Caring for publics - Andreas Birkbak thesis 2016

256 Pages·2016·3.3 MB·English

by  Andreas Birkbak

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CARING FOR PUBLICS

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ANDREAS BIRKBAK
DISSERTATION SUBMITTED 2016
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CARING FOR PUBLICS
HOW MEDIA CONTRIBUTE TO ISSUE POLITICS

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Andreas Birkbak

Dissertation submitted 29th January 2016

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Dissertation submitted: January 29, 2016
PhD supervisor: Prof. Torben Elgaard Jensen,
Aalborg University
Assistant PhD supervisor: Associate Prof. Noortje Marres,
University of Warwick
Director of Research Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
Reuters Institute, University of Oxford
PhD committee: Professor MSO Anders Buch
Aalborg Universitet
Professor Fabian Muniesa
Mines ParisTech
Professor Celia Lury
University of Warwick
PhD Series: Faculty of Humanities, Aalborg University
ISSN (online): 2246-123X
ISBN (online): 978-87-7112-491-0
Published by:
Aalborg University Press
Skjernvej 4A, 2nd floor
DK – 9220 Aalborg Ø
Phone: [phone]
[email protected]
forlag.aau.dk
© Copyright: Andreas Birkbak
Printed in Denmark by Rosendahls, 2016
Acknowledgements
Academic writing is often referred to as an activity that takes place in an imaginary
ivory tower, secluded from practical concerns. Having completed this thesis, I find the
image of a white and tranquil tower quite misleading. The experience of authoring a
doctoral dissertation is better captured by comparing it with a wholly different kind of
tower – the golden one found in Tivoli, Copenhagen’s old amusement park. Before
taking a ride in the golden tower, you are filled with expectation. Then you are
suddenly in free fall and the experience gets quite uncomfortable. Afterwards,
however, you almost want to do it all over again.

I wish to thank a number of people for organizing such a ride for me. First and
foremost, I want to thank my supervisor Torben Elgaard Jensen for his unflinching
support and belief in me and my project. Without his advice and encouragement, I am
convinced the ride would have been much rougher. I also wish to thank my two co-
supervisors, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Noortje Marres, for taking an interest in me
and my project. Both were generous with their time and offered crucial disturbances
to my work.

Other people helped me greatly: Brice Laurent, Fabian Muniesa, and everyone else at
the CSI in Paris. In addition to that: Casper Bruun Jensen, Annemarie Mol, Tommaso
Venturini, Anders Blok, Peter Dahlgren, Brit Winthereik, Estrid Sørensen. And my
fellow doctoral students at AAU and beyond, not least: Hjalmar Bang Carlsen, Tobias
Bornakke, Irina Papazu, Anne Kathrine Vadgaard Nielsen, David Moats, Thomas
Turnbull, Jess Perriam, Thomas Vangeebergen, Alex Dobeson, Ask Greve Jørgensen,
Christian Nold, the list could go on. Thank you. Had I only been able to use all that I
learned from you, there would be far less imperfections in my text.

I would also like to extend a big thank you to everyone in the techno-anthropology
research group at Aalborg University. This group emerged at a very fortunate point in
time for me, and I could not have found a better place to work. A special thank you to
my close colleagues Anders Kristian Munk, Anders Koed Madsen, Morten Krogh
Petersen, Stine Willum Adrian and Anders Buch for being there all the way. I look
forward to working with you all in the future.

Finally, the biggest thank you, not surprisingly, is for Hege. Without your patience,
enthusiasm, wisdom and care, there would likely be no thesis at all.

Andreas Birkbak
Copenhagen, January 2016
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English Summary
The subject of this dissertation is how media contribute to the unfolding of public
engagement with issue politics. The introduction outlines the nested problems of
publics, media and issues. I suggest something of a puzzle, i.e., that the media can be
seen as crucial for democratic politics as well as a threat to such politics. The
introduction suggests adopting a pragmatist approach to the problem, and draws on
John Dewey, Walter Lippmann and recent work in science and technology studies
(STS). I argue that the pragmatist approach on the one hand helps avoid a problem
with Habermasian approaches that adopt an ideal and fixed notion of public debate
that is not issue-specific. On the other hand, I also argue that the pragmatist approach
avoids the media studies problem of attributing deterministic effects to media. As an
alternative, the pragmatist approach formulates an empirical examination of the
(issue-)specific work and contributions of particular media. I suggest that these
contributions may be conceptualized as a ”caring” for publics, where media are
studied as part of an ongoing tinkering with issue articulations and how to organize
publics in relation to issues.

Following this approach, the empirical component of the thesis comprises a
comparative investigation of two media, specifically a newspaper and a social media
website. These objects of study are motivated in Chapter 2, which argues that even
though Dewey and Lippmann attached great importance to the role of media in issue
politics, recent work in STS inspired by these authors tends to assume that some kind
of media publicity is available, yet leaves publicity media understudied. Chapter 3
discusses some of the key analytical challenges raised by studying media in relation to
issues. It argues for the notion of devices as useful for taking into account how media
dynamics are intertwined with issue dynamics, and how the media are not conveyors
of publics but performative of publics and issues. At the same time, the Chapter points
to the challenge of taking into account the ontological politics of assigning different
domains and roles to different media devices, as in ”news” media and ”social” media.
This challenge is particularly important in relation to controversial issues, where what
counts as social or news are part of what is at stake, as illustrated by a recent
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controversy over congestion charges in Copenhagen. This congestion charge issue
serves as an empirical case throughout the thesis.

