Adam Brown

Book Review: Producing the Internet: Critical Perspectives of Social MediaOlssonTobias (ed.), Producing the Internet: Critical Perspectives of Social Media, Nordicom, Göteborg, 2013, ISBN 9 7891 8652 3596, 259 pp., €28.00.

In just over a hundred pages, Shaun Moores argues persuasively for a ‘non-media-centric form of media studies’ (p. 108), which challenges those working in the field to better appreciate how media practices are situated in a broader social context. According to Moores, the benefit of adopting such an approach is particularly evident in trying to understand how the concepts of media, place and mobility are interrelated. Moores begins this work by exploring why the notion of place ought to be of some continued significance for media scholars. In the first chapter, he offers a sympathetic yet critical review of Joshua Meyrowitz’s influential body of work in the discipline of media studies. Although Moores commends Meyrowitz’s readiness to synthesise theories from other fields, he takes aim at Meyrowitz’s argument that the world has become ‘placeless’ because of the arrival of new forms of electronic media. For one thing, what is flawed about Meyrowitz’s argument is that it too eagerly assumes that the emergence of electronic media has radically unsettled the existing social order. Moores also alleges that Meyrowitz ‘tends to underestimate the ongoing significance of physical location’ (p. 11). Critically, what Meyrowitz’s analysis overlooks is how place has not been made irrelevant by electronic media as much as it has been transformed. To illustrate this point, Moores utilises Paddy Scannell’s ‘doubling of place’ argument to understand how electronic media can pluralise a person’s sense of place. In the second chapter, Moores highlights a further shortcoming of Meyrowitz’s account of place, which narrowly defines place as either a physical location or a social position. Moores suggests that a more enhanced understanding of place emerges through the phenomenological insight that a place is created through sensory experience, dwelling and ‘repetitive habitual practices’ (p. 27). Moores then uses the rest of the second chapter to discuss how the practice of placemaking is related to the issue of mobility. What is deficient about some notable phenomenological accounts of place is that they view mobility as an obstacle to placemaking. However, Moores argues that the mobility of peoples, things and ideas plays a crucial role in the place-making process. In the final chapter, Moores draws from the sociological work of Manuel Castells and John Urry to further emphasise the important relationship between mobility and place. Moores argues that without the contrast of mobility (e.g. travel, immigration, networking), a true phenomenological construction of place cannot be created. For example, this insight is critical for grasping how some portable electronic devices have transformed the transit spaces that people inhabit. For such a short scholarly text, Media, Place and Mobility should be commended for presenting such a rich and novel way of understanding how the concepts of media, place and mobility are interconnected. While at times the work is theoretically dense, Moores does an exceptional job at providing easily digestible examples. Through the prism of place-making and mobility, Moores ultimately presents a convincing case for why the field of media studies ought to adopt a more interdisciplinary outlook. — Samantha de Wit, Communications, International Studies and Languages and Eric L. Hsu, Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia

Book Review: Media and MemoryGarde-HansenJoanne, Media and Memory, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2011, ISBN 9 7807 4864 0348, 174 pp., US

There is no better time than the present for revisiting the fundamental intersection of media and memory, and Joanne Garde-Hansen does so with clarity and sophistication. Media and Memory engages with the complexities of how various media both enable and contribute to the pervasive desire (or need?) to store, manipulate and disseminate memories in an increasingly digitally driven world. By broadly assessing how previous theorists have conceptualised memory and media separately and alongside one another, Garde-Hansen demonstrates that a renegotiation of this relationship is pivotal to understanding ‘how we individually and collectively make sense and order of our past through media’ (p. 8). The resulting analysis highlights the key roles of industries, institutions, individuals, textual products and digital media devices in constructing and navigating memory. Designed in the main as a textbook for students, the volume provides a highly accessible introduction to the field through a substantial section covering its theoretical background, followed by four chapters consisting of interesting and diverse case studies. Combining theoretical discussion with contemporary exemplars, the book is clearly structured and highly readable, with exercises and further reading lists accompanying each chapter. The book could serve as an essential reading for a unit/course in media studies, while its inter-/cross-disciplinary nature offers valuable insights pertinent to history, cultural heritage, sociology, psychology and other disciplines. Garde-Hansen’s book is by no means only suitable for student readers, as its sustained reflections on select case studies provide new and valuable insights into the power of radio’s ‘invisibility’ as seen through BBC Radio, the mash-up of war memories on YouTube, the consumption of celebrity culture online through an analysis of Madonna and the mediation of memories by young people via digital camera phone technology. The book also addresses fundamental transformations in the nature of memory and media research, noting at one point that media researchers are now ‘participatory, creative, innovative and respectful of the media literacy of the former audience who are actively engaged in the consumption, production and dissemination of knowledge and information’ (p. 105). While this generalisation of ‘new media citizens’ in academia and elsewhere might not hold up to absolute scrutiny, and it is important to qualify utopian discourses about digital media generally, the author nonetheless makes a strong case that ‘we can no longer speak of audiences and consumers but of active, critical and creative citizens of media, culture and society who have access to cheap and effective communication technologies even in the poorest countries’ (p. 105). As Garde-Hansen points out, the end of the twentieth century saw media conceived in relation to the personal, political, private, public, national, urban, social, communicative, cultural, contextual, collective, ethical, religious, performative, prosthetic and so on (p. 26). However, the ways in which media and memory can be seen to have converged have not been sufficiently distilled, and Garde-Hansen is to be commended for her endeavour to further enable this. Covering issues as diverse as the vexed subject of a potential ‘false memory syndrome’ in relation to historical events such as the Holocaust (p. 27), the tension between the ‘personal consumption of media and the corporate and commercially owned media’ (p. 67) and the democratising potential of digital media through its transformation of (to draw on recent shifts in terminology) viewers into viewsers and users into produsers, Media and Memory marks a significant achievement in the field(s) with which it engages. — Adam Brown, Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University

