Jack Monroe and the cultural politics of the austerity celebrity

This article conceptualises home cook Jack Monroe as an ‘austerity celebrity’, a mediated figure who forged her public persona directly through articulations with austerity culture. Drawing on an intertextual analysis of her blogs, cookbooks, interviews, speeches and representations across the media, I argue that Monroe demonstrates the paradox of anti-austerity celebrity in becoming economically successful as the face of modern poverty. Monroe’s navigation of a dual identity of celebrity and activist manifests in her critique of the government, her middle-class precarity, her status as a mother and her queer identity which requires consistent ‘authenticity labour’. In Monroe’s case, this labour is visible as a constant and politicised struggle over the terms of her ‘authenticity’. While unable to manage her more complex middle-class, queer identity, which confronts the established grounds of ‘feckless mothers’, the UK tabloid media attempts to frame Monroe’s success as a rags-to-riches style narrative reinforcing hegemonic rhetorics of resilience and creativity as routes to overcoming adversity. This analysis of the struggles at work in Monroe’s mediated presence demonstrates how the moral imperatives for women to offer to resourcefully manage the ‘challenges’ of austerity cuts, arguably draws attention away from austerity as structurally and politically motivated.

Introduction: #TogetherApart: Mediatization, (Inter)subjectivity and Sociality at a Time of Pandemic

This special issue features 12 contributions by early career scholars and artists dealing with the role of mediatization in the COVID-19 pandemic conjuncture. Themes such as mediated intimacy and sociality, pandemic ideology, politicians’ curated authenticity and discursive constructions of self, and playbour and resistance in digital games are examined in five original articles, while three autoethnographic contributions explore the concepts of mediated presence, collectivity, contemplative community, loneliness and relationality. The autoethnographies – in the form of short film, collage and poetry vignettes, respectively – add a personal experiential layer to the broader themes. To generate (mediated) interpersonal dialogue, two artists/academics engage deeply with the autoethographies, further reflecting on the themes explored therein. The issue concludes with an interview with Professor Andreas Hepp, of the University of Bremen, who comments on the contributions and reflects on the role of “deep mediatization” in the pandemic world.

Paradox of Presence

The following work is an autoethnographic study on emotional engagement and sense of presence mediated by Internet in cases of extreme situations. This story is the one of death. In April 2020, my step-father died of lung cancer. The COVID-19 lockdown had caught him and my mother in Berlin, where my step-father had been undergoing his treatment which unfortunately turned out to be unsuccessful. Based in Lisbon, I was not able to be physically next to my parents during these hard times. However, I tried to do my best giving support via messages and videocalls. It coincided that on the night of my step-father's death, when my mother was next to him in the hospital room, I was also there, “next” to them both, but via videocall. My short film is a creative reflection on the concept of mediated presence.

Agenda selfying and agendamelding

This essay examines the notion of personal salience, introducing individual online media users as ‘objects’ in the context of agenda setting theory. The salience of the self has been investigated by scholars in various interdisciplinary explorations. In this project, the notion of personal salience is revisited from an agendamelding perspective. Along with political and civic agendas of individuals that meld in online community environments, individuals promote themselves as agendas that deserve public attention. Examining personal agendas raises new questions about perceptional and behavioral influences as ordinary individuals strive to establish their mediated presence.

Integrating the world of presence theory: Illusion, pretence, attending, and pretending

We selected four fragments from the world of presence theory for particular attention. These are: presence as a perceptual illusion, as a pretence, as attending to an external world, and as pretending the virtual is real. We reflect on and try to unite these fragments into a fairly coherent and perhaps more general view of the nature of presence, one that may help integrate insights into both ‘natural’ and mediated presence. One conclusion from this work is that when we feel present, we believe that what is happening is real, in the moment, whether it is in the physical world or in a virtual reality (VR). In other words, when we feel really present in an environment it is real for us. If presence in VR is an illusion, so is presence in the physical world. Presence in VR requires imagination and belief (though not make-believe), and so does presence in the physical world.

Been There, Done That

Digital media have been defined as meta-media that integrate new as well as old media on a single technological platform. As such, digital media enable new forms of meta-communication about the conditions under which communication is accomplished. The resulting meta-data bear witness to who was present, when, where and doing what, and these meta-data remain present for system administrators, regulators, marketers and other third parties to reinterpret and recycle. This article outlines the importance of meta-communication for contemporary communication theory, examines mediated presence as an instance of meta-communication, and addresses the implications of digitally mediated presence for current issues of surveillance.

NAVIGATING NETWORKED TIME: VISUAL SELF-IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND MANAGEMENT AMONG YOUTH

According to dominant theorizations of contemporary society, many people’s daily practices now occur within, and reproduce, a social world where media are the fundamental reference and resource for the development of the self (Couldry and Hepp 2017:15). Although previous research has revealed the mutual shaping of technologies, interaction, and identity in the broader contexts of economic and social change related to ‘millennials’, we know little about the precise ways in which these practices occur and how the self is being differently constructed over time. Using a multi-method qualitative approach, this work in progress paper explores three key questions: 1) What happens when visuality becomes a part of youth’s everyday practices of interaction? 2) What roles are images playing in routine interaction among youth? 3) How and in what ways does the maintenance of a visually ‘mediated presence’ in social media shape youths’ views of the self? This paper elaborates on findings within three categories that illustrate youth’s visual practices and how they are differently understood over time: (1) images of the self in the moment; (2) images of the self over time; and (3) images of the self under surveillance. The preliminary findings of this research suggest that although youth’s technological practices may not all be new, there are significant aspects of visuality that alters some of the key factors shaping young people’s use and understandings of new media technologies.

From Correspondence to Computers: A Theory of Mediated Presence in History

This article proposes a theory of mediated presence, defined as the sense of presence— despite physical absence—made possible by technology. Pushing the boundaries of media, the theory integrates various notions of presence at a distance: telepresence in telecommunications and computer-mediated communication, liveness in broadcasting and on the Internet, and the epistolary presence of antiquity. Theoretically, it adopts a social constructivist approach to long-term communication history, with an emphasis on technological breakdowns. The core discussion addresses three criteria for a historical, comparative analysis of mediated presence: dissemination versus dialogue, transmission-reception time lags, and levels of disembodiment. Refuting axiological and technology-centered views of history, the article concludes that increased technological options for presence at a distance have remained essentially ambivalent for users who vacillate between the need for distance and the search for connection.