10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17290
This section presents three perspectives on the trajectories of interaction between science &amp; technology studies and media studies in three different national contexts: Germany, France and Italy. Each of the contributions focuses on a specific country and adopts a distinctive standpoint to unfold how STS and media studies have interacted or have maintained boundaries and differences. The first contribution about Germany moves from the outcomes of two workshops on these topics and highlights how STS and media studies seem to tap into each other in a highly selective manner, filling some of their conceptual and empirical gaps, but not engaging in an actual mutual discussion. The second text assumes as fulcrum the concepts of “mediation” and “dispositif” in order to argue that, in France, these ideas has played the role of “boundary objects”, enabling a dialogue between the two different fields. Finally, the third and last input to this section reconstructs some of the trajectories that led specific groups or individuals working in communication studies and semiotics in Italy to connect with the STS framework, arguing that the concept of “mediation” emerges as a productive common ground for both communication and STS scholars.
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17290
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Estrid Sørensen
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Italy
STS and Media Studies. Alternative Paths in Different Countries
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
7
Crossing Boundaries
2016-07-08
2023-06-20
2016-07-08
2023-08-07
109-128
TS
Estrid Sørensen
2016/07/08
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17290
109
Ruhr-University in Bochum
2038-3460
1
Italy
en
128
STS and Media Studies. Alternative Paths in Different Countries
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17290/16152
7
                                                                       Crossing Boundaries

STS and Media Studies
Alternative Paths in Different Countries

         Romain Badouard                                        Clément Mabi
    Université de Cergy-Pontoise (FR)             Université de Technologie de Compiègne (FR)

            Alvise Mattozzi                                  Cornelius Schubert
  Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (IT)                       University of Siegen (DE)

            Guillaume Sire                                     Estrid Sørensen
     Institut Français de Presse (FR)                      Ruhr-University in Bochum (DE)



    Abstract: This section presents three perspectives on the trajectories of in-
    teraction between science & technology studies and media studies in three
    different national contexts: Germany, France and Italy. Each of the contribu-
    tions focuses on a specific country and adopts a distinctive standpoint to un-
    fold how STS and media studies have interacted or have maintained bounda-
    ries and differences. The first contribution about Germany moves from the
    outcomes of two workshops on these topics and highlights how STS and
    media studies seem to tap into each other in a highly selective manner, filling
    some of their conceptual and empirical gaps, but not engaging in an actual
    mutual discussion. The second text assumes as fulcrum the concepts of
    “mediation” and “dispositif” in order to argue that, in France, these ideas has
    played the role of “boundary objects”, enabling a dialogue between the two
    different fields. Finally, the third and last input to this section reconstructs
    some of the trajectories that led specific groups or individuals working in
    communication studies and semiotics in Italy to connect with the STS
    framework, arguing that the concept of “mediation” emerges as a productive
    common ground for both communication and STS scholars.

    Keywords: STS; media studies; Germany; France; Italy.

    Corresponding author: Alvise Mattozzi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
    Faculty of Design and Art, Piazza Università 1, 39100 Bozen-Bolzano, Italy.
    Email: amattozzi@unibz.it.




TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
7 (1) pp. 109-128 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                2016
110                                                         Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

Encounters, Lone Travellers or Productive Differences:
media studies and STS in Germany

