This comprehensive collection introduces and contextualizes media studies’ most influential texts and thinkers, from early 20th century mass communication to the first stages of digital culture in the 21st century. The volume brings together influential theories about media, mediation and communication, as well as the relationships between media, culture and society. Each chapter presents a close reading of a classic text, written by a contemporary media studies scholar. Each contributor presents a summary of this text, relates it to the traditions of ideas in media studies and highlights its contemporary relevance. The text explores the core theoretical traditions of media studies: in particular, cultural studies, mass communication research, medium theory and critical theory, helping students gain a better understanding of how media studies has developed under shifting historical conditions and giving them the tools to analyse their contemporary situation. This is essential reading for students of media and communication and adjacent fields such as journalism studies, sociology and cultural studies.

One of the editors of this book was once a participant in a seminar with a famous French sociologist. The professor gave advice about projects and research ideas to the researchers and doctoral students that were participating. Then, someone asked the question of how best to understand one’s contemporaries and contemporary society. Perhaps the person asking the question had expected an answer about innovative research methods or about which social phenomena could say the most about the times we live in. But the sociologist had other advice. He said: stop following the noise of the news, turn off your feeds, and use the time you earn to re-read sociology’s classic texts. There was silence in the room. Would the way to understand the society of the 21st century go via texts written at the end of the 19th century, by people like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel?.

Den som vill förstå dagens mediesamhälle har mycket att hämta genom att återvända till tidigare analyser, teorier och idéer – till vad som kunde kallas för medievetenskapens idétraditioner. Den här antologin inventerar och förmedlar ett förråd av traditioner och texter, fyllt av verktyg för att navigera i det samtida medielandskapet. Varje kapitel behandlar en klassisk medievetenskaplig text och placerar den i sitt historiska och vetenskapliga sammanhang; presenterar en närläsning av dess centrala innehåll och diskuterar dess relevans idag. Bokens kapitel är tänkta att erbjuda ett stöd till egen läsning av originaltexterna, inte att ersätta sådan läsning. Boken riktar sig till studenter och lärare i medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap och närliggande ämnen samt andra som intresserar sig för medievetenskapens idétraditioner.

The aim of this article is to report, summarize and spread the results of a largescale European research project funded by EBU Radio in 2011 to map best practices in social media and European public radio, focusing on the way successful public service radio formats have incorporated social media in their production flow. The programmes have been selected for one of the following reasons: programmes that are audience leaders in their country, use innovative radio language or are youthoriented productions. The survey has been carried out by a team of ten European researchers from seven countries on a sample of 28 public radio programmes analysed for two months between January and February 2011. The research team attempted to answer the empirical question: ‘How social media are used by public service?’. Are there some common threads and shared practices among successful programmes in different countries? The team adopted an empirical approach based on social media content analysis and interviews with radio producers. This article will present the main results of this empirical research project. It will conclude with practical guidelines for public radio production and social media innovation.

This article provides a discussion of some of the recent research on media trust focusing on arguments for why media trust matters. What are the arguments for why trust is important? Are there reasons to accept these arguments? We identify three distinct arguments in the literature. First, that it is important for media organizations and for the media as an industry. Secondly, that media trust is essential for democratic citizenship and for bringing forth informed individuals with the capacity for political engagement. Lastly, that media trust is similar to other forms of (social) trust and connected to a wider existential discussion on ontological security. None of these arguments are totally convincing when inspected more closely and in light of empirical research. The article thus concludes that there is a lack of strong arguments for why falling levels of trust in the news media are legitimately described as a crisis or a problem. A supposed “trust crisis” mainly exists when viewed from what must be described as a rather narrow ideological and normative perspective.

The concept of the Media Welfare State describes Nordic specificity in how media are organised and how they serve a lively and inclusive democracy. This article engages in a dialogue in regards to the contention that this media system has persisted in the midst of rapid social change. We synthesise previous research and documented changes in media policy in Sweden, covering the last three decades, to show the ways in which the Swedish media system has undergone significant transformations. Media use is becoming more polarised and connected to social class. The state is retreating from its involvement in media policy; consequently, the press and public service media are facing unprecedented challenges. Finally, the "consensual" relation between media companies and the state, which is said to be typical for the media welfare state, no longer characterises the media market. While some of the features of the media welfare state system remain in Sweden, the current media system is best characterised as a neoliberal media welfare state. The article discusses tensions and conflicts in the existing model and possible future developments.

