Geographies of media and communication I

Media and communication are attracting increasing amounts of attention from geographers but the work remains disorganized and lacks a unifying paradigm. This progress report suggests a new paradigm for geographical studies of media and communication and indicates how recent research fits under this umbrella. The report presents recent studies of literature, film and television, digital media, photography, comics, stamps and banknotes. The range of theoretical concerns in this body of work includes performance, agency, materiality, immateriality, networks, politics, emotions and affect. Collectively, these concerns point to communications not merely as transmissions through infrastructure, space and time, but rather as encounters between various human and nonhuman agents. The metaphysical question is exactly what such encounters do to participants – how agents are transformed by other agents’ communications. This leads to synthesis in a new paradigm for media/communication geography: the metaphysics of encounter.

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Afterword

Believing in Bits ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0014 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 229-238

Author(s):

Carole M. Cusack ◽

Massimo Leone ◽

Jeffrey Sconce

Keyword(s):

Popular Culture ◽

Digital Media ◽

Media Studies ◽

Media Communication ◽

Film And Media Studies ◽

The Subject ◽

Media And Communication ◽

The Relationship

In this afterword, three leading scholars, whose work explores the intersections of media, communication, and religion from different viewpoints, enter in dialog on the subject. Carole Cusack is a historian of religion and the author of groundbreaking works about the relationship between religion, imagination, and popular culture. Massimo Leone is a semiologist whose work has stretched the boundaries between the study of religion and the study of signs, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. Jeffrey Sconce is a scholar in film and media studies whose pioneering monograph, Haunted Media (2000), placed the theme of the supernatural at the forefront of studies in media and communication. Their responses provide a map of potential trajectories to further explore the connections between digital media and the supernatural.

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On the concept of figurations, deep mediatization, and the adulthood of media and communication studies – the interview with Andreas Hepp

Mediatization Studies ◽

10.17951/ms.2017.1.109 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 109 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jakub Nowak

Keyword(s):

Digital Media ◽

Communication Theory ◽

Empirical Studies ◽

Editorial Staff ◽

London School ◽

Media Communication ◽

Media Sociology ◽

Information Research ◽

London School Of Economics ◽

Media And Communication

Andreas Hepp is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research at theUniversityofBremen. Mediatization research is among his various research interests that generally include media and communication theory, media sociology, and transcultural communication. Theoretical and empirical studies on mediatization processes are also among the leading subjects in the academic work of ZeMKI.Andreas Hepp is the author of several publications on the subject of mediatization, including his latest book The Mediated Construction of Reality written with Nick Couldry of the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science. In The Mediated Construction of Reality, Couldry and Hepp revisit the question of how the social world is constructed, originally asked by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966), and provide the reader with their own original answer, acknowledging the complex and irreducible contribution of digital media to the process. The editorial staff of Mediatization Studies reckons Andreas Hepp as one of the leading academics in the field of mediatization research and his and Couldry’s book as one of the most interesting and up-to-date accounts on the issue. This is why we decided to present it via this interview.The interview was conducted during the Communicative Figurations international conference in Bremen (December 7-9, 2016), which focused on transforming communications in times of deep mediatization. Couldry and Hepp’s book had its official presentation during the conference.

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From headliners to hangovers: Digital media communication in the British rock music festival experience

Tourist Studies ◽

10.1177/1468797619885954 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

pp. 75-95 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Alyssa E Brown ◽

Keith Donne ◽

Paul Fallon ◽

Richard Sharpley

Keyword(s):

Digital Media ◽

Emotional Response ◽

Rock Music ◽

Online Activity ◽

Media Communication ◽

Time Activity ◽

Music Festivals ◽

Music Festival ◽

Space And Time

Extant tourist experience literature focuses on ‘live’ space and time activity, while pre- and post-components are often neglected despite the opportunities offered by increasing use of digital media communication (DMC). Focusing especially on the pre-festival experience but also addressing peri- and post-phases, this study examines the role of DMC in tourists’ experiences at British rock music festivals. Interviews with festivalgoers revealed three core and inter-related themes: information, emotional response and communitas. Initial engagement with DMC enabled planning, generated feelings of anticipatory excitement and created a sense of communitas. Online activity reduced peri-festival but continued to enhance the live event experience, while the virtual communitas was extended at the post-festival phase.

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Mobile bystanders and rubbernecks, disaster tourists, and helpers. Towards a theoretical framework for critically studying action possibilities at accident sites

Mobile Media & Communication ◽

10.1177/2050157920984828 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 205015792098482

Author(s):

Linus Andersson ◽

Ebba Sundin

Keyword(s):

Digital Media ◽

News Media ◽

Well Being ◽

Theoretical Framework ◽

Communication Studies ◽

Mobile Media ◽

Ethical Implications ◽

Theoretical Perspectives ◽

Media And Communication ◽

Media Practices

This article addresses the phenomenon of mobile bystanders who use their smartphones to film or take photographs at accident scenes, instead of offering their help to people in need or to assist medical units. This phenomenon has been extensively discussed in Swedish news media in recent years since it has been described as a growing problem for first responders, such as paramedics, police, and firefighters. This article aims to identify theoretical perspectives that are relevant for analyzing mobile media practices and discuss the ethical implications of these perspectives. Our purpose is twofold: we want to develop a theoretical framework for critically approaching mobile media practices, and we want to contribute to discussions concerning well-being in a time marked by mediatization and digitalization. In this pursuit, we combine theory from social psychology about how people behave at traumatic scenes with discussions about witnessing in and through media, as developed in media and communication studies. Both perspectives offer various implications for normative inquiry, and in our discussion, we argue that mobile bystanders must be considered simultaneously as transgressors of social norms and as emphatic witnesses behaving in accordance with the digital media age. The article ends with a discussion regarding the implications for further research.

