From media technologies to mediated events: a different settlement between media studies and science and technology studies

ABSTRACT

There have been many recent attempts to bring insights from science and technology studies (STS) into media disciplines, many of which associate this work with materiality and technology, while existing media theories are used to analyse the domain of media content and political economy. While this is a reasonable settlement, in this paper I will suggest an alternative arrangement based around controversies. Controversies, and related empirical objects, can help break down dichotomies like producer/audience, social/technical, content/material and also provoke questions such as ‘which media technologies matter in a given case?’ However, controversies are often specific to science so I propose a type of study based around ‘mediated events’ (drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers). I illustrate this with the case of the Woolwich attacks on Twitter. While this approach does not deliver a comprehensive theory of the media, it proposes a new settlement between STS and media studies, grounded in the empirical rather than high theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Science and technology studies
• media studies
• controversies
• materiality
• Woolwich
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

David Moats is a postdoctoral researcher at TEMA T (Technology and Social Change), Linköping University. David's PhD was about developing new forms of data visualisations for researching public science controversies with data from online platforms like Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter. David's current research pertains to the role of visual representation in ‘big data’ analytics. He is currently collaborating with data analysts in a variety of fields (market research, epidemiology, sports statistics, etc.) to develop new types of data visualisations with a view to both understanding how practitioners use ‘social’ data and imagining how data analysis could be approached in more open, exploratory and interpretive ways.

ORCID

David Moats http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9622-9915

Notes

1 Silverstone embraced social shaping of technology, but was somewhat ambivalent about ANT (see Couldry, 2008).

2 There is also a whole genre of STS-influenced studies under the banner of Digital Methods (Rogers, 2013) which, in particular, unify materiality and content, and similar to my proposal, do so around issues. However, they mainly use quantitative tools which I do not have space to discuss in this paper – see Marres and Moats (2015).

3 When Molotch & Lester say ‘issue’ they make explicit reference to Dewey’s ‘problems’.

4 Provided by Stuart Shulman of Discover Text at the DMI Winter School 2013.

5 There may, of course, have been earlier tweets which did not mention the query words explicitly.

6 While Twitter is often thought of as a medium for whipping up rumours, it is also a rumour correcting engine (Procter, Vis, & Voss, 2011).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council.