Cornelius Schubert and Estrid Sørensen

The following pages sketch out conceptual encounters as well as evasions
between STS and media studies against the backdrop of meeting at and
organising shared STS/media studies workshops and conferences. Both
authors have a background in STS and have been collaborating with
scholars in media studies over the last years. We report our experiences as
personal perspectives of how STS and media studies meet, overlap and
diverge in Germany as well as in broader international context.
    Our mutual interest in engaging with media studies from an STS per-
spective began at the 2013 conference of the German media studies Asso-
ciation (GfM) in Lüneburg, where both authors happened to run into
each other. We found that we both had recently taken up jobs associated
with media studies: Estrid in Bochum and Cornelius in Siegen. We took
our meeting in Lüneburg and our new jobs as circumstantial evidence,
that the two fields of STS and media studies were somehow converging
and we were immediately interested in what this supposed convergence
might look like. Already, a convergence could be seen in several publica-
tions where German media scholars were engaging with concepts from
STS and especially with ANT (Hepp et al. 2006; Schroer 2008; Thiel-
mann et al. 2013).
    From our experiences of working with media scholars, we felt that we
were often talking about similar phenomena, albeit in different terms. Of
course, there was an interest in issues of mediation, a central term in both
fields. However, the empirical cases tend to differ: not surprisingly media
studies focus primarily on media such as books, newspapers, radio, televi-
sion and the internet, technology studies focus primarily on tools and ma-
chines, and science studies on scientific instruments and theories. Out of
this heterogeneous mix, the internet in its broadest sense seemed to be
the most promising field of conversion (see Gillespie et al. 2014). Follow-
ing our brief encounter in Lüneburg, we decided to look for current re-
search at the intersections of STS and media studies.
    Our next step led us from Germany to Poland, where we organised a
session titled “STS and media studies: Empirical and conceptual encoun-
ters?” at the 2014 EASST (European Association of the Study of Science
and Technology) conference in Torun. The session called for presenta-
tions that would spell out the similarities and differences of between me-
dia, science and technology studies. However, we found that most
presentations were concerned with enhancing media studies through var-
ious STS perspectives. This much was to be expected at a STS confer-
ence, but we both had the feeling that the connections between STS and
media studies were generally not very well balanced. Most importantly,
Badouard, Mabi, Mattozzi, Schubert, Sire & Sørensen                     111
we felt that we did not gain a deeper insight into how STS might benefit
from media studies instead of the other way round.
    The session in Torun, the existing literature, and the frequent ex-
changes with our media studies colleagues left us with the impression that
there is a curious division of labour at work in the convergence of STS
and media studies. In many cases, we found that when media scholars en-
gage with STS, they tend draw on the concepts and ideas of STS, espe-
cially the notions of mediation, flows and networks found in ANT. Yet in
the other direction, STS scholars rarely seem to draw conceptually on
media studies – with some notable exceptions (Latour 1986). When STS
scholars engage with media studies, it usually concerns the common em-
pirical cases of information infrastructures such as the internet (Boczkow-
ski and Lievrouw 2008), yet they keep on using the conceptual apparatus
developed in STS. Put differently, STS scholars seem rather to engage
with studies of media than with media studies.
    All in all, we became suspicious, that there might actually not be a
conversion between STS and media studies after all. Rather, the two fields
seem to tap into each other in a highly selective manner, filling some of
their conceptual and empirical gaps, but not engaging in a mutual discus-
sion. Only few STS scholars talk about aesthetics or affects, mass media
or media with a more playful or creative character such as movies, com-
puter games, and art products (see however Sørensen 2016). On the other
hand, less attention is paid by media studies scholars to issues of produc-
tion and industrial machines or legal regulation of technological innova-
tion.
    The experience that both fields have a strong tendency to engage with
the other in highly selective ways brought us to organise a workshop in
which we wanted to explicitly trace more unusual connections between
STS and media studies – e.g. STS scholars importing concepts from me-
dia studies and media scholars interested in laboratories and workplaces.
Based on an open call for papers, we organised a workshop in Siegen ear-
ly 2015 with the title “Roads less travelled: Exploring new connections
between Media Research and STS”. Many of the presenters at the session
in Torun reacted to the call, just as several scholars who had not yet been
involved in our discussion joined the workshop in Siegen. What intrigued
us over the course of this workshop was that even though we aimed at
finding more connections, the presentations and discussions instead re-
vealed significant differences between (and within) the two fields. Rather
than finding hidden connections, the presentations explored how con-
cepts, methods, perspectives and interests differed between STS and me-
dia studies. We felt that these presentations provided a very good insight
into the current state of the relations (and lack thereof) of STS and media
studies, and for this reason those presentations will be in the focus of the
rest of our discussion.
    The heterogeneity of the cases and approaches presented at the work-
shop highlighted the fact that media studies seem to encompass an even
112                                                           Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

