Omar Al-Ghazzi University of Sheffield the Arab Transnational Media

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Omar Al-Ghazzi University of Sheffield

The Arab transnational media system and the temporality of revolution Part of a bigger project, this paper explores how activists and media practitioners in the Middle East and North Africa have framed their political aspirations since 2011 in terms of acquiring or deviating from a position within an Arab historical trajectory. I relate the pervasiveness of narratives about history in the contemporary Arab world to the transnational character of Arab media and political culture. Media, whether news media or social media, were at the heart of the dissemination of a unified narrative of an Arab awakening and revolution in 2011 across half a dozen Arab countries. However, this spatial multiplicity was concealed by a temporal narrative that sought to flatten the political complexity of the Arab world. Accordingly, I explore how the Arab transnational regional media system impacted the mediation of collective memory during the 2011 Arab uprisings and their bloodied aftermaths. I explore how, since 2011, Arab activists, authoritarian regimes, and even jihadist movements, such as the Islamic State, have all cloaked their political agendas in historical terms— claiming to correct and erase a collective historical path that has gone astray and choosing a past historic period as an originary point to animate the future. They demonstrated a particular kind of burden in Arab politics in projecting a political repertoire that attributes agency to an Arab-Islamic body-politic, on to significantly different country and location-specific conditions. This tension I argue is exacerbated by transnational media in the way they mediated a single story of Arab revolutions or awakening across national contexts, leading to significant political implications in undermining pluralism and contributing to fractured and violent politics.

Biography Omar Al-Ghazzi is lecturer in Journalism, Politics and Public Communication at the Department of Journalism Studies, the University of Sheffield. Omar gained his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. A former Fulbright scholar, his research interests lie in global communication, activism and collective memory, particularly within the context of the Middle East. Omar’s work has appeared in journals such as Communication Theory, Media, Culture & Society, the International Journal of Communication, and Popular Communication. Omar also comes from a journalism professional background. He previously worked at the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat and at the BBC.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Jeannine Baker Macquarie University

Temporality and women’s radio programming in Western Australia The promise of early radio – that it could transcend distance and modify isolation – played out differently for the small, scattered and largely rural population of Western Australia (WA). While radio could bring Australians together spatially, and encourage a sense of national identity, it could not erase the time difference of two hours between WA and the Eastern states. Shoesmith and Edmonds (2003) have argued that this time difference worked to protect the regional culture of West Australians, and accentuated their difference and separation from the rest of Australia. WA rural women were particularly dependent on their radios, but their temporal and spatial distance from the Eastern states subjected them to different patterns of listening. When the Australian Broadcasting Commission dispensed with paid women speakers in women’s sessions in 1940, it advised women to tune-in instead to a talk relayed to all States. Perth broadcaster Irene Greenwood complained that the broadcast time of 1.30pm in WA coincided with the usual dinner- time for farm workers, who would refuse to listen to a woman’s program. Farm women, claimed Greenwood, ‘thus lose doubly, [in] another example of domination from the East by persons who do not know WA conditions.’ This paper will discuss temporality in relation to the historical development of women’s radio programming. It will argue that although WA’s time difference underscored women’s separation from the Eastern states, it also increased the importance of commercial radio for the creation and maintenance of a strong imagined community of rural women.

Biography Jeannine Baker is a postdoctoral research fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney. She is the author of Australian Women War Reporters: Boer War to Vietnam (2016) and the co-editor of Small Screens: Essays in Contemporary Australian Television (2016). She is currently researching the history of women in Australian broadcasting.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Mark Banks University of Leicester.

The Luxury of Biography? Inequalities in Media and Cultural Work There is now an established set of social theory interests in temporal erraticism – realised in various concerns with ruptures, inconsistencies, unpredictable rhythms and the fragmentation of time into discontinuous ‘events’ - not least in fields of media and cultural work where organisation and value-production appear to be breaking free from traditional temporal orderings. While sympathetic to such thinking, this paper also explores the important influence of continuities (in clock time, industrial time and class time) that continue to shape the distribution of opportunities, resources and rewards in media and cultural work. In particular, by focussing on the idea of the ‘career biography’ amongst creative media workers, this paper argues that some traditional notions of time remain vital for organising work, and for reinforcing conventional inequalities and patterns of advantage. Biographical time (and the capacity to control and narrate it) is shown to be unevenly distributed, a luxury and continuity made possible by patterns of social inequality embedded in the division of labour. It is therefore argued that even in the erratic uncertainty of the creative media workplace, certain temporal structures endure – not least the capacity of owners and managers to insulate themselves against the unpredictable by displacing risk and uncertainty onto the shoulders of more precarious workers, and by securing (as far as is possible) their own predictable futures.

Biography Mark Banks is Professor of Culture and Communication and Director of the CAMEo Research Institute on Cultural and Media Economies at the University of Leicester. He writes widely on cultural and media industries, work and employment, and is the author of Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Melodee Beals Loughborough University

Quid Nunc, Quid Tunc: Perceptions of Time in Reprinted News Before the widespread use of telegraphy, Anglophone newspapers engaged in scissors-and-paste journalism, wherein one newspaper copied, in part or in whole, material from other publications. This created a highly decentralized, global news network that proved remarkable robust in the spread of local, regional and national content. Although the level of reprinting varied greatly between titles, the practice was largely seen as mutually beneficial and in the wider public interest. To that end, both the British and United States governments subsidised postal exchanges between newspapers and larger newspapers employed exchange editors to curate incoming material for republication. Although time-sensitive news was usually prioritised over miscellany such as poetry, jokes and literary content, practicalities in transoceanic and overland travel meant that “today’s” news was an amalgamation of events from across the world and hundreds of days, often arbitrarily compressed or elongated by factors beyond the editor’s control. Moreover, as reprinted content was often let unaltered, verb tenses, date references and other indicators of time presented Anglophone readers with a mutable sense of concurrent activity that both promoted and distorted a shared vision of the world. The paper will explore the ways in which the reprinting culture of the late Georgian period (1780s-1830s) affected perceptions of time and space and the extent to which Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ were enhanced or limited by the hurried timelessness of unattributed, and largely unaccountable, reprint reportage.

