Theme 2 - How Do We Research Media and Change?
If you want to find out more about how CRESC Theme 2 researchers tackle issues of media and change please check out this page.
All CRESC Theme 2 researchers were challenged to write a “pithy paragraph” (or few) offering personal accounts of their research interests and projects. We have tried to present these accounts in a way that is open and accessible to all – members of the public, stakeholders and users. We feel that it is important that our research reaches beyond the walls of academia and that it is open to question and public debate.
We would like to know what you think about our research and what the key issues relating to media and change are for you. Please feel free to contact me or indeed any of the researchers whose work interests you. Further information about the details of projects is available on the projects page.
Thank you for your interest.
Diasporas, Media and Identities
Marie Gillespie (Theme 2 Convenor)
My research examines two of the most fundamental dimensions of social and cultural change in contemporary societies: a massive increase in flows of human migration and radical transformation in media technologies and texts, institutions and audiences. This strand of CRESC research offers analyses of the combined social and cultural force of migration and media in relation to
(a) Changing configurations of audiences
Television and radio audiences have long been conceived of in national terms and as contributing to the ‘imagined community’ of the nation. Diasporic and transnational flows of media and new formations of audiences are assuming ever greater significance and increasingly complicate this national-centric picture. National news media address audiences and citizens and publics so we now need to enquire into how transnational media (Zee TV, Al Jazeera) address and attract diasporic and transnational audiences? Do transnational publics come into being around new media and with what kinds of social and political consequences?
My CRESC research has developed and tested a new kind of collaborative audience ethnography. Ethnography is based on fieldwork, participation and observation, as well as conversational data. It’s a luxury these days in academia to spend 18 months or two years in a particular local field doing fieldwork so pragmatics dictates that researchers pull together a to find new ways of working collaboratively. Also conducting comparative research means multi-sited fieldwork so there’s another reason why researchers can best combine their efforts to undertake research in multiple locations. Our ESRC project “Shifting Securities: News Cultures Before and After the Iraq War 2003” undertook research in 8 cities across the UK. Current research on Pakistani diaspora audiences in the UK that we are conducting in partnership with BBC World Service, involves 8 researchers in 8 key locations.
We are developing a range of innovative methods to research media publics, producers and policies with BBC and DCMS and linking up with colleagues in the OU’s Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance to organise a series of workshop on media and security policy, and media policy in relations to sexuality and intimacy. The social life of methods is at the top of our agenda as we believe that methods we use make the worlds we study!
‘(b) News Media and Critical Events
One of the ways in which we study transformation in media is through researching ‘critical events’ (for example, the attacks of 11 September 2001, and the London bombings of July 2005 www.mediatingsecurity.com.). This involves linking the study of audiences and texts, producers and policy-makers round events. It is in the articulation of these domains that are usually studied separately, that CRES C is making a major contribution to study media and change. Specifically, we are engaged in theorising the nature, scope and scale and impact of changing technologies and texts, modes of delivery and audiences in the context of changing geo-political context. But our theorising is based on solid empirical evidence. We do not take ethnicity or gender or class as already defined but examine how they come to be significant, or not, through events. Thus are approach to analyses of media change is firmly embedded in the social and political contexts in which media operate. We do not believe that it is possible to isolate media as a singular cause in a cause effect chain – as so many reports about media effects in public and table of debate suggest.
(c) Changing media institutions
Another key entry point into examining media, and social and economic change is through case studies in institutional change. Our work on the BBC World Service mobilises historical perspectives (see details of our recently published [October 2008] special issue of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. But our research takes this step further and conducts comparative and cross-cultural analyses at the same time. One of the best things about working in CRESC is that the collective spirit of mutual interest in collaborative research is nurtured. Take a look at our website: http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/ The CRESC sum is greater than the parts!
Media Frames and Political Conflict
Farida Vis (Theme 2 Researcher)
Within the field of Media Studies, understanding the production of media texts and their reception plays a fundamental role. In the middle of this information flow sits the text itself, and a range of approaches to textual analysis exist. My research on media texts has largely been restricted to print media but more recently I have been analyzing online forms as well. I focus on two issues:
Firstly, by looking at the rapid change and growth in on line 'media texts', (blogs, user generated content, wikinews etc.), I seek to address whether or not these new texts require new methods of analysis. Debates around Web 2.0 proposing a Media Studies 2.0 are considered here.
