Information, Communication & Society
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From media technologies to mediated events: a
different settlement between media studies and
science and technology studies
David Moats
To cite this article: David Moats (2019) From media technologies to mediated events: a
different settlement between media studies and science and technology studies, Information,
Communication & Society, 22:8, 1165-1180, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2017.1410205
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INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY
2019, VOL. 22, NO. 8, 1165–1180
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1410205
From media technologies to mediated events: a different
settlement between media studies and science and
technology studies
David Moats
a,b
TEMA –T Technology and Social Change, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden; bSociology Department,
University of London, London, UK
a
ABSTRACT
ARTICLE HISTORY
There have been many recent attempts to bring insights from
science and technology studies (STS) into media disciplines, many
of which associate this work with materiality and technology,
while existing media theories are used to analyse the domain of
media content and political economy. While this is a reasonable
settlement, in this paper I will suggest an alternative arrangement
based around controversies. Controversies, and related empirical
objects, can help break down dichotomies like producer/audience,
social/technical, content/material and also provoke questions such
as ‘which media technologies matter in a given case?’ However,
controversies are often specific to science so I propose a type of
study based around ‘mediated events’ (drawing on the work of
Isabelle Stengers). I illustrate this with the case of the Woolwich
attacks on Twitter. While this approach does not deliver a
comprehensive theory of the media, it proposes a new settlement
between STS and media studies, grounded in the empirical rather
than high theory.
Received 6 April 2017
Accepted 21 November 2017
KEYWORDS
Science and technology
studies; media studies;
controversies; materiality;
Woolwich; social media
1. Introduction
In recent years, many scholars from media disciplines have taken up the ‘material turn’
suggested by work in science and technology studies (STS) as a way of moving past social
constructivist approaches to media but also complicating approaches seen as technodeterminist (Lievrouw, 2014; Livingstone & Lievrouw, 2009). For the most part, these
are attempts to bring insights from STS, or actor–network theory (ANT), into media disciplines or to carve up divisions of labour diplomatically between the two (Boczkowski &
Siles, 2014; Couldry, 2008; Gillespie, Boczkowski, & Foot, 2014; Wajcman & Jones, 2012).
Many of these thinkers assign STS the task of studying materiality and technology, while
existing media theories, particularly those concerned with news media and journalism, are
leveraged to analyse things like history, culture and texts. While this is in many ways a
reasonable settlement between the two approaches, it seems counterproductive (and
against the spirit of STS) to carve up the empirical world into different domains with
different theoretical equipment.
CONTACT David Moats
Linköping, Sweden
david.moats@liu.se
TEMA –T Technology and Social Change, Linköping University, 581 83
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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D. MOATS
In this paper, I want to offer an alternative settlement, coming more from the STS side
of the equation. Instead of focusing on the materiality of media technologies, I will argue
that media scholars should follow objects like controversies which disrupt media routines.
In ANT, controversies (as well as ‘problems’, ‘issues’ or ‘matters of concern’) allow privileged glimpses of how socio-technical assemblages like media work when they break
down. They also help us to question dichotomies like production/reception and content/materiality which have plagued media studies in the past. However, as some have
argued (Lewenstein, 1995b) ANT-inspired approaches have often underplayed the role
of media and communication in their studies. So the task of this paper is to think through
what sorts of controversies are most appropriate to disclose media technologies and practices. Drawing on past work from media sociology and recent work in STS, I will suggest
‘mediated events’, which I distinguish from ‘media events’ (Couldry, 2003; Dayan & Katz,
1994), as one possible object to orient ourselves to.
I will then briefly sketch what such an analysis would look like with a discussion of the
Woolwich attack in London 2013 and how it implicated both news media and social
media, but also a host of other collectives. Finally, I will speculate on what this suggests
for a new settlement between STS and media studies, one grounded in the empirical rather
than in high theory.
2. The settlement between media and STS
There is, today, a rapidly expanding body of work at the intersection of STS and media
studies which addresses itself to the historical neglect of materiality in media, though
attempts at such a dialogue have been going on for some time (Couldry, 2008; Livingstone
& Lievrouw, 2009; Oswell, 2002; Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992; Turner, 2010; Van Loon,
2007). This work has already yielded important insights and new fields of study, yet by
all accounts this is a difficult and unfinished project of integration (Sørensen & Schubert,
2016).
