Deuzeblog

Media Life Interviews

2009-11-03T08:24:00.003-05:00

In preparation for a series of talks and public lectures in the next couple of months (first up, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on November 9, after that at the University of Wroclaw in Poland, the Dutch "Communicatiecongres" symposium on November 12, at several different departments at Indiana University, later on at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and so on), here are links to the audio of two hourlong interviews I recently had the chance to do.

In November 2009, I had the chance to talk about the project - about the consequences of a life lived in, rather than with, media - with the WILL AM 580 station in Urbana; check the audio of the program on their site and on Chirbit.

In May 2009, the folks at WFHB in Bloomington were kind enough to discuss media life, the Truman Show metaphor, and related issues - the audio is up on their site as well as on my Chirbit page.

Please feel free to contact me for more info about the project, to discuss options for me (and/or the graduate students involved with the research) to drop by for a talk or seminar, or if you are interested to be part of this project as a future MA or PhD student at IU Telecommunications (application deadline for funded positions: December 1 for international students, January 15 for US students).

Media Life Course Grades 2006-2009

2009-10-26T11:34:00.001-04:00

[earlier published in 2007] Every semester and academic year, students are scrambling to move in and about campus, enroll in courses, plan their time ahead... It is a hectic and at times confusing time for all.

Of course there are plenty of commercial services out there that help students (esp. in the US) select courses - for example through sites like RateMyProfessors.

However, one of many things that are public in the US that are private elsewhere can be an indicator of a course or professor, especially in the case of large lecture courses: the grade distribution in such courses in the past.

Almost every semester I offer the university-wide T101 Media Life (formerly known as: Living in the Information Age) for about 400+ students per semester. I'm excited about it - and I hope the students too. It generally is a wild ride.

For those students who want to know how their friends fared in the past, I compiled this report on Section GPA averages for the times I taught this course:

Fall 2005 T101 Living in the Information Age
122 Students, Section GPA: 2.810
Spring 2006 T101 Living in the Information Age
116 Students, Section GPA: 2.993
Fall 2006 T 101 Living in the Information Age
115 Students, Section GPA: 3.127
Spring 2008 T 101 Media Life
388 Students, Section GPA: 3.174
Fall 2008 T 101 Media Life
385 Students, Section GPA: 3.374
Spring 2009 T 101 Media Life
391 Students, Section GPA: 3.187
Fall 2009 T 101 Media Life
418 Students, Section GPA: TBA

Another indicator of how students do in this course is by looking at the average grade of the entire class for midterms and final exams:

Fall 2005 T101 Living in the Information Age
122 Students, Midterm: 75; Final: 77
Spring 2006 T101 Living in the Information Age
116 Students, Midterm: 80; Final: 82
Fall 2006 T 101 Living in the Information Age
115 Students, Midterm: 79; Final: 76
Spring 2008 T 101 Media Life
388 Students, Midterm: 77; Final: 80
Fall 2008 T 101 Media Life
388 Students, Midterm: 82; Final: 83
Spring 2009 T 101 Media Life
388 Students, Midterm: 77; Final: 83
Fall 2009 T 101 Media Life
415 Students, Midterm: 78; Final: TBA.

The End of the University (or a New Beginning)

2009-09-25T18:29:00.005-04:00

after reading about the current protests across the University of California system, and the ongoing commercialization and corporatization of higher education (as exemplified by top-down hierarchical decision-making practices focused on the "bottom-line" and the domination of managerial speak in bureaucratic rhetoric on education, such as: "efficiency", "results", "return on investment", and so on) - and considering my own research on the precarity of work in contemporary liquid modernity (especially in the creative industries, but evidently across all industry sectors), I'd like to share a few thoughts on the end or possibly a new beginning of the university.

as mentioned, the inspiration for these concerns comes from recent publications documenting the transformation of the university around the world, as exemplified in the US by:

- a gradual decline in the number of tenure-track jobs (and an increase of adjunct, parttime, visiting, and otherwise contingent positions);

- the ongoing marketization/commodification of knowledge and innovation produced by universities exclusive to companies, including closed-access corporate publishers (as opposed to actually making that knowledge available to all people, which the university increasingly does not do);

- increasing investments in e-learning (in effect "virtualizing" teachers), financial markets (making budgets of universities contingent on market fluctuations, see for example the endowment problems at all US universities that manage such funds), and sports facilities (intended to boost revenues from ticket sales, merchandising, and corporate sponsorships);

- a shift in thinking about education from teaching critical thinking to offering industry-driven or "work-ready" skills (preparing students for a labor market that is increasingly precarious, contingent, atypical, and uncertain).

although my university - Indiana University - has a long and proud tradition of protecting the faculty and students against much of these influences, recent years have seen an acceleration of the aforementioned trends: huge building projects (of up to $ 1 billion dollars), tenure-track hiring freezes (but plenty of openings for adjunct and visiting lines), and increasing pressure on us to provide students with e-learning facilities and "practical" skills that help them in the "real world" (where what is "real" is defined by mainstream segments of industry).

all of these trends boost the corporate and commercial orientation of the university (which trend in turn gets reinforced as one-third of US college presidents in fact serve on the boards of corporations).

i do not consider the role of corporations or commerce a problem per se (one could argue that the current proliferation of academic knowledge mainly through and perhaps due to the internet is encouraging), but if that orientation does not come with specific caveats, protections, checks and balances, the university as we know it becomes just another factory workplace - not a place for independent and critical reflection; a place that teaches people to make up their own minds.

