| 1. |
- Fast, Karin, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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A spatial approach to fan labor : Conceptualizing fan mobilization in transmedia marketing
- 2017
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- When Swedish artist Tove Styrke released her album Kiddo (2015) on Spotify, she mobilized her fans through an immersive marketing campaign that stretched across and beyond media platforms: an 8-bit game, Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, Dreamhack, and a major Swedish music festival were key campaign platforms. The campaign construction was hardly unique, but rather illustrative of current trends in cultural production, including transmedia marketing and the increasing reliance on fan labor.This paper argues that informed spatial approaches to fan labor, and business strategies aimed to cultivate such labor, are missing in the existing research on cultural production. While descriptions of our transmediatized culture often-times do include spatial metaphors, such as “flow”, “stream”, “fluid”, and “liquid”, our conviction is that a more serious engagement with geography is vital for understanding, mapping, and ultimately critiquing industry practices that potentially are exploitive, unethical, and even harmful.Therefore, this paper suggests a theoretical framework for exploring the geographies of fan labor and presents exemplifying cartographies of authentic music marketing campaigns. The framework is influenced by two recent ‘turns’ in media and communication studies: the labor turn and the spatial turn. From labor theory, we borrow the idea that consumer engagement can be read as labor that is typically unpaid, affective, and voluntarily given. Spatial theory, next, provides us with a conceptual toolbox to disentangle the spatiality of transmedia marketing, including the relationship between physical and virtual elements.The notion of ‘transmediascape’ is brought in to describe the embodiment of transmedia marketing – in mediated and non-mediated spaces and flows. Such transmediascapes, the paper argues, can be read as the perfect soil for fan labor since they mobilize consumers in more than one respect: they assemble fan affect and, at the same time, encourage physical as well as virtual fan movement. Due to its multifaceted connotation – pointing towards both affectivity and mobility – the term ‘mobilization’ fruitfully bridges labor theory and spatial theory and serves, ultimately, as a key concept for analyzing contemporary forms of cultural production.
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| 2. |
- Fast, Karin, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Geographies of free labor : Mobilizing consumers across immersive transmediascapes
- 2017
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- When Swedish artist Tove Styrke released her album Kiddo on Spotify in 2015, she simultaneously released an 8-bit game for her fans to play on kiddogame.com. By sharing high scores, users could win merchandise especially put together by the artist. The game was also promoted by one of the most well-known Swedish gaming streamers, posting his own Kiddo Game competition to his followers. A week after the release, Tove performed at Dreamhack, which also shared the game on their website and on Twitter. Later that summer, a live version of the game was staged at a major Swedish music festival, where Tove also performed. The game was easily shared via Facebook and twitter, and while playing the game the album played via Spotify.Worldwide, the music industry struggles to come to terms with how to make profit in times of illegal downloading, streaming, and Spotifyication. One apparent strategy is to rely on consumer engagement. The Tove Styrke campaign could be read as a contemporary example of so called transmedia marketing; that is, as a “holistic content creation approach” (Zeiser, 2015: xv) that simultaneously involves multiple content platforms. The attraction of transmedia marketing lies in its potential to foster engaged consumers who are ready to “haunt” a brand experience across several content platforms. In this paper, we join with the burgeoning critical scholarship that interprets consumer “engagement” as a form of labor. Since much of this labor gets paid in affect rather than money, such labor has rightfully been recognized as a form of free labor.While both transmedia marketing and free labor has been subjected to many studies over the last decade, there is a lack of research initiatives that explicitly address the spatiality of both of these phenomena (though see e.g. Stork’s [2014] engagement with the “transmedia geography” of the Glee franchise). What is more; if it is rare to talk about the geographies of transmediality in the first place, it is equally rare to talk about transmediality, at all, in relation to music. Perhaps not so surprisingly but all the more inaccurately, there seems to be a prevailing perception that transmedia productions are exclusive to, at least traditionally, more narrative-bound franchises such as television, film, game, or comic books. However, storytelling is becoming all the more important