Nick Couldry

Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling

This article reviews the social potential of digital storytelling, and in particular its potential to contribute to the strengthening of democracy. Through answering this question, it seeks to test out the relative strengths and weaknesses of two competing concepts for grasping the wider consequences of media for the social world: the concept of mediatization and the concept of mediation. It is argued that mediatization (developed, for example, by Stig Hjarvard and Winfried Schulz) is stronger at addressing aspects of media textuality, suggesting that a unitary media-based logic is at work. In spite of its apparent vagueness, mediation (developed in particular by Roger Silverstone) provides more flexibility for thinking about the open-ended and dialectical social transformations which, as with the printed book, may come in time to be articulated with the new form of digital storytelling.

Theorising media as practice

This article explores the possibility of a new paradigm of media research that understands media, not as texts or structures of production, but as practice. Drawing on recent moves towards a theory of practice in sociology, this paradigm aims to move beyond old debates about media effects and the relative importance of political economy and audience interpretation, at the same time as moving beyond a narrow concentration on audience practices, to study the whole range of practices that are oriented towards media and the role of media in ordering other practices in the social world. After setting this new paradigm in the context of the history of media research, the article reviews the key advantages of this paradigm in mapping the complexity of media‐saturated cultures where the discreteness of audience practices can no longer be assumed.

Media meta-capital: Extending the range of Bourdieu’s field theory

This article addresses a general problem in media sociology – how to understand the media both as an internal production process and as a general frame for categorizing the social world, with specific reference to a version of this problem in recent work on media within Bourdieu’s field-based tradition of research (work previously reviewed by Rodney Benson in Theory and Society28). It argues that certain problems arise in reconciling this work’s detailed explanations of the media field’s internal workings (and the interrelations of that field’s workings to the workings of other fields) and general claims made about the “symbolic power” of media in a broader sense. These problems can be solved, the author argues, by adopting the concept of meta-capital developed by Bourdieu himself in his late work on the state, and returning to the wider framework of symbolic system and symbolic power that was important in Bourdieu’s social theory before it became dominated by field theory. Media, it is proposed, have meta-capital over the rules of play, and the definition of capital (especially symbolic capital), that operate within a wide range of contemporary fields of production. This level of explanation needs to be added to specific accounts of the detailed workings of the media field. The conclusion points to questions for further work, including on the state’s relative strength and the media’s meta-capital that must be carried out through detailed empirical work on a global comparative basis.

Culture and citizenship : The missing link?

This article argues that, instead of assuming that we know what ‘cultural citizenship’ involves, we should investigate more closely the uncertainties about what constitutes the ‘culture’ (or cultures) of citizenship. The article argues for the distinctive contribution of cultural studies to the problem of democratic engagement, as usually framed within political science. It then reports some preliminary findings from the recently completed ‘Media Consumption and the Future of Public Connection’ project, which focus on the importance of social opportunities for talk about public issues, the possibilities of withdrawal from news because it presents issues which people can do nothing about, and alternative forms of collective connection through media (such as celebrity culture) which exhibit no effective link to public issues.

Playing for Celebrity: Big Brother as Ritual Event

If we are to understand series such as the first U.K. version of Big Brother as events, rather than just as texts or production processes, we need to draw on anthropological theory, for example, Dayan and Katzs theory of media events. This article develops an anthropologically informed argument about the status of Big Brother as event, its ambiguous claims to present social “reality,” and the connection of those claims with its other claim to offer “liveness” in a new web-enhanced form. These ambiguities can be traced not only in the discourse of the program but also in the discourses by producers and others that surrounded it, ambiguities that are ideological in the same way that “myth” was for Roland Barthes.

