Anne Kaun

Facebook time: Technological and institutional affordances for media memories

People are spending increasingly more time on social media platforms, with Facebook being the biggest and most successful. Historically, media technologies have for long been considered of importance for the structuration and the experience of time in general. In this article, we investigate the technological affordances of Facebook for the temporal experiences of its users. Relying on a case study of a Facebook page dedicated to media memories, we link user experiences to technological and institutional affordances. By doing so, we seek to answer the question of how a business model and an infrastructure that largely build on immediacy and newness are experienced and negotiated by users that engage in a multiplicity of durations and time layers in their everyday lives. Drawing on a platform analysis, in-depth interviews and a survey among the users of the page “DT64—Das Jugendradio der DDR,” we develop the concept of “social media time” while considering notions of the archive, flow, and narrative, which contribute to shedding light on how specific media technologies afford specific temporalities. We conclude by discussing the consequences for the users and society at large.

Open-Ended Online Diaries: Capturing Life as It Is Narrated

Weblogs and life journals are popular forms of reflecting and reporting online about ones everyday life. In this article the author examines whether solicited online diaries can be used in qualitative research. She discusses advantages and disadvantages of the online research, diaries as a source of data, and narration as a method. The discussion is exemplified by the presentation of an online diary study conducted in two parts in the spring and autumn of 2009 with students from Tartu, Narva, and Tallinn, Estonia. This article shows the illuminating potential and richness of solicited online diaries applied in an open-ended, qualitative understanding as a way to investigate everyday life. At the same time, the main challenges are presented and discussed.

Regimes of time: Media practices of the dispossessed

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.

'I really don't like them!' - Exploring citizens' media criticism

In information and media affluent societies, the critical ability of citizens is increasingly important. This is reflected in a number of political initiatives that aim at engaging citizens in questions of media content and production, often labelled as media literacy. In this context, skills related to media technologies that are often accentuated in media literacy education are a necessary but not sufficient condition for media literacy. Critical reflexivity and critical practices are crucial for media literacy and therefore in the centre of this article. This article proposes an analysis of media criticism from a citizens’ perspective. Drawing on solicited, open-ended online diaries as well as in-depth interviews with young Estonian citizens, the article applies an inductive approach to media criticism while paying attention to the specific context in which the media criticism arises.

‘Our time to act has come’: desynchronization, social media time and protest movements:

Protest movements have successfully adopted media technologies to promote their causes and mobilize large numbers of supporters. Especially social media that are considered as low-cost and time-saving alternatives have played particularly important roles in recent mobilizations. There is, however, a growing concern about the contradictions between long-term organizing for progressive, social change, on one hand, and the media technologies employed, on the other. Hartmut Rosa has argued that the current culture of accelerated capitalism is characterized by a growing desynchronization between political practices (slow politics) and the economic system (fast capitalism). This article traces the increasing social acceleration related to (media) technologies employed by protest activists and asks whether there is an increasing desynchronization with their political practices discernible. Furthermore, the article investigates strategies of resistance to overcome the growing gap between ‘machine time’ and political time. Empirically, the article builds on archival material and in-depth interviews documenting the media practices of the unemployed workers’ movement (1930s), the tenants’ movement (1970s) and the Occupy Wall Street Movement (2011/2012) and argues for the need to re-politicize media infrastructures as means of communication in order to tackle democratic problems that emerge from the divergent temporalities.

“Volunteering is like any other business” : Civic participation and social media

The increased influx of refugees in 2015 has led to challenges in transition and destination countries such as Germany, Sweden and Denmark. Volunteer-led initiatives providing urgent relief played a crucial role in meeting the needs of arriving refugees. The work of the volunteers in central stations and transition shelters was mainly organised with the help of Facebook, in terms of both inward and outward communications. This article examines the role of social media for civic participation drawing on Swedish volunteer initiatives that emerged in the context of the migration crisis in 2015 as a case study. Theoretically, this article provides an analytical framework, including power relations, technological affordances, practices and discourses, which helps shed light on the interrelation between social media and civic participation.

An Introduction to Innovative Methods in Media and Communication Research

Kubitschko and Kaun explicate the book’s aim to actively and prolifically approach methodological challenges and opportunities by bringing together empirical research about media transformations as well as studies that do research through media. The chapter highlights that the book gathers unique insights to innovative methodological approaches in media and communication studies while embedding these in the rich history of interdisciplinary empirical research of various fields. Kubitschko and Kaun advocate an inclusive understanding of ‘innovation’ to denote the lively and productive qualities of emerging methods. Innovation here is a call for widening and rethinking research methods to further understandings of the role media technologies and infrastructures play in society. Above all, methodological innovation takes place in doing. To innovate one has to develop, apply and critically reflect on research methods.

Media Memory Practices and Community of Remembrance: Youth Radio DT64

A recent essay in the German weekly Spiegel proclaimed the end of a distinct East German identity (Berg, 2013), the end of Ossi. However, online and offline sites for commemorating cultural artefacts from the former GDR are flourishing. One example is the still-growing Facebook page DT64 – Das Jugendradio der DDR dedicated to a former youth radio station that disappeared from the re-unified German media landscape already in the early 1990s. We consider the Facebook page not so much an example of persistent Ostalgia — that is, nostalgia for the East (Gallinat, 2006; Godeanu-Kenworthy, 2011), but an illustration of how media memories are performed in our digital age, entangling individual and collective memories. In that sense, we are interested in the kind of community of remembrance that is afforded by the Facebook page and the media practices it fosters.

Digital Activism : After the Hype

Research on digital activism has gained traction in recent years. At the same time, it remains a diverse and open field that lacks a coherent mode of inquiry. For the better or worse, digital activism remains a fuzzy term. In this introduction to a special issue on digital activism, we review current attempts to periodize and historicize digital activism. Although there is growing body of research on digitial activism, many contributions remain limited through their ahistorical approach and the digital universalism that they imply. Based on the contributions to the special issue, we argue for studying digital activisms in a way that traverses a two-dimensional axis of digital technologies and activist practices, striking the balance between context and media-specificity.

Workfulness: governing the disobedient brain

ABSTRACT The Scandinavian telecommunication company Telenor recently introduced the notion of Workfulness by adapting digital detox to the workplace. Workfulness is a management program aimed at technology-intensive companies that rely strongly on digital media. The program encompasses strategies of disconnection for employees, including mobile and email-free work hours and technology-free meetings, in order to enhance focus and efficiency. This article investigates Workfulness as one prominent example of managerial approaches that are based on neuroscientific assumptions about human decision-making. Drawing on textual materials and interviews, the analysis shows that Workfulness manages digital distractions in the workplace by establishing a form of stimulus-control rather than appealing to rational self-control. Workfulness alludes to the necessity of making choices, but it considers unconscious behavior, which is explained with reference to preconscious workings of the brain. The human brain becomes a battleground between rational and impulsive decisions, and it is the disobedient brain that needs to be governed in order to become an efficient employee. We situate the Workfulness program as part of and at the same time extending the biopolitical economy by incorporating advances in neurosciences into modes of governance.