Television, Technology, and Culture: A Contextualist Approach

Abstract

In this article, the author offers a contextualist approach to contemporary debates about new (and old) media in different historical times and geographical places. This approach, rather than starting with the internal essence of a technology and then attempting to deduce its effects from its technical specifications, begins with an analysis of the interactional and cultural systems in play in a particular context and then investigates how any particular technology is fitted into them. Building on his previous work in microanalyses of technology use in the home, and drawing on recent debates in technology studies and media anthropology, he further develops the implications of this approach, at a macro level, in terms of temporal and cultural contexts. The article concludes by reviewing the outstanding problems that still confront our field, in respect to its deeply ingrained presumptions concerning the universal relevance of what are, in fact, specifically Western (and thus contingent) relations between television, technology and national cultures. TECHNOLOGY, CAUSALITY, AND CONTINUITYWe are surrounded by discourses telling us what new technologies are going to do to us, for better or for worse. However, we must be wary of such a media-centric focus on the supposed effects of technologies because, as the uses and gratifications theorists observed many years ago, we need also to think about what people do with media technologies (Halloran, 1970).

Who Do We Think We (and They) Are? The Audience and the Researcher as Participants in Sociomaterial Practice

“…Here the term "mediatization" with its' various interpretations (e.g., Lundby, 2009) needs to be differentiated from the general "mediatedness" of experiencing the world (cf. also Morley, 2012). Paraphrasing Sonia Livingstone (2009), Critical Psychology would indeed claim that "everything is mediated" -at least from a human being's perspective.…”

“…The research process culminated in two central questions which I would like to discuss here: What do "we" researchers think we are and do when engaging in research, and how is this connected to what we think the participants in our research are and do in this constellation? The elaboration on these onto-epistemological questions proposes an alternative "contextualist approach" (Morley, 2012) and is supposed to contribute to ongoing debates in the field of (active) audience research that have been most clearly addressed in a special issue published in The Communication Review in 2006 (cf. the contributions of Press, 2006;Barker 2006a;Morley, 2006).…”

Cultural Studies, Common Sense and Communications

“…In this respect, it is curious how often otherwise sophisticated theoretical perspectives on new technology return to a long discredited model of hypodermic effects, in which these technologies are presumed to have fairly simple and straightforward effects and thus ultimately produce questions which are both banal and unanswerable, such as 'Did Facebook cause the events of the Arab Spring'? The further problem with that kind of approach, from my point of view, is not simply its technological determinism, but also its lamentable media -centrism: its tendency to presume that the media can be understood independently of the cultural contexts in which they operate (Morley 2009(Morley , 2012.…”

État des lieux de la sociologie des médias au Québec

“…Plus spécifiquement, le Web semble menacer le vieux système audiovisuel en bouleversant ses modes de production et de diffusion, alors même que de nouvelles formes d'appropriation se dessinent en mode multiplateforme, tels le visionnement connecté et mobile ou la programmation individualisée. Ainsi, l'incitation à penser les technologies numériques et les nouveaux médias comme une seule et même révolution planétaire est aujourd'hui remise en question, entre autres à la faveur d'approches prenant davantage en compte les aspects géographiques, historiques et linguistiques propres à chaque contexte (Morley, 2012). Ces quelques éléments, sans épuiser l'ensemble des problématiques médiatiques, nous permettent à tout le moins de mettre en lumière de nouvelles dynamiques culturelles liées aux transformations médiatiques et de repérer des articulations liant les médias à la culture québécoise contemporaine.…”