Papers by Christian Schwarzenegger
Media and the Dissemination of Fear, 2021
Publizistik, 2020
Medien und Zeit-das Wechselverhältnis dieser beiden Begriffe und ihre miteinander verknüpften Kon... more Medien und Zeit-das Wechselverhältnis dieser beiden Begriffe und ihre miteinander verknüpften Konstitutionsbedingungen sind als Thema in der Kommunikationswissenschaft keine Unbekannten. Zeitbezogene Begriffe wie etwa Aktualität oder Periodizität gehören zu basalen Kategorien der Medienkunde. Die Bedeutung von Medienkommunikation und zur Verfügung stehenden Kommunikationsmitteln für die Wahrnehmung, Strukturierung und Beurteilung von Zeit(erleben) im Alltag oder in spezifischen Kontexten der Medienproduktion, Medienrezeption oder Mediennutzung ist intensiv besprochen worden. Allerdings entwickeln sich die Möglichkeiten und Bedingungen der Medienkommunikation für die soziale Konstruktion von Zeit weiter. Es ist daher nur folgerichtig, dass Perspektiven auf das Verhältnis von Medien und Zeit "für ein digitales Zeitalter" aktualisiert werden. Das geschieht derzeit auch in internationalen Fachzeitschriften und Herausgeberbänden. Der vorliegende Band, der von Maren Hartmann, Elizabeth Prommer, Karin Deckner und Stephan O. Görland als HerausgeberInnen verantwortet wird, nähert sich dem Themenfeld aus einer Perspektive, die sich besonders für Transformation und Wandel, aber auch Kontinuitäten in der Wahrnehmung von Zeit im "intricate relationship between media, their users and social life" (S. 2), interessiert. Durch die mobile und dauerhafte digitale Verfügbarkeit ist in den letzten Jahren die Unterscheidung von Zeit, die man mit oder ohne Mediennutzung verbringt, zusehends verschwommen bis hinfällig geworden. Durch neue Potentiale sowohl synchroner wie auch asynchroner Mediennutzung sind kommunikationswissenschaftliche Erkläransätze zudem herausgefordert worden.
Digital Journalism, 2018
Approaching journalism history through digital archives, digital sources, and digital methods is ... more Approaching journalism history through digital archives, digital sources, and digital methods is a demanding task for media historians, but also offers prospects. We explore some of the challenges and potential benefits in the light of a concrete research project that investigates journalism history in Germany from 1914 to 2014. The project focuses on the development of journalistic news storytelling following the inverted pyramid model. This paper mainly discusses the difficulties of assembling an adequate corpus. The German case is complicated, mainly because the country's violent history, with two World Wars and two dictatorships, has left several desiderata for historical journalism research. We subdivide a hundred years of journalism history into different phases, and for each of these we discuss different approaches with regard to the availability, accessibility, and usability of sources in digital form. We conclude that digital archives and digital sources open up new techniques for historical journalism research, including methods such as automated content analysis and text mining. Nevertheless, new technological and cultural environments of news pose genuinely new challenges and require new skills and literacies to cope with journalism history through digital archives. KEYWORDS journalism history; digital archives; digital sources; inverted pyramid model
Medien Zeit, 2011
This issue of Medien & Zeit follows up a range of case studies aimed at revealing communicati... more This issue of Medien & Zeit follows up a range of case studies aimed at revealing communication histories that were analyzed in Part I, studies conducted in light of geographical and cultural borders. They highlighted historical artifacts; examined their availability in university curricula and research centers; addressed for different countries the status and history of communication history as an academic profession; and highlighted strengths, limitations, and prospects awaiting a distinctly European account of the historical record. Such scholarship seeks to uncover history. Part II aims to turn the matter around, showing how history might inform scholarship. Here, four essays examine theoretical shifts as appropriate to historical shifts that produce rereadings of communication history. Specifically, shifts in historiography from the national to the transnational address the thematic question, What is European Communication History? , with theoretical issues and recommendations that take note of the recursive, EU-era problem of the nation in a transnational milieu. Essays in Part II trace this recursiveness to earlier times, preceding the formation of today’s Europe, and locate it along lines — theoretical and material — of communication and media history. Each essay offers ontological and material reasons to reconceptualize European communication history as a transnational project. Three of the four authors make distinctly different cases for communication history as transnational history, suggesting, at the very least, that the national cannot and, in fact, has not developed within the geographical borders of the nation. A fourth essay offers reflections on the conduct of European communication history beyond the shift from national to transnational frameworks for theory
Navigating “Academia Incognita” : The European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School and... more Navigating “Academia Incognita” : The European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School and ECREA’s Young Scholars Network
Publizistik
With smart speakers diffusing into society, artificial intelligence is moving from the imaginativ... more With smart speakers diffusing into society, artificial intelligence is moving from the imaginative reservoirs of dystopian storytelling into vernacular living. How do users perceive communication with it? Are Alexa and Siri considered simple devices, sentient assistants, or even artificial friends? Based on nine qualitative interviews with former smart speaker users in Germany, this study analyzes smart speaker use and related personal epistemologies within a media repertoire perspective. By presenting six interrelated action-guiding principles explaining smart speaker use and people’s ambivalent sensemaking, we argue that smart speakers appear neither as friends nor as mere neutral devices to their users. The identified principles explain the peripheral role of smart speakers within media repertoires as handy but suspicious gimmicks. For future smart speaker adoption, whether smart assistants are interpreted as simple-minded, exploitative gimmicks or relevant, reliable, and trustwo...
