Lucia Vesnić Alujević

European Commission | ec · Joint Research Centre (JRC)

Political campaigns are made to attract the attention from citizens. The beginning of its adaption is linked to the appearance of the social media and user-generated content. Since the number of users of social network sites in Europe constantly grows, 2009 was the first time that these websites were used in political marketing purposes for the Eur...

Techno-scientific imaginaries implicitly frame policy agendas that protect and motivate new technologies. In this paper we focus on how smart grids (SG) are portrayed in European policies and through social actors’ discourses, as well as, what their significance for citizens is claimed to be. Drawn upon the concept of socio-technical imaginaries we...

The appearance of digital interactive technologies opened up space where the audiences can express themselves freely through the user generated content. Often these new possibilities have been associated with the concepts of 'participation' and 'empowerment' on one side, and 'free labour' and 'exploitation' on the other. Through literature publishe...

The year 2030 seems to be beckoning a fair amount of prospection and critical speculation, with regard to the roles of ICTs in governance, public policy in a variety of sectors, and its interfaces with digital futures, with the arrival of Big Data. In the context of a book located theoretically within the long tradition of audience studies, we repo...

Digitalization has significantly changed journalism and brought about the rise of digital journalism with the considerable fall of printed editions’ circulation. Journalists are faced with a faster production speed, a 24-h news cycle, greater competition and pressure. The goal of this chapter is to explore and examine the current and future challen...

Technology foresight report looking at different foresight methods that can be useful for public funding of innovation, with the following chapters and co-authors: 1. Per Dannemand Andersen - "Potential uses of the Delphi method in innovation funding institutions"; 2. Marco Bevolo - "Individual intuition and communicative charisma as enablers of fu...

Recent events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, made clear that being prepared for the unknown and unexpected becomes increasingly important. Foresight scenarios are a practical tool that can help improve decision making in a context of turbulence, uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity. To increase preparedness for a...

Situated in the context of the increased integration of foresight and citizen engagement in European policy developments, this paper outlines the FuturGov game and the game’s potential to develop futures and political literacy through leveraging the ‘safe spaces’ for engagement that the game creates. We argue that the use of FuturGov game could lea...

The objective of the foresight process was to look at Open Strategic Autonomy in a systematic and systemic way, encompassing different dimensions and look at them in a holistic manner. This report is part of the 2021 European Commission Strategic Foresight Agenda. Desk research, including literature review and policy analysis, synthetises existing...

This paper explores the future government models and emerging societal challenges in the relationship between citizens and governments. By assessing various factors and their convergence, among which the uptake of participatory governance on the one hand, and the governance of digital technologies and media on the other, four scenarios have been cr...

With the rise of social media, media professionals have got more information sources now than ever before. An interesting phenomenon is the use of social media posts with political content as political news sources in traditional media in Croatia. This article explores the use of Facebook posts as political information source in eight news media. I...

Introducing a special issue of Policy Design and Practice on designing future governments, this article draws on growing interest in the concepts and practices of anticipation, foresight and design among policy makers in international bodies, think tanks and governments. Building on the concept of anticipatory governance, we aim to show how approac...

This paper offers a critical review on conditions and impacts of AI/ML in society, with a dedicated overview of the European AI policy framework. Through the analysis of policy papers produced by European institutions, European national governments and other organisations situated between research and policy-making, we bring an overarching outlook...

The Future of Government project explored how we can rethink the social contract according to the needs of today’s society, what elements need to be adjusted to deliver value and good to people and society, what values we need to improve society, and how we can obtain a new sense of responsibility. Based on the experience from previous decades, it...

The Future of Government 2030+: A Citizen Centric Perspective on New Government Models project brings citizens to the centre of the scene. The objective of this project is to explore the emerging societal challenges, analyse trends in a rapidly changing digital world and launch an EU-wide debate on the possible future government models. To address...

We are only at the beginning of a rapid period of transformation of our economy and society due to the convergence of many digital technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is central to this change and offers major opportunities to improve our lives. The recent developments in AI are the result of increased processing power, improvements in algor...

Wearable sensors are an integral part of the new telemedicine concept supporting the idea that Information Technologies will improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare. The use of sensors in diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of patients not only potentially changes medical practice but also one's relationship with one's body and mind, as we...

In the age of ubiquitous technologies, algorithmic agents pervade all aspects of our (online) lives. A growing number of connected digital devices track our activities and store our data on digital platforms or in the Cloud (Van Dijck, 2014; Porcaro, 2016). They give us recommendations for songs and movies, filter news or rank search results based...

This chapter deals with the co-option of audiences’ data as well as user-generated content by institutional powers behind intrusive interfaces. It draws upon longstanding concepts from political economy such as the commodification and exploitation of audiences, as well as digital and free labour, but also discusses these processes in terms of parti...

Blog-article written together with L. Vesnic-Alujevic, on recently adopted laws in several countries around the world that force NGOs to register as foreign agents, including the media. As a consequence, many NGOs financed from abroad are tracked and monitored by the state. On the global level, the adoption of aforementioned laws and the pressures...