Secondly, I focus on one such method for studying media texts frequently used within the communication discipline: frame analysis. To assess how this method can be further developed and possibly benefit from the incorporation of other methods, I am involved in a project with the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS). Frame analysis is a more challenging method than content analysis, which focuses on counting and correlating word frequencies. Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis (CAQDAS) packages are available to manage and manipulate textual and/or multimedia data. However, are they sufficiently advanced to automate the interpretive work of coding that lies at the heart of frame analysis? Are there developments in text-mining that provide better support for the frame analyst than CAQDAS packages? While the amount of social data is growing at an unprecedented speed, a scalable solution for the analysis of large corpora is urgently required. With ever more information available to the media researcher, through a range of online databases, LexisNexis the most popular, and elsewhere, it is relevant to explore what consequences such repositories of information have for various methods as well as the building of a corpus of texts to be analysed.
Linked to these methodological concerns I have a strong interest in better understanding the relationships between news production, news text and news reception. I explore these various aspects through studying ‘global crises’ in the media. Analysing (increasingly interconnected) critical media events and crises (‘terror’, ‘conflict’, ‘natural disaster’, ‘disease’ etc.) has proved a fruitful way of tracking specific elements in rapidly changing media landscapes. Earlier work focused on the Palestine/Israel conflict, through looking at events of political violence, ‘terrorism’. More recently I have extended this work on ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ by examining the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One of the issues is how online audiences dealt with mainstream media coverage of its aftermath by studying how they discussed these matters online. I focus on the photo-sharing website flickr where users discussed particular aspects of this news coverage. I want to understand both what they said, how their discussion evolved and evaluate/measure levels of deliberation. Linked to these ideas of deliberation and the potential of greater level of democracy offered by the Internet, another strand of the project looks at the ‘open to all’ news website Wikinews, where users can write their own news items. How do such user-created news sites function in crisis situations? How do they compare to the mainstream? What kind of alternative do they provide? Hurricane Katrina offers a valuable case study to analyse changing media landscapes where the boundaries between production, creation, producer/user and audience are rapidly blurring. While the mainstream media are still the main providers of news, websites such as Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and not Wikinews, the news site, are snapping at the heels of the mainstream media and has become a real competitor in this arena.
In sum: my research aims at providing a better understanding of the relationship between news production, news texts and news reception, through researching how a range of media break news of crises. My research has offered important glimpses into the changing global media landscape. Developing appropriate methods to deal with diverse news outputs will enable us to understand how such conflicts and crises are mediatised.
Cultural Work and Creative Industries
With the emergence of ‘creative industries’ and ‘knowledge economy’ discourses and policies, the distinctive subject of labour has come to prominence. The ‘creative’, ‘cultural’ or ‘artistic’ worker has emerged as both a fact and aspiration of post-industrial labour. This cultural worker is a powerful normative signifier, marking the beneficial transition from an ‘old’, industrial world where labour was inhibited by tradition and bureaucracy, with individual creativity fettered and unable to achieve its full ‘potential’, to a new world where workers - released from the ‘chains’ of managerialist bureaucracies - are free to explore and practice individual creative autonomy in more fluid and ‘human-centred’ workplaces. Work is promoted as the new freedom, and cultural work - that vast panoply of professional and/or creative occupations housed in media, music, fashion, art, design, public relations, marketing, advertising, IT, new media, and other forms of communicative and cultural mediation – is especially identified as autonomous and sovereign. But what kind of work is being promoted for, and demanded of, these new ‘creatives’? Whose interests does this work serve? This project aims to find out – seeking to address social change through the lens of emergent patterns of creative work.
A significant question here is what kinds of identities are being formed and practiced through cultural work? Does the cultural worker represent a new kind of labouring subject, or simply extend pre-existing workplace subjectivity? Such questions are important given the perceived primacy of cultural/creative work as a solution to problems of economic growth and the growing academic desire to understand the character of work in these ostensibly de-collectivized and ‘precarious’ times.