Addressing the challenge of the ontological politics of media devices, the two first
empirical chapters (4 and 5) trace the roles that two large and influential media
devices are assigned in relation to issue politics. Chapter 4 traces the shift of the
Copenhagen congestion charges controversy from a policy setting to a news media
setting; it argues that news media are not only associated with generating a public,
but also constitute a setting that assumes a rather generic public agenda to exist
externally from issues. Chapter 5 shifts focus to the social media site Facebook as an
interesting contrast to the traditional news media, because issues on Facebook
constitute a vantage point for public engagement. However, the Chapter argues that
viewing Facebook primarily as a vehicle for gathering authentic public engagement
tends to overlook the contributions of Facebook to the articulation and development
of issues.

The two last empirical Chapters (6 and 7) seek to push beyond the division of roles
between social and news media traced in Chapters 4 and 5 by pursuing a more
praxiographic account of the two media devices by articulating some of the practices
that tend to be overlooked at each site. Chapter 6 examines the discursive exchanges
on the Facebook pages devoted to the congestion charge issue, and argues that what
goes on here is not the delivery of some kind of pre-given social take on the issue, but
the careful construction of an issue-specific public that is also very much an
intervention into the substance of the issue. Facebook has become part of the media’s
intervention into what is newsworthy, which is no longer the exclusive privilege of the
traditional news media. Chapter 7 pursues this analysis of current media practices
further by shifting focus to a specific news medium, the major Danish newspaper
Politiken and its recent launch of a so-called School of Debate and Critique. This is an
opportunity to investigate how news media work hard to stage sociality and thus
contribute to the articulation of new issues and new publics, rather than keeping an
arm’s-length relationship to a public debate that is assumed to exist externally.

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Chapter 8 returns to the questions raised in the opening chapters. It argues that if we
are interested in issue politics and public engagement in politics as something that is
closely intertwined with problematic issues, we need to rethink the role of media
devices as crucial parts of the ongoing tinkering with articulating issues and publics
that issue politics requires rather than devices that clear up issues through publicity. I
argue that a comparative perspective on multiple media contributions is key here, and
discuss the notion of caring for publics as a way to approach media practices.

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Table of contents

1. INTRODUCTION 9
STUDYING MEDIA FROM A DEVICE PERSPECTIVE 15
AN ISSUE-ORIENTED APPROACH 18
THE OBJECT OF STUDY: CARING FOR PUBLICS 22
RESEARCH QUESTIONS 25
THE CHAPTERS THAT FOLLOW 26
2. ISSUE POLITICS AND THE PROBLEM OF PUBLICITY 31
BROADENING POLITICS WITH ANT 32
LATOUR’S PRAGMATIST POLITICS 35
New procedures 40
Controversy mapping 46
ISSUE POLITICS ENABLED BY PUBLICITY 50
MEDIA PUBLICITY AS AN UNSTABLE ALLY 55
CONCLUSION 63
3. STUDYING MEDIA AS DEMOCRACY DEVICES 65
DEVICES AND THEIR CO-ARTICULATIONS 66
DEMOCRACY DEVICES 72
DEVICE ANALYSIS AND THE MULTIPLICITY ARGUMENT 76
A PRAXIOGRAPHIC APPROACH 81
CARING FOR PUBLICS 85
EMPIRICAL STRATEGY AND MATERIALS 92
CONCLUSION 98
4. SOME LIMITATIONS OF “PATERNOSTER POLITICS”: THE
COPENHAGEN PAYMENT RING CONTROVERSY 101
HOW NOT TO DO POLITICS 103
PUBLIC ATTENTION TO ISSUES 107
ISSUE DISPLACEMENT 110
THE POLICY SETTING 112
THE NEWS MEDIA SETTING 119
CONCLUSION 126
5. UNSCREWING SOCIAL MEDIA TWICE: SEVEN ISSUE-
ORIENTED FACEBOOK PAGES 131
SOCIAL MEDIA AS AN EMERGING SITE FOR POLITICS 132
ANT AS SOCIOLOGY OF TRANSLATION – AND ITS CRITICS 135
QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS AND THE PETITION CRITIQUE 138
NETWORK ANALYSIS AND THE ECHO CHAMBER CRITIQUE 143
QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS AND THE FLAMING CRITIQUE 146
UNSCREWING THE FACEBOOK PAGES IN TWO WAYS 151
CONCLUSION 153
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6. AN ASOCIAL PAYMENT RING: “EVERYDAY PUBLICITY” ON
FACEBOOK 156
PAYMENT RING CONCERNS 159
FACEBOOK AS A MOBILIZING TECHNOLOGY 161
A FACEBOOK PAGE ADMINISTRATOR 166
FACEBOOK AS AN AD HOC DEVICE FOR THE CAPTATION OF PUBLICS 169
EVERYDAY PUBLICITY ON FACEBOOK 172
THE “PUBLICNESS” OF ISSUE POLITICS ON FACEBOOK 177
CONCLUSION 182
7. QUALIFYING PUBLICS AND ISSUES: THE SCHOOL OF DEBATE
AND CRITIQUE 185
A NEWSPAPER EXPERIMENT 189
PUBLIC DEBATE AT POLITIKEN 192
PRACTICAL CONSTRAINTS ON MAKING DEBATE 194
RECRUITING STUDENTS 197
TRAINING PARTICIPANTS 200
TENSIONS IN THE NUMBER 150 204
CONCLUSION 208
8. MEDIA CONTRIBUTIONS TO ISSUE POLITICS 213
REVISITING PUBLICITY 215
CARING FOR PUBLICS 218
CONCLUSION 225
REFERENCES 231
DANISH SUMMARY 251

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