now let me assure you: i am not a socialist or communist, nor a fascist or capitalist (if anything, i am radically opposed to anything that comes even close to TINA-thinking).

i am, however, concerned about the growing threats to the foundational values of the university - especially academic freedom and faculty governance - that compelled me to come to the US to work there in the first place.

optimist as I am, I'm looking for evidence for a new beginning...

some further links that offer food for thought:

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

essay on Digital Labor and education by Michelle Glaros (Dakota State University)

EduFactory

Media Life Public Lecture

2009-09-25T10:34:00.009-04:00

If you are around, I hope to see you on Monday, November 9, at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Champaign. The graduate students of the InfoStructure: Intersections Between Social and Technological Systems program have been kind enough to invite me to deliver a public lecture on the media life project I am currently working on; a working paper on media life (version 1.0) is archived at IU ScholarWorks. The event starts at 12:30pm in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, Room B02 Auditorium.

The title of my talk is: Media Life - The Experience of Love, Sex & Death in Digital Culture.

Abstract: Research since the early years of the 21st century consistently shows how through the years more of our time gets spent using media, how being concurrently exposed to media has become a foundational feature of everyday life, and that consuming media for most people increasingly takes place alongside producing media. Contemporary media devices, what people do with them, and how all of this fits in the organization of our everyday life disrupt and unsettle well-established views of the role media play in society. Instead of continuing to wrestle with a distinction between media and society, this contribution proposes we begin our thinking with a view of life not lived with media, but in media. The media life perspective starts from the realization that the whole of the world and our lived experience in it can be seen as framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by (immersive, integrated, ubiquitous and pervasive) media. In this presentation, the media life perspective is developed by correlating the claims of contemporary social theory with recent reports on media use among teenagers around the world.

This abstract is based on the abovementioned working paper I have drafted with two extremely talented graduate students in our program at Indiana University's Department of Telecommunications, Laura Speers and Peter Blank. A book-length manuscript, titled Media Life, will be published by Polity Press in 2011.

InfoStructure is a multidisciplinary program led by graduate students and funded by a Focal Point Grant from the Graduate College and by various co-sponsors. As their site states:

"InfoStructure is an endeavor to examine and discuss the hidden complexities of information technology systems that can often be obscured by disciplinary boundaries. Invited speakers will address recent developments in information technology in order to create a broadly accessible debate whereby systems are viewed as simultaneously technological and social."

Editing Journal Special Issues

2009-09-16T11:15:00.003-04:00

During the last three years, I have had the privilege to work together with some of the most amazing minds in the field of media production, management, and work studies: Henry Jenkins (USC), John Banks (QUT), and Tim Marjoribanks (Melbourne). Together with these friends I guest co-edited special issues of what I consider to be among the most inspiring and diverse academic journals in our field:

- Convergence (volume 14/1 of 2008, on convergence culture with Henry);
- International Journal of Cultural Studies (volume 12/5 of 2009, on co-creative labor with John); and
- Journalism (volume 10/5 of 2009 on newswork, with Tim).

If you are interested and active in research, teaching, or taking courses related to media work, labor, production, management, and industries, I hope and suggest you check these special issues out. They feature some of the best scholars in these fields, both upcoming talent and well-established stars. I want to use this blogpost to record my sincere thanks and deep appreciation for the work of Henry, Tim, and John. It has been a tremendous experience editing these journals (which in turn also inspired me to edit a book-length volume, on which you can expect some more info soon (working title: "Managing Media Work"), as its full manuscript has just been sent to the publisher...

The Media Organizations Group Blog

2009-09-13T11:59:00.005-04:00

In the context of courses I teach at Indiana University on what work in the media and creative industries is all about, graduate students and I have started a group blog, titled Media Organizations @ IU, where we will post news items, commentary, analyses, and debates on all things related to working in the media. We hope you will check us out there, bookmark us, leave comments, and include us in your RSS feeds!

Just Out: Guest-Edited Special Journal Issue on CoCreative Labour

2009-09-03T16:17:00.007-04:00

My friend and colleague at QUT, John Banks, and I worked on this special for the last two years or so, and we are very excited how it turned out. I hope you check one or more of the papers out! Please let me know if you need one of the PDF's, I'm sure we can help.

International Journal of Cultural Studies Table of Contents for SPECIAL ISSUE: CO-CREATIVE LABOUR: 1 September 2009; Vol. 12, No. 5.

Table of Contents Alert

Co-creative labour
John Banks and Mark Deuze

Amateur experts: International fan labour in Swedish independent music
Nancy K. Baym and Robert Burnett

America Online volunteers: Lessons from an early co-production community
Hector Postigo

Misfortunes, memories and sunsets: Non-professional images in Dutch news media
Mervi Pantti and Piet Bakker

Working for the text: Fan labor and the New Organization
R.M. Milner

The mediation is the message: Italian regionalization of US TV series as co-creational work
Luca Barra

All for love: The Corn fandom, prosumers, and the Chinese way of creating a superstar
Ling Yang

Opiniebijdrage Trouw

2009-08-20T09:37:00.007-04:00

Onlangs (donderdag 20 augustus 2009) publiceerde dagblad Trouw een opiniebijdrage van mij over de veronderstelde impact van internet op de democratie (zie plaatje voor de bewuste pagina). Het was een leuke uitdaging dit stuk te schrijven - waarin ik vooral de correlatie uitwerk tussen toenemende online participatie (discussiefora, blogs, wikis, enzovoorts) en afnemende offline actie (politieke deelname, collectieve besluitvorming, de barricades op voor democratische idealen). Reacties zijn welkom op de site van het stuk bij Trouw!

