[ecrea] New book - Media and the Experience of Social Change: The Arab World

Very pleased to announce the publication of my new book *Media and the 
Experience of Social Change: The Arab World* (Rowman & Littlefield). You 
can order a copy here 
(https://www.rowmaninternational.com/book/media_and_the_experience_of_social_change/3-156-2a905cfc-3a37-4722-ab73-8c40375aaab2) 
– and a synopsis follows.

This book investigates how we live through social change, and what role 
media play in shaping that experience. These questions matter because 
there is growing anxiety that the cocoon of the present that 
characterises our day-to-day existence blinds us to more profound shifts 
taking place around us. The idea of the present as an overwhelming 
plenitude that disorientates us in the broader scheme of things is not 
new: it is encapsulated by Heidegger’s concept of ‘thrownness’, and has 
antecedents much further back in the history of philosophy. But the 
ceaseless barrage of stimuli that confront us in today’s 
hyper-consumeristic, mediated-saturated world raises significant 
questions about what this enveloping stream of media does to our 
understanding of longer-term social, political and economic processes.

Journalists in particular come under fire for obsessing over the 
short-term and sensational, of not doing enough to understand and 
communicate the unfolding of history. And the rest of us as media 
audiences and publics are portrayed as superficial, fickle and 
narcissistic, oriented only towards the next affective hit that media, 
especially of the social variety, can deliver. When this congeals from 
ways of doing things with media into a distinct way of being in the 
world, the result is that media consumers are thought to treat every 
calamity and triviality alike as just another spectacle to register, or 
ignore, before moving on to something else. All sense of context is 
lost, and with it a proper apprehension of the lives that flit briefly 
across our screens.

Looked at philosophically, however, we are necessarily geared towards 
experiencing the world through a reductive lens: these are the routines 
and rituals that make everyday life liveable. In fact there is nothing 
intrinsically wrong with failing to be bowled over by the unique import 
of every event we witness. We rely on reducing everything we encounter 
to categories, to shorthand and avatars. It is true that this runs the 
risk of complacency, of recourse to caricature and stereotype, but it is 
also a fundamental human skill that allows us to respond to most things 
instinctively, underpinning an experience of daily life that is, for the 
most part, seamless. And in practical terms this means that if 
professionals or citizens fail to grasp in an immediate and revelatory 
way the historic changes evidenced by specific events, it does not 
necessarily make us ignorant or self-absorbed: it is not in itself a 
moral failing. Apathy, indifference and fatalism are all real problems, 
but political scientists and media analysts routinely misdiagnose and 
mistreat them.

The question of how we experience change has never mattered more. The 
past decade has famously been characterised as everything kicking off 
everywhere: from Occupy to the Arab spring, the financial crisis to 
Islamic State, the scale of tumult appears unprecedented. But, according 
to many social critics, Western publics are too tightly tethered to 
their hedonic treadmills to notice, or if they do it is in 
inappropriate, disrespectful and self-serving ways. Seismic political 
upheavals become things to tweet, the suffering of a refugee becomes a 
tool for demonstrating your compassion on Facebook.

And wherever reductionism and dehumanisation are detected in the manner 
in which people engage with global events, media are usually first 
against the wall. Whether it is because of the commercial motives of 
mainstream broadcasters or the nature of mediation itself, there is 
something about the way that distant wars, disasters and uprisings are 
framed that bleed them of their distinctive vitality. This book, 
however, makes the case against the blanket pathologisation of media. It 
argues that the only way to grasp and assess how public engage with the 
stuff that matters – from events that change the course of history to 
the experience by others of suffering and injustice – is 
phenomenologically, methodically investigating how these events and 
experiences emerge as objects of consciousness amid the rhythms and 
routines of our workaday lives. Objectification has a bad name in 
cultural studies, connoting the worst kinds of dehumanisation that media 
do to those they depict, but for phenomenologists objectifying and being 
objectified are a fundamental part of human life.

The book develops its core thesis on the basis of a meticulous empirical 
analysis of a cohort of Arab journalists, first by way of a discourse 
analysis of their tweets, and then through ethnographic work with 20 
media practitioners in Egypt and Lebanon. The focus on professional 
journalists rather than audiences is not intended to suggest that the 
former are somehow ideal citizens, more finely attuned to the mechanics 
of history or more perceptive when it comes to the nuances. They may 
well be as a group, but the point is more about what their motivations 
and principles look like in microcosm. The book shows that the everyday 
lives of these individuals, dedicated to documenting momentous events 
and the extremes of the human condition, are like for the rest of us a 
matter of routines and logistics, reductions and affect. Even if a 
journalist is covering the Syrian civil war she cannot be blown away by 
everything she encounters: like in other contexts, she develops patterns 
of anticipation that makes life more or less instinctively navigable.

