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- Convenors:
-
Cornelius Schubert
(TU Dortmund)
Estrid Sørensen (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
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- Theme:
- Changing Knowledge Communities
- Location:
- C. Humanisticum AB 2.09
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 17 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
Long Abstract:
Over the last years, we have seen an increasing interdisciplinary interest in the overlapping areas of STS and media studies. Both fields are inherently concerned with questions of mediation, they ask similar questions concerning related topics. However, they also differ in their empirical and conceptual approaches.
Conceptually, media studies centre around, of course, the notion of 'media' and 'machine', while STS more often theorise in terms of 'instruments' and 'apparatus', 'tools', 'devices', and of course 'technology'. Empirically, STS pays little attention to leisure and entertainment media and media content. Media studies, on the other hand, is less interested in how innovations are politically and legally regulated. The notion of 'technology' evokes questions about what this phenomenon 'does', about mechanisms of production and control (Deuber-Mankowsky 2007), while 'media' invites inquiries into what it 'holds', into aesthetics and emotional aspects.
In this track, we would like to trace the similarities and differences between empirical and conceptual approaches. We are interested in the characteristics of how the notions of media and technology are applied in such heterogeneous fields like STS and media studies. We want to enable a fruitful discussion which makes possible exchanges between STS and media studies concerning the manifold processes of mediation in current societies. Thus, we call for papers which address, among others, questions about differences in understandings and vocabularies as well explorations of empirical, methodological, and theoretical overlappings which already exist.
While the motivation of this call is conceptual, we very much welcome empirically founded papers.
The papers will be presented in the order shown and grouped 3-4 between sessions
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 17 September, 2014, -Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses how STS concepts complemented those from media studies during my one-year ethnographic investigation of amateur video producers' Internet distribution practices.
My investigation was initially framed by media studies literature, which emphasised concepts such as participation and community, and primarily concerned human actors. I realised after a short time however that this focus only partially captured my informants' experiences: Many found the technologies they used problematic, and the various concerns expressed about them, initially dismissed by me as background "noise" as I sort to understand my informants' social ties, became important clues to understanding the nature of the processes of which they were a part. It was at this point that I turned to Actor-Network Theory (and also DeLanda's reading of Deleuze's and Guattari's assemblage theory) to provide a broader theoretical framework. This enabled me to foreground the technologies, treating them as important actants, and conceptualise the different processes the producers were a part of as heterogeneous networks, which provided a broader vocabulary to analyse the contested and precarious nature of their distribution practices.
My paper concludes by discussing one of the key findings from my research: how asymmetries of power in the networks significantly hindered the producers. I argue that while a media studies approach alone would likely have lead to a similar conclusion in this instance, the STS framework allowed for a more systematic treatment of technology's role in these power relations, and provided deeper insights into the processes at work.
Paper long abstract:
The presentation will focus on the case study of an online amateur community devoted to instant analogue photography (Polaroid-like). It will be argued that concepts from STS and media studies could be fruitfully used together to enrich the understanding of this practice of "technological resistance" (Kline & Pinch, 1996) to digital photography. On the one hand, concepts drawn from the SCOT tradition will be used to illustrate how photographers are creatively re-appropriating an obsolescent technology, while at the same time opposing its use to the non-use of digital cameras. On the other hand, the concept of "remediation" (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) will prove to be useful to understand how an image-based online community translates the materiality of analogue photography into digital images, in order to produce and share a "resistant" meaning. Thus, the case study will provide an insight into the dialectical tension between digital and earlier media. It will be claimed that a cross-disciplinary approach could achieve a deeper understanding of the socio-material and symbolic dimensions of contemporary, "resistant" photographic practices.
Bolter & Grusin (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kline & Pinch (1996) 'Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social
Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States', Technology and Culture 37(4):
763-795.
Paper long abstract:
I will show results from a three-year participant observation on a group of very influential German Twitter amateurs. There, I have participated in a field, where the relationship of media technology and media practices can be studied extraordinarily well.
This relationship is one of the core issues of German media theory: After a dominance of techno-determinism, media theorist Hartmut Winkler developed a cyclical model of mutual inscription of media practices and media technologies, whereas one of them still holds a primate as »cameras are produced by camera producers not by cameramen« (Winkler 2004, 136). Winkler's approach has been criticized by Jens Schröter (2014, 244) for this prioritization.
In that debate, German media theory encounters concepts of innovation and interpretative flexibility that have been developed in The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987), which has already been used by van Dijck (2012) to analyze Twitter. She states »Twitter's meaning has not stabilized yet« (ibid., 19).
