Medijsko hrepenenje: manjšinski radio med ohranjenjem in obnovo kulture

Članek nadaljuje tradicijo raziskovanja, ki je usmerjeno v vpliv gledanja televizije in uporabe drugih medijev na kulturne usmeritve in lojalnost migrantskih skupin. Ker so diaspore po definiciji vnovič zamišljene skupnosti,je njihovo preživetje odvisno od njihove sposobnosti, da zagotovijo prostor za konfliktne izjave o pripadnosti, in volje, da pomirijo razlike, prav mediji pa zagotavljajo tako vrsto multiplih pripovedi. Članek proučuje radio kot tisti del diasporičnih medijev, ki je za večino manjšin najdosegljivejši. Posebej obravnava javni radio MultiKulti, ki oddaja za Nemce in etnične manjšine v Berlinu, ter zasebni radio BeurFM, katerega program je namenjen samo severnim Afričanom v Parizu in okoliških mestih. Avtor vidi v radijskih programih priložnost ne samo za kulturno preživetje, ampak tudi za kulturno obnovo ter v nemškem primeru za promocijo sporazumevanja med različnimi priseljenskimi skupinami in večinskim nemškim prebivalstvom.The article promotes the growing body of research concerned with the impact of television watching and the uses of other media on the cultural orientation and loyalty of migrant groups. Since diasporas are by definition re-imagined communities, their survival depends on their ability to provide a space for conflicting claims of belonging and their willingness to reconcile those differences, and the media provide that kind of multiple narratives and discourses. The article examines radio as that part of diasporic media that for most minority groups in Europe is the most accessible. Specifically, it is focused on Radio MultiKulti, a public service station targeting Germans and all ethnic minorities in Berlin, and BeurFM, a private station targeting only North Africans in Paris and some other French cities. The author sees in their programming an opportunity not only for cultural survival, but also for cultural renewal and, in German case, for promoting understanding between different immigrant groups and the German majority population

Third Spaces, Religion and Spirituality in the Digital Age

How can we study religion and spirituality in the digital age without privileging the techno-fantastic or reifying deterministic binaries of old media-old religion versus new media-new religion? Framing our research around the novelty of technologies leads us to adopt a hierarchical indexing of what constitutes a real, authentic experience of community, belonging and belief, precisely because we draw distinct lines between the traditional and the modern, the physical and the digital, place and non-place, and the real and the proximal embodied experience. As Hermann Bausinger argues, folk culture and tradition are much alive in the world of modern technologies and “busily recruiting and adapting new technologies to old purposes.” If mediation is an inherent function of religion and if we agree that new media are not just technological innovations but continuous cultural and social spaces (Moores, 2012), what’s new in digital religion and how and where can we locate differences and disjunctures in the religious today without reducing newness to simply leaving tradition behind? This panel argues that our theories of religion and the media will benefit greatly from an analysis of how religious meaning is generated and performed at the borderlines of a complex ecosystem of media ensembles and hybrid spaces. Religion is not simply the subject of yet another round of media technologies. The articulation and contestation of what constitutes the religious increasingly take place in in-between spaces where we move beyond narratives of origin and hierarchical subjectivities. Our appropriation of the concept of Third Spaces serves as an interpretive tool to highlight what we call a ‘thickening’ of the religious experience beyond dichotomous definitions of both religion and media categories. In this sense, and rather than treating the digital as having a “self-enclosed cyberian apartness” (Miller and Slater, 2000), we privilege an understanding of religious and spiritual practices in the digital as part of everyday life and the outcome of potentially contested sites. The spatial metaphor of a third space also allows us to visualize the mobility of everyday religion and explore the dynamic ways in which contemporary subjects imagine, produce and navigate new religious and spiritual places. The digital in a third space configuration also becomes much more revealing because it makes legible the dynamics of translation and reflexivity as individuals, and at times institutions too, seek alternative modes of belonging and community building. So, instead of seeing the digital in the study of religion solely in terms of its technical properties and their impact on some pure belief or on the authenticity of the spiritual experience, we look at it as a complex text of social practice, a site of negotiated religious praxis, which resists totalizing and monologic frames of reference and produces its own spiritual repertoire, its own discursive logic, and its own aesthetics of persuasion. Digital third spaces of religion thus stand out by virtue of their in-betweenness. They exist between private and public, between institution and individual, between authority and individual autonomy, between large media framings and individual "pro-sumption," between local and translocal, etc. Our empirical case studies reflect on the creative outcomes of this condition of in-betweenness and the emergence of other places of religious and spiritual meaning, particularly as intervening sites of social practice, or even peripheral spaces of power negotiation and social action. These third spaces of digital religion, we contend, can be strategically peripheral as they imagine creative ways of thinking about faith and spirituality while resisting entrenched frames of social power and nested structures of religious authority. Highlighting the contestatory potential of these sites, however, is not meant to endorse a rampant view of digital utopianism or obscure the fact that digital cultures still operate within a logic of neoliberalism. Rather, we believe that a critical analysis of these spaces can elicit an important contemporary dynamic of religious practice and change and assess the work of social actors who act meaningfully in and through these spaces as viable sites of cultural intervention and imagination of alternative possibilities. This panel will present findings from a two-year research project entitled, ‘Finding Religion in the Media”, in which a group of researchers surveyed and analyzed media spaces where the terms and practices of religion, spirituality, the ‘not-so-religious’ and the not-so-spiritual,’ and things that bear a resemblance to religion, are present. Drawing on the philosophy of technology, religious studies, media studies, and postcolonialism, this panel examines alternative ways in which we can think about the intimate nexus between the religious and the mediated in the age of the digital

