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1 Hybrid media culture
An introduction
Simon Lindgren, Michael Dahlberg-Grundberg and Anna Johansson
The distinction between the digital and its non-digital counterpart is becoming more and more difficult to sustain. This is a consequence of developments wherein digital tools and platforms for communication are progressively becoming commonplace, while at the same time the cultural conceptions that surround the technologies â for example, immediacy, constant accessibility, and availability â are becoming increasingly mainstream. The online and offline dimensions, which were formerly thought of as mutually exclusive or at least conflicting, are becoming intertwined. This is both in reality and as idea. Because of this, new theoretical and methodological issues need to be addressed.
As computer-mediated communication evolves and as interaction becomes more and more dependent on the Internet, we start to see how social, cultural, as well as political aspects of life get caught and entangled in the web of contemporary digital communication technologies. Furthermore, as the digitalization of society seems to continue with uninterrupted swiftness, âvirtualityâ starts to appear as an inescapable dimension of sociality. By penetrating the fabric of social reality, the digital is thus becoming an everyday feature of human, as well as non-human, interaction, more or less encompassing all information exchange.
With this book, we provide an interdisciplinary exploration of how the online and the offline interact in present-day culture. As the media landscape has changed during the past decades, it has been claimed that perceptions and uses of material space, physical bodies, and geographical localities have been fundamentally transformed. In digital culture, media forms that were previously separate have been combined and are increasingly converging. In the aftermath of all-encompassing perspectives on âpostmodernizationâ and âglobalization,â there is now an all the more pressing need for scholars of new media and society to come to terms with issues of place, embodiment, and materiality in a world of âvirtualâ flows and âcyberâ culture. This book is a theoretical as well as an empirical exploration of this dilemma in relation to case studies of hybrid media places.
Early observers of digital culture were rather preoccupied with defining and theorizing the differences and demarcation lines between our online and offline selves (Turkle, 1995) and between the space of places and the space of flows (Castells, 1996). Today however, there is widespread consensus that the online and the offline are intermingled in intricate relations. This is often underlined, but actual research on the inner architecture of this interconnectedness is scarce. Because there is no developed understanding of how these relations are structured and of how they function, the theorization of this type of interplay is now emerging as a major conceptual dilemma. Much in the way social scientists and theorists have wrestled historically with structure versus agency, digital researchers must now explore ways of conceptualizing the online/offline nexus. And this is what we set out to do in this book.
The either/or fallacy
In certain aspects the merging of the online and offline spheres within contemporary society and culture seems quite obvious and hard to refute. Certainly, the offline dimension still prevails because it needs to be addressed if identities, views, opinions, and so on are to be ârealizedâ or âmaterialized.â One might ask however, if it is possible to analytically separate the two, and whether it is still feasible to do so. First, however, we must discuss what hybridity actually may be in the context of the digital and what it can refer to. For the purpose of this book, the concept should be generally understood as representing the coming together of online and offline, media and matter, or, more dynamically, as the interplay between the online and offline dimension. But, more specifically, it could also be viewed in terms of interaction between old and new media (Jenkins, 2006). Either way, the hybrid dimension of contemporary media culture concerns the fact that offline and online worlds are becoming increasingly intertwined. In other words, what goes on in hybrid media culture can be understood as a product of the suspension of the delimitation inherent in the online/offline divide. Thus, without qualifying it further, hybridity can be said to describe the process where the online is constantly translated to the offline and vice versa. The inner workings of this process are the object of study for this book.
As the more theoretical version of the concept both draws on informational philosophy and has material connotations (virtuality and reality, offline and online), a technological aspect of it must be considered, at least briefly. But, because hybridity has to be considered as a product involving two spheres, in doing this one must,
⊠avoid an excessively exclusive (or even âdeterministicâ) focus on technology in studying its âimpactsâ on social and political practices. It is important to underline that these âimpactsâ must be considered as âoutcomesâ that emerge from a complex interplay between existing institutions and practices on the one hand and (the characteristics of) new technologies on the other hand.