I will demonstrate Twitter's efforts to remain ›unstable‹ up to the present day and discuss the role of usage practices in that context. I will ask, in how far Winkler's model might have failed to describe the relationship of media practices and media technologies on a general level but remains helpful to understand the relationship of Twitter practices and the platform Twitter, as Twitter is produced by the company Twitter and not by Twitterers.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years media studies discovered STS to revitalize discussions about the materiality of media as well as empirical research into media practices. In the Anglophone media studies the introduction of STS concepts is part of an overcoming of understanding media as a facilitor of something else (intentions, meanings, power etc) and an alternative approach to context-, content- and effect-oriented approaches. In German speaking media studies it is more a way to rescue media ethnography from its focus on humans, interpretation and 'text' as well as doing media theory without a technological apriori. At the same time STS have recognized that contemporary technology is to a large extent communication and media technology. The interest in rather mundane technologies and the rise of internet and software gave way to a renewed interest in media not only as broadcaster of scientific and technological knowledge, but to understand scientific and technological practices as mediation and to understand media technology in its distributed material agency. Further in particular digital media are used to learn from for doing social and cultural research.
In my talk I discuss these encounters between STS and media studies and aim to illustrate these with examples taken from research into television audience ratings and/or mobile (location based) games. By building on the rich insights of both studies, such an approach can illuminate the affects, performativity and politics of media technology in more depth.
Paper long abstract:
The presentation will develop a discussion on some concepts coming from STS and media studies, only marginally considered together in the study of media and culture: the concepts of "formats", "standards" and "infrastructures". These notions, with their different origins and applications, will be discussed to address questions related with the process of digitalization of cultural consumption, with specific reference to the circulation of digital music and ebooks. The concepts of "standard" and "infrastructure" have a robust tradition in STS (i.e. Star & Ruhleder, 1996), but this work has not been embraced in media studies, even if both these terms are commonly used in general ways to discuss media and communication. The notion of "format" and its relevance to understand media have been recognized only recently as extremely relevant in media studies, following the work of Jonathan Sterne (2012) on the creation of mp3. Sterne's work, which can be rightly considered an STS-informed historical approach to digital media, has highlighted the need to develop further media studies to consider the hidden dimension implicit in digital media standard and infrastructures. The presentation will discuss these concepts and their reciprocal connections to develop potential intersections between STS and media studies, also illustrating these ideas with empirical examples regarding the process of digitalization of consumption practices of music and books.
Star & Ruhleder (1996). Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces. Information Systems Research, 7(1), 111-134.
Sterne (2012) MP3. The meaning of a format, Duke University Press.
Paper long abstract:
Along with the growth of the video game industry, Game Studies have been developed as a research field of its own in the early 2000s. From the start, the field has been and remain strongly anchored in communication and media studies, that gather 30% of the authors of the two main Game Studies journals. Early works were especially focused on online games, and they appeared as an epistemic culture (KnorrCetina) aiming at providing answers to what was then a puzzling phenomenon associated with that new media : "virtual worlds" (Mayra). From then on, the major debates in the field both had to do with the opposition between game and play: internalism vs. externalism, formalism vs. culturalism (Lowood). In the last 5 years, the ability of STS to articulate the technical and social dimensions of games (Taylor, Kerr, Nardi) was instrumental in the search for a way out of this gap between games and culture (Dovey&Kennedy).
We propose here a scientometric study of the foundationnal moment of Game Studies' field through the analysis of all articles published in its two main journals, *Games & Culture* (2006-) and *Game Studies* (2001-). From the perspective of a sociology of science, we study the birth of a discipline through the evolution of its objects (its original focus on online games) and its themes. We then investigate how the disciplinary origins of scholars shaped their approach of videogames. We finally show how the influence of STS on Game Studies was meditated through anthropological studies of players communities.
Paper long abstract:
Technological determinism has been a tacit companion in most of the Media Studies tradition since their beginnings, focusing mainly in the study of the media effects and impacts of new technologies on society or culture. But the language of "effects and impacts" has been progressively influenced by other approaches, like STS, that take this determinism into account and surpasses it.
Media Archaeology and ANT approaches, even with important differences between them, have also some key points in common that are contributing decisively to the development of Media Studies. First of all, their battle against technological and social determinism; then the redefinition of the agencies involved; also the resignification of the materiality of media and its relation with discourses; and finally the redistribution of causalities and linear temporality as well, amongst many others. In this sense, through the analysis of similarities and differences between them, we would like to approach to Media Archaeology as a strategic connector between key contributions of STS to the Media Studies.
Our goal in this communication it is to expose some of the onto-epistemic contributions of STS to Media Studies through the dialogue and analysis of contributions and limitations of a Media Archaeology approach to key study cases of media apparatus.