Mobile Media 2007

Posted on | July 9, 2007 | 5 Comments

I promised to blog about last week’s conference, but in doing so I won’t be quite as comprehensive as Axel, so you should go there if you want specifics on lots of the papers. There are a couple more reports here too; plus hopefully Larissa will share her flickr account details with me soon, given how many photos she took of us sweating over our presentations or trying to look smart in the audience! I guess I’m more interested in teasing out a few other things I learned at the conference, and that I’ve been chatting to other people about since… things that are partly to do with new media theory/research specifically, and others that are a bit more personal.

For instance, as Michiel points out, so much of the empirical work being done right now is about “teenagers” or “young people”. Why? I mean, of course young people are using new media. But not all of them, especially when considered across any class- or culturally-sensitive axis. As others have argued much more coherently recently, this seems to be a profound instance of myopia and/or fetishisation in contemporary academic research. I’ve written elsewhere that the youth emphasis in internet studies seems in many ways attributable to funding structures, the convenience of the classroom cohort as a research sample, and the pressure to provide soundbites for journalists fixated on so-called Generation Y. But when you get the chance to hear about the kind of work that is being done across cultures and ages as we did at this conference, it makes me acutely depressed about the lack of wonder and curiosity that the endless fascination with teen networking sites betrays. It also makes me annoyed – when faced with the sophisticated work of some of the industry reps at the conference – that scholarship so often seems to be a matter of finding evidence (in young people’s behaviour) of some grand theory of societal change proffered by white European male sociologists (in this case, but in other contexts they tend to be philosophers). This was something that affected keynotes as much as other papers, and makes me wonder for what and whom this kind of knowledge production is useful.

Another issue was to do with preferred forms of empiricism. I faced criticism in my session for using cultural studies methodologies to try to understand changes to workplace culture. But as soon as I mentioned that I was interviewing people later on in my project (as if interviewing people wasn’t a methodology cultural studies uses regularly) everything was okay. Part of the reason I think this area of research needs cultural and gender theory so badly is because there is so little acknowledgement that people don’t always say what they truly think, especially not to academics from universities who are using them as subjects for their own career-building studies. Moreover, discourses that circulate in popular culture, HR and management bibles and eventually government policy briefing documents are often the very resources offering the “common sense” grounding for many academics’ interview agendas, and hence, the way their subjects feel compelled to understand themselves in relation to others. As Rich Ling noted so eloquently in the closing plenary, it would be good to admit a bit more honesty about the limits of disciplinarity in approaching complex questions, to appreciate the value of both quantitative and qualitative methods, and that different people will be better than others at each, at different times.

For me the papers that stood out were those that highlighted the English-speaking, middle-class and secular bias in media studies more broadly, whether it was Genevieve Bell’s inspiring keynote, or Raul Pertierra’s work on Filipino texting & migrant labour, or Heather Horst’s ethnographic work in Jamaica. Also, those that focused on policy issues in this country – something that’s increasingly interesting me as Gerard Goggin and I edit a bunch of papers on wireless for an upcoming issue of MIA.

But perhaps my lasting impression of the conference, given the international cadre of speakers, and the chance it offered to catch up with dear colleagues, was the extent to which it felt conditioned by a general feeling of frazzledness amongst the young academics both organising and presenting. It might just be my own sensitivitity to these issues given my research interests, or it might be that I now have a few more reasons to get homesick when I travel for work. It could just mean that I’m growing up. But it seems to me there are growing numbers of people who have reached a point of being beyond busy, forever jumping between states and continents to keep pace with the publishing and conference mill, whose outstanding research capacity has to learn to contend with the physical limits of a body that can only operate for a set number of hours in the day. Catching the plane home with yet another bunch of business blokes and their Blackberries, I wondered what place this mobile culture affords for those who might enjoy sitting still in one place long enough to hear, to think, to imagine what it all means, and who also want to be employable. Perhaps ironically, a conference on mobile media left me with a strong urge to shut the laptop, turn off the phone, avoid the office and spend time with friends – ones that I can touch and feel as well as have populate my homepages.

Category: Academia, Research, Travel

Comments

5 Responses to “Mobile Media 2007”

  1. seonaid
    July 10th, 2007 @ 7:41 pm

    Oh my goodness! How very well said.
    [ubuntu = neotopic mobile ideal for the non-mac galaxy?]

  2. annap
    July 15th, 2007 @ 5:32 pm

    I will delurk to say how much I like this post (esepcially reading it against the one that comes before it where you are off to London again). Two reasons:
    1) it made me feel slightly better about *not* going to the other side of the world to give a paper (and go to the Cultural Studies Now conference), which is the first time in my fledging career I have had to admit – professionally – that my body just can’t hack it. You make some interesting points regarding this, and I look forward to seeing how this plays out in your research.
    2) your critique on the emphasis of youth is very interesting, and reminded me of Rob Latham’s (not necessarily original to him, but he puts it well) analysis of how ‘youth’ so often stands in for everything capitalism loves about itself. The conflation between ‘youth’ and ‘new’ and ‘technology’ (according to Latham) reaches back to the Fordism, where young workers were seen as ideal employees in the new factories because of their ability to learn how to use machinery more quickly than older workers, and this linkage seems to be replayed ad nauseum in the emphasis on youth in the research you discuss.

  3. M-H
    July 15th, 2007 @ 6:19 pm

    Thanks for this interesting post. As an older technology worker and PhD student, it really resounded with me. I think the use of technology by people over 40 is a neglected research area.

  4. michiel
    July 25th, 2007 @ 9:35 pm

    Good read! Agree completely with your point about the bias towards teenagers. I forgot who, but during the conference one of the speakers said something in the vein of “we should focus on teenagers because they show us what the future of mobile phoning will be”.
    Another bias that was very apparent and which I find very interesting is the one about Japan and increasingly south-Korea as “countries of the future”. Here too there seems to be this idea of ‘look at those countries and you’ll see what mobile phone future looks like’.
    So instead of this teleological idea of future “convergence” according to patterns already laid out by east-Asian teenagers, we might consider the many divergent futures of this relatively young collection of technologies.

  5. melgregg
    July 31st, 2007 @ 10:54 am

    Yes I agree – thanks for writing! I also loved Genevieve Bell’s comments on the phenomenal relationship between religion and mobile tech: not something you’re likely to anticipate focusing on Australian teenagers! Her point about certain countries never having a desktop experience as a starting point was also really useful for me.

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