Media and the Experience of Social Change

The Arab World

Tim Markham

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786604217
• eBook ISBN: 9781786604231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

For centuries scholars have fretted about the gulf that exists between the enormity of historical change and the banality of people's everyday lives. This is said to be exacerbated in our media saturated age, immersed as we have become in an endless stream of sensations and distractions. In response, media theorists and practitioners alike try to come up with new ways of breaking through people's complacency and waking them up to the reality or what's going on out there. Drawing on both philosophy and an investigation of what people actually do with media, this book takes aim at that conventional wisdom and opens up new ways of thinking about media and the way we experience change. For politics, journalism, activism and humanitarianism, the upshot is that we shouldn't be trying to provoke moments of revelation amongst publics and audiences, but to understand what is really at stake in the way the present endlessly unfolds in everyday life.

Chapter One

Introduction

This book begins from a well-observed conundrum (Bourdieu, 2001) about journalism’s conflicted role as writer of the first draft of history. On the one hand, journalists are fixated by change, obsessively looking for those day-to-day shifts in politics, economics and anything else, shifts that constitute news. In many ways the rise of data journalism and non-professional media production has diminished the centrality of the classic job of reporting what has happened in the immediate past, with many journalists and commentators more often engaged in predicting the future: spotting trends, identifying directions of travel and speculating about probable outcomes. On the other hand, though, journalists and commentators have a fairly dismal record when it comes to apprehending – let alone predicting – political and social changes that are more systemic and take time to gestate: few predicted the financial crisis of 2008 (Fraser, 2009) or the uprisings that erupted in Iran in 2009 and the Arab world towards the end of the following year (Cottle, 2011); most were surprised by the outcome of Britain’s EU referendum and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The fault lies not just with media practitioners, however, but also with political scientists collectively overstating the resilience of authoritarian regimes (Stoker et al., 2015) and academic economics departments roundly accused of tunnel vision when it comes to the historical context in which neo-liberal capitalism operates (Colander et al., 2009). And more widely than that, it is arguable that one of the conditions of contemporary life for most of us, experts and amateurs alike, is that we experience things in a bubble of the present, pushed this way and that by a constant stream of stimuli that leaves us insensible to the broader sweep of history (Stiegler, 1998). Philosophers have identified such temporal blindness as a symptom of life lived inauthentically, but this book wants to push back against that accusation along with all of the associated claims about our superficial, distracted and fickle engagement with the world around us. In doing so it foregrounds the role that media play in this lived experience of change and continuity – media we consume, produce and just live among – since it is media saturation that is often said to foster this inauthentic way of being in the world. Further, the specific focus on media practitioners that opens up an opportunity to explore precisely how change is experienced when engaging with the world is ostensibly the core of one’s personal principle and professional ambition. Above all else what becomes clear is that substantive engagement is not all or nothing, and certainly never constant – seen under the microscope it is uneven, contingent and provisional, though no less real than any pious proclamation of solidarity with global others. And if that is true for the professionals, might it not also be so for the rest of us?

Thinking about the experience of continuity and change, big and small, in everyday life (Back, 2015; Neal, 2015) is the lodestar of the phenomenological tradition, whose lineage can be traced back through Merleau-Ponty and Schutz to Husserl, Kierkegaard, Marx, Hegel and, ultimately, Kant. Phenomenology has continued to evolve and mutate, but much contemporary research still takes its cue from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, originally published in 1927. Among its many innovations is the provocative claim that thinking is not really the point. You can only understand being in the world by acting in it; you do not grasp the meaning of a tool by reflecting on it but by picking it up and using it, its meaning consisting not in the conscious awareness of what you are about to do with it but the fact that everything you could do with it and how to do it is activated by you reaching out to pick it up. This is at-handness, an idea that drives beyond experience and expertise – knowing how to do things with objects – to the way that whole worlds of possibility and meaning are effortlessly invoked by a tool’s being not simply there but just-pick-upable. How does such a state of affairs come to pass, an experience in which plenitudes of actions and ideas are seamlessly summoned as we go about our daily routines? Habituation and taking things for granted is the norm, but what becomes habituated and accepted as given is heavily, historically contingent. Heidegger writes about how our being in the world is always simultaneously oriented in relation to the past, present and future – and that to live authentically entails fully grasping the significance of each. Now, this could be interpreted as saying that it is incumbent upon us to know how we got to where we are, as individuals and collectively – and this would certainly fit some post-Marxist calls for an archaeological approach (Foucault, 1972) to political and cultural analysis, digging through layers of determination that made the status quo possible. But Heidegger has something else in mind: not so much the determination of symbolic superstructure by economic base as the preconditions for everyday experience being just liveable, what makes it possible to just be and do in the world, usually without reflection. This is the core principle of all phenomenology – seeking to understand what makes so much of what we do instinctive, and instinctively meaningful – and it will be seen that far from committing ourselves to cataloguing the banal, it is at this level that political insight is at its most acute. Likewise, Heidegger’s appeal for us to stand in full recognition of the future is taken in more psychologizing readings (Mulhall, 2005) to mean a reconciliation with mortality and in historical ones (Farías et al., 1989) as foreshadowing the disastrous embrace of national destiny. But there is a much more practical application of his understanding of time to come, in being aware of the stakes in whatever situation we find ourselves thrown into, knowing how it could play out and accepting responsibility accordingly.