Part of the aim of this project is to examine the moral basis of cultural work. Is it the case, as many argue, that encroaching market pressures and the pursuit of an instrumentalized self-interest wholly determine the moral parameters of cultural production – rendering it abject and ‘desocialized’, or, alternatively, is it possible to conceive of and identify pluralistic, morally diverse and progressive forms of cultural work? Outside of its specific qualities, work is now presented as our primary social obligation – but how does this relate to other kinds of personal and social obligation that creative workers possess?
Assessing the politics of cultural work also involves asking questions about ‘affect’ – that is the emotional management, practices and intentions of cultural producers and workers – how is affect made manifest in cultural work? What emotional performances are demanded or made possible in creative occupations?
Project contributors take an evaluate approach to the rich variety of cultural studies, political-economy, post-operaist and autonomist, post-Foucauldian, liberal and neo-liberal approaches to cultural work. The project sits within the broader CRESC context of seeking to address the changing character of cultural and media production in contemporary societies.
Technological Convergence and Media Change
"Convergence" is the dominant contemporary force for media change. "Convergence" is a fluid term but essentially signifies the erosion of sector specific distinctions (for example, between voice telephony and broadcasting, or between television and newspapers etc) based on specific technologies. "Convergence" is a doctrine of (almost) boundless substitutability and is captured by Kevin Werbach's (of the USA's Federal Communications Commission) proposition that the Internet is a substitute for all existing media.
Research in projects 5 and 6 has focused on new regulatory frameworks (notably impacts on the UK of the transnational EU framework and the synergies and conflicts between statutory and self-regulation) and governance regimes. It has voiced a critique of scholarly claims (claims with important policy implications) for the pervasiveness of network governance and of what I have called "three myths of Internet governance": that is the myth dominant in the public policy domain, that Internet governance is best when the market decides; second, the myth dominant in scholarly discussion of the Internet that network governance and self-regulation is both pervasive and effective; third, the myth that Internet governance is quite distinct from governance of "legacy media" with a consequential neglect of national governance of the Internet.
Latterly, research has considered how far major themes in contemporary applied philosophy (notably Rawls' and Fraser's notions of redistribution and recognition and O'Neill's ideas about "trust") provide a heuristic and/or principle of action in respect of contemporary media governance policy and practice.
Work on "legacy media" focuses on public service broadcasting (PSB) and on exogenous and endogenous factors of change. Notably the extent to which (exogenous) technological change and (endogenous) the adoption of new organisational and managerial doctrines ("new public management" and "public value" doctrines) have affected the legitimation, and thus the regulatory/governance regimes, of PSB.
The two projects link to suggest a new policy paradigm of encouraging entry of new, web based, media services whose claim on public finance should be conditional on their adherence to public service objectives (eg contributing to democratic deliberation and debate), to norms of editorial and journalistic conduct and to exploiting the potential of "Web 2.0" interactivity to establish a corpus of transparent, robust and authoritative information and commentary. Such a strategy has implications for PSB incumbents in that it promises (threatens) to diversify supply of public service content and thus diminish the legitimacy of incumbents which rests, at least in part, on exclusivity.
The relevance and quality of this work is attested by the lead researcher's appointment as Special Advisor to a Parliamentary Select Committee on the future of the BBC, by his delivery of an invited seminar to the Federal Communications Commission in the USA, advice to the government of Namibia on broadcasting policy, participation in by invitation only seminars organised by UK governmental agencies (notably BERR, DCMS and the Defence Academy), invited contribution to closed seminars organised as part of the EU Presidencies of Germany and France, a funded senior fellowship at the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California and international scholarly publication, notably in refereed journals in the UK, the Americas, France and Germany.
Musics, media and transformations? A mini case study from Fiji
It is commonly held that there is something unique about the present epoch. In a way that was not possible in earlier years, musics of many different kinds now migrate and mingle through rapid global interactions and new technological media, dominated in many respects by Euro-American-originated culture and institutions.