more diverse field than STS. Trying to bridge the two fields is thus a dif-
ficult, if not impossible task to undertake. It would force singular identi-
ties onto polyphonic fields. Instead, the workshop revealed that STS and
media research overlap in certain areas of interest, both conceptually and
empirically, such as in studies of infrastructures and media technologies.
    Paolo Magaudda (Padova) elegantly showed how user studies in STS
and media research share a common ancestor in domestication theory
(Silverstone and Hirsch 1992) and the idea that the shaping of media and
technology is hardly finished after they enter the user household (e.g.
Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003). Yet both sides tend to obscure this shared
history in favour of purifying their respective approaches.
    Somewhat unexpected by the organisers, the workshop gave in many
presentations rise to discussions of relevant differences between STS and
media studies. By comparing approaches of the German media theorist
Friedrich Kittler with that of Bruno Latour, Judith Willkomm (Siegen)
elaborated how Kittler was primarily concerned with the “logic” of me-
dia, whereas Latour is preoccupied with their “logistics”. Despite their
common interest in media, processes of mediation, and inscriptions, they
undertake different analyses and ask different questions.
    Sergio Minniti (Milan) argued that media archaeology focuses on sub-
altern and artistic practices of media use rather than re-tracing the devel-
opment of a successful technical or scientific innovation in STS. In a simi-
lar vein, the classic studies in STS of innovation failures, like that of Ara-
mis (Latour 1996), usually do not take the subaltern position as a starting
point, but argue from the perspective of (forestalled and unsuccessful)
powerful actors.
    One theme that followed from this was that STS is often seen as only
following dominant actors while at the same time not taking clear politi-
cal sides in favour of suppressed minorities. This critique has been lev-
elled at STS from media studies in the tradition of Cultural Studies. STS
scholars usually find such accusations tiresome feeling this critique is ut-
terly misplaced. This is particularly the case when taking more recent
studies into account (i.e. de Laet and Mol 2000) along with feminist stud-
ies in technoscience (i.e. Haraway 1991). However, the exchanges at the
workshop revealed that the discussion more than anything is about what
counts as political, and in what contexts STS and media studies scholars
can be granted political relevancy. STS scholars mainly argue with respect
to the (sometimes invisible) levels of “doing politics”, and ontological
politics (Mol 1999). These are embedded in the ways in which technolo-
gies, media and scientific categories influence the ways in which we think,
act and assess practices, social (and material) relations, discourses and
even impact what comes to count as the political. Media studies scholars,
on the other hand, tend to understand the political in a more distanced
and diagnostic sense – pointing out power differences in media techno-
logical arrangements from a (media studies) scholarly informed perspec-
tive. It became clear in the course of the workshop, that if we force both
Badouard, Mabi, Mattozzi, Schubert, Sire & Sørensen                     113
tendencies to their extremes, we risk creating the “essential” differences
between STS and media studies we sought to overcome, and which are
hardly warranted given the internal diversity of both fields. Yet different
perspectives remain and we should be sensitive to their boundaries.
    Another striking difference between STS and media studies is the en-
gagement with issues of war. In the evening keynote Erhard Schüttpelz
(Siegen) articulated two divergent positions: On the one hand media
studies were primarily born out of Communication Studies occupied with
propaganda related to warfare. Kittler and McLuhan shared a common
interest in military media technology. In STS on the other hand we find
very few empirical studies on war and on military technologies (except for
some prominent cases such as MacKenzie 1993; Law 2002), but indeed
military metaphors proliferate along with a strong political rhetoric in or-
der to draw attention to the conflictual nature of science and technology.
The most obvious example of this is the “science wars” rhetoric.
    The preference for asymmetries in media studies and symmetries in
STS was mirrored in the presentations of Adam Fish (Lancaster) and Dil-
etta Luna Calibeo and Richard Hindmarsh (Brisbane). From a Cultural
Studies background both engaged with visibilities in social media. Adam
Fish analysed how Anonymous video producers see themselves in a war
with Scientology and government agencies and how they are at the same
time inextricably linked to commercial video platforms. Diletta Luna Cal-
ibeo elaborated how environmental activists may be framed as eco-
terrorists in their struggle to create visibility for corporations’ environ-
mentally damaging activities. These presentations also hinted at another
difference between STS and media studies: the latter prefer situating their
cases in a “bigger picture” of capitalism, whereas the former tend to look
more closely at individual cases, and draw more modest conclusions.
    That our attempt at exploring new connections between STS and me-
dia studies also brought their differences to the fore was one of the most
insightful and unexpected results of the workshop. It showed that the
search for novel links in many cases occasioned a re-tracing of boundaries
between and homogeneity within STS and media studies. No simple
equation can be made between STS and media studies. Yet, the distinc-
tion between perspectives is productive in focusing and specifying our
discussions of science, technology, and media. If we look beyond the
beaten tracks of collaborations between STS and media studies a plethora
of new questions arise concerning media, technologies, and science, along
with variations of more or less disciplinary ways of answering them. De-
spite the differences, common themes and ancestors of STS and media
studies came to the fore. They warrant their continued engagement,
among others with issues of power and subversion, materiality and mean-
ing, mediation and cooperation, design and use.
    STS and media studies undoubtedly (have to) share empirical fields
and conceptual perspectives and both benefit from manifold cross-
fertilisations. Mapping out our similarities and differences, we need to
114                                                          Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

simultaneously engage in the work of purification and hybridisation (cf.
Latour 1993): looking for homogeneities as well as heterogeneities within
and across their boundaries (some of which may be fluid), and from there
to identify productive ways of collaborating and ways of productive
fighting.


