Niklas Woermann

On the Slope Is on the Screen Prosumption, Social Media Practices, and Scopic Systems in the Freeskiing Subculture

Internet-based social media have emerged as an important site for creative consumption, or prosumption, and a number of studies have examined how consumers interact in and shape this virtual space. However, less is known about how social media transform consumers’ bodily practices beyond the realm of the Internet itself. Thus we might ask, If consumers embrace participatory web cultures, how does the web participate in (offline) consumer cultures? This article analyzes the significance of social media for a range of bodily subcultural practices. Using ethnographic data from freeskiing, a lifestyle sport similar to snowboarding, it details how social media converts “offline” forms of prosumption into mediatized and globally embedded practices. It argues that important subcultural practices, such as self-observation, learning, and developing a sense of style, all depend on habitual practices of seeing and that these offline practices change as the production and consumption of visual social media becomes more widespread. The article suggests that social media institute the global coordination of individual aesthetic practices that include hedonism, reflection, and knowledge. It concludes that social media can be conceptualized as scopic systems: decentralized, nonhierarchical mechanisms that select, distribute, and contextualize visual content and foster global microstructures among dispersed audiences. In developing this argument, the article specifies the impact of social media on prosumption on the basis of insights from science and technology studies.

Timeflow: How Consumption Practices Shape Consumers' Temporal Experiences

While the importance of the temporal dimension for both positive and negative consumption experiences has been well understood, no general theory exists to explain how consumers’ temporal experiences come about. We theorize temporal experiences as an effect of performing consumption practices in order to move from assessing isolated contextual variables to a more holistic understanding. The timeflow of a practice is defined as its ability to evoke an experienced temporality that cannot be reduced to either subjective “inner” time or cosmic “outer” time. On the basis of a longitudinal ethnography of temporality in two lifestyle sports—freeskiing and paintball—we find that five practice elements shape temporal experience: material set-up, bodily routines and skills, teleoaffective structures, rules, and cultural understandings. Misalignments of practice elements induce experiences of temporal drag or rush associated with experiences such as boredom and stress. We contribute to prior research on consumption experiences, waiting, and servicescapes.

Back to the roots!: Methodological situationalism and the postmodern lesson for studying tribes, practices, and assemblages

This article argues that one can revive the critical edge that postmodernist theory has brought to marketing, thinking without subscribing to any particular school of (critical) theory by following the principle of methodological situationalism. The roots of postmodernist critique lie in careful empirical observation of how social reality is being constructed in local contexts. Because knowledge, subjects, power, and value are social accomplishments, they are neither fixed nor without alternative. Many key developments in marketing theory such as assemblage theory, practice and consumer tribes formulate alternative accounts of how precisely constructing social facts occur. When further advancing these and other critical approaches, it must always be taken into account that society and culture manifest in concrete, local situations. Data sets or theories that do not take the local production of social order into account, hence fail to provide sensible insight. I propose the principle of methodological situationalism as a litmus test to the analytical strength of a theory or piece of research. The principle states that theoretically adequate accounts of social phenomena must be grounded in empirical observations of manifest meaning or social order in concrete situations. This does not mean that macro-processes or structures should be ignored, but that their roots and effects in local lived life have to be scrutinized. Critical theorizing does not need to resort to utopian or ideological arguments about the grand scheme of things. Careful empirical work zooming in on social life in concrete situations will provide plenty of novel insight and critical edge.

Dimensionen und Dynamiken synthetischer Gesellschaften

Eine der Konsequenzen des Mediatisierungsprozesses ist die Veranderung der Ordnung sozialer Situationen auf der Mikroebene. In unserem Beitrag untersuchen wir, wie die Verwendung sogenannter skopischer Medien die mikrosoziologische, situative Interaktionsordnung im ethnografischen Detail transformiert. Anhand zweier Fallbeispiele hochmediatisierter Interaktionssituationen, eSport und staatliches Schuldenmanagement, zeigen wir, wie zwei Dimensionen der mikrosoziologischen Begriffsarchitektur fur mediatisierte Gesellschaften entsprechend angepasst und erweitert werden mussen. Die erste Dimension betrifft den Zeitbezug in der Handlungskoordination und die Einfuhrung eigenlogischer situationaler Zeitzonen, die zweite Dimension behandelt die Delegation institutioneller Funktionen an skopische Medien. Abschliesend stellt der Beitrag eine Skizze synthetischer Gesellschaften vor: Gesamtgesellschaftliche, globale Strukturen beziehen sich auf mikrosoziologische Einheiten, wenn andere Mechanismen der Handlungskoordination, wie beispielsweise Organisationen, auf globaler Ebene uberfordert sind. Der Begriff der Globalen Mikrostrukturen konzipiert dabei die Ausbreitung von Koordinationsformen, die sich global aufspannen und gleichzeitig mikrosoziologischer Natur sind. Synthetische Situationen werden durch die Nutzung skopischer Medien und aufbauend auf Prozessen der Mediatisierung global aufgespannt und bieten Formen der Handlungskoordination global an.

Focusing ethnography: theory and recommendations for effectively combining video and ethnographic research

ABSTRACT Building theory with ethnography and filmic research increasingly requires focussing on key practices or settings, instead of painting a broad panorama of a culture. But few authors discuss why and how to focus. This article provides a systematic discussion of the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of focusing ethnographic research by comparing different schools of thought and suggesting a practice theory-based approach. It argues that many research projects are focused but do not reflect on the process of focusing, describes how to identify focal settings or practices, and introduces sequential analysis as a tool for studying them. Analysing videos, documents and language are discussed in turn, and methods for ensuring quality in focused ethnography are suggested. Finally, the article provides recommendations for publishing focused ethnography as text or film.

“It’s really strange when nobody is watching”: Enactive intercorporeality and the Spielraum of practices in freeskiing

The artful practices of freestyle skiing present a paradox: despite the fact that freeskiing is a solo sport requiring no team interaction, freeskiers routinely refuse to practice their tricks if no other freeskiers are around to watch them. My contribution sets out to explain this riddle by showing how local congregations of skiers interactively assemble what I call a Spielraum – sites of watching and being watched within which mutual attunement and a shared teleoaffective tension enable athletes to perform dangerous and difficult tricks they would not dare or care to try on their own. Using video analysis and ethnographic data from four years of fieldwork in the German-speaking freeskiing scene, I demonstrate how spatial positioning, bodily posture, lines of sight and practices of seeing are artfully combined to unfold sites of athletic performance on inhabitable mountains. I show that the three ingredients of intercorporeality suggested by Meyer and v. Wedelstaedt are key preconditions for learning and performing freestyle skiing: mutual attention, a shared rhythm, and bodily tuning into others’ performance. Drawing on Heidegger as well as recent practice-based theories of space, I conceptualize the Spielraum of practices as the site within which enactive intercorporeality becomes possible – and which is in turn itself a product of enactive engagement.

Die unmögliche De-Visualisierung von Wissen: Über einige Sehpraktiken einer extremen Gemeinschaft

Wovon genau spricht man, wenn von Wissen in visueller Form die Rede ist? In letzter Zeit wurden innerhalb der Wissenssoziologie verstarkt Studien zu Phanomenen des Sehens, Zeigens, und Verbildlichens vorgelegt, die einerseits die grundsatzliche Bedeutung des Visuellen als Dimension der sozialen Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit betonen (z. B. Raab, 2008) und andererseits die aktuell wachsende Bedeutung visueller Darstellungen und performativer