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- 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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- Gustrén, Cia, 1979-
(author)
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Negotiating school identities : a multimodal analysis of upper secondary school promotion on the web
- 2021
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The research interests of this doctoral thesis are the mediated ways of presenting and promoting Swedish upper secondary schools on the web to attract students. The thesis studies the rationale of schools’ strategically designed attempts to reach out with their educational offers in a highly competitive school market. The aim is to study how the identities of upper secondary schools are constructed and how potential students are addressed to identify with schools as of year 2020- 2021. More specifically, the thesis is concerned with the multimodal character of school identities as situated in the interplay between different means of communication. The way visual components reinforce, complement, or contradict each other in the presentation of schools is focused. The relation between text and image is admittedly a field of research of its own. Other research interests are concerned with the way potential students are positioned along with a certain worldview as well as how they are supposed to recognize themselves in the description of four theoretical study programs.Moreover, I study the grips or gripping forces by which the audiovisual promotion of schools is designed to appeal to or encapsulate potential students on basis of a sense of purpose and belonging. The study material for the thesis is hence found in three categories of web-based information: 64 schools’ self-presentations online, program descriptions of four theoretically oriented study programs on the so-called “school webs” of the same schools and, finally, upper secondary schools’ YouTube-videos integrated in many cases on the websites. These empirical instances are studied to learn more about different school identities, the ideological significance of education as related to certain world views, and the way of addressing or gripping potential students in the promotion of schools.My method of inquiry is a combination of a logics approach with visual analysis to address the relation between different modalities. A set of discursive logics are integrated with a multimodal framework to emphasize multiple modes of communication and to make sense of the interplay between them. The multimodal analysis proceeds from the way discursive statements are situated in a field of tension. Because the descriptive means by which upper secondary schools are presented to potential students are based upon the self-interpretations of schools, they are well-suited for the study of the construction of school identities in the intersection between visual modalities of text, image, and video. It is important to point out that the thesis has no intention to analyze the meaning of images per se, but mainly the way they reinforce, add to, or contradict the textual or spoken messages found in the self-presentations on the web or in the audiovisual presentation of schools. Discursive statements are hence approached as mediated accounts. Form matters as much as content; the way messages are conveyed has a bearing on the perceived meaning of statements.This thesis is situated at the intersection between strategic communication, visual culture studies, multimodal analysis, and the critical study of education. A major finding is that a traditional identity of schools is largely appropriated for or turned into a means of competition. A competitive approach is also associated with that of caring and tradition as a way of gaining legitimacy. Tradition is not so much questioned from a market point of view as reaffirmed as necessary for schools to be recognized as such. Opposite demands are continuously negotiated and hence subject to the ideological logics of both/and, as it often appears as desirable to incorporate, embrace and balance different aspects instead of maintaining just one of them. This offers a more flexible approach to identity construction in allowing schools to incorporate opposite demands as though complementary aspects.As to the role of visual means of presentation, images form an integrated and central part of webpages as mediated presentations of schools. Because of the poignant or emotive implications of images in relation to text, they are often considered a powerful means of identification with the schools and their core values. A crucial aspect that emerges in the interplay between text, image, and video, is that of reciprocity. Schools and students are seen to be mutually dependent upon each other and so, in terms of a caring and compassionate attitude, look after each other’s interests. As the free choice educational system depends for its efficacy and perceived success on students making the “right” choice of education, ninth graders’ personal interests are what is supposed to guide their choice of school. Although admission also depends on previous school merits, it is understood as desirable for a sense of common purpose that the interests of students overlap with those of the schools. In sum, students are indeed expected not only to represent but to be the schools or incorporate all that which schools are claimed to be.
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