                                    ***

Mediation as a Boundary-Object, Dispositif as a
Boundary-Concept

Romain Badouard, Clément Mabi and Guillaume Sire

STS and media studies have made a pragmatic turn over the last two dec-
ades, by deciding to study what they both call “mediations”. Media stud-
ies stopped describing societal phenomena like just a problem of mass
communication or an interpersonal one. They have, so to speak, given
back its complexity to the social, thanks to this term, “mediation”, which
“usefully highlights the artefacts and practices used to communicate” and
allows to study “social and organizational arrangements through which
mediation is instituted” (Livingston 2009, 10).
    For their part, STS gave to the technical artefacts the status of “media-
tors”, i.e. that artefacts can change, alter, enhance or lower the performa-
tivity of social actions (Hennion and Latour 1993). In doing so, STS have
analysed the innovation process by describing it as an encounter of differ-
ent program of actions, which is achieved by the mediation of technical
artefacts (Latour et al. 1991; Akrich 1993). They moved away from a clas-
sic epistemology which opposes the world of speeches and the world of
things to a conception of the world where speeches and things are co-
constructed; because speeches are not outside things: they circulate with-
in these things, with and trough them (Callon 2006, 269).
    This shared preoccupation about the materiality of mediation has cre-
ated an opportunity for dialogue between these two research fields within
a same program. This is particularly encouraged by the development of a
digital ecosystem that has given a central position to technical artefacts in
our societies. This similar turn occured within the two fields —for which
the use of the term “mediation” is a result, not a cause— so STS and me-
dia studies have begun to share common issues. In studying information
and communication technologies, the two fields need to avoid the pitfall
of both social and technological determinisms, in order to take into ac-
count the socially constructed dimension of technology and the question
of the effects that technical artefacts can have on social practices. It will
Badouard, Mabi, Mattozzi, Schubert, Sire & Sørensen                              115
allow them to analyse the way technology, which results of actors’ will
and actions, can regulate actions and normalize social practices. There-
fore, technical artefacts are not immovable and unreachable entities but
results of sociotechnical processes. That’s why, in the Handbook of Sci-
ence and Technology Studies, Pablo Boczkowski and Leah A. Lievrouw
(2008) advocate for bridging the gap between media studies and STS in
order to analyse the materiality of medias and mediations. This concept of
materiality is also at the heart of Gillespie et al.’s book that aims at openig
up new ways of federating scholars, at the crossroads between STS and
media studies, to question what kind of boundary-objects1 are the media-
tions (Gillespie et al. 2014).
    For this to be possible, it is necessary to define and operationalize key
notions that will serve as boundary-concepts to these boundary-objects.
These concepts would allow to mix the two approaches in a coherent and
operational theoretical framework, rather than just referring to the fields
of one another. This is what has been initiated during the last years in
France thanks to the French concept of “dispositive”2, which has been
used to study mediations within the digital ecosystem. We will briefly in-
troduce this boundary-concept, originated from Michel Foucault’s work,
and explain how its operationalization has allowed to mix approaches of
STS and media studies to analytically deploy mediations as boundary-
objects.

Philosophical Origins

The first time the word dispositif was used as a social concept was during
an interview of Michel Foucault published in 1977 in the journal “Or-
nicar?”. In a crucial contribution, the philosopher presented it as a

thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, archi-
tectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific
statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said
as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the dispositif. The dispositif itself
is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (…) On
the one hand, there is a process of functional overdetermination, because each ef-
fect —positive or negative, intentional or unintentional— enters into resonance or
contradiction with the others and thereby calls for a readjustment or a re-working
of the heterogeneous elements that surface at various points. On the other hand,
there is a perpetual process of strategic elaboration. (Foucault 1994, 299) [our em-
phasis]

    Several linguists and philosophers, such as Jäger, Raffnsøe, Agamben,

    1
      About boundary objects, see Star and Griesemer (1989).
    2
      In English, some scholars say “social apparatus” or “device” but we prefer to
keep that word in french, because its meaning is extremely subtle and looses some
of its essence in both translations.
116                                                                 Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

Pasquinelli, have then given their own definition of this concept. In
France, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze detailed and completed the fou-
caldian approach, considering dispositifs as machines that make one see
and talk: “The two first dimensions of a dispositif —or those to which
Foucault draws our attention in the first instance— are curves of visibility
and curves of enunciation” (Deleuze 1989, 185). From this point of view,
a dispositif produces some speeches and acts as a “truth-telling regime”.
Deleuze does not forget the fundamental dimension of Foucault’s con-
cept: the dispositif is a space where power relations are visible. He stresses
the importance of the idea that power results from a strategy more than a
status or a property; it is exercised more than it is possessed; it comes
from a way of being linked to one another (relationship) rather than of
having something that the other has not (ownership) (Badouard 2012,
54). We will explain later why this reading of Foucault’s work by Deleuze
is particularly interesting for the dialogue between STS and media stud-
ies.

An often Misemployed Concept that Can Make Sense through
the STS Lense

For the past twenty years, the concept of dispositif has colonized the
French social sciences (Beuscart and Peerbaye 2006) and in particular
media studies (Appel et al. 2010). However, as Laurence Monnoyer-
Smith has said, its use reflects the existence of an unavoidable reference
from scholars who have not really thought about what it involves theoret-
ically and methodologically (Monnoyer-Smith 2013, 172). Indeed, it
seems that the porous, versatile and elastic nature of this concept has con-
tributed to its success (Peeters and Charlier 1999, 15) but has also made it
as easy to quote yet as difficult to employ properly. This has resulted in
seductive but questionable uses:

Like other social sciences, media studies have overused the concept of dispositif
and drained it of its heuristic basis. Its reinterpretations and uses have led it far
from Foucault’s original thought whose purpose was to associate it to the notions
of “intentionality” and “strategy” in order to make a more instrumental use of it,
which will allow to understand and conceptualize the mediations and the way the
dispositif underlies them (Gavillet 2010, 20).