also to music brands. Consequently, we identify a need for studies that acknowledge that 1) the notion of transmediality is applicable also to music, and 2) that the spatiality of transmedia endeavors is worthy scholarly review. Our conviction is that just as work-places constitute obvious research objects in relation to other kinds of labor, so do the transmedia “social factories” warrant scholarly attention.As to compensate for the identified research lack then, this paper investigates several actual cases of transmedia marketing in the music industry – and the free labor that such marketing potentially engenders – by way of qualitative content analyses that employ a cross-disciplinary conceptual framework. The framework combines theoretical perspectives from the ‘spatial turn’ and the ‘labor turn’ in media studies and allows us to approach, and visually present, transmedia marketing as a landscape – what we call a transmediascape. Such transmediascapes, our results indicate, can be read as the perfect soil for free labor since they mobilize consumers in more than one respect: they assemble consumer affect and, at the same time, encourage physical as well as virtual fan movement. Thus, due to its multifaceted connotation, pointing towards both affectivity and mobility, we find that the term ‘mobilization’ serves as a fruitful link between spatial theory and labor theory and a key concept for analyzing the geographies of free labor.The era of transmediatization is marked by increased reliance, in all the more societal spheres, on content that transcend singular media platforms and, accordingly, by new modes of media consumption. Much research has recognized, confirmed, and explored this transformation, and ‘transmediality’ has hitherto been subjected to relatively extensive theorization. Nonetheless, the spatiality of transmediality remains largely undertheorized. As to correct for this shortage, this paper proposes transmediascape as an analytical tool for discerning the complex topographies of media ownership, technologies, texts, meanings, and practices that constitute today’s transmediatized culture. With inspiration from work in both the ‘spatial turn’ and ‘labor turn’ in media studies, we recognize the transmediascape as an arena of labour, where both paid and unpaid forms of work are carried out. Ultimately, we argue, the concept of transmediascape works as a tool for mapping geographies of free labour across institutional, technological, and textual levels. The present study illuminates current modes of ‘transmediascaping’ – or the practice of cultivating good “soil” for profitable consumer engagement – by focusing the transmedia marketing campaign that launched British/Irish boyband One Direction’s album ‘Made in the A.M’, in 2015.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Ryan Bengtsson, Linda, 1976-, et al.
(författare)
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Share! Like! Create! How fan is cultivated and practiced in the contemporary music industry
- 2017
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Ingår i: 2017: AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- When the band One Direction released their sixth album “Made in the A.M.” they marketed it through several joint events within different digital platforms. They used google streetview to create a fictional room, in which fans discovered new material and share it within their social networks using #MadeintheAM. In a joint event with Twitter they launched a 24-hour competition, asking which “country” loves One Direction the most. The 10 countries that were able to mobilize the most Twitter-activity on their country’s hashtag during a set period of time were rewarded with their own One Direction emoji. Just before the album release One Direction joined with Apple Music to stage an international competition that ran across several social media platforms and offered fans the chance to win tickets to an exclusive performance by the band. Connecting the music industry with media platforms combining social media happenings and live events, the campaign mobilized fans be part of the marketing of the album. Recently the music industry has struggled with how to make profit in times of illegal downloading, streaming, and Spotifycation. One overarching strategy developed in response is to rely on consumer engagement, making the One Direction campaign a contemporary example of transmedia marketing involving multiple platforms simultaneously. The willingness of the music industry to use transmedia marketing is related to its potential to foster consumers’ engagement in brand experiences across several content platforms (cf. Jenkins, 2006). Like other actors in the entertainment industries, labels and artists are increasingly interested in exploring the potentials of transmedia entertainment and how consumers – without payment – contribute to the production and circulation of content across and beyond media platforms. In this paper, we understand online consumer engagement as a form of labor that reconfigures users as digital publics. Since much of this labor is paid for in affect rather than money, such labor has been recognized as a form of free labor (se