Activity Theory has been used as a framework for human computer interaction research (Kuuti, 1996). Activity theory focuses on the activities that people engage in, who is engaging in that activity and what their goals and intentions are, what objects or products result from the activity, the rules and norms that circumscribe the activity and the community in which the activity occurs (Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999, p. 62). An activity is a collective form of doing directed to and driven by an object (Engeström, 2008 ; Kuuti, 1996). Activities are open systems (Engeström, 2001). They are continuously changing and developing (Nardi, 1996 ; Kuuti, 1996). […]

a) subject: the individual or group of actors engaged in the activity (Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999);

b) object: the physical or mental entity towards which the activity is oriented, that motivates the activity (Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999);

c) tools: mediate and alter the activity and that can in turn be altered by the activity (Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999);

d) community: consists of all actors directly involved in an activity, sharing the object with the subject (Ojo et al., 2011);

e) rules: the explicit and implicit norms, conventions and social relations of a community (Kuuti, 1996 ; Ojo et al., 2011) that guide the actions or activities acceptable by the community (e.g. legal framework) (Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999);

f) division of labour: roles (Ojo et al., 2011) that prescribe the task specialization by individual members of the group within the community (Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999);

g) outcome: the transformation of the object into an outcome motivates the existence of an activity (Kuuti, 1996).

In this talk I review an emerging area of scholarship centred on the media practices of social movements. I distinguish two broad camps. First, there are authors who use the notion of media practices as a methodological conduit to reach one or more aspects of a given social movement. Second, there are others who ask what we actually mean by ‘media practices’ in the context of social movements research (e.g. Mattoni 2012), seeking answers in the recent ‘practice turn’ in media theory (Couldry 2004, Bräuchler and Postill 2010). Both camps are doing valuable work in their own right, but it is only the second camp that faces serious epistemological challenges, including (1) the mediation vs. mediatisation fork, (2) how to separate one media practice from another (Christensen and Røpke 2010), (3) whether to differentiate between media practices and media actions, (4) how to understand the life and afterlife of transient practices, e.g. those of square occupations, and (5) what to do with the notion of communicative practices, as opposed to media practices.

John Postill, RMIT

Two key readings

Kubitschko, S. (2015). Hackers’ media practices: demonstrating and articulating expertise as interlocking arrangements. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 21(3), 388-402.

Boler, M., Macdonald, A., Nitsou, C., & Harris, A. (2014). Connective labor and social media: Women’s roles in the ‘leaderless’ Occupy movement. Convergence, 20(4), 438-460.

Further reading

https://johnpostill.com/2017/03/28/media-practices-and-social-movements-reading-list/

Postill, J. and L.C. Epafras forthcoming 2017. Tweeting religion in Indonesia: when political arenas go viral. American Ethnologist (virtual issue)

The popularity of social media in Indonesia, combined with the rise of political Islamism in recent years, are changing the ways in which people engage with religious matters in the world’s largest Muslim country. One significant change is the way that religious and political figures incorporate a combination of online and offline audiences in maintaining their public authority.

Take the entrepreneur, peace activist and senator Fahira Idris. Born in 1968 into Indonesia’s political and religious elites, Fahira’s father held several ministerial posts, while her late mother was the daughter of a former chairman of the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI).

Fahira was an early adopter of Twitter and other social media. In 2010 she was voted “The World’s Most Inspiring Tweeter” in an international poll. The tweet credited with establishing her reputation was addressed to the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), a hardline group often linked to violent incidents. It read (our translation): “Dear FPI, is that how Islam was taught by the prophet Muhammad?”[1]

This tweet was widely interpreted as a reference to a recent violent attack, reportedly by the FPI, on a Batak Christian Protestant Church (HKBP) congregation in West Java. It sparked intense debate online between supporters of Fahira and the FPI. Fahira posed an open question, channelling what she called “the magic of Twitter” (Kristanti 2010) by asking if any of her 260,000 followers knew the address for the FPI national headquarters, information that was not public. She quickly received multiple responses offering the address, as well as other tweets advising caution (Patung 2010).

The exchange led to a high profile meeting between Fahira and Habib Rizieq, the FPI leader, at the FPI headquarters in central Jakarta. On arrival, Fahira handed Habib Rizieq a printed copy of over 1,200 emails from people across Indonesia, including victims of FPI linked violence, with comments and questions for him. In the meeting, Fahira stressed the importance of dialogue and the rule of law in a multi-faith society like Indonesia’s, and insisted that “Islam is a religion of peace” (Suara Pembaruan 2010).

Two viral arenas

The Fahira vs. Habib Rizieq controversy is a textbook example of two Turnerian “arenas.” Victor Turner defined an arena as “a bounded spatial unit in which precise, visible antagonists, individual or corporate, contend with one another for prizes and/or honour” (Turner 1974: 132-133). In an arena nothing can be left unsaid or “merely implied” (1974: 134). Rather, “all actors drawn into the drama […] must state publicly where they stand on the dispute at hand” (Postill 2011: 96).

When Fahira publicly interpellated FPI on Twitter, Habib Rizieq and his inner circle felt they had no option but to respond. Remaining silent would have meant losing face. Agreeing to see Fahira in person when she publically announced her intention of meeting with them was the only reasonable choice to make. As a result, two arenas were assembled in rapid succession: one on Twitter, the other face to face. Overnight Habib Rizieq and Fahira became “precise, visible antagonists” vying for the hearts of minds of Indonesia’s vast Muslim population at a time of heightened inter-faith tension.

Turner argued that arenas come in many different forms: “[a] political or legal arena may range from an actual battlefield to the setting of a trial or verbal debate” (1974: 133). In the Fahira vs. Habib Rizieq case, each of the two arenas afforded these political actors a distinct set of communicative possibilities: while their in person encounter offered a richer repertoire of verbal and non-verbal social cues and immediate feedback, Twitter presented ordinary citizens with an opportunity to participate in the debate and the prospect of the issue going viral – which it did.

This episode illustrates how Twitter has come to function as a central site for short-lived arenas within Indonesia’s increasingly politicized religious space. In other words, this immensely popular platform has become a highly visible stage where public figures are compelled to unambiguously declare their stance on a current religious issue.

But what makes a Twitter arena come into being and go viral? Three factors appear to be crucial: the timing of the initial challenge, the core societal problem it addresses, and the public standing of the lead actors drawn – or dragged –into the arena.

First, the timing of Fahira’s now famous ‘Dear FPI’ tweet was significant, as it came immediately after the alleged FPI assault on the Protestant congregation. With tempers riding high, Fahira’s rhetorical question about the prophet Muhammad struck a chord with moderate Indonesians and was widely retweeted. The impact came as much from the content of the tweet as from the fact that Fahira had dared to confront an intimidating organization, generating a David vs. Goliath scenario.

Second, most current affairs are in fact recurrent affairs, for they address unfinished business within a social space or society. In Indonesia, one political problem unresolved since independence in 1945 is the relationship between Islam and the state. In terms of Turner’s social drama theory, the FPI attack was a breach in the established order of things; the first stage in a social drama triggered by Fahira’s tweet that brought out into the open this perennial national issue. There followed a crisis phase in which Habib Rizieq sought damage control. In effect, he was reluctantly acknowledging the state’s monopoly over the means of physical and symbolic violence. This led to a protracted phase of Turnerian re-integration between Fahira and Habib Rizieq, a phase that continues to this day, rather than a rupture or schism – the other possible outcome – between them.

The third crucial factor in the making of a viral arena is the standing of the main actors involved. Fahira’s entrepreneurial success and religious elite ancestry, together with her social media savvy, were equally instrumental in establishing her credibility as an FPI interlocutor. Similarly, Habib Rizieq was also known as a controversial “hardliner’ with a large following across the archipelago. Differing in their life trajectories and location within the country’s religious space, Fahira and Habib Rizieq represent a new genre of religious actor familiar to anthropologists of religion around the world. New religious mediators exploit the opportunities afforded by emergent media to further their ambitions in competition and/or cooperation with an incumbent religious class.

References

Kristanti, E.Y. (2010). “Saya Tidak Takut FPI, Karena Saya Benar”, Viva.co.id, 30 August 2010, http://fokus.news.viva.co.id/news/read/174089-tweeter-paling-inspiratif

Patung (2010) Top Tweeter: Fahira Idris. Indonesia Matters, 30 August 2010, http://www.indonesiamatters.com/10721/fahira-idris/

Postill, J. (2011). Localizing the Internet: An Anthropological Account. Oxford: Berghahn.

Republika Online (2016) Senator DPD vs Aktivis JIL, Fahira: Akhmad Sahal Ingin Pendukungnya Bully Saya, 17 March 2016, http://nasional.republika.co.id/berita/nasional/umum/16/03/17/o46ek6377-senator-dpd-vs-aktivis-jil-fahira-akhmad-sahal-ingin-pendukungnya-bully-saya

Suara Pembaruan (2010) Fahira Fahmi Idris Islam Mengajarkan Damai’ 22 September 2010. http://www.suarapembaruan.com/home/fahira-fahmi-idris-islam-mengajarkan-damai/74.

Turner, V.W. (1974). Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Note

[1] The original tweet read: Dear FPI, apakah seperti itu Islam yang diajarkan Nabi Muhammad?