Such a movement has also been noticed by Peeters and Charlier (1999,
18): “[The dispositif] becomes fewer and fewer panoptic, and increasing-
ly pragmatic and interactionistic”.
    STS have less suffered from these pitfalls, mainly because of the soci-
ology of translation (Akrich et al. 2006) and because the definition of the
dispositif was close to what Bruno Latour calls an actor-network. Indeed,
the two notions refer to the same idea of sociotechnical artefacts, power
relations, hypothetical subjectifications, and, more generally, to the idea
Badouard, Mabi, Mattozzi, Schubert, Sire & Sørensen                      117
of mediation (Beuscart and Peerbaye 2006). Dispositifs make materially
possible the phenomena of translation, through a mix of human and non-
human actors where the skills and the capacities are distributed and
where the different actions can bee mediated and coordinated. The geog-
raphy of power relationships depends on the distribution of skills and ca-
pacities. “[Dispositifs] make things. They articulate actions; they act and
make other actors to take actions” (Muniesa et al. 2007). Scholars have to
measure the strength of associations, to identify what can weaken or
strengthen them and to figure out for each involved actor how and to
what extent he can inflect or alter others’ actions and to influence their
effective results.
    However, even if they have used the concept of dispositif in order to
designate the instrumental dimension of mediation more than mediation
itself, STS have somehow neglected the power. According with
Yochai Benkler (2016, 16) we consider the notion of power as “the capac-
ity of an entity to alter the behaviors, beliefs, outcomes, or configurations
of some other entity”. Thi is the reason why they could benefit from me-
dia studies, i.e. by considering all of the mediation’s purpose and not just
its materiality and its social causes and involvements.

Dispositif, the Dialogue between STS and media studies and the
Study of Communicational Mediations

    In order to remedy the “instrumental temptation”, it seems essential
to shift the focus back on the foucaldian meaning, to understand the dis-
positif as a tool of power. It would then be a matter of building a theoret-
ical framework, which could allow analysing mediations with their soci-
otechnical complexity by unfolding the “making-say” and the “making-
see” of the dispositif. It could also help identifying the power relations
within the mediations, keeping in mind that a mediation between two
parts cannot be perfectly symmetrical.
    Several scholars in France have done exactly that for the past six
years. They used the concept of dispositif as a fulcrum thanks to which
they could make STS and media studies dialogue and study mediations
typical of digital technologies of information and communication. This
approach has been developed in particular by a research team of Univer-
sité Technologique de Compiègne: in their academic work Julia Bonac-
corsi and Virginie Julliard (2010) and then Laurence Monnoyer-Smith
(2013) have proposed to operationalize the dispositif to understand the
way communicational practices could structure power relationships
through the mediation of technical artefacts. Romain Badouard (2012)
Jean-Christophe Plantin (2012) and then Clément Mabi (2014) have ex-
tended this reflexion in their PhD thesis by using the same approach in
order to study participatory devices and digital navigable maps. And
Guillaume Sire (2015) has used the same notion in order to show how the
actions of Google and news publishers can exercise a mutual influence,
118                                                           Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

and therefore influence the way news are told, the way they circulate and
the way they are ranked within the search engine’s results.
     In order to avoid determinism, these scholars consider that the dispos-
itif is not totally crystallised into hypothetical power relations but let the
possibility for individuals to express themselves as subjects. Actors can
implement strategies in order to contest existing divisions of power. By
using their imagination, some of them can set up a space within the dis-
positif where they are free from the pressures that otherwise could be ex-
erted on them. Some can also “siphon” the power of other actors. More-
over, these scholars take into account actors’ creativity and consider that
the dispositif is always moving, so that they do not lock a priori the social
actors they study into insurmountable lines of a strategic idea of power
(Monnoyer-Smith 2013). Such an approach advocates for a subtle consid-
eration of power, which aims to help scholars to describe how mediation
is operated and how the dispositif that allows it can rebalance or counter-
balance sociotechnical relationships.

      Conclusion

    A dialogue between different disciplinary fields is always difficult and
often disappointing. But for some social phenomena there is not other
way than to look at them from various angles because they can’t be un-
derstood by using just one disciplinary framework. These types of phe-
nomenon are called “boundary-objects”. Mediation is a perfect example
of it, and it could benefit in particular from a crossed perspective that
would be based on both STS and media studies. In order to succeed in
this dialogue, we have introduced here how the boundary-concept “dis-
positif” and explained why and how it is used in France by scholars inter-
ested in digital mediations.
    More generally, we think that the boundary-object “mediation” is at
the crossroads of human and social sciences as a whole: history, law, eco-
nomics, psychology, sociology, aesthetics, and so on. And we think that
the boundary-concept “dispositif” could be a good way to articulate these
different approaches in a pragmatical framework, in order to study —
theoretically and practically— what power relations are, do, could be and
could do.




