10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17292
application/pdf
2038-3460
17292
1
en
Giuseppina Pellegrino
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski and Kirsten A. Foot (eds.), Media Technologies. Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, The MIT Press, 2014
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
7
Book Reviews
2016-07-08
2023-06-20
2016-07-08
2023-08-07
150-153
TS
Giuseppina Pellegrino
2016/07/08
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17292
150
Università della Calabria
2038-3460
1
en
153
Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski and Kirsten A. Foot (eds.), Media Technologies. Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, The MIT Press, 2014
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17292/16154
7
150                                                          Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

  Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski and Kirsten A.
  Foot (eds.)
Media Technologies. Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2014, pp. 326
Giuseppina Pellegrino Università della Calabria

    One of the most recent and emerging strands in STS is the encounter
with media and communication studies (media studies from now on-
wards), which also inspires this Tecnoscienza special issue. Such a fascina-
ting and not linear encounter is concerned with looking at (new) media
and mediation as technology–based, an inextricably material and not only
symbolic process.
    Beside coining a new term which identifies an emerging field of theo-
retical and empirical research, Media Technologies. Essays on Communica-
tion, Materiality, and Society proposes a multiplicity of sites and sights to
look at the convergence and interconnection between materiality of arti-
facts, practice and politics on the one hand; meaning and discourse on
the other. Actually, the various book chapters represent and account for a
number of intersecting paths traceable between STS and media studies,
making media technology a field of “hybrid” scholarship.
    Gillespie, Boczkowski and Foot assemble a book whose format (essays
plus commentaries; workshop devoted to build up a collected volume) is
overtly inspired to an STS classic seminal work (The Social Construction
of Technological Systems). The editors aim to question and overcome both
the technological and the “socio-cultural” determinism, which inspired
and characterized the field of media studies, especially the mass media
but also, due to the mimicry occurring when innovations enter the stage
of public discourse, early new media studies. On other hand, dissatisfac-
tion with both technological and social determinism constituted the pri-
mary trigger for the emergence and consolidation of STS as a field.
    By addressing the materiality of mediation as well as the social prac-
tices and meanings which sustain media technology, both the editors and
the contributors of the collection engage with shifting from the binary
discourse of media/technology impacting on society (and vice versa) to
the multiple arrays and articulations of the material, the social and the
cultural and their “concurrent realities”, as Brunton and Fenton describe
them in their chapter on hardware, infrastructures and superusers.
    Overall, the collection accounts for the decreasing invisibility of tech-
nology in media studies and of media in STS, a path which starts and bur-
geons with the emergence and configuration of information and com-
munication technologies, especially the rise of the Internet and digital so-
cial media.
    The account starts from theoretical and epistemological reconstruc-
tions of the two fields (STS and media studies) and the ways they engaged
Book Reviews                                                             151
with materiality of technologies and media, as broadly illustrated by Leah
Lievrouw. Her analysis points out how materiality has been addressed but
not sufficiently articulated in media studies, and that the prevailing orien-
tation towards meaning-making and socio-cultural dimensions still forces
materiality to the margin of the field, which she qualifies as “an unfin-
ished project” (24).
    While emphasizing that there is no necessary equivalence between
technological determinism and materiality, even if the two issues tended
to overlap over time and studies of media and technologies, the whole bo-
ok tries to argue and show that materiality does not exclude reference to
texts, content, meaning, cultural forms and public discourse. These di-
mensions enter the STS stage in multiple ways and connecting them to
materiality is one of the ambitions of the encounter and hybridation be-
tween STS and media studies.
    Boczkowksi, a pioneer in bridging STS and media studies through his
research on online journalism, and his co-author Siles attempt to go be-
yond the finished and closed provinces of established scholarship in me-
dia research, steadily identified by two binary frameworks: producti-
on/consumption and content/materiality. The two authors propose to
adopt a cosmopolitan sensibility to go towards transdisciplinary analyses
of the whole life cycle of media technologies.
    In fact, focusing on materiality and doing it at the crossroads of STS
and media studies means to address the specificity of media technologies
which “are about the linkages between the symbolic and the material.
That is, all technologies have a symbolic dimension, but media technolo-
gies have distinctive, material capabilities to embed, transform, and make
accessible symbolic content (….)” (10).
    The various chapters of the book focus on different parts of such link-
ages. Editors and contributors share the aim of overcoming barriers and
fences which separated content from materiality (technology/medium),
production from consumption, design from use, practice from discourse
and so on.
    The result is a material shift or material turn in the analysis of media
technologies that configures the concept as very hybrid, heterogeneous
and not univocal. Materiality is something which goes deep into the in-
stalled basis of technology and infrastructure, “close to the metal” (Brun-
ton and Fenton); it is something which demands care, maintenance and
repair: ordinary but not trivial practices, crucial and inextricable sites of
innovation as world breaks down continuously (Jackson). And it can be
retrieved even in apparently “abstract” concepts such as positive and
negative liberty, which play an unexpected role in shaping the history of
computing beyond its most popular (libertarian and utopian) versions, as
shown by Kelty.
    Beside the main focus on materiality and the material, few other con-
cepts seem to bridge the diversity and variety of encounters between the
material and the symbolic, production and consumption, design and use,
152                                                           Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

