Personal media vs. communal media in Jenkins’ Convergence Culture

I’m reading Henry Jenkin’s Convergence Culture, 2006 version. Impressed with fluency of writing, with examples of how old and new media coexist in the present era, with attempt at distinguishing media from ‘delivery technologies’ (p. 13-14) and with the frank admission that the author doesn’t really understand the current media revolution – a rare public confession to make in the genre of popular new media scholarship, not generally known for the modesty of its authors. Jenkins argues against a technology-driven account of media convergence. Instead he regards convergence as a ‘cultural shift’ in which consumers ’seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content’ (p. 3).

Because of Jenkins’ insistence on the growing complexity of today’s media landscape, I was surprised to read in the Conclusion about his views on ‘personalised media’. This, says Jenkins, was an early 1990s ideal promoted by the likes of the conservative theorist George Gilder in which digital media would liberate us from the tyrannical mass media, ‘allowing us to consume only content we found personally meaningful’ (p. 255). In contrast to this individualistic world dominated by personal media, Jenkins argues that convergence fosters ‘participation and collective intelligence’ (p. 256). He concludes that

[r]ather than talking about personal media, perhaps we should be talking about communal media – media that become part of our lives as members of communities, whether experienced face-to-face at the most local level or over the Net (p. 256).

But surely it is not an either/or matter? With Marika Lüders (2008), I would argue that three main types of media coexist and collide in many parts of our contemporary world: mass media, group media and personal media. Personalised media is one trend among many that we can observe in recent years – the ability of individuals to personalise their media uses. But it is not the only trend, and individuals never operate in a boundless, undifferentiated social space. Individuals personalise their media within and across organisations, markets, fields, kin groups, peer groups, cohorts, and so on, each with their own social and media ‘logics’, as I argue in a forthcoming paper, The weakness of weak ties.

Anthropology of Media book series, Berghahn

Series Editors: John Postill and Mark Peterson

The ubiquity of media across the globe has led to an explosion of interest in the ways people around the world use media as part of their everyday lives. This series addresses the need for works that describe and theorize multiple, emerging, and sometimes interconnected, media practices in the contemporary world. Interdisciplinary and inclusive, this series offers a forum for ethnographic methodologies, descriptions of non-Western media practices, explorations of transnational connectivity, and studies that link culture and practices across fields of media production and consumption.

Read more

Towards an anthropology of security

** via cascanews **

Call for papers for a special session at the 2010 Annual Conference of the Canadian Anthropological Society / Société canadienne d’anthropologie (CASCA)

May 31 to June 3 2010, Montréal

Despite the fact that references to (in)security are becoming a normal feature of contemporary political discourses, anthropologists rarely engage directly with this issue. The field of Security Studies seems to be monopolized by political scientists and military experts. But various voices have recently emerged within the critical and post-structural trends in Security Studies calling for sociological and anthropological researches on security. Strangely, few anthropologists seem to accept this invitation.

In the past, anthropologists have successfully taken as object of analysis concepts traditionally associated with other fields of social sciences. The concept of development is a good example. The past and current contributions of what we now refer to as “Anthropology of development” to the critical scrutiny of the concept and practices of development cannot be overestimated. In the light of such experiences and in the context of growing security-oriented discourses and practices, the organizers of this session believe that it is urgent to reflect on our possible contribution to the critical analysis of security.

What would this Anthropology of security look like? Does such a field already exist? What are the current scholarly anthropological works on security? What have they achieved? How? Does it make sense to unify these researches under the common label of Anthropology of security? What theoretical and methodological approaches could be mobilized? What objects of investigation seem particularly promising?

The organizers of this session think that these are important questions that deserve to be addressed and would like to invite you to take part to this discussion during the 2010 CASCA Conference.

Please submit proposed abstracts (150 words), including name, departmental
positions and affiliations to Ariane Belanger-Vincent (ariane.belanger-vincent.1 at ulaval.ca) or David Moffette (moffette at yorku dot ca) by February 7th.

