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.