Biography M. H. Beals is a Lecturer in Digital History at the Department of Politics, History and International Relations at Loughborough University. The main focus of her research and publication has been Scottish emigration, including both settlement communities and those who remained in Scotland, and she is particularly interested in the role of newspapers in public perceptions of demography and migration. Her current research project is Scissors and Paste, which utilises digitised newspapers to explore the possibilities of mining large-scale newspaper databases for reprinted and repurposed news content. The project has involved the development of a suite of tools and methodologies, created using both out-of-the-box and custom-made project-specific software, to efficiently identify reprint families of journalistic texts and then suggest both directionality and branching within these subsets. From these case-studies, detailed analyses of additions, omissions and wholesale changes offer insights into the mechanics of reprinting that left behind few if any other traces in the historical record.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Antonello Bocchino University of Westminster

Exploring social media’s impact upon the perception of time passing - a case study of a patients’ social movement ‘Timeless time’ as defined by Castells results when there is a perturbation of chronological events, that is an impact upon the perception of time passing, “born from the material verification that another life is possible” (Castells, 2015:172). Castells analyses this concept in the context of social movements, characterised by their on-the-street protest activities. This paper, by contrast, examines ‘timeless time’ using a case study of an Italian patients’ social media movement whose protest activities occurred exclusively online. The patient movement grew out of a medical discovery which challenged the existing medial orthodoxy about the causes of the chronic disease, Multiple Sclerosis (MS), offering alternative treatment options. Based on auto-ethnography since the inception of the movement in 2009 and on over 60 in-person, audio-recorded, semi-structured interviews of the movement’s activists, this paper argues that, during its first year, the movement generated an experience of timeless time through its online protest activities. Two elements were essential in fostering the experience of timeless time within the movement. Firstly, digital media and more specifically social media, facilitated timelessness by allowing for simultaneity in social practices at a distance. Secondly, as MS is a disease which progressively worsens patients’ quality of life, funding research into the new discovery was a matter of urgency since any delay could result in further disabilities, including being confined to a wheelchair. With the visualisation of a tangible hope, patients were inexorably drawn to the day-by-day occupation of the “social media streets”, disrupting the linear experience associated with the daily routine of their worsening disease in their quest for “another life”.

Biography Antonello is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Westminster in London and a member of its Centre for Social Media Research (CSMR) of the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI). His research examines the use of social media to build a counter-power movement, focusing on a case study of an Italian social movement promoting studies into a contested medical discovery which is challenging the pharmaceutical industry’s therapeutic monopoly. The research has been presented in Italy, in the UK, Sweden, and at the European Sociological Association’s conferences in Prague and Lisbon. An opinion article on Regulation and Social Media has been recently published in the online journal Noema, Technology and Society: http://noemalab.eu/ideas/regulation-and-social-media-speed-bumps-or-the-code-2-0/ His engagement with new media started with his participation in the innovative Netmagazine/Magnet in 1996, Italy’s first online magazine, still cited as a significant innovator in interface design. Since graduating from the University of Bologna with a Master’s Degree in New Technology and Integrated Marketing Communication, Antonello has lived and worked in a number of countries, most recently in Cairo, Egypt, where he was a journalist and presenter for Egyptian State Radio and Television, and coordinator of social media strategy for the Italian Institute of Culture. Since 2014 he has been a teaching assistant for the modules Social Media in Theory and Practice, Network Society and the Media, News and Public Opinion, and Internet Cultures. He has given lectures on Social Media and Social Change, News and Social Media, and Regulation and Social Media.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Henrik Bødker Aarhus University

The history of Vice Media Inc. as overlapping and competing temporal patterns The trajectory of Vice Media Inc. — from free youth magazine in Montreal to global, multi-platform media company in Brooklyn — is embedded within overarching temporalities linked to: 1) youth — in terms of media technology and platforms, entrepreneurial spirit and as well as confrontational content, popular music and audiences; 2) maturity — relate to popular culture narratives of fringe, sell-out and mainstream; and 3) death — in relation to conventional journalism and print. This paper approaches these interrelated temporalities through various renderings of a central anecdote, namely the “stand-off” between journalist and media critic David Carr from The New York Times and Vice founders — depicted in the documentary “Page One: Inside the New York Times” (2011). While this, at one level, is an instance of what Carlson (2015) discusses as boundary work within metajournalistic discourses it is simultaneously a more broadly significant event within what Natale (2016) calls “a complex web of narratives [that] constitutes the core of each and every historical media culture”. While all narratives are complex temporal constructions, the ones issued from and surrounding Vice Media Inc. are enmeshed in overlapping and competing temporal trajectories, which foreground what the call for the symposium terms the “temporal character of historical developments in media”. Following this, an unravelling of the history (or histories) of Vice Media Inc. thus highlights how this cannot be fully separated from important cultural and temporal fault lines linked to youth, maturity and death.

Biography Henrik Bødker is Associate Professor, Ph.D. Media and Journalism Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Jo Coleman Birkbeck College

Harking Back to the “Stuff of Reality”:1 the development of a genre This paper is testing the potential for retro-fitting a practice theory framework to study the development of the dramatized documentary genre in radio production. Through listening to a representative sample of such features made over the BBC's lifetime, can we trace how the introduction of new technologies changed how producers approached, and what they achieved with, their medium? Taking for granted clearer audio quality, due to storage and remediation processes, can we deduce how innovations influenced production practices, such as the gathering of raw material, editing strategies or sound design? Production values and aesthetic quality are contingent on the skills, knowledge and structural conditions to which the available technologies are applied, not to mention prevailing industry standards and audience expectations. Will analysing this sample retrospectively reveal shifts in practice? Is it possible to infer how the generally-accepted way of producing dramatized documentary features evolved over time? Immersion through listening does not provide the researcher with grounded experience of the situated acts, activities and interactions involved in production routines and procedures. For this we must seek first-hand accounts of working on BBC features. But can a practice-centric analytical focus be attained from afar, in both spatial and temporal respects? Drawing on Bourdieu, Schatzki, Postill and others, this intellectual exercise aims to illuminate the relationship between agency and technology in the ongoing development of a practice framework for making imaginative radio features.

Biography Jo is currently a graduate student at Birkbeck College in London, working on an MPhil/PhD in the Film, Media and Cultural Studies Department (FMACS). Talk of the Town is a research project into the production practices of local community radio in the UK, through a Practice Theory lens. This practice-based project will also incorporate self-reflexive analysis of her own programme- making in the field. With a degree in Geography from Cambridge University, Jo has worked in radio for nearly thirty years, with experience across all three sectors: commercial, community and the BBC. Following a stint at the National Film and Television School as course coordinator for the MA in Documentary Film-making, she left to study for a Masters in the History of Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck. She was however drawn irresistibly back to the realm of radio for her thesis: Hear Today … Gone Tomorrow: Radio docudrama in the Digital Age.

