Innovative Methods in Media and Communication Research

342 Pages·2016·6.129 MB·English

by  Sebastian Kubitschko, Anne Kaun (eds.)

Innovative
Methods
in Media and
Communication Research
Edited by
Sebastian Kubitschko
and Anne Kaun
Innovative Methods in Media and Communication
Research
Sebastian Kubitschko • Anne Kaun
Editors
Innovative Methods
in Media and
Communication
Research
Editors
Sebastian Kubitschko Anne Kaun
University of Bremen (ZeMKI) Södertörn University
Bremen, Germany Huddinge, Sweden
ISBN 978-3-319-40699-2 ISBN 978-3-319-40700-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40700-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956372
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F ‘I M
oreword to nnovatIve ethods In
M C r ’
edIa and oMMunICatIon esearCh
How we research the social world can seem to be the concern only of pro-
fessional academics. Even among academics, books about methods tend
to be the books you consult only when you have to, while debates about
methods (methodological debates), although they sometimes come to the
fore in particular academic fields, generally do so under disguise, as dis-
putes about ‘ontology’, new paradigms, and the like. A major collection
of essays by young scholars on what is at stake in innovative methods is
therefore a notable event.
The context indeed could not be more urgent. The transformations
of what we still try to call the ‘media’ environment over the past quarter-
century have been profound. Twenty-five years ago the challenge for
media and communications scholars was to reflect on the implications of
expanding television channels and everyday video recording. In the early
years of the internet’s commercialization, modes of internet access seemed
to play out in a parallel world of their own—the world of ‘cyberspace’—
which attracted its explorers and methodological pioneers. Yet their work
could safely be ignored by the mainstream of media research, although by
2000 it was clear that the internet was going at some point to bring major
transformations.
Those times of ‘normal science’ and quarantined exploration seem
unrecognizable today. The past fifteen years have disturbed the comfort-
able division of labor in media research between mainstream and innova-
tive margins, and in their course dismantled the boundaries around media
research itself. No actual or would-be researcher of ‘media’ today can
avoid the questions of where exactly to ‘cut in’ to our lives with media, why
v
vi FOREWORD TO ‘INNOVATIVE METHODS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION...
make that cut exactly, and relying on what combination of research tech-
niques and skills. Not only have the surface features of media, the range of
their contents, the modes of their production or delivery to audiences, and
the complexity of their intertextual connections changed hugely in the
past fifteen years, but so too has the way in which media contents, media
choices, and media-related practices are embedded in daily life. Entirely
new portals of media consumption now exist (such as YouTube and social
media platforms); meanwhile, the options for, in some sense, ‘producing’
media content, or distributing it on a significant scale, have also expanded
massively. The result is a complexity, a flux, that is genuinely puzzling at
times, posing major difficulties in how to capture it.
Yet this is only the first transformation whose impacts on how we
research the social world must be considered. Two further transforma-
tions stem from the nature of the internet itself, distinctive features that
have only become clear, to most of us at least, in the past five to eight
years. During its first few years, the internet was predominantly discussed
as a space of freedom, a space into which human agency could expand
by acquiring more information, making personal connections, joining up
information and things in new ways: a ‘technology of freedom’, in Ithiel
de Sola Pool’s resonant phrase. As the size, depth, and multi-layeredness
of internet space expanded, it increasingly became clear that much work
is needed simply to keep track of the proliferating variety of the things
we do online, or with/through media reached online: this was the so-
called practice turn in media research that has broken apart the traditional
boundaries of media studies since the early 2000s.
Looking back, however, this transformation was to be succeeded by
a further transformation potentially much more disruptive to the study
not just of media, but of the social world in all its forms. This third trans-
formation has reconfigured the specialist space of media research as part
of a wider continuum in which information and computer science, soci-
ology of the economy and information, legal studies, and many other
disciplinary traditions converge. This third transformation derived from
changes deep within the production of online content and online interac-
tion spaces, which have profoundly altered the nature of the internet as an
infrastructure. The impetus came primarily from a crisis in the advertising
industries, which could no longer reliably reach their audiences in a world
of proliferating informational content: the result was the construction,
over time, of ever more sophisticated ways of tracking automatically what
people do online, as they do it, and the distribution of that data for value
FOREWORD TO ‘INNOVATIVE METHODS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION... vii
within and beyond the media industries, a story that Joseph Turow in par-
ticular has told brilliantly. The corporate gathering of consumer data goes
back to the late 1980s, as Turow’s former Annenberg School colleague
