André Jansson

Texture : A key concept for communication geography

The article outlines the contours of an emerging sub-field within media and cultural studies — communication geography. It is argued that post-industrial society nurtures a regime of hyperspace-biased communication, which generates spatial ambiguities tied to mobility, convergence and interactivity. These ambiguities call for a spatial turn within media studies — a turn which implies a problematization of the space—communication nexus, through which communication can be understood as the production and becoming of space. Following Henri Lefebvre, the term `texture is advanced as a potential cornerstone for the geography of communication. The concept refers to the communicative fabric that mediates between the structural properties of space and the spatial or communicative practices that (re)produce space. Textural analysis holds the potential to go beyond the duality of transmission and ritual views of communication, as well as to take the material geographies of communication into closer consideration.The article outlines the contours of an emerging sub-field within media and cultural studies — communication geography. It is argued that post-industrial society nurtures a regime of hyperspace-biased communication, which generates spatial ambiguities tied to mobility, convergence and interactivity. These ambiguities call for a spatial turn within media studies — a turn which implies a problematization of the space—communication nexus, through which communication can be understood as the production and becoming of space. Following Henri Lefebvre, the term `texture is advanced as a potential cornerstone for the geography of communication. The concept refers to the communicative fabric that mediates between the structural properties of space and the spatial or communicative practices that (re)produce space. Textural analysis holds the potential to go beyond the duality of transmission and ritual views of communication, as well as to take the material geographies of communication into closer consideration.

Complicit surveillance, interveillance, and the question of cosmopolitanism: Toward a phenomenological understanding of mediatization

The institutional and meta-processual dimensions of surveillance have been scrutinized extensively in literature. In these accounts, the subjective, individual level has often been invoked in relation to subject–object, surveillor–surveilled dualities and in terms of the kinds of subjectivity modern and late-modern institutions engender. The experiential, ontological realm of the “mediatized everyday” vis-a-vis surveillance remains less explored, particularly from the phenomenological perspective of the lifeworld. Academic discourses of surveillance mostly address rhetorically oriented macro-perspectives. The same diagnosis largely applies to the debates on the cosmopolitanization process. The literature of cosmopolitanism revolves around broad cultural and ethical transformations in terms of the relationship between Self and Other, individual and humanity, and the local and the universal. Our aim in this article is to conceptualize the dynamics that yield a cosmopolitan Self and an encapsulated Self under conditions of increasingly interactive and ubiquitous forms of mediation and surveillance.

News Media Consumption in the Transmedia Age: Amalgamations, orientations and geo-social structuration

Technological convergence and altered dynamics of content circulation, what is here referred to as “transmedia textures”, change the ways in which news is consumed. This is in regard to both how individuals navigate and orient themselves through representational spaces and flows, and how their media practices amalgamate with other activities in everyday life. The aim of this study is to explore how altered dynamics of amalgamation are related to various news media orientations and how these relationships correspond to forces of structuration. The study applies a communication geographical analytical framework and combines quantitative and qualitative interview data from Sweden. The empirical data illustrate how the spatial practice of news consumption changes into an increasingly amalgamated, mobile practice. Transmedia textures flourish within geo-social settings marked by relatively affluent, mobile lifestyles and cosmopolitan news orientations. However, it is also shown that transmedia textures, due to the forces of geo-social structuration, sustain sedentary lifestyles, corresponding to more locally oriented news media practices.

Cosmopolitanism and the media : cartographies of change

Acknowledgements PART I: MAPPING THE TERRAIN: BOUNDARIES AND BRIDGES 1. Introductory Essay: Cosmopolitanization, Mediatization and Social Change 2. Cosmopolitan Trajectories: Connectivity, Reflexivity and Symbolic Power 3. Remediated Sociality and the Dual Logic of Surveillance PART II: CONTEXTUALIZING SPACE, MOBILITY AND BELONGING 4. Transnational Media Flows: Globalization, Politics and Identity 5. Transclusion vs. Demediation: Mediatization and the Re-Embedding of Cosmopolitanism 6. Cities, Embodied Expressivity and Morality of Proximity 7. In Conclusion: Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents References Index

Three tasks for mediatization research: contributions to an open agenda:

Based on the interdisciplinary experience of a Swedish research committee, this article discusses critical conceptual issues raised by the current debate on mediatization – a concept that holds great potential to constitute a space for synthesized understandings of media-related social transformations. In contrast to other, more metaphorical constructions, mediatization can be studied empirically in systematic ways through various sub-processes that together provide a complex picture of how culture and everyday life evolve in times of media saturation. The first part of this article argues that mediatization researchers have sometimes formulated too grand claims as to mediatization’s status as a unitary approach, a meta-theory or a paradigm. Such claims have led to problematic confusions around the concept and should be abandoned in favour of a more open agenda. In line with such a call for openness, the second part of the article introduces historicity, specificity and measurability as three transdisciplinary and transparadigmatic tasks for the contemporary mediatization research agenda.

