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The triple articulation of audiovisual media technologies in the age of convergence
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Courtois, Cédric |
| Copyright Year | 2013 |
| Abstract | ing these ideas, Ward (2006) proposes a definition of home, treating it at the material as well as the symbolic level: ’Home [...] refers to the domestic, private sphere, and is understood as a symbolic space, constructed by the family who live in a particular household. The family is regarded as a web of human relations, whose interactions within a household construct a home: a symbolic entity that articulates the values and habitus of the family, while also finding constitution within those values’ (pp. 147-148). Hence, the home could be considered as a micro-economic entity, nested within the macro-system of the formal commoditybased economy. Both are connected by the consumption of media technologies and texts. As Silverstone et al. (1992) argue, communication and information technologies affect the social and economic order of the household. They offer a complex and sometimes even contradictory link with other households and individual family members with the outside; or in brief: with what is happening beyond the front door. The idea is to understand the appropriation of media technologies, as commodities as well as media messages, within the context of the micro entity of the home, taking into account its dynamics in terms of values and interests. This transactional system of economic and social relations, actively linking private and public, is referred to as the moral economy of the household, a concept inspired by developments in anthropology (Silverstone, et al., 1992). On the one hand, the home is considered an economy because of its members’ productive and consumptive activities in the public economy, while on the other it is moral, because activities at work, leisure and shopping are brought about by specific cognitions, evaluations and aesthetics, rooted within the household and its members’ histories, biographies and politics. The home is a safe haven for its members, with a sustained and distinct autonomy and identity as economic, social and cultural unit. This provides with day-to-day practical value creation and reproduction, which offers a sense of ontological security; a concept by Giddens (1984, 1990) denoting people’s continuous, 2-24 AN INTER-PARADIGMATIC APPROACH stable sense and experience of trust in the world as it is. It is the confidence, or trust, of most humans in the continuity of their self-identity and the constancy of the social and material environments in which they act. It concerns an emotional rather than a cognitive state, rooted in the unconscious. In modern society, in which daily routines are less supported by face-to-face encounters, kinship relations, and a sense of locality, we increasingly rely on networks and mechanisms we cannot physically perceive. In such an environment, media receive focal roles, both in the visible and hidden ordering of everyday life. By structuring various temporalities, both following and guiding experienced routines and rhythms of the day (Silverstone, 1994). It is clear the domestication perspective strongly draws upon anthropological insights, centralizing the notion of the everyday and its routines. Hartmann (2008) argues to overlook the mundane and repetitious, and focus on the everyday as a site of agency. She attempts to synthesize the ill-defined notion of the everyday by drawing upon the work of Schütz and de Certeau. The former stresses the central factor of human communicative interaction, intersubjectivity, as the basis for the shared assumptions on the construction of the social world. This boils down to the agentic construction of the everyday within the everyday, in which these assumptions are persistently agreed upon and re-constructed. Hence, there is no determined stable structure, as much as there is a need for and a sense of stability (cf. ontological security). Likewise, the notion of intersubjectivity is equally central in de Certeau’s work. His idea of agency, focusing on actions instead of actors, is however pertinent on the use of agency, as resistance of the weak through tactics against and within strategies of the powerful. Hartmann (2008) notes that the user, as member of audiences or publics, exercises agency through everyday circumstances to interpret and make sense of media technologies and content. When linked to ideas of agency and structure, and the inclination for stability through the everyday, we must take into account that the very same everyday can be persistently renewed and renegotiated. This is paradoxical in a way that on the one hand the everyday functions as both an inhibitory and sensitizing factor. While it can bring about a tendency towards a form of conservatism, preventing innovative interpretations of media technologies and texts, it can equally clear the way to novel interpretations of media. The domestication perspective, and the broader ethnographic take on media research, has brought about a considerable body of conceptual and empirical research. An initial central focus was on the appropriation on television in the home, claiming that ’... television is part of our socialization, just as we are socialized to television in parlors, sitting rooms and kitchens [hence, the domestic]. We learn from television; television provides the stuff of family talk and neighborhood gossip. We see other households and other families on television. We take television |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/4108784/file/4336375.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
