Generalised affirmation of an "information society", exemplified for instance by a world summit on the topic, suggests that a theoretical effort is worthwhile to distinguish utopic or ideological aspects from what may reasonably be expected from the worldwide development of information and telecommunications technologies. One facet of inquiry regards the place of politics in this information society, and particularly the utopic notion of a "cyberdemocracy". This article applies to Pierre Lévy's most recent work an analysis based on Habermas's writings on the "public sphere" and on "technology and science as ideology" in the 1960s. Our conclusion is that the notion of cyberdemocracy allows the resurfacing of a reduction of politics to the economic, reminiscent of the theories espoused by liberal economists in the late 18th century.

Recent work under the direction of Elihu Katz deepens research on electoral behaviour going back to the 1970s to foreground the importance of a "limited effects paradigm" of media in social sciences, more specifically in "communications research" as formulated from the mid-1950s by Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues at Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research. Our rereading of four texts focuses on two key theoretical and methodological preoccupations which form a tension running through Katz's work : 1) to take into account networks of intepersonal relations and their influence on opinions and attitudes, as in media effects research, and 2) to reexamine the "effects" concept itself, suggesting that it has been prematurely narrowed to consider only the sucess of persuasive messages targetting individuals' opinions over very short time periods. Finally, we examine how these two preoccupations lead Katz to propose an instrumental model of political communication.

Programming plays an important role in television activity, because it must encourage the encounter between programmes and audiences. If its role in French television was at first limited to ensuring complementarity between the different public television channels, programming is now a basic part of channels' strategy in the war between them. The programmer therefore occupies a key place in television channels' organisational charts, even if programming choices themselves are often the result of interaction between different internal units. Full-blown competition between channels, and their related desire to better know their audiences, have facilitated an arsenal of ever-more-advanced tools which are available to programmers. It is in this light that the author reviews the literature on television programming in over-the-air French programming.

This article looks at Russian identity in the framework of two marketplaces: the Marché International des Programmes de Television (MIPTV) and Marché International du Film (MIF) at Cannes. These "terrains", influenced by the globalisation process, are at the crossroads of identitary recomposition. To analyse the representation of Russian identity, we resorted to complementary techniques for data collection: an open questionnaire, semi-directed interviews, and participant-observation. International professionals' point of view on the representation of Russian identity, analysis of these points of view through early-20th-century Russian philosophy, and comparison with other filmic identities, give rise to three hypotheses: 1) this Russian identity remains largely unknown; 2) its transformations result from changes at the international level, and 3) the spectator, too, has evolved. We finish by formulating several suggestions and perspectives on the role that audiovisual production might play in the diffusion of Russian identity.

For the last dozen years, the question of journalistic ethics has found itself at the heart of reflection on the role of news and of journalists' identities, following a series of events that, for a time, posed serious challenges to media credibility. Our research builds on the principle that ethics are at the heart of arguments seeking to legitimise the journalistic profession, ongoing since the profession's birth. Our approach focuses on analysis of representations. Through the discourses produced by one of the social actors directly involved, we analyse the meanings and values sought and wielded to legitimate the power to say, not what is true or false, but what is proper and improper conduct in this profession-at bottom, an updating of the meanings that journalism and, in particular, the Syndicat National des Journalistes (National Journalists' Union), assigns itself.

Analysing the role of speech in chat practices must, regarding both quantity and quality, take into account chat's status as a text-based participative system incorporating anonymous relations and the absence of prior familiarity between participants. How does this framework transpose the banalities with which we fill silence in face-to-face interaction, what Erving Goffman called "safe supplies"? Observation of the chat function in the Caramail messaging services led us to identify three safe supplies in cyberconversations: out-of-frame activity, constitution of a common imagined environment and, particularly, text-mediated singing. We also examined the role played by inflamed exchanges, for the most part constituted by ad hominem attacks and crude insults, and the use of software designed to generate ASCII text and drawings. We suggest that despite their unusual character, these activities, too, constitute functional substitutes in interaction.

Through the presentation of a field study conducted among five Tunisan small and medium enterprises (SMEs), we attempt to frame the challenges and strategies of internal actors following the introduction of new information and communication technologies (NICTs). In order to realise their objectives, and despite their divergences, these actors act either individually or through alliances and cooperation. Because their work situations contribute to business objectives, each actor works individually to maximise the advantages arising from this contribution, and to minimise the inconveniences: they negotiate to adjust their relations of force and dependency. Negotiating becomes the mode of interaction through which, mediated by reciprocal adjustments, actors seek arrangements allowing them to reduce their divergences. Starting from game theory, we distinguish two models of such negotiation: distributive negotiation based on competition, in which one actor wins and the other loses, and integrative negotiation based on cooperation and alliance-forming, in which both actors other win or lose together. The various case studies allow us to observe the empirical implementation of these two logics.