The Dispositif

4Complexity of Media Productions

The media, whether they are journalistic, communicational or documentary, are occupied by information and communication science (ICS). Despite the diversity of researchers’ approaches in this discipline, it seems to us that the concept of the dispositive provides them with a converging element. This chapter highlights the complexity of the media by means of the concept of the dispositive, “which makes intelligible the entanglement of the relationship between all the actors (including objects) of a communicational practice” (Monnoyer-Smith, 2008) or informational practice (Couzinet, 2009), either in a public context or inside an organization.

Media include a discursive dimension, since they produce articles, television programs and websites, for an audience or community that it must capture. Economic considerations are involved in media, as well as discursive logics and audience search. These different logics are valid for television, press, social media, etc., and are part of their designation as media. We are going to discuss the theoretical proposals of authors who, from our point of view, focus on complexity by cross-checking different logics. First, we will consider the idea of dispositive embedding offered by Noël Nel and used again by Guy Lochard in the context of television. The editorialization of digital contents revisited by Yves Jeanneret and Emmanuel Souchier illustrates a way of analyzing the complexity of the media dispositive. ...