Intermediality and Media Change
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INTERMEDIALITY AND MEDIA CHANGE JUHA HERKMAN TAISTO HUJANEN PAAVO OINONEN (eds.) INTERMEDIALITY AND MEDIA CHANGE Copyright 2012 Tampere University Press ja tekijät Bookshop TAJU Street Address: Kalevantie 5 P.O.Box 617 33014 University of Tampere tel. +358 40 190 9800 fax +358 3 2159009 [email protected] www.uta.fi/taju http://granum.uta.fi Layout / Page design Maaret Kihlakaski Cover Mikko Reinikka ISBN 978-951-44-8962-4 (print) ISBN 978.951-44- 8963-1 (pdf) Tampereen Yliopistopaino Oy – Juvenes Print Tampere 2012 Contents Acknowledgements .............................................................. 7 Juha Herkman 1. Introduction: Intermediality as a Theory and Methodology ....................................... 10 I ABOUT MEDIA AND MEDIATION: RELEVANCE OF THE CONCEPT OF A MEDIUM .. 29 Mikko Lehtonen 2. Media: One or Many? ..................................................... 31 Arild Fetveit 3. The Concept of Medium in the Digital Era ..................... 45 Raimo Salokangas 4. The Media – Material for Historical Studies, and a Research Object ... 72 II INTERMEDIALITY IN DISCOURSES ABOUT MEDIA CHANGE ...................... 91 Taisto Hujanen 5. The Discursive Transformation of Television and the Paradox of Audiovisualisation .......... 93 Hannu Salmi 6. Intermediality in the Visions of ‘World Television’ in the 1970s: A Cultural Historical Approach .................. 118 Seppo Kangaspunta and Taisto Hujanen 7. Intermediality in User’s Discourses about Digital Television ................................................... 145 III INTERMEDIAL ANALYSES OF MEDIA CHANGE .. 171 Paavo Oinonen 8. Intermedial Hosting in the Making: A Case from Finnish 1960s Television ............................. 173 Maiju Kannisto 9. Dancing with the Media: Finnish Case Study of Intermedial Strategies in the Media Event ................... 193 Marko Ala-Fossi 10. Digital Divergence of Terrestrial Broadcasting Systems in Europe .................................... 214 IV CHANGE OF MEDIA INSTITUTIONS AND PROFESSIONS: CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES ......... 243 Kauko Pietilä 11. Professional Journalism: An Intermediary Social Practice ..................................... 245 Eeva Mäntymäki 12. Does the Medium Matter? Network Journalism Meets Professional Practice and Ethics ........................... 266 Alan G. Stavitsky 13.’Notional Public Radio’: Intermedial Change in U.S. Public Radio ...................... 286 Authors ............................................................................... 303 Acknowledgements This book grew up and was developed through research and coopera- tion that was funded by the Academy of Finland for the period 2008- 2010 in a project titled From Convergence to Intermediality: Continuity and Change in the Development of Finnish Media (INTERMEDIA Project). The project site was the former Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Tampere, now the School of Communication, Media & Theatre. The research team in Tampere consisted of the project leader Taisto Hujanen along with Marko Ala- Fossi, Seppo Kangaspunta and Eeva Mäntymäki. The team included also members from two other Finnish universities, Juha Herkman from the University of Helsinki (Department of Communication) along with Maiju Kannisto, Paavo Oinonen, and Hannu Salmi from the University of Turku (Department of Cultural History). The project organized a series of consultations, seminars and workshops that contributed to the collection of articles in this book. We would first like to thank Professor Sandra Braman in the Depart- ment of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for consultations with the research team in May 2008 in the connection of her visit to Tampere. For the next, in May 2009, we held a seminar at the University of Turku about the construction and challenges of media authorship in the context of intermediality, which raised ques- tions about changing professional identities and the need to critically reflect on the institutional forms and traditions of vocational and academic training in the field. This book was initiated in the context of two events in autumn 2010: the project work shop titled Convergence vs. Intermediality: How to Approach Media Change, held at the University of Tampere, and a consequent panel at the 3rd European Communication Conference (ECREA2010) in Hamburg. To complement the research team we invited two Nordic colleagues, Arild Fetveit (University of Copenha- gen) and Eli Skogerbø (University of Oslo), and one American scholar, Alan G. Stavitsky (University of Oregon), to contribute. We want to thank Eli for her involvement in our work shop and for chairing the panel in ECREA2010; Arild for contribution to the work shop and