1 Gilliam, Laurence (Ed.) B.B.C. Features, Evans Brothers Ltd, 1950: 11

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Karin Deckner Berline University of the Arts

Eigenzeit Revisited This presentation focuses on the potential of Helga Nowotny’s theoretical and recently revisited concept of Eigenzeit. An underlying assumption of the paper is that this concept can contribute to empirical studies of the mundane use of ICTs and the perception of time, especially of feelings that are connected with time-pressure or the acceleration of the pace of life. Nowotny’s Eigenzeit (1989) underlines the illusionary nature of the idea of global simultaneity and the temporal dependencies that result from those interactions with technological devices. She points out how technical and therefore economical time overwhelms us and leads to significant changes in our individual perception and allocation of time. The term “Eigenzeit“ describes the urge of individuals to disconnect from the ubiquitiouos time-structure of concurrence and create one´s own time. In 2015 Nowotny briefly revisited the concept with the expanded idea of “mediale Eigenzeit” (2015) by describing the effects of digital possibilities and our allocation and perception of time in a broader context. The difference between artificial, technological and therefore mediated time and human time appears now even tapered and actually more complex. Similiar to Nowotny’s thoughts the effects of the use of ICTs and thereby changed timestructures have - among others - recently been discussed in relation to the question of acceleration (e.g. Rosa 2005, 2016), time-pressure (e.g. Wajcman 2012, 2015) and further the time-pressure-paradox. Mediated time, connected with the use of ICTs, is multilayered, fragmented and polychrone, challenging empirical research in this distinct field. “Mediale Eigenzeit” proposes an elaborated theoretical impulse to be considered as an approach or maybe even as a dispositif for describing circumstances occurring with – and help to understand - the mediatization of time.

Biography Karin Deckner works as a Research Assistant at the Berlin University of the Arts. Her research interests are mainly the interdependency between media and the social structure of time. Besides her work is focused on material culture and the ANT. She is part of the DFGfounded ongoing research project Mediated Time.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Simone Dotto University of Udine

A living reproduction of History: Early phonography as a medium for “real time” communication. Taking cue from Lisa Gitelman’s conception of media as historical subjects, my presentation will investigate the case study of an almost forgotten use of sound recording. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Italian record industry had been serving the patriotic propaganda by publishing the so-called scene dal vero (i.e., “live” or “real scenes”), a genre of spoken, narrative records were often aimed at “re-living” some pivotal moments in recent national history. The staging of past events, performed and re-enacted by theatrical actors in a recording studio, was officially presented by the record companies as audio-chronicles from the First World War front, “a living, real reproduction” of historical facts. Moreover, the scene dal vero were primarily promoted to the Italian immigrants’ communities abroad, since they were supposed to act both as a piece of information and an aural postcard coming from their home country. The paper aims at pinpointing the intersection of two different conception of temporalities: on the one hand, the historical temporality for the way in which it significantly affects and changes our understanding of a medium; on the other hand the temporality addressed by the medium itself. In this case, the enhancing of the “reproductive” features of audio technologies, instead of their potentials as supports for technical inscription or means for archival preservation, confront us with new issues: could the mere fact that these fictional representations had appeared as “reliable documents” for a while suggest us something about how the new medium was received? Was the seemingly “immediate” character of recorded and reproduced voice ever considered a useful trait for making history present? Had an hypothesis of “real time communications of past events” through sound ever surfaced media history? In the attempt of answering these questions, we will try to pave the ground for a new, historically aware, epistemological account of sonic media.

Biography Simone Dotto is a PhD candidate in the Audiovisual programme at the University of Udine. His research project deals with the epistemology of sound recording and broadcasting media and the sonic representations of history during the interwar period in Italy. He has published essays on several italian music and cinema magazines and on national and international academic journals. Since 2016 he has been member of the steering committee of the MAGIS international film studies Spring School in Gorizia and a managing editor of Cinema&Cie. He has recently joined Francesco Federici and Vincenzo Estremo in co-editing of the book series “Cinema and Contemporary Arts” published by Mimesis International.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Michael Evans Museum of Australian Democracy

Distorting Time: simultaneity and media representations of two shipwrecks in colonial Victoria.

Nineteenth century Australian colonies struggled to maintain a sense of a British identity that was underpinned by shared cultural communications, yet undermined by separation in distance and time from Britain. In terms of Benedict Anderson’s work homogeneity was in tension with simultaneity. This tension has received much less attention by Australian historians than has the creation of simultaneity within Australia through new media and communications technologies. In this paper, I focus on the problem of simultaneity by exploring media representation of two disasters that convulsed the colony of Victoria in 1859.

In August, 1859 the steamship Admella was wrecked on a submerged reef close to the border with South Australia, while in October the auxiliary steamship Royal Charter, travelling from Melbourne, was wrecked on the Welsh coast. In Victoria media treatment of these two disasters differed significantly. The Admella disaster unfolded over a week as attempts were made to rescue survivors, with electric telegraph reports published almost in real time. News of the loss of the Royal Charter, on the other hand, was received in a compressed and much delayed form via ship- delivered mails. These differing media representations distorted perceptions of time and affected both personal experience and communal memory of both disasters.

The juxtaposition of these contrasting media representations provides an almost unique opportunity to explore the interaction of media, communication technologies and time in the nineteenth century and, I argue, exposes the need for increased attention to the lived experience of time and for a more nuanced understanding of the notion of simultaneity.

