José Jorge Barreiros, PhD in Sociology from ISCTE-IUL. Assistant Professor at the ISCTE-IUL – University Institute of Lisbon. Works in different areas of research, teaching and supervision of dissertations on Communication, Information and Media, the convergence between Sociology, Communication Sciences and Political Sciences.

Mobile Communications, Digital Media, Politics and Democracy

Communication and politics are interdependent activities. Politics, particularly democracy, implies different modalities of public communication, through the available media, depending on factors such as the characteristics of the media and societies, interests, values and strategies of the several actors who act in them, the settings of the respective social and political systems.
The emergence of digital media, namely mobile media, provides changes in the possible ways to access to public communication as a vector of social, individual and collective action, with potential incidence in different sides of civic and political life.
What is essential in the opportunities and conditionings of ongoing changes? From the point of view of the equation and the civic and political performance, to what extent, and under what conditions, so that the availability of bidirectional means, personalized and always handy, rhymes with a more responsible politics, connected to democracy and citizenship? Will the characteristics of these means (potential of interaction and proximity at distance, almost instantaneous intervention, sharing of information and knowledge, mobilization, among others) may contribute to regenerate weaknesses and inefficiencies of the political systems arising from representative democracy model of liberal inspiration?
New opportunities of communicational act are resulting on behavioural changes of public actors and political system itself? What role, what the potentialities and limits of communication and media as factors of public and political life?