There is indeed something to be said for this viewpoint. But it can also lead to over-emphasising present-day ‘transformation’ and to highlighting (and exaggerating?) only selected media. The small piece of research I am undertaking about the development and context of local radio in Fiji (part of the ‘Migrating music’ strand of the ‘Tuning in’ research) is confronting this by exploring the complex intersections of media, music and change in this – to us – remote corner of the Pacific, with a focus on three contrasting ‘moments’ (1937, 1978 and 2008/9). In the conventional view the mix of musics in Fiji (as in many once-colonised countries) might be traced to European colonial expansion and its powerful influence on an unsophisticated native audience, led principally in the early years by the colonially controlled and far-reaching medium of BBC radio, and more recently transformed through globally circulating mass media and new technological devices. A more detailed look using a combination of documentary sources and earlier fieldwork is revealing a much more complex story.
In the Fiji of 1937 the BBC Empire Service struggled to be heard even by the small European population likely to take an interest in its productions. There were already other competing radio stations, often considerably more audible, as well as companies selling gramophone records, propagating varieties of music scarcely then approved by the BBC music pundits (so-called ‘negroid’ jazz and ‘crooning’ for instance, and probably some Indian popular music). Fiji was already notable for its cultural diversities and international contacts, among them three major music traditions: European; Fijian/Pacific and Indian (there was a substantial local Indian diaspora in Fiji, from indentured labourers and their descendants). And though radio and gramophone records were indeed accepted media, another outlet was the equally if not more important medium of live musical performance, including Fijian meke (danced songs composed by recognised inspired experts) and Indian religious music, continued even through the hardest indentured years. And these in turn were already intershot by popular music from many sources and by mixtures like the Fijian Methodist choirs. The complexity and multiplicity of such forms – essential elements in local experience – disappear if we look primarily to the ‘canned’ media or, even more limiting, privilege just the radio output of the London-centred BBC.
By 1978 the local situation was even more multi-stranded. It was not just the proliferation of broadcast forms but media like audio cassettes (widely marketed and, at times, created locally), and continuous international contacts, not least the pervasive Indian film music and latest hits of Euro-American pop. The frame of reference was not just Europe but Asia and Australasia. The amount of active music-making was extraordinary and while to an extent shaped by the three established traditions it also included complex crossovers and mutual influences between them. 2008/9 (which I will be exploring further) promises to be equally interesting – and complex.
This little case study reminds us that linked into the great global interactions we like to highlight in our somewhat Eurocentric way, are many other peoples and active interests besides ourselves and that the technological and cultural processes extend in their changing complexities far beyond the present years or the particular set of media that many current studies take as their frame. The research both raises questions about ‘epochal’ interpretations of history and reinforces the position of some other projects in this series that ‘media’, while indubitably important, need to be considered not as independent, simple or self-evidently central, but in the changing settings of the multiple audiences and participants that give them life.
Religion, Media and Socio-Cultural Change
Thinking about the relationship between religion and social change has been dominated by the secularization paradigm which, while shaken by the failure of religion to disappear as a social force in many contemporary societies, has not yet been replaced by a coherent and widely accepted alternative. This research project seeks to move towards an alternative understanding of the relationship between religion and social change based on the observation that religious symbols and discourses are circulated, reproduced and take on new meanings for new audiences through new media. To that end this inquiry seeks (i) to build collaborative interdisciplinary links between scholars investigating these relationships across different fields of enquiry (sociology, media studies, anthropology, religious studies), (ii) to investigate empirically the representation of religion in transnational on-line discussion forums, which often exist in relationship to transnational broadcast networks (e.g. BBC, Al-Jazeera) and (iii) to advance theory in conceptualizing the relationship between religion and socio-cultural change.
