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- Jarlbrink, Johan, docent, 1978-, et al.
(author)
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From Big Bang to Big Data : A History of the Media
- 2023
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Book (peer-reviewed)abstract
- More than just newspapers, television, and social networks, media are the means by which any information is communicated, from cosmic radiation traces to medieval church bells to modern identity documents. Cultures are held together as much by bookkeeping and records as they are by stories and myths. From Big Bang to Big Data is a long history of the media – how it has been established, used, and transformed from the beginning of recorded time until the present. It is not primarily a story of revolutions and innovations, but of continuities and overlaps that reveal surprising patterns across history. Many media were invented as ways to store and share information, and many have served as powerful tools for administration and control. The concerns raised about media today, whether about privacy, piracy, or anxieties over declining cultural standards, preoccupied earlier generations too. In a playful style, accompanied by more than one hundred illustrations, the authors show us how every society has been a media society in its own way. From antique graffiti to last year’s viral YouTube clip, the past is only approachable through media. From Big Bang to Big Data provides a new way of thinking about media in history – and about human societies past and present.
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| 2. |
- Norén, Fredrik, 1984-
(author)
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"Framtiden tillhör informatörerna” : samhällsinformationens formering i Sverige 1965–1975
- 2019
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation is about the formation of governmental information in Sweden during the period 1965 to 1975. During this period information related issues were high up on the political agenda, in Sweden and internationally. I argue that the period is of particular interest in order to understand the impact and development of governmental information in Sweden, even for our time. One overreaching research question has guided this study: What ideas and practices characterized how and why the state disseminated information to the public? The thesis uses four tensions to study the formation of governmental information in Sweden during the late 1960s and early 1970s: (1) information as a solution – information as a problem, (2) dissemination of information – control over information, (3) information through mass communication – information through interpersonal dialogue, and (4) governmental information – commercial information. These tensions draw theoretically from John Durham Peters’ notions of communication.The thesis uses strands from three research fields: PR-history, cultural histories of media, and digital humanities. The four papers use different theoretical perspectives in order to shed new light on of the formation of governmental information in Sweden. Adding to that, and to theoretically tie the papers together, the thesis presents an overarching network perspective with a special focus on conceptual history as a means to better understand how governmental information was discussed as well as practiced. Different methods are used to study the formation of governmental information. The latter is partly because of the political issue’s porous boundaries and fragmented-oriented character, and partly due to the lack of previous research with a problematizing and historical approach to governmental information in Sweden. The thesis combines qualitative and quantitative methods to study different aspects how the state communicated with the public.This dissertation presents new findings about the formation of governmental information during the period 1965 to 1975. One regards the different intersections of governmental information. It shows that the production and dissemination of information from agencies to citizens was far from “pure” governmental information, and rather entangled with various actors from industry, academy and civil society. A second finding concerns the language of governmental information. Here, the dissertation shows – through large-scale digital text methods – how the concept of “information” exploded in usages from the 1960s and onwards, and how “information” as a discursive element infiltrated a growing number of political topics from the same period and onwards. A third finding centers on the media of governmental information. One result shows how broadly academics and bureaucrats defined the concept of media in relation to the practice of governmental information. All kinds of media devices, and not only the traditional news media, were considered important for the purpose of disseminating information on large scale to the public. Lastly, this dissertation reveals governmental information as without guaranties. Overall it shows how information from state agencies to citizens was generated through various conflicting tensions that have to be addressed, but without any hope of finding a balance free from communication problems. These problems tend to reoccur in different settings through history, also visible today. This result should however not be regarded as a pessimistic standpoint, rather it calls for modesty in terms of communication in general, and governmental information in particular.
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| 5. |
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Mediernas kulturhistoria
- 2008. - 1
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Editorial collection (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Historiska diskussioner om medier har länge dominerats av olika framstegsberättelser. Mediehistoriens mening tycks här bero på vad den pekar fram emot. Om kilskriften kulminerar i Gutenbergs tryckpress, når Turingmaskinen följaktligen sin höjdpunkt i Apples senaste gränssnitt. Men vid varje tidpunkt i historien finns ett vidsträckt medielandskap som väntar på att utforskas. Den här boken är ett bidrag till mediernas kulturhistoria. Med utgångspunkt i ett brett mediebegrepp belyser den massmedier som teve, film och internet, men också äldre medieformer som skriften, posten och ornamentik. En rad olika mediepraktiker lyfts fram från skriftkulturens administrativa förändring av statsapparaten kring 1700, över marknadsföringen av konfektyr med hjälp av kändisar runt förra sekelskiftet, till dagens realtidsövervakning med skärmbildsteknologier. Boken argumenterar för att det är först när medier betraktas i sin historiska specificitet som det blir möjligt att föra mer övergripande resonemang om hur relationer mellan medier och kultur skiftar över tid och rum. Gamla medier var en gång nya. De vittnade om ett levande förflutet och en osäker
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| 6. |
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Återkopplingar
- 2014
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Editorial collection (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Det bedrivs alltför lite mediehistorisk forskning i Sverige. Mediehistoria kan – och bör – skrivas på många olika sätt. En ambition inom den kulturhistoriska medieforskning som presenteras i den kommande boken, Återkopplingar, är att genom ett breddat mediebegrepp och historisk sensibilitet uppdatera mediestudiet. Förnyelsen sker inte sällan i skärningspunkten mellan den ofta teknikdeterministiska mediearkeologin och den historiskt lika anspråksfulla som problematiska medialiseringsteorin.I denna bok presenteras 19 mediehistoriska texter som behandlar medieformer som skrivbord, papper, affischer, kassetter, fisheye linser, radio, telegraf, film, smarta telefoner, litografier, dagstidningar, mikrofilm, begagna de mp3-filer, krigsbyten, biblioteksbyggnader och ölkrus. I boken presenteras en rad samtida perspektiv på förflutna medier – allt i form av en icke-linjär växelverkan mellan nu och då – därav titeln: Återkopplingar.