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Theorizing media, communication and social change: towards a processual approach

Media Culture & Society ◽

10.1177/0163443718810926 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 41 (4) ◽

pp. 482-501 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Sabina Mihelj ◽

James Stanyer

Keyword(s):

Social Change ◽

Social Order ◽

Media Communication ◽

Shared Language ◽

Agent Of Change ◽

Media And Communication ◽

Conceptual Language ◽

Processual Approach

Debates about the role of media and communication in social change are central to our discipline, yet advances in this field are hampered by disciplinary fragmentation, a lack of shared conceptual language and limited understanding of long-term shifts in the field. To address this, we first develop a typology that distinguishes between approaches that foreground the role of media and communication as an agent of change, and approaches that treat media and communication as an environment for change. We then use this typology to identify key trends in the field since 1951, including the sharp downturn in work focusing on economic aspects of change after 1985, the decline of grand narratives of social change since 2000 and the parallel return to media effects. We conclude by outlining the key traits of a processual approach to social change, which has the capacity to offer the basis for shared language in the field. This language can enable us to think of media, communication and social change across its varied temporal and social planes, and link together the processes involved in the reproduction of status quo with fundamental changes to social order.

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Martin Heidegger’s Anti-Semitism: Philosophy of Technology and the Media in the Light of the "Black Notebooks". Implications for the Reception of Heidegger in Media and Communication Studies

tripleC Communication Capitalism & Critique Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society ◽

10.31269/triplec.v13i1.650 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Christian Fuchs

Keyword(s):

Digital Media ◽

Philosophy Of Technology ◽

Modern Technology ◽

Being And Time ◽

German Philosophy ◽

Black Forest ◽

Media Communication ◽

Anti Semitism ◽

The Media ◽

The Moment

“Heidegger is the petty bourgeois of German philosophy, the man who has placed on German philosophy his kitschy night-cap […] When I see that even super-intelligent people have been taken in by Heidegger, […] I feel sickened to this day. […] Heidegger used to hold court at Todtnauberg and at all times would allow himself to be admired on his philosophical Black Forest plinth like a sacred cow. […] They made their pilgramages, as it were, into the philosophical Black Forest, to the sacred Martin Heidegger and knelt down before their idol”--- Thomas BernhardAbstract:In spring 2014, three volumes of the Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks), Heidegger’s philosophical notebooks, were published in the German edition of his collected works. They contain notes taken in the years 1931-1941 and have resulted in public debates about the role of anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s thought.This article asks: What are and should be the implications of the publication of the Black Notebooks for the reception of Heidegger in the study, theory, and philosophy of media, communication, and technology? It discusses Theodor W. Adorno’s and Moishe Postone’s contributions to the critical theory of anti-Semitism and applies these approaches for an analysis of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks.The analysis shows that the logic of modern technology plays an important role in the Black Notebooks. The paper therefore also re-visits some of Heidegger’s writings on technology in light of the Black Notebooks. There is a logical link between the Black Notebooks' anti-Semitism and the analysis of technology in Being and Time and The Question Concerning Technology. The first publication provides the missing link and grounding for the second and the third.Heidegger’s works have had significant influence on studies of the media, communication, and the Internet. Given the anti-Semitism in the Black Notebooks, it is time that Heideggerians abandon Heidegger, and instead focus on alternative traditions of thought. It is now also the moment where scholars should consider stopping to eulogise and reference Heidegger when theorising and analysing the media, communication, culture, technology, digital media, and the Internet.Image source: By Willy Pragher (Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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What does frustration, serendipity and uncertainties of global media and communication means? Some versions from Latvia and Estonia

Informacijos mokslai ◽

10.15388/im.2020.87.23 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 87 ◽

pp. 8-12

Author(s):

Deniss Hanovs ◽

Anda Rozukalne

Keyword(s):

Everyday Life ◽

Digital Media ◽

Chemical Formula ◽

Global Media ◽

Short Novel ◽

The Usa ◽

On Line ◽

Media And Communication ◽

Low Wages ◽

Entertainment Culture

In a short novel by contemporary Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin “White square” (2018), the moderator of the show with the same title gets killed during the show in which four guests express their visions of present society. Everyone can follow the killing on-line, having voted shortly before for the most entertaining guest. After having received an injection of a new chemical formula which is supposed to entertain the audience, the four participants get wild and destroy the whole show enjoyed by the audience. A new moderator is being engaged to let the show go on... This rather gothic plot shows another part of the reality – the memories of the director of the show about someone, a person unknown to the reader, who has been killed to start the bloody entertainment. The ring, made of the skin of this unknown person gets lost and lands in a realm beyond the on-line entertainment culture: poor workers, their uneducated wives and alcoholics, who still inhabit the off-line everyday life of low wages, heavy physical jobs and simple joys ignored by blood thirsty audience, voting and selling advertisement time for higher prices. Both groups, digital media users and poor underpaid blue collars are in contemporary Europe and the USA targets for populist messages in media.

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