The fact that we for the most part fail to grasp how the past and future inform our experience of the present need not trouble us overly, since the last thing this book aims for is advice on how to live more fully in the present. Instead, the objective is to set out how we experience, often through media, the past, present and future, and with what implications (Barker, 2009). Thinking about the way that the future emerges to consciousness is then not about prediction but about assessing what it tells us about our experience of the present – it is about temporal orientation. Dire predictions about the death of news, for instance, tell us much more about what journalism means to us now, not least to journalists, than it can actually foretell what the future has in store. Or if our imaginings of future forms of politics are unencumbered by history or parties, manifestos or leadership, then this reveals much about our current relation to all things political and what we think is at stake. The distinctive experience of media as new (Rantanen, 2009), as constantly ushering in new futures, points to potentially profound insights not just about our attitudes towards technology but also about what we understand by concepts like identity, cultural value and citizenship. As for the past, we will see in chapter 6 that the way it appears to consciousness is functional more than anything else, in that it often serves little more purpose than to rationalize what people do day in, day out. More importantly, it will become clear that it appears in ways that are decontextualized, atemporal or just at odds with an understanding of historical change as necessarily incremental, non-linear and, above all, generative of contingent modes of thinking and behaving. The upshot is much more significant than a time lag between historical change and the way we see the world (Bourdieu, 1984): while significant shifts are taking place around us, shifts which will also leave their mark on our own subjectivities, we are thrown backwards and forwards or simply out of time, enacting mislearned schema and wishful projections in order to navigate each encounter in the world as it appears to us.

But before proceeding, it is worth making a few caveats clear. The intention of this book is not to diagnose false consciousness that leaves us blind to what is ‘really’ going on. Against Heidegger’s notion of living authentically, fully cognizant of past and future and the passing of time in between, the aim here is to understand how change is experienced, as opposed to how it should be experienced. Much can be gleaned from the starting point that while upheaval apparently swept the Middle East in the early years of this decade, for many of those interviewed for this research, the daily rituals of being woken by an alarm set on a mobile phone, grabbing a hurried bite to eat and taking a bus or driving a car to work went more or less unchanged. This is not to render political turmoil mundane but to counsel against imagining it as something ethereal. Likewise, this book does not set out to blame the media for surrounding us in a fog of stimuli and distraction (Poster, 2001) – in this regard it is in line with much current thinking that resists reducing analysis to what media do to people (see, for instance, Bird, 2003). It is important to appreciate the extent to which habituated media encounters – whether conscious or barely registered – contribute to the seamlessness and continuity of everyday experience, even or especially when our attention is repeatedly drawn to the apparently novel. But media are not extrinsic to subjectivity; they sit alongside all the other determinants of conscious experience, none of which we could easily call unmediated. Everyday encounters demand individually internalized habits and collective cultures of practice. The book sets out how those habits and cultures rub against transformations taking place in the world and sheds light on our relation to historical change – whether it is engaged or fantastic, ambivalent or indifferent.

Phenomenology and Politics

The aim, then, is to investigate the myriad media practices people enact as they navigate the world temporally, amid the routines and taken-for-granted realities of everyday life. Those practices obviously include media consumption and production, though just living among media is not a passive state of being but something achieved practically: reacting to, adjusting to and ignoring media are as much practices as commissioning, curating or managing it. And that world being negotiated a mile a minute as we adapt to its vicissitudes by learning to embody habits and strategies is no flat backdrop but a complex configuration of environments that threatens to overwhelm and demands to be apprehended at every turn. How we do that apprehending changes over time and space, and scholars disagree about how well we and others understand what is going on out there, often through the media we use and are exposed to. It is also a particular kind of world in historical terms, threaded through with all manner of continuities and long-term trends but also vivid and maybe transformative events: financial crises, environmental chaos and an outbreak in the early 2010s of uprising and protest across the world that the journalist Paul Mason (2012) described as ‘kicking off everywhere’. The years 2010 and 2011 saw eruptions of protest in the Middle East, Spain, Greece and Israel as well as the spread of the Occupy movements from Zuccotti Park around the globe (Benski et al., 2013; Tejerina et al., 2013). As well as proliferating like a blithe kind of global contagion, there seemed to be something about these nascent political cultures that was capable of anything: overthrowing dictators, resisting the remorseless march of capitalism and so on. Soon we started asking whether the way the political groupings organized themselves and their activism through new kinds of networked media was what lay behind their unique potency (Castells, 2012), though this book starts from the consensus that congealed in the following few years, these were not Facebook revolutions; social media were important but not causal (see, for instance, Dencik & Leistert, 2015; Uldam & Verstegaard, 2015). Rather than take on all of those diffuse political phenomena, the book frames its analysis specifically around the uprisings in the Arab world no longer known as the Arab Spring, in the light of subsequent reversals and stagnation in many countries of the Middle East and North Africa (Moghadam, 2013).