Update [21.08.2009]: some interesting translations and responses to my argument about how our participation online ("e-participation", as political pundits like to call it) seems to come at the price of increasing disengagment (or: deliberate, sustained action) offline at the German site of Rebell.tv (check them out, great stuff there) and at the English-language Eurotopics.

Update [26.08.2009]: some more translations of my argument: in French, Polish, Estonian (and appearing on another Estonian site).

Teaching to the Digital Generation

2009-08-19T10:00:00.004-04:00

While working on the forthcoming Media Life book, I've been tweaking the approach to teaching new media and society in our Department's overview course, T101 Media Life. An essay about the background and philosophy (which sounds grander than it is, of course) is now posted on our website. It includes samples of students' creative work and a course review slideshow.

Tentative title of the essay: Teaching To The Digital Generation: T101 Media Life. As always, any thoughts and comments are much appreciated!

New Books Forthcoming

2009-07-25T13:11:00.004-04:00

Just a quick note: the writing of Media Life has started... with the signing of a publishing contract with the always amazing Polity Press, with a delivery date (of the manuscript) for December 2010. I'm extremely excited about this project, and will post regular updates and working drafts to this blog.

This Summer (of 2009) I'm finishing putting together and editing a book, titled "Managing Media Work", that is contracted through Sage. It features 24 original essays by leading international scholars in the field of (critical) management studies on the changes and challenges of contemporary media management - as in the management of firms, as well as the management of (individual) careers across media, cultural, and creative industries. Reading the various chapters now - it promises to be a wonderful collection. More on this - including the names of the authors involved - soon...

Media Work Book Review (6)

2009-07-10T13:31:00.013-04:00

As I blogged earlier this week, it has been a fantastic ride with my last book, Media Work (Polity Press), especially in terms of the feedback I've been getting. The latest issue of The Information Society contains yet another (by my count 6th) scholarly review piece on the book - after earlier ones in the International Journal of Media Management, the European Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Ecquid Novi:African Journalism Studies, and Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.

The review in The Information Society was done by Greg Downey of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin, Madison (US). Greg is an expert in the field of (the historical analysis of) information labor, and his work and teaching - check out his excellent information society course materials - are a source of inspiration for me. His review of the book is critical, but overall I am pleased with the comments he makes.

Greg Downey particularly laments my lack of historical grounding - which is true, and as a historian by way of my graduate training I should know better - and the rather limited use I make of my empirical material (in-depth interviews with 600+ media professionals in the US, The Netherlands, South Africa, and New Zealand), or my theoretical framework (particularly Zygmunt Bauman's concept of liquid modernity). Again, I have no qualms nor excuses here.

Other than that, I'm thrilled that he described the book and my writing style alternately as "lively", "readable", "useful", "effective", and generally part of what he calls an "important niche", whereas he considers Media Work especially powerful when read next to his own work, citing his 2004 edited volume (with Aad Blok), Uncovering labour in information revolutions, 1750–2000 (published by Cambridge University Press). I must admit I did not know that book, which is my bad.

Overall I must admit that one thing bugs me about this book review - something which I have noticed a bit too often in the responses of scholars in more or less established (read: older) fields of study to work that is explicitly done or located in the realm of new media and digital culture (which Polity's title for the book series, Digital Media And Society, alludes to): a tendency to dismiss many of not all of the work, theorizing, and claimsmaking done in new media studies as intrinsically overemphasizing the "new". Although this is a valuable critique, it is also a bit too easy. As Greg and other historians know, nothing is ever really new, as everything is caught up in micro, meso, and macro flows of history. To claim that someone is not articulating the history his or her argument enough (simply by stating that whatever he or she signals today has been signaled one way or another before), is something that can be pretty much stated about almost any scholarly work.

Furthermore (and I may be mistaken), I do not think I am actually stating anywhere in the book that whatever I found to be happening in media work today is exclusive or unique to the situation right now, but I do argue that the historical categories we have used to this day to explain things in (media) sociology and social theory are perhaps different, less useful, or run the risk of turning our field into a (as Giddens and Beck among others argue) "shell" and "zombie" sociology. Considering Greg's valuable thoughts and comments, I should do a much better job exploring and articulating such notions.

Some highlights from the (copyright-protected) review:

Media Work, by Mark Deuze. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007. 278 pp. $69.95 cloth/$22.95 paper. ISBN 978-07456-3924-6 (cloth), 978-07456-3925-3
(paper). Reviewed by Greg Downey, School of Journalism and Mass Communication and School of Library and Information Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, USA

"Mark Deuze’s Media Work is a useful but limited attempt to situate and synthesize recent literature on what it means to be a creative professional in four cross-cutting industries: advertising, journalism, screen entertainment, and video games. This lively and readable account demonstrates that the study of new media through the lens of labor—both the increasingly contingent labor of media professionals and the increasingly interactive labor of their fragmented audiences—is an important and vibrant area of interdisciplinary scholarship, sitting at the intersection of communication studies, labor studies, technology studies, and cultural studies.

