Fredrik Stiernstedt

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.

The Political Economy of the Radio Personality

In music radio broadcasting, radio personalities (presenters, hosts, DJs) have traditionally been of critical importance to programming success. In this article, I seek to add to the understanding of contemporary developments within radio, especially music radio, through focusing on the presenter from a political economy perspective. How do new business models and technologies affect the performances and forms of talk developed by presenters in contemporary radio? What new roles are assigned to presenters in commercial music radio? How are work practices and labor relations affected? The article shows how media convergence has impacted the work of radio personalities in traditional broadcasting.

Watching reality from a distance: class, genre and reality television:

The cultural significance of reality television is based on its claim to represent social reality. On the level of genre, we might argue that reality television constructs a modern day panorama of the social world and its inhabitants and that it thus makes populations appear. This article presents a class analysis of the population of reality television in which 1 year of television programming and over 1000 participants have been analysed. The purpose of this analysis is to deepen our understanding of the cultural and ideological dimensions of reality television as a genre, and to give a more detailed picture of the imaginaries of class in this form of television. The results bring new knowledge about the reality television genre and modify or revise assumptions from previous studies. Most importantly, we show that upper-class people and people belonging to the social elite are strongly over-represented in the genre and appear much more commonly in reality television than in other genres. This result opens up a re-evaluation of the cultural and ideological dimensions of the reality television genre.

Ghettos and Gated Communities in the Social Landscape of Television: Representations of Class in 1982 and 2015

Ghettos and gated communities in the social landscape of television : Representations of class in 1982 and 2015

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.

Naturalizing Social Class as a Moral Category on Swedish Mainstream Television

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of how social class is constructed as a moral category on Swedish mainstream television. Practices of categorisation by the media is an important area of study since these practices are part of a process of co-construction of social categories that are offered to media users as cognitive tools and frames for navigating the social landscape. Based on a content analysis of television in Sweden, we show that the medium of television categorises people appearing on television along the social divisions of class and constructs class as a moral category, with a lower moral value assigned to the working class in comparison to the middle and upper class.

Defusing the male working class: Populist politics and reality television:

This article presents an analysis of the makeover reality show Real Men, which was broadcast on Swedish television in 2016. The analysis shows that Real Men – like other shows of its genre – functions as a form of ‘governmentality’ through which forms of neoliberal subjectivity are propagated and pedagogically enforced on ‘bad subjects’. However, the show surpasses the genre conventions by questioning the authority of the norms and values (i.e. middle-class, cosmopolitan and urban values) that are being propagated and in letting the values held by the working-class men on the show eventually be victorious and accepted within the narrative. The purpose of this article is to try to make sense of a popular cultural artefact such as Real Men against the background of the crisis of legitimacy for the neoliberal ideology and the rise of (right-wing) populism, and to try to understand how the forms and genres of popular culture transform and respond to this changing political context.

Voice, silence and social class on television

The question of voice is a central and timeless political issue. Who gets to speak? Who is silenced? Who is listening? One of the main arenas for voice in modern, advanced democracies is the media. Media infrastructures, technologies, institutions and organizations are a precondition for political voice in large-scale societies, but are also an important factor in distributing the possibilities for voice among different groups and sectors of the population. In this article, we take on the question of voice in relation to social class and aim to analyse how the medium of television gives voice to people from different social classes. This study operationalizes the theoretical notion of voice by asking the following questions: who has the opportunity to appear and speak on television, to whom do they speak and under what circumstances does this communication occur? Based on a content analysis of television in Sweden, the results from this study show that voice is distributed in a highly unequal manner. It also shows that the relations enacted by television appearances conform to the social hierarchy. Whereas people from the ruling class frequently speak to people from the working and middle classes, they are rarely spoken to by members of a class that is positioned below their own. Television thus constructs a social hierarchy of voice and authority that reproduces and legitimizes already existing social hierarchies.

[Book Review:] Keith Sommerville. Radio Propaganda and the Broadcasting of Hatred: Historical Development and Definitions

[Book Review:] Keith Sommerville. Radio Propaganda and the Broadcasting of Hatred: Historical Development and Definitions

[Review of] Gilfillan, Daniel: Pieces of Sound : German experimental radio, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press 2009 ISBN: 978081664771, eISBN: 9780816667840

of the radio programs The National Farm and Home Hour and Music Appreciation Hour, both of which enjoyed large audiences in the 1920s through the 1940s. These were both considered sustaining programs, which as Benjamin writes, ‘were those shows developed and aired by the networks or stations themselves and for which the broadcaster received no revenue’ (p. 9). At issue with sustaining programming were concerns about the content of the programs, the audience, and money, as the network absorbed the cost of these types of programs. Since the very purpose of the Advisory Council was to help ‘NBC plan programs in the public interest,’ it was asked to weigh in on a number of controversial programming issues. In Chapters 4, 5 and 6, Benjamin describes a number of issues brought to the council, regarding the broadcasting of religious programs, birth control information and political advertisements and speeches. She subtly makes the case that the Council’s decisions continue to inform the way that these contentious issues are dealt with today. She wraps up the Council’s work in Chapter 7, discussing a few additional issues that it addressed. However, by the early 1940s, much of the work the Council was asked to do in its early days had been accomplished, and thus, as Benjamin writes, Owen Young formally disbanded the group in 1945, which had by this point ‘outlived its usefulness’ (p. 112). The NBC Advisory Council and Radio Programming, like Slotten’s book, is another informative addition to the growing field of radio studies. Though she takes a narrower focus, Benjamin explores another crucial moment in radio history that, long after its demise, continues to have a marked influence on broadcasting. In this relatively slim volume, Benjamin covers the key issues of her subject; hopefully her work will provide the foundation for further contextualisation of NBC’s role in radio broadcasting, including a more thorough investigation of the important distinctions between sustaining and sponsored programs, and particularly, the division between the NBC Red and Blue networks. Each of these well-researched books makes a substantial contribution to the existing historical scholarship on American radio and should be appreciated by specialists in the discipline as well as by anyone interested in this period of American history.