One aspect of strand (iii) of the inquiry is the development of ‘publicization theory’. ‘Publicization’ refers to the range of processes which shape the extent and forms of religions' public presence in society. Such presence may manifest itself in public discussions, controversies, policy formation, and through the actions of various religiously identified actors and organisations in the public spheres of contemporary societies, as well as through major religious institutions. It is concerned with public presence as well as social significance (which may not be publicly visible), because it is public presence which is to be the focus of much widespread contemporary concern, yet is little addressed as an explicit theme by secularization theorists. This new theoretical framework seeks to explain the differing levels of religion’s social influence and public presence across an increasingly interconnected world. It argues that current theories (secularization-based and supply-side) fail to do so because they under- and mis-theorize the structure-culture-agency relationship, so that either structural processes are held to favour a general trajectory of decline in religion’s social significance (secularization) or religious authority (neo-secularization), or the specific historical/cultural construction of religion is neglected (supply-side theories). They also fail to identify structural processes which favour growth in religion's public presence. Using media-related examples it is argued that social differentiation creates the conditions for increasing religious presence across modern systems and publics as well as for declining religious influence, with outcomes dependent on the articulation between modern media and other knowledge (such as educational) systems, existing cultural practices, and political conditions.
Hugh Mackay
My research interest focuses on media technology and is concerned with the complex and subtle relationship between new media technologies and social and cultural change. Specifically, in my CRESC project, I’m interested in how users in their everyday lives can be seen as shaping the technology. So this is a far cry from the technological determinism that characterises much of the discourse of politicians, journalists and others about new media. In the book that I’m writing on the Internet – based on my CRESC research – my argument is that how the domestic Internet is working out (whether for profit, for entertainment, as a work technology, on the TV or PC, etc) is essentially determined by how people are choosing to use it. So this is an example of work in the sociology of technology that’s looked at how users are shaping technology.
A major part of my work is to extend ‘domestication’ work on communication technologies by connecting it with ‘social shaping of technology’ debates, by examining how users’ practices – using particular sorts of web sites (and not others) – are shaping the Internet. A key part of my argument is that the outcome of user practices (in the aggregate) means that particular Internet genres, which are stabilising, can be identified – rather as did broadcasting genres in the 1920s. I’m addressing in the utility of applying notions of ‘genre’ to the Internet, which is especially problematic given the breadth of activities and forms of engagement that are involved – but I’ve developed what I think is a fruitful typology of internet uses, each of which involves particular institutions and use practices.
Methodologically I’ve tended to deploy qualitative approaches, but I’m strongly committed to the value of quantitative measures. So in the book I’m writing on the Internet, I’m combining my own data from six small-scale ethnographic studies of households with a breadth of quantitative measures of Internet take-up and use from around the world. Like any study of Internet use, I’m involved in the thorny question of the relationship between life ‘behind the screen’ and how the Internet fits with everyday life in households. My study focuses very much on the latter, while also working with the notion that what’s out there isn’t simply a set of texts, but involves new kinds of interactivity. My approach is unusual in that I’m grappling with the Internet as a whole, with generalising about the medium, in contrast with so many accounts of the Internet which have focused on one genre (e.g. gaming or a forum).
With the interactivity that’s going on, we are seeing very new and different uses of media – in some ways challenging fundamentally core conceptions of what’s meant and understood by ‘mass media’. In examining what people are doing with the Internet, I’ve been applying some core concepts in the field to my case studies. So I’m looking at how both public and private are being transformed (with enhanced capacity of connection, public exposure and civic involvement); how the Internet is used to sustain local communities as well as extending global contacts; (in the Silverstone/ Morley tradition) how uses and meanings are patterned in households in terms of gender and generation; at the sorts of frustrations as well as pleasures that are involved in Internet use; and how uses of new and old media intersect (new media don’t simply replace the old, but the new transform and work in conjunction with the old, in sometimes unexpected and subtle ways).
Among my perhaps counter-intuitive findings, I’ve identified how Internet use, as well as fragmenting household life, also serves to bring members of families together. The speed-up, instantaneity and time-saving facilitated by the Internet is appreciated, but in other cases it is seen as distracting and time-wasting. The generational distribution of Internet expertise means that power in households can be redistributed with the arrival of the Internet; and in some cases the Internet replaces parents as sources of information. The sheer volume of information that is available on the Internet is a source of considerable pleasure and even enlightenment; but there are frustrations about speed, concerns about privacy and security, feelings of guilt when time is wasted and a sense of pressure that is generated by the infinite choice that is available. Whilst for some the Internet has replaced letter-writing, faxing and even radio, in most households it has added to the blend of mass media, with some Internet use undertaken simultaneously with using the radio and television.