Studies in Communication and Media, 2020
Forschungsdaten sind das primäre Produkt empirischer Studien und die zentrale Grundlage wissensch... more Forschungsdaten sind das primäre Produkt empirischer Studien und die zentrale Grundlage wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis. Ihre langfristige Sicherung und Bereitstellung zur intersubjektiven Nachvollziehbarkeit und damit zur Qualitätssicherung sollte daher in allen wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen unterstützt werden. Entsprechend hat die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft 2016 die sozialwissenschaftlichen Fachgesellschaften in Deutschland aufgefordert, sich mit dem Thema zu befassen und konkrete Leitlinien zum Umgang mit Forschungsdaten zu entwickeln. Die vorliegenden Leitlinien sind dabei aus einer Arbeitsgruppe der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft entstanden. Sie beziehen sich auf alle in der Kommunikationswissenschaft generierten Datentypen und reflektieren dabei die Bedeutung der Bereitstellung von Forschungsdaten, aber auch Herausforderungen und Einschränkungen. Daraus werden Empfehlungen für verschiedene Zielgruppen abgeleitet, um die Bereitstellun...
Musik und Klangkultur, 2021
Everything not saved will be lost -Nintendo Quit Screen Message Can contemporary history be writt... more Everything not saved will be lost -Nintendo Quit Screen Message Can contemporary history be written without pictures and sounds or without an adequate representation and incorporation of audio and visuals? Although this was a matter of debate only a couple of years ago, when historians were still engaged in a lively dispute about whether the history of the 20 th and 21 st centuries could be adequately written without properly taking into account the ubiquitous dissemination and reception of the mass media, 1 it already seems like the distant past. Meanwhile, we face a new period of transformation in the research into our communicative past, which makes it almost seem absurd that until rather recently the role of media was discussed predominantly with regard to their ambiguous value or validity as a source for historical work rather than as a crucial social and cultural factor playing a part in molding and shaping how historical processes developed. Digital media have since had a massive impact on how we (can) do (media and communication) historiography on several levels. Digital media data or digitized analogue media as new sources that can be used and become relevant for the reconstruction of the past is only one of the levels affected. Against the background of digital change, many subjects of the arts and humanities as well as the social sciences are experiencing a radical structural 1 Classen, "Zeitgeschichte ohne Bild und Ton?"
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2021
The ongoing normalization of digital connection has also increased the interest in digital discon... more The ongoing normalization of digital connection has also increased the interest in digital disconnection research. The desire to disconnect is typically considered a critical reaction to the peculiar affordances and prerequisites of fully participating in digital society. While social and political potentials of disconnections as well as reasons to turn away from media are explored in various trajectories, we still know relatively little about the “what then” and “what else” of digital disconnection. In this article, we address this gap and investigate what stories are told and which imaginaries are invoked in order to commodify disconnection in an exemplary field of the growing disconnection industry, namely tourism. Drawing from interviews and analysis of online representations, we analyze how tourist marketers and accommodation providers in the Austrian province of Salzburg are communicating why people should use their vacation to disconnect and what they can expect to find once ...