Photo caption: A recent picture of the Indonesian entrepreneur, peace activist and senator Fahira Idris. Source: Twitter. https://twitter.com/senatorjakarta

Postill, J. 2017. The diachronic ethnography of media: from social changing to actual social changes. Moment, Journal of Cultural Studies 4(1): 19-43. PDF (Moment), PDF (Academia.edu)

Abstract

In this article I address the challenge of how to study media and actual social changes ethnographically. To do so I draw from the relevant media ethnography literature, including my own research in Malaysia and Spain. I argue that ethnographers are well positioned to contribute to the interdisciplinary study of media and social change. However, to do so we must first shift our current focus on media and ‘social changing’ (i.e. how things are always changing) to the study of media in relation to actual social changes, e.g. the suburbanisation of Kuala Lumpur in the 1970s to 2000s, the secularisation of morality in post-Franco Spain, or the success of new indignados parties in Spain’s 2015 local government elections. This shift from the ethnographic present continuous to the past simple – a move from potential to actual changes – does not require that we abandon ethnography in favour of social history. Rather, it demands new forms of ‘diachronic ethnography’ that can handle the biographical, phase-by-phase logic of actual social changes. It also requires that we conduct not only multi-sited (Marcus 1995) but also multi-timed fieldwork on specific congeries of media practices, forms and agents.

Keywords: media, social change, diachronic ethnography, media ethnography

Introduction

The 1990s ‘ethnographic turn’ in British media studies was a response to both the uncritical portrayal of passive audiences common in the discipline at the time and to the prevalence of quantitative mass communication studies, particularly in the US (Horst, Hjorth and Tacchi 2012: 86). One area of great interest within the ethnography of media since then has been the link between media and sociocultural change. However, most media ethnographers have so far paid far more attention to media and ‘social changing’ in general than to media in relation to concrete social changes. In other words, ethnographers tend to discuss how matters were changing at the time of fieldwork rather than how they actually changed, say, in the late 2000s, or in 1939-1945, in any given country or field site. In this respect, they are no different from most other media and communication scholars who study contemporary lifeways: they write about media in the present continuous.

This present continuism is no doubt partly an artefact of the ethnographic genre in its current incarnation. In the case of anthropology, the discipline from where the method originates, while earlier generations of fieldworkers denied their research participants ‘coevalness’ by writing in the ethnographic present tense (Fabian 1983, Postill 2006: 31-33), the current generation writes in the ethnographic present continuous as it strives for an ‘anthropology of the contemporary’ (Rabinow and Marcus 2008, Budka 2011). The focus on social changing may also signal a collective anxiety (again, shared with media scholars who are not ethnographers) about technological obsolescence; a fear that the technologies we study in the field will be regarded as ‘old media’ by the time our findings are published. Moreover, the ethnographic present continuous fits well with recent phenomenological approaches to media inspired by Ingold (2000, 2007) and other theorists, in which humans exist in a perpetual state of ‘becoming’, forever a work in progress (see, for instance, Moores 2010, 2012).

Whatever the roots of the problem, in this article I argue that it is crucial that we do not confuse ongoing social changing (A is changing) with completed or realised social changes (A changed into B). An example of social changing would go something like “At the time of fieldwork, most villagers in the area were abandoning subsistence farming for waged labour as their main economic activity”. By contrast, a social changes passage would read: “Most villagers in the area switched from subsistence farming to waged labour as their main economic activity between the 1980s and the early 2000s”. (Note that I am not positing a crude account of ‘social progress’ here; the example would work equally well in reverse, i.e. a shift from waged labour to subsistence farming).

The trouble with relying on the present continuous is that it paints oddly ahistorical pictures that can tell us a great deal about media and social changing but less so about media and actual social changes[1]. These are accounts that suffer from an undiagnosed condition we could call ‘imminentism’. That is, we tacitly favour the imminent (and immanent) at the expense of the actual and completed, conflating the recent past, the present and the near future in a fuzzy ‘now’.

In this article I address this latter question by drawing from the media ethnography literature, including my own research in Malaysia and Spain (Postill 2006, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2016, forthcoming), as well as work by ethnographers from fields other than anthropology. I first sketch a history of media anthropology, identifying a number of key works and themes as well as two main phases of growth since the 1980s. I then argue that anthropologists and other ethnographers are well positioned to contribute to the interdisciplinary study of media and social change. However, to do so we must first shift our current focus on media and ‘social changing’ (i.e. how things are changing) to the study of media in relation to realised social changes, e.g. the suburbanisation of Kuala Lumpur in the 1970s to 2000s, the secularisation of morality in post-Franco Spain, or the success of new indignados parties in the 2015 local government elections held across Spain. The shift from the ethnographic present continuous to the past simple that I am proposing – a move from potential changes to actual changes – does not require that we abandon ethnography in favour of social history. Rather, it demands new forms of ‘diachronic ethnography’ that can handle the biographical (phase-by-phase) logic of actual social changes.

At the heart of this proposal lies the working assumption that media-related changes, like all historical processes, have a life course of their own (with a beginning, a middle, and an end) that is amenable to the usual techniques of biographical analysis.

The ethnography of media

It was only as late as the 1980s that anthropologists began to take a serious interest in the study of media (Dickey 1997, Ginsburg et al 2002, Peterson 2003, Spitulnik 1993) and, almost by default, in media and social change. After a brief period of intense activity during the Second World War, followed by a long lull that lasted the better part of the Cold War, the anthropology of media is now thriving. From 2002 to 2005 alone four comprehensive overviews of the field were published (Askew and Wilk 2002; Ginsburg et al. 2002; Peterson 2003; Rothenbuhler and Coman 2005) while the EASA Media Anthropology Network expanded from a score of founding members in 2004 to nearly 1,600 participants by May 2017. Anthropologists have now conducted fieldwork – as well as historical research – in numerous countries and on a vast range of media practices (Coleman 2010).

Two main stages of subfield development can be distinguished (1) the 1980s and 1990s as a ‘take-off’ phase in which the study of television took pride of place and (2) the 2000s to the present as a stage marked by theoretical innovation and media diversification. The first stage is well covered in Ginsburg et al’s (2002) reader Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (see also Osorio 2001 and Peterson 2003). Ginsburg et al identify five main themes running through the anthropology of media of the preceding two decades: media production, the cultural politics of nation-states, transnational media, indigenous activism, and the ‘social life’ of media technologies. To these five themes we could add a sixth, namely media, ritual and religion, first addressed in an edited volume by Hughes-Freeland (1998, see also Couldry 2003, Eisenlohr 2011 and Rothenbuhler and Coman 2005).

This late twentieth century literature largely consists of single-medium ethnographic studies of the dominant media of the day: radio, television, film, video, and print media (the latter sometimes coming under the separate remit of ‘orality and literacy’, see Postill and Peterson 2009, Street 1993, 2001). Anthropologists working on the ‘reception’ end of the media continuum often turned their attention to media questions during fieldwork, after they found their research participants literally turning their backs on them to watch television (Adra 1993, Hobart 2000, Miller 1992). This generation sought theoretical inspiration in British media and cultural studies, whilst hoping to expand the cultural geography of the field beyond the metropolitan North to include ‘out-of-the-way places’ (Ginsburg et al 2002).

The second phase (2000s-2010s) is still marked by media ethnographers’ sustained attention to television, radio and film, but now with an added interest in social and mobile media. This phase opened with the publication of Miller and Slater’s (2000) The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach which paved the way for other ethnographic studies in which the internet was portrayed not as an exotic realm set apart from everyday life but rather as an integral part of the everyday (Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002, Kjaerulff 2010a, Postill 2010, but see Boellstorff 2008 for a counter-argument). Like their colleagues in other research traditions, media ethnographers have found it increasingly difficult in recent years to conduct research around a single medium or internet platform (for an exception, see Miller 2011). One example is Madianou and Miller’s (2012) call for the study of ‘polymedia’, a term they coined to capture the new predicament of media users around the globe faced with a vastly expanded choice of social technologies. This is a situation, they argue, in which choosing the ‘wrong’ technology or platform (e.g. Facebook instead of SMS) can have dire social and personal consequences. Other anthropologists have similarly undertaken research across a range of online and offline sites, e.g. to track the logics of virality and aggregation of the new protest movements (Juris 2012, Postill 2014 and forthcoming).

Throughout this second period of expansion media anthropologists gained greater visibility across media and communication studies and led theoretical advances on topics such as transnational media (Mankekar 2008), cultural and political activism (Bonilla and Rosa 2015, Ginsburg 2008, Juris 2008, Postill 2011), ICT for development (Slater and Tacchi 2004), 3D virtual environments (Boellstorff 2008, Malaby 2009, Nardi 2010), blogging (Estalella 2011, Hopkins 2012, Reed 2005), geek and hacker subcultures (Kelty 2008, Coleman 2011, 2014), journalism (Bird 2010, Born 2004, Boyer 2011, Rao 2010), advertising (Mazzarella 2010, Moeran 2013), mobile media (Horst and Miller 2006, Tenhunen 2008), social media (Gershon 2010, Miller 2011, Miller et al 2016), practice theory (Bräuchler and Postill 2010) and methodology (Boellstorff et al 2012, Gray 2016, Pink et al 2015, Postill 2016, Vidali 2016, Vidali and Peterson 2012).

Critical interventions

Ethnographers have conducted a substantial amount of work on media and social change/changing since the 1980s. Often they have addressed this question obliquely, via specialist topics such as cultural activism, communication for development, media production, gendered relations, nation-building or international migration (see Ginsburg et al 2002, Peterson 2003, Postill 2006, 2011, Skuse et al 2011). These scholars link specific media forms and practices to broad societal or regional changes, e.g. the spread of neo-Hinduism in India (Mankekar 1999, Rao 2010), neo-Pentecostalism in Africa (Meyer 2010, Pype 2011), or British media development ‘aid’ in post-Soviet Central Asia (Mandel 2002, Skuse 2012).