the consequent panel at ECREA as well as for an article in the book; and Al for contribution to the work shop and the current book. Two members of the Advisory Board, Professor Mikko Lehtonen and Professor Gregory F. Lowe, both from University of Tampere (Department of Journalism and Mass Communication), acted as commentators in the project work shop in autumn 2010. Mikko elaborated his work shop contribution to an article in our book, and we also owe thanks to him for opening our eyes to intermediality in his earlier writings. Greg has been an important support in the management of the project, and he also assisted in language edition of some texts for the book. Another important event which led to several articles in the book was the panel which our project organised in the Broadcast Education Association’s conference in Las Vegas in spring 2010 (BEA2010). The panel entitled European Public Service Media in the Digital Age: Trans- forming Content and Identity was initiated and organized together with Professor Alan G. Stavitsky, then Director of the George S. Turnbull Portland Center, University of Oregon School of Journalism and Com- munication, and chaired by Professor Joseph D. Straubhaar, University of Texas at Austin. In addition to three members of the Intermedia research team, Marko Ala-Fossi, Taisto Hujanen, Eeva Mäntymäki, the Finnish contributors to the panel included Tuija Aalto, then Head of New Media Services in the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE). We will always remember the trouble and anger caused by the eruption of Eyafjallajökull on Iceland for our return flights. Two articles in the book were handpicked from outside the above networks to fill in gaps in our own work. One deals with media his- tory and is authored by Professor Raimo Salokangas, the University of Jyväskylä; the other is about journalism as an intermediary social practice and is authored by Docent Kauko Pietilä, the University of Tampere. We thank them both for important contributions and for a smooth and quick integration into the team spirit. Finally, we would like to thank Tampere University Press for publishing this book and for offering a highly qualified peer review of the manuscript. In Tampere, November 1st, 2012, on behalf of the Intermedia research team and editors of the book Taisto Hujanen Project leader JUHA HERKMAN 1. Introduction: Intermediality as a Theory and Methodology Media change has always been a major theme in the field of commu- nications and media research. Quite often these changes have been anchored in the developments of media technology, although they have also been connected to shifts in economic, political, social and cultural domains. Since the late twentieth century, the key words of media change have been ‘computerization’ and ‘digitalization’, which, without question, have radically transformed media and communica- tions environments. The grand narrative of media change argues that, hand-in-hand with the spread of networks and online communica- tion, digitalization has led to the development of a whole new social form, namely the ‘information society’, dependent on communication media and immaterial information networks (Castells 1996, Webster 2004). The story of media convergence has been one branch in this grand narrative. Since the 1990s especially, ‘convergence’ has been among the most popular terms used to describe media change (Baldwin et al. 1996, Mueller 1999, Murdock 2000). In general, media convergence has referred to developments in which formerly medium specific content 10 can today be distributed and published through various media. The same news, for example, can be transmitted and consumed in paper, radio, television, and various Internet forms. This has meant remark- able changes not only for media consumers but also for the media companies, which have had to redesign their production and marketing practices for the new multimedia and cross-media environments (Cottle 1999, Hesmondhalgh 2002). The great utopia of convergence has been the assumption that various electronic communication technologies – telecommunications, broadcasting and Internet – will in the (not too distant) future merge into a single entity, a ‘super-media’ (Pool 1983, Baldwin et al. 1996: 2-3, Küng et al. 1999: 30, Sauter 1999: 65). As many commentators have shown, however, there are several problems in talking about media convergence (Storsul and Stuedahl 2007). One of the most critical observations is perhaps the empirical fact that, instead of coalescing, as the term convergence suggests, there is nowadays more variation in communication and media technolo- gies, gadgets, devices, formats and standards than ever before. In this sense, as Henry Jenkins (2001, 2008) has remarked, we have been witnessing a media technology divergence rather