Citizen Media and Practice

Currents, Connections, Challenges

Hilde Stephansen, Emiliano Treré, Hilde C. Stephansen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138571822
• eBook ISBN: 9781351247351
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

This groundbreaking collection advances understanding of the concept of media practices by critically interrogating its relevance for the study of citizen and activist media.

Media as practice has emerged as a powerful approach to understanding the media's significance in contemporary society. Bringing together contributions from leading scholars in sociology, media and communication, social movement and critical data studies, this book stimulates dialogue across previously separate traditions of research on citizen and activist media practices and stakes out future directions for research in this burgeoning interdisciplinary field. Framed by a foreword by Nick Couldry and a substantial introductory chapter by the editors, contributions to the volume trace the roots and appropriations of the concept of media practice in Latin American communication theory; reflect on the relationship between activist agency and technological affordances; explore the relevance of the media practice approach for the study of media activism, including activism that takes media as its central object of struggle; and demonstrate the significance of the media practice approach for understanding processes of mediatization and datafication.

Offering both a comprehensive introduction to scholarship on citizen media and practice and a cutting-edge exploration of a novel theoretical framework, the book is ideal for students and experienced scholars alike.

1

PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH?

Currents, connections, and challenges in theorizing citizen media and practice

Hilde C. Stephansen and Emiliano Treré

Introduction¹

Prompted by the rise of digital communications technologies, the past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in citizen and activist media within a variety of fields, including social movement research, journalism studies, political communication, performance studies, and translation studies. Much commentary on citizen media has focused on how digital technologies enable non-institutionalized actors to disseminate media content that challenges dominant discourses or makes visible hidden realities, but there is also a growing interest in the social, material, and embodied aspects of citizen media. The concept of ‘media practices’ – and, more broadly, an understanding of media as practice (Couldry, 2004, 2012) – has become increasingly popular as a means of developing socially grounded analyses of citizen and activist media. Especially among scholars of social movements and media, among whom we count ourselves, ‘media practices’ has provided a productive conceptual hook for challenging the media centrism (i.e. the tendency to take media technologies and media content, rather than broader social practices and relationships, as a starting point for enquiry) of recent literature on digital media and protest.

In turning to ‘practice’ as a conceptual framework for studying the social movements–media nexus, scholars in this field have taken a cue from a growing interest in practice within media and communication studies more generally, which in turn has been inspired by the recent resurgence of practice approaches in social theory (e.g. Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, & von Savigny, 2001; Reckwitz, 2002; Shove, Pantzar, & Watson, 2012; Hui, Schatzki, & Shove, 2016; Spaargaren, Weenink, & Lamers, 2016). As we will show in this chapter, much work has already been done to refine our conceptualizations of media practices. This book seeks to continue such efforts to define, problematize, and theorize media practices – with a specific focus on citizen and activist media. A key aim is to stimulate dialogue among scholars working in different fields and bridge previously separate traditions of theory and research. In doing so, we acknowledge the antecedents of the current turn to practice in areas such as audience studies, media anthropology, and alternative media, but we also want to give due recognition to a different trajectory. While much of the recent work on social movements and media has taken Couldry’s (2004) call for a new practice paradigm as a starting point – and can be situated within a largely anglophone European and North American tradition of media and communications research and social theory – the notion of media practices also has a rich history within Latin American communication theory, as the contributors to the first section in this volume (Rodríguez, Rincón & Marroquín, Barranquero, Barbas) clearly illustrate. Although the interest in practices among Latin American communication scholars pre-dates the current ‘turn’ to practice in European and North American media scholarship by at least a couple of decades, there has been little take-up of their ideas among English-speaking academics. One important aim of this book is therefore to begin to rectify this lack of dialogue by introducing anglophone scholars to the Latin American tradition.

At the same time, we also want to help deepen engagement with practice theory as developed in the anglophone tradition. While looking ‘back’ at the Latin American roots of the media practice concept, the book also contributes to very current debates by exploring the utility of the media practice approach for getting to grips with urgent questions about agency, power, and social change in the context of processes of datafication and mediatization. Contributions to the book employ the practice approach to examine the complex relationship between activists’ media practices and technological affordances (della Porta Cammaerts, Kaun); explore its relevance for understanding video activism as an increasingly important mode of contemporary media activism (Kidd, Askanius, Mattoni & Pavan); and consider the implications of expanding the media practice concept to include practices that involve ‘acting on media’ (Hepp, Kannengießer, Stephansen). Contributions to the final section of the book – on ‘citizen data practices’ (Kennedy, Milan, Fotopoulou, Dencik) – make a strong case for studying people’s engagement with data and processes of datafication from a practice perspective.