Another common tack has been to use ethnographic research to critique the grand claims of media scholars and ‘gurus’ about the supposedly transformative power of new media in the ‘network society’ (Coleman 2010, Green et al 2005, Horst and Miller 2006, Postill 2008, Slater 2014) – although some media ethnographers themselves have not been averse to making epochal prognoses of their own based on localised or platform-specific studies (see Postill 2009 for examples)[2].

There are, however, some instances of ethnographic texts that have explicitly theorised the elusive relationship between media and social change(s). For instance, Kjaerulff (2010a, 2010b) discusses how teleworkers in Denmark seek to order their lives by separating their work and personal activities, albeit not always successfully. Updating Barth’s classic theories of practice and social change, Kjaerulff regards work as a changing ‘cultural stream’ that shapes the practices of local (tele)workers. Adopting a more political stance, Wallis (2011) cautions against the optimism with which mobile phones have been welcomed in ICT for development (ICT4D) circles. Like other researchers (e.g. Horst and Miller 2006, Jensen 2007, Stammler 2009, Tenhunen 2008), Wallis found that mobile phones can indeed improve the livelihoods of people in the global South, but this potential is highly unevenly distributed. Following mobile phone research among rural migrants in Beijing, she argues that many ICT4D studies unwittingly further a neoliberal ideology in which ‘all that is needed is a mobile phone to let the market work its magic, and inequities and power differentials related to gender and class are rendered irrelevant’ (2011).

For her part, Tenhunen (2008) builds on fieldwork on mobile ICTs in rural West Bengal (India) to argue that media ethnographers such as Horst and Miller (2006) and Miller and Slater (2000) have a tendency to overstress social reproduction at the expense of social change. Tenhunen also takes issue with practice theorists (Bourdieu 1992, Ortner 1984, Sahlins 1985) for overlooking historical agents’ ‘critical faculties’. This author regards mobile technology as ‘a source of dynamism’ that shapes culturally specific ‘social logistics’, highlighting the need to attend to people’s desire for social change. Thus, she shows how mobiles have given young women in rural West Bengal greater autonomy from their elders’ surveillance, whilst paradoxically reinvigorating traditional cultural forms such as kin-based reciprocity.

As if responding to this call for greater attention to social change, Madianou and Miller (2012) have teased out two tangled processes of change among Filipino transnational families: first, how media and migration shape such families over time; second, the ways in which ‘vertical’ technological changes unfold through processes of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000).

The biography of an actual social change

Identifying an actual social change is only the first step. We then need to reconstruct its life course and main stages of development. In other words, we must adopt a biographical (or processual) model.

At this point, a further semantic clarification is in order. In common academic parlance the notions of ‘life cycle’ and ‘life course’ are often conflated. Yet this is another crucial distinction to make, as it corresponds to a fundamental difference between recursive and non-recursive processes. For instance, when a monarch dies, another monarch takes his or her place. “The King is dead. Long live the King!”. Monarchies have an in-built recursive mechanism (succession) which allows them to reproduce themselves indefinitely (for as long as they can withstand revolutionary or republican pressures). On the other hand, the biological death of an individual king or queen is irreversible, for the human life course (or curriculum vitae, Lebenslauf) is non-recursive. Whatever our beliefs about the Afterlife and reincarnation, we can be sure that there is no biological going back. Just like their subjects, monarchs are Heideggerian ‘beings towards death’ (Giddens 1984: 35).

To be sure, most human beings are creatures of habit(us) with fairly predictable cycles or rounds of activity, but we are also embarked on life journeys that will end in certain, irreversible death. Likewise, the career of an actual social change will contain recursive elements, but it is nevertheless a finite process that will eventually either run its course or meet a premature death.

Table 1. A sample of four processual (stage-by-stage/sequential) models used by media and communication scholars.

Processual thinking has a long pedigree in media and communication studies (see Table 1). Of course, the models listed in Table 1 are merely sketches of real-world processes that are invariably complex, messy, overlapping and contradictory. Thus, not all actual cases of ICT domestication will follow the neat four-stage sequence specified in the model. In some instances two stages will be empirically indistinguishable, in others they will overlap, and so on (see Silverstone and Hirsch 1992). Nevertheless, these models are powerful tools that allow us to track both changes and continuities in socio-technical processes that would otherwise remain hidden amidst the mass of empirical data generated by ethnographic and social-historical research. Moreover, as with any theoretical model, the actualities of research ‘on the ground’ will help to shape the model dialectically and lead to its refinement. For instance, when I carried out research on the ‘biographies’ of radio and television sets among the Iban of Sarawak (East Malaysia), I soon realised that a fifth stage was required in order to provide a fuller picture of these artefacts’ life courses, namely their disposal (Postill 2006: 135).

But how can a processual model be applied to an actual social change? To answer this question, let us retake for a moment our earlier hypothetical example of the villagers who switched from subsistence farming to waged labour in the 1980s and 1990s. A processual analysis of this social change and its media dimensions would:

1. start with the historical origins (or birth) of this shift, e.g. one could interview the first villagers to make the switch to waged labour back in the 1980s, as well as their employers, local leaders, politicians and other historical agents involved with this stage of the process; the media aspects of this early adoption would be woven into the interviews, e.g. one could inquire into radio and television shows recalled by local labourers, as well as into government leaflets, church sermons, face-to-face meetings with NGOs, etc. encouraging the abandonment of supposedly ‘backward’ and ‘inefficient’ farming practices;
2. continue with a series of interviews with local farmers who took up waged labour in the 1990s, i.e. during the middle phase of the process; one could investigate a possible ‘network effect’ (Boyd 2009) and ‘tipping point’ (Gladwell 2000) to explain why most residents took up waged labour at a particular moment in the early 1990s, along with other environmental (e.g. a prolonged drought) and socioeconomic factors (e.g. a steep rise in living costs); in addition, one could again enquire about the media forms and practices related to this middle phase but always avoiding ‘media-centric’ biases (see Couldry 2012, Moores 2012);
3. end with the final stage of the process, namely the point at which the practical totality of villagers have by now abandoned farming and rely almost entirely on waged labour for their livelihoods (if this is indeed the case, as ethnographic research will sometimes overturn even the most reasonable working assumption).

Diachronic ethnography

In both popular and academic discourse we have a habit of using the notion of ‘social change’ as an uncountable noun, as if it were a powdery or granular substance like flour or sugar. We seldom hear this term being used in the plural (‘social changes’). Indeed, the very phrase ‘media and social change’ suggests a level of generality that defies empirical application. Before we know it, the mind boggles and we have added ‘social change’ to our mental list of esoteric concepts that are best left undefined, along with ‘culture’, ‘society’ and the like.

Instead of accepting this indefinition, it is more helpful to think of actual social changes in the plural, as (a)countable, concrete, identifiable, unique and messy processes. But adopting a processual approach carries its own costs, for it requires that we rethink our ethnographic practice. For many years we have subscribed to the spatial metaphor of ‘multi-sited ethnography’ (Marcus 1995), but have yet to embrace its temporal counterpart: multi-timed ethnography.

There is nothing new about historicising ethnographic research and writing. Revisiting a site where we – or our predecessors – have worked in the past is a long-established anthropological practice (e.g. Firth 1959, Freeman 1999, Hutchinson 1996, Leach and Leach 1983, Postill 2006)[3]. However, because of its relative youth, this is yet to be a common occurrence in the anthropology or ethnography of media, but it is likely that this will become more habitual as today’s young scholars reach maturity.

If we are to move towards a multi-timed ethnography, one early hurdle to overcome is our collective reluctance as a discipline to date our research. There are of course exceptions, but frequently when reviewing the (media) ethnographic literature, I found that crucial information about the length and period of research was concealed in a footnote, or not given at all. Without adequate dating, though, there is no hope to produce a coherent account of actual social change, let alone compare our findings with those of contemporary researchers working at other sites.

Another obstacle to clear is the anthropological tendency to romanticise ‘non-Western’ time (Postill 2002) and exoticise contemporary time, the latter a trait anthropologists share with cultural studies and other fields that came under the sway of postmodernism in the 1980s. As Gell (1992: 315) concluded in his painstaking review of the anthropology of time, there is

no fairyland where people experience time in a way that is markedly unlike the way in which we do ourselves, where there is no past, present and future, where time stands still, or chases its own tail, or swings back and forth like a pendulum. All these possibilities have been seriously touted in the literature on the anthropology of time … but they are all travesties, engendered in the process of scholarly reflection.

For better or worse, we must accept the underwhelming reality that both us and our research participants – whether we are in Borneo, Chile or Norway – organise our daily, weekly and seasonal rounds through modern clock and calendar media (Postill 2002). These mediated routines, and their life-historical changes over time, are as inescapable a fact of life as money, gravity, taxes or death. It is only fair, given the circumstances, that we should avoid fairyland notions such as ‘timeless time’ (Castells 1999) and at long last come to terms with the universality of modern clock-and-calendar time. After all,

without chronological tools it is hard to envisage how media anthropologists … [would] go about tracking the uneven spread and adoption of media innovations such as writing, radio or mobile telephony. And how could we possibly study media events such as 9/11 in America (Rothenbuhler 2005), People Power II in the Philippines (Rafael 2003) or the assassination of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands (Eyerman 2008) without chronicling the unfolding of these events in real time across different media platforms and physical settings? (Postill 2009).