Although Deuze falls short of his goal to present a rich global ethnography of these industries, the anecdotal firsthand data that his students and colleagues have collected does add flavor and perspective to his narrative. And while a lack of theoretical breadth and a frustratingly shortsighted view of media history will limit the usefulness of his book for most graduate students and media scholars, Media Work would make a provocative and productive text in any undergraduate course on mass communication, cultural theory, or new media technology.

[...]

In his very brief conclusion, Deuze seems to reject wholesale a century of media sociology, stating that “It is tempting to analyze this kind of media life in terms of the boundaries and parameters that have well-established meanings such as social institutions (the family, the company, the state), and corresponding conceptual categories (culture, economy, creativity). However, the overview of the lives and identities of people professionally employed as media practitioners if anything suggests that these analytical devices are not particularly helpful if we want to make sense of media work—and thus of the problems and solutions people in overdeveloped capitalist democracies increasingly face on a day to day basis” (p. 233). But if the category of “media work”—or, more broadly, “knowledge work” or “information work”—is worth defining and analyzing, it is precisely because such a concept must be productively used together with those “well-established” analytical categories that Deuze derides as “not particularly helpful.” Arguing that these categories might be more “fluid”—interpenetrating, impermanent, contingent, or just changing historically—is not the same as accepting that these categories are useless.

[...]

As a snapshot of present-day working conditions and recent interdisciplinary scholarship around the question of professional media work, Deuze’s short and readable volume fills an important niche. But in the end, the broadest conclusion Deuze is able to make is that “a structural sense of constant change and permanent revolution is the strongest guide or predictor of the human condition in the digital age” (p. 235). Rather than always seeing historical discontinuity around digital networked infrastructures, perhaps we must admit that “constant change,” especially when it comes to practices of cultural creation, knowledge production, and information circulation, has been a hallmark—if not the hallmark—of what has been called “modernity” for a very long time indeed."

Coming Soon: Special Issue on "Newswork"

2009-07-09T10:21:00.011-04:00

After two years of exciting work with friend and colleague Tim Marjoribanks (University of Melbourne), our special issue on "Newswork" of the journal Journalism Theory Practice & Criticism is coming out soon; I just got the page proofs this week. As a sneak preview, please find the table of contents below.

By the way: the authors' version of the introductory essay Tim and I wrote for the special issue (on the changing conditions of work and labor in the global news industry) is available for download at IU Scholarworks. It features a broad discussion of the changes and challenges facing journalists in terms of labor, working conditions, and management, as well as a brief summary of all the wonderful articles that are featured in this special issue.

Journalism Volume 10 Number 5 October 2009

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Newswork
Mark Deuze and Timothy Marjoribanks 555

ARTICLES

Between tradition and change: A review of recent research on online news production
Eugenia Mitchelstein and Pablo J. Boczkowski 562

Compressed dimensions in digital media occupations: Journalists in transformation
Amy Schmitz Weiss and Vanessa de Macedo Higgins Joyce 587

An actor-network perspective on changing work practices: Communication technologies as actants in newswork
Ursula Plesner 604

Token responses to gendered newsrooms: Factors in the career-related decisions of female newspaper sports journalists
Marie Hardin and Erin Whiteside 627

The performative journalist: Job satisfaction, temporary workers and American television news
Kathleen M. Ryan 647

Structure, agency, and change in an American newsroom
David M. Ryfe 665

Watchdog or witness? The emerging forms and practices of videojournalism
Sue Wallace 684

The shaping of an online feature journalist
Steen Steensen 702

Changing journalistic practices in Eastern Europe: The cases of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia
Monika Metyková and Lenka Waschková Císarová 720

Media Work Book Review (5)

2009-07-01T10:30:00.011-04:00

My last book, Media Work (Polity Press), is now out for almost two years. As far as I can tell, about 2,000 copies have been sold, roughly half of which in the US. Beyond all of that, it is really cool to see it get noticed and picked up for review in several scholarly journals: the International Journal of Media Management, The Information Society (forthcoming issue), the European Journal of Communication (as a booknote), New Media & Society, and Ecquid Novi:African Journalism Studies.

Most of these reviews I reproduced on this blog - find them here.

I just came across one more review in a scholarly journal - Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Spring 2008 issue (volume 85, issue 1, pages 212-213). Although most reviews of the book have been complimentary, and all reviews - also those that have been more critical - have been respectfully written, the one in JQ by Ohio University's Professor Emeritus Guido H. Stempel III is the odd one out. Unfortunately, the journal is not online, so I'll reproduce the review below.

It is safe to say I do not agree with just about every point Stempel makes - except for his final conclusion about the book, which is excellent: "The issues discussed in this book are important, but Media Work represents only a starting point for the conversation" (admittedly, I would prefer to replace "but" with "and", while deleting "only").

Media Work. Mark Deuze. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007. 278 pp. $64.95 hbk. $22.95 pbk. Reviewed by Guido Stempel III in Journalism Quarterly.

"This book bills itself as a "primer" on working in the information age, based on interviews with media professionals in the United States, the Netherlands, South Africa, and New Zealand.

The author, an assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University and a professor of journalism and new media at Leiden University, deals with the impact of digital age technologies on the people who work for media and for media organizations.

He divides media into four categories—advertising, public relations, and marketing communications; journalism; film and television; and games. Each is the subject of a chapter, which is appropriate because work differs so much from one to another.