This chapter has four parts. First, we provide an overview of different currents in research on media practices, identifying the antecedents of the media practice approach in different theoretical traditions and highlighting possible points of convergence between them. Second, we take stock of the current ‘state of the art’ of practice-focused research on citizen and activist media by providing an overview of how the concept of media practices has been used in recent literature and identifying key strengths and shortcomings. Third, we delineate future directions for research on citizen media and practice and reflect on some of the challenges facing this growing interdisciplinary field. Finally, we provide an outline of the contributions of the book.

Converging research paths around ‘practice’?

The turn towards practice within media and communications scholarship is often attributed to Nick Couldry’s (2004) article ‘Theorising media as practice’. Couldry’s intervention was significant in that it engaged explicitly with sociological theories of practice, and proposed an understanding of media as practice as a new paradigm in media research. The aim of this paradigm shift, for Couldry, was ‘to decentre media research from the study of media texts or production structures (important though these are) and to redirect it onto the study of the open-ended range of practices focused directly or indirectly on media’ (2004, p. 117). Couldry defined media practices as the ‘open set of practices relating to, or oriented around, media’ (2004, p. 117), later further distinguishing between ‘acts aimed specifically at media, acts performed through media, and acts whose preconditions are media’ (2012, p. 57). Theorizing media as practice thus involves asking what people are ‘doing in relation to media across a whole range of situations and contexts’ (Couldry, 2012, p. 37).

In developing this framework, Couldry took inspiration from the growing prominence of theories of practice within the social sciences. Conceived as an attempt to transcend the ‘dualisms of structure and agency, determinism and voluntarism’ (Shove et al., 2012, p. 3), practice theory challenges prevalent ways of thinking about subjectivity and sociality by ‘shifting the research focus away from studying individuals, their motivations and background features primarily, towards a more in-depth investigation of “context” or the activities, the social practices, they engage in’ (Spaargaren et al., 2016, p. 4). With long roots in social theory stretching back as far as Wittgenstein and Heidegger, practice theory comprises a variety of approaches. Bourdieu’s (1977, 1990) theory of habitus and Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration – which in different ways sought to reconcile the structure/agency dualism in social theory – are commonly thought of as ‘first-generation’ practice theories. The turn of the 21st century then saw the emergence of a ‘second generation’ of practice theorists, who have sought to systematize and extend practice theory by refining definitions of practice and elaborating on the relationship between practices, social order, and social change (Schatzki, 1996; Schatzki et al., 2001; Reckwitz, 2002; Shove et al., 2007, 2012; Hui et al., 2016; Spaargaren et al., 2016; Jonas, Littig and Wroblewski, 2017).

While there is no single, universally agreed-upon definition of ‘practices’, most practice theorists agree that they comprise some combination of embodied activities, shared understanding, and material or cultural objects. Schatzki, in an attempt to synthesize common understandings, defines practices as ‘embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around shared practical understanding’ (2001, p. 11). In a slightly more elaborate definition, Reckwitz describes a practice as

a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge

(Reckwitz, 2002, p. 249)

Along similar lines, Shove et al. (2012, p. 12) develop an understanding of practices as consisting of three main elements: materials (objects, technologies, tangible physical entities), competences (skill, know-how, technique), and meanings (symbolic meanings, ideas, aspirations). A practice, thus, can be thought of as ‘a “block” whose existence necessarily depends on the existence and specific interconnectedness of these elements’ (Reckwitz, 2002, pp. 249–250). These blocks, in turn, ‘link to form wider complexes and constellations – a nexus’ (Hui et al., 2016, p. 1) and this nexus, for practice theorists, is what makes up the social.

Placing materiality, embodiment, knowledgeability, and process at the centre of social analysis, practice theory thus offers a holistic framework for understanding the media’s social significance. By taking practices as a starting point for enquiry, it enables open questions to be asked about what people are doing in relation to media and how these media-related practices combine and intersect with other social practices – thus facilitating an analysis of the broader social processes of which media practices form part (Couldry, 2004, 2012).

While Couldry’s proposal, and most subsequent anglophone research on media practices, looked mainly to practice theory for inspiration, a shift towards practice had already taken place decades earlier in Latin American media and communication studies, and has since then profoundly defined the scholarly DNA of the discipline – as the contributors to the section on Latin American communication theory in this book make abundantly clear. The reasons why it was not properly acknowledged in the Global North until very recently can be attributed – as Clemencia Rodríguez points out in her passionate introduction to Part One – to the disregard for academic production in Spanish by scholars of the Global North, and also to the different conceptual labels that have been used. Indeed, media practice is not a term used by Latin American scholars, who favour instead a plurality of terms that connect to the concept of lo popular, which means ‘of the people’, or link it to the notion of ‘mediation’ developed by Martín-Barbero in the mid-1980s to counteract functionalist and media-centric approaches from North America. The shift towards the exploration and understanding of the practices of people in Latin America, and the interest in what media users do with the media in a variety of social contexts, had an inherently political nature. In one of the most unequal regions in the world, scholars such as Paulo Freire and his comunicación popular pointed to the centrality of communication, dialogue, and interaction to give voice to the oppressed, the marginalized, and the exploited in their own terms.