In the present article my aim is not so much to stress the importance of adding a diachronic dimension to our ethnographic work. Rather it is to seek ways to develop diachronic techniques that will allow us to study the life courses of actual social changes (as opposed to media events or media innovations, as in the above quote).

But how does one decide which process(es) of social change to chronicle and analyse ethnographically? Isn’t this an impossible mission given how muddled, entangled and overlapping such processes are in the real world? My proposal is that we combine our existing preference for ‘emergent’ micro-processes and practices with a newly found interest in large-scale processes that have reached a mature stage in their life courses. For example, if I were studying, God forbid, the media practices of Spanish divorcees who claim to be Catholics, I would pay attention not only to how things are changing at present but also to a mature process of change: the post-Franco secularisation of morality in Spain, with special reference to the sub-process of how divorce became normalised in the 1980s and 1990s (following its legalisation in 1981). So I would be asking people the same sorts of questions about their lives during two or three slices in the nation’s divorce history, say the early 1980s, the mid-1990s and the early 2010s.

Alternatively, I could rethink my 1999-2009 diachronic ethnography of suburban activism in Subang Jaya, Malaysia (Postill 2011), only now armed with the distinction between social changes and social changing – a distinction I did not originally make. Thus I could follow up my original study of digital media and social changing with a sequel that would peg the local data to a broader historical process of social change, e.g. the mass suburbanisation of the Kuala Lumpur region from the 1970s (early phase) to the 2000s (terminal phase).

Let me unpack this idea. If in the mid-1850s Kuala Lumpur was ‘little more than a collection of huts occupied by immigrant tin miners from China’, by the 1930s it had become a ‘racially segregated British colonial town surrounded by rubber plantations’ (Postill 2011: 33). Although the satellite township of Petaling Jaya was created in 1953 to cater to a fledgling population of middle-income commuters (Dick and Rimmer 2003: 325; Thong 1995: 318), it was only in the 1970s and 1980s that suburbanisation got under way on a large scale, coinciding with the region’s prodigious industrialisation (Thong 1995). Subang Jaya-USJ, the locality where I conducted fieldwork in 2003-2004, was a late developer relative to Petaling Jaya. After a slow start in the 1970s by Subang Jaya, its twin township, USJ, eventually opened in 1988 and soon experienced rapid growth

to meet the demands of largely middle-class families, many of them ethnic Chinese. By 1999 Subang Jaya had twelve thousand residential units, where USJ had thirty-seven thousand units spread over 728 hectares and was still expanding but was reaching satu­ration point. Because of their staggered settlement, each half has a dis­tinctive demographic and domestic cycle profile. Subang Jaya’s families have as a norm older children than those in USJ. At the time of field­work in 2003–2004 many offspring were already in their twenties and even thirties, and no longer lived with their parents. By contrast, many USJ families still had children of preschool or school age (Postill 2011: 35).

In this diachronic ethnography of digital media and social changing (an investigation into how digital media may be ‘changing’ local forms of residential activism) I stretched out both ends of my 2003-2004 fieldwork with archival and online research to cover a longer period of time, namely from 1999 to 2009. If I were to revisit this study with a media and social changes research agenda, however, I would perhaps retell the story of how USJ developed a vibrant internet activism scene in the early 2000s as a small sub-process nested within a larger process of change, namely the suburbanisation of the Klang Valley that started in the 1970s and ended in the 2000s. I would cut off this process in the 2000s not because there are no more suburbs being built in the 2010s – there are – but because the cultural ideal and reality of the car-dependent suburb as the doxic ‘place to be’ for middle-class Malaysian families was by the early 2000s fully naturalised; that is, the process of naturalisation had practically run its course by the time I left the field in 2004.

I am aware of a lurking danger here: that I may be misunderstood as advocating rigid, old-fashioned ‘linear’ models of change with limited applicability to the increasingly complex, ‘rhizomatic’ (Estalella 2011, Hopkins 2012), ‘assemblaged’ (Hinkelbein 2008), and ‘conjunctural’ (Mankekar 1999) socio-technical worlds we now reportedly inhabit. My response to this possible objection is twofold.

First, I am not proposing a model in which temporal precedence translates into mono-causality, i.e. stage one of a given process does not ‘cause’ or determine stage two. Processual form and sequencing do matter, but causality is always multiple and entails the interaction of endogenous and exogenous factors within a dynamic field of regular practice and irregular action.

Second, clock-and-calendar time is integral to the planning and coordination of modern socio-technical practices and ‘assemblages’. Take a recent ethnography of Spanish ‘passionate blogging’ by Estalella (2011). This study is set at a key moment in the history of blogging in Spain (and other European states), namely the 2006-7 period when blogging was at its peak, just prior to the explosive growth of mass social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Estalella’s postmodernist/Latourian approach works well in a number of places (e.g. when discussing the socio-technical logic of blogs as databases) but it runs into difficulties when discussing the temporality of blogging. Although rightly dismissing fanciful notions of ‘cyberspace’ as a paradoxical realm of ‘timeless time’ (see Castells 1999 and above) and stressing the clock-and-calendar aspects of blogging (e.g. the folk definition of blogs as diaries written in reverse chronological order), he then follows Latour into a world in which time and space are the ad-hoc products of agents and actants constituting one another. To recall Gell’s earlier remark, this Latourian world is a fantasy ‘engendered in the process of scholarly reflection’ (1992: 315).

Once again: modern processes of social change are unavoidably mediated by clock-and-calendar time – arguably the most universal of all human codes (Postill 2002). Granted that in recent decades most of us have experienced an ‘acceleration’ of social life (Eriksen 2001, 2016, Wittel 2001), the fact remains that our worldwide standard of time-reckoning and scheduling has not changed at all. Our days still have 24 hours, and there are still seven days in a week. Governments, markets, social movements, media forms and platform algorithms may come and go, but this ubiquitous code remains firmly in place around the globe.

Spain’s recent political changes

To tie together all these loose epistemological threads about actual changes, collective biographies and diachronic ethnography, let me offer one final case study: recent socio-political events in Spain in the wake of the 2011 indignados (15M) movement.

A time traveller who left Spain in the year 2010 and returned in 2017 would find it hard to recognise the country’s present political landscape. At the national level, she would notice that the seemingly stable two-party system that she left behind – in place since the end of the Franco regime – has now been replaced by a four-party system. Whilst the old Conservative (PP) and Socialist (PSOE) parties are still in existence, they have now been joined in the Spanish Parliament by two new populist (or citizenist) parties: the leftist Podemos and the centre-right Ciudadanos. What is more, Podemos is currently polling second in voter intention, ahead of the Socialists^[4]. Our time traveller would also notice in astonishment the existence of numerous other new political parties and platforms arising out of something Spaniards call ‘the 15M movement’. These are now governing or aspiring to govern at the local, regional and national levels (e.g. Ahora Madrid, Marea Atlántica, Barcelona en Comú, and Un País en Comú). Many of these formations have been successful at the ballot box, with Spain’s major cities, including Madrid and Barcelona, now in the hands of 15M-derived platforms (Postill 2016, forthcoming).

At this point some readers may counter that it is still early days to speak of a political transformation in Spain; these varied processes and initiatives, they would argue, are still unfolding and we will not know their outcomes for many years, perhaps even decades, to come. For all we know, the argument would go, the new ‘citizen parties’ may be defeated in the coming elections and the country may return to its customary two-party system. Besides, the Conservatives (PP) are still in power, and the Spanish economy is showing signs of recovery after many years of crisis, which could favour the establishment parties.

These are all fair points, but they all tacitly subscribe to present continuism as defined above; that is, they collapse the recent past, the present and the near future into one blurry sameness. Yet, to reiterate an earlier point, if we wish to understand actual changes, and their media aspects, we must be able to study the recent past on its own terms. A large, still ongoing process of socio-political transformation like Spain’s current ‘second democratic transition’ can still be analytically disaggregated into smaller sub-processes of change in the recent past. Some of these changes will already be completed, whereas others will still be unfolding. Both types of changes are amenable to processual, phase-by-phase analysis.

Let us take but one of these concrete changes – the coming to power of an indignados platform, Barcelona en Comú (BComú for short), following the 2015 local elections in Barcelona – and outline its collective biography. Like all biographies, the biography (or life course) of this socio-political change has a beginning, a middle and an end. Whilst the story of this change clearly ends with the platform’s coming to power in 2015, its beginnings are murkier. Platform members themselves often trace them to the 2011 indignados protests. One of their international members puts it thus:

When the indignados occupied the public squares of Spain on May 15, 2011, demanding ‘real democracy’, they changed the terms of public debate. They called for an end of elected officials excessive privileges, measures to tackle corruption in public life, the dismantling of the stale two-party system, and citizen participation in decision-making (Baird 2014).

Out of this historical event came the new citizen platform Guanyem, which later had to change its name to Barcelona en Comú for legal reasons. However, prior to Guanyem and the occupied squares, the core members of BComú were involved in a housing rights platform named PAH, aimed at defending the rights and wellbeing of families unable to pay their mortgages after the property market collapsed. The former PAH activist and current BComú councillor, Gala Pin, once noted that although PAH was slightly older than the indignados movement (it was launched in 2009), the two were ‘a perfect match’. There was, however, one striking difference between them: whilst the indignados eschewed any notion of leadership, PAH was unapologetically led by Ada Colau (Nodo50 2013) – a charismatic activist who went on to to lead BComú and became the mayor of Barcelona in May 2015.