Media and Communication, 2021
The hopes regarding the positive impact of the Internet and digital participation in civic societ... more The hopes regarding the positive impact of the Internet and digital participation in civic society have faded in recent years. The digital realm is now increasingly discussed regarding its role in putting democracy in jeopardy and polarizing public debate by propagating extremist views and falsehoods. Likewise, the perception of so-called alternative media as beneficial carriers of counter-public spheres and as important complements to mainstream positions in social debate has flipped. Alternative media are now often associated with the “Wicked web” of disinformation, political populism, or even radicalization. Following Quandt’s (2018) notion of ‘dark participation’ and Phillips and Milner’s (2017) description of the Internet as ambivalent, this article asks, whether the same holds true for the users of alternative media: a segment of the audience traditionally discussed in terms of community, engagement, participation, and strong ideological identification with progressive politic...
Studies in Communication Sciences, 2020
The main conference topic for the ECREA conference in Lugano addressed the many ways in which cen... more The main conference topic for the ECREA conference in Lugano addressed the many ways in which centers, cores and peripheries, and also mainstreams and alternatives are dealt with in academic media and communication research. The premise of this panel was to apply this general outline of the conference for academic introspection and to recount the many shifting centers and peripheries of communication research over time and discuss the redrawing of the contours of our expanding field. Less than two decades back, the question what the main subjects of media and communication inquiry were would have highlighted the centrality of (already slowly declining) mass media as the main pillars alongside journalism and public communication. Since then, the very notion of mediated communication has become less clear and has expanded to nearly all areas of the human experience and encompasses a variety of technologies, tools, platforms and intermediaries for communication.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2020
At consumer and tech fairs, the future of digital technologies has always been imagined. In this ... more At consumer and tech fairs, the future of digital technologies has always been imagined. In this study, we investigate how the annual CeBIT tech fair (held in Hanover, Germany, from 1986 to 2018) and a keynote speech given there by Bill Gates in 1995 have been constructed, framed, and substantiated through media coverage and in mediated memory. Thanks to a qualitative content analysis, based on more than 500 articles published in general interest media and technology magazines, the ways the future of digitization was, and partially still is, imagined and narrated at tech fairs emerge. It is a quasi-religious future, predicted in quasi-religious gatherings (the ‘Mecca’ of digital futures), where gurus (Messiahs) and new ideas emerged, are celebrated, criticized, or rejected. During fairs, there is also a political and strategic use of the future because the ways digitization is forecast can shape and drive its future through investments and obliged visions.
New Media & Society, 2020
While the perils of social media, fake news, and an alleged distrust in legacy media have attaine... more While the perils of social media, fake news, and an alleged distrust in legacy media have attained considerable public attention, the implications of these public narratives for their audiences have remained understudied. The aim of this article is to identify consequences of an emerged “fake news and post truth-era-narrative” for media users’ personal epistemologies, media beliefs, and news navigation practices from a media repertoire perspective. Forty-nine in-depth media-biographical interviews with people from three different age groups and with different media repertoires were conducted. Based on the study, the three interrelated dimensions (1) selective criticality, (2) pragmatic trust, and (3) competence–confidence were developed to analyze users’ media and news navigation. These three dimensions can be applied to other scenarios to investigate how people navigate their media repertoires and interact with the news in general.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2019
It is an old, yet, accurate observation that the ‘newness’ of media is and most probably will con... more It is an old, yet, accurate observation that the ‘newness’ of media is and most probably will continue to be a catalyst for research in media and communication studies. At the same time, there are numerous academic voices who stress that studying media change demands an awareness of the complexities at play interweaving the new with the old and the changes with the continuities. Over the last decades, compelling theoretical approaches and conceptualizations were introduced that aimed at grasping what defines old and new media under the conditions of complex, disruptive media change. Drawing from this theoretical work, we propose an empirical approach that departs from the perception of media users and how they make sense of media in their everyday affairs. The article argues that an inquiry of media change has to ground the construction of media as old or new in the context of lifeworlds in which media deeply affect users on a daily basis from early on. The concept of media ideology...
