Snurb's blog

Hamburg.
The main ECREA 2010 conference starts with a keynote by Kevin Robins, whose focus is on transcultural communication. In this, ‘transcultural’ is a very specific term, and different from transnational, international, intercultural, and other similar terms: this is not about an interaction of one supposedly distinct entity (for example, of one nation with another, or of ‘Europe’ and ‘Islam’) with another, but about a more complex traversing of boundaries that more closely describes the interchanges and crossovers that actually do happen. Recent research, especially in Europe, has been pushing especially in this direction, not least also to deal with the complexity of a changing Europe.

The key difficulty with this is that it has been connecting with agendas beyond communication research – sociological and anthropological migration research, for example. Crucial to such transcultural research in Europe is that Europe itself has changed – it has become larger and more complex, and is facing the challenges of global migration. Germany, for example, is currently experiencing some very acrimonious debates about migration, and especially some ugly right-wing islamophobic dog-whistling about migration from Muslim countries.

Bremen.
The final speaker at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference is Friedrich Krotz; he begins by noting our conservatism in using methods – once we have learnt them, we tend to utilise the same methods each time, regardless of the specific object of study.

Friedrich draws on the work of Clifford Geertz and Norbert Elias in approaching the study of culture and society; Elias’s main concepts are figuration (of various groups of actors – nations, families, groups of people in specific social situations) and habitus. It is not enough to simply measure cultural exchanges, of course, but we must aim to understand their meaning; this is complicated also by the fact that researchers themselves are embedded in their own cultures, of course.

Bremen.
The next speaker at the ECREA 2010 pre-conference ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ is John Downey, whose view is that comparative media methods are not as well developed as those in the social sciences. We might be able to learn from these other fields.

Comparative media analysis has made little progress in recent time in terms of explaining media phenomena; there is a danger of ethnocentricity, and an overemphasis on normative concerns. Data are often difficult to compare across different frames of research, and the appropriate methodological approaches are disputable; case studies, for example, are approached in a relatively unsystematic manner. Comparative approaches often build on a choice of the ‘most similar’ or the ‘most different’ cases.

Bremen.
The final session at this very enjoyable ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference starts with Felix Ortega, whose focus is on the Iberian and Latin American mediasphere (which increasingly also includes the US, of course).

His research group began by running a questionnaire directed at media experts across a range of Spanish-speaking countries, to identify which research tools and instruments they were currently using. Advanced statistical methods, ranked highly here, along with bibliographical analysis and data work. For non-Spanish speaking researchers, this would look different – there is very little engagement with the wealth of Spanish-language-only research by Anglo-Saxon and other researchers doing satellite projects in Spanish-speaking countries.

Bremen.
The next speaker at ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ is my CCI colleague Jean Burgess, presenting on our Mapping Online Publics research project; this presentation is the methodological part, and I’ll show some more results at the main ECREA 2010 conference later in the week. Our research is part of an ARC Discovery project exploring methods for examining Australian social media use – the aim is to develop methods for computer-assisted cultural analysis. Over the course of the three years, we’ll examine blogs, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

Here’s Jean’s Powerpoint, and my transcript is below, too. I’ll add the audio later.

Bremen.
The next speaker at this ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference for ECREA 2010 is Asimina Michailidou, whose interest is in online public opinion formation in the European Union. This is deliberately avoiding an examination of party politics or opinion polls, but rather goes straight to online interaction – in this case, in the context of the EU parliamentary elections in 2009. The focus here was on twelve EU nations as well as a number of pan-European opinion and debate sites.

There are a number of methodological challenges with this – across the three areas of sampling, analysis, and interpretation. The project necessarily proceeds from a mixed-methods design, as it attempts to measure the forms and processes of communication on online platforms and investigate the content and participant community.

Bremen.
The next session at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference for ECREA 2010 starts with Ben Peters, who begins by noting the work of Paul Lazarsfeld as a pioneer of media research methods. Ben’s work focusses on the critical, historical, and international dimensions of networks, and he notes the importance of sharing datasets to the project of building a field of global network studies.

Ben’s research is on studying the failed Soviet attempts to build a domestic Internet-style network around the same time that the US developed ARPANET – while there was substantial expertise available, where the US succeeded through a collaborative approach, the Soviet Union failed because of strong competition between bureaucrats. Researching this topic encounters a number of obstacles – a particularist/structuralist divide, the positioning of the researcher, and the researcher’s own skills and preoccupations.

Bremen.
It’s too early, too chilly, and too foggy for words – but regardless, the second day of the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference to ECREA 2010 is about to begin. The keynote speaker this morning is Tristan Mattelart, whose focus is on audiovisual piracy - and he begins by noting the substantial attention already paid to this phenomenon, though mainly as a for of 'criminal' activity. He notes that there is a difference between Internet piracy and physical piracy (the sale of counterfeit DVDs and CDs), and that there are differences in such piracy between different countries.

We already know the legal economy of communication in southern and eastern countries pretty well – but that’s less true for the informal economy of communication, which is nonetheless an important aspect of these overall economies. This informal economy plays a central role in the circulation of media and cultural products, in fact – and what Tristan means by ‘southern and eastern countries’ are countries as far afield as Tunisia, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, and others.

Sadly, the existing literature on the subject of piracy in southern and eastern countries is voluminous, but very narrow in coverage. It is formed mainly of self-interested reports by copyright industries (MPAA, IFPI, BSA, IIPA), and contains alarmist analysis of the dangers which piracy poses to the movie, music, and software industries. What such reports contain are figures on the calculated ‘losses’ to the industry due to pirated content; many southern and eastern countries especially appear as zones of maximum instability for the industry.

Bremen.
The final speaker for the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference is Miriam Stehling, whose focus is on doing a comparative study of globally traded television formats; she’ll use the Top Model format as a case study. The key challenge here is to understand transculturality: new forms of cultural phenomena that go beyond or across cultures. There no longer is necessarily a congruence between culture and territory, and binary approaches to researching international communication cannot work here; instead, there needs to be a focus on similarities and connections between cultures.

Transculturality, then, requires new methods for empirical research, differentiating between transculturality as a research perspective and transculturality as practices of discourse and social action. Miriam’s study of global TV formats provides a perspective on this: there is a strategic transculturality that is used to maximise global profits, but also a transculturality of text (a common subject matter that makes sense for diverse audiences), and a transculturality of reception – in the production of transcultural meanings and/or in transcultural modes of reception.

Bremen.
The final session at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference for ECREA 2010 today starts with Hanna Domeyer, who was briefly my office mate at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg when I visited there a couple of years ago. Her interest is in how media users relate to one another across borders and cultures. Such intercultural communication is to be seen as a special mode of social interaction that may happen anywhere and at any time. So, the research challenge is less in finding new research methods, but in developing a specific research perspective on such forms of interaction.

Media use across cultures is made possible by the increasing range of media options available to us. These options can be combined in a wide range of ways. Research into this is often limited to a predefined segment of the media, or a specific form of transnational or transcultural relations. Responses to these limitations include a focus on the entirety of the media forms that a particular person uses, and/or by examining a variety of transnational or transcultural relations.