Biography Michael Evans is Head of Content Development and Learning at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House in Canberra. An historian by training, with an MA (Public History), Michael has worked in museums throughout Australia and New Zealand. In almost all his positions Michael has advocated the presentation and interpretation of nineteenth century colonial cultures in museum contexts. His current work on cultural repertoires of disaster in nineteenth century Victoria has grown out of earlier work on response to disasters and accidents on the Victorian goldfields. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Dion Georgiou King’s College London

Time after Time: temporality, narrative and high school reunions and flashbacks in 1990s American film and television This paper considers the place of the literal and imagined return to high school as a plot device in the Hollywood films Beautiful Girls (1996), Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997), and Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), the made-for-TV movie Since You've Been Gone (1998), and the television series Friends (1994–2004). It is concerned with the high school reunion and flashback as both content and form. The ritualistic revisiting of and working through adolescent traumas by characters whose passage through the lifecycle had subsequently been somehow retarded became a widely recognisable and relatable theme. At the same time, it constituted an integral generic plot device: the reunion as crisis-cum-resolution that protagonists must negotiate and which drives the plot forward; the frequently co-present flashback which both interrupts narrative linearity and facilitates character and plot development. Combining textual and intertextual readings of the films and programmes in question with analysis of the structures and agents involved in their production and dissemination and of the receptions they provoked, this paper argues that they functioned as chronotopes. It examines how they built upon much of the long- emergent social and technological infrastructure of nostalgia and revival – the high school reunion; the television repeat; the home video; the camcorder; Web 1.0 – which by the 1990s were fuelling reformulations of conceptions of the lifecycle specifically and temporality more generally.

Biography Dr Dion Georgiou is a Research Assistant in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London, as well as teaching in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent, in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, and in School of Arts and Digital Industries at the University of East London. He previously completed a PhD at Queen Mary on suburban street carnivals in Edwardian London in 2016, has had articles published in The London Journal, Sport in History and Urban History, and is co-editor of Sport and Other Leisure Industries: Historical Perspectives (2017).

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Natalia Grincheva University of Melbourne

Crowdsourcing national memory The project will draw on the conceptual framework of French critical philosopher Bernard Stiegler (2008), who explored the technologies of human consciousness manipulation in his seminal series, Techniques and Time. According to Stiegler, the mechanisms that are in place in the reconstruction of human experiences through interaction within digital networks can be explained by the ability of digital communication to represent the pasts of others while being in the present for an individual. As a result, history, traditions, and communities can be “instrumentalized” and transmitted, building a collective memory which has strong political implications. My project will explore these political implications of reconstructing time and memory through an empirical analysis of the Singapore Memory Project (SMP). SMP is an online national initiative for public memory preservation, facilitated by the National Libraries and Museums Board in 2011 to collect and provide access to Singapore’s culture to tell the “Singapore Story” through the voices of ordinary people in the live stream of their shared memories. The recreation of the cultural past is an important political task for Singapore. Being a young country, the government strives to establish the country’s legitimacy through representations of evidence of its very existence in time, as this brings more leverage when negotiating identity and interests with various parties in the global context. Crowdsourcing techniques, involving ordinary people in recreating national memory, appears to be a quite sophisticated technology of manipulating the construct of time within the national consciousness. Drawing on the case study of several SMP’s online campaigns. My research will reveal the power dynamics between the national memory portal and its audiences. Digital ethnographic research on the SMP online audiences and their behaviour will help to understand whether digital forms of communication can become powerful tools of changing publics’ perceptions of time and construction of collective memory.

Biography Dr. Natalia Grincheva is a Research Fellow at the Transformative Technologies Research Unit at the University of Melbourne. Focusing on new museology and social media technologies, she conducts research on “diplomatic” uses of new media by the largest internationally recognized museums in North America, Europe, Russia and South Asia. Currently she is working on her monograph “Online Museums as Sites of Digital Diplomacy.”

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Maren Hartmann Berlin University of the Arts

Momentum and the longue duree – temporality in (mobile) media theorisations The starting point for this contribution is the question of what is missing in theorisations of mobilities and mobile media. One answer to this question is simply ‘temporality’. In order to begin to add these missing parts to this theorisation, two (more or less) well-established temporal concepts will be reflected upon and combined in this contribution. Additionally, they will then be added to the aforementioned theorisation. The first of these two is French historian Fernand Braudel’s often quoted concept of the longue duree – an emphasis on historical change that is not event-based, but rather long-term and sometimes near-invisible. This concept, so the claim of this paper, is helpful when we regard media developments – or rather the use of (mobile) media. It offers an emphasis on the differing pace of historical and technological change, but also on different paces of adoption and appropriation. The second concept – momentum – is a rather different one. It combines an eventual character with a notion of growth and emphasizes the processual character of media uptake and use. Taken in combination, these two concepts help to underline the simultaneous as well as successive developments of mobile media uptake, while also helping to underline immobilities and all kinds of processes that are not only not one- directional, but especially have different temporalities that are all too often not regarded.

Biography Maren Hartmann is professor for media and communication sociology at the Berlin University of the Arts. She has worked at several universities in Germany, Belgium and the UK. Her recent research focuses on mobile media and mobilities, media and time, notions of home and homelessness.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Ekatarina Kalinina Södertörn University

Time of Nostalgia: Archive and Civic Engagement While scholars have recognised that emotions play a central role in mobilization processes and identity construction, nostalgia has been overlooked as a potential affect capable of various forms of political mobilisation. Building on Ann Cvetkovich's (2003) and Lauren Berlant's (2010) theories of archive as affective political practice, I aim to analyse nostalgia’s potential for civic engagement by focusing on temporality of mediated and media nostalgia manifested in practices of archiving as both preceding and constituting actions of civic engagement. The case study suggested for scrutiny is comprised of the analysis of two digital archives, which contents form a collection of affective descriptions and imagery of urban environments and old media that are no longer present. First, I conceptualise the digital archives as communities of feeling that invoke the nation as a community based on affective connections (i.e., an intimate public), emphasising “affective and emotional attachments located in fantasies of the common, the everyday, and a sense of ordinariness” (Berlant 2008, p. 11). Second, I propose analysing temporality in these archives as affective time or time of feelings as proposed by Ann Cvetkovich(2003). Third, I move on to ethnographic study of the role of nostalgic emotion to civic engagement where I put the main emphasis on temporality of nostalgic experience in relation to the temporality of the political engagement.