local practices and public discourses presented in the book. In particular,
it is crucial the concept of infrastructure, both in an implicit and explicit
way, starting from Lievrouw’s model of mediation as a tripartite infra-
structure constituted by artifacts, practices and social arrangements (and
corresponding processes of reconfiguration, remediation and reformation).
     Brunton and Fenton look at the material, social and discursive dimen-
sion of infrastructures such as Anonymous movement and Spam emer-
gence and management, getting close to the hardware components which
are necessary but not sufficient to understand infrastructure itself. Of
course the concept is of the greatest importance to Bowker’s analysis of
academic knowledge and databases, and his concern about massive, mass-
produced and standardized data whose main model of circulation is still
the single-author paper.
     Jumping (infrastructural) contexts is the key of Downey’s historical,
STS-oriented research on information labor in early electrical media and
organizational technologies (telegraph, stenograph and libraries) which
shows how networking characterized other new media of the past, well
before what we refer to as digital and social media today.
     Both Gillespie and Jackson, respectively looking at algorithms and re-
pair, deal with different infrastructural dimensions. Gillespie shows the
inextricable opacity of algorithms, an automated and legitimized mode of
knowledge (a logic), which constructs public relevance and calculated
publics, more and more in competition with an editorial model of know-
ledge (traditional, expert-based journalism). The installed basis of algo-
rithms as infrastructure stays opaque, never fully accountable to users and
even providers. Jackson unveils the deep and hidden power of repair
practices, usually neglected in the study of innovation, indeed crucial to
change and transformation of the world we inhabit as subject to continu-
ous breakdown and restoration, which call for sustainability and ecologi-
cal issues in infrastructures and beyond them.
     In sum, it can be said that infrastructure, consistently with its etymol-
ogy (infra means in-between) constitutes a central bridge to put STS and
Media Studies together, not as a juxtaposition but as a combination, hy-
bridation and reciprocal fertilization/openness (in Boczkowski and Siles’
terms, a “cosmopolitan” approach or (in)sight).
     Another fil rouge which can be traced is constitutively linked to infra-
structure, namely invisible work and opacity/ambivalence of knowledge
(Brunton and Fenton; Bowker; Downey; Gillespie; Jackson). As a coun-
ter-part, there is a visible and publicly relevant work, that of mass-media,
techno freaks, gurus and politicians in associating new technologies and
media with ideas of freedom and liberty, in both overt and implicit forms,
as Kelty points out in his illuminating chapter on media, technology and
political theory.
     The scope and range of research in media technologies presented is
very broad; both contemporary and historical cases are analyzed. Conti-
nuities and contradictions of knowledge and media infrastructures are
Book Reviews                                                            153
pointed out, e.g. the centrality of human labor for networking (Downey)
and the opposite (complementary) automation of algorithms (Gillespie).
    The fertile encounter between STS and media studies is evident
through concepts like information labor (vs media broadcast/producti-
on); power users or superusers (vs designers/users); calculated publics (vs
media audience). Such concepts emerge exactly from media technology as
a cross-field convergence.
    The book as a knowledge enterprise attempts to re-think about given
classifications and infrastructures of disciplinary knowledge in two fields
of established scholarship (namely, STS and media studies). As such, it is
very much attuned with an STS sensibility, summarized by concepts like
“mutual constitution”, “co-construction” and “heterogeneous networks”.
    Indeed, as a scholar trained in Communication Studies then focused
on STS, my critical remark after reading the book is that it embraces
more of STS lessons than of Media Studies, despite the declared aim to
make the two fields fertilize each other. This is an outcome that can be in-
terpreted in different ways– it could be Media Studies scholars are more
open “to be hybridized”, or more cosmopolitan than provincial in their
scholarship. It could also be that this STS-driven hybridation is the inevi-
table result of electing heterogeneous materiality (in an STS vein) as the
starting and entry point of most contributions to the volume.
    However, this leaves the main merit of the book untouched. It sound-
ly succeeds in showing that materiality matters and is there, going beyond
and against the resistant myth of immateriality and de-materialization as
univocal, irresistible hallmarks of digital media technologies, eventually
bringing the myth itself in the picture and connecting it to wires and ca-
bles.


                                   ***

Nick Couldry
Sociologia dei nuovi media. Teoria sociale e pratiche mediali digitali,
Milano, Pearson, 2015, pp. 288 [italian translation of Media, Society,
World. Social Theory and Digital Media Practice, 2012]

Davide Bennato Università di Catania

    One of the most interesting debates in the field of Media Studies is
about which role social theory plays. This debate stems from the critique
of postmodernism and the disappearance of the social that usually afflicts
cultural studies and thereby Media Studies. Trying to solve this problem,
Nick Couldry makes a very delicate as much as fascinating intellectual
move: the proposal of a socially oriented media theory (9). This proposal