For journalism faculty, the chapter on journalism will be a good deal more useful than the others. Those teaching advertising and public relations also will find the chapter dealing with those areas helpful.

The chapter on film and television deals only with entertainment, not with television news. The chapter on games deals primarily with games themselves, not how they fit into the configuration of the mass media environment.

The main thesis of the book is that media work will become individualized — that full-time freelancers will replace media companies. The worker will go from job to job rather than working continuously for the same organization, Deuze predicts. Then the author deals with the impact of this on the individual and on family life. Yet I feel the author underestimates how individualized newswork is already and therefore overestimates how much of a change this will be.

What the author does not deal with very much is the implication of all this for news. Where will the news come from? Might the Associated Press become the model for news coverage? If the Internet is the main medium for news and information, what kind of news will we have? How will a freelancer covering the mayor of Indianapolis differ from the reporter from the Indianapolis Star, representing that established institution, covering the mayor? Will freelancers maintain the ethical standards that media institutions maintain, or might they perhaps maintain higher ethical standards? There is also the question of how news will be paid for. Bloggers and Web sites use information gathered and paid for by media organizations. If those organizations seek to exist who will pay for the news?

The issues discussed in this book are important, but Media Work represents only a starting point for the conversation."

Spreekbeurten in Nederland & Denmark

2009-05-08T19:02:00.008-04:00

In mei en juni ben ik twee weken in Nederland (en tussendoor in Denemarken) voor een aantal spreekbeurten. Als je in de buurt bent en zin/tijd hebt, kom graag langs!

27 mei 2009, avond [UPDATE]: presentatie "Journalistiek zonder Journalisten" (op basis van een oudere bijdrage in het NRC Handelsblad en een binnenkort te verschijnen publikatie als co-auteur samen met Leopoldina Fortunati met als werktitel "Journalism Without Journalists") op de Universiteit van Leiden. De presentatie is zowel openbaar toegankelijk en gratis. Plaats: Lipsius-gebouw zaal 003, van 19.00-20.45 uur. Voor meer info, neem graag contact op met Peter Burger (p.burger at hum.leidenuniv.nl).

29 May 2009, ochtend: workshop "Internet for Journalists" at the Radio Nederland Training Centre in Hilversum.

2 June 2009, 14:00 uur: for those in Denmark: I'll be speaking/giving a workshop with the Mediatization of Culture group from 2-5pm at the Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication (Film & Media Section) of the University of Copenhagen. This workshop will center on the first couple chapters of "Media Work" (Polity Press, 2007) and the opening chapters of a forthcoming book on "Media Life"; see the working paper at IU Scholarworks for more info.

5 juni 2009, 14:00 uur: lezing over toenemende publieksparticipatie en de veranderende inrichting/ organisatie van het journalistieke werk op het Symposium "Nieuws: Maak het mee! Televisiejournaal, nieuwssites en burgerjournalistiek in beweging" (13.00-17.30 uur), in de Theaterzaal van het Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid te Hilversum. Kosten: €27,50 (studenten €15.-). Tip: voor mij spreekt Huub Wijfjes (RUG), hetgeen altijd bijzonder de moeite waard is.

11 juni 2009 [UPDATE]: I was scheduled to deliver a plenary session at the Cross Media Impact congres of the Hogeschool Utrecht but alas, the conference was cancelled. Keep watching this space - I hope to be able to still come to Utrecht for a presentation/workshop, as I have fond memories of the journalism school there (I used to teach classes in online journalism in Utrecht back in the late 1990s), and professor Crossmedia Content Piet Bakker is an old friend.

Media Life, Baudrillard, Plato, and the Real

2009-04-27T12:14:00.005-04:00

This week we're finishing the Spring Semester here at Indiana University, which also means our University Division, 400-student course T101 Media Life is drawing to a close. Let me take this moment to embed the final slides of this course (all slideshows are available at Slideshare, search slides tagged with "T101").

In this lecture, I'm making the argument that media do not reflect nor direct us, but instead make reality (by providing the key ingredients for meaning-making). Using Baudrillard's critique of the Platonic allegory of the cave-based treatment of reality (as the simulation it is) in The Matrix trilogy, I move on to consider our experience of a media life as that of Truman Burbank in the 1998 movie The Truman Show, with one exception: there is no exit. I end with Baudrillard's call for "theoretical violence, not truth" - something that inspires everything I do (I hope, I wish).

T101 Media Life Lecture 26

View more presentations from Mark Deuze.

Human Technologies

2009-04-10T13:41:00.004-04:00

Great (short) TED talk by my friend and always awesome Renny Gleeson (Wieden + Kennedy, Portland). I especially like the idea of always fluid, always constructed identities - a key feature of media life.

The End of Newspapers

2009-03-17T10:50:00.005-04:00

(This post also appears on Polity Press' Digital Media and Society blog)

European and North American newspapers have been in decline for decades. Slowly but surely, all indicators of a more or less healthy product - circulation, audience penetration, advertising effectiveness, credibility and trust - have been eroding to the point where, today, they are in freefall. None of this is surprising given the historical trend, but it still features in feverish debates online and offline as to what the future of democracy is without newspapers.

The link between newspapers and democracy is tenuous, and also rather uninspiring as a basis for debate - as one can find similar discussions in the professional and academic literature in the 1920s (economic depression, general distrust of media as vehicles for wartime propaganda, rise of radio as a mass medium), the 1980s (TV news trumps print news, increased media concentration, decline of political and other forms of civic participation), and the early 1990s.