for example Andrejevic, 2008; Baym 2009; Fuchs, 2014; Fast, 2012). But the One Direction campaign also illustrates the spatial qualities of such campaigns through the diversity of initiatives taken to mobilize consumers to perform different actions and move between different media platforms. While both transmedia marketing and free labor have been subjected to many studies very few studies address the spatiality of both of these phenomena (though see e.g. Stork’s [2014] “transmedia geography” and “performance space” of the Glee franchise). Spatial metaphors offer both a way to represent and visualize the movements of the consumers, as well as to understand how marketing campaigns construct immersive worlds where free labor is promoted and exploited. Using spatial metaphors also enables a methodological approach to transmedia marketing, positioning actions and actors in relation to each other in time and space. We develop the concept of transmediascape to refer to such contexts, a term directly inspired by Appadurai’s (1996: 35) ‘scape’-metaphor, which accentuates the global flows of people, technology, capital, media content, discourses, and ideas. Indeed, we suggest that the music industry purposely constructs digital narratives that spill over from one media platform to another forming transmediascapes. This paper explores how music consumers perform and act within music marketing campaigns, posing the question: How do music consumers navigate across the transmediascapes constituted by marketing campaigns? In this study we follow the music audience movement within the promotional campaign of one internationally known artist, capturing the audiences’ actions and interactions by using the artist’s hashtag and additional hashtags specified by the campaign. A network analysis allows us to map how the audience moves through the campaign in time and space, and how the prepared trails guide the consumer to various media platforms (e.g. from the official website, to Instagram, to Spotify, etc.) It is important to note that the analysis includes the trails that run from online to offline spaces, or from virtual to physical places (e.g. from Facebook to festival site, or vice versa). However, we also seek to understand users engagement in the production of content, and how this content is then recirculates within the campaign. Thus we have chosen a nethnographic approach to the campaign material. The quantitative material guides us to instances where content production occurs, allowing a close study of these specific events. Thus this is an exploratory study, following the case study approach (Yin, 2003), to approach one specific campaign in depth by adopting a multi-method approach rooted in digital methods (se for example Kozinets 2009; Hjort & Sharp 2014). Our preliminary results indicate that consumers within the music industry are mobilized as they assemble consumer affect and promote physical as well as virtual fan movement. The consumer follows a path constructed by the marketing campaign, making consumers migrating between various spaces located in different platforms. We identify audience engagement in these events and how audiences both produce and share content with the campaign as well as within their own networks – thus giving the campaign access to their social media networks and their productions. We also detect instances of resistance, where the audience use the hashtag or distributed material in a way that was not intended by the campaign. Finally, our paper also contributes with methodological development where acknowledging the spatial dimensions of free labor and transmedia marketing provide an analytical approach to media consumers within the contemporary transmediascapes.
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| 5. |
- Bengtsson, Stina, 1971-, et al.
(författare)
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Media and basic desires : An approach to measuring the mediatization of daily human life
- 2021
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Ingår i: Communications. - : Mouton de Gruyter. - 0341-2059 .- 1613-4087. ; 46:2, s. 275-296
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The extended reliance on media can be seen as one indicator of mediatization. But even though we can assume that the pervasive character of digital media essentially changes the way people experience everyday life, we cannot take these experiences for granted. There has recently been a formulation of three tasks for mediatization research; historicity, specificity and measurability, needed to empirically verify mediatization processes across time and space. In this article, we present a tool designed to handle these tasks, by measuring the extent to which people experience that media reach into the deeper layers of daily human life. The tool was tested in an empirical study conducted in Sweden in 2017. The results show that perceived media reliance is played out in relation to three types of basic desires: (1) (re)productive desires, (2) recognition desires, and (3) civic desires, and is socially structured and structuring. We argue this tool, in diachronic analyses, can measure one important aspect of mediatization.