Historical Social Research Historische Sozialforschung, 2012
Erkundungen des digitalen Gestern. Reflektionen zu 'New Media' und zur Zukunft der Kommunikations... more Erkundungen des digitalen Gestern. Reflektionen zu 'New Media' und zur Zukunft der Kommunikationsgeschichte«. This paper emanates from the consideration that communication history cannot only focus on communication that is within today's past but must also to cope with challenges communication history will face in "tomorrow's yesterdays". In nowadays perspective, apparent challenges for the future of communication historiography are posed by the impact of (now) new media technologies and digitalization. The article reflects about different shifts digitalization may bring for communication historiography, in terms of digital media as sources and the impact of digital communication on the understanding of temporal and spatial relations in communication historiography. Doing so, the paper discusses from a communication studies perspective if "new media" history likewise entails a new "media history". The article concludes that digital media will prompt communication historians to adapt to new conditions. Such adaption to the respective "new" is depicted as constituent of historical research as communication history has ever been kind of change management.
First Monday, 2014
In times when media are mundane fellows that are disappearing from our consciousness; when media ... more In times when media are mundane fellows that are disappearing from our consciousness; when media usage is partly habitualized and therefore invisible, looking at disconnections rather than exclusively connection enables us to develop a deeper understanding of what it means to live in mediatized worlds. Media disconnection beyond digital divide and knowledge gap is, however, rarely addressed in current studies of mediatization. This paper is an attempt to explore specific forms of disconnection in conjunction with connection enabled by media. By using forced disruption of the daily stream of online engagement as a method, the article discusses how online disconnection can contribute to an understanding of media participation and its role in the everyday lives of young adults.
Digital Roots
In this chapter we set out to historicize and trace the pre-digital roots of the concept of dataf... more In this chapter we set out to historicize and trace the pre-digital roots of the concept of datafication of communication and society. Collecting and processing data as well as governing data storage and access to it are not to be seen as a particularity of the digital era. Data and datafication produced, already long before the digital revolution, exclusive arrangements of infrastructures and knowledge orders and they can hence be seen as building blocks of culture and society. We illustrate this argument in four steps using different historic examples. We first provide a glimpse into the beginnings of datafication in ancient times. We then present data as early social science instruments in the modern welfare states since the mid-nineteenth century used for social control and to grasp facets and consequences of social modernization. Thirdly, data were also crucial in the service of oppression during the National Socialist era, in which cutting-edge data technologies contributed to the planning and implementation of the Holocaust. Finally, the shift of data from the numerical to the digital information age in the second half of the twentieth century and its consequences for a "datafication of everything" is discussed.
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Papers by Christian Schwarzenegger
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON MINORITIES/MAJORITIES, INCLUSION/EXCLUSION, CENTRE/PERIPHERY IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION HISTORY
“Our group first!” A familiar chant, which echoes past times in contemporary voices has recently gained momentum in the political discourse in Europe and the United States with resonance all over the globe. The claim and focus of such demands is however not new, but rather restorative with illustrious historical predecessors. Throughout history, communication has always been used to disseminate stereotypes, narratives and social myths aimed to the end of creating clear distinctions between a superior “us” and the “other”. Drawing lines between “us” and “them” is functional in negotiating senses of community and belonging and goes way beyond its political use. However, inclusion always harbors exclusion as well and the identity of groups also demarks their boundaries. For this workshop the ECREA Communication History Section invites scholarly presentations to shed light on questions of inclusion/exclusion, minorities/ majorities and centre/periphery in communication.
The goal is to understand such practices throughout a variety of historical and cultural settings and to learn from the past for contemporary challenges. The workshop allows for a scope ranging from the macro level of national or supranational societies, to very peculiar particularities of social groups and issue communities. The workshop is also interested in work that helps to deconstruct or re-evaluate assumptions about minorities/majorities, exclusion/inclusion, centre/periphery in a variety of contexts and as they are constructed or stabilized in academic work. Submissions dealing with the topics below are specially welcomed, even though the workshop will be opened to papers dealing with other aspects of the relation between media, minorities and majorities (including gender relations).
Minorities through the eyes of the Majorities and vice versa
In different historical locations the media have claimed to reflect societies in which they operate, disseminating cultural and social values that are accepted by the social structure in place, contributing to the imagination of community. In many cases this has led the media to focus their attention on majorities, while minorities are mostly ignored or represented in a negative fashion. Many authoritarian regimes, for example, have used all sorts of communication technologies, from posters and literature to broadcasting and newspapers, to promote fear and hate against minorities while exalting the qualities of those who are said to be the true patriots.
