Conditions of Mediation

Conditions of Mediation

Phenomenological Perspectives on Media

Edited by Tim Markham and Scott Rodgers

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Frankfurt • Berlin
Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Markham, Tim, editor of compilation. | Rodgers, Scott, editor of compilation.

Title: Conditions of mediation: phenomenological perspectives on media / edited by Tim Markham, Scott Rodgers.

Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2017.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016034678 | ISBN 978-1-4331-3470-8 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4331-3469-2 (paperback: alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4539-1904-0 (ebook pdf) ISBN 978-1-4331-3729-7 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4331-3730-3 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Mass media—Philosophy. | Phenomenology.

Classification: LCC P90 .C6375 2017 | DDC 302.2301—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034678

DOI: 10.3726/978-1-4539-1904-0

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

© 2017 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

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All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
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About the author

Tim Markham (DPhil., University of Oxford) is Professor of Journalism and Media at Birkbeck, University of London. He is author of The Politics of War Reporting: Authority, Authenticity and Morality (2011) and co-author of Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention (2007).

Scott Rodgers (Ph.D., King’s College London) is Senior Lecturer in Media Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. His research focuses on the relationships of media and cities, media production practices, digital and networked technologies and ethnographic methodologies.

About the book

Phenomenology has become one of the most important philosophical traditions underpinning recent theory and research on new media, whether or not the word is used explicitly. Conditions of Mediation brings together, for the first time in a single publication, the diversity of phenomenological media research—from social platforms and wearable media to diasporic identity formation and the ethics of consumer technologies.

The new orthodoxy in media studies emphasizes the experience of media—whether as forms, texts, technics or protocols—marking a departure from traditional approaches preoccupied with media content or its structural contexts. But phenomenologically informed approaches go beyond merely asking what people do with media. They ask a more profound question: what constitutes the conditions of mediated experience in the first place?

Beginning with an accessible introduction, this book invites readers to explore a wide range of phenomenological perspectives on media via two critical dialogues involving key thinkers alongside a series of theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded chapters. In so doing, interdisciplinary media studies is brought into conversation with the work of philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as phenomenologically-inspired thinkers such as Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, Tim Ingold, Henri Lefebvre, Friedrich Kittler, Marshall McLuhan and Bernard Stiegler.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Table OF Contents

List of Figures

Introduction: Theorizing Media Phenomenologically

Tim Markham and Scott Rodgers

Part One: Critical Dialogues

First Dialogue

McLuhan and Phenomenology

Graham Harman

Signal Territories: Broadcast Infrastructure, Google Earth, and Phenomenology

Lisa Parks

To the Things Themselves: Thoughts on the Phenomenology of Media

Paddy Scannell

Discussion

Second Dialogue

Digital Orientations: Movement, Dwelling, and Media Use

Shaun Moores

Phenomenology and Critique: Why We Need a Phenomenology of the Digital World

Nick Couldry

Phenomenological Approaches to the Computal: Some Reflections on Computation

David M. Berry

Discussion ←v | vi→

Part Two: Bodies, Technics, Agency

Chapter One: Techno-Phenomenology, Medium as Interface, and the Metaphysics of Change

Shane Denson

Chapter Two: What Does the Body Know of Photography?

Eve Forrest

Chapter Three: Mobile Media and Mediation: The Relational Ontology of Google Glass

Ingrid Richardson and Rowan Wilken

Chapter Four: Media In and Out of Time: German Media Science and the Concept of Time

Tim Barker

Chapter Five: Conducting Medial Wills to Power: A Phenomenological Critique of Intellectual Property

Daniel M. Sutko

Part Three: Spaces, Places, Environments

Chapter Six: Structures of Experience: Media, Phenomenology, Architecture

Joel McKim

Chapter Seven: From Non-Place to Place: A Phenomenological Geography of Everyday Living in Media Cities

Zlatan Krajina

Chapter Eight: Mediated Orientation: Phenomenology and the Ambivalence of Everyday (Diasporic) Space

Eyal Lavi

Chapter Nine: Finding Time for Goffman: When Absence Is More Telling Than Presence

Kenzie Burchell

Part Four: Meaning, Politics, Ethics

Chapter Ten: Chickens that Like Pink Floyd: Media Physicalism and the Experience of New Technology

Brenton J. Malin

Chapter Eleven: Interactive World Disclosure (or, an Interface Is Not a Hammer)

Roy Bendor←vi | vii→

Chapter Twelve: Mediating Subjectivity Through Materiality in Documentary Practice

Catalin Brylla

Chapter Thirteen: Becoming Quiet: On Mediation, Noise Cancellation, and Commodity Quietness

Matthew F. Jordan

Contributor Biographies .

Index ←vii | viii→ ←viii | ix→

List of Figures

Figure D.1: Google Earth image of United States, with FCCInfo layer

Figure D.2: Google Earth of Gibraltar Road transmission station, with FCCInfo layer

Figure D.3: Creative mediation of broadcast infrastructure site