What role have different forms of media, as well as the more generalized condition of living in an age of media abundance and convergence, played in how individuals have lived through the political turmoil as citizens, media practitioners, activists and audiences? That many of those watching and interpreting the Arab uprisings were not from that part of the world – often with a limited understanding of its histories, cultures and languages – presents clear problems. Are clueless distant spectators chipping in with their view on events in Tahrir Square on Twitter somehow worse than those who do not engage at all (Alterman, 2011; cf. Žižek, 2011)? Are Western academics and journalists commenting on developments in the region inevitably complicit in the neocolonial subjugation of its peoples, however pure their intentions (Newsom et al., 2011)? We have been here before, needless to say. Edward Said (1978) pushed beyond doubt the fact that the Middle East of the West’s imagining cannot escape centuries of exploitation, bloodshed, literature and tourism. And yet to posit the insuperability of orientalism as a Foucauldian sort of always-everywhere discourse, while politically compelling, does us little good as we seek better ways to understand and engage with the wider world. Just as problematic is the refusal of critical academic engagement, instead framing historic events as the expression of some authentic Arab culture – or worse yet, Arab street (for a critical view, see Lynch, 2003) – as though such an embodying, reductive essence existed. Like everything else we encounter in the world, the people, places and events of the Arab world appear to us as objects – of journalism, international relations, travel and so on. Objectification is a given; the phenomenologist’s task is to unpack how it proceeds and on the basis of what assumptions, always motivated by the Hegelian imperative of apprehending the full subjectivity of that objectified other, a subjectivity for which we in turn are other (Miller, 2016).

Recognition of the subjective other (see especially Taylor, 1994; Fraser & Honneth, 2003; Mark, 2014) is no small feat, still less embedding recognition in professional practice and institutionalizing it in mission statements and codes of practice. Lois McNay (2008) makes a compelling case that all recognition is essentially misrecognition, deriving from the phenomenological tenet that perception always begins with intention; intentive recognition always comes from the recognizer, not the recognizee (see also Klikauer, 2016). Judith Butler (1993) makes this point more sharply political, arguing that the act of recognizing amounts to the incited performance of subjectivity on the part of the recognized: it is not just that we do not see them for who they are, we also require them to be the selves that we see. Both tie into more widespread angst about a contemporary crisis of recognition. Whether it is because of galloping narcissism (Lasch, 1978), the commodification of everything (Lash, 2010) or the inexorable pervasiveness of mediated representation (Baudrillard, 1983), there is something fundamentally lacking in the relations that unknown others have with each other. This is not simply about solipsism, since the inability to grasp the reality of others prevents us from understanding the profundity of change and continuity in the world we inhabit on a daily basis. For Hegel (Hegel, 1979 [1807]) this is much more than a belief that people should try to imagine walking in another’s shoes; it is how subjectification works, the dialectic through which individually and collectively we perceive and act in the world around us as we are perceived and acted on by it.

If there is a crisis of recognition, then it is one of self-identity as well as global citizenship. The selves we instinctively see and the worlds they invoke when we watch the news are insuperable stereotypes, while the selves we snap into becoming as we watch are short-circuited, stunted. Worse yet, the collective act of watching amounts to subjugating others to our regimes of recognition, while those subjects that we snap into becoming are not our own. What if each is not just an accident of history but the expression of economic and political logics embedded in cultural norms, industries and the very architectures of the technologies that mediate between us all? How can we make people more aware not only of the lives of others but also of the sheer contingency of our own lived presents, the historic evitability that what is experienced as utterly normal and unremarkable would actually come to pass? And, finally, how can we ensure apprehension by audiences and publics of what is at stake in how things unfold from here? An important starting point is to disentangle what is at stake in the playing out of history and what is at stake in each encounter – everything in the case of the former, not so much in the latter. Rowing back from the idea that particular mediated encounters between distant others matter makes the question of solidarity one of ongoing work, work that does not have to be continuous, intense and focused. This changes the game for journalists, humanitarian campaigners and academics, from one in which the agreed goal is to produce critical encounters that break through habituated experience to something less intense but more protracted and able to underpin a more generalized and dispersed orientation towards subjective recognition.