Biography. Ekatarina Kalinina is Senior Lecturer, Department of Media and Communication, Södertörn University (Sweden). Board member International media and nostalgia network https://medianostalgia.org. Latest publications include: Kalinina, E. and Menke, M. (2016). Negotiating the past in hyperconnected memory cultures: Post-Soviet nostalgia and national identity in Russian online communities. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 12 (1), pp. 57–72. Kalinina, E. (2016). Narratives of Russia’s “Information Wars”. Politics in Central Europe, 12(1), pp. 147-165. doi:10.1515/pce-2016-0008. Kalinina, E. (2016). The Flow of Nostalgia: Experiencing Television from the Past. International Journal of Communication, 10, pp. 5324 - 5341. Available at:

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Anne Kaun & Staffan Ericson Södertörn University

Media Times: Mediating Time and Temporalizing Media Time-mediating technologies such as calendars, clocks, and diaries link the individual, lived experience of time to a shared sense of time as well as to natural temporal cycles. Besides making a temporal experience possible in the first place, media add social aspects to temporal mediation, giving rise to what has previously been described as logistical affordances of synchronization or forms of common public time. The proposed paper draws on the outcomes of the Scandinavian research network Mediatization Times, which, over the course of three years, has discussed theoretical approaches toward and empirical investigations of temporal aspects of mediatization. More particularly it presents two case studies that discuss media times and times of the media. Looking at the pre- and post-history of television, the first study engages with Ingmar Bergman’s television adaptations of dramatist August Strindberg and explores various thematic and formal expressions of temporality in both plays and the specificities of television. The type of historicity involved in the claim that art may anticipate oncoming media technology is related to Walter Benjamin’s notion of pre- and post- history. The second case study is dedicated to the temporal changes of the archive related to the media technologies employed in archiving practices. Empirically it draws on (self-)archiving of protest movements of the dispossessed since the 1930s and compares changes in the media-related temporalities over time. Combining these two investigations allows to address three major fields of inquiry that are related to the discussion of media and time: (a) time, history, and memory; (b) liveness, presence, and simultaneity; and (c) cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken), infrastructures, and Eigenzeit.

Biographies Anne Kaun is an associate professor in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research is concerned with media and political activism and the role of technology for political participation from a historical perspective. Anne holds degrees from Örebro University and Södertörn University, Sweden (PhD) and the University of Leipzig, Germany (MA).

Staffan Ericson is an associate professor in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. Between 2006 and 2009 Ericson and Patrik Åker headed "Media Houses" (Östersjöstiftelsen), a multidisciplinary reseach project on the interrealtions of media and architecture, resulting in Ericson & Riegert: Media Houses. Architecture. Media and the Production of Centrality (2010, Peter Lang). From 2010, Ericson is heading "The Times of Television" (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond), a project on television, temporality and historiography, and is also a member of the six year research program "Time, Memory and Representation" (RJ, headed by Hans Ruin).

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Paul Long Birmingham City University

Recorded Music, Time and History The voice sings: Some of these days You'll miss me, honey

“Someone must have scratched the record at that spot because it makes an odd noise. And there is something that clutches the heart: the melody is absolutely untouched by this tiny coughing of the needle on the record […] behind these sounds which decompose from day to day, peel off and slip towards death, the melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness.” Sartre, Nausea

Popular song is often associated with memory practice, conveying and employed in reflections on time and history. Personal and collective in nature, some of this is evoked in songs such as: ‘Let’s Twist Again’ (…Like We Did Last Summer)’; ‘Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio?’; ‘Summer of ‘69’; ‘December 1963 (Oh What a Night)’; or ‘In My Life’. In popular music, the song lyric is an obvious means of referring to the past, of what happened, where and when it happened as well as capturing the moment of recollection. Nonetheless, memory, history and time are not only conveyed in song lyrics but also in the soundscapes of music compositions and recordings, for instance in direct quotation, samples, and pastiche and of course in cover versions. Recordings are themselves experienced as two or three minutes in time. They are also material referents for time and historical moments – the point at which they were first popular and/or when we first heard them (which may not be the same thing). This paper explores these ideas in terms of the temporality of recorded music. Beyond a mnemonic for an affective reverie or nostalgia, how does listening to (or other encounters with), the creative sounds of the past - classical, jazz, pop, instrumental and vocal - situate us in relation to the historical and as evocation of pastness and indeed perceptions and experiences of time?

Biography Paul Long is Professor of Media and Cultural History at Birmingham City University and Director of the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. He has written and published widely on aspects of popular music history and heritage and lately co-curated the exhibition 'Is There Anyone Out There?' Documenting Birmingham's Alternative Music Scene 1986-1990’.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

James Mansell Nottingham University

At Nine O’clock: The Big Ben Silent Minute In 1940 BBC radio began what was to become a nightly broadcasting ritual: a full broadcast of the chimes of Big Ben at nine p.m. The broadcast, which preceded the evening news, took just over one minute to complete and was announced in the daily ‘Radio Times’ listings as the ‘Big Ben Minute’. The idea was that, each evening, radio listeners would pause and listen in silence. Promoted by a specially-convened organisation known as the ‘Big Ben Council’ the minute was intended as an opportunity for silent reverence and prayer. In particular, it was hoped that listeners would use the opportunity to think of their loved ones fighting away from home. The Minute was broadcast on the Armed Forces service so that these positive thoughts could be reciprocated around the world. The minute was explicitly religious: it had the backing of all the major religious leaders and was supported by a group of religiously-inclined Conservative Party MPs associated with the Toc-H Christian movement. The BBC was not keen on losing a precious minute of prime time broadcasting and thought that it was already providing enough religious content. The personal intervention of Churchill himself persuaded the Director General to give it his blessing. This paper will consider the role of the Big Ben Silent Minute as an auditory beacon of nation and Empire during the Second World War. The ritual was adopted outside of Britain, for example in New Zealand, and provides the opportunity for interesting reflection on the temporalities and auralities of Empire. In addition, however, the religious origins of the Minute give pause for reflection on the nature of secularisation in British public life. Not only does the Minute expose the explicitly religious underpinnings of the ‘People’s War’, but it was also based on the ideas of a prominent mystic, Wellesley Tudor Pole, whose ideas about sonic vibration, the power of thought and prayer, and about the spiritual forces at work in the war cause us to question our usual narratives about modern time and modern sound. The paper will open up new possibilities for interpreting what Tudor Pole himself described as the ‘spiritual front’ in the Second World War.