My research is based in Wales, where I’m connected with policy networks that are exploring appropriate responses to the changing media landscape. So here and in other work I’m interested in the relationship of the arrival of digital to media policy – especially how media policies in Wales can enhance citizenship, in the dominance of Ofcom’s liberal free market approaches to media regulation.
Creativity, Copyright and Change
Media really do change things. They have effects on audiences, on politics and indeed on the global economy, as the financial crisis of 2008 has demonstrated. Watching stories on the TV at lunch time about the likely impact of a bank closure, stock market traders respond in the afternoon by offloading shares in that same bank. At the turn of the1960s Stanley Cohen called this phenomenon a ‘media amplification spiral’. He was talking about the effect of news coverage of seaside riots on the rioters; mods and rockers. Plus ca change?
But if mass communications have substantial powers of this sort it is mistake to treat the media as independent. Rather they are part of the complex of social structures which constitutes the capitalist world system. Not to recognise this, not to acknowledge how the media are themselves influenced, directed or other wise impacted on is to commit the sin of what scholars sometimes call ‘mediacentrism’ – the fallacy that everything starts with the media.
In my work for Theme 2 I’ve been trying to cope with these two counter-posed ways of approaching the media, namely as strong and effective, yet also subject to impact and influence. My inquiry into jazz and cultural policy for instance has at its heart the idea that jazz is awkwardly placed at the border between art and popular culture. The main media channel for jazz in the UK is BBC Radio 3 which, despite recent attempts to broaden its audience, remains resolutely high cultural in its agenda. Funding for live jazz performance via the Arts Council and training in jazz music making in conservatories also reinforce the position of jazz as bourgeois music at the edge of art.
Meanwhile, and chiefly among black musicians and communities, jazz has a different character. It is the genre which young music makers aspire to play as they learn their craft in churches and community music projects. In the case of jazz, then, media profiling has only had a limited effect, and the social meaning of the music in Britain remains contradictory and unresolved, reflecting deep contradictions in British society itself.
I’m also examining the problem of copyright and its impact on creativity. Here the tension between media-on-society and media-in-society takes on a rather different aspect. In effect, the media industries have been granted monopoly rights in their products. For what copyright does is give owners the legal power to control the use of media products even after such products have been notionally sold on to consumers. A record label, for instance, can and does stop you from uploading your CDs on-line. This raises important issues about access to culture and the rights of users. But actually my focus is on a different, though related topic - the way that copyright has generated a creative regime of enforced originality.
Under copyright conditions media makers are continually pushed into thinking about their work in terms of its substantial difference from previous works. The dictum ‘Don’t copy, make new’ has actually contributed to the production of banality. Most important, perhaps, copyright has closed off alternative approaches to creativity. The collapse of creative sampling in popular music since the early 1990s is a well documented case. But we can also see the effects of ‘enforced originality’ in the continuing absence from mainstream film making of what is called in the avant garde, the ‘photo-essay’. This is a genre in which existing footage is re-used to disruptive, lyrical or richly associative effect. Yet outside copyright-free Cuba or the enclaves of underground film-making such techniques remain not just unused but unthinkable. The censoring power of copyright reigns supreme.
This, then, is a case where the media considered as an industry and an institution has had extraordinary impact on culture. Yet, critically, the media’s copyright regime depends on the ability of the ‘content industry’ to persuade the state to grant it a legally binding monopoly. In other words, it is capitalist social relations which prevail here. Personal note: I’m writing a book for Polity on these issues entitled Copyright and Culture.
Finally, my Theme 2 work has encompassed the connection between media studies and social theory. I co-organised the CRESC conference of 2006 on this topic, and co-edited with David Hesmondhalgh a volume on this question - the first book to come out in the CRESC series with Routledge. In a nutshell, we saw a gap between a strangely parochial media studies on the one hand, and the continually developing body of social ‘meta’ theory on the other. The conference and book represent an attempt to bridge it, to show that in its effect upon society, the media is always part of the matrix of mechanisms and causes which is society. Come back conjunctural analysis – all is forgiven.