FSMK Conference Transforming Media and Communication Ecologies

Abstract

Ecologies of meaning: Understanding media as meaning-making practice

Digital media and the new datafied media landscape has transformed how we access and make use of information in daily life. News use is decreasing on behalf of new emerging ‘information repertoires’ and new ways to conceptualise what news is. Yet, when we look at the meaning-making practices of the people navigating the digital media ecologies, many familiar aspects appear. This presentation argues for the importance of a revitalised approach to the meaning-making practices of audiences and users inhabiting our contemporary media landscape. Based on an ethnographic study of young adults (18-26 years old) conducted in Sweden between 2019-2021 it will demonstrate what a deepened focus on the ecologies of meaning may add to our understanding of technologies, data, and infrastructures.

Stina Bengtsson is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University. She researches the role of the media in everyday life and how people make meaning of media technologies and texts as part of their mundane practices. Her most recent books include Navigating the News: Young People, Digital Culture and Everyday Life (with Sofia Johansson, de Gruyter 2024), Classics in Media Theory (Ed. with Staffan Ericson and Fredrik Stiernstedt, Routledge, 2024), and Digital Media and the Dynamics of Civil Society: Retooling Citizenship in New EU Democracies (with Bakardjieva et al. 2021, Rowman & Littlefield).

Abstract

Transforming Ecologies of Media Research and Education in the Age of Communicative Machines

In the history of media and communications research, technological and organisational dynamics in media production and consumption has always impacted on research and teaching. Our object of study has a certain ephemeral character that forces us as researchers and educators to constantly reevaluate our theories, methods, and approaches. This is not least so in face of the rapid spread of communicative technologies such chatbots, LLMs, and machine learning, which are penetrating all societal domains from public administration systems to entertainment media. In this presentation, I will reflect on some of the implications of these developments for theoretical research and education practices.

Göran Bolin is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. His research focusses on information management, branding and policy, as well as datafication and digital markets. He is the author and editor of Value and the Media: Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets (Ashgate, 2011), Cultural Technologies: The Shaping of Culture in Media and Society (Routledge, 2012), Media Generations: Experience, Identity and Mediatised Social Change (Routledge 2016) and Managing Meaning in Ukraine: Information, Communication and Narration since the Euromaidan Revolution (with Per Ståhlberg, MIT Press 2023). He is a member of the Executive Board of ECREA and Chair of the Film, Media and Visual Studies section of Academia Europaea, as well as the present Chair of FSMK.

Abstract

Transforming Conceptualisations and Constitutions of Media Audiences

Against a backdrop of new ways of configuring audiences across technologies, platforms, regions and modes, there is a revitalisation of audience studies, offering fresh theoretical territory that follows the patterns of the emerging conditions of being an audience. These new lines of thinking are shaping the present and future of audience studies and expanding its intersection with other areas of study. This backdrop of the changing media environment provides the impetus for revision, review and reflection for audience research. Drawing on editorial work for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Media Audiences, with Peter Lunt, I reflect on two themes of layering and frictions arising from the collection. We see examples of the audience layering of empirical material and the diversification of conceptual resources used to interpret and understand what audiences do. And we see friction as a useful term to use for unpacking audience modes of engagement and experiences across layers of watching, reacting, making and participating with media in society and culture. As audiences are already alert to the sparks, conflicts, and differences in their relationships with and without digital media, researching what audiences do will be a dynamic, multi-layered field of research.

Annette Hill is Professor in Media and Communication, Jönköping University, Sweden. With 25 years experience of audience research, in over 100 publications, her work addresses transnational audiences for factual and fictional genres, live events, tourism and theatre, using multi methods and analytic dialogue with industry and citizen stakeholders. Her latest book is Media Engagement, with Peter Dahlgren (Routledge 2023) and her next book is The Routledge Companion to Media Audiences, with Peter Lunt (Routledge 2024).

Abstract

The media forensic production of visual evidence in the documentation and prosecution of human rights abuses

My talk considers the recent turn towards new media forensic practices and use of online open-source imagery and video footage as evidence in international human rights investigations and prosecutions. It looks at how human rights advocates and lawyers are harnessing new image technologies and advancements in computing power to both reassess and reassert the status of video as usable evidence in advocacy and court. I will specifically reflect on how open-source investigations open possibilities for creating new kinds of documentary evidence and for laying newly vested claims to the truth of visual media – and what the significance of this is for the pursuit of justice and the broader battle over truth in today’s vexed media and communication ecologies.

Kari Andén-Papadopoulos is Professor of Media Studies at the Institute for future studies and the Department of media studies, Stockholm university. She is currently heading the research project “Digital Eyewitness Images and Human Rights Practice” (funded by the Swedish research Council 2023-2026) which uses an ethnographic approach to examine how new forms and practices of digital eyewitness video are reshaping traditional ways of doing and understanding human rights.

Espen Ytreberg is Professor of Media Studies at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. He researches media history and theory, and publishes literary nonfiction. His latest major academic publications are A Social History of the Media (4th edition with Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, Polity Press, 2022) and Media and Events in History (Polity Press, 2023).

Title: How mediated events have created environments

The great and minor events of history have long taken place in thoroughly mediated environments. Today’s virtual studios and social media layouts are in this sense new twists to an old tale, that of how media have taken on environmental functions of both infrastructural, social, temporal and spatial kinds. The talk traces the historical emergence of media environments for two kinds of large-scale events: planned ones such as conquests and exhibitions, and media-planned ones such as stadium concerts and Eurosong. It is argued that in all these event-cases, albeit by different technological means, media perform essential environing functions.

The talk follows on from a recent book (Media and Events in History, Polity Press 2023) that proposes seeing large-scale events not merely as a class of media output but as a main building block of contemporary societies. Mediation is how events can be built on a society-wide scale, and this construction work has been going on at least since the advent of industrialisation. The book bridges history and media studies in order to present this broader and deeper view of what events are and do.

Espen Ytreberg is Professor of Media Studies at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. He researches media history and theory, and publishes literary nonfiction. His latest major academic publications are A Social History of the Media (4th edition with Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, Polity Press, 2022) and Media and Events in History (Polity Press, 2023).