28.00. Distributor: New South Books.

The premise of Civilized Violence is the Foucauldian understanding of civilisation as replacing the visible exercise of sovereign violence with discursive regimes. Hansen-Miller convincingly argues that the role of violence in popular cinema can be seen as a means of reconciling and dealing with the violence that has been ‘concealed and absorbed’ within modern democratic governance (p. 2). The book explores in detail four films, spanning the twentieth century, which Hansen-Miller considers to be notable both for their violence and continuing relevance despite advancing age: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), The Sheik (1921), Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) and Deliverance (1972). Analysis of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) in parallel with Freud’s ‘Aetiology of Hysteria’ is particularly illuminating: the renarration of actual violence as fantasies born of psychic disturbance in both cases betrays a simultaneous desire to inscribe and disavow violence. Civilized Violence draws on a solid theoretical framework, built mainly on Foucault, and enters into productive dialogue with existing literature on the films. This frame allows for a fruitful and nuanced discussion of the cultural function of cinematic violence across the twentieth century. The book incorporates detailed textual analysis, a discussion of popular and critical reception of the central films and in-depth consideration of the broader social, historical and cultural contexts in which the films were produced. HansenMiller’s focus on films across such a broad timespan, which are diverse in genre and socio-cultural context, allows patterns in the treatment of violence to be made visible without glossing over the particularities of each film. However, such an emphasis on the specificities of each text has resulted in a lack of continuity between the chapters, and there is little ‘conversation’ between them even where clear opportunities exist. While the function of violence in general is well articulated, there is often a problematic slippage between rape and other forms of violence, particularly in discussion of The Sheik and ‘Aetiology of Hysteria’/Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Although Hansen-Miller’s analysis of the films is well situated within the highly patriarchal discourses and structures of the films’ production, the specific question of rape warrants more careful attention, as the structures, discourse and ideologies that support it – as well as the implications – differ significantly from those associated with other forms of violence. Although in Once Upon a Time in the West it is dealt with in a more nuanced manner, the discussion of male–male rape in Deliverance appears isolated from treatments of other forms. When rape is a central focus of the violence in most of the films discussed, a lack of engagement with any of four decades of rape scholarship hampers the development of a nuanced discussion, and seems a large oversight in an otherwise theoretically strong book. Civilized Violence is stylishly written, well structured and logically set out, and despite its limitations regarding rape it makes an important contribution to contemporary understandings of on-screen violence. Moving beyond simplistic notions of cinema violence as satisfying supposedly innate, primal needs, Hansen-Miller’s work represents a significant advancement in scholarship on media violence. – Deb Waterhouse-Watson, Arts, Monash University

Book Review: Science Fiction Film: A Critical IntroductionJohnstonKeith M., Science Fiction Film: A Critical Introduction, Berg, London, 2011, ISBN 9 7818 4788 4763, 197pp., US

Media International Australia to romanticise the artistic practice of literary writing, the comprehensiveness of Underwood’s biographical research cannot be denied, and nor can its timeliness. As Underwood himself points out, researchers increasingly have been captivated by ‘the impact of trauma and coverage of violence on journalists, the subjects of their coverage, and the secondary effects on their audience’ (p. 2). Underwood’s own work highlights these issues in its final reflections on the reshaping of traumatic experience by more contemporary industry trends, including the advance of new media, and the increased self-reflexivity of journalists about the impact of trauma in their work. Underwood’s epilogue is therefore a highlight for the imperative questions it raises about the inevitability of ‘emotional suffering and fractured personal lives’ as ‘the price of artistic accomplishment’, and the ‘impact of the journalistic environment as a precipitating factor in such tumultuous lives’ (p. 193). It is here that Underwood’s work most clearly demonstrates its welcome and innovative contribution to this area of scholarship, and the continued redefining of trauma theory in its various applications and appropriations across interdisciplinary fields. – Katrina Clifford, Journalism, Media and Communications, University of Tasmania