Education in mass media and the construction of education’s image in TV news, Communicatiion Issues, 2007

Media Life (version 1.0)

Co-authored with Peter Blank and Laura Speers, this is a first version of an essay/working paper that is scheduled for publication (in different iterations) in a forthcoming issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, and as a contributing chapter in a forthcoming work on media studies for the 21st century (publisher: Routledge). All comments are welcome!

Research since the early years of the 21st century consistently shows how through the years more of our time gets spent using media, how being concurrently exposed to media has become a foundational feature of everyday life, and that consuming media for most people increasingly takes place alongside producing media. Contemporary media devices, what people do with them, and how all of this fits in the organization of our everyday life disrupt and unsettle well-established views of the role media play in society. Instead of continuing to wrestle with a distinction between media and society, this contribution proposes we begin our thinking with a view of life not lived with media, but in media. The media life perspective starts from the realization that the whole of the world and our lived experience in it can be seen as framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by (immersive, integrated, ubiquitous and pervasive) media. In this presentation, the media life perspective is developed by correlating the claims of contemporary social theory with recent reports on media use among teenagers around the world.

Happiness Is Closer than You Think

Forthcoming, "The Pursuit of Happiness", exhibition catalogue, Arsenal Gallery: Poznan, Poland, 7 - 26 May, 2010

As if nobody’s reading’: The imagined audience and socio-technical biases in personal blogging practice in the UK

Thesis

This thesis examines the understandings and meanings of personal blogging from the perspective of blog authors. The theoretical framework draws on a symbolic interactionist perspective, focusing on how meaning is constructed through blogging practices, supplemented by theories of mediation and critical technology studies. The principal evidence in this study is derived from an analysis of in-depth interviews with bloggers selected to maximise their diversity based on the results of an initial survey. This is supplemented by an analysis of personal blogging’s technical contexts and of various societal influences that appear to influence blogging practices.

Bloggers were found to have limited interest in gathering information about their readers, appearing to rely instead on an assumption that readers are sympathetic. Although personal blogging practices have been framed as being a form of radically free expression, they were also shown to be subject to potential biases including social norms and the technical characteristics of blogging services. Blogs provide a persistent record of a blogger’s practice, but the bloggers in this study did not generally read their archives or expect others to do so, nor did they retrospectively edit their archives to maintain a consistent self-presentation.

The empirical results provide a basis for developing a theoretical perspective to account for blogging practices. This emphasises firstly that a blogger’s construction of the meaning of their practice can be based as much on an imagined and desired social context as it is on an informed and reflexive understanding of the communicative situation. Secondly, blogging practices include a variety of envisaged audience relationships, and some blogging practices are essentially self-directed with potential audiences playing a marginal role. Blogging’s technical characteristics and the social norms surrounding blogging practices appear to enable and reinforce this unanticipated lack of engagement with audiences. This perspective contrasts with studies of computer mediated communication that suggest bloggers would monitor their audiences and present themselves strategically to ensure interactions are successful in their terms. The study also points the way towards several avenues for further research including a more in-depth consideration of the neglected structural factors (both social and technical) which potentially influence blogging practices, and an examination of social network site use practices using a similar analytical approach.

"Make a Call and Burn the World!": Phone Prank's Fan Community in Russia (IN RUSSIAN) ["Voz'mi trubku i zazhgi mir..." (molodezhnoe soobshhestvo prankerov v Rossii)]

published in "Molodezhnye subkul'tury Moskvy ["Youth subcultures in Moscow"], Moskva, 2009. P. 401-439.

Computers as Invocational Media (PhD thesis 2001)

PhD thesis 2001, Macquarie University

This thesis argues that computers are invocational media. It shows how this technological lineage can be defined not only by the power of computation, but also by the power of invocation — storing, generating and recalling images, sounds and simulations. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, a wide literature on computer, medium theory and actor-network theory, it argues that invocational media are based on the ‘genetic element’ of invocation. The cultural practice of invocation, which has an ancient heritage, mixes command and memory to produce decisions. Invocational media not only answer calculations; they also invoke any number of dynamic new media environments. Summoning concepts from cultural milieux, they have been called on to invoke (among other things) ‘intelligence’, ‘life’ and even ‘reality’.
Invocational media are as significant as previous historical transitions in media technology. If television brought secondary orality (Ong), invocational media bring nth oralities: chat, queries, e-mails and ICQ. Although technology has displaced conventional magic, tropes of magic recur in technology’s cultural imaginary. Invocational magic is domesticated and commodified. Hobbled together from surveillance, spectacle, command and control technologies, its powers are conditional. Users must answer ‘avocations’: standards that condition everything that is invocable. Invocational aesthetics are distinctive. Disregarding the computational aesthetics of pure mathematical form, users appreciate the emergent qualities of the invocational aesthetic: playable games, responsive interfaces, and immersive experiences. Everywhere, invocations are polyvocal, calling to wider assemblages. Hyperlinks combine technological systems, textual conventions and mediations of social commitments in producing invocationary speech acts.