Organizers:

Ariane Bélanger-Vincent
PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Laval University
External Graduate Researcher, York Centre for International and Security Studies

David Moffette
PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, York University
Graduate Researcher, York Centre for International and Security Studies

New media and cultural change, 1980-2010

Still musing and reading in my spare time about new media and cultural change from 1980 to 2010. Of possible interest:

* New book out on the barriers to the free flow of media contents across international borders: Cultural Barriers to the Success of Foreign Media Content: Western Media in China, India, and Japan, by Ulrike Rohn. The argument would seem to cohere nicely with media anthropological evidence on the cultural selectivity of foreign media contents. Perhaps what’s really interesting is not so much those rare products such as Avatar or the Olympics that enjoy planetary appeal but to look at the country-specific patterns of cultural appropriation – these are likely to vary greatly and tell us about a country’s unresolved issues at a given historical moment.

* John Downing’s mid-1990s book about the need to internationalise (and politicise) media and communication theory in which he studies the post-socialist transitions in three Eastern European countries. Politico-institutional stability of UK-US (the heartland of media theory) is the exception, not the norm around the world, says Downing.

* Daya Thussu’s recent paper on the challenges posed to media and communication studies by rise of China and India (or ‘Chindia’) to global power, given the long-standing UK-US ‘duopoly’ in such studies.

* Jenkins’ Media Convergence – intriguing ideas about the clash of old and new media in the early 21st century, albeit firmly within a tacit US context. How would such ideas travel to Ghana, Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea?

* Nation-states as media and cultural change ‘laboratories’ ripe for comparative analysis? e.g. Malaysia example of state-led process of mediated cultural engineering (‘nation-building’)  in a postcolonial state; Papua New Guinea far less successful case, it would appear (but see Foster’s Materializing the Nation); Zambia somewhere in between?

* Regions also interesting for comparative analysis, e.g. EU, African Union, Asean.

* Epstein found in 1950s Copperbelt region of Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia) that processes of change within a social field – in that case the field of residential affairs – unfold unevenly, with some regions of the field enjoying better insulation from the winds of change than others. Is the same happening on a planetary scale? Are some regions of the planet more sheltered from media-related changes than others?

* Historical processes are finite – eventually they all run their course. “The Second World War released many currents and some of them have yet to run their full course” (J. M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World, 1995: 954).

Political agency and communication

Downing, John (1996) Internationalizing Media Theory. London: Sage.
Gledhill, John (2000) Power and its Disguises. London: Pluto.

p. x. According to Downing, questions of state, of totalitarian systems, of political activism, etc, have often been studied without reference to communication, ‘as though politics consisted of mute pieces on a chessboard’.

On reading this passage I was reminded of Gledhill’s point about Bourdieu’s theory of the political field. Gledhill argues that Bourdieu’s use of his notion of habitus in the study of politics is problematic because it sees humans as being programmed through socialisation and downplays the role of communication in the activities of political agents.

How do we account [if we use the notion of habitus] for the unusually persuasive nature of the ‘messages’ of certain prophets and party leaders at particular moments in time, and for the fact that the same community (say French industrial workers) can be mobilized by communists in one period and racists and fascists in another? (Gledhill 2000: 141)

Whitehall’s web revolution: the inside story

Original Message
Received: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:27:37 PM GMT
From: Steven Clift <…>
To: newswire <…>
Subject: [DW] UK – Whitehall’s web revolution: the inside story #gov20 #opengov

From:
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/01/whitehalls-web-revolution-the-inside-story/

Prospect has uncovered the story behind Tim Berners-Lee’s work deep inside British government, and his remarkable success at busting open a closed, data-hugging state

Before working as an editor at Prospect, I was briefly a civil servant. The experience taught me that most civil servants knew nothing about data, and the few that did were rarely listened to. Most were masters at prevarication when anyone tried to suggest that they open up vital information about schools, housing, health services, to the public; the crown jewel in Britain’s data crown, Ordnance Survey, was especially jealously guarded. So I was a surprised—shocked, even—to learn just before Christmas that the deal was done. An infrastructure for the mass release of data into the public domain was in place: in a few months they would be giving it away for free. How had this minor policy miracle happened? Three words, I was told: Tim Berners-Lee. It seemed the inventor of the world wide web, and one of Gordon Brown’s boldest and unlikeliest appointments of the last year, had winkled open the treasure chest.

For the last six months he and his friend Nigel Shadbolt have been leading an unlikely, quiet crusade inside Whitehall. This morning both both Berners-Lee and I discussed the implications of what they have been up to on the Today programme [see here, scroll down to 7:45am].

