Halima El Joundi

War for a Ball: the Impact of User-generated-content over the Behavior of Media Consumer in Times of Crisis: a Football Case Study Halima El Joundi

The recent breakthroughs in communication technologies have reintroduced the user to Internet. Media consumers became empowered with the capabality to produce, and will gradually shift from the traditional role of an audience to generate content, compete with mainstream media and construct new social and cultural realities. This is a new era where communication is reshaping the world, redefining responsabilities and bringing in new (dis)orders. The channels of social media, through which audiences are mostly active, seems to be vulnurable platforms where Noise is integrated with the message by default, resulting in a participatory form of control and a state of deindividuation as the user gradually merges in the group. Thin lines set boundaries between the diffusion of information and the fuel of confusion, the enhancement of innovativeness and the distribution of persuasion; sustaining social control and menacing social order.