Re: new media and shock
Hi all - I generally just lurk, but I was struck by a discontinuity in discussion last Thursday and think it bears on this question of becoming inured to shock. There were 6 posts on "London...the internet accounts" interspersed with 4 on "AoIR 6.0 Chicago 2005 Registration is now open", 1 each on "iCS 8.2", "Call for proposals", and "Internet and fun/joy/pleasure". In the three days since, "London" vanished, some of the other threads continued, and new ones appeared. This is no doubt the nature of most conversations on this list, and perhaps everything that could be said about shock and bearing up and giving sympathy was expressed in the comments that were posted, and/or continuation has moved to other venues. But I had some cognitive dissonance reading the disparate threads as business-as-usual went on for many (including me) while others were wondering just how "usual" their lives were going to continue to be. I'm not familiar with any of the literature on shock, but some levels or layers of protection are evident in the acts of just getting on with things, whatever those immediate things that consume us may be. At the same time, I'm aware it would also be counterproductive (at least to purposes of peace and justice) to mine the event for all its tragedy, as this would play into political efforts to cast the attack in symbolic terms that fuel nationalisms and other hatreds. Shock, by definition, puts one in a state of non-responsiveness; the challenge may be the degree to which that lack of response gets carried over or continued into the return to the mundane, especially after the state-of-shock has worn off. best, steph http://www.reflexivity.us On Jul 10, 2005, at 3:07 PM, air-l-aoir.org-request@listserv.aoir.org wrote:
Hello all--a colleague of mine asked me if I could help him with the following question. I'm not an authority on the Frankfurt School or its theorization of shock but hope that some of you out there might be. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Ken
His problem/question is as follows:
Much ink has been spilt over shock within Frankfurt School writings. A concept clearly taken over from Simmel and Freud, shock runs to the heart of Benjamin's media theory. But have Benjamin and Adorno appropriated the term as face value without ever considering the implications of their assertions? Adorno's thinking would seem to intimate that at some future date nothing will ever shock us anymore, for the body will have developed such a thick protective barrier that nothing harmful will ever get through--an idea worth resisting in itself.
Are there any sustained studies of the question of shock particularly within the domain of media Are there any articles within media theory that address the matter of shock in a postmodern, digital world?
Hi, I am working on protest group online communication (thanks to the endless list of suggestions on this mailing list, I started using HTtrack!) and I am content analysing some 200 websites. So far, I have found quite a fragmented literature on content analysis of the Web. Would you flag out any specific work? Thanks! stefania Stefania Vicari PhD student in Sociology University of Reading PO Box 218, Reading, RG6 6AA, United Kingdom. _______________________________________________
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Hi Stefania, I am already impressed - 200 websites is a phenomenal amount of content.. We have also been struggling with this problem in our research community and would be interested to know what you turn up. So far, the difficult issues we have discussed have been: 1) freezing/archiving the state of the websites; or more generally how one deals with change. this can range from a very difficult problem if the website you are using is database-driven and/or constantly updated (like a news website) or it can be more simply a problem of how you download and reference what exists. Participants on this list have raised questions about IPR (ie the legality of copying), but I think the argument has been forcefully made that this can be considered fair use. If, on the other hand, your website contains the archived postings of members of the public and you want to analyse their content, you are getting into a whole different ethical kettle of fish. 2) documenting the structure of the website (ie its links) as a part of its content. How should this be done? Then in terms of analysis, understanding the place of each web page relative to the whole site. for example, in most sites the home page gets by far the lion's share of the hits. Is it therefore appropriate to analyse the homepage in depth and subsidiary pages in less depth? I guess only your theoretical framework can tell ;-) 3) understanding the visual design of the website with reference to its content. 4) understanding the place of the website with regard to the rest of the web, ie with link analysis or search term analysis... I think if you just wanted to scrape text from each page and then run it through, say, Atlas.ti to generate word lists or do a more traditional content analysis such as is applied to media texts, then that could be done. But I do think some of these other issues might arise anyway. Elizabeth On 11 Jul 2005, at 13:03, <s.vicari@reading.ac.uk> <s.vicari@reading.ac.uk> wrote:
Hi,
I am working on protest group online communication (thanks to the endless list of suggestions on this mailing list, I started using HTtrack!) and I am content analysing some 200 websites.
So far, I have found quite a fragmented literature on content analysis of the Web. Would you flag out any specific work?