Leah Lievrouw, in an important edited volume, Media Technologies (2014), argues that
this is part of the swing of the pendulum: while early media research could be criticized as
technologically determinist, the idea that technologies are drivers of shifts in society and
culture, it then swung too far towards social constructivism, the idea that society or culture
shapes uses and meanings of media technology. As Lievrouw explains, the stated goal of
much current work in the field is to describe the ‘co-production’ or ‘mutual shaping’ of
society and technology, inspired by STS, but she argues that much of this work still
remains ‘tilted’ towards the social side.
One early attempt at a synthesis came from Roger Silverstone (Silverstone, 1994) who,
drawing on work in STS, described media as ‘doubly articulated’: as both a material, technical object of consumption, situated in the household and as a purveyor of content,
arguing that media scholars must understand the interrelation of the two. Boczkowski
and Siles (2014), however, remind us that researchers must also contend with another
dichotomy which has long haunted media studies: between production and reception of
media content and the production and consumption of media technologies. In a similar
effort, Wajcman and Jones (2012), drawing on successive theorizations of media by
Hall, Silverstone and Du Gay, see media as comprising two interrelated ‘circuits’ (production and consumption are a feedback loop): (a) the production/consumption of
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material artefacts like TVs and computers; and (b) the encoding/reception of media messages they carry. They then argue for a unification of these circuits such that STS is assigned
the analytic weight of the material production/consumption circuit. van Dijck (2013) in
her study of social media looks at six dimensions of media, with ANT responsible for
unpacking the influence of algorithms and interfaces. There is not space in this paper
to parse the differences between these research programmes, sender–receiver models
and circuits, axes and dimensions but what I do want to draw attention to is that all of
them involve proliferating dichotomies (even if the aim is to un-think them) and each
of these solutions associate STS or ANT with the study of technology and materiality.
Now, although STS and ANT are sometimes conflated in common parlance, these
mean different things. ANT is a specific approach to empirical research which famously
made bold claims about the agency of things (Callon, 1986; Latour, 2005) while STS refers
to the somewhat amorphous field of researchers which also include the related approach of
social construction of technology (SCT) (Bijker, Hughes, Pinch, & Douglas, 2012), and the
sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) (Bloor, 1976). It is thus worth noting that,
implicitly, many of these media researchers are drawing on SCT, which is concerned
with the development of technological artefacts such as the bicycle, as opposed to ANT
which in its earliest form was concerned with knowledge.1 It is also worth stating that,
to the extent that they invoke ANT insights, these researchers tend to treat it as a theory
(that is, an ontological statement of relations between humans and things) rather than as a
method for unpacking ingrained assumptions and disentangling complex situations.
Of course media disciplines are just as heterogeneous. There is a huge gulf between the
more theory-led media studies, which leans towards continental philosophy, cultural
studies or software studies, and media sociology which tends to study news media and
mass communications. There are also distinct national traditions (Badouard et al.,
2016), particularly that of Germany, which has explored different interfaces with ANT
drawing on the legacy of Kittler and Luhmann (Markus & Beate, 2016; Thielmann & Gendolla, 2013). However, this paper is not concerned with proposing, once and for all, a theory of media, but rather an alternative approach to studying it empirically. Thus my
remarks are mainly addressed to Anglo-American media sociology, to those primarily
concerned with mass communication and journalism, partly because this is where the
interface between STS and media is most fraught with dichotomies but also, as I will
explain later, potentially most valuable.
Now from the perspective of media sociology, there are good reasons for the current
terms of this arranged marriage with STS, because ANT is seen as lacking certain equipment. Couldry (2008) rightfully raises some concerns about ANT’s inability to deal with
‘meaning’ or ‘the symbolic’ or ‘agency’ – in the traditional sense of the word. Certainly in
its rejection of inherent properties of entities, ANT precludes more structural analyses of
conditions underlying media production. ANT is also reluctant to talk about culture
except insofar as it is invoked by participants (Entwistle & Slater, 2014). So certainly
ANT-inspired approaches do need some help to deal with the news media in the way
media scholars have classically defined it.
However, my concern with the current settlement is the way these approaches divvy up
empirical terrain. While the stated aim of these contributions is in theory to break down
dichotomies, such dichotomies seem in practice to keep multiplying. As Sonia Livingstone
has pointed out in relation to Silverstone’s materiality/content distinction, followers of
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Silverstone have for various reasons tended to study either the materiality or the content
(Livingstone, 2007). Indeed in the last few years, there has been an explosion of ‘platform
studies’, focusing on the material, algorithmic aspects of mostly online media technologies
(Gillespie, 2010) but more often than not divorced from any particular content. There
have also been STS-inspired attempts to study production or reception: Hemmingway,
for example, studied the newsroom as a laboratory (2008), and Ian Ang provocatively
showed how audiences are constructed through various measurement devices (1992).
