J. van Dijck

Mediated memories: Personal Cultural Memory as an Object of Cultural Analysis

Like many people born in the 1950s and 1960s, I own a shoebox containing a variety of personal items signalling my personal past: photos, letters, diaries, and so on. In the course of several decades, its treasured contents have expanded considerably. Adding my collection of recorded content (audiocassettes with taped music and videocassettes with recorded films and television programmes) I could easily fill a large suitcase with what I prefer to call my ‘mediated memories’. Many people wield media technologies—everything from writing tools to digital cameras—to inscribe, record, store and recall personal experiences. We commonly cherish our mediated memories as a formative part of our autobiographical and cultural identities; the accumulated items typically reflect the shaping of an individual in an historical time frame. Besides being of personal value, collections of mediated memories, however, are also interesting as objects of cultural analysis. In fact, both memory and media constitute intermediaries between individual and society, and between past and present. Historians and social scientists have theorized individual memory primarily as a particularized view on the grand narratives of history; they tend to value individual memories only as retrospective angles on, or as representations of, collective history. In this article, I propose to conceive of personal memory as a cultural phenomenon that encompasses both the activities and products of remembering. We inscribe experiences in the present to facilitate future recall; such material inscriptions are always filtered through discursive conventions, social and cultural practices, and technological tools. In recent years, historians have frequently commented upon the mediation of memory—the role of media as interlinking past and present. This article will try to counteract the common

After the two cultures: Towards a (multi)cultural practice of science communication

In his famous lecture “The Two Cultures” (1959), C. P. Snow identified an unbridgeable gap between two hostile branches of knowledge: the (natural) sciences and the humanities. The twocultures opposition has long dissolved since 1959. In the twenty-first century, the postmodern condition of science has given rise to the “(multi)cultural paradigm” of science communication—a paradigm beyond the two cultures and the narrativation of knowledge, acknowledging not only the increasing cultural diversity in populations throughout the world but also the many cultures or disciplines involved in the construction and communication of science.In his famous lecture “The Two Cultures” (1959), C. P. Snow identified an unbridgeable gap between two hostile branches of knowledge: the (natural) sciences and the humanities. The twocultures opposition has long dissolved since 1959. In the twenty-first century, the postmodern condition of science has given rise to the “(multi)cultural paradigm” of science communication—a paradigm beyond the two cultures and the narrativation of knowledge, acknowledging not only the increasing cultural diversity in populations throughout the world but also the many cultures or disciplines involved in the construction and communication of science.

Understanding the promises and premises of online health platforms

This article investigates the claims and complexities involved in the platform-based economics of health and fitness apps. We examine a double-edged logic inscribed in these platforms, promising to offer personal solutions to medical problems while also contributing to the public good. On the one hand, online platforms serve as personalized data-driven services to their customers. On the other hand, they allegedly serve public interests, such as medical research or health education. In doing so, many apps employ a diffuse discourse, hinging on terms like “sharing,” “open,” and “reuse” when they talk about data extraction and distribution. The analytical approach we adopt in this article is situated at the nexus of science and technology studies, political economy, and the sociology of health and illness. The analysis concentrates on two aspects: datafication (the use and reuse of data) and commodification (a platform’s deployment of governance and business models). We apply these analytical categories to three specific platforms: 23andMe, PatientsLikeMe, and Parkinson mPower. The last section will connect these individual examples to the wider implications of health apps’ data flows, governance policies, and business models. Regulatory bodies commonly focus on the (medical) safety and security of apps, but pay scarce attention to health apps’ techno-economic governance. Who owns user-generated health data and who gets to benefit? We argue that it is important to reflect on the societal implications of health data markets. Governments have the duty to provide conceptual clarity in the grand narrative of transforming health care and health research.

Rearticulating Audience Engagement Social Media and Television

This introduction to the special issue on social media and television audience engagement sketches the key dimensions that affect how audiences are transformed through the development of social platforms. Building on the five contributions to the special issue, we identify three dimensions that deserve further attention: (1) the character of national media cultures, (2) whether social platforms are employed by public or commercial broadcasters, and (3) the specific techno-commercial strategies of television producers and social media companies. By exploring these three dimensions, the article presents a basic analytical model to systematically compare and contextualize empirical findings on the relationship between social media and audience engagement.

Televisie in het tijdperk van de digitale manipuleerbaarheid

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[Review of: D. Miller (2009) The comfort of things]

I once worked in a department where three academics shared an office. One desk always looked meticulously clean and empty, no matter when you entered the room. The second resembled a battlefield – piles of papers and empty coffee cups covering the surface. The third desk showcased pictures of children and pets; even the edges of the computer screen were decorated with refrigerator magnets. Before I had read Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things, I automatically explained the differences between these desks by comparing their user’s personalities and styles of working. Miller chooses the anthropological approach rather than the psychological one, and teaches us how to read people through their possessions. As an anthropologist, he ‘tries to engage with the minutiae of everyday life while retaining a commitment to understanding humanity as a whole’ (p. 6). For 17 months, Miller and his co-researcher Fiona Parrott investigated the domestic interiors and material living spaces of over 30 households in Stuart Street – a random street in suburban South London with a mixed population (only 23 percent of the people interviewed were born in London). The resulting book is a fascinating collection of 30 portraits – a gallery of verbal, almost literary, paintings of people who come to exist for us in and through their material possessions. Each portrait also describes a household by concentrating on objects: pictures on the wall, clutter in the hallway, or the virtual emptiness of a flat give rise to a lively description of its occupant(s). We do not learn much about the inhabitant’s profession, his or her family descent or income level. Miller does not take recourse to socio-economic categories (gender, class, sexual preference, race) to understand this cross-section of suburban London, because ‘categories create assumptions’ (p. 4). Instead, he lets material culture bespeak individuality and connectivity: ‘Material culture matters because objects create subjects much more than the other way around.’ R E V I E W S