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| 7. |
- Eriksson, Maria, et al.
(author)
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Spotify teardown : inside the black box of streaming music
- 2019
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Book (peer-reviewed)abstract
- An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of "teardown" from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood. Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online. Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's "front end" with experimental, covert investigations of its "back end." The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.
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| 8. |
- Eriksson, Maria, 1988-
(author)
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Online music distribution and the unpredictability of software logistics
- 2019
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This compilation dissertation examines the role of software in online music distribution and critically scrutinizes the increased influence of digital technologies in everyday life. In particular, it explores how software coordinates and arranges things, people, and information surrounding music and thereby exerts a logistical power that makes music calculable and governable online. The dissertation consists of four case-studies that problematize the role of software and algorithms in regulating how digital music moves. Article I highlights the role of algorithms in organizing, evaluating, and creating knowledge about artistry, article II uncovers the material, political, and technical networks that facilitate streamed music, article III scrutinizes editorial playlists and their role in packaging and containing digital sound, and article IV traces how software is designed to identify and regulate how music moves and is monetized in the online domain. These case studies draw attention to issues concerning visibility, access, ownership, control, but also—as this dissertation especially aims to highlight—the elements of surprise, unpredictability, and unsettlement that are inherent to complex software technologies.The research contributes to three subfields in media and communication studies: music-oriented media studies, materialist media studies, and software studies. It contributes to music-oriented media research by accounting for the role of digital technologies in organizing musical practices and thereby illustrates how algorithms and software must be taken seriously as agents that shape cultural practices surrounding music. Relatedly, the research contributes to materialist- and softwareoriented media research by continuing the tradition of paying close attention to the technical constitution of media technologies and reflecting on the power and politics of software logistics and its unpredictabilities. Methodologically, the research builds on—and advocates—a mixed-methods approach that combines the use of digital methods, media archeological tactics, and a technology-oriented ethnographic approach. In combining these methods, the dissertation illustrates the benefit of experimental and qualitative methods in the study of digital technologies and highlights the need to approach software as both an object of study and a strategic research tool.Theoretically, the dissertation mainly draws upon materialist and German media theory (e.g., Kittler 1990; 1999; Ernst 2012; 2016), theorizations of logistical operations (e.g., Neilson 2012; Cowen 2014; Durham Peters 2013; Case 2013; Young 2014; 2015), and theories regarding technological accidents, ruptures and unpredictabilities (e.g., Frabetti 2010; Virilio 2007; Parikka and Sampson 2009; Fuller and Goffey 2012). In doing so, the dissertation highlights how the hidden and seemingly ‘grey’ and mundane task of regulating the movement of online music online is, in fact, a deeply cultural and subject to ongoing power struggles. Ultimately, the dissertation illustrates the continued relevance of media research that critically engages with software, adopts digital and experimental methods in the study of digital technologies, acknowledges the logistical power of software, and accounts for the unpredictable events that software technologies sometimes trigger.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Norén, Fredrik, et al.
(author)
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Distant reading the history of Swedish film politics in 4500 governmental SOU reports
- 2017
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In: Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. - : Intellect. - 2042-7891 .- 2042-7905. ; 7:2, s. 155-175
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Using computational methods, digitized collections and archives can today be scrutinized in their entirety. By distant reading and topic modeling one particular collection – 4500 digitized Swedish Governmental Official Reports (SOU) from 1922 to 1991 – this article gives a new archival perspective of the history of Swedish film politics and policy-making. We examine different probabilistic topics related to film (and media) that the algorithm within the topic modeling software Mallet extracted from the immense text corpora of all these Official Reports. Topic modeling is a computational method to study themes in texts by accentuating words that tend to co-occur and together create different topics. Basically, it is a research tool for the discovery of hidden semantic structures, exploring a collection through the underlying topics that run through it. Hence, our article captures a number of film discourses and trends within the SOU material. In conclusion, we argue that topic modeling should be recognized as a method and research aid for gathering an overview of a major material; as a way to pose new and unforeseen research questions; and as a kind of computational support that makes it possible to apprehend major patterns more or less impossible to detect through a traditional archival investigation.
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