation with social organizations and institu-
tions), electronic communication converts information technologies into
machine learning (a more current expression for artificial intelligence)
devices and, through the electronic network, introduces a new paradigm,
with a structure of invisible interconnection in which everything is, at the
same time, both connection and transition.
At the same time, from the economic and organizational point of
view, the technology for processing and storing data—the name for the
product which sustains the great, new industry of this century—strides
in the direction of private monopolies, as expressed by corporate brands
such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and IBM (the so-called
Big Tech companies), administrators of big data, that is, of the great
masses of data, or macro data, who manipulate complex, artificial intelli-
gence algorithms through the electronic network.
Of course, one can instantly respond to an interlocutor, and the cir-
culation of speech on the networks does appear to break the commu-
nicative monopoly. There is, however, an enormous difference between
the technical aspect of the tool and the cultural device of communication.
As a device, the network is a technological matrix capable of increasing
the physical space-time, amplifying the space, and shortening the time,
which implies the creation of a parallel reality capable of conditioning the
users’ places of speech. In practice, it is a new, immaterial urbs, with its
own norms for the hosting and circulation of discourse.
Thus, there is no symbolic response from the user—an autonomous
behavior in relation to the searched data—to the centralized, electronic
network, where the monopoly has culturally shifted. The increase of
the technical freedom of response for the user—therefore, its individ-
ual “responsibility”—hides the “irresponsibility” of the economic and
technological system, which launched the technologically augmented
individual into the precariousness of social relations deprived of the com-
munal bond. The primacy of circulation within the electronic system is
quantitative.
Quantity indicates the prevalence of digits or numbers, therefore, a
trend toward the equalization of the places of speech, in which agents
are oriented by the equal, in a systematic rejection of the expressive
PREFACE ix
quality of differences. Dialog, it is worth emphasizing, is not defined as
the prioritized exchange of words, but as the opening and amplification
of the cohesive tie, through discourse and actions, in order to strengthen
the human bond.
At the level of cultural autonomy, it is worth noting that if in tra-
ditional media, manipulation consisted of the unilateral repetition of
messages—an old, basic recourse for ideological, political, or religious
propaganda—now it is the combination of digital patterns which feeds
artificial intelligence. Not the simple monopoly of speech, therefore, but
rather a true oligopoly, at the same time economic and cultural—but pre-
dominantly mechanical—of the variables which compose the subject’s
existence in his everyday life. The potential autonomy of the algorithms
opens the path toward subterranean and humanly uncontrollable dis-
courses, in that the digits amplify their generative capacity from a sepa-
rated reality, gifted with its own logic and “language,” toward a new bios,
specifically a virtual one.
Bios is an Aristotelian and Platonic concept used for designating the
spheres of existence within the Polis: Bios politikos (political-social rela-
tions), bios theoretikos (knowledge, comprehension) and bios apolaustikos
(the sensory, pleasure). Contemporary communication has introduced a
fourth sphere, the virtual bios, which has technologically materialized in
information devices. This book, The Science of the Commons, pursues ele-
ments for a greater comprehension, both methodological and political,
of this virtual bios, inherent to the society it now helps to design.
This current century has brought into the light considerable theoretical
and political reservations to the proclaimed cultural transitivity of the free-
dom of expression, at the same time in which it demonstrated, through
the notable technological expansion of technological devices, the growing
human deficit in comprehending the phenomena of media and communi-
cation, generally taken as culturally “natural” and politically neutral.
This book inquires if there is some reasonable point of divergence
between the prolific German, Anglo-American, French, and Latin
American studies and investigates what comprehensive ground one can
tread upon when the “tectonic plates” of knowledge shift under the
pressure of the capital world’s new laws of motion, of the growing deval-
uation of human labor, of the transformations in social relations and the
dynamics of technological and organizational changes.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Muniz Sodré
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 A Post-disciplinary Science 9
Sociologists and Anthropologists 18
References 32
3 A Financial Ideology 35
The Communicational Focus 50
More Phenomenon Than Concept 61
Cognitive Dispersion 67
Absence of Episteme 77
References 82
4 A Science for the Virtual Bios 85
A Post-disciplinary Science 94
References 142
5 The Organization of the Common 145
The Binding and the Cohesion 157
The Republican Common 164
From the Thing to the Technique 177
The Ecology Metaphor 188
The Organizing Factor 200
xi