Biography James G. Mansell is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of ‘The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity’ and co-editor of ‘The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit’.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Manuel Menke University of Augsburg

What social sciences can bring to the table: Memory and history under changing communicative conditions of public sphere(s)

Social sciences increasingly turn to memory and history in their endeavour to investigate dynamics of change and continuity in modern societies. Yet, in return there is little effort to enrich conceptualizations of memory and history with theoretical contributions from social sciences, let alone from media and communication studies, that would allow to (diachronically) understand how the conditions under which memory and history are produced and negotiated do shape the construction and usage of the past today. One example is the neglect of models of public sphere that could add vastly to understanding the communicative conditions under which memory and history are negotiated in societies saturated with mass media as well as numerous ICTs. Hence, the talk will outline how these conditions changed from the 20th century mass media public sphere(s) to the 21st century digital public sphere(s) in regard to their influence on what societies and their citizens (can) do with memory and history to collectively negotiate cultural and societal change. One major development to elaborate on is how personal memories that have previously mainly been ingrained in the communicative memory of personal lifeworld networks now do enter public discourses within online communities where they contribute to bottom up narratives about the past entangled with history and broader collective memories. Furthermore, such online communities establish their own temporal anchors connected to the decisive moments defining their collective identities. I would like to discuss with the symposium participants how models of (digital) public sphere(s) can potentially help us to investigate the temporal (de-)synchronization of memory and history resulting from a fragmentation of public sphere(s).

Biography Manuel Menke (born 1985) is research and teaching assistant at the Department for Media, Knowledge and Communication (imwk) at the University of Augsburg, Germany. From 2004 to 2011 he studied communication and politics at the Universities of Mainz and Bamberg, Germany. He is young scholar representative for the ECREA Communication History Section and the German Young Scholars Network for Communication History (NAKOGE). He is also in the founding team of the International Media and Nostalgia Network (IMNN). His research interests are (theories of) social and media change, media and nostalgia, memory and narratives in media and public sphere(s) and journalism research.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Teke Ngomba and Henrik Bødker Aarhus University

Media, Memory and Time: Mediated Narratives of Remembrance and Re-appreciation of VHS and Vinyl

In July 2016, Funai Electric, the last known company still manufacturing videocassette recorders, announced that it would manufacture its last VHS player at the end of July 2016. A series of ‘Rest in Peace VHS’ news reports, often with narratives of personal memories of the VHS, followed this announcement. The announced ‘death’ of the VHS contrasted sharply with reports few months later, that the hitherto ‘dead’ vinyl, was experiencing a surprising revival. In an October 2016 report aptly titled: ‘A new groove: How millennials are warping the vinyl industry’, The Economist wrote that although vinyl ‘evokes another time’, it remains ‘a potent force in our current musical climate of streaming and digital downloads. 2015 marked the tenth straight year of growth in the market…Even more surprisingly, the biggest-selling audio device (aside from the iPhone) of that year was not handsfree headphones or Bluetooth speakers but the humble turntable.’ These news reports and mediated personal narratives about the ‘death’ of VHS and the ‘re-birth’ of vinyl are rich discourses in which perceptions of media, materiality, identity and time are intricately interwoven. Drawing on insights related to ‘biographies of the media’ (Natale), music and materiality (Straw and Bodker), taste cultures (Gans), constructions of authenticity (Negus) and journalism and memory (Zelizer) we examine the individual, social, cultural and political narratives that permeate the memories and re-appreciation of these non-mobile media technologies. The wider goal of this is to advance our understanding of how we relate to mediated content through changing media materialities and how this is inscribed within the meaning and status ascribed to these technologies within the complex temporalities of media history.

Biographies Henrik Bødker, PhD. is Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Journalism Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. His current research focuses on the temporalities and circulation of journalism as well as on magazines, globalization and cosmopolitanism.

Teke Ngomba, Ph.D. is Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Journalism Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research in the fields of journalism and media studies; political communication and communication and social change has been published in several international peer-reviewed journals.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Lars Nyre University of Bergen

Three platforms for time: A history of recorded, live and predictive sound. There is a strong link between technology and time. There are time-keeping tools like the calendar, the bell tower and the wrist watch, and there are time-transportation infrastructures like the telegraph, radio and recording. The latter were made to transport ongoing events at microphones through live transmission or recording media, and present them for listeners in completely different situations. It is generally accepted that there are only two platforms for time transport in technological communication; namely live transmission and recordings. However, a hundred years of accumulation of material functions and network complexity has led to the emergence of third, remarkable time platform; predictive, synchronous sound. The speech software Siri by Apple is a striking example. Voice sounds can be generated in the specific situation of each user, as support, augmentation and accompaniment. Theoretically, the analysis presented here explains the developments towards predictive sound by identifying a certain sequence of events in history. For example, there is an accumulation of quickness and precision in the production of sound. The article explains the most significant technological steps in the history of sound media from their inception in the 1870s, and supports the claim that we can now see the contours of a third platform for time. The approach adopted here can be considered a form of soft determinism (Heilbroner, Heidegger).

Biography Lars Nyre is a Professor of New Media at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Norway. Nyre is the author of Sound Media (Routledge, 2008).

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Edward Owens University of Lincoln

Monarchy, Mass Media and Time Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz argue that broadcasts of royal family events work to reinforce the status quo: they ‘integrate societies in a collective heartbeat and evoke a renewal of loyalty to the society and its legitimate authority’.2 This interpretation of the impact of royal media events continues to exert a powerful influence on the way communications theorists and historians have approached the effects of royal ritual in the modern British context. However, inadequate attention has been paid to the way media audiences have received and internalized the sounds and images they have consumed through their radio and television sets during royal events. Drawing on my recent research on the emotional dimensions of live royal broadcasts in the years 1932 to 1953, I will argue in this paper that the temporal simultaneity – the sharing of time among a people – created during media events of this kind has been crucial in imaginatively uniting the national community. Personal testimonies written about live royal broadcasts reveal how these new kinds of mass media transformed listeners’ and viewers’ social identities. Audience members expressed a strong sense of emotional identification not only with the royal protagonists at the centre of the event, but also with the national collective which they imagined united around the broadcast.

Biography Edward Owens is a lecturer in modern British history at the University of Lincoln. His current research project examines the relationship between the monarchy, mass media, and public in the period 1932 to 1953. He is interested in how new media technologies helped create a more informal, intimate style of royalty which appealed to popular sensibilities. He is also interested in the way media audiences have forged emotional bonds with public figures and the implications these relationships had on cultures of celebrity, citizenship, and national identity. He has published articles on these topics having completed his doctoral research at the University of Manchester in 2015 under the supervision of Professor Frank Mort and Dr Max Jones.

