In Sur la télévision (On Television), a slim red volume published in 1996, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu delivers a highly-charged polemic on television and on journalism. Just over two years later, Daniel Schneiderman - columnist at Le Monde, the French daily of record, and host of a television programme dedicated to decrypting the "little image factory" - makes a first attempt to refute Bourdieu's theses with Du journalisme après Bourdieu.
What makes his analysis so disappointing? And why is it so unconvincing? This article tries to answer these questions, starting not only with an internal analysis of Schneiderman's book, but also by taking into account the context in which it was published.
Anxious to rehabilitate a profession which, in his eyes, has been made victim of a veritable media lynching, Daniel Schneiderman instead winds up with eloquent testimony, both to the pertinence of the Bourdieusian critique which he had thought to demolish, and to his own inability to distance himself from a professional mythology without which Schneiderman appears incapable of finding "meaning" in his journalistic activities.

Keywords: Bourdieu, Schneidermann, television, journalism, sociology, connivance, censorship, deontology.

© 2000 - Pascal Fortin - All rights reserved.

With the generalized and recurrent domestic use of New Information and Communication Technologies (NICT), society's computerization is changing the daily practices of a growing proportion of the population. The wide-spread use of NICTs implies a number of changes in the social construction of time and, by corollary, in the representation of time more generally. Based on a research project undertaken for a master's program in sociology, this article suggests that these new representations of temporality require us to completely reexamine the temporal framework objectified by modernity since its beginnings. It tries, first, to examine what this upheaval of "time" consists of inside the framework of recurrent Internet use, and second, to look at how the individual's relationships with time and with space place the question of the chronothesis directly into play. In so doing, the article questions the phenomenological basis of time's new representations in the context of NICT deployment.

Keywords : Temporality, chronothesis, representation, space, Internet .

© 2000 - Luc Bonneville - All rights reserved.

This article's goal is to present Gilbert Simondon's contribution to the study of technology. After having shown the ways in which his ideas remain relevant today, the article establishes several connections between Simondon's and more recent theories of the technological object, examining Simondon's doctoral thesis, entitled Du mode d'existence des objets techniques. The article starts by outlining first principles as well as the postulates upon which Simondon's thesis rests, before examining the concept of individuation. Moving to the later chapters of the thesis, the article attempts to facilitate understanding by presenting the genesis of the modes of thinking and of being-in-the-world that constitute a generalized genetic interpretation of the human being's relations with the world at large.

Keywords : Gilbert Simondon, technophobia, culture, individuation, technology, philosophy, genesis.

© 2000 - Élisabeth Gladu - All rights reserved.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a sociotechnical dispositif (apparatus) whose interface takes the form of a synchronous, text-based, distributed teleconferencing system, based on an open protocol. It is probably the Internet application most commonly used to practice what, in the English language, is referred to as "chat". Looking beyond the attention often paid to the ludic, or playful, aspects of this form of electronic sociability, this article attempts to analyse it as a case which, in the author's opinion, exemplifies an application of the Internet protocol, thereby showing how IRC helps shed light upon the larger parameters of the relationship between the social and technological. Developed through a collaborative process, the technical protocol underlying IRC has, in a decade of existence, been the object of numerous adaptations and variations, parallelling the explosion in its user base. This article attempts to analyse the dispositif according to two perspectives, one synchronic, the other diachronic. In the first, we present the IRC's functional characteristics from both technical and social standpoints, showing how this communicational space is the object of complex relations of power, of which some are inscribed at the technical level itself. In the second, we examine the main steps involved in the sociotechnical development of IRC over time, bringing into sharper focus the structuring role of communication practices in the modification, even reinvention, of the technological artifact, and by extension, the relative erasure of boundaries between designers and users.

Keywords : sociotechnical dispositif, sociotechnical apparatus, computer-mediated communication, network, Internet, IRC, chat, social uses, technological practice, appropriation.

© 2000 - Guillaume Latzko-Toth - All rights reserved.

This article is intended to propose several research questions to help examine the limited circulation of Cultural Studies in the field of university-based research on media communications in Québec. Using his academic biography as a starting point, the author explains his interest in Cultural Studies (CS) and offers a brief description of the CS project. The article then briefly reviews the social sciences' beginnings in Québec, summarising the special characteristics which led to the founding of communications departments. Then, following a short presentation of early Québécois research on culture, particularly through the political economy of cultural industries, the first Québécois articles to comment upon CS are identified and discussed.
The article attempts to underline and to comment upon the "asynchronous" circulation of ideas between French-language and English-language worlds, carrying the discussion into an overview of the critiques of CS formulated and circulated within media studies. Finally, the article concludes with a call for discussion, hoping to shake loose the reasons for the failure of the CS approach to noticeably "seduce" students and scholars toward this approach to communication studies.

Keywords : Cultural Studies, media studies, communication studies, culture, Québécois research, Québec.

© 2000 - François Yelle - All rights reserved.