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Edlom, Jessica, 1972-
(författare)
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Show me love : Emergent strategic communication practices and fan engagement within the popular music industry
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis studies how the music industry’s strategic communication practices interplay with and steer audience and fan engagement. Relationships with, and expectations on, “active”, “prosuming” or “co-creative” music audiences make it imperative for communication practitioners to produce engagement. The music industry has adapted its promotional strategies accordingly, and data-driven processes and algorithms have become ever more central to understanding and controlling audience practices. Currently, we are witnessing the emergence of new strategic communication approaches to follow, foster, steer, track and commodify audience engagement, via big data. Applying qualitative and ethnographic approaches and socio-cultural perspectives, the thesis explores how strategic communication practices are enacted and designed to cater for, interplay with and steer fan engagement. Drawing on practice and structuration theory, critical questions are asked about the social consequences of communication engagement and an engagement imperative – for both individuals and organisations involved in the strategic communication around a music brand. Results indicate that the contemporary, digitalised music industry demands communication practices that are at the same time strategic, professionalised, agile and co-creative. The study highlights important implications of such practices, in terms of changing professional competences and ethics as well as context-specific articulations of the power relations that support and are (re-)produced through the engagement imperative. In sum, the thesis is aimed at extending our understanding of how strategic communication practices respond to, and change in, a seemingly liquid, yet at the same time carefully orchestrated, communicative context.
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| 8. |
- Enli, Gunn, et al.
(författare)
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Political Solutions or user Responsibilization? : How Politicians understand Problems Connected to Digital Overload
- 2023
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Ingår i: Convergence. The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. - : Sage Publications. - 1354-8565 .- 1748-7382. ; 29:3, s. 675-689
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Politicians are decision-makers responsible for policy and opinion leaders with unique powers to construct challenges and problems as political. An emerging problematic issue pertains to users’ experiences of digital overload and invasive media (Syvertsen 2020; Lomborg and Ytre-Arne, 2021). Existing studies report that users struggle to self-regulate their digital media use – or ‘disconnect’. This relates to how connectivity platforms develop increasingly advanced techniques to keep them from logging off (Karppi 2018; Zuboff, 2019; Ytre-Arne et al., 2020).This article aims to unpack how politicians understand problems about digital overload and invasive media and to what degree they regard digital disconnection as a potential political issue. We have selected Norway as our case country because of the population’s level of digital connectivity and the tradition of media regulation in the Nordic region (Syvertsen et al., 2014). Based on 16 research interviews with politicians and think-thank experts and a document analysis of official party-political platforms, we ask to what degree the politicians experience digital overload and invasive media as problematic, and if so, whom they believe is responsible for causing and solving the problems, and what specific solutions they suggest to the issues. In addition to digital disconnection literature, we draw on theoretical perspectives from media policy, political theory, and responsibilization.Key findings indicate that politicians regard digital overload and invasive media as highly problematic. However, they are reluctant to suggest political interventions as solutions to these problems but rather place responsibility on the users and the platform industries. The politicians struggle to imagine political interventions that could help users disconnect while respecting personal authority and are doubtful about their power vis-à-vis the global tech companies. The article concludes with a critical discussion about the politicians’ acceptance of the neoliberal idea of responsibilization. This ultimately produces a reluctance to discuss disconnection as a political issue, not just an individual challenge.