Thanks! stefania
Stefania Vicari PhD student in Sociology University of Reading PO Box 218, Reading, RG6 6AA, United Kingdom.
_______________________________________________
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Elizabeth Van Couvering PhD Student Department of Media & Communications London School of Economics and Political Science http://personal.lse.ac.uk/vancouve/ e.j.van-couvering@lse.ac.uk
On 11 Jul 2005, at 13:03, <s.vicari@reading.ac.uk> <s.vicari@reading.ac.uk> wrote:
Hi,
I am working on protest group online communication (thanks to the endless list of suggestions on this mailing list, I started using HTtrack!) and I am content analysing some 200 websites.
So far, I have found quite a fragmented literature on content analysis of the Web. Would you flag out any specific work?
here's a starting-point for you: http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/%7Eherring/web.syll.04.html enjoy, --elijah
My response is the same as Elizabeth's - Focusing in on the language (text) means using more conventional CA methods Looking at the website as a whole - well the only people that have generated tools for this that I know of are Noral Paul's team at the Institute for New Media Studies, University of Minnesota. They had a prototype - an analysis tool for looking specifically at online newspapers and comparing them. . . this may be connected to their current project in digital storytelling. Might be worth a look. http://www.inms.umn.edu/ POINT HERE is that the comparable units of the websites were each defined as elements, pulled into a qualitative database where the comparisons could be made. So each item on each webpage was selected by hand, tagged as an "element" type - etc. Then the elements could be compared from page to page. QSR International NVivo 6 is an interesting analysis tool for text but don't think it will work on .html unless cut & copy into the database. Cheers, Denise Denise N. Rall, PhD candidate, School of Environ. Science, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 Sustainable Forestry Mentoring Coordinator & Internet Researcher Room T2.12, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Tuesdays or Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html
Everyone is well and truly over this thread, but here's a good book on Cyberprotest: Pickerill, J. (2003). Cyperprotest: Environmental activism online. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press. Jenny Pickerill is at www.jennypickerill.info/ She's a very good scholar, currently at the Department of Geography University of Leicester University. Jenny might have encountered some of the issues that Stefania is looking into now. . . . Cheers, Denise Denise N. Rall, PhD candidate, School of Environ. Science, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 Sustainable Forestry Mentoring Coordinator & Internet Researcher Room T2.12, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Tuesdays or Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html
Hi all, do you know of any interesting study on facebook as a social network or, in more specific terms, as a tool for political discussion, propaganda? Thanks! stefania vicari Stefania Vicari PhD Sociology University of Reading, U.K.
Check out Christine Williams and Jeff Gulati's work at Bentley College: http://blogsandwikis.bentley.edu/politechmedia/ -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of stefania vicari Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2009 11:21 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-L] facebook for political propaganda Hi all, do you know of any interesting study on facebook as a social network or, in more specific terms, as a tool for political discussion, propaganda? Thanks! stefania vicari Stefania Vicari PhD Sociology University of Reading, U.K. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Hi Stefania, Are you interested in the discussion aspect or in propaganda? These are two very different phenomena! ~Jenny Assistant Professor Department of Communication, SS 340 University at Albany, SUNY Albany, NY 12222 518-442-4873 jstromer@albany.edu http://www.albany.edu/~jstromer
Hi all,
do you know of any interesting study on facebook as a social network or, in more specific terms, as a tool for political discussion, propaganda?
Thanks! stefania vicari
Stefania Vicari PhD Sociology University of Reading, U.K.
Hello Stefania, Maybe this study about the use of Facebook for political activism could interest you. It takes as a case study the Anti-FARC Rallies and should include some interesting references for you. Here the link : http://www.digiactive.org/research/facebook-for-protest-the-value-of-social-... The paper has also been presented at the "Social Web - Towards Networked Protest Politics?" Conference in Siegen (Germany) last November. Yana ---------------------- Yana BREINDL PhD Candidate Department of Information and Communication Sciences Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), BELGIUM Tél.: + 32 (0)2 650 44 46 Fax : +32 (0)2 650 39 21 E-mail: ybreindl@ulb.ac.be http://sic.ulb.ac.be/2008/09/yana-breindl/
Hi all,
do you know of any interesting study on facebook as a social network or, in more specific terms, as a tool for political discussion, propaganda?
Thanks! stefania vicari
Stefania Vicari PhD Sociology University of Reading, U.K.