The same logic applies to those selves summoned when we pay attention to media. It is true that at the moment of activation, media demands that we apprehend it as a fully formed, always-already world and that this apprehension necessitates a particular apprehending self (Scannell, 1996). As with Heidegger’s tools, media calls forth not just particular competences and skills but also whole ways of being. And yet, these are not as enveloping or overdetermining as they seem; after Scannell (see also Friedman, 2016, on the ‘habitus clivé’, and Silva, 2016, on the fragmented habitus), they are only partially implicated selves. This is not because of some innate resistance to coerced subjectification but rather because we are being simultaneously summoned by different worlds all demanding to be encountered as they are. Over time, dominant modes of subjectification emerge that cut across different kinds of interaction and experience – we are historical creatures after all – but we are not overwhelmed or incited towards replete subjective enactment every time we switch on one of our media devices. In Butler’s (1993: 121) terms, interpellation may be formative. But against Butler, this need not amount to complete subjectification: users of social media are not invoked fully formed when they participate in their favourite platforms (cf. Hay, 2011; Andrejevic, 2011) – other things are going on. Users may be called forth in particular ways and asked to be certain kinds of self, but this is not the same as being annihilated or rent asunder by the logics of these platforms – their architectures, their algorithms, their profit-seeking business models.

Principal Aims and Claims

In its concluding pages this book makes a case for journalists, professional or otherwise, playing an integral role in future public life by acting as agents of dissensus. The term is Rancière’s, and in our context it can be simply explained: What if journalists, beyond acting as intermediaries and translating different groups to each other, focused on explicating that which is untranslatable? The underlying argument is that if we are to properly grasp social change at its most profound and nuanced, which means recognizing the stakes in the various presents we find ourselves in, we need to constantly work at making clear the limits of intelligibility of our conscious experience of everyday life. Chapter 2 begins to make this case by positing that journalists are well placed to perform this function, equipped with a particularly epistemological relation to the world around them. This is not about journalists knowing more than others or possessing an ethereal sense of what is important, but a basic anticipatory framework that methodically sizes up all encounters big and small and refuses to take them at face value. The way that journalists often operate according to gut instinct (Schultz, 2007), effortlessly turning everything they see into copy that cleaves to stale convention, is rightly critiqued (Johnson-Cartee, 2005). The same can be said about the constant quest for novelty, wilfully blind to less sensational but more meaningful longer-term trends. But there is something else in the journalistic disposition that only grows in salience as media converges and proliferates, a sceptical curiosity that resists the urge to think that whatever is present is always-already the way things are now.

That sceptical, curious professional bearing towards the world opens up new ways of thinking about how change is experienced – by journalists as well as the rest of us. We are creatures of habit, and our habituated orientations towards the world we inhabit have the tendency to reproduce the status quo in that world. At the same time, however, we are constantly being reminded that we are living in times of ever-escalating flux, with the comforting continuities as well as durable iniquities of the past about to be swept away by whatever comes relentlessly next. For journalists this often takes the form of the death of the trade itself, rent asunder by massively networked communication, redundant economic models and algorithmic automation. The reality, though, is that most journalists neither have their head in the sand when it comes to questions of systemic change nor do they accept claims of the imminent arrival of an unprecedented, unrecognizable future with wide eyes and gaping mouths. So how exactly are the profundity of historic change and the mundanity of work routines reconciled in everyday life? And what can we extrapolate from the journalistic experience to that of people more broadly? That is the task this book sets out to achieve, following Tilly’s (2007) commitment to ‘developing theoretically sophisticated accounts of social processes somewhere between the stratosphere of global abstraction and the underground of thick description’. It trains its empirical gaze on the Middle East in part as a small corrective to the dominance by the global North and west of the academic literature in the disciplines of journalism, sociology, cultural studies and philosophy. But this focus is particularly apt given recent ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two Professional Media amid Change and Hysteresis
• Chapter Three Empirical Perspectives: Arab Journalists Debate the Upheavals
• Chapter Four Change and Hysteresis in Cairo
• Chapter Five Flux and Atrophy in Beirut
• Chapter Six Anti-Politics, Populism and Social Media
• Chapter Seven The Politics of Change: Media, Protest and Conflict
• Chapter Eight Facebook Revolutions?: Understanding the Work That Social Media Do
• Chapter Nine Living in Interesting Times: The Work of Experience, Engagement and Identity
• References
• Index