Navigating Media Ambivalence: Strategies of Resistance, Avoidance, and Engagement with Media Technology in Everyday Life

As media technologies continue to infiltrate the domestic sphere with interactive opportunities, an increased interest in time and content management has surfaced. Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter have been commonly associated with “wasted time” and the accessibility of unchecked content has placed a strain on the preservation of family ethics and values. On the other hand, media technologies continue to offer spaces of both meaningful and necessary communication, as well as enjoyment, education, creativity, and political action. Based on this cultural conundrum, important questions about social practice and media resistance follow: Under what logics are individuals and families using deciding to resist media technologies? What are the everyday practices of media ambivalence and resistance and how do they operate in the domestic sphere? In most research and popular discussion of media texts and platforms, the focus is understandably on current or potential users of media. This panel aims to provide space for discussing an important, though perhaps under-attended to, phenomenon within media consumption: the active non-use or negotiation of media by subjects who hold ambivalent attitudes toward communication technologies. Using empirical evidence and discourse analysis, each of the papers on this panel draws attention to the strategies employed by people who want to actively manage their own media use, as well as that of their families. The papers collected here consider a variety of communication technologies (email, television, smart phones, and social network sites) and focus on a range of factors (including gender, religion, and national context) that shape the attitudes taken and the tactics deployed in regulating media use. The first paper in this panel explores and analyzes technological and discursive “tactics” (i.e., “screen time”) that users employ to negotiate and limit media use for themselves and their families. Drawing upon qualitative interviews conducted in households in Israel, the authors try to make sense of these different practices through comparisons with research conducted about parents and children. The second paper looks at the role of gender, as a social practice, in the regulation of domestic media consumption—including the gender identification of the primary policing parent and resistance toward gendered symbols in media culture—in order to identify how gender norms are perpetuated through practices of media regulation. The third paper in this panel explores how Muslims in the United States devise evasive tactics that both engage and resist the proliferation of media technologies in the household. In particular, the author argues that given their media deficit in American society, Muslims often feel they cannot afford to resist media technologies, particularly smart phones and social media because of their connective qualities and their interventionist affordances. Finally, the last paper examines the practice of refusal of social media platforms, for example, the active resistance by potential users to participation on sites like Facebook. The author argues that this works against the potential for media refusal to function as effective strategy of collective action. Practices of social media refusal and the discourses around it serve as sites of symbolic and material struggle within the contemporary commercial media context. As a panel, the papers converse with each other to examine the ways that individuals and families confront their usage of new technologies in a media saturated age. In particular, the nuances of media resistance are analyzed at the discursive and textual level in order to understand the productive ways in which media technology is managed. In an age where individuals and families increasingly use technology to restrict their technology use, scholarship on media ambivalence becomes essential to understanding the contemporary media landscape

