Media, representation, imagination: Time to move beyond the ‘Holy Trinity’

The ways in which media frame existing and possible social worlds, and thereby contribute to moral debates, has been the subject of renewed interest in the social sciences over the past decade. Often tied to the increasingly global circulation of texts, images and ideas, much of the focus has been on the ability of media to represent the ‘other’ in ways that generate understanding and empathy, rather than fear and distrust. The two books under discussion, Tim Dant’s ‘Television and the Moral Imaginary’ and Shani Orgad’s ‘Media, Representation & the Global Imagination’ come at the broader topic from very different angles, but are also more or less interested in how media shape understandings of self and other in an increasingly complex social environment. In reviewing these titles, I also want to make some wider points about how the link between media and imagination has been conceptualised and grounded and to contrast some of these efforts with recent work that has called for a move beyond representational theories and, indeed, media-centric theories of media (Couldry, 2012, Moores, 2012, Pink & Mackley, 2013)

Understanding the social in a digital age

Datafication, algorithms, social media and their various assemblages enable massive connective processes, enriching personal interaction and amplifying the scope and scale of public networks. At the same time, surveillance capitalists and the social quantification sector are committed to monetizing every aspect of human communication, all of which threaten ideal social qualities, such as togetherness and connection. This Special Issue brings together a range of voices and provocations around ‘the social’, all of which aim to critically interrogate mediated human connection and their contingent socialities. Conventional methods may no longer be adequate, and we must rethink not only the fabric of the social but the very tools we use to make sense of our changing social formations. This Special Issue raises shared concerns with what the social means today, unpicking and rethinking the seams between digitization and social life that characterize today’s digital age

Media, Capabilities, and Justification

In this paper, I evaluate the ‘capability approach’ developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum as a normative perspective for critical media research. The concept of capabilities provides a valuable way of assessing media and captures important aspects of the relationship between media and equality. However, following Rainer Forst’s critique of outcome- oriented approaches to justice, I argue the capability approach needs to pay more attention to questions of power and process. In particular, when it comes to deciding which capabilities media should promote and what media structure and practices should promote them, the capability approach must accept the priority of deliberative and democratic processes of justification. Once we do this, we are urged to situate the concept of capabilities within a more process-oriented view of justice, focused not on capabilities as such, but on outlining the conditions required for justificatory equality. After discussing the capability approach, I will outline the process-oriented theory of justice Forst has developed around the idea of the ‘right to justification’. While Forst does not discuss media in depth, I argue his theory of justice can provide a valuable alternative normative standpoint for the critical media research

Celebrity culture and public connection: bridge or chasm?

Media and cultural research has an important contribution to make to recent debates about declines in democratic engagement: is for example celebrity culture a route into democratic engagement for those otherwise disengaged? This article contributes to this debate by reviewing qualitative and quantitative findings from a UK project on 'public connection'. Using self-produced diaries (with in-depth multiple interviews) as well as a nationwide survey, the authors argue that while celebrity culture is an important point of social connection sustained by media use, it is not linked in citizens' own accounts to issues of public concern. Survey data suggest that those who particularly follow celebrity culture are the least engaged in politics and least likely to use their social networks to involve themselves in action or discussion about public-type issues. This does not mean 'celebrity culture' is 'bad', but it challenges suggestions of how popular culture might contribute to effective democracy

Tracking the reflexivity of the (dis)engaged citizen: some methodological reflections

The relationship between governments and citizens in many contemporary democracies is haunted by uncertainty and sociologists face the task of listening effectively to citizens’ own reflections on this uncertain relationship. This article reflects on the qualitative methodology of a recently completed UK project which used a combination of diary and multiple interviews/ focus groups to track over a fieldwork period of up to a year citizens’ reflections on their relationship to a public world and the contribution to this of their media consumption. In particular, the article considers how the project’s multiple methods enabled multiple angles on the inevitable artificiality and performative dimension of the diary process, resulting in rich data on people’s complex reflections on the uncertain position of the contemporary citizen

At close quarters: combatting Facebook design, features and temporalities in social research

As researchers we often find ourselves grappling with social media platforms and data ‘at close quarters’. Although social media platforms were created for purposes other than academic research – which are apparent in their architecture and temporalities – they offer opportunities for researchers to repurpose them for the collection, generation and analysis of rich datasets. At the same time, this repurposing raises an evolving range of practical and methodological challenges at the small and large scale. We draw on our experiences and empirical data from two research projects, one using Facebook Community Pages and the other repurposing Facebook Activity Logs. This article reflects critically on the specific challenges we faced using these platform features, on their common roots, and the tactics we adopted in response. De Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactics provides a useful framework for exploring these struggles as located in the practice of doing social research – which often ends up being tactical. This article argues that we have to collectively discuss, demystify and devise tactics to mitigate the strategies and temporalities deeply embedded in platforms, corresponding as far as possible to the temporalities and the aims of our research. Although combat at close quarters is inevitable in social media research, dialogue between researchers is more than ever needed to tip the scales in our favour

Coming out with the media: the ritualization of self-disclosure in the Dutch television program Uit de Kast

Using the media to disclose one’s sexual identity has become an increasingly salient practice in recent years. Yet little is known about the reasons for the emergence of this form of self-disclosure. Based on an analysis of the Dutch television programme Uit de Kast (‘Out of the Closet’), this article relates the rise of mediated coming out practices to the ritualizing power of the media: we argue that media plays a quintessential role in transforming the socially unscripted act of coming out into a patterned, culturally meaningful performance. Our analysis reveals that the ritual work of the programme is embedded in the ways 1) the generic format of the show structures the self-disclosures, 2) the authority of the media is deployed to channel the coming out process, and 3) the programme, while controlling diversity, reinforces dominant societal values and ideologies. The case not only highlights how unprecedented ritual forms come to flourish in the current era of ‘participatory’ media culture, but also demonstrates how ritualization supports and naturalizes the claim that media is an effective agent to create order in everyday, ordinary lives