ABSTRACT
An issue that is repeatedly discussed in Media Studies is the way in which the media field establishes a meaningful order in a social universe in continuous flux, particularly through news reports. The question that arises is: how do the media and those who work within them record the many events of this constantly changing process within an ordered universe of meaning? How do media professionals introduce order and meaning to a universe that is constantly changing, in which the emergence of the contingent and random is an ever-present possibility? The question refers to a key issue: how do the media shape social reality?
Additionally, we must understand what it means to be public. How does voice matter in the online public sphere following the redefined categories of public and private? Will the balance between authenticity and anonymity, intimacy, privacy and functionality delimit the public and the private, intimate and personal spheres? Or are we dealing with a struggle between obscurity and a hypervisibility that enables us to reach the spotlight of attention? Our main concern is naturally with journalism, considering the changes seen in the field.
According to our perspective, online communication and user performance in the mobile environment have produced a wide range of possibilities concerning time and space. Within this ever-changing ecosystem of coordinates in real and virtual worlds, users seem to have different kinds of perceptions about what was traditionally considered “public, private, intimate and personal”. Emotion management and technological literacy appear to play key roles, while concepts like anonymity, authenticity, intimacy, identity and the self, flow intermittently within this media ecology.