Oscar Gandy uncovered, and states have, of course, for two centuries tried
to gather data about citizens. However, the latter state-based gathering
was for a very long time confined to discrete chunks of information related
to isolated moments, aggregated only with difficulty, and affording only
broad snapshots of populations. Automated tracking of computer-based
action, driven by corporate innovations (cookies and the like) and com-
bined with huge increases in networked computing power, has, however,
in the past decade normalized continuous data gathering in every domain
of online life. The embedded software that gathers and processes such data
has become a banal, if often hidden, element of doing anything online.
The resulting rise of data collection has been so profound that it is
now driving new types of object in the world. The ‘internet of things’ is
just a catchy phrase for something rather more interesting: the routine
embedding not simply of online connection, but automated data gather-
ing and data processing in an infinitely expandable set of everyday objects
and tools. Parallel transformations in information gathering and process-
ing have been under way in specialized domains, such as the physical and
medical sciences, trading markets, and so on. From the combination of
these many ‘local’ transformations has come the phenomenon of ‘Big
Data’ and the banal installation of automated data surveillance in every
stream of social life.
The methodological challenges that flow from this profound transfor-
mation in how the world is ‘mediated’ through online infrastructures are
twofold: first, we have at work in daily life devices and systems for track-
ing people, bodies, and objects, which may, or may not, generate social
knowledge; second, and not tracked by the new devices and systems them-
selves, there are the social, political, and cultural adjustments to the pres-
ence of such tracking in daily life, which generate new types of reflexive
problem for human subjects that, in turn, require new ways of studying
those problems and how they are, or are not, resolved.
In response to these more recent transformations and challenges,
some commentators seem to have lost their head completely. When Chris
Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, proclaimed Big Data as the har-
binger of the ‘End of Theory’ (a claim noted, and rejected, in this book’s
introduction), he mistook the role of commentator for legislator; fortu-
nately, until now, the world has ignored his imperious proposal. Much
viii FOREWORD TO ‘INNOVATIVE METHODS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION...
more interesting have been the adjustments to the universalization of
data tracking by multiple scholars across many parts of the social sciences,
which are reflected in this book. Far from leading to the ‘end of theory’
or—Anderson’s rhetoric had gone even wider—the redundancy of all her-
meneutic approaches to the world, the emergence of ‘big’ data (which
is never quite as comprehensive as its proselytes claim) becomes itself an
important issue to be thought about in terms of the changes it brings to
the texture of the social world.
In addressing these challenges, themselves driven by deep changes in
the technologies through which the world is mediated, there is no way of
avoiding thinking about the consequences of Technology for innovations in
method, the topic of this book’s Part II. Yet the consideration of technol-
ogy, as I have implied, is inadequate unless grounded in an understand-
ing of the stuff out of which the world is put together (in part a matter
of prior naturalizations of technology), addressed in the book’s Part I
on Materiality. None of this would be so interesting if we insisted on
ignoring its consequences for our experience of the social world, which is
addressed in the book’s Part III on Experience. The result, undeniably, is
to increase massively the scale of information about the social world that
requires interpretation, necessitating in turn better ways of presenting the
data of social research (and indeed corporate and state research too), dis-
cussed in Part IV on Visualization.
The richness of this book’s explorations is hugely to be welcomed. At
a time emphatically not of ‘normal science’, whether in media research or
the social sciences generally, we need a book like this that brings together
young scholars in a collective endeavor to discover how much method—
and sophisticated, theoretically informed innovation in method—matters
for the quality of social life.
April 2016 Nick Couldry
London School of Economics and Political Science
C
ontents
1 An Introduction to Innovative Methods in Media
and Communication Research 1
Sebastian Kubitschko and Anne Kaun
Part I Materiality 13
Saskia Sassen
2 Engaging (Past) Participants: The Case
of radicalprintshops.org 17
Jess Baines
3 A Materialist Media Ecological Approach to Studying
Urban Media in/of Place 37
Erin Despard
4 Socio-spatial Approaches for Media and
Communication Research 59
Segah Sak
ix
x CONTENTS
Part II Technology 75
Noortje Marres
5 Neither Black Nor Box: Ways of Knowing Algorithms 81
Taina Bucher
6 Sketching Bitcoin: Empirical Research
of Digital Affordances 99
Pablo R. Velasco
7 Beyond Blobology: Using Psychophysiological
Interaction Analyses to Investigate the Neural Basis
of Human Communication Phenomena 123
Richard Huskey
8 As We Should Think? Lifelogging as
a Re-emerging Method 139
Alberto Frigo
Part III Experience 161
Sarah Pink
9 Visual Ethnography and the City: On the Dead Ends
of Reflexivity and Gentrification 167
Emily LaDue
10 Exploring Inclusive Ethnography as a Methodology
to Account for Multiple Experiences 189
Paola Sartoretto
11 Interviewing Against the Odds 207
Neha Kumar