Assistant Professor Jernej Amon Prodnik, PhD.
See also:
Jernej Amon Prodnik is an assistant professor at the Department of Journalism, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a researcher at the Social Communication Research Centre based at the same institution. He served as the head of the Department of Journalism between 2018 and 2021.
Between 2014 and 2015, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University (Czechia). In 2018 he received the Solemn Charter of the University of Ljubljana, award for young university teachers and associates for outstanding achievements in teaching, research, and art.
Jernej’s principal research interests encompass critique of political economy and historical transformations of capitalist societies with an emphasis on journalism, media, and social communication.
His research is based in various strands of critical theory, especially political economy of communication, which provides him with a generalist perspective on a variety of research topics. These include historical processes influencing development of journalism; structural changes in political communication and the public sphere; or the wider social context of technological changes and democratic potentials brought about by the new ICTs. Jernej is either an author or co-author of more than 30 academic articles and 10 book chapters and has presented his papers at more than thirty international conferences and symposia.
Notable Publications
1
News Sources in the Sociology of the Media: A Critical Re-Examination
Sourcing practices are among the central research topics within the sociology of the media. Empirical studies have analysed what and who are the major journalistic sources, demonstrating that the selections journalists make not only depend on their subjective choices, but are connected to the norms and routines established in the profession. While invaluable, these studies are primarily media-centric and focused on small-scale investigations, meaning they regularly ignore the social totality in which sourcing is inevitably embedded. Such studies hence also pay too little attention to the external actors that provide ‘information subsidies’ to journalists. By employing the framework of the public sphere, we show that news sources should be viewed as a topic of central social relevance that touches on wider power relations within society. Sociological approaches should thus be complemented with other critical traditions, for instance the political economy of communication. The latter approach’s value is revealed in brief sketches that point to the possibilities of achieving deeper understanding of the topic.
2
Towards a Critique of Mediatisation
Mediatisation has established itself in the last decade as a key approach in media and communication studies. Its aim is to explain the vast transformations of social relations caused by the growing power of the media. I provide a theoretical and empirical critique of this approach, with a particular focus on the institutionalist (strong) approach to mediatisation. As I argue, one of the biggest problems of mediatisation is that it perceives the power of the media in a wholly abstract manner. Even though authors advocating for the mediatisation approach typically preach about holism, their works often narrowly focus on the media, without embedding them in the social totality. This leads to a flawed approach, primarily due to the excessive media-centrism. For a critique of the ontological, epistemological and theoretical failures of mediatisation, I largely base the article on two critical approaches to the media and communication research: critical sociology of the media and political economy of communication. Empirically and mostly for illustrative purposes, the article is based on semi-structured interviews with representatives of Slovenian political parties. Three fundamental issues are identified based on this focus of the paper: mediatisation fails to distinguish between the form and content of communication; it does not make a proper distinction between public political communication and political activity; and it ignores the non-public parts of politics and deep inequalities, which influence the political process. Mediatisation generally bypasses these issues, in turn also ignoring the wider relations of power in capitalist society and how they change.
3
Algorithmic Logic in Digital Capitalism
This chapter details the key characteristics of algorithmic systems in their current hegemonic social form, which helps to shed a light on the reasons for their increasing social influence. These characteristics include: opacity/obfuscation, datafication, automation, and instrumental rationalisation. Because technologies are inevitably embedded in – and influenced by – the social context in which they develop, the author’s analysis considers these systems as a part of competitive and inherently unstable capitalist society, or to put it more narrowly, as a part of digital capitalism. This provides a critical analytic framework that points to the fact there is nothing ‘natural’ in these characteristics of algorithmic systems, while making it possible to delineate both the structural reasons for their development and their social consequences. On this basis it is claimed we can denote a specific algorithmic logic in digital capitalism that continuously reinforces itself.
4
The article examines current processes in institutional politics and the often discussed tendency towards the professionalisation of political communication. It relates this tendency to the instrumentalisation of political life and its adoption of the commodity logic in public communication. The study proceeds from the perspective of critical theory and the political economy of communication. It connects this theoretical basis to Slovenian institutional politics with the aim to analyse whether and in which ways instrumental reason and commodity logic have been adopted in the political communication of political parties. The study is based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted with key representatives of seven parliamentary and three extra-parliamentary Slovenian parties or groups.
5
The commodity-form played an important, if often overlooked, role in the studies of capitalism. Processes of transforming literally anything into a privatized form of (fictitious) commodity that is exchanged in the circulation process are of fundamental importance for the rise and reproduction of capitalism. At the same time the commodity, as the “cell-form of capitalism”, has played a crucial role throughout Marx’s oeuvre. The central aim of the paper is to demonstrate how the commodity-form develops in his works (both as a part of his “global” argument and in the context of historical changes) and what role it plays in some of the key works of critical theory. Furthermore, the aim is to show how this topic was approached in critical communication studies and has been analysed in the political economy of communication. The latter is done principally through a reappraisal of the “blind spot debate” initiated by Dallas W. Smythe and the audience commodity thesis, in which it was raised. This long-lasting debate, which at least indirectly continues to date, can be seen as an invaluable source for practices and ideas connected to both Marxian-inspired critical communication studies and to a serious analysis of the continuing commodification of different spheres of society and its increasing pervasiveness in contemporary life. In the last section, these findings are connected to some of the recent neo-Marxist approaches, especially to the findings of the authors coming from the autonomist (post-operaist) movement. Insights into this intellectual strand can provide an understanding of the ongoing commodification processes, while also offering possibilities of convergence with Smythe’s approach.