Archive for publications, October 2017

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

Fri Oct 06 15:45:13 GMT 2017



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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