2 D. Dayan & E. Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (London, 1994), 9.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Stuart Poyntz and Frederik Lesage Simon Fraser University

Caring time and the nation in a digital media era: The Tragically Hip and the constitution of national temporalities In an era of global communication and transportation infrastructures, digital media technologies and practices are among the care structures that constitute everyday, ordinary experience. Such technologies and practices are vital components within the relational totality of involvements that now make up the conditions and resources we use to become who and what we are. In this way, care structures are the constituent elements of the umwelt or roundabout-me world that enable one to be a particular human. Our media technologies and practices reveal this in the way they shape how we speak and act with others, how we respond and become responsive to the world. Patty Scannel captures elements of this process in un-concealing how liveness now operates for communication subjects in his 2014 text, Television and the meaning of ‘live’: An enquiry into the human situation. In this paper, we extend Scannel’s Heideggerian conception of care through a concept of reification drawn from Lukacs and Feenberg and use this framework to examine the Tragically Hip’s final ‘Man Machine Poet’ concert in the summer of 2016. The event was broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in a special commercial-free presentation carried live on radio and TV and streamed live online via the CBC's website, apps, YouTube channel and Facebook page. It marked the legendary band’s final tour concert due to the lead signer’s very public terminal illness and reached an estimated 11.7 million viewers on the evening of the broadcast. We will use this event as a test case for reflecting on the particularities of digital modes of communication and how they are used to produce caring time for the contemporary nation.

Biographies Stuart R. Poyntz is Associate Dean (FCAT) and Associate Professor, School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. His research addresses children’s media cultures, phenomenology and theories of the public and urban youth media production. He has published three books and is currently Principal Investigator of the research project, Youthsites: Charting the informal arts learning sectors in Canada and the UK. His work can also be found in various international and national journals (Journal of Children and Media, Cultural Studies, the Journal of Youth Studies, the Media Education Research Journal, and the Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies) and edited collections.

Frederik Lesage is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. His current research interests include the vernacular in digital media cultures. His most recent work is focused on document the cultural biography of consumer-driven creative digital tools like Photoshop. Frederik is the co-author (with Peter Zuurbier) of a book titled Masamune’s Blade: A proposition for dialectic affect research published by Peter Lang. He has also contributed to edited books and academic journals including Fibreculture, the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media and Convergence.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Elizabeth Prommer University of Rostock

Blending time and mobile media use: ‘Always on’ or polychrone use patterns? Globalization and the introduction of networked and mobile digital media have altered our media environments dramatically. Former borders and boundaries are blurring and even dissolving. We speak of cross media, to describe the different platforms a media text can be produced for, we talk of media convergence, when different media are combined on one device and we define hybrid genres. But there is still a lack of concept for the audience activities in these borderless environments. Do the audiences develop new polychrone modes of reception (Prommer 2012) or are they just simply ‘always on’ (Knop et al 2015)? While media was formerly characterized through its primarily linear program and time structure, things have changed: we can use media anytime and anyplace. Does this lead to a digital blend of media use and what happens to our concept of time? Mobile media use has changed the concept of working and leisure time. We can now work anytime and anywhere, just as we can post a private blog on facebook during office hours. But also former distinctions between media genres and technologies, mainly used either for working or for leisure, such as television as leisure and the typewriter for work, have blended into one device and blurred the former boundaries. Until now, the blurring in term of space has often been a central concern, i.e. the change in spatial structures (public vs. semi-public vs. private, work vs. leisure). The question is, however, whether mobile communication technologies lead not only to the creation of new concepts of space, but also to new and different forms of time and its use and appropriation. The paper will reveal that this transgression of boundaries has changed our modes of media use and media reception. With this process negative concerns have appeared: some authors state that by being permanently online we kill our free time voluntary (Castells 1997) or speed up our life time. Rosa (2013) coined the phrase of social acceleration due to digital media: ICT accelerates the increasing shortage of time, as a consequence of this the average person feels more stressed instead of less. Paradoxically while digital media helps us reduce time and space, it also tends to stress us. By discussing theoretical concepts of time combining these with media use concepts and data from a recent study about polychronic media use, this paper will point out, that polychronic media use leads to new ritualized media use, where multitasking, and compression creates timeless time (Castells, 1997) or what we call: “Mediated Time”.

Biography Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Prommer; professor and chair for communication and media studies, at the University of Rostock Germany. Contact: [email protected]; +49 381 498-2718. She heads the German Research Foundation (DFG) Project “Mediated Time” together with Prof. Dr. Maren Hartmann, Berlin University of Arts.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Maria Rikitianskaia and Gabriele Balbi Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano

Internationalization of Time: Wireless Telegraphy and Time Signals in the 1910s The paper discusses the application of wireless technology to time synchronization at the beginning of the 20th century. This relation between time signals and wireless telegraphy reveals important issues in pre-history of radio broadcasting and perception of time in historical perspective. First, wireless was an essential infrastructure for time synchronization. From 1912, when the International Time Conference inaugurated the network of signaling stations with the Eiffel tower, wireless eliminated deviations in clock synchronization and transformed a perception of time, making it international. Second, radio time signals brought forward the development of wireless and changed the pattern of radio transmission: they became one of the first widely accepted forms of radio broadcasting as a form of infotainment. Third, some users reused the international time brought by wireless in indirect ways, for example applying it to aviation, meteorology, and seismology, therefore expanding wireless influence from time-space compression to different scientific and technologic domains. The research is based on the research into primary sources of the International Telecommunication Union, International Time Conference, Bureau des Longitudes, radio amateurs' magazines. This paper analyses this correlation between wireless and time signals that had significant political, social and economic consequences, both for national landscapes and from the transnational point of view.

Biographies Maria Rikitianskaia is a Ph.D. student and research assistant at the Institute of Media and Journalism of Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Lugano, Switzerland. At the University of Lugano, her research topic is the cultural history of media in the period of 1903-1927, with a particular focus on the transnational perspective on the prehistory of radio broadcasting.