VoxPopuli tool enables quantification of absolute and relative salience of news articles published on daily news web portals. Obtained numerical values for the two types of salience enable direct comparison of audience impact of different news articles in specified time period. Absolute salience of a news article in a specified time period is deter...

This chapter deals with the political advertising strategies used on Facebook during the elections campaigns for the European Parliament in 2009 and 2014. It explores and examines the posts of 11 political parties and comments they received during the last two weeks before the elections. The focus of the chapter is on possible interactions among ci...

In the era of declined public trust in democratic institutions, the emergence of social media renewed hopes for citizens' firmer inclusion and engagement in politics. This study explores young adults' online political engagement in a new European Union member state - Croatia. This case is particularly important as it deals with a 'newly' democratic...

In the era of declined public trust in democratic institutions, the emergence of social media renewed hopes for citizens' firmer inclusion and engagement in politics. This study explores young adults' online political engagement in a new European Union member state - Croatia. This case is particularly important as it deals with a 'newly' democratic...

In preparation for chapter drafts in co-authored book: Policy and research programmes articulating the role of eHealth and mHealth in the future of European health care, promise flexible and more personalized care, patient involvement and greater citizen responsibility in managing disease and staying healthy. It is not clear however, how the ICT-ba...

This document provides a set of policy recommendations, based on the findings of a three-year long case study on wearable sensors. The key objective was to assess state-of-the-art developments in this domain of innovation, using evaluation and analytic methods that correspond with the expertise and experience available on our study team and among o...

The second half of the twentieth century brought major changes in the society and consequently in the different areas of the sciences. The growing number of universities after the second world war, the post-war industrial growth and later digitalization transformed the sciences present until then, enlarged the scientific community and the number of...

The development and widespread use of information and communication technologies (ICT) are having a profound impact in many aspects of our daily lives, transforming the conditions and procedures of work, changing the modes of communication and social interaction, and altering the fundamental nature of human action, insofar as they play an important...

Memory is a ‘dualistic entity’, composed of remembering and forgetting, and it is one of the constitutional elements of one’s identity and one’s self (see for instance, James, 1890/1950; Conway, 2005). As much as remembering, forgetting is constitutive in the formation of new identities (Connerton, 2009). A seminal text in the field of memory studi...

The history of the future is now written in bytes. Current and emerging information technologies are mediating and shaping the narratives we build both about ourselves as individuals and ourselves as a collective. These will eventually constitute our future memories. The diffusion of Internet-based technologies has been changing the approach that p...

After the initial wave of optimism about the role of the Internet in societal and social changes, many scholars are gradually becoming less positive in their appraisals. Popular discussion, however, is still firmly optimistic and gives a great deal of attention to this issue. Some even consider social media a deus ex machina that will resolve the m...

The period after the collapse of the communist Yugoslav state was marked by wars in several ex-Yugoslav states. Therefore the state-building period overlapped with the transition from communism to capitalism and processes of reconciliation between the disputed states. This is reflected in the transformation of the media audiences in the Western Bal...

The period after the collapse of the communist Yugoslav state was marked by wars in several ex-Yugoslav states. Therefore the state-building period overlapped with the transition from communism to capitalism and processes of reconciliation between the disputed states. This is reflected in the transformation of the media audiences in the Western Bal...

The dissolution of Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 1990s gave birth to seven independent states. After the wars that followed the initial proclamation of independence in several of these countries, a period of consolidation ensued, along with European integration as well as reconciliation efforts. The principal goal of this paper is to explain t...

The objective of this paper is to chart the boundaries of the developing phenomenon of the use of information and communication technologies to support politics by large political organizations such as the European Parliament through the analysis of the online strategy of the European Parliament in its campaign for widening participation in the 200...

The goal of this paper is to obtain the model for political participation on social network sites in Europe with a focus on European politics. We want to find out if and how European citizens are interested in using Facebook in political communication on the European level and if that can lead to more participation and more inclusion of citizens in...

Despite the different approaches to the term ‘democratic deficit’, the majority of scholars today focus on political legitimacy and accountability. In this paper we assess the democratic deficit of EU institutions, more precisely the European Commission and the European Parliament. We suggest how this deficit could be overcome through the EU treaty...

This study examines the use of Facebook in political communication during the 2009 European Parliament elections campaign. Its goal is to explore the possibilities of the European Parliament communication strategy on Facebook as well as the interaction and participation of its online audiences. The analysis has discovered new concepts significant f...

Following the rise in use of online communication in electoral campaigns throughout the world, this article deals with the use of blogs by politicians in Europe. Through the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis, it analyzes blog posts written by the European Parliament incumbents running for the European Parliament elections in 2009, from four d...

The research focuses on the role of internet in electoral campaign for the EP elections 2009. It includes: -the use of internet in marketing purposes; -the communication between citizens and political actors; -the interdependency of internet and other mass media; -and the advertising modes through Internet. The theoretical framework is based on the...

The goal of political campaigns is to attract citizens’ attention and they are narrowly linked to the most influential mass media, especially television. But, today, under the influence of internet and in particular web 2.0 applications, the situation changes. Campaigns are more and more adjusted to the new medium, in order to keep the attention of...