(Donk, et al., 2004: 6, our emphasis)
We also must add to our theoretical and methodical repertoire tools for analyzing the economic and political (i.e., the material) structures circumscribing â and making possible â the digital dimensions of society (Fuchs, 2011). For this reason it is important to avoid a situation where one neglects or overemphasizes either side when studying hybrid media culture: we must, as Dahlgren (2004: xv) writes, âavoid becoming obsessed just with the communication technology itselfâ and, preferably, âinclude in our analytic horizons the complex ways in which ICTs interplay with the dynamics of the social movements, as well as with mainstream political structures and contemporary cultural trends that frame these movements.â
But even if, as discussed above, the online and the offline enmesh, a number of questions remain. One might ask, for example, what happens to theoretical and methodological approaches that were based on the premise of a separation in terms of the initial conceptual divide. Taking this approach, the clash between cyber-pessimists and cyber-optimists can, through the introduction of the concept of hybridity, be exposed as a pseudo-problem. In relation to a hybrid methodology, the remarks on online activism by Davidson, Joyce, and Ballard (2012) offer some important guidance as regards this. In accordance with their view, recognizing diverging logics concerning causality is of utmost importance:
A methodology of hybridity implicitly rejects monocausal logics that give rise to misleading terms like âFacebook Revolution,â âTwitter Revolution,â and âsocial media revolution.â If digital technology is a factor in hybrid causality it is unlikely to be the single causal factor in any political outcome. Monocausality is an appealing straw man for cyber-pessimists because it allows them to set up an argument in which digital technology only has value if it is the singular cause of a particular political outcome. The argument posits an unnecessarily high bar for the salience of digital technology in activism outcomes, making the optimist case (salience) harder to prove and the pessimist case (lack of salience) easier. In this argument, the optimists only win if digital technology was an overwhelming factor in a particular outcome, where multicausality tells us that the effect was likely more complicated.
(Davidson, Joyce, and Ballard, 2012)
Even if one might disagree with their interpretation regarding the two positions (and the arguments of the respective sides), they express the key acknowledgement that social and cultural practices, regardless from where they are emanating (i.e., online or offline), are always rooted in multiple spheres.
Previous work in the field
The concept of hybridity has been applied in a wide variety of contexts. The most well known use is perhaps in postcolonial studies, where hybridity has come to signify the process through which cultures and identities intermingle and transform through mixture (Bhabha, 1994; GarcĂa Canclini, 1995; Young, 1995). Although it is important to acknowledge that this notion of hybridity shares some underlying ideas with our use of the term â for example, in that it points to issues of ideology and power struggles â the definition of hybridity in this book refers exclusively to the relationship of digital media to its social, spatial, and material contexts.
Over the past years, there has been an increasing emphasis on material and spatial aspects in media studies, as more and more scholars realize that the digital and the physical can no longer be treated as separate domains. Our volume should be seen as a contribution to this emerging field of research, and our approach is indebted to previous work on the interplay between online and offline dimensions as well as to research in the broader area of media, place, and materiality. It is therefore important to trace the idea of hybridity within these fields.
Perspectives on the situatedness of media
Joshua Meyrowitz argued, in his No Sense of Place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior (1985), that increasing electronic mediatization renders physical location irrelevant and, thus, that electronic media transform our understanding of place. Interestingly, this claim has sometimes been referred to as the starting point for a âspatial turnâ in the field of media studies (see, e.g., Falkheimer and Jansson, 2006) because it sparked debate and was challenged by many scholars (e.g., Morley, 2000; Moores, 2007; Scannell, 1996). Since then, several interdisciplinary volumes have combined an interest in the spatial and material dimensions of media with an understanding of technology as shaped in interaction with users (e.g., Berry, Kim, and Spigel, 2009; Couldry and McCarthy, 2004; Crang, Crang, and May, 1999; Falkheimer and Jansson, 2006; Munt, 2001; cf. Appadurai, 1996 on âmediascapesâ). These conceptualizations of the entanglements between place and media (old and new) also shed light on the interplay between online and offline dimensions that we describe in terms of hybridity.