Does ‘the Media’ Have a Future?:

■ Media-related practices have so long been configured in a particular one-to-many pattern that the mass communication paradigm has seemed automatic as both frame for research and fact of social life. The paradigm is summed up in the English term ‘ the media’. But what if the very idea of ‘the media’ is also imploding, as the interfaces we call media are transformed? Does the implosion of ‘the media’ generate a crisis of appearances for government and other institutions? Three dynamics are considered here — technological, social and political — that are potentially undermining our idea of ‘the media’ as a privileged site for accessing a common world. The article concludes that, instead of collapsing, the social construction of ‘the media’ will become a site of intensified struggle for competing forces: market-based fragmentation vs continued pressures of centralization that draw on new media-related myths and rituals. ■

Rethinking the politics of voice: Commentary

The project of cultural studies has, for some time, lacked a focus. The once critical idea of paying attention to popular culture and its investments, now comfortably institutionalized, has lost its critical edge; and, in my view at least, conjunctural analysis is by itself too general a procedure to yield distinctive results. But a fuller engagement with the problems of democracy still retains the bite of cultural studies’ earlier interventions. This is the type of intervention that the Listening Project promises, bringing to mind both Raymond Williams’ original urgent challenges to formal democratic culture and, in its crossdisciplinary ambition, Williams’ protest that there was no specific discipline where he could pose the questions that mattered to those whose voices he encountered in the process of teaching (communicating about) culture (Williams 1961, 10). The Listening Project is an exciting and genuinely new intervention. As the essays in this special issue testify, it offers a searching and critical engagement with the languages and practices of democracy; it promises a great deal, analytically, elaboratively, methodologically, because it knows where it is heading. A virtue of the Listening Project is the explicitness and directness of its normative foundations. In these closing comments to this special issue, I want to reflect in a little more detail on what might be at stake here and to add my thoughts on how exactly the binary of listening and speaking might be refashioned. For as the editors of this special issue make clear, the point is not to value listening at the expense of speaking but to understand better the relationship between the two practices, their ‘interdependency [and] the dynamic relation between them’ (Bickford 1996, 145). This is surely right: as Gayatri Spivak put it two decades ago, ‘“Who should speak?” is less crucial than “who will listen?”’ (1990, 59), since only if there are listeners will people’s voices be registered. But why exactly is this, and if this is relatively obvious, why has it been so easy nonetheless to forget? Listening matters for reasons other than the pleasures of aural attentiveness; of course, we have the faculty of hearing and listening, and exercising it gives most people great pleasure. But listening in the sense discussed here is not dependent literally on hearing; it could just as easily be practised by people deprived of hearing, whether using sign language or reading the words of others. Listening here is, first and foremost, the act of recognizing what others have to say, recognizing that they have something to say or,

Liveness, “Reality,” and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone

Televisions liveness has long been seen as one of its key features. This paper argues that “liveness” is not a textual feature, but a more fundamental category (in Durkheims sense) that contributes to underlying conceptions of how media are involved in social organization through their provision of privileged access to central social “realities.” This ideological view of liveness (cf. Jane Feuers early work) is then extended in two ways: first, to consider two new forms of “liveness” that do not involve television (online liveness via the Internet and “group liveness” via the mobile phone); and second, by connecting liveness with Bourdieus concept of habitus, and thereby linking “liveness” (including in its extended senses) with other parts of the materialized system of classification through which we make sense of the everyday world.

Big Data from the bottom up

This short article argues that an adequate response to the implications for governance raised by ‘Big Data’ requires much more attention to agency and reflexivity than theories of ‘algorithmic power’ have so far allowed. It develops this through two contrasting examples: the sociological study of social actors used of analytics to meet their own social ends (for example, by community organisations) and the study of actors’ attempts to build an economy of information more open to civic intervention than the existing one (for example, in the environmental sphere). The article concludes with a consideration of the broader norms that might contextualise these empirical studies, and proposes that they can be understood in terms of the notion of voice, although the practical implementation of voice as a norm means that voice must sometimes be considered via the notion of transparency.

The Productive ‘Consumer’ and the Dispersed ‘Citizen’

This article argues for a more nuanced approach to the relationships between the figures of ‘consumer’ and ‘citizen’, normally assumed to exist in separate spaces. Against the idea that each acquires information and feelings of connection in isolation (the ‘plugged-in monad model’), the article argues for an open research agenda into how the spaces of public connection that frame both practices are sustained and the common issues of trust that affect them. This is linked to the author’s forthcoming research into media consumption and public connection. The conclusion reflects briefly on the policy implications of this research direction.