We can therefore speak of six main phases in the life course of the process of change culminating in BComú gaining control of Barcelona’s municipal government. First, the early PAH years. Second, the square occupations of May 2011. Third, a post-squares interim period of renewed PAH activity. Fourth, Ada Colau leaves PAH to launch the citizen platform Guanyem (later renamed BComú). Fifth, BComú contests the local elections. Finally, it wins the elections and forms a new municipal government, which brings the process to an end.

Alongside this diachronic, phase-by-phase account of a new state of affairs in Barcelona’s local government, we can ask questions about the media and communication aspects of this process of change, e.g.: How important were social media vs. mass media for BComú? What about the role of face-to-face communication during its campaigning? Like Podemos, BComú’s electoral success was the result of a low-budget but highly effective transmedia strategy. Their electoral programme was ‘crowdsourced’ to over 5000 people, ‘with contributions made in open assemblies and online’ (Baird 2015). One of BComú’s campaign offshoots was SomComuns, a network of internet activists campaigning via social media. Another was a collective of designers and artists named The Movement for The Graphic Liberation of Barcelona (Sandiumenge 2015). A thorough account of this transmedia strategy would map it onto the six phases of the process just outlined.

Conclusion

The chief purpose of this article is to start a productive conversation about the urgent need to explicitly distinguish between (a) media and ‘social changing’ and (b) media and actual social changes. The methodological and conceptual difficulties of operationalizing this new distinction are daunting (Larkin 2012), yet if we wish to study media-related changes systematically, we must rethink and expand our conceptual language and methodology. This applies not only to media ethnography, but also to all other media and communication studies that concern themselves with the recent past, the present, and/or the near future.

Relying on the vague tacit notion of ceaseless social changing to understand actual social changes is rather like trying to clap with one hand, or like weighing oneself only once to measure weight loss. It would be as frustrating as watching but one episode of a thrilling Scandinavian crime series on TV and never knowing how the story unfolded in subsequent instalments.

I have suggested that we should be specific about the media-related changes we examine, studying them processually as collective biographies with a beginning, a middle and (eventually) an end, and acknowledge that actual changes entail a transformation from an original state A to a subsequent state B. Claiming that ‘change is not linear’ or that ‘things are changing all the time’ will not get us very far. Instead, we must get down to the business of teasing out empirical examples of mediated social changes that have already taken place in the recent or distant past.

In sum, I am proposing that we turn our attention from social change in general (a mind-boggling notion) to media and concrete social changes. One advantage of this approach is that it forces us to grant media producers and consumers historical agency. That is, the analysis can only work if we posit variously positioned historical agents (both media professionals and non-professionals) within a social space or field struggling for or against a specific process of change. No process of change ever goes unchallenged, and as media scholars we would want to know who supported and resisted the change, through which media and with what consequences, e.g. journalists engaged in the struggle for and against apartheid in South Africa, or politicians caught up in the campaign for and against Brexit in the UK. A post-Bourdieuan field-theoretical analysis may be useful in future analyses, with fields understood not as institutionalised domains of regular practice – as they are in Bourdieu’s theory – but as dynamic domains of cooperation and conflict subject to abrupt fluctuations in their personnel, boundaries and media ensembles (Postill 2015).

The social changes approach I am advocating does not commit us to the idea that a ‘change from A to B’ will be necessarily clear-cut. Most changes will be hard to research, messy, unclear, ambiguous, and open to multiple interpretations – but this does not mean they are unresearchable (see Postill and Pink 2012). For example, Spanish scholars may disagree about the timing, sequencing and media dimensions of the process of post-Franco secularisation, but not many would dispute that there has been a major societal shift in Spain away from Catholic values and practices over the past 40 years (albeit with a possible regression or backlash in recent years under the PP’s conservative government)[5].

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Vidali, D. S. (2016). Multisensorial anthropology: A retrofit cracking open of the field. American Anthropologist, 118(2), 395-400.

Vidali, D. S., & Peterson, M. A. (2012). Ethnography as theory and method in the study of political communication. The SAGE Handbook of Political Communication, 264.

Wallis, C. (2011). Mobile Phones without Guarantees: The Promises of Technology and the Contingencies of Culture. New Media & Society 13, no. 3, 471-485.

Wellman, B., and C. A. Haythornthwaite. (2002). The Internet in Everyday Life. Oxford, Blackwell.

Wittel, A. (2001). ‘Toward a Network Sociality’, Theory, Culture & Society 18(6): 51–76.

Notes

[1] The approach that I am proposing is compatible with some recent discussions of history and temporal heterogeneity inspired by Foucault, Deleuze and other social theorists. Thus, in the context of her anthropological work on cultural production, Georgina Born (2010: 195) writes: “Foucault offers clarity in elaborating difference as a methodological principle. He outlines three modalities of difference to be utilized when tracing genealogy. The first is synchronic: that we should assume the internal differentiation of dominant cultural formations, analysing both their regularities or coherence, and their dispersion. The second is diachronic: that we should trace the trajectory of such dominant cultural formations, assuming neither continuity nor discontinuity, nor a uniform rate of transformation; here we read the ethnographic material for its encapsulation of currents or dynamics of different temporal depth. The third is analytical: that in elucidating genealogy, we should effect ‘a sort of multiplication or pluralization of causes … a multiplication [that] means analysing an event according to the multiple processes that constitute it’, leading to a ‘polymorphism’ of the elements brought into relation in the analysis, and of the domains of reference mobilized.”

[2] The ethnographic critique of the grand claims, important as it is as a corrective, can have the unintended side-effect of exaggerating sociocultural continuity while downplaying the part played by new media in processes of social change, as shown in Tenhunen’s (2008) ethnographic study of mobile phones and village sociality in West Bengal, India.

[3] In fact, as Brian Larkin (2012) pointed out in a response to an earlier version of this paper, ‘history, or multi-timed ethnography creeps into all anthropological work’, for instance, when returning to one’s original fieldwork site or reading the literature on a given geographical area.

^[4] Source: El Pais, 9 February 2017, http://elpais.com/elpais/2017/02/07/media/1486470621_506275.html

[5] Meanwhile, other countries have seen concurrent shifts towards greater religiosity, particularly in the global South.

by Christian Pentzold
Centre for Media, Communication
and Information Research
University of Bremen

In order to capture the socio-technical scaffoldings that enable digitally networked communication and interaction, current scholarship typically resorts to the dubious though alluring notion of ‘affordances’. Usually, this choice of word comes with the idea that technologies make possible some activities while constraining others. As such, the notion is invoked in order to sidestep a technological determinism on the one side and a social determinism on the other.

In her ethnographic inquiry grounded in rich evidence from her Turkish field site, Elisabetta Costa does not denounce the commonly held belief that the hardware and software of the internet open up and close down possibilities for action and, more fundamentally, the possibility to act. However, her detailed analysis invites us to scrutinize the gross simplification to think that such (im-)material structuring collapses into the binary options of either constraint or possibility. Hence, by taking a close look at a setting besides the often studied metropolitan areas in the US and Western Europe, Elisabetta Costa is able question some household ideas, namely context collapse and affordances, of how to make sense of digitally networked social life.

Broadening and detailing the richness of prefigurations the dichotomy unduly covers, I would like to point to Theodore Schatzki (2002, p. 225f) and his theory of social practice. He argues that social practices are the central social phenomenon. Through the participation in practices, the ‘tissue of coexistence’ is woven, as Schatzki put it.  Consequently, he suggests that our attention needs to be directed to the multitudinous ways that the mesh of doings and sayings in their entanglement with technologies make courses of action “easier, harder, or simpler more complicated, shorter, longer, ill-advised, promising of ruin, promising of gain, disruptive, facilitating, obligatory or proscribed, acceptable or unacceptable, more or less relevant, riskier or safer, more or less feasible, more or less likely to induce ridicule or approbation—as well as physically possible or impossible.”

Such view runs against what might be called the ‘received’ view on affordances. It takes them to be the enabling vs. constraining action possibilities which artefacts possess by virtue of their materiality (Hutchby, 2001). In this narrow understanding, the idea has been taken up in a variety of fields that have set out to map and take stock of all the action possibilities made available by certain technological artefacts. However, if we want to take the challenge posed by Costa’s perspective seriously, we cannot hope to find effective abilities, but a continuous, contingent, as well as contested accomplishment of socio-material enablements (Rappert, 2003).

In this regard, Orlikowski (2000) introduces the concept of “technologies-in-practice” (p. 407). It questions the thought that technologies embody inherent structures. The translation between material things is no one way process where human designers invent technologies whose construction goes hand in hand with the shaping and stabilizing of cultural knowledge, ways of handling and images of what an ideal user would be. Instead of assuming built-in arrays of fixed and embedded determinate structures that are somehow available to users, Orlikowski asks us to appreciate their structuring potential that need to be instantiated to become effective and only exist in conjunction with practices.

In the same vein, Bloomfield, Latham and Vurdubakis (2010) urge us to see affordances as being actively maintained. They come into being and are made to function not in smooth planned process. Rather they involve a considerable amount of negotiation and problematizing of human capabilities and machine capacities. „The ‘affordances’ of technological objects,” they write, „cannot be easily separated from the arrangements — that is the shared understandings, discourses and conventions, participant constellations, places and time, institutions and organizations — through which and amid which they are realised in practice.“

Rethinking, therefore, the idea of technological prostheses and the projection of bodies into durable objects, we could assume that neither of them is self-contained but placed in convertible arrangements. In consequence, we must not only ask what a given affordance is, but also where and when, and how and for whom and with whom an affordance is made.