These studies in different ways help flesh out the specificities of how media work but
they, like the above approaches, reinforce these conceptual divisions between production/reception, or materiality/content, etc. There are certainly examples where these
divisions are successfully navigated (Birkbak, 2013; Marres & Rogers, 2008; van Dijck,
2013) but they are the exception.2
In an institutional sense, as Boczkowski and Siles (2014) draw attention to, scholars are
trained to study texts or materiality, production or reception and these roles become hardwired into academic departments. Some of these divisions are also reinforced by issues of
access – it is easier to analyse texts than to recruit research participants for either audience
studies or production studies – and methods: focus groups or ethnography or textual
analysis are applied to different aspects of these dichotomies making them hard to relate
to each other. In any case, there is more to balancing these many dichotomies than simply
wishing them away. The project of ANT (and after) has fundamentally been about breaking down dichotomies between nature/culture, human/non-human, subject/object, but
this was not accomplished through theory alone but through the empirical examination
of concrete situations. Along these lines, Lucy Suchman (2014) argues in her response
to Boczkowski and Siles that in any given empirical case, the content–material distinction
should not hold anyway. However, ANT has historically used a particular type of empirical
object – controversies – to disclose these socio-technical relations. What if instead of
deploying STS to study the materiality of media, we draw on the ANT tradition of
using controversies to break down these dichotomies?
3. ANT and controversies 1000
The use of controversies in the sociology of science goes back to the tradition of SSK and
Bloor’s ‘symmetry principle’ (Bloor, 1976) which states that in a controversy we must analyse accepted-as-true science and discredited false knowledge with the same conceptual
equipment. This was extended by Latour and Callon to include symmetry between
human and non-human, the social and the technical (see also Marres & Moats, 2015).
In other words, we cannot account for how the sciences create knowledge with only
‘nature’ or ‘society’; we need heterogeneous and fragile networks of human and nonhuman entities.
To follow a controversy according to ANT is to not decide in advance what types of
actors are consequential for its settlement. Thus, non-human entities, technologies and
nature are not interesting for their own sake but only to the extent that they matter for
the stabilization of knowledge and society, and are worth foregrounding to the extent
that their role has been underappreciated in the past. In fact, any such conceptual categories like human/non-human or science/politics we bring as researchers need to be
INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY
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bracketed during the analysis. The goal is merely to describe the development of the controversy using participants’ own (multiple, provisional) articulations of it.
ANT studies are prototypically ethnographic, centred around a particular setting like a
laboratory or public hearing but they are not confined to these locales because they also
frequently rely on texts. Against conventional wisdom, ANT does not ignore textual content – it emerges in part from semiotics – however, texts are not just representations to be
decoded, they do certain work. They can be analysed as performative proposals for ‘actor
worlds’ (Law, 1986): possible configurations of actors which may to some extent be realized if these proposals are taken up by others, though never quite in the ways their authors
intend.
When studied in this way, controversies allow us to see processes that only become visible when the ‘social’ fabric breaks down – we get to see what kinds of forces are required
to hold things together. Controversies also lead us into unexpected places because they do
not respect boundaries, conceptual, institutional or geographic: we might start in the laboratory and then find ourselves in the legal sphere or a political protest (Latour, 1988). So
whether it be ethnographic settings or corpuses of texts, ANT encourages us to consider
that the controversy may exceed the materials or settings we start with.
Now in recent years, controversies, in the sense of controversies over knowledge, have
been elaborated upon. ‘Matters of concern’ (Latour, 2004) and ‘issues’ (Marres, 2005) are
used to designate objects which are ontologically unstable and not so easily settled in terms
of facts. Climate change, GM foods, nuclear power are all problems which straddle the
technical and the political and gather heterogeneous collectives around them, most notably concerned publics, which, following Dewey (1927), arise when private problems
become articulated as shared consequences. Much work in STS has been devoted to
how issues become framed or articulated (both discursively and materially) and how
these configurations entail certain types of participants and modes of participation at
the expense of others.
