My master's thesis work in progress on the sociology of online publics will be presented at no less than three conferences this year. First comes the DASTS 2012 conference later this month, which is also a rehearsal for the huge 4S/EASST conference in Copenhagen in October. The third conference that I am going to present at is the 26th Conference of the Nordic Sociological Association in Reykjavik, Iceland, this August - for which I received a student scholarship to cover some of the costs (thanks!).
Here follows the short version:
Here follows the short version:
Public-formatting technologies and their
displacement
Recent research
within STS (e.g. Marres, Latour) has followed Dewey’s argument that the
contemporary public is not a stable sphere, but rather ”scattered, mobile,
manifold” (Dewey 1927, p. 146). This paper aims to contribute to the research
agenda of how publics organize under plural, socio-technical conditions. Based
on a case study of a snowstorm on the Danish island of Bornholm that kept
hundreds of islanders snowbound for a week, the study traces how media
technologies were used to bring together the symbolic and material resources
needed to translate the snowstorm from a private nuisance to a public issue. For
about a fortnight, public service media as well as so-called social media overflowed
with efforts to represent the snowstorm and its consequences. The paper argues
that the different socio-technical materialities of these media technologies
resulted in diverging ways of perceiving and public-izing the consequences of
the snowstorm, and thus formatted the public in different ways. The analysis
suggests that public service media, although designed as a home for ’the
public’, were less successful in producing sufficiently common understandings
of the situation. In their place, Facebook groups emerged as a stabilizing
technology for unruly publics, despite – or rather because of – the platform’s
original design intentions, which allowed for ongoing negotiation as to what could
be deemed private obstacles and public issues. As such, the case is an
exemplary displacement of design intentions that contributes to our
understanding of how media technologies format the contemporary public.
Sejt, Andreas
ReplyDelete