Intermedial Passages in Time and Space

Abstract

Media are tools for communicating across space and time.They are technologies of culture, socially organised machineries for constructing meanings, identities and forms of power.Media use is always spatially and temporally located, while simultaneously both representing and effectively shaping space and time.Each specific media use is also anchored in multiple networks of mediation, where single media are intrinsically interconnected and interdependent.A critical cultural studies perspective on mediated communication acknowledges its powerful social and spatial contexts, its shifting temporal processes and its open and heterogeneous internal structures.Experiences from the large Swedish media ethnographic Passages project highlight some consequences of such a perspective for media and communication studies at large. 1 I will focus on three aspects that became central to this interdisciplinary project and that invite reworking key perspectives within current media studies in general, relating to some basic spatial, temporal and relational aspects of mediated communication.The project worked as a collective research team, combining multifarious methods and perspectives in a study of media use in a everyday practices.The starting-point was a large shopping centre, where a wide range of media genres and media users were present.The rich results can be summarised along three main dimensions.(1) Starting in a specific place made it possible to develop an awareness of the spatial aspects of media use.(2) Following the temporal processes of media use from beginning to end acknowledged the processual character of encounters between media and people.(3) Looking for intermedial relations between media types and genres was a way to avoid isolating and reifying any of them.I will in turn discuss some preliminary conclusions for media studies at large that can be drawn in each of these directions, based on a selection of findings.10.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.