Now the reader might rightly point out that media scholars deal with many contentious
stories and topics, but in general, these researchers have taken particular media as their
object (television or social media) when studying these issues, when in the formulation
above perhaps the first question we should ask is ‘which media?’ or ‘what counts as
media?’ in a given controversy. The same goes for other dichotomies: is the controversy
driven by media producers, or audiences or publics? Is it particularly salient messages
or the material vehicles they arrive in, or even the background infrastructures which
carry the most weight? In this case, the balance of what we study, what matters, is determined by the empirical case, rather than by academic schemas.
So controversies specifically offer ways of short circuiting the sorts of dichotomies the
above authors are concerned with dispelling. Of course, there are still practical, methodological and institutional barriers to addressing them, as Boczkowski and Siles (2014) have
noted, and these might explain at least partially why ANT-influenced scholars have often
neglected media in their accounts of controversies.
4. ANT and media
There are many examples of STS scholars, particularly those in the field of public understanding of science, who acknowledge the importance of media but fail to fully explore
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them. Dorothy Nelkin (1974), Nowotny and Hirsch (1980), Brian Wynne (1992) and
Sheila Jasanoff (2005) all discuss controversies in which media play a central role, but
do not unpack journalistic routines, rhetorical conventions or channels of communication
in the same way they do for science. Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe (2001) even assert that
media coverage generally benefits the settlement of issues by making positions in the
debate perceptible to the other parties. But in all of these accounts, news media are treated
as resources to be tapped into, or an ether through which the controversy flows, rather
than active sites in which the controversy plays out.
There are several possible reasons for this blind spot. This could be because mass media
seem slight and inconsequential in relation to the imposing representations of science or
perhaps because media circulate so widely that their diffusions are difficult to trace in networks. It could also be because of a lack of expertise or access to media actors in the STS
field. And yet, mass media outlets are potentially very important in the development and
cultivation of publics and issues. As Wajcman and Jones, put it, creating a dialogue
between STS and media is just as pressing for STS as it is for media (2012).
Lewenstein (1995b) long ago lamented the fact that STS does not offer a sophisticated
model of how media work, which can match STS’ ‘sociologically sophisticated’ take on
scientific knowledge. There are of course countless studies of ‘science communication’
(Bauer & Bucchi, 2007), but while these authors do study the routines of science journalists, according to Lewenstein they do not pose the question of what counts as media: media
are assumed to be mostly journalism, as opposed to, say, science fiction, and it is also
assumed that journalism largely comprises newspapers and television, as opposed to,
say, radio. Neither do they, in general, question the boundaries or hierarchies between
media and science (as well as other institutions). It is often assumed that media disseminate scientific messages ‘downstream’ (Hilgartner, 1990) to ‘the public’ but while this ‘deficit model’ (Sismondo, 2008) has been widely critiqued, this has mostly been directed at
public engagement exercises rather than the media, per se.
Lewenstein does not offer an alternative account of media but he shows how one could
be developed, appropriately, through the analysis of a controversy: the cold fusion scandal
(1995a). In 1989, scientists Pons and Fleischmann held a press conference about their
apparently successful demonstration of cold fusion to gain the attention of funding bodies
and circumvent the normally slow peer-review process. This study is interesting for two
reasons. First, Lewenstein shows the media–science relationship as bidirectional –
media do not simply ‘translate’ scientific knowledge – science responds to and orients itself
to media. Second, Lewenstein discusses not only mainstream news, but also a diverse array
of less obvious ‘media’: policy reports, email, audio recordings, pre-prints of scientific
papers, faxes and phone calls. For this reason, he argues that a ‘circuit’ of media hardly
describes the complexity of this tangle of communication channels and back channels.
This particular arrangement of media technologies, institutions and actors only comes
into relief through the contingency of a particular controversy.
The upshot of studying media through controversies is that controversies reveal the
often hidden infrastructures through which different media, audiences, publics and
experts are intertwined. However, controversies over knowledge, like the cold fusion scandal, only involve communications media in, particular, limited ways. Next I will to turn to
media sociology literature to ask what sorts of objects front-stage mass media practices
and technologies.
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5. Events
Now, a controversy-based empirical approach to media is not as alien to media as the preceding discussion might suggest. For example, Lewenstein’s insight about the interrelation
or web of different types of media is not new or specific to STS. Ten years earlier, Herman
Bausinger (1984), a media anthropologist, made the case that in a given domestic setting it
does not make sense to talk about TV or radio or newspapers because they all intersect in
everyday household practices – something he refers to as media ‘ensembles’. Yet if we do
not want to confine ourselves to consumption of studies of media in the home, what other
types of objects will reveal these ensembles?