Stefania, You might also find some of the papers presented at the "Politics: Web 2.0" conference in April last year in UK useful. Quite a few of the participants have posted their papers on the conference website: http://newpolcom.rhul.ac.uk/politics-web-2-0-conference/ -Lisbeth
Hi all,
do you know of any interesting study on facebook as a social network or, in more specific terms, as a tool for political discussion, propaganda?
Thanks! stefania vicari
Stefania Vicari PhD Sociology University of Reading, U.K.
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Hi Steph, Agree that sensationalisation and emotionalisation of this kind of event (along with "stranger danger", internet scares, etc etc etc) are playing into the hands of manipulative mechanisms to achieve social and political control. Think Adam Curtiz' documentary "The Power of Nightmares" is really worth watching if you can get it (it's up on usenet sometimes). I think Curtiz' analysis - that USA regimes since the fall of the Berlin Wall have been setting up "Islamic" terrorism as the new bogie-man in order to tighten its grip on the North American psyche is a valid one. I'm not sure if you're referring to Londoners as being traumatised by this event/ I didn't get the impression that Londoners were anywhere near traumatised by the latest bombing. Britain is a post-colonial nation and has had a very long time to digest the bitter pill that messing violently in other people's affairs will usually end in some sort of decentred retaliation eventually. Any loss of life is tragic, of course, but in comparison with conditions in any number of countries from Burma to Congo I think that most people can see that we don't have too much to complain about. I think most of us can also "do the math" that in a city of 7.5 million people, your chance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time in a bombing claiming 38 lives is statistically minute and utterly negligible in comparison with your risk of cancer or car accident. The bomb on the underground system is a little freaky as going down underground is always mildly unpleasant. But we've got pretty well-trained minds on the whole . . . I suspect that most of the paranoia effect will actually be in "middle England" which is masochistic enough to read right-wing tabloid newspapers! Paula Stephanie Kent wrote:
Hi all - I generally just lurk, but I was struck by a discontinuity in discussion last Thursday and think it bears on this question of becoming inured to shock. There were 6 posts on "London...the internet accounts" interspersed with 4 on "AoIR 6.0 Chicago 2005 Registration is now open", 1 each on "iCS 8.2", "Call for proposals", and "Internet and fun/joy/pleasure".
In the three days since, "London" vanished, some of the other threads continued, and new ones appeared. This is no doubt the nature of most conversations on this list, and perhaps everything that could be said about shock and bearing up and giving sympathy was expressed in the comments that were posted, and/or continuation has moved to other venues. But I had some cognitive dissonance reading the disparate threads as business-as-usual went on for many (including me) while others were wondering just how "usual" their lives were going to continue to be.
I'm not familiar with any of the literature on shock, but some levels or layers of protection are evident in the acts of just getting on with things, whatever those immediate things that consume us may be. At the same time, I'm aware it would also be counterproductive (at least to purposes of peace and justice) to mine the event for all its tragedy, as this would play into political efforts to cast the attack in symbolic terms that fuel nationalisms and other hatreds.
Shock, by definition, puts one in a state of non-responsiveness; the challenge may be the degree to which that lack of response gets carried over or continued into the return to the mundane, especially after the state-of-shock has worn off.
best,
steph http://www.reflexivity.us
On Jul 10, 2005, at 3:07 PM, air-l-aoir.org-request@listserv.aoir.org wrote:
Hello all--a colleague of mine asked me if I could help him with the following question. I'm not an authority on the Frankfurt School or its theorization of shock but hope that some of you out there might be. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Ken
His problem/question is as follows:
Much ink has been spilt over shock within Frankfurt School writings. A concept clearly taken over from Simmel and Freud, shock runs to the heart of Benjamin's media theory. But have Benjamin and Adorno appropriated the term as face value without ever considering the implications of their assertions? Adorno's thinking would seem to intimate that at some future date nothing will ever shock us anymore, for the body will have developed such a thick protective barrier that nothing harmful will ever get through--an idea worth resisting in itself.
Are there any sustained studies of the question of shock particularly within the domain of media Are there any articles within media theory that address the matter of shock in a postmodern, digital world?
_______________________________________________ The Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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participants (11)
-
Denise N. Rall -
elijah wright -
Elizabeth Van Couvering -
Jennifer Stromer-Galley -
John McNutt -
Lisbeth Klastrup -
Paula -
s.vicari＠reading.ac.uk -
stefania vicari
-
Stephanie Kent -
Yana Breindl