What seems to be lacking from the current debate - about the end of an era for local newspapers in the UK, or the demise of one or more national newspapers in The Netherlands, and the shutting down of at least 10 or more prestigious newspapers in the US - is a critical awareness of the workforce restructuring of journalism that runs parallel to this process. This process shifts the economy from one based on the production of commodities (such as news) at specific places (as in the office buildings of news organizations) using the skills of specific employees. It is perhaps useful to interpret the demise of newspapers as an important step towards the liquefaction of all these categories.

Economists for years have been predicting or advocating the emergence of a global weightless economy, where ideas are the primary form of capital (rather than, say, machines). Such a weightless economy centered on information and communications technology (ICT), the Internet, and (copyright-protected, trademarked) intellectual assets, in turn produced by immaterial labor. Immaterial labor produces the informational and cultural content of a commodity, which content is valued on the basis of impermanent, unstable, and generally unpredictable categories: creative norms, user preferences, consumer taste, seasonal fashions, and so on.

I would argue that another element defining the "weight" of a weightless economy - next to factories and machines - are people, as in: employees. People that are owned - and taken responsibility for through contracts and other formal social arrangements - by companies. The majority of journalists in countries all over the world has always been employed by newspapers. The newsroom sizes of newspapers can run into the hundreds of reporters and editors, whereas broadcast and online teams tend to be just a fraction of this.

Another difference has been that newspaper staffers generally have had the most stable kind of employment arrangements, often working in fulltime, open-ended contractual capacity. This compared to their colleagues in online, magazine, and broadcast news, which operations are more often than not staffed with contingent workers (parttime, temporary, freelance) in "atypical" or otherwise casualized labor conditions - often even working without a contract. Interestingly, in these areas of the profession the gender balance tends to be almost neutral, whereas in newspapers men dominate the workforce in countries such as The Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Australia, and the US - often by a margin of up to 80%.

At the heart of the demise of newspapers and the restructuring of a global weightless economy is the permanent uprooting and letting go of the majority of employed, contractual workforce in the news industry, and the overall casualization of labor.

Journalism is losing weight. Its weight is its workforce, and with that the remaining labor protections that still governed the profession. That is the real tragedy of the end of newspapers.

My Research and Teaching

2009-03-06T13:43:00.004-05:00

A bunch of us (colleagues at Indiana University) started a series of online video introductions to what we do in our teaching and research. Partly for fun, partly to get our work out there in a personalized way, partly in the hopes of attracting a wide and global range of undergraduate and graduate student applicants to our program.

Below is my (way too long and overly self-important) intro, and I hope you'll check out the work of my awesome colleagues and friends - videos collected and produced by Jim Krause. See links to better quality video at our departments' website here: my 2 cents, Lee Sheldon, Rob Potter, Norbert Herber, and Julia Fox.

Even More Media Work Reviews

2009-03-02T14:34:00.007-05:00

Excited to learn of two more academic journals publishing reviews of my Media Work book: the International Journal of Media Management (appearing in issue 11/1), and The Information Society (this after earlier scholarly reviews or booknotes in the European Journal of Communication, New Media & Society and Ecquid Novi).

The review in the International Journal of Media Management is extensive, and the editor has asked me not to copy and paste the whole thing on my blog. Fair enough, but I cannot resist at least quoting a concluding comment by the reviewer, as I am very pleased with it, and indeed have been hoping this is what people would get from the book:

"In sum, Deuze’s book makes at least three significant contributions to the analyses of the interactions between media, technology, and work. First, he is able to clearly trace the transformative impacts of technology across key sectors of the media, showing both their unique features but also the ways in which processes and practices are converging. In this regard, his argument makes a clearly stated case for the need to explore how global macro processes interact with national and local microlevel practices in our analyses of the media industry. These interactions have a significant impact on how media professionals understand and experience their work.

Second, his book shows that media now goes well beyond traditional understandings of the media as being the domain of experts who provide information and entertainment to the masses. Deuze’s analysis clearly shows how the distinctions that have marked much media practice and analysis are being transformed very rapidly, with pre-existing understandings and practices coming under severe threat and challenge. For example, for media workers in journalism, old hierarchies between producer and consumer are increasingly irrelevant as audiences are now content producers, as well as content consumers.

Third, Deuze’s book makes a convincing case that if we are to understand contemporary society, we must analyse the media. Crucially, in one form or another, we are all part of the media now."

Especially the third point is important to me, as it provides the lead-in for my next/current book project (next to an edited volume on media management), titled Media Life, which should be finished by Fall 2010...

The Media Logic of Media Work

2009-02-22T11:15:00.005-05:00

The inaugural issue of the new open-access academic Journal of Media Sociology just came out, featuring some excellent work that I warmly recommend to be checked out. I'm excited to have a piece included in this opening issue, titled "The Media Logic of Media Work", which is a hopefully more or less coherent take on my recent book, Media Work (Polity Press, 2007). The abstract is cut and pasted below, the journal can be downloaded in its entirety for free at the Marquette publishers' website (Link to PDF).

