EDITORIAL CITIZENS ’ ORGANIZATIONS IN THE KNOWLEDGE AND INFORMATION SOCIETY: NEW MEDIA, NEW FORMS OF PARTICIPATION

Our relationship with the media and with the sources that inform the public opinion is changing. Its transformation has occurred in line with the transformation in the forms and dynamics of social organization, with the emergence of new socio-technical hybrids serving politics, and with the productive and creating praxis resulting from collective action. Traditional media, concentrated on easily identifiable socioeconomic groups, give way to new forms of communication that emerge as citizens ’ initiatives rather than as products. This is not a simple amplification of individual arche-types, but an activation of forms of collective organization that seem to fill the void left by the crisis of representation of institutional politics, which is observed in countries with authoritarian regimes as in developed countries living in democracy. We can argue that this change of focus of media com-munication is undoubtedly one of the most significant changes in recent years. It is astounding to review what the intellectuals in the social sciences thought about these changes. Initially, we rushed to demonize everything that came from areas that we still call “virtual” as if they had no real existence. Academically, we turned emerging social networks into symbols of the banality of a consumeristic, hedonistic, and bourgeois youth. The most moralistic ones, both from the left and the right, were scandalized by teenagers ’ selfies that seemed to underpin their comple