1. Media Logics, Mediatization and the Culture of the Database Jakob Svensson 1

2. Media Logic Altheide & Snow, 1979 “media logic functions as a form through which events and ideas are interpreted and acted upon” (Altheide and Snow, 1979: 240) “… media as infrastructures that run underneath, through and in the background of social structures” (Deuze, 2012: 40) “… media as part of the whole fabric of routine everyday life and practice” (Deuze, 2012: 49) 2

3. Media Logic - Media Logic is interactive and based on various elements - Not one way relationship - Attac on both effects studies and uses & gratification “It is not a case of media dictating terms to the rest of society, but an interaction between organized institutional behavior and media. In this interaction, the form of media logic has come to be accepted as the perspective through which various institutional problems are interpreted and solved” (Altheide and Snow, 1979: 15). 3

4. Media Logics - Hjarvard (2008: 113) explicitly refers to the term media logic as something society and its institutions to an increasing degree are submitted to/ dependent on - Media centric? - Media Logics & Mediatization Mediatization = “meta-process by which everyday practices and social relations are historically shaped by mediating technologies and media organizations” (Livingstone, 2009: foreword x; see also Krotz, 2009: 24), 4

5. Media Logics & Mediatization - As a meta-process - And from an institutional perspective - critique mediatization approaches to identify “one single type of media-based logic that supercedes older logics” (Couldry, 2009: 378) and that social transformations are “too heterogenous to be reduced to a single media logic” (ibid.). There is no media logic independent of cultural and societal contexts (Krotz, 2009: 105) 5

6. Media Logics & Mediatization Lundby (2009) criticises media logics for its singularity (p.104), its linearity (p. 105) and it being fixed, referring to rules/ formats rather than to processes and forms of social interactions (pp. 109- 110). Can we talk about a Media Logic? 6

7. Media Logics and Politics Politics is one of the social institutions most closely aligned with the evolution of media forms and thus bears the most notable marks of media's influence. Media logics have clearly informed political styles, cases, issues and even outcomes. 7

8. Media Logics and Politics Media logics as a theoretical concept to discuss the non-neutrality of social media platforms without resorting to technological determinism or normalization 8

9. Technological Determinism - Ever since the internet emerged, researchers have been interested in how it has been utilized by politicians. - Part of the explanation for this attention is that the rise of the internet coincided with less civic participation and growing dissatisfaction with representative democracy. - This resulted in perceptions of the internet as a kind of “magic elixir”, to increase citizen participation and hence legitimizing the representative democratic system. 9

10. Normalization While early studies generally departed from such more positive expectations on the influences of the internet, later studies have been more negative, suggesting that offline structures of political, economic and other sources of power are mirrored online. But although later studies seem to underline this politics as usual approach, researchers continue to be fascinated by the internet at the hands of political actors. This is especially the case with the increasing use, and perceived importance, of social media platforms. Within political communication there is a sense that something is changing when bringing politics to the online realm of social media. However, deterministic analyses and study designs have not fully succeeded in accounting for this (see also Miller). 10

11. Media Logics and Politics Media logics contribute with a different theoretical framing – different from deterministic arguments that either portray the internet as the solution to all of the problems democracies face, or as merely reinforcing the existing political practices and power balances. By conceiving of social media platforms as intertwined with the rise of a distinctly different (though overlapping) logics, we may move beyond framings of social media platforms as inherently good or bad, while avoiding resorting to an argument that they are neutral. In other words, the theory of media logics/ mediatization allows us to address this non- neutrality without resorting to either technological determinism or normalization. 11

12. Are we seeing the rise of network media logic? MASS MEDIA LOGICNETWORK MEDIA LOGIC Production Expensive information selection and content generation by professional journalists according to news values Inexpensive information selection and content generation by (lay) users according to their individual preferences and attention maximizing Distribution Content selected by expert/professional opinions and gatekeepers – based on established news values - distributed to a paying fixed audience of subscribers Users are like intermediaries, distributing popular content, such as a chain letter, within networks of like-minded others Media usage Location bound mass audience with limited selective exposure oriented towards passive consumption of information, based on professional selection Interest bound and like-minded peer networks with highly selective exposure oriented towards interaction through practices of updating (Klinger & Svensson, in review) 12

13. Media Life We live in media (not with media) Media augment life (augmented reality) Media cannot be switched off (pervasive & ubiquitous – the truman show but without exit) It is an illusion that we can control (comprehensively) our media We cannot make sense of a world outside media In a sense this is mediatization (and permanent mediation) of society and individuals at the same time Do we use media or media use us? We are so tied up in media we become media Cyborgs? Humanchines? Hubots? – Since we extend our bodies in space (see also Miller, 2011: ch. 9) 13

14. Media Life Mediapolis – (Deuze, drawing on Silverstone) media underpin and overarch the experiences of everyday life Teleprescence – The here and now dimishes in favor of communication elsewhere (updating – checking phone all the time) Mediasphere – We are enclosed in an invisible electronic shell around us Mediascape – (Deuze, drawing on Appadurai) Media shapes our imagined co-created worlds Interface Culture 14

15. Culture of the Database A media life can be seen as living in the ulimate archive / database (see also Miller, 2011; Manovich, 2001) Memex – collective intelligence – part of the imaginary of the Internet. (a public library of (almost) everything, embodying a personalized experience of all the information of the universe (Deuze, 2012: overview xv) 15

16. Culture of the Database The storage of digitalized content in databases of all types, and its accessibility by software programs, is a pivotal component of all interactive media The urge to manage the list of friends and linkages on Social media platforms points towards a shift from the narrative as a key form of cultural expression to the database as a prominent cultural form in our digital late modern age 16

17. Culture of the Database new media technologies do not tell stories, they have no beginning or no end, no development, thematically or otherwise that would organize them into a sequence Databases are always in progress and thus the management of them can never be finalized or transformed into traditional narratives. Timeless time Hence after the end of grand narratives and the arrival of the web, the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts and other data records. 17

18. Culture of the Database The problem at the end of the 20 th century was no longer how to create a new media object, but how to find an object that already exists somewhere. This led to a need for technologies to store, organize and efficiently access these materials. computer databases become a metaphor to conceptualize individual lives and collective memory (ex. life caching – Deuze, 2012: 87). This contributes to a shared spatial memory, a collective repository of our knowledge of the world. Databases have thus become the way to represent human experience, the world and human existence in it. 18

19. Power? What mechanisms of power are at play here? 19

20. Power? Social media enable communication among an ever widening circle/ database of contacts The network logic disciplines to construct and maintain and expand our databases of potential contacts and information Andrejevic – digital working class and the possibility to capitalize on our networks/ databases of contacts Infocracy 20

21. Surveillance Traceability Foucault 1973 - power = to extract knowledge from individuals and about individuals who are subjected to observation and surveillance Surveillance Society (see also Deuze, 2012: ch. 4) 21