Neither gaze nor glance, but glaze: relating to console game screens

SCAN Journal, Vol 1, No. 1. January 2004

Drawing on John Ellis's comparison between the screen - viewer relationship in Television and Cinema, this paper develops a reading of how players tend to relate to console games. Where the relationship to the screen of cinema is famously the gaze, Ellis argues television is the glance.
The player of console games is different again: not glance nor gaze, but glaze. The glaze is immersive (eyes glaze over), sticky (holding power); and self-reflective (identification with avatar).

Blogs and the crisis of authorship

Paper presented at BlogTalk, May 2005

The uptake of blogs proves that reports of the death of the author are greatly exaggerated. The Author is alive and well, and has a blog.

In the speculative era of cyberculture criticism in the early 1990s, many authors claimed electronic text would destabilise the institution of authorship (Poster 2001; Landow 1994; Bolter 2001). They argued changes of material form of writing would decrease the power of the author. They connected this claim with critics such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault who had questioned conventional assumptions about authorship, and speculated on the possibilities of texts without authors. While the claims of these electronic writing advocates were contested theoretically (Grusin 1994), the popularity of blogs empirically demonstrates the persistence of authorship, and how progress often works backwards.

Authorship is so familiar it’s almost invisible, and so flexible it cannot be defined. Certain elements of a text attribute it to a source: an author’s name on the book cover, a newspaper by-line, or the author information in a blog. The Author emerged in the West alongside a range of economic, technological, social, political and legal changes associated with the rise of individualism, capitalism, rationalism, democracy and rule of law. Authorship functions as a boundary abstraction that connects each of these discourses. It gives authors the legal protection of copyright, economic connections with the printing and publishing industries and provides the key field to locate books on the shelves of booksellers and libraries. In silent reading, it provides a persona for the reader to imagines, completing a text’s meaning. Canons of authors provide symbolic figures whose names become shorthand for concepts and stories. The convention of reading a text with reference to its author is ingrained, even if this institution is only 500 years old. Blogs have succeeded because they are less innovative than other online forms.

Far from dissolving authorship, blogs perpetuate, coexist with, and transform it. Authorship re-emerges in proportion to the distance that a text moves from its context. Specific features of blogs allow them to invoke Foucault’s author-function more effectively than static personal home pages: the inverted narrative structure of the archive, the consistent voice, the time stamp that positions posts in a reference to a temporality shared with readers. However, the practices associated with blogs also do transform authorship. The reader’s capacity to give feedback through comments compensates for the conversational mode of writing. Many blogs’s authority comes from positions outside institutions.

Blogs gravitated towards two discourses that reflect the conventional split between public and private domains: the political polemic blog, and the confessional diary. Media events that brought certain blogs into the public sphere in 2003 and 2004 followed standard scripts for each side of this split. The role of political blogs in discrediting Dan Rather’s report on Bush’s war record was generally celebrated as evidence that blogs were legitimate players in the public domain. On the other hand, the most high profile personal diaries were those that presented narratives of transgressive sexuality: Muzimei in China, the London Callgirl in the UK, and Washingtonienne in the US. By contrast with the political bloggers, these authors who brought the private sphere to the public were subject to a moralistic collective tribunal.

Text/Hypertext

in Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Ed. George Ritzer (2007), Vol X: 4971-4.

Soulful Technologies. Everyday Aesthetics in New Media

The following article will appear in a book in Danish concerning the substance of images, which will be published around May 2010. In August next year it will be published in an English book concerning visuality, technology, and New Media.

Last year Samsung introduced a mobile phone called "Soul" made with a human touch and including itself a “magic touch”. Through the analysis of a Nokia mobile phone TV-commercials I want to examine the function and form of digital technology in everyday images.
      The mobile phone and its digital camera and other devices are depicted by everyday aesthetics as capable of producing a unique human presence and interaction. The medium, the technology is a necessary helper of this very special and lost humanity. Without the technology, no special humanity, no soul - such is the prophecy. This personification or anthropomorphism is important for the branding of new technology. Technology is seen as creating a techno-transcendence towards a more qualified humanity which is in contact with fundamental human values like intuition, vision, and sensing; all the qualities that technology, industrialization, and rationalization, - in short modernity – have taken away from human existence. What old technology has removed now comes back through new technology promoting a better humanity.
      The present article investigates how digital technology and affects are presented and combined, with examples from everyday imagery, e.g. TV commercials and internet commercials for mobile phones from Nokia, or handheld computers, as Sony-Ericsson prefers to call them. Digital technology points towards a forgotten pre-human and not only post-human condition.