Mediatization at the Margins : Cosmopolitanism, Network Capital, and Spatial Transformation in Rural Sweden

Abstract The significance of mediatization in countryside settings is an under-researched topic in media studies. In this paper, based on qualitative fieldwork carried out in two rural areas in Sweden, we study how mediatization integrates the prospects of cosmopolitan social change. The current phase of the mediatization process, which imposes a more dynamic register of networked communication, nourishes a new type of cosmopolitan identity in the countryside. As shown in the study, this development is constituted by complex configurations of different forms of mobility and connectivity. We argue that these spatial processes are socially structured, meaning that certain social groups are better equipped, through the appropriation of network capital, for turning cosmopolitan dispositions into a transformative resource, a ‘cosmopolitan politics of place’. Such alterations of the social structure may successively destabilize the relationship between ‘the urban’ and ‘the rural’.

Perceptions of surveillance: Reflexivity and trust in a mediatized world (the case of Sweden)

Even though the field of surveillance studies has expanded during the last decade, there is still a need for studies that empirically explain and contextualize people’s perceptions of the increasingly mediatized ‘surveillance society’. This article provides a ‘middle range’ social theorization, following Giddens, as well as an updated empirical account, based on a nationwide Swedish survey, of how various forms of surveillance are perceived as social phenomena. Through factor analysis three dimensions are elaborated: state surveillance, commercial surveillance and mediated interveillance. The article argues that the realm of interveillance blurs the line between systemic and social trust, and thus calls for context-specific modes of routinized reflexivity. Whereas such modes of boundary maintenance may potentially run across social lines of division, the results suggest that the management of interveillance primarily constitutes an instance of sociocultural structuration.

Mobile elites: Understanding the ambiguous lifeworlds of Sojourners, Dwellers and Homecomers

This article introduces the Special Issue Mobile Elites: Sojourners, Dwellers and Homecomers, in which five articles look into the hidden frictions and social and emotional costs involved in privileged forms of mobility. Such existentially oriented aspects of globalization are still relatively underresearched. It is argued that cultural studies hold a responsibility to carry out ethnographically oriented analyses of mobile elite groups in order to unveil the complexities of life trajectories commonly associated with social as well as economic success. The article outlines an epistemological platform for carrying out such analyses, combining the new mobilities paradigm with social field theory and social phenomenology. Based on the empirical analyses presented in the Special Issue, the article also introduces three ‘registers of ambiguity and negotiation’: ambiguities of moral geographies, ambiguities of re-embedding and ambiguities of flow-architectures.

The Hegemony of the Urban/Rural Divide Cultural Transformations and Mediatized Moral Geographies in Sweden

The urban/rural divide constitutes a socially pervasive lived space, corresponding to what Cresswell calls a moral geography. In modern society, the symbolic association of urbanism, globalism, and mediatization defines the dominant metaphysics of flow, which can be distinguished from the more sedentarist metaphysics of fixity, largely representing rural values and life conditions. This article provides an empirically based account (survey data and qualitative interviews) of how these metaphysics are linked to popular understandings of “the city” and “the countryside” in contemporary Sweden, and how such moral geographies are affected by mediatization processes. The findings suggest that although “the city” occupies a culturally dominant position as the mediated center (Couldry), this position evolves through the mutual interplay between the two metaphysics. Ultimately, it is argued that the mediatized reproduction of an urban/rural divide holds a hegemonic function in contemporary society, annihilating conditions that are neither “urban” nor “rural.”

A second birth? Cosmopolitan media ethnography and Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology

What does it take to carry out media ethnography in times and spaces of cosmopolitanization? How can ethnography reach beyond nationally or otherwise territorially bounded theories and methodologies, towards a new set of cosmopolitan approaches that manage to account for globalized logics of symbolic power? This article explores whether and how cosmopolitan media ethnography could be built around the epistemology of Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology. This would imply the methodological commitment to Bourdieu’s ideal of conversion of the scientific gaze, as well as the incorporation of his intermediary concepts of habitus and field. It is also argued that cosmopolitan media ethnography should be based on a non-media centric view revolving around the concept of texture – a concept through which it is possible to grasp the socially structured relationship between fields and spaces of flow and the various locations where symbolic power is ultimately played out. The theoretical points are brought into dialogue with recent experiences from media ethnographic fieldwork carried out among expatriate development workers in Nicaragua.