Some of Britain’s most impressive internet policy experts had long been trying to break down this particular door. Ex-MP Richard Allan. Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson. Internet gurus Tom Steinberg, and Tom Loosemore. Former Number 10 policy advisor William Perrin. All bounced back dazed when they tried shoulder charging the Ordnance Survey’s door, as if tripped up by a canny geographer’s sandal on their run up. So my colleague Tom Chatfield and I decided we that needed to find out exactly how the man who invented the web had managed to reinvent the rules of British data.

The story we uncovered will be on the cover of Prospect magazine’s next issue (out on Thursday 28th January). It is a tale of star power, serendipity, vision, persistence and an almost unprecedented convergence of all levels of government. It is the best sort of policy story: one where the policy works, the good guys win, and public interest is served.

More:
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/01/whitehalls-web-revolution-the-inside-story/

Digital epidemics and social fields

Working on a paper on ‘viral’ digital contents, i.e. those jokes, rumours, videos, photos, etc. that spread like wild fire over email, SMS, personal network sites and so on. Some of the ideas I’m chewing on:

* To study digital epidemics one must take into account both psychological and ecological (social) factors (Sperber 1996, Explaining Culture), that is, both (a) the innate cognitive predispositions that lead individual users to select and forward  certain digital contents and not others as well as (b) the social milieux in which these individual users decide whether or not to ‘pass it on’ (firms, offices, fields, markets, kin groups, peer groups, subcultures, culture areas, etc.)

* A lot of attention has been paid in recent years to those rare digital epidemics that are hugely successful, especially to marketing campaigns that ‘went viral’ and clocked millions of hits, e.g. YouTube viewings. While these pandemics are important, we shouldn’t lose sight of that ‘long tail‘ of would-be epidemics that never spread beyond a small circle of friends and acquaintances.

* My focus in this paper will be on digital epidemics in relation to  a specific kind of social milieu: the field of practice (art, sociology, fencing, political activism, etc.). I will argue that digital epidemics do not simply spread through ’social networks’. To understand each epidemic’s rates and patterns of distribution we must bear in mind that humans operate within and across moral universes that will vary in the degree and quality of their boundedness and openness. For instance, let’s imagine you work for a sexually conservative religious organisation. I forward you a lewd joke and you receive it on your PC at work. Although you find the joke funny you may decide to delete it straight away without forwarding it to anyone, least of all to your superiors. Had you received that same joke on your iPhone or laptop at home, though, you may have forwarded it to a select group of friends and contacts who you know (or hope) will enjoy the joke without taking offence (some of them may even pass it on).

* Or say you are a sociologist and receive that same joke at home. Whilst you may well pass it on to a few sociologists who are part of your lewd joke list (a list that includes non-sociologists) you probably won’t forward it to your sociological mailing lists as this wouldn’t be appropriate. It is precisely the field dimensions of digital epidemics that I want to concentrate on, drawing from my research on a field of suburban activism in Malaysia. How do field practitioners (sociologists, artists, activists, taxi drivers, political bloggers…) regulate the spread of digital epidemics within their fields? How do they innoculate other practitioners from digital epidemics regarded within the field as pernicious (e.g. slurs and rumours reportedly spread by their political enemies)? What sort of technical (incl. software) and discursive mechanisms are there in place to protect a given field site (e.g. a sociology mailing list) from certain ‘viral’ contents whilst allowing the spread of supposedly beneficial viruses contents?

CFA: The politics of digital media in the Balkans and the Middle East

From: [...] Helga Tawil Souri
Sent: 20 January 2010 17:06
To: [medianthro list]
[...]

Editors: Helga Tawil-Souri (New York University) and Zala Volcic (University of Queensland)

We invite abstract submissions for an edited book on the creation, dissemination, interpretation, and role of digital media for political purposes in the Balkans and the Middle East. The Balkan and Middle East contexts provide interesting case studies because of their overlapping patterns of national and regional identification combined with the tensions these create.

The overall goal of the edited volume will be to consider the relationship between a wide array of internet uses and forms of political deliberation, taking into consideration both the ways in which interactive media help to foster deliberation, discussion, and the coordination of collection action, and the ways in which they may thwart public sphere ideals of rational critical deliberation and public accountability. Our intent is to provide an overview of the spectrum of political uses of new media in these two regions.