Youth, MySpace, and the interstitial spaces of becoming and belonging

MacIntosh, L. & Bryson, M. (2008). Youth, MySpace, and the interstitial spaces of becoming and belonging. Journal of LGBT Youth: The Interdisciplinary Quarterly of Research, Policy, Practice, and Theory. 5(1), 133-145

This essay provides a queer reading of MySpace (http://www.MySpace.com). The analysis engages how this hugely popular youth site, as exemplar of online peer-to-peer networking, might provide educators and researchers with an ideal location for asking good questions
about queer relationalities within hyper-mediated spaces. Social
networking sites are changing the way people socialize, are interpellated, and made visible. Significantly, these sites are altering structures of recognizability. The authors asseverate that the significance of social networking sites to queer youth, then, is not helpfully construed as threat, or as trendy cultural accessory, but as constitutive of everyday interstitial locations of engagement and signification to which we need to
pay close and careful attention.

Does Rotten Tomatoes Spoil Users? Examining Whether Social Media Features Foster Participatory Culture

published in Stream, Fall 2008

Participatory culture, as conceived by Henry Jenkins, existed prior to the advent of the World Wide Web. Now, due to the increasing popularity of social media tools, participatory culture is flourishing online as well. One popular movie review website, Rotten Tomatoes, demonstrates this trend. The website includes a suite of interactive, social media tools. Based on an ethnographic observation, participatory culture was seen to be occurring on the site. The power of the website to provide an open and accessible means of cultural dialogue and to encourage civic participation can be observed particularly when online user activity moves beyond discussions of film aesthetics to encompass larger societal and cultural issues. However, despite the site’s intriguing potential, there are various flaws observed that prevent a greater flourishing of participatory culture.

On Tags and Signs: A Semiotic Analysis of Folksonomies

published in Faculty of Information Quarterly, 2009

The practice of tagging resources on the Internet has become a popular activity on such websites as Delicious, Flickr, Technorati, CiteULike, and LibraryThing, making tagging a key method to enable online information retrieval and sharing. When tagging is done by members of the general public, it is known as a folksonomy. Folksonomies, unlike many other forms of communication, are created by individuals acting in isolation from one another and with no coordinated effort. Yet when the individual practice of tagging resources is shared openly difficulties in meaning arise, due in part to the lack of sufficient message coding and ambiguous connotations.

Lifehacking - a New Social Phenomenon Inspired by the Hacker Culture

published in 'Studia Medioznawcze' (Media Studies) 3 (30) 2007

Since its foundation, the Internet is constantly being influenced by its users who tend to adjust it to their own needs. Manuel Castells called it the self-evolution of the Internet. It is important to note that hackers played a particularly important role in creating and forming of the Internet. In a classic article "How to become a hacker", Eric S. Raymond defined the group as people who "solve problems and build things, and [...] believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help". The author ascertained that the hacker philosophy is not limited to computer environment. It is not indeed, as lifehacking, the new Internet phenomenon in North America, shows. One of the particularly interesting aspects of lifehacking is its ability to transport ideas of the old Internet culture back into the common, often non-computerized life. This tendency is rather rare as of now, but definitely worth noticing. Lifehacking, nevertheless, can also be seen as a part of a wide debate about the positive and negative influence of the Internet on human life. Presented here were the origins of the phenomenon, its relations with hacking, as well as its social usefulness and perspective future.

...full article in English, not translated by myself, is available at http://sm.id.uw.edu.pl/Numery/2007_3_30/pregowski.pdf

Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture

Published (in 2006) in The Information Society 22(2), pp.63-75.

Within media theory the worldwide shift from a 19th century print culture via a 20th century electronic culture to a 21st century digital culture is well documented. In this essay the emergence of a digital culture as amplified and accelerated by the popularity of networked computers, multiple-user software and Internet is investigated in terms of its principal components. A digital culture as an undetermined praxis is conceptualized as consisting of participation, remediation and bricolage. Using the literature on presumably ‘typical’ Internet phenomena such as the worldwide proliferation of Independent Media Centres (Indymedia) linked with (radical) online journalism practices and the popularity of (individual and group) weblogging, the various meanings and implications of this particular understanding of digital culture are explored. In the context of this essay digital culture can be seen as an emerging set of values, practices and expectations regarding the way people (should) act and interact within the contemporary network society. This digital culture has emergent properties with roots both in online and offline phenomena, with links to trends and developments pre-dating the World Wide Web, yet having an immediate impact and particularly changing the ways in which we use and give meaning to living in an increasingly interconnected, always on(line) environment.

Media Industries, Work and Life

Working paper (dated: June 2009)

Convergence culture, as a concept, articulates a shift in the way global media industries operate, and how people as audiences interact with them. It recognizes contemporary media culture as a primarily participatory culture. In turn, this assumption renders notions of production and consumption of (mass, mediated) culture not just theoretically problematic – as has been established earlier in disciplines as varied as communication studies, cultural geography, and media anthropology – but also less than useful on a practical level when making sense of the role media play in people’s everyday lives. This paper explores the practical applications of convergence culture from the perspectives of media workers, suggesting not so much the use of “new” categories, but rather an alignment of production, mediation and consumption as constituent practices in all experience of (in) media life.