Third Spaces, Religion and Spirituality in the Digital Age Panel 2

How can we study religion and spirituality in the digital age without privileging the techno-fantastic or reifying deterministic binaries of old media-old religion versus new media-new religion? Framing our research around the novelty of technologies leads us to adopt a hierarchical indexing of what constitutes a real, authentic experience of community, belonging and belief, precisely because we draw distinct lines between the traditional and the modern, the physical and the digital, place and non-place, and the real and the proximal embodied experience. As Hermann Bausinger argues, folk culture and tradition are much alive in the world of modern technologies and “busily recruiting and adapting new technologies to old purposes.” If mediation is an inherent function of religion and if we agree that new media are not just technological innovations but continuous cultural and social spaces (Moores, 2012), what’s new in digital religion and how and where can we locate differences and disjunctures in the religious today without reducing newness to simply leaving tradition behind? This panel argues that our theories of religion and the media will benefit greatly from an analysis of how religious meaning is generated and performed at the borderlines of a complex ecosystem of media ensembles and hybrid spaces. Religion is not simply the subject of yet another round of media technologies. The articulation and contestation of what constitutes the religious increasingly take place in in-between spaces where we move beyond narratives of origin and hierarchical subjectivities. Our appropriation of the concept of Third Spaces serves as an interpretive tool to highlight what we call a ‘thickening’ of the religious experience beyond dichotomous definitions of both religion and media categories. In this sense, and rather than treating the digital as having a “self-enclosed cyberian apartness” (Miller and Slater, 2000), we privilege an understanding of religious and spiritual practices in the digital as part of everyday life and the outcome of potentially contested sites. The spatial metaphor of a third space also allows us to visualize the mobility of everyday religion and explore the dynamic ways in which contemporary subjects imagine, produce and navigate new religious and spiritual places. The digital in a third space configuration also becomes much more revealing because it makes legible the dynamics of translation and reflexivity as individuals, and at times institutions too, seek alternative modes of belonging and community building. So, instead of seeing the digital in the study of religion solely in terms of its technical properties and their impact on some pure belief or on the authenticity of the spiritual experience, we look at it as a complex text of social practice, a site of negotiated religious praxis, which resists totalizing and monologic frames of reference and produces its own spiritual repertoire, its own discursive logic, and its own aesthetics of persuasion. Digital third spaces of religion thus stand out by virtue of their in-betweenness. They exist between private and public, between institution and individual, between authority and individual autonomy, between large media framings and individual "pro-sumption," between local and translocal, etc. Our empirical case studies reflect on the creative outcomes of this condition of in-betweenness and the emergence of other places of religious and spiritual meaning, particularly as intervening sites of social practice, or even peripheral spaces of power negotiation and social action. These third spaces of digital religion, we contend, can be strategically peripheral as they imagine creative ways of thinking about faith and spirituality while resisting entrenched frames of social power and nested structures of religious authority. Highlighting the contestatory potential of these sites, however, is not meant to endorse a rampant view of digital utopianism or obscure the fact that digital cultures still operate within a logic of neoliberalism. Rather, we believe that a critical analysis of these spaces can elicit an important contemporary dynamic of religious practice and change and assess the work of social actors who act meaningfully in and through these spaces as viable sites of cultural intervention and imagination of alternative possibilities. This panel will present findings from a two-year research project entitled, ‘Finding Religion in the Media”, in which a group of researchers surveyed and analyzed media spaces where the terms and practices of religion, spirituality, the ‘not-so-religious’ and the not-so-spiritual,’ and things that bear a resemblance to religion, are present. Drawing on the philosophy of technology, religious studies, media studies, and postcolonialism, this panel examines alternative ways in which we can think about the intimate nexus between the religious and the mediated in the age of the digital