Molotch and Lester (1974), even earlier, proposed the study of ‘media events’. They first
defined ‘occurrences’ as the raw materials out of which time is segmented which can be
‘infinitely divided and elaborated into additional happenings and occurrences’ (Molotch
& Lester, 1974: 102). ‘Events’ in contrast are reified as an object through strategic acts
of definition. Events are constructions in the news positioned in relation to past events
and anticipating future events. For example, the My Lai Massacre could have been a
mere occurrence – ‘a routine search and destroy mission’ – or an event, which upsets
and redefines both past and future understandings of the Vietnam War and armed conflict
in general. An ‘issue’ arises when there are competing uses (definitions) of an event by
actors with access to ‘event-creating mechanisms’ such as the mass media.3 The goal of
studying events is to describe how particular event definitions come to dominate over
others.
This relational and unstable usage of both ‘events’ and ‘issues’ chimes quite well with
the usage in STS of the same terms. However, coming from the social constructivist tradition, the authors’ (1974) focus here is on discursive constructions which produce the
event as such while more recent discussions of events (Savransky, 2016) remind us that
events have an existence outside of representations of them: these concatenations of heterogeneous actors demand to be represented, though they do not overdetermine how they
are articulated. Events in this sense are opposed to the facile idea of an active scientist ‘discovering’ passive nature – events actively resist and evade attempts to contain them, both
by scientists, media actors and researchers.
Isabelle Stengers (2000) describes events as designating a before and after in which the
identities of all participants are at stake in the event, becoming together, rather than given
in advance. In relation to media, this would include not just the subjects of media coverage
but media actors themselves, and if we continue this logic, the media researchers as well.
However, following the earlier discussion of controversies, we should say that our access to
these events is always mediated by various representations and contingent on other
objects; we cannot apprehend said event independently of them. These translations and
transformations, as the event or issue moves through networks, are in fact what we are
interested in.
This understanding of ‘events’ is of course in contrast to the recent literature about
‘media events’ (Couldry, 2003; Dayan & Katz, 1994) which draws on Durkheim to specify
a particular kind of event in which the collective (or the myth of the collective) becomes
affirmed. There is not space to discuss this body of work fully, but one could think of these
‘media events’ as one possible outcome of the more generalized events I am invoking; but
as others have argued, such events can just as easily create disunity as unity (Jiménez-
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Martínez, 2014). To distinguish the two, I will call the ‘radically empiricist’ version for
which I am arguing ‘mediated events’ to emphasize that we are interested in how the
event is mediated and translated while remaining agnostic about which sorts of actors
are doing the mediating.
One iconic example of using events to study media, though the authors would not
necessarily identify it in this way, is the seminal study Policing the Crisis (Hall, Critcher,
Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, 1978). The authors take as their object not particular
media but a series of occurrences which become eventful and then coalesce into an
issue: mugging. Through this emergent object, they reveal everyday media processes,
which often go unseen. For example, they find that the news is dependent on official
spokespeople and official modes of speaking and this favours certain versions of events;
that those actors who arrive on the scene first – ‘primary definers’ – have the upper
hand in making their framings stick. Most importantly, they show that mugging is not
constructed by media alone: media are closely intertwined with the police and the courts
in the development of the issue. The mugging controversy constantly crosses these
domains even though the law and the police must pretend that they are not being driven
by media panics and the media must maintain that they are not colluding with the police.
Of course these authors come from a critical, Marxist perspective, in which wider class
dynamics help explain the particulars of the case in a way not compatible with ANT; my
point is that there is an established tradition in media of using controversies or events to
do similar work (e.g., Corner, Richardson, & Fenton, 1990).
6. Woolwich
What would it look like to study an event in the media like an STS analysis of controversy,
but without relying on the classic substantive focus of STS: science, technology or knowledge? In what follows I will think through a particular event: the Woolwich attacks which
took place in London in 2013. On 22 May at 2 pm, two assailants Michael Adebolajo and
Michael Adebowale attacked and killed army drummer Lee Rigby with knives and a cleaver as he left a military base, claiming it was retribution for the killing of Muslims abroad.
Later that evening a far-right group, the English Defence League (EDL), marched on
Woolwich and in the coming days mosques across the UK were attacked and Muslim citizens harassed. I am interested in how this occurrence, through various mediations,
becomes an event of national, even international significance and how competing articulations, especially in relation to race and religion, come to dominate. This event has been
dealt with before but certainly not in the way I am proposing (Bartlett, Reffin, Rumball, &
Williamson, 2014; Burnap et al., 2014; McEnery, McGlashan, & Love, 2015).