References

Bloomfield, B. P., Latham, Y., & Vudurbakis, T. (2010). Bodies,technologies and action possibilities. Sociology, 44(3), 415–433.

Hutchby, I. (2001). Technologies, texts and affordance. Sociology, 35(2), 411–456.

Orlikowski, W. (2000). Using technologies and constituting structures. Organization Science, 11(4), 404–428.

Rappert, B. (2003). Technologies, texts and possibilities. Sociology, 37(3), 565–580.

Schatzki, T. (2002). The site of the social. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press.

We will be launching our next e-seminar on Tuesday the 9th of May 2017 at 00:00 GMT. If you are new to the list, our e-seminars run for a period of 2 weeks and they are vibrant spaces for discussion and confrontation on a specific paper.

For our 60th e-seminar we will be discussing the following working paper by Dr Elisabetta Costa (University of Groningen) and our discussant will be Dr Christian Pentzold (University of Bremen).

Social media as practices: an ethnographic critique of ‘affordances’ and ‘context collapse’

Abstract

Drawing on data gathered during ethnographic fieldwork in Mardin, a medium-sized town in southeast Turkey, this paper examines people’s production of different online social spaces. The paper shows that social media users actively appropriate online platforms and change privacy settings in order to keep different social spheres and social groups apart. Social media users actively mould online social environments that largely resemble those existing in the offline world. Keeping different online social contexts divided from one another is the taken for granted way of using social media in Mardin. By contrast, social media scholars have extensively discussed the effects of social media in terms of context collapse (among others see Marvin 2013; Marwick and Boyd 2011; Marwick and Ellison 2012; Vitak 2012; Wesch 2008, 2009). This in turn has been described as a consequence of platform’s architecture and affordances. This paper shows that the theory of context collapse does not account for the uses of social media in Mardin. It demonstrates that the concept of affordance has been largely used to describe “intrinsic” properties of a platform and its architecture, which are instead the results of pattern of usage within Anglo-American contexts. The paper concludes by suggesting the importance of considering social media as an open set of situated practices, rather than architectures provided with unchangeable and intrinsic properties.

You can find the paper to download from our website
http://www.media-anthropology.net/index.php/e-seminars

Really looking forward to the discussion
Veronica

Dr Veronica Barassi
BA Anthropology and Media Programme Convenor
Department of Media and Communications,
Goldsmiths, University of London

******************************************

EASA Media Anthropology Network
http://www.media-anthropology.net

For further information please contact:
Dr. John Postill
RMIT University, Melbourne

To manage your subscription to this mailing list, visit:
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I will try to update it in the near future. Further suggestions are always welcome!

Update 23 June 2017: See also lecture abstract

Last updated: 28 June 2017.

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Askanius, T., & Espinar Ruiz, E. (2016). Media practices in contemporary feminist movements in and across Europe: Mapping feminist activism in Spain and Sweden. In ECREA, 2016.

This paper presents the results of a pilot study prepared for a larger research project entitled ‘Media practices in contemporary feminist movements in and across Europe’ which examines how feminist groups and networks in Northern Europe (Sweden, Denmark) and Southern Europe (Spain and Portugal) are engaging online media in their struggle for gender equality and transformative social change. As part of the effort to understand how feminist movements are shaped by different socio-economic and political contexts across Europe, this paper details the preliminary analytical steps of identifying and mapping organisations, groups and networks in Sweden and Spain to be selected for further analysis. In the analysis, we consider different types of social movement organizations and actors in the two countries to examine commonalities and differences in the ‘repertoires of communication’ from which activists choose and then engage in different sets of contentious media practices (Mattoni 2013). … Such a comparative case approach to studying social movements (Snow and Trom 2002) is premised on the belief that ‘if we want to explore how web technologies are transforming political participation, we have to explore how different political groups, which are grounded on different political cultures, understand internet technologies according to context-specific political imaginations’ (Barassi 2015).

Boler, M., Macdonald, A., Nitsou, C., & Harris, A. (2014). Connective labor and social media: Women’s roles in the ‘leaderless’ Occupy movement. Convergence, 20(4), 438-460.

This article draws upon the insights of 75 Occupy activists from Toronto and across the United States interviewed as part of the 3-year study ‘Social Media in the Hands of Young Citizens’. This article highlights three major roles adopted by women in the so-called leaderless, horizontally structured Occupy movement – both within the offline, face-to-face General Assembly meetings held during the Occupy encampments and within the online spaces of Facebook pages, Web sites, affinity groups, and working committees. As key participants in the movement, women used social technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, and livestreaming as modes of activist engagement, developing unique roles such as that of the ‘Admin’ (Social Media Administrator), the ‘Documentarian’, and the ‘Connector’. The women’s adoption of these roles illustrates, we argue, the emerging notion of ‘connective labor’ an extended enactment of Bennett and Segerberg’s (2012) notion of ‘the logic of connective action’, augmenting its logic to reveal the often hidden labor of women in sustaining the networked and affective dimension of social movements. This article highlights the gendered, hybrid, embodied, and material nature of women’s connective labor that has supported, and in many ways sustained, the contemporary Occupy movement.

Bräuchler, B. and J. Postill (eds.) (2010) Theorising Media and Practice. New York: Berghahn.

Although practice theory has been a mainstay of social theory for nearly three decades, so far it has had very limited impact on media studies. This book builds on the work of practice theorists such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Bourdieu, Barth and Schatzki and rethinks the study of media from the perspective of practice theory. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from places such as Zambia, India, Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, Norway and Denmark, the contributors address a number of important themes: media as practice; the interlinkage between media, culture and practice; the contextual study of media practices; and new practices of digital production. Collectively, these chapters make a strong case for the importance of theorising the relationship between media and practice and thereby adding practice theory as a new strand to the anthropology of media.

Casero-Ripollés, A. (2015). Estrategias y prácticas comunicativas del activismo político en las redes sociales en España/Strategies and communicative practices of political activism on social media in Spain. Historia y comunicación social, 20(2), 533-548.

Social media are introducing significant changes in social movements. The aim of this article is to analyse the strategies and communicative practices developed by political activists on social media in the Spanish context. Three processes are studied: the self-mediation, the monitoring of power centers and the reversed agenda-setting. The methodology is based on case study and in-depth interviews. The results reveal that the web 2.0 offers numerous potential for political activism but also sets limits to their action.

Couldry, N. (2004) ‘Theorising Media as Practice’, Social Semiotics 14(2): 115–32.

This article explores the possibility of a new paradigm of media research that understands media, not as texts or structures of production, but as practice. Drawing on recent moves towards a theory of practice in sociology, this paradigm aims to move beyond old debates about media effects and the relative importance of political economy and audience interpretation, at the same time as moving beyond a narrow concentration on audience practices, to study the whole range of practices that are oriented towards media and the role of media in ordering other practices in the social world. After setting this new paradigm in the context of the history of media research, the article reviews the key advantages of this paradigm in mapping the complexity of media‐saturated cultures where the discreteness of audience practices can no longer be assumed. Keywords: Media Theory, Media practice, practice theory,  functionalism,   Agency

Christensen, T.H., & Røpke, I. (2010). Can Practice Theory Inspire Studies of ICTs in Everyday Life? In B. Bräuchler & J. Postill (Eds.), Theorising Media and Practice (pp. 233–258). Oxford: Berghahn.

This chapter by Toke Haunstrup Christensen and Inge Røpke explores the practical uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the daily lives of Danish families through examples of practices such as shopping, ‘holding things together’, maintaining social networks, or ‘killing time’. Taking issue with Reckwitz’s (2002) depiction of individuals as the ‘carriers’ of practices, the authors stress the importance of social interaction. In most cases, they suggest, ‘the successful performance of a practice depends on the active participation of several persons’, for instance, when micro-coordinating a shared family dinner over several mobile phones. Whilst concurring with Shove and her associates (e.g. Shove and Pantzar 2005) on the need to overcome the neglect of materiality by practice theorists (such as Bourdieu, Giddens or de Certeau) they also point out that Shove et al, like Reckwitz, downplay social interaction.  The chapter ends with some remarks on the challenges of using practice theory for the study of ICTs in everyday life, including the empirical difficulties of separating out one practice from another (e.g. shopping vs. ‘holding things together’), or ascertaining whether a given activity belongs with more than one practice simultaneously.

Craig, R. (2005). Communication as a practice. In G. Sheperd, J. St. John, & T. Striphas (Eds.), Communication as … (pp. 38–47). London: Sage.

No abstract available.

Grau, B. E. (2016). Activism and Digital Practices in the Construction of an LGTB Sphere in Spain. Dados, 59(3), 755-787.