                                     ***
Badouard, Mabi, Mattozzi, Schubert, Sire & Sørensen                       119

“Decentering”: Connections between media studies
and STS in Italy

Alvise Mattozzi

 “Communicaton”, much more than “media”, has been the word and the
domain around which researchers working in Italy gathered, in order to
carry out researches ascribable to “media studies” (Ms). These resear-
chers came from different disciplines like film studies, semiotics and so-
ciology of communication, that pertain to different institutional scientific-
disciplinary sectors into which Italian academia is officially partitioned.
Since the ‘90s, this gathering has been also possible, thanks to the institu-
tion of graduate and undergraduate teaching programmes in “Communi-
cation sciences”, where all these disciplines, together with other ones,
were taught.
    “Television” is another word that has characterized Italian research
into and around Ms. “Television” has of course characterized Ms more or
less everywhere. However, television has remained the centre of Italian
Ms for long time, even when it started to be decentered by the presence
of other information and communication technologies (Ict). Such “fixa-
tion” on television –which is somewhat understandable in a country like
Italy where television has had a well-known direct political relevance– has
had its consequences for the establishment of connections between Ms
and STS.
    Nevertheless, they have been established. And, although later than in
other countries, it is possible to find connections even before STS started
to have an organizational structure (i.e. STS Italia – The Italian Society
for Social Studies of Science and Technology) and a certain visibility in
Italy. With this contribution, I want to reconstruct some of the trajecto-
ries that led specific groups, disciplines or individuals working in the field
of communication in Italy to connect with STS. Thus, this article largely
privileges a historical account of the emerging connections between Ms
and STS and also it prevalently focuses on the way already established
Italian media studies have approached STS perspectives, rather than on
the way Italian STS practitioners have increasingly adopted media as their
object. For this same reason, my focus here is generally on long term vec-
tors of influences, rather than on the present situation characterised by an
increasing number of STS researchers who do studies of media technolo-
gies combining from the start Ms and STS – an area that is widely repre-
sented by this double special issue of Tecnoscienza. As a consequence of
this choice, I will not review here today Italian STS researches centred on
(new) media in Italy, taking as a departure point that many of their prota-
gonists are participating to this issue of Tecnoscienza as editors as well as
authors and book reviews writers.
120                                                              Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

    In other countries –notoriously Great Britain, but also Norway– it is
through a “decentering” of television –started already at the end of the
‘80s thanks to researches on “domestication” (Silverstone and Hirsch
1992; Lie and Sorensen 1996; Berker et al. 2006)– that an overcoming of
the taken-for-grantedness of the tangible, artefactual and technical featu-
res of television has been possible and, with it, also the establishment of
connections with STS – especially with the Social Shaping of Technology
(Sst) approach. Looked at from the viewpoint of the Vcr or of the home
computer, television started to show not only what was on the screen
(programmes) and in front of it (audiences), but also what was around,
behind and in between them: shells, frames, interfaces, devices, other ar-
tefacts, as well as values and negotiations, not just over interpretations of
what was shown on television, but also over Ict intended as goods and
household appliances. All these things, in a way or another, mediated the rela-
tion between the screen and its audiences and needed to be accounted for.
    Only much later, such shift has taken place in Italy. It happened
when, thanks to diffuse digitalization, television has started to be “techni-
cally” decentered. Given the often taken-for-grantedness of the technical
and artefactual aspects of television (Ortoleva 1995)3, its centrality for Ita-
lian studies of communication has also meant that those technical and ar-
tefactual aspects of media have tended to be disregarded4, thus mining
the possibility of a dialogue with STS. Italian studies of communication
have indeed developed within the trails of the encoding/decoding para-
digm they inaugurated –as indicated by Stuart Hall, who, in his famous
essay “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse”, cites indi-
rectly Eco and collegues (1965) as ground for his proposal. They have
thus tended to focus on the tension between the emission and the recep-
tion of “symbolic content” –as the preference for the word “communica-
tion” over “media” underlines.
    For instance, the debate around “neotelevision” – i.e., the configura-
tion of television shows that emerged in the ‘80s in Italy, through which
television became much more self-referential and in tune with everyday
domestic life – was tackled mainly in enunciational terms, looking at how
Tv shows would address and engage audiences differently. As Peppino
Ortoleva, historian of media who has always taken STS into considera-
tion, has noticed, that debate has taken very little into account that such
new way of doing television was based on colour transmission, a relevant

    3
      These aspects not only were taken for granted, but also – I would say – as a
sort of doom – a framework within which it is very difficult to introduce Sts, Sts
have, indeed, usually to do with possible alternative paths. Against the view of
media and technological systems as forever stabilized landscapes, Italian leftist
movements tried often to propose and practice alternatives (Berardi et al. 2003;
Collettivo A/Traverso 1976; Faenza 1973).
    4
      For a way to consider technologies and materiality within Italian Ms, which
differs from that of Sts, see Attimonelli et al. (2011).
Badouard, Mabi, Mattozzi, Schubert, Sire & Sørensen                          121
technological change – with an explicit socio-political relevance for Italy
(Ortoleva 1995) 5.