In the space remaining, I will only be able to sketch an analysis and suggest some directions as to where it might lead. The primary source materials I used were a collection of
tweets directly related to the event. The query was ‘adebolajo, bnp, duggan, edl, leerigby,
leerigbyrip, markduggan, rigby, ripleerigby, woolwich’. It also included some key user
accounts.4 Twitter, as is well known, is a social media platform where users post short
140 character status updates called ‘tweets’ which can be seen by other users who ‘follow’
that user (Murthy, 2013). Users can also create ‘hashtags’ by placing a hash (#) in front of a
word as a way of identifying tweets devoted to a topic or event. Users can also share links,
images and videos using shortened hyperlinks. While I could discuss further the limits of
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this particular corpus of materials, the aim of following events is that they quickly force us
to question our starting point (Twitter, certain keywords) and follow the event into other
domains.
The first trace of the event in the dataset is a few scattered tweets by local residents
about the confrontation with police 20 minutes after the attack.5 In Britain, where guns
are rare, a gunshot is already enough to make an occurrence jump out against the pallid
background of everyday police sirens and petty crime, but many users passed off the sound
as ‘typical’ of Woolwich, which is often presented as a ‘deprived’ area. One reaction to
events is always to deny their eventfulness (Stengers, 2000):
Man taking pot shots at the police in woolwich. #wonderfulworld
Soon after, a local musician with many Twitter followers, @Boyadee, gives a much more
dramatic account of what happened.
Ohhhhh myyyy God!!! I just saw a man with his head chopped off right in front of my eyes!
Oh my God!!!! The way Feds took them out!!! It was a female police officer she come out the
whip and just started bussssin shots!!
This is an example of what has been called citizen journalism (Allan, 2007) where bystanders through social media or blogs beat the news, even the wire services, to the scene of an
event, upsetting normal routines and information flows. But why Boya Dee’s narrative gets
picked up as opposed to other eyewitnesses is more complicated than just down to the
properties of Twitter. Boya Dee does not initially have enough followers to explain the
wide reach of these tweets (though he gains about 30,000 followers in the process); neither
does he always use a hashtag – the most likely way of linking tweets to an event – and when
he does he uses #se16, the postcode of the attack, when most users congregated around
#Woolwich. However, what he has over the other eyewitness is the off-the-cuff, witty
language he uses, which lends both humour and seeming ‘authenticity’ to the account.
His use of language also invites many problematic statements from Twitter users about
his background. In any case, we cannot understand his prominence without social and
technical factors, materiality and textual content.
So the incident is already an event, but it has yet to be defined as anything other than an
‘attack’, though rumours of a beheading and a samurai sword begin to fly. Some time
around 16:00 GMT, a BBC reporter appears to be the first to mention the word ‘terrorism’,
though in a very speculative way. But on Twitter this assertion quickly takes hold.
Guy on bbc news says ‘Woolwich is a relatively poor area we dont [sic] know if this is terror
related’. What the fudge. #Woolwich
One person’s head chopped off, is it really that big a deal? Its [sic] not a terrorist attack. On
another note, I fucking LOVE London <3 #woolwich
Terrorists hack soldier to death in woolwich, both shot by police.
This shows how closely linked Twitter is to traditional televised media but also how media
statements can take on a life of their own: the more that terrorism is mentioned the less
qualifications become necessary – the conditions of production, the source of the claim is
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gradually removed (Latour, 1987). This reveals how particular articulations can be naturalized on Twitter even before ‘official’ versions come to light.
At some point before the police arrived, attacker Michael Adebolajo asked a passer-by,
filming the aftermath on his smartphone, to record him making a statement. He explained
that the attack was retribution for Muslims dying in foreign lands. So the attackers are
using media to similarly frame the attack as terrorism even though in the months that follow it becomes clear that the two attackers are largely on their own – not linked to or under
the direction of international, organized terrorism per se.
This video, which did not appear initially on social media, was acquired by the ITV network and The Sun newspaper who posted it on their website later in the afternoon. It was
viewed so many times that the website crashed – the fragile infrastructure of the web only
becomes visible in cases when it breaks down. But the video was not transmitted unaltered:
various outlets cropped it to landscape or filled in the sides with extra graphics to match
the standard TV aspect ratio or blurred the bloody hands, knife and crumpled body in the
background. These various aesthetic and material ways the video was presented as well as
the discursive ways it was talked about (and talked over) potentially have consequences for
how the message was received – does the attacker appear powerful and confident or
deranged? In ANT there are no intermediaries who transmit messages without transforming them, there are only mediators (Latour, 2005), so we need to look at the many ways the
video is transformed by bystanders, the phone software, editors and legal teams as well as,
potentially, audiences at home.