For instance, âMediaSpace,â a term coined by Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy in 2004, encompasses âboth the kinds of spaces created by media, and the manifest effects that existing spatial arrangements have on media forms as they materialize in everyday life.â It âdefines the artefactual existence of media forms within social space, the links that media objects forge between spaces, and the no less real cultural visions of a physical space transcended by technology and emergent virtual pathways of communicationâ (Couldry and McCarthy 2004: 2). Jesper Falkheimer and AndrĂ© Jansson (2006) propose the term âgeographies of communicationâ to designate a similar approach, centred on âhow communication produces space and how space produces communicationâ (page 9) in the light of contemporary spatial ambiguities because of increasing mobility and interactivity. And Berry, Kim, and Spigel (2009) discuss the âelectronic elsewheresâ that emerge when media reconfigure or even produce space, in the material and lived sense as well as through the construction of imaginaries.
While media scholars have turned to geography and spatial theory in recent years, geographers have also acknowledged the need for studying media. For instance, Paul C. Adams (2009) maps the field of communication from a geographical viewpoint by outlining how various kinds of media are enmeshed in and also produce physical space in different ways. A number of themed journal issues have specifically addressed the geographical implications of Internet use, the impact of geographic space on the structuring of virtual space, and the ways in which the Internet is always embedded in offline power relations (Adams and Wharf, 1997; Dodge, 2001; Ayoyama and Sheppard, 2003; see also Crang, Crang, and May, 1999).
In addition to these interdisciplinary volumes, the immersion of (old and new) media in everyday life has been the focus of many influential case studies. To name but a few, works on the incorporation of television (Spigel, 1992) as well as computer and Internet technologies (Aune, 1996; Bakardjieva, 2005; Lally, 2002) in domestic spaces or screens and television in public spaces (McCarthy, 2001) have all provided insights into the ways in which media produce specific forms of socio-spatial practices. This strand of research has offered in-depth understandings of how technologies are redefined in accordance with existing norms and ideologies (regarding, e.g., public, private, gender, and family), and thus how media contribute to the reproduction and/or transformation of social relations. But not only do media and media artefacts transform the spatial settings where they are incorporated; the incorporation and âdomesticationâ can also transform the meaning of the media technologies themselves in ways that remind us of what we think about as context-specific online/offline hybrids.
Although the present volume focuses specifically on the merging of offline and online modalities more than on the general interplay between media and place, the above-mentioned works have been valuable for pointing out the situatedness of traditional as well as digital media. They all, in various ways, demonstrate how media integrate into peopleâs material realities and lived experiences, shaping everyday activities and discourses; they also point out the importance of understanding media as both technology and representation. However, many of the previous works have taken as their point of departure particular physical places â the home, the workplace, or public places â in order to show how these affect and also are affected by media technologies, media representations, and media use. This book, instead, starts out from broader thematic fields, where the negotiations between online and offline dimensions have proved to be of particular significance.
Straddling the online/offline divide
Early studies of digital culture tended to describe online and offline as essentially quite separate domains (Castells, 1996; Rheingold, 1994; Turkle, 1995). Whether utopian or dystopian in their approaches to cyberspace, such accounts built on â and upheld â a sharp distinction between virtual, cyber, or non-physical dimensions and the physical, offline world. This distinction was also essentially normative and hierarchical â although life online was sometimes described as liberating, the physical world was nevertheless attributed the status of ârealâ or âauthentic.â In contrast, online activities and identities were often understood as artificial, as simulations, or as being simply of less importance.
With time and technological innovation, however, it soon became apparent that online and offline were not isolated dimensions. People bring offline norms and experiences to their online lives, thereby reproducing offline power structures and discourses â and, in much the same way, online activities impact on peopleâs offline existence. Scholars from various disciplines began to turn their interest to this dialectic and started to see reality and virtuality as existing on a continuum rather than as two antagonistic poles. The concept âmixed realityâ (Milgram and Colquhoun, 1999) came to describe this state in between, and although the concept has been used primarily in the field of interaction design, it also had some relevance for social and cultural studies (see, e.g., Galloway, 2004).1 Media theorist Lev Manovich (2006) developed the ideas in his essay on âaugmented spaceâ: âthe physical space overlaid with dynamically changing informationâ such as multimedia forms and mobile technologies (2006: 220). If mixed reality referred to the hybrid environment of augmented reality and augmented virtuality (cf. Galloway, 2004), then Manovichâs augmented space attempted to capture all of these dimensions. The question for Manovich was whether the new configurations of i...