Based on the anthropological interrogation into communities and the construction of a public sphere, this article approaches the digital strategies used to shape what may be referred to as the Spanish LGTB sphere. I consider LGTB activism as the main producer of legitimized social discourse, and have therefore analyzed the websites of seven LGTB collectives and other digital resources in order to examine the articulation of digital and non-digital practices, based on a shared knowledge evoking collective identities and feeding activism. In combining anthropological fieldwork on activism and digital ethnographies for virtual environments, I suggest that despite their intensive use of digital resources, the LGTB sphere still largely depends on traditional social networks. As a consequence, the article questions the usefulness of conceiving of digital and non-digital relations as separate and distinct and discusses this embeddedness as a main feature of contemporary activism. Keywords: digital practices; social networks; LGTB activism; mobilization; communities

Ferrell, J., D. Milovanovic and S. Lyng (2001) Edgework, media practices, and the elongation of meaning: a theoretical ethnography of the Bridge Day event, Theoretical Criminology 5(2), 177-202

This article discusses the events that took place at a BASE jumping event in West Virginia (USA) in 1998. BASE jumping is the practice of ‘[often] illegally parachuting from bridges, buildings, antennas and cliffs’ – an increasingly mediated practice. The event, known as Bridge Day, attracted a great deal of mass media attention. But rather than becoming ‘media fodder’, BASE jumping practitioners brought their own media equipment to the encounter, including small video cameras fitted onto their helmets and/or bodies that allowed some jumpers to become ‘stars of their own in-flight movies’. Although many of the practices of jumpers and media professionals were intertwined, the authors also stress the contrasting imperatives of the two worlds of practice: while for the journalists the imperative was to present an easily understandable relationship between doer and deed, for the practitioners the emphasis was on recreating through media technologies the actual experience of the jump. There are ironies here, as the authors point out: jumpers’ increased dependence on collective media representations (the ‘elongation of meaning’) does not fit well with their own accounts of their practice as individual, ineffable and ephemeral. There is also an activist dimension to the world of BASE jumping, more specifically what we might call ‘subcultural activism’ (cf. Faye Ginsburg’s notion of ‘cultural activism’ with reference to indigenous media productions). This is played out especially on the main BASE website, where journalists in search of footage or information are regularly accused of misrepresenting the BASE ‘community’ and leading practitioners seek to legitimise this largely illegal practice as a ‘sport’. Moreover, for jumpers their practice is not a flight from reality: quite the contrary, it is a ‘hyperreal’ (Baudrillard) experience that makes everyday life seem less than real by comparison (for similar accounts by BDSM practitioners in San Francisco, see Weiss 2005) Summary by John Postill

Figueras, J. (2016). Political Parties and Grassroots Participation: digital media practices in the Spanish Podemos. Master’s Thesis, Malmo University.

The creation and rapid growth of the Spanish political party Podemos has created high expectations among citizens who want to participate in politics beyond voting. With a strategy that combines analogue and digital media, the party has emerged as the third biggest party in the last general elections, June 2016. Podemos has been conceived as a hybrid between a political party and a social movement, striving for wining the elections while relaying on grassroots activism through decentralised groups called “circles”, which operate locally and interact with the party via digital media. Although the potential of digital media for participation has been many times stressed, how the circles use these media depends highly on ongoing power relations and struggles within the party. Through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, this research analyses the perceptions of seven participants in two Podemos circles from the perspective of media practices, and looks into the potential of digital tools for political participation and the way ongoing power relations affect this participation. The results show that media practices within the circles are limited by the position of power of the leaders, who make use of analogue media to convey unidirectional messages that can hardly be countered via digital media. Furthermore, the research analyses the existence of relevant tensions in Podemos as a party that promotes citizen participation within a hierarchical, top-down organisation.

Kaun, A. (2015). Regimes of time: Media practices of the dispossessed. Time & Society, 24(2), 221-243.

Media technologies are structuring time and space in crucial ways. Especially the temporal aspect has been of interest lately, which is expressed in a growing commentary on media-related time in terms of speed and acceleration. Taking this discussion as a starting point, I problematize the consequences of temporal structuring by media technologies for civic participation and more specifically protest movements. Drawing on two case studies – the unemployed workers’ movements of the 1930s and the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011/2012 – I explore the changing regimes of time that are related to dominant media technologies. The main aim is to disentangle the relationship between temporal regimes suggested by media technologies and their appropriation by protest movements that emerged in major economic crises. Combing archival materials with in-depth interviews, I discuss the importance of media practices for the two movements and uncover a shift from mechanical speed to digital immediacy having crucial implications for democracy and civic participation.

Lee, A. Y., & Ting, K. W. (2015). Media and information praxis of young activists in the Umbrella Movement. Chinese Journal of Communication, 8(4), 376-392.

Young people were key participants in the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the media also played an important role in this protest. This study examines how Hong Kong’s young activists developed communication strategies and media practices to mobilize this social movement. A framework termed “media and information praxis of social movements” is proposed for the analysis. The findings showed that in their praxis, the young activists used their media and information literacy skills to initiate, organize, and mobilize collective actions. They not only used social media and mobile networks but also traditional mass media and street booths in a holistic and integrated approach to receive and disseminate information. Hence, these young activists served as agents of mediatization. The results also indicated that the young activists moved away from the traditional movement mode which just tried to motivate a large number of people to protest in the streets. They actively engaged in the new movement mode, which emphasizes the media and information power game. Their praxis in the Umbrella Movement reflects the trend toward the mediatization of social movements in Hong Kong. Keywords: media and information literacy, media and information praxis of social movements, mediatization, Scholarism, Umbrella Movement, young activists

Kubitschko, S. (2015). Hackers’ media practices: demonstrating and articulating expertise as interlocking arrangements. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 21(3), 388-402.

The increased level of technical abstractness poses a challenge for laypersons and politicians alike to notice the political impacts specific technical developments might bring. By presenting qualitative research on Europe’s oldest and one of the world’s largest hacker organizations – the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) – the article shows that the CCC acts as a civil society organization that brings together a wide range of knowledge, skills and experiences related to media technologies and infrastructures. By deconstructing the abstractness of a given technology, the CCC materializes its formerly unrecognized political quality. Yet, the political endeavour of closing the expert-public gap, in the interests of public democracy, is only brought to life once the outcomes of a particular hack are communicated in comprehensible manners to diverse publics and audiences. Overall the article points to the emergence of new modes and practices of expertise by conceptualizing the Club’s active demonstration of expertise through hacking and its articulation of expertise through media-related practices and interactions with institutional politics as interlocking arrangements. Today, hackers – and in particular hacker organizations – are best considered actors whose skills, knowledge and experiences are ever more relevant for political cultures and democracy at large.

Mattoni, A. (2012) Media Practices and Protest Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate.

How do precarious workers employed in call-centres, universities, the fashion industry and many other labour markets organise, struggle and communicate to become recognised, influential political subjects? “Media Practices and Protest Politics; How Precarious Workers Mobilise” reveals the process by which individuals at the margins of the labour market and excluded from the welfare state communicate and struggle outside the realm of institutional politics to gain recognition in the political sphere. In this important and thought provoking work Alice Mattoni suggests an all-encompassing approach to understanding grassroots political communication in contemporary societies. Using original examples from precarious workers mobilizations in Italy she explores a range of activist media practices and compares different categories of media technologies, organizations and outlets from the printed press to web application and from mainstream to alternative media. Explaining how activists perceive and understand the media environment in which they are embedded the book discusses how they must interact with a diverse range of media professionals and technologies and considers how mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media represent protests. Media Practices and Protest Politics offers important insights for understanding mechanisms and patterns of visibility in struggles for recognition and redistribution in post-democratic societies and provides a valuable contribution to the field of political communication and social movement studies.

Sebastian Kubitschko writes: Alice Mattoni defines media practices as, (1) both routinised and creative social practices that; 2) include interactions with media objects (such as mobile phones, laptops, pieces of paper) and media subjects (such as journalists, public relations managers, other activists); (3) draw on how media objects and media subjects are perceived and how the media environment is understood and known. (Mattoni 2012: 159)

Mattoni, A. (2013) ‘Repertoires of communication in social movement processes’, in B. Cammaerts, A. Mattoni and P. McCurdy (eds.), Mediation and Protest Movements. Chicago: Intellect, The University of Chicago Press. (pp. 39-56).

Starting from activist media practices, this chapter explored the concept of repertoire of communication that is a situated and dynamic the entire set of relational media practices that social movement actors might conceive as possible on the basis of knowledge media practices, and then develop in the latent and visible stages of mobilization to reach social actors positioned both within and beyond the social movement milieu. The literature on media and social movements suffers from fragmentation. One of the reasons for this is the small number of scholars conducting comparative research to explore how social movement actors interact with the media environment in which they are embedded. The repertoire of communication can function as an analytical tool for comparative research on mediation processes and social movement processes. First, repertoires of communication are intrinsically comparative since they refer to the existence, for the same social movement actor, of arrays of activist media practices related to the appropriation of various media technologies, the production of various media texts and interaction with various media professionals. Second, repertoires of communication are extrinsically comparative because, starting from this concept, scholars can engage in comparative research across time to investigate variations in repertoires of communication in past and present media environments, and across space to investigate variations in repertoires of communication in different countries and at different territorial levels. To develop comparative studies on media and social movements would also allow more sophisticated theoretical understanding of three interrelated dynamics that occur at the intersections of the political and media realms: transformations in visibility, changes in the patterns of recognition, and variations in the construction of public identities for non-established political actors in democratic and authoritarian societies.

Mattoni, A. (2017). A situated understanding of digital technologies in social movements. Media ecology and media practice approaches. Social Movement Studies, 1-12.