Because most news media largely accepted and promoted the attacker’s phrasing, the
event became terrorism with a capital ‘T’. A private act of killing was articulated as shared
concern. But shared by whom? Of course publics must also be mediated; they need spokespeople to be made visible, and initially it is the far right who strategically take up the mantle of ‘the concerned public’.
The EDL, a since disbanded far-right group, started making noise on Twitter soon after
the attacks were covered on the news.
RT @Official_EDL: ****CONFIRMED WE HAVE BEEN SUBJECT TO A TERROR
ATTACK BY ISLAM WE ARE CURRENTLY UNDER ATTACK****
This utterance encapsulates the tendency of Western commentators to treat Islam as a
singular identity, personified as a deviant individual (Said, 1997). The EDL and other
far-right groups use all UPPER CASE letters and asterisks to make their messages visually
stand out in quickly moving Twitter streams. Tweets are not just pure discourse, they also
have technical, material features which help them travel further or faster. This and other
similar messages from EDL and related accounts start to ‘trend’ on the UK version of
Twitter as messages like the above are retweeted. ‘Trending’ is a term for when particular
hashtags or search terms become dominant in a particular geographic area, according to
the Twitter algorithm and feature on the front page.
But like all mediatiors, the trending algorithm’s valorisation of the EDL in quantitative
terms needs to be interrogated. On closer inspection, most of the retweets look like this:
‘@Official_EDL ****CONFIRMED WE HAVE BEEN SUBJECT TO A TERROR ATTACK
BY ISLAM WE ARE CURRENTLY UNDER ATTACK****’ shut up you fucking idiot.
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1175
So, ironically some of the backlash against the EDL feeds into the (quantifiable) popularity
(McEnery et al., 2015) which then elicits more backlash. Meanwhile, other users start to
contest news media coverage: the audience begins to feedback to the producers.6
RT @TheHalalPotato: ‘Muslim appearance’? Talk about #stereotyping and demonising us.
#BBC #Woolwich #islamophobia http://t.co/rbIk67HHDF
Of course Islam is a heterogeneous set of cultural practices which cannot be so easily read
into someone’s appearance. Yet this odd slip shows how race and perceived culture
become conflated (Gunaratnam, 2003).
RT @Martinbigpigmor: When the IRA were killing people we didn’t blame ALL Catholics. So
lets not be racist and blame ALL Muslims for #woolwich
In one sense, the strategy here is reframing and undermining the simplistic narrative of the
far right and the news media, but it is also algorithmic.
RT @Das_Beard: Can we push the EDL off the trend list with this: #DontRiotPlaceAPoppyInstead? what you think? A message of peace against …
The Twitter platform’s popularity-based mode of circulation supplies certain rules of the
game, but these do not over-determine behaviour, they allow ambivalent and strategic
responses as well. But by the end of the day, Muslim groups denouncing the attack
coalesce around the hashtag #notinourname, which itself becomes a story covered by
many media outlets. Twitter began the day as a tool of citizen journalism, but was later
aping articulations of the event in mainstream news media, only to end the day again leading the story. In the coming days, Twitter is then used to organize more anti-Muslim
marches and harass Muslims on Twitter (Bartlett et al., 2014).
The reader will hopefully see that in the context of this event, there is no need to talk
about materiality or content, production or reception, old or new media because they are
always, already intertwined. By focusing on how particular articulations or representations
of the event rise to the top, we learn which textual conventions, algorithms, media or
actors are consequential for their circulation. We are not talking about technology or
materiality for their own sake, only to the extent that they matter for the situation.
This is possible because we do not presume anything about the identities of the attackers, social media platforms, media actors or institutions; all identities are at stake in the
event. Of course the direct participants are transformed into folk heroes (in the case of
Boya Dee) or devils (the attackers) but smartphone cameras will never again be the innocent reporting tool of citizen journalism after they were used as a vehicle of propaganda;
any theoretical conception of Twitter as emancipatory or revolutionary after the 2011
Arab Spring needs to be rethought after it was used as a mouthpiece of hate. The event
also reframes past events such as the 7/7 bombings, and the unprecedented broadcast
of the video largely paves the way for the wide circulation of ISIS propaganda (including
beheading videos).