Title
The Media Logic of Media Work

Abstract
Culture creation is quickly becoming the core industrial (and individual) activity in the globally emerging cultural economy. This process gets amplified through the increasing conglomeration of media corporations, as well as the widespread diffusion of information and communication technologies. This paper combines insights from research on (professional and amateur) media production from disciplines as varied as institutional sociology, organizational psychology, cultural economy, management, media studies and economic geography to present a review of trends, developments and values co-determining media work. The concept of media logic is used as a mapping tool, articulating contemporary institutional, technological, organizational, and cultural trends as they co-determine media work. This hermeneutic analysis identifies principal components of workstyles in the media production industries across disciplines and genres, including journalism, advertising, film and television, and digital game development.

Link to PDF

Black Box Fallacy

2009-02-16T11:40:00.005-05:00

The video embedded below is a great example of the media industry's black box fallacy (BBF) - a concept referring to the tendency of many to see convergence exclusively in terms of the combination of different media functions within the same device, rather than at the very least additionally understanding its cultural component. The BBF was introduced, if I'm not mistaken, by Henry Jenkins (link to a BBF-related post on his blog) in the context of his convergence culture argument. Anyway, check out the clip if you have not done so already (its making the online rounds)... hilarious.

Media Life Slides

2009-02-12T10:40:00.004-05:00

As the basis for my new book project I'm working on these days (titled "Media Life"), I'm giving talks using the slideshow below... as always, comments are appreciated!

Media Life 2009

View more presentations from Mark Deuze. (tags: media life)

Media Work Blog @ Polity Press

2009-02-11T12:09:00.004-05:00

As from this week, I'll be blogging more or less regularly at the brand new Digital Media And Society book series website of my publisher, Polity Press.

The blogposts will follow the daily news coming out of the media/ cultural/ creative industries, focusing on the working lives of people across these industries and disciplines - including, but not limited to journalism, advertising, computer and video game development, marketing communications, PR, film/TV production, and music. Of course, the topics/themes selected relate to my Media Work (2007) book, but you can expect other Polity authors to join in the discussion soon.

Some early posts cover the "Content is not King" debate and focus on new business models in the global motion pictures industry.

I hope to see you there, please leave comments, and feel free to (re-) tweet, post and link any of the material there.

FYI: for regular linksharing and brief posts on all things media work/media life, the best place to find me is at my Facebook newsfeed; for midsize blogposts on media work please check out the Polity Press DMS site, and for longer pieces on (forthcoming) articles, books, and working papers, I'll use this "Deuzeblog". The shortest blurbs can be found at my Twitter account, of course.

Media Life [abstract]

2009-01-28T11:22:00.004-05:00

As I've blogged before, I'm currently working on a book titled "Media Life", further exploring the argument in the opening chapter of "Media Work" - suggesting our lives are lived not with, but rather in, media. See also some of my tweets on the topic, as well as posted items on my Facebook profile (only visible to friends, so friend me...).

In the run-up to actually writing the book, the plan is to condense the overall media life argument into a more or less coherent paper. Right now, that particular piece is a work in progress, but for a couple of upcoming talks and book chapter commitments, I'd like to offer a draft extended abstract. Comments, as always, are deeply appreciated!

“Media Life” abstract (dated: 28 January 2009)

Life in today's liquid modern society (Bauman 2000) is all about finding ways to deal with constant change, whether it is at home, at work, or at play. As I have argued elsewhere (Deuze 2007), Over the last few decades, all these key areas of human existence have converged in and through our concurrent and continuous exposure to, use of, and immersion in media, information and communication technologies. Our media environment has become a key site of how we give meaning to the converging context of how we live, work, and play, as media connect us to each other, to our entertainment, and to our work - all at the same time.

Media are both the directors and reflectors of human behavior and social organization. Manuel Castells (2001) for example suggests that “We know that technology does not determine society: it is society. Society shapes technology according to the needs, values, and interests of people who use the technology.” Yet somehow, this pluralism of viewpoints does not seem to do justice to the different ways all those taken for granted products and experiences that make up our day-to-day existence have become automated, augmented and organized through media. A secondary problem is the (often implicit) insistence on maintaining some kind of conceptual or even normative boundary between “media” and “society”. In this contribution, I therefore argue for a perspective that seeks to dissolve such boundaries, suggesting that the whole of the world and our lived experience in it can be seen as framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by media.

This world is what Roger Silverstone (2007) labels a mediapolis: a mediated public space where media underpin and overarch the experiences of everyday life (where, in his words, “technologies don’t care”). Instead of continuing to wrestle with a distinction between media and society, I propose we begin our thinking with a view of life as lived in media – media that have, as Lev Manovich (2001) argues, pervasive, ubiquitous, remixed and remixable properties. This paper addresses the most fundamental aspects and themes of everyday life - such as work, family, love, play and work - such as these can be understood in the context of a life lived in media.

A media life is analogous with living inside our very own Truman Show: a world characterized by pervasive and ubiquitous media that we are constantly and concurrently deeply immersed in, that dominate and shape all aspects of our everyday life. As a case in point, I will discuss the recent suggestion by psychiatrists Joel and Ian Gold that the combination of pervasive media, classical syndromes such as narcissism and paranoia, and an emerging media culture where the boundaries between the physical and virtual world are blurring produces a new type of psychosis (as documented in patient case histories): a “Truman Show Delusion” (TSD).