Decentering Television: Attempted Connections
As already mentioned, a decentering of the television took place thanks to
the general process of digitalization, first with the diffusion of mobile
phones, then with the penetration into the everyday life of people of
computer mediated communication and, finally, through the digitaliza-
tion of television thanks to digital terrestrial transmissions.
    On all these topics, the OssCom (Osservatorio sulla Comunicazione –
Observatory on Communication) of the Catholic University of Milan has
conducted researches by using “domestication” (Silverstone and Hirsch
1992) as main interpretative and methodological framework (among oth-
ers, Pasquali and Scifo 2004; Scifo 2005; Pasquali et al. 2010). As it hap-
pened ten years before in Great Britain, through domestication a connec-
tion with the Sst approach has been attempted. Since these researches
were mainly focused on audiences and users, what the OssCom research-
ers found interesting in Sst was the development of user-oriented per-
spective on technology that, at the time, was being developed.
    What we see in these researches is, however, just a general reference
to Sst, without a direct and systematic inquiry into how actually artifacts
were shaped. This happened also because most of these researches were
based on interviews or on narrations and discourses (intending them in
verbal or visual terms), so that not much is said about how actual interac-
tions and mediations took place not just through, but also on and around
the researched artefacts – an exception being Aroldi et al. (2008, § 2.3).
Thus, whereas domestication was analyzed often in a very detailed way,
taking into account all the phases through which artifacts become parts of
households’ routines, Sst did not get developed in a thorough and sys-
tematic way. Not surprisingly, the references to Sst have tended to fade
through time.
    The category of “innovation” is another way through which STS got
connected with Italian Ms, still in relation to the decentering of television
operated by digitalization. Framing media technologies as innovation has
been possible especially thanks to the comparison proposed by Leah
Lievrouw (in Lievrouw and Livingstone 2002) between the diffusionist
theory of innovation and the Sst approach. For instance, a reflection on
digital divide in terms of innovation has been developed by Maria Fran-
cesca Murru’s essay in Colombo (2007), by using Lievrouw’s comparison.
However, also in this case a systematic use of the Sst approach has not
followed – and actually within the same research project (Colombo 2007)

    5
     For a reconsideration of the debate around neotelevision that takes into ac-
count the relevance of media, however still without acknowledging the issue of
colour transmission, see Colombo (2007, 16).
122                                                          Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

certain innovations have been tackled only through the diffusionist ap-
proach. Lievrouw’s article is present in Lievrouw and Livingstone (2002),
a book grounded in the dialogue between Ms and STS, which has been
also translated in Italian in 2007, thus allowing STS to enter in Ms stu-
dents’ handbooks in Italy (see, for example, Sorice 2012).

Decentering Ict: a Connection in Progress

It is through a further decentering of Ict in relation to the urban space
(Tarantino and Tosoni 2013a), that a move toward a more systematic and
promising connection between Ms and STS is at present in progress. In
order to account for the presence and role of media distributed and inter-
acting with the urban environment, Simone Tosoni –who had already
taken part to the mentioned OssCom’s researches– and Marco Tarantino,
are developing an approach, called the “Rpm model, an STS–informed
inquiry of socio–spatial production” (among other essays, Tarantino and
Tosoni 2013b) –where RPM stands for Representation/Practices/Materia-
lity. They propose to read the social space as the outcome of the interac-
tion among various “sociospatial production patterns”, considered as
“networks of representation of space”, “spatial practices” and “spatial
morphology” in a relationship of continuous translation and co-shaping.
In order to reconstruct the various chain of translations between media
and spaces they use categories taken from Actor-Network Theory (Ant),
in order to account for non-human actors, but also taken from the Social
Construction of Technology (Scot) approach, in order to take into ac-
count relevant social human actors, through which understand which are
the relevant non-human actors.