Contributors may come from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, attending to how political groups, practices, and communicative genres are underwritten and sustained via engagement with digital technology, as well as to how the political realm itself is transformed in the age of digital media.

Relevant topics include but are not limited to the following:

- The political uses of digital media

- The uses of digital media for purposes of organizing protest and dissent and for the construction of forums for political deliberation.

- How activists and (political) groups have used the internet to hold state authorities accountable or challenge them, or to publish and circulate information.

- The creation, dissemination and/or interpretation of digital media content by communities and individuals for political purposes

- The kinds of politics that are created/expressed in the digital media environment

- How mediated expressions and spaces connect to politics ‘on the ground’

- The kinds of political challenges that arise from digital media use in the regions

- The shifting relationship between digital media and journalism

- How population groups use the internet to connect with one another across national divisions (for example Serbs living in Bosnia, Serbia, and Montenegro; Palestinians living in Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria).

- Chapters may focus on different forms of digital media and spaces: internet cafes, social networking sites, bulletin boards, blogs, twitter, wikipedia, youTube, listservs, websites and other digital/social media.

- Chapters may focus on one national context or sub-context, or may be comparative in scope.

- For the purposes of this project, the relevant geographic range of the Balkans and the Middle East includes the following: Albania, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestinian Territories, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen.

- We particularly welcome contributions from scholars from the relevant regions.

Please send a *short bio, a publication list,* and a *500 word abstract* detailing
the topic of your article, the overall context, your material, methodology, and theoretical argument by *March 1, 2010*. Authors will be notified by the 25th of March 2010 of the outcome of their submissions. If accepted, full papers, of a maximum of 6,000 words, should be submitted by* September 1, 2010*. Papers will then be reviewed individually by the editors and in the standard blind review process of the publisher.

Submissions and inquiries about this volume should be sent to both

helga /at/ nyu dot edu

z.volcic /at/ uq dot edu dot au

Tras 12 años de Internet: evolución del periodismo digital en Costa Rica

by Gabriela Mayorga Memoria
via Observatorio para la Cibersociedad

Tomando el año de 1995 como el punto de partida para comprender el impacto de la Internet a nivel masivo, se ofrece un panorama resumido de los cambios provocados por el surgimiento de la Internet. En la descripción se refleja la pasión y la ilusión desbordante que empapó el contexto del nacimiento de la Internet a nivel masivo y las esperanzas que se depositaron y se depositan aun en en ella. Se explica el por qué el proceso marca un cambio en el quehacer periodístico, al cumplirse la promesa de una revolución en los procesos comunicativos. Tras ese repaso, se apuntan algunas observaciones que pretenden describir las prácticas del periodismo digital en Costa Rica, construyendo una vista panorámica de lo ocurrido en los últimos años respecto a la aplicación de las técnicas de escritura para la web en el país y con ello arribar a un escenario general sobre el cómo los medios de comunciación están procesando los cambios impulsados por la revolución digital.

more…

New PhD course in media ethnography

via Ørecomm site

by Admin on 19 January 2010

A PhD course on Media Ethnography: Theory and Practice will be held at Pappersbruket, near Osby in south Sweden, 9-11 June 2010.

Among the confirmed speakers are:

• Jo Helle-Valle, Nat’l Institute for Consumer Research, Oslo, Norway
• Debra Spitulnik, Emory University, USA
• Thomas Tufte, Roskilde University/Ørecomm, Denmark

This course is designed to introduce PhD students to the theory and practice of media ethnography. We explore how media ethnography applies to both media production and media reception, and how it is fundamentally both a theory and a method for investigating everyday practices and lived experiences as they are shaped by culturally-specific ways of being-in-the world. Media to be considered include: television, film, radio, newspapers, and new media. The course will begin with a brief overview of the history of ethnographic approaches within media studies and cultural studies, which dates back to the mid 1980s. We then engage more recent scholarship within media anthropology, focusing specifically on three dimensions of ethnography:

• as fieldwork method;
• as anthropological lens, and
• as a method of writing and re-presentation.

The course is organised by the Danish National Research School for Media, Communication, and Journalism (FMKJ). Detailed information will soon be available at the FMKJ website.