The article tackles two main aspects related to the interaction between social movements and digital technologies. First, it reflects on the need to include and combine different theoretical approaches in social movement studies so as to construct more meaningful understanding of how social movement actors deals with digital technologies and with what outcomes in societies. In particular, the article argues that media ecology and media practice approaches serve well to reach this objective as: they recognize the complex multi-faceted array of media technologies, professions and contents with which social movement actors interact; they historicize the use of media technologies in social movements; and they highlight the agency of social movement actors in relation to media technologies while avoiding a media-centric approach to the subject matter. Second, this article employs a media practice perspective to explore two interrelated trends in contemporary societies that the articles in this special issue deal with: the personalization and individualization of politics, and the role of the grassroots in political mobilizations. Keywords: Social media, digital technologies, media practices, media ecology, social movements.

Mattoni, A. and E. Treré (2014) ‘Media Practices, Mediation Processes, and Mediatization in the Study of Social Movements’, Communication Theory 24(3): 252–71.

The aim of this article is to explore the use of 3 concepts of media studies—media practices, mediation, and mediatization—in order to build a conceptual framework to study social movements and the media. The article first provides a critical review of the literature about media and movements. Secondly, it offers an understanding of social movements as processes in which activists perform actions according to different temporalities and connect this understanding with the use of the 3 media related concepts mentioned above. Then, the resulting conceptual framework is applied to the Italian student movements. In the conclusion, benefits and challenges in the use of such framework are considered and lines of inquiry on current movements are suggested.

Postill, J. (2010). Introduction: Theorising media and practice. In B. Bräuchler and J. Postill (eds) Theorising Media and Practice. Oxford: Berghahn.

In this Introduction I review the relevant media studies and practice theory literature to argue not for a new ‘practice paradigm’ in media studies (pace Couldry and Hobart this volume) but rather to argue for practice theory as a new strand to add to existing strands of media theory. Drawing from the practice theories of Giddens, Bourdieu and Warde, as well as from my own research in Malaysia, I sketch out a field-of-practice approach to media around three main questions: media in everyday life, media and the body, and media production. I then note some of the limitations of any practice perspective on the study of media, ending with an outline of the book.

Postill, J. (2015). Fields: Dynamic configurations of practices, games, and socialities. In V. Amit (ed.) Thinking Through Sociality: An Anthropological Interrogation of Key Concepts. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 47-68.

In this chapter I address some of the criticisms of field theory, but my intention is not to provide yet another appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of Bourdieu’s field theory. Instead, my aim is to examine the potential of the concept of field to shed light on obscure aspects of human sociality in tandem with other concepts, including non-field concepts. The chapter is organised as follows. First I reintroduce the Manchester School’s concept of field after decades of virtual oblivion and contrast it with Bourdieu’s own field concept. I then take up two criticisms – namely the view that field theory cannot account for change and the metaphor of the field as a game – and use them to explore the idea that the concept of field can in fact be an invaluable tool in the study of dynamic, heterogeneous domains of practice and sociality. I conclude with a reflection on the limitations and potentialities of this plural approach to the concept of field and with suggestions for future research.

Postill, J. (2016). The multilinearity of protest: understanding new social movements through their events, trends and routines. In Othon Alexandrakis (ed). Impulse to Act: A New Anthropology of Resistance and Social Justice. Indiana University Press.

Clock-and-calendar time is integral to the planning and coordination of modern socio-technical practices and ‘assemblages’ in our increasingly digitised world, including collective actions such as protests. With this premise in mind, in this chapter I explore the heterogeneity of protest-related time through three concepts borrowed from the historian and social theorist William H. Sewell (2005), namely events, trends and routines, in the context of Spain’s indignados (or 15M) movement. Rather than deploying these concepts synoptically, I do so diachronically, drawing a separate protest timeline (or set of parallel timelines) for each concept. This multilinear approach allows us to explore the highly diverse temporality of digitally assisted protest, yet without overlooking the ubiquity of clock-and-calendar time.

Keywords: multilinearity, temporality, time, clock-and-calendar time,  new social movements, protest, Spain, 15M, indignados, anthropology

Postill, J. forthcoming (2017). The Rise of Nerd Politics: Digital Activism and Political Change. London: Pluto.

The recent irruption of WikiLeaks, Anonymous, Edward Snowden and other tech-savvy actors onto the global political stage raises urgent questions about the impact of digital activism on political systems around the world. The Rise of Nerd Politics is an anthropological exploration of the role that such actors play in sparking new processes of political change in the digital age. Drawing from long-term ethnographic research in Spain, Indonesia and Malaysia – as well as on a wealth of empirical examples from other countries, including the United States, Iceland and Taiwan – the book tracks the rise of technology ‘nerds’ as a new transnational class of political brokers with growing influence. Postill identifies and explores four domains of nerd political praxis that have experienced a dramatic expansion since 2010, namely digital rights, data activism, social protest and electoral politics. Together, these various explorations reveal a dynamic ‘space of nerd politics’ inextricably entwined with broader processes of political change and continuity.

Postill, J. forthcoming (2018) Political culture keywords: exploring the media practices of social movements that are worlds apart, Media, Culture and Society.

The concept of political culture offers scholars of media and social movements a powerful way to overcome the field’s traditional neglect of cultural specificities. This concept must, however, be handled with care to avoid both ahistoricism and sociocultural determinism (the equally evil twin of technological determinism). With this note of caution in mind, the present essay proposes an approach to the holistic study of social movements and their technological mediations inspired by Williams’ (1976) classic Keywords, Peters’ (2016) Digital Keywords remake and Sewell’s (2005) theory of historical change. I propose the urgent compilation of culture-specific political vocabularies from the ground up, i.e. by drawing from vernacular resources along six lines of inquiry: actors, media, divides, practices, trends and events. The resulting glossaries would provide scholars with rich spaces of dynamic relationality in which to locate particular activist groups or movements and their media practices. These lexicons would then be amenable to historical comparisons within the same political culture or to cross-border comparisons with coeval ones elsewhere. I briefly exemplify this approach by sketching the trajectories of digital rights activists operating within the Spanish and Indonesian political cultures, whose respective sets of keywords are – not surprisingly – worlds apart.

Stephansen, H. C. (2016). 2 Understanding citizen media as practice. Citizen Media and Public Spaces, 25. http://bit.ly/2nqCuzc

Much recent commentary on citizen media has focused on online platforms as means through which citizens may disseminate self-produced media content that challenges dominant discourses or makes visible hidden realities. This chapter goes beyond a concern with media content to explore the much broader range of socially situated practices that develop around citizen media. Drawing on Couldry’s proposal for a practice paradigm in media research, it suggests shifting the focus from ‘citizen media’ to ‘citizen media practices’ and demonstrates, through a case study of communication activism in the World Social Forum, how this framework can bring into view a broad range of citizen media practices (beyond those directly concerned with the production and circulation of media content), the different forms of agency that such practices make possible, and the social fabric they can help generate. I conclude by arguing that a practice framework necessitates a rethink of the way that the concept of (counter-) publics is used in the context of citizen media. Citizen media practices of the kind described here can be understood not only as practices of ‘making public’ previously unreported issues and perspectives, but as practices of public-making: practices that support the formation of publics.

Warde, A. (2005). Consumption and Theories of Practice. Journal of Consumer Culture, 5(2), 131-153.

This article considers the potential of a revival of interest in theories of practice for the study of consumption. It presents an abridged account of the basic precepts of a theory of practice and extracts some broad principles for its application to the analysis of final consumption. The basic assumption is that consumption occurs as items are appropriated in the course of engaging in particular practices and that being a competent practitioner requires appropriation of the requisite services, possession of appropriate tools, and devotion of a suitable level of attention to the conduct of the practice. Such a view stresses the routine, collective and conventional nature of much consumption but also emphasizes that practices are internally differentiated and dynamic. Distinctive features of the account include its understanding of the way wants emanate from practices, of the processes whereby practices emerge, develop and change, of the consequences of extensive personal involvements in many practices, and of the manner of recruitment to practices. The article concludes with discussion of some theoretical, substantive and methodological implications.

Yates, L. (2015). Everyday politics, social practices and movement networks: daily life in Barcelona’s social centres. The British journal of sociology, 66(2), 236-258.

The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much contemporary social science. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to moments of mobilization, and to movements with clear organizational boundaries, tactics and goals. Exceptions have explored collective identity, ‘free spaces’ and prefigurative politics, but such processes are framed as important only in accounting for movements in abeyance, or in explaining movement persistence. This article focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organization are continually being developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicized and politicizing as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres. Following Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilization to occur. However, they not only underpin mobilization, but are themselves politically expressive and prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The variety of political forms – adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinized everyday practices, allow diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non-activists. An approach which focuses on practices and networks rather than mobilization and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive.

Abstract

The rise of WikiLeaks, Anonymous, the Pirate Parties, Edward Snowden and other new techno-political actors has coincided with the global emergence of ‘hybrid media systems’ (Chadwick 2013) in which new and old media forms interact in complex ways. In this paper I explore the idea of a hybridly mediated space of ‘nerd politics’ through the case studies of four controversial internet bills: SOPA in the United States, Ley Sinde in Spain, Lei Azeredo in Brazil and UU ITE in Indonesia. I argue that the formation of transient publics around these contentious issues has helped to both politicise technology and technologise politics in domestic and international contexts. I also suggest that transient publics are paradoxically crucial to the maintenance of dispersed social spaces such as the space of nerd politics, particularly when they are able to swiftly reconfigure themselves into new publics, e.g. from SOPA to ACTA, from Ley Sinde to indignados, or from Lei Azeredo to Marco Civil da Internet. I end with a reflection on the broader theoretical implications of the complementary concepts of ‘hybrid media space’ and ‘transient public’ for our understanding of digital media and political change in the contemporary era.