Decentering Signs and Enunciation: a Dedicated Connection
It is very likely that, if we would take into consideration only quantitative
data – number of citations – the domain of Italian Ms connecting the
most with STS would result to be semiotics. However, looking more
closely, we would see that most of the citations would refer to Bruno
Latour's works. This is the result of the close relation Bruno Latour has
had with semiotics and especially with Greimasian semiotics – which is
largely diffused and practiced in Italy –, since the beginning of its inquiry
on sciences. Latour was introduced to semiotics by Paolo Fabbri – one of
the co-authors of Eco et al. (1965) – with whom Latour also signed one of
his first STS articles in 1977.
     However, the present relation between Latour and Italian semiotics,
though grounded on that heritage, started much later on two other
grounds, related to the decentering of two basic semiotic concepts: signs
and enunciation. Greimassian semiotics, and especially the way it has
been practiced in Italy, has tended to overcome the concept of sign – and
with it also of representation – in order to develop a semiotics of texts,
Badouard, Mabi, Mattozzi, Schubert, Sire & Sørensen                      123
intended as complex configurations of meaning-bearing relations. Thus,
texts can be the traditional objects of Ms like movies, television shows,
advertisements, but also more tangible artifacts like tools, interfaces,
technical objects.
    Therefore, a systematic relation with Latour has been resorted within
the attempt to analyze tangible artifacts as complex configurations of rela-
tions (see, among others, Deni 2002; Mangano 2009), similarly to what
Akrich and Latour (1992; see also Latour 1992) did, by using semiotics
too. The results of these researches, thanks also to a broader reflection on
the Latourian concept of interobjectivity – intended, though, in a restrict-
ed way, only as relations among objects – have been used to analyze more
traditional texts as paintings, movies or advertisements (Landowski and
Marrone 2004) as well as new media (Marrone et al. 2004). Within, this
framework the entire reflection around the concept of script (Akrich and
Latour 1992) has been connected to Eco's concept of "model reader”,
with which Eco intended a "system of instructions aiming at producing a
possible reader whose role is designed by and within the text" which "can
be extrapolated from it and described" (Eco 1994, 52) – a definition very
similar to that of script. This relation between script and model reader
has proven productive in order to analyze interfaces (see, for a general
overview, Cosenza 2004).
    Enunciation has been a very relevant concept for Italian Ms –as I said,
neotelevision has been analyzed mainly in enunciational terms. Enuncia-
tion is also a concept often used by Latour, who has proposed a radical
extension of it (Latour 1999), providing the basis for the subsequent re-
flection on the “modes of existence”. As for now, such further decenter-
ing has been the ground for a reconsideration of the concept by Italian
semioticians, however it has not yet given way to a more radical rethink-
ing that Latour’s proposal probably requires.

Decentering Signification and Information: a Possible Connection
Tiziana Terranova’s contribution to Cultural Studies and to Internet
Studies – especially through the influential essay on “Free Labour” (now
part of Terranova 2004) – intersects in various ways STS, representing a
possible connection between Italian Ms and STS.
    “Free Labour”, for instance, is the result of a Bristish research project
connecting cultural studies and STS (Wyatt et al. 2001), which is explicit-
ly grounded on the Italian autonomists reflection, especially on its con-
cept of “social factory”. Another example can be found in her reflections
on the Gramscian concept of “hegemony” (Terranova 2007) – notorious-
ly very relevant for Cultural Studies as well as for Ms. Trying to ground
such concept in a more materialist framework, she introduced issues
which are shared with STS, such as ontological politics, the concept of
publics (Marres 2012) and the rediscovery of Gabriel Tarde. A further
example is related to her more recent reflection on the use social move-
124                                                              Tecnoscienza - 7 (1)

ments do and are able to do of corporate social media (like Facebook and
Twitter), which she sees as new mass media. One of the steps of this re-
flection (Terranova and Donovan 2013) has been the result of an encoun-
ter that has taken pace at a STS Italia’s conference.
    However, beside these intersections, I would like to highlight what I
consider a more relevant connection between her work, Ms and STS.
Such connection could emerge in relation to decenterings she proposed
of the concepts of signification and information. In the first chapter of
Network Culture (Terranova 2004), she addresses information as a more
productive concept than signification – a first decentering within Ms. She
operates this decentering by reconsidering information within a more ma-
terialistic framework, allowing to free that concept from the tension be-
tween sender and receiver. By considering the relation between infor-
mation and noise (and by giving relevance to noise), she decenters infor-
mation, too, and reconceives it not as a passage between two already es-
tablished positions, but as a constitutive event that contributes to create
also the positions between which such event takes places. Thus, infor-
mation is thought in transformative and instaurative terms. This way of
thinking information is very similar to the one in which Antoine Hennion
and Latour have conceived mediation, always in relation to artifacts, to
translation and to enunciation.

Conclusions
    At the end of this reconstruction of some of the trajectories that led
specific groups, disciplines or individuals working in the field of commu-
nication in Italy to connect with STS, the concept of mediation appears to
emerge as a productive common ground that could, in turn, connect the
various decenterings here introduced. Mediation, however, as conceived
by Ant, thus, not so much in relation to media, but within a broader
framework – which encompasses also media. And mediation, for Ant, al-
ways presupposes decenterings – deviations, delegations, otherness.
    Thus, recovering Hennion and Cecile Medael’s (1986, 30) words –
stated exactly thirties years ago in one of the few explicit Ant study of
media –, I can conclude by saying: “we should rely rather on our ability to
define another unit of analysis; to no longer speak of media, but of media-
tion” (Hennion and Meadel 1986, 301).



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