Gabriele Balbi is Assistant Professor in Media Studies at USI-Università della Svizzera Italiana, where he is Vice and Study Dean and director of the China Media Observatory at the Faculty of Communication Sciences. He teaches courses in media history and sociology of mass communication and his main areas of research are communication history and, specifically, history of telecommunications. He wrote four books, several book chapters and articles for historical and communication journals on these topics.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Pedro Telles da Silveira Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Microtemporalities of new media and historical time: notes towards the development of a time-based critique of media formats SOPA and PIPA protests on January 18, 2012 after the US Congress having taken measures against online piracy showed not only the power of the Internet giants but also something about the flux of time in contemporary society. Going offline for a day, some hours, minutes or even seconds illustrated the sheer amount of data traffic on the Web, and the impact these small timescales have on a broader context. One could say the same happens with high-speed trading or in social media platforms like Snapchat or media formats like .gif. New media, being computer based, unfolds time so that even a second contains enough information for minutes, hours or days. This points, albeit indirectly, to a confluence of what German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst calls the macrotemporality of social life and the microtemporality of data processing. This also challenges accounts of historical temporality, social transformation and human agency based on grand timescales, such as the longue durée scheme proposed by Fernand Braudel. What the examples above show is the blurring of the differences between the three times of history as it moves towards the microtemporality of new media. In this way, another layer of time needs to be added, one that straddles the continuum between difference and repetition set in motion by the modularity of new media. Through this set of questions, this paper asks what does new media brings to historical time and what is needed for the development of a time-based historical critique of media formats?

Biography Pedro Telles da Silveira is a graduate student at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil, where he studies the theoretical implications of digital history and of the impact of new media and digital technologies on historical writing. His main research interests include new media, digital history, digital humanities, and theory of history, through which he tries to understand the history of historical writing and the experience of time throughout history. His former research interests included also Renaissance historiography and seventeenth-century Brazilian historical writing. For more info and a sample of the author’s writings, see https://ufrgs.academia.edu/PedroSilveira

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Michael Skey Loughborough University

Media and the representation of community across time

This paper challenges Anderson’s seminal argument that communities are to be distinguished by the style in which they are imagined. Instead, it focuses on the particular role of media in representing different types of communities as (more or less) unified, coherent and homogenous entities across time. Beginning with an overview of debates in social psychology around the key concepts of entitativity and perceived collective continuity, the extent to which a group is perceived as an entity that moves through time, the first part of the paper then looks to connect these discussion with approaches in media and cultural theory that emphasise the ways in which media create relatively stable and familiar frameworks for making sense of the world. The second part builds on these arguments by using empirical data to show how a particular form of community, the nation, is consistently represented, performed and discussed as if it was a concrete entity. Using the case of Britain, the analysis focuses on two key temporal dimensions of this process. First, a content analysis of newspaper, radio and television reporting explores the routine and consistent ways in which the nation is flagged on a daily basis. Second, through an investigation of both the range and style of reporting during a period of collective effervescence, in this case the 2012 Olympic Games. Here, it is argued that it is the relationship between these banal and ecstatic forms that contributes to a popular understanding of the world as composed of discrete nations with their own territories, histories and cultures.

Biography Michael Skey is a lecturer in communication and media at Loughborough University. He was previously a lecturer in media and cultural studies at University of East Anglia and has also taught sociology at UEL and University of Leicester. His research interests are in the areas of; national belonging, globalisation, sociology of everyday life, media events and rituals, mediatization, sport and discourse theory.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Thomas Sutherland University of Lincoln

The temporal lag and latency of media theory For many scholars, one of the greatest frustrations of media studies as a discipline is its inability to keep pace with the rapid rate of technological change and constant accumulation of data that we experience under the conditions of the network society. Our inability as researchers to do anything other than lag behind what Régis Debray describes as ‘a techno-scientific process of becoming that is ever-accelerated (by the increasingly close union of research and development)’, along with an accordant proliferation of information (most obvious in the realm of social media) is typically presented as a problem that must be overcome, often through the renunciation of theoretical reflection in favour of up-to-the-minute empirical observation and data-mining. In decided contrast to such perspectives, I wish to propose in this paper that media theory might be conceptualized instead as an antidote to this incessant becoming, reframing its congenital incapacity to keep speed with its objects of study as a virtue rather than a fault. At a time when media architectures are driven primarily by a ceaseless process of accumulation and recycling of information that breaks down any barrier between the past and the present, dynamically generating new content on the basis of its ever-expanding archives, I will argue that an important alternative model for considering the historical concerns of media is proffered in the discrete past-qua-past afforded to us through the measured (but not at all stagnant) pace of theoretical cogitation. The media theorist, I propose, might be understood as Nietzsche once understood the philosopher: as a ‘brakeshoe on the wheel of time’.

Biography Thomas Sutherland is a Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Lincoln. He previously received his PhD in the Media and Communications programme at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

MEDIA AND TIME BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Espen Ytreberg University of Oslo

Mediated simultaneities and the 1914 Oslo Centenary Jubilee Exhibition

The Great Exhibitions were pervasively mediated events. They were also events of crowd communication on an unprecedented scale. These two aspects of the exhibitions provide different intakes to understanding simultaneity, a key theme of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the heyday of the Great Exhibitions. In media-historical research following theorists such as Stephen Kern and John B. Thompson, the experience of mediated simultaneity has primarily been seen as a function of the much-discussed ability of certain media to impart a sense of vicarious presence with an event as it takes place. The paper argues that mediated simultaneity can also vitally depend on the physical movement of people and information along networks of communication. In the case of the Great Exhibitions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, technologies of transport and media representation went together in allowing the great exhibition crowds a sense of simultaneity with the event. The paper’s conceptual discussions are illustrated via the case of the Centenary Jubilee Exhibition held in Oslo in 1914. Analysis is based on visual and print material from the Exhibition, as well as on the comprehensive newspaper coverage. This exhibition was considerably smaller in scale than those held in the major European and American cities, but it was constructed on the template provided by them, including the vital role played by media. A wide-ranging ensemble of media acted as exhibits, as promotors and legitimisers of the exhibitions, as arenas for discussing them, and as archives guaranteeing their role for posterity. The paper’s analyses of the Oslo exhibition concentrates on cases where media facilitated the gathering and movement of crowds, while at the same time providing a wider audience with ongoing and simultaneous coverage of the event. The roles of booklet guides, post cards and the designated fair guide are examined, as is the way crowds were managed via media on the day of the exhibition’s opening.

Biography Espen Ytreberg is Professor of Media Studies at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. He has recently published on issues of media and temporality among other in Media Culture & Society, Media History and the International Journal of Communication. His current research concerns media event theory and historical media events in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.