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| 9. |
- Fast, Karin, 1979-
(författare)
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A Discursive Approach to Mediatisation : Corporate Technology Discourse and the Trope of Media Indispensability
- 2018
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Ingår i: Media and Communication. - Lisbon : Cogitatio Press. - 2183-2439. ; 6:2, s. 15-28
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Hitherto, and mainly by way of ethnographic studies, mediatisation research has informed us regarding the relevance, influence, and role of media in various spheres of social life. Less is known, however, about how mediatisation is discursively constructed. The relevance of constructivist approaches to mediatisation has been explicated, e.g., by Krotz (2017), who calls for critical mediatisation studies that consider the economic interests of mediatisation stakeholders, including the ICT industry. Against this backdrop, this article scrutinizes what the alleged 'mobility revolution' entails according to some who would benefit most from such a revolution. More concretely, the article studies the discursive practices of three leading corporations in the mobile communications sector: IBM, Huawei,and Ericsson. Stimulated by critical mediatisation theory as well as related accounts of the (technology) discourse-reality relationship, the article asks: if mobile media changes 'everything' in life-whose lives are being changed? If mobile media are 'indispensable' to modern ways of living-what are they supposed to do? Ultimately, the article speaks to the theme of this thematic issue by interrogating how contemporary mobile technology discourse contributes to the (re-)production of social space. Findings suggest that mediatisation is constructed as the response to an internal human drive for connectivity and as an inexorable natural force. Three sub-discourses on mobile technology are identified: 'technologies of cosmos', 'technologies of self', and, ultimately, 'technologies of life'. Altogether, these sub-discourses disclose and reinforce the hegemonic nature of mediatisation by communicating the indispensability of mobile media in modern-notably, urban and privileged-lives. In addition to providing answers to the study's empirical questions, the article includes a discussion about the potential implications of existing discourse overlaps between ICT companies and mediatisation theorists, as well as a sketch for an agenda for the 'discursive turn' in mediatisation studies.
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| 10. |
- Fast, Karin, 1979-
(författare)
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A discursive approach to mediatization : ICT companies, coworking spaces, and the construction of media indispensability
- 2018
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- When the ‘World Wide Web’ started to mature, the ‘information revolution’ was celebrated by researchers, politicians, policy makers, and others. Today, a new kind of technologically driven revolution is said to emerge: the ‘mobility revolution’. Unsurprisingly, the revolutionary potentials of mobile media tend to be particularly promoted by ICT companies. By all means, ICT corporations have a stake in marketing their technological gadgets as useful. Beyond this, however, they have an interest in constructing and safeguarding the idea of media as indispensable; as things necessary to lead a good life. While heavily promoted by technology producers, the media indispensability trope is not exclusive to the ICT industry. Rather, the trope also occurs in media research and in mediatization theory especially. Although there are still many suggestions as to how to define ‘mediatization’ (cf. Lundby, 2009; Hjarvard, 2013; Couldry & Hepp, 2013; Hepp & Couldry, 2016; Ekström et al, 2016; Krotz, 2009, 2017), some researchers foreground media indispensability as key to the concept. Jansson argues that ‘Today, we can see that media are generally, and to an increasing extent, perceived as indispensable to the interactions between individuals and groups’ (2015a, p. 380). Notwithstanding other areas of potential dispute, then, mediatization researchers and the communications industry unite in the recognition of technology as agents of social change. As noted by Krotz (2017), mediatization is not a natural, automatic process, but accomplished by humans. As such, he argues, it ‘must be reconstructed critically in order to find the points where the civil society was not asked’ (p. 114). Krotz calls for critical mediatization studies that consider the economic interests of mediatization stakeholders, including the ICT industry. My paper responds to recent calls for critical mediatization studies (see also Jansson, 2018), by scrutinizing the discursive practices of three leading corporations in the ICT sector: IBM, Huawei, and Ericsson. My overall objective is to approach the ‘mobility revolution’ from a constructivist standpoint in order to inspect what the alleged, media induced, social transformations entails according to some of those who would benefit the most from such a revolution. Stimulated by mediatization theory as well as related accounts of the (technology) discourse-reality relationship (e.g. Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Williams, 1974; Pinch & Bijker, 1984; Marvin, 1988; Fisher, 2010), this paper asks: if mobile media changes ‘everything’ in life – whose lives are being changed? If mobile media are ‘indispensable’ to modern ways of living – what are they supposed to do? Addressing these questions, the paper ultimately informs us about how mediatization is discursively constructed and sold to people.Findings suggest that mediatization is embraced and sold back to consumers as the response to an internal human drive and presented as an inexorable natural force. Three sub-discourses on mobile technology are identified in the empirical data set: ‘technologies of cosmos’, ‘technologies of self’, and, ultimately, ‘technologies of life’. Altogether, these sub-discourses disclose and reinforce the hegemonic nature of mediatization by communicating the indispensability of mobile media in modern – notably, urban, middle-class – lives.
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