Silverstone - mediation - The social role of media

1. 老研究
   1. 1)作为一个传统项目一直以来的media研究关注
      1. accuracy, truth and trustworthiness
      2. news, from reflect reality to construct reality.

         Annotations:

         • 但是 Michael Schudson (2000): these approaches rarely depart significant from an often unstated normative view that the news’ primary function is to serve society by informing the general population in ways that arm them for vigilant citizenship. ---- we still expect the news to act as the Fourth Estate.
   2. 2）relationship with other symbolic spaces

      Annotations:

      • 但这个也指向ideological tarnish “News remains a distinct product of mediated modernity and is powerful in its significance for defining a reality”.
   3. 3）effects

      Annotations:

      • Schudson认为news’ effectivity is mostly confined to elites. 但Silverstone认为这种说法not entirely fair。 因为已经有研究how audience work with, decode news content,还有include news in the wider category of informational media.
   4. 对老研究方向的critic

      Annotations:

      • 最重要的critic，很多研究都是transmission approach to communicational infrustructure of news, and a communicational rather than mediational approach
2. mediation的角度来研究
   1. 举个
      1. Luhmann (2000) - news as a social phenomenon

         Annotations:

         • challenges news’ elision of information, illumination and truth as well as noting the paradox of its regularity (How come it’s the news if it happens everyday?) This leads to concern with the wider significance of news as a cultural category and its relationship to social and media process.
         1. 引起concern with function.

            Annotations:

            • > Bird and Dardenne (1988) characterization of news as a story.   这样做的，opens up a range of counter-intuitive ways of thinking about this so-taken-for-granted aspect of mediation in everyday life. >Raise questions: news’ paradoxical role in the massaging and managing of collective anxiety, and as a central component of a mass culture that privileges forgetting over remembering and dissemblance over resemblance.
            1. risk society

1. 1. background: global village
   1. 带来两种结果

      Annotations:

      • Global Village: two important dimensions and consequences of mediation McLuhan’s vision: Convergence – a presumption that the extension of communicative reach would bring with it an intensification of mostly benevolent social relationships >MEDIA involvement in the reconfiguring of space and time. – hyperbole?  Critique: technological determinism & unproblematic account of the social
2. 2.media in enabling different forms of sociality
   1. Writing- empire (Goody, 1977)
   2. Printing – nations (Anderson, 1983)
   3. Digital media - a global world of intense connectivity and mutuality.
      1. at issue1

         Annotations:

         • These networks’ capacity to create a symbolic space where identities can be formed and relationships sustained on a global stage (Tomlinson, 1999) --- these are questions of both scale and differences.
      2. at issue2

         Annotations:

         • The ways in which the media provide a mesh for the interweaving of global and local frames of reference and spheres of activity.
3. 3.mediation

   Annotations:

   • A shift in the location of interaction form face-to-face, liberating communication from the constraints of the immediate and the local. >>>>>decline of community – media provide a compensatory framework in imagined or indeed virtual spaces
   1. symbolic

      Annotations:

      • Anderson,1983 – 走的是symbolic的路子。 Individual participation in the shared ritual of reading the morning paper as a crucial component of the imagined community of the emerging capitalist nation-state.
   2. material.

      Annotations:

      • Castells,1996 – network society, a new intensity in the free flowing of information – materiality for action and connection 包括Giddens在内，这些学者看出这个global infrastructure的转变对local activities的影响》 “ the two are fundamentally intertwined, and it is the media that provide the links in which global forces are ( or are not) both appropriated and reflected upon at the local level.
      1. Media在形成community的过程中扮演了不同角色

         Annotations:

         • Expression, refraction and compensation (Silverstone, 1999)
         1. Expression

            Annotations:

            • Expression – Anderson’s imagined community, in which media and media practices enable the creation of community as a symbolic space. 1)       这样看来 public service broadcasting --  key institutions of modernity 2)       Fragmenting national culture and the availability of multiple communication channels are testament, too, of the significance of this aspect of the media as community-building and community-reflecting institutions.
         2. Refraction

            Annotations:

            • Refraction Cohen(1985) community is claimed through moments of symbolic reversal as much as through moments and activities in which values, ideas and beliefs are represented as being unproblematically shared. Ø  Tabloid and the yellow press; confessional talk show. The media are constantly involved in the refractory delineation of difference and similarity (Silverstone, 2000)
         3. Compensation

            Annotations:

            • Appadurai 1996 Ø  The question of how both old and new media enable the creation of alternative and arguably compensatory forms of community expression is one which will become increasingly important in the new century.

1. 和public sphere联系在一起理解妈呀

   Annotations:

   • Understand against market-driven media & Habermas’ public sphere 在现代这种情况下，一方面media是the subject of manipulative intent & less than obviously potent in delivering changes in opinion and behavior. > transmission & ritual models of the processes of mediation contest the terrain.
   1. root concern

      Annotations:

      • The role of media in enabling citizenship and democracy in an increasingly fragmented, and of course in an increasingly global, society.
      1. 带来的问题
         1. 1.invasion of privacy

            Annotations:

            • Intrusion: private lives of public figures & seducing of the private citizens into the public limelight – in name of public interest Consequence: destroy the media’s own freedom and its legitimacy; blurring of boundaries between real and mediated lives.
            1. 再看一下啊哦
         2. 2.Public sphere－ – essentially a mediated public sphere

            Annotations:

            • How to make sense of its functioning but also how to generate normative criteria for its improvement and regulation 哈贝马斯（1992） The effects of mass mediation on the conduct of political life and the quality of democracy—complex and contradictory. e.g. television’s role in the dismantling of communism in the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and Romania.> 1) a historical process that happened to be shown on TV; 2) whose very mode of occurrence was televisual.. 然后哈贝马斯还criticize了 Meyrowitz (1985)的media determinism – misses the point of this complexity by ignoring the range of changes in society which accompany the palpable loss of place in modernity.

Annotations:

• 小总结一下： mass media provide infrastraction for public participation and debates; provide a cultural framework for collective identification (Scannell, 1996, 2000); created an intensively mediated political culture --- political increasingly becomes a matter of representation (images in place of ..) rather than representation (action on behalf of…). 展望未来： how the new media can be mobilized to enhance a direct, deliberative and representative democracy.