In anglophone media research, meanwhile, the more recent ‘turn’ to practice has antecedents in diverse traditions. Because of its ability to account for the broad range of practices that involve media, the practice framework has been understood to offer a solution to a perceived crisis in the study of audiences (Couldry, 2012, citing Ang, 1996). A concern with practices arguably has a long history within the tradition of audience research: the question of what people do with media formed the starting point for the Uses and Gratifications approach that emerged in the, 1940s (Couldry, 2012), and qualitative research on ‘active audiences’ became prominent following the cultural turn in the social sciences of the 1980s and 1990s. However, these frameworks remained focused on people’s interactions with specific media technologies or texts (Cammaerts & Couldry, 2016) – an approach which became increasingly untenable given the growing ubiquity and embeddedness of media in everyday life. Around the turn of the 21st century, scholarship on media audiences thus moved away from a focus on direct engagement with texts toward ‘a consideration of multiple articulations with media in everyday life’ (Bird, 2010, p. 85; see also Bird, 2003). Practice theory offers a propitious framework for studying these multiple articulations. In a media-saturated world, where media practices cannot be reduced to ‘individual usage of bounded objects called media’ (Cammaerts & Couldry, 2016, p. 327), the openness of the practice approach seems better suited to capturing the diversity of everyday practices involving media (Couldry, 2012).

For similar reasons, practice theory has also been taken up within media anthropology – a field which has always taken people and their social relations (rather than texts or technology) as a starting point for analysing media as a social form (Ginsburg, 1994, p. 13). The notion of media practices has been widely used by media anthropologists as a shorthand for people’s various everyday articulations with media; however, it tended until recently to be used in a mostly descriptive and unreflexive manner (Postill, 2010, 2017b). Sparked by Couldry’s (2004) intervention, the edited collection Theorising Media and Practice (Bräuchler & Postill, 2010) sought to remedy this by bringing media anthropology into explicit conversation with practice theory. Exploring the value of practice theory for understanding diverse ways of engaging with media, contributors to this volume explored a wide range of practices, from uses of information and communication technologies by Norwegian (Helle-Valle, 2010) and Danish (Christensen & Røpke, 2010) families to practices of newspaper readers (Peterson, 2010) and news journalists (Rao, 2010) in India, amateur audiovisual production (Ardévol et al., 2010), and free software activism (Kelty, 2010). The practice framework has also been employed by digital ethnographers as a methodological framework for studying interrelated digital practices across multiple sites and platforms (Gómez Cruz & Ardévol, 2013a, 2013b; Ardévol & Gómez Cruz, 2014). Here, practice theory has been characterized as providing ‘a bridge between theoretical conceptualization and empirical data, allowing us to extend our ethnographic account of mediation processes by including in our analysis a wider scope of relationships between uses, meanings, routines and technologies’ (Gómez Cruz & Ardévol, 2013a, p. 33).

Most recently, the practice approach to media research has been taken up both enthusiastically and extensively in research on social movements and media activism, as a means of developing socially grounded analyses of activists’ media practices. Much of this work has come as a response to a perceived ‘media centrism’ – i.e. a tendency to take media platforms, rather than broader social practices and relationships, as a starting point for enquiry – in recent literature on digital media and protest. Hence, the media practice approach has been seen to offer a means to develop non-media-centric analyses of activist and citizen media practices, and at the same time as a way to overcome communicative reductionism – i.e. ‘the belief that media technologies’ role within social movement dynamics is either not relevant or merely instrumental’ (Treré, 2019, p. 1) – that plagues accounts on the relationships between media and protest movements to different extents. More specifically, it has been adopted to challenge technological determinism and instrumental visions of media as neutral communication channels (Barassi, 2015; Lim, 2018; Treré, 2019), and the one-medium fallacy, i.e. ‘the tendency to focus on the use of single technologies without disentangling the whole media spectrum with which activists interact’ (Treré, 2019, p. 9 – on the problematic implications of this fallacy see also Treré, 2012; Mattoni & Treré, 2014) in order to develop more nuanced analyses of the intersections between protest and media (see, for example, Barassi, 2015; Kaun, 2016; Kubitschko, 2015; Martínez Martínez, 2017; McCurdy, 2011). The endorsement of the practice approach in this subfield should also be understood as a reaction against the digital positivism (Fuchs, 2017) that largely defines many studies adopting big data/computational techniques to analyse collective action dynamics (Gerbaudo & Treré, 2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Foreword by Nick Couldry
• 1. Practice what you preach? Currents, connections, and challenges in theorizing citizen media and practice
• PART I: Latin American communication theory
• PART II: Activist agency and technological affordances
• PART III: Practice approaches to video activism
• PART IV: Acting on media
• PART V: Citizen data practices
• Index