The concern about how minority groups are represented in public communication and how they engage in media production has deserved academic attention with the publication of books and journal issues dealing mostly with how mainstream media treat disabled citizens and gender, ethnic and religious minorities, migrants or refugees. We are interested in submissions addressing the logics, motives and uses of communicative constructions of normality and deviance, homogenization of cultural norms, dealing with heterogeneous concepts of life, alteration and hybrid identities. The workshop will focus on the creation of different types of minority groups as in-groups and out-groups, the alteration of their positions, identities and histories.
Different by choice
Differentiation and distinction are important ingredients for identity work. We are interested in communication phenomena and styles, which aimed at differentiating perspectives and creating alternative communities (e.g. hackers, tech-nerds) or establish alternative cultural scenes (e.g. religious groups such as the Amish). This ranges from subcultures to the doing identity of political, LGBT, or activist groups and the conflicts and struggles they engaged in. Research is invited, which analyses special media formats produced by or addressing specific niches in the “small life-worlds of modern man” or highlight specific (protest) campaigns or identity management practices of such groups. Also representations of such minorities by choice through the lens of majorities, the mainstream media or popular culture are welcomed.
Inclusion and exclusion
Minorities are often excluded from possibilities of communication that are taken for granted and offered to majorities. Policy makers and commercial driven companies often consider as unprofitable bringing communications in unpopulated areas which leads to the exclusion of specific groups of people or specific region. Moreover, people tend to self-exclude themselves from too difficult, too expensive, and too complicated forms of communication. The workshop welcomes contributions on the history of communication divides (analogue and digital), and histories of political or business practices aiming to exclude groups of potential users.
Minority Media, Majority Practices
With the decline of mass communication and the slow disappearance of large audiences the lines between minorities and majorities get blurred when it comes to reception practices and habits. The discussion on how majorities and minorities use communication (technologies) and how they are represented on the media should also take into account the role of alternative media that, in many different historical contexts, have been created and operated by minorities. While cases like the Jewish press comes immediately to mind, feminist magazines and community radio stations are also examples of how different groups have used the media to promote their ideas and ideologies among fragmented audiences and compartmentalized collective identities. Many of these media played a role in in-group identity construction, frequently transcending borders and linking transnational audiences. The use of technologies that has widely disappeared or retracted to small niches or the nostalgic rediscovery of past media devices that are considered minoritarian will also be discussed.
Centre and periphery
Majorities are often at the centre and minorities at the periphery of infrastructures and networks. While at the centre the flow of communication is more intense and the speed of connections is higher, at the peripheries connections can be unstable and less reliable. Nevertheless, peripheries are also places where unexpected and minoritarian uses of media and communication emerge. In different historical periods, cities such as Athens, Rome, Venice, London, and New York have been at the centre of communication flows while places distant from the centre have to deal with their peripheral status. Case studies and papers dealing with the consequences of being central or peripheral in communication will be welcomed.
“Us and them” through the history of communication studies
Another field of inquiry the workshop is interested in is the role of academic research in observing and thus preserving logics of inclusion and exclusion through academic work. How do and did media and communication scholars normalize some media practices and pathologize others? What was the role of media and communication scholarship in stabilizing social in-groups while alienating outsiders (e.g. through links to political propaganda, psychological warfare and similar manipulation strategies or corporate advertising)? Which myths and narratives are cultivated by media research and how do prevalent concepts, eligible methods and accessible sources shape and foster certain understandings of media history, highlighting specific groups while sidelining others, thus creating an implicit invisible mainstream? Is thus a biased understanding of majority and minority groups at a given created in communication history? Which strategies could be used to deconstruct and re-evaluate existing assumptions in the light of gender, postcolonial or non-Western perspectives? How can subgroups hidden in the alleged communication mainstream be made visible? How are in-groups and out-groups (mainstream and outsider perspectives) constructed within the academic field of (historical) communication research?
Abstracts of 500 words (maximum) proposing empirical case studies as well as theoretical or methodological contributions should be submitted no later than 29 April 2017. Proposals for full panels (comprising 4 or 5 papers) are also welcome: these should include a 250-word abstract for each individual presentation, and a 300-word rationale for the panel. Send abstracts to: [email protected]
Authors will be informed regarding acceptance/rejection for the conference no later than 15 May 2017. Early career scholars and graduate students are highly encouraged to submit their work. Please indicate if the research submitted is part of your thesis or dissertation project. The organizers will aim to arrange for discussants to provide an intensive response for graduate students projects.
Conference fee: 110 €. The price includes 2 lunches + buffet /coffee-break, excludes opening dinner which is optional.