Importantly, this is not the same as compassion fatigue or 
desensitisation. It is entirely possible to exist with relations of care 
for and solidarity with those who are inevitably reduced to the stuff of 
work in the daily run of things. Full, revelatory recognition of the 
subjectivity of others and the reality of human suffering might be 
lacking in some – most, even – discrete situations, but care and 
solidarity can be nurtured and sustained over time in contexts that 
appear repetitive and even banal. The distinctive approach taken here, 
then, is not to ask these professionals about their motivating 
principles with the aim of sanctifying them as noble warriors of human 
rights and social justice – though they are undoubtedly passionate and 
principled. The idea instead is to show how those principles as well as 
their sense of history unfolding are sustained amid everyday work and 
social rituals, experiences that usually look more affective than 
political. What becomes clear is that the lunchbreaks, the workplace 
in-jokes and teasing, and checking in on social media too – these are 
not obstacles to understanding what is really going on in the work they 
produce, getting in the way of registering that the events they cover 
are happening to actual people. Instead they are the bedrock of such 
awareness.

This all boils down to an important phenomenological intervention in how 
we think about the experience of everyday life and change over time: 
subjectivity is not clinched in specific, critical moments but worked at 
over time, usually in humdrum ways. You are generally not called upon to 
prove yourself – your politics, your humanity – in some all-or-nothing 
encounter; and on the other hand nor are you interpellated or called 
forth as a fully-determined subject of hegemonic structures, as others 
claim. For these journalists there are real subjective stakes in how 
things play out from here in their personal and professional lives as 
well as in the world they inhabit and report on, and this is true more 
generally as well. However constrained our agency we are all always 
provisional selves with a stake in how we see ourselves and how we are 
seen, as well as what impact we can have on the worlds we live in.

Journalists and activists might be in a different league when it comes 
to political motivation and passion. And it is true that seen in 
miniature most citizens fail to demonstrate a clear grasp of history 
unfolding and solidarity with those embroiled in it as they go about the 
routines that give temporal form to their days. The point is that even 
if someone regularly fails to switch on the news, or to give an article 
they encounter about distant suffering their full, undistracted 
attention, there is nonetheless scope for substantive political 
engagement amid the banalities of everyday life. As with our 
professional participants, the assorted affective pulls of the 
multi-mediated environments we inhabit are not only distractions, but 
potentially the very thing which sustains empathy and citizenship. 
Previous research has shown that a majority of people sustain some kind 
of orientation towards public life; the unique contribution of this book 
is that it pulls apart how this works at the level of subjectification. 
This is about self-work, the incremental and often fragmented effort 
that people put in to ensuring some kind of continuity and control over 
how they see themselves and how they are seen by others. What can easily 
be written off as narcissistic about the way people engage with the news 
is in fact the key: self-work is not self-absorption but the condition 
of living in time, of their being stakes in futuricity.

In practical terms this is not the same as giving media audiences a free 
pass and assuming whatever they do will amount to empathy and engagement 
in the long run. But it does mean rejecting the notion that the aim of 
media witnessing should be to shake people out of their complacency, and 
instead seeking to nurture the conditions in which something like 
solidarity could solidify over time. This can be argued to be a good 
thing from first principles, the kind of conditions befitting an 
idealised polity, but it is simultaneously an environment experienced as 
subjectively strategic as well as discontinuously, distractedly. But 
that is how political principle operates: not as an inner quality 
externalised, wielded in decisive encounters, but worked at and 
maintained amid the hum of everyday life.

The book ends with a reframing of the journalist’s role as writer of the 
first draft of history, instead casting her as guardian of historical 
contingency. Rather than predicting how history will unfold, journalism 
is reconceived as a constant worrying away at the edges of 
intelligibility, a reminder of just how provisional our experience of 
the present is, and how much is at stake – for ourselves as well as the 
worlds we live in – in where things go from here.

Tim Markham is Professor of Journalism and Media at Birkbeck, University 
of London. He is the author of /Media and Everyday Life: A Textbook/ 
(Palgrave, 2017), and /The Politics of War Reporting: Authority, 
Authenticity and Morality/ (Manchester, 2012); co-author of /Media 
Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention/ 
(Palgrave, 2007; 2010) and co-editor of /Conditions of Mediation: 
Phenomenological Perspectives on Media/ (Peter Lang, 2017).

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