TSD is coined after the motion picture “The Truman Show” (1998), in which actor Jim Carrey portrays the life of a man who does not know his entire life is one big reality television show, watched by millions all over the world. People who suffer from TSD are more or less convinced that everything around them is a décor, that the people in their lives are all actors, and that everything they do is monitored and recorded. McGill University’s Ian Gold attributes TSD in an interview with Canadian newspaper the National Post to “unprecedented cultural triggers that might explain the phenomenon: the pressure of living in a large, connected community can bring out the unstable side of more vulnerable people […] New media is opening up vast social spaces that might be interacting with psychological processes” (July 19, 2008, p.A1). In a background story in the International Herald Tribune several experts confirm TSD and suggest that “[o]ne way of looking at the delusions and hallucinations of the mentally ill is that they represent extreme cases of what the general population, or the merely neurotic, are worried about” (August 30, 2008, p.7).

The British Journal of Psychiatry describes the common symptoms as follows: “First, there is the sense that the ordinary is changed or different, and that there is particular significance in this. This is coupled with a searching for meaning, which, in this case, results in the ‘Truman explanation’. The third feature is a profound alteration of subjective experience and of self-awareness, resulting in an unstable first-person perspective with varieties of depersonalization and derealization, disturbed sense of ownership, fluidity of the basic sense of identity, distortions of the stream of consciousness and experiences of disembodiment” (Fusar-Poli et al. 2008, p.168).

The Truman explanation can be considered an example of looking at the definition and role of media as completely woven into the fabric of our lives. This is not so much a normative warning against the presupposed “effects” of media on society, but rather an investigation of the integration of media with society. This perspective ultimately begs the question: given the “open source” nature of a lived reality through pervasive, ubiquitous, and remixed/remixable media, what do people and insititutions do with this newfound power and emerging read/write literacies in what John Hartley describes as our contemporary “redactional” society?

References

Zygmunt Bauman (2000) Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Manuel Castells (2001) The internet galaxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mark Deuze (2007) Media work. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Paolo Fusar-Poli, Oliver Howes, Lucia Valmaggia, Philip McGuire (2008) ‘Truman’ signs and vulnerability to psychosis. British Journal of Psychiatry 193, p168.
John Hartley (2000) Communicational democracy in a redactional society: the future of journalism studies. Journalism Theory Practice & Criticism 1(1), pp39-47.
Lev Manovich (2001) The language of new media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Roger Silverstone (2007) Media and morality: on the rise of the mediapolis. Polity Press, Cambridge (UK).

Shadow Media, Creative Work, and Organized Networks

2009-01-10T15:12:00.006-05:00

Media professionals are, like everyone else, hit hard by the economic downturn - but not just that. In an age of egocasting, consumers turning mediators and producers (or: produsers/prosumers), and behaviors of media firms signaling those of the people formerly known as the employers, mass layoffs, outsourcing and other forms of contingency have great impact on the employment, morale, and creative process in media work.

All of this is particularly problematic if one assumes work to take place in the specific context of media firms and companies – if one understands media work in the traditional sense of employment. That model for media work is (and has been for quite a while) not very realistic for many professionals across the media industries, as their work relationships can best be described as contingent and "atypical", which means: work takes place often without contract, without any kind of formal responsibility or accountability system, is dependent on fluctuations (for example in the market, consumer demand, pricing and financing arrangements) beyond the control of the professional(s) involved.

In 2009 we can add to this caveat on media work the emergence of what Businesweek’s Jon Fine predicts as a shadow media, consisting of

“properties created and staffed by those pink-slipped in '08 and '09. This sets the stage for epic clashes with existing players in '10 and beyond.”

Indeed – clashes with those still under some form of employment. Yet those numbers are declining fast, according to a brief but powerful overview in The Hollywood Reporter:

“Layoffs in the media industry, which includes film and TV companies, amounted to 28,083 last year, the highest since 43,420 staffers were let go in 2001 following the bursting of the dot-com bubble.”

The question is: how can we make the shadow media economy (or rather: ecosystem, if we do not necessarily assume the creative work involved is done to further commercial enterprise) visible?

One way is through the emergence of formal, semi-formal, and informal organized networks (see the work of Ned Rossiter, Vincent Mosco and Catherine McKercher in this context) of creatives (in advertising, film/TV, journalism, games, and so on). These are often not unions, but rather loosely integrated collectives, often local yet increasingly transnational in nature that act as some kind of bulwark against the intimidating nature of the global marketplace for media/cultural/creative industries.

Examples of formal global media professional networks: the International Federation of Journalists, Global Unions, and the Media/Culture/Graphical sector of the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Examples of semi-formal global networks are the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), and Artbox.

Examples of informal networks: any and all nodes and hubs online where media workers come together, such as at numerous Facebook groups and Twitterfeeds (at Twitter I warmly recommend following themediaisdying).

Some personal favorites on Facebook are: "Don't tell my mum I'm in advertising - she thinks I play piano in a brothel” (5,162 members as of 10 January 2009), the Newspaper Escape Plan (2,413 members on Jan.10), "Trust me, I’m a Journalist" (with 18,230 members on Jan.10), the Film Industry Network (18,051 members on Jan.10), and the "People who have had their souls broken by working in the games industry" group (with 513 members on Jan.10).

It should be fascinating to follow these intitiatives or "spaces of flows" as Castells uses the concept. How this all translates to better conditions for creative work to flourish and professionals to be rewarded for their expertise, I do not know. But the inspiration is certainly there, and our research should follow suit.