The event also distorts time and space, quickening for a while the already rapid pulse of
social media streams and exerting a gravitational force, pulling the attentions of far-right
groups from far-flung corners of the globe towards a neighbourhood of South-East
London. The event also crosses domains between institutions like the police, television,
blogs and social media, and reveals the backchannels between them. This is not a simple
1176
D. MOATS
circuit between audiences and producers – it is a web of different media stretching between
the visual and the textual, online and offline.
The event also demands that we question our own methods and study design. Is Twitter
really the best corpus through which to view the event when television and online news are
so crucial? Do the application programming interfaces and search queries, which enable
research on Twitter, translate the event in particular ways – driving us to popular content,
for example (Marres & Weltevrede, 2013)? Finally, we can start to question, in a situation
like this, what count as media. Are we talking about broadcast media, suicide notes, farright tee-shirts, police press conferences or murder itself which are the most effective
vehicles of event definitions? Thus event-based studies would help pose critical questions
to media scholars about the very nature or remit of their field (Markus & Beate, 2016).
While this analysis raises many pertinent questions and destabilizes inherited ideas, it
does not however provide us with a theory of media or race, nor any firm normative positions. To take this case further, we might need help from critical race theory, and a political economy of media institutions to understand the terrain in which this event plays
out. Events might allow an anchor point at which these different frameworks could coexist
– but on what terms?
What I propose as the new settlement, the new division of labour, is not based on materiality and content, production or reception, but before and after. What ANT is good at is
unsettling our inherited ideas when new technology or uncertain knowledge destabilize
things. We need event-based or problem-based descriptions to understand what matters
and how things interrelate, but later we might need more settled theories and broad historical analyses, or discussions of symbolic goods, culture and meaning, which is where
existing media expertise comes in. So perhaps ANT can be used as a first responder on
the scene and media disciplines can build on the ground cleared by the event-analysis,
though it will be important to return to events whenever things get too settled, too neat.
7. Conclusions
In this paper, I have tried to make the case that in work at the intersection of media studies
and STS, instead of focusing on the materiality of media, we should focus on the object of
mediated events. Controversies, problems and matters of concern have allowed ANT
scholars to retain a fidelity to the empirical without deciding who, where or how things
work. Media scholars can use ANT-inspired approaches not to give them ready-made concepts of technologies but to help unsettle notions of what count as media and what is at
stake in media’s presence.
However, I also showed that ANT has not always attended to the role of media in their
accounts of controversies and suggested that a different modality of controversy was
necessary to deal with news media routines. I argued that mediated events are perhaps
a more media-specific unit of analysis through which this dialogue could happen. However, other scholars may find that issues, with attendant publics, or knowledge controversies or matters of concern which play out over a longer period of time are more
appropriate for particular cases.
Finally, I used the Woolwich attacks to show how all these previous dichotomies are
erased by a particular event, which then allows us to question these presumed distinctions.
But once we unsettle things, we need other disciplines, potentially, to develop something
INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY
1177
new in the space that has been cleared. In this way, media theory can be built up from
empirical surprise, rather than be constantly surprised by the empirical.
Notes
1. Silverstone embraced social shaping of technology, but was somewhat ambivalent about
ANT (see Couldry, 2008).
2. There is also a whole genre of STS-influenced studies under the banner of Digital Methods
(Rogers, 2013) which, in particular, unify materiality and content, and similar to my proposal, do so around issues. However, they mainly use quantitative tools which I do not have
space to discuss in this paper – see Marres and Moats (2015).
3. When Molotch & Lester say ‘issue’ they make explicit reference to Dewey’s ‘problems’.
4. Provided by Stuart Shulman of Discover Text at the DMI Winter School 2013.
5. There may, of course, have been earlier tweets which did not mention the query words
explicitly.
6. While Twitter is often thought of as a medium for whipping up rumours, it is also a rumour
correcting engine (Procter, Vis, & Voss, 2011).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council.
Notes on contributor
David Moats is a postdoctoral researcher at TEMA T (Technology and Social Change), Linköping
University. David’s PhD was about developing new forms of data visualisations for researching
public science controversies with data from online platforms like Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter.
David’s current research pertains to the role of visual representation in ‘big data’ analytics. He is
currently collaborating with data analysts in a variety of fields (market research, epidemiology,
sports statistics, etc.) to develop new types of data visualisations with a view to both understanding
how practitioners use ‘social’ data and imagining how data analysis could be approached in more
open, exploratory and interpretive ways.
ORCID
David Moats
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9622-9915
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