Previous research has neglected media audiences' and citizens' opinions on how the media should be organized, how they should function in society and what individual, corporate and state responsibilities should be in regard to these questions. In an attempt to understand the relationship between citizens' broader political attitudes and their attitudes on media-related politics and responsibilities, this study uses a survey (n = 2003) of the adult Swedish population to investigate the distribution of a range of media political attitudes in the contemporary space of political positions. The results reveal overlaps between the space of media political attitudes and the broader political space, where support for a Nordic 'media welfare state' corresponds to leftist and GAL-oriented values, while TAN-oriented and right-wing attitudes link to scepticism towards state interventionism in the media landscape. A small but highly opinionated right-wing and TAN-oriented segment displays laissez-faire views on media policy that are reflected in current policy propositions from right-wing political parties in parliament.

What does media welfare mean from a normative perspective? The notion of media welfare and "the media welfare state" has mainly been used descriptively, to depict the particular way in which the media are organized in the Nordic welfare states. In this article, we explore media welfare from a normative perspective. Our intention is to open up a discussion about the normative and political implications of the notion of media welfare and to bring the concept into the contemporary discussion on normative perspectives regarding the media.

I denna rapport redovisas resultat från den existerande forskningen – både i Sverige och internationellt – kring relationerna mellan samhällsklass och medier. Bland annat ser vi att arbetarklassen är kraftigt underrepresenterad och osynliggjord – den undanhålls både röst och erkännande – i svenska medier och att avsaknaden av representation i medierna kan leda till en (berättigad) känsla av osynliggörande som i sin tur kan ligga till grund för ett avståndstagande från medierna. Vidare ser vi att klasserna är betydligt mer ”segregerade” i televisionens genresystem i dag än vad som var fallet för 35 år sedan; arbetarklassen har i det närmaste försvunnit från nyheter och faktaprogram och återfinns istället huvudsakligen i film, drama och reality-program. Just reality-tv ger dramatisk form till dominerande ideologier som på samma gång exploaterar klass – för att skapa narrativ dramatik – och förnekar eller undertrycker frågan om klass och klasskonflikter. Inte minst gestaltas personer från arbetarklassen på ett stereotypt, nedsättande och hånfullt sätt. Avsaknad av röst och erkännande kan blockera formeringen av klassidentitet och minska arbetarrörelsens möjligheter att organisera sig och formera sig för politisk kamp. Vad gör dagens svenska arbetarrörelse på detta område?

Den tionde april 2019 fyllde professor Göran Bolin 60 år. Vänner och kollegor inom medie- och kommunikationsvetenskapen i Sverige och utomlands tog tillfället i akt och förärade honom denna bok.

Bidragen i boken tar upp en rad olika teman och ämnen som på olika sätt anknyter till Görans gärning: Här återfinns texter om mediegenerationer, medialisering, fält och kulturell produktion och vår förhoppning är att den återger något av den spännvidd som finns i dagens medievetenskapliga forskning. Vi hoppas också att bokens kapitel i någon mening fångar den slags medievetenskap som vi uppfattar att Göran står för: En medievetenskap som kombinerar samhällsvetenskapliga och humanistiska traditioner, en empirisk, kritisk forskning som närmar sig tidens stora frågor med ett historiskt grundat och teoretiskt välinformerat perspektiv.

Building on an interview study from Sweden (n = 80), this article develops the concept of media resentment as a tool for understanding contemporary developments such as the diminished trust in news media and journalism. We view media resentment as a complex of feelings and ideas that are both individual and social, embodied, and ideal. Media resentment is defined as the feeling that the media – intentionally or unintentionally – are denying you or endangering what you have rightfully earned, whether by not giving it to you, by directly telling you to abstain from it or by intervening in social processes so that your enjoyment of what you have earned becomes impossible.

This paper presents an analysis of how social class is constructed as a moral category on Swedish mainstream television. Practices of categorisation by the media is an important area of study since these practices are part of a process of co-construction of social categories that are offered to media users as cognitive tools and frames for navigating the social landscape. Based on a content analysis of television in Sweden, we show that the medium of television categorises people appearing on television along the social divisions of class and constructs class as a moral category, with a lower moral value assigned to the working class in comparison to the middle and upper class

This article investigates a paradox in the reception of Web 2.0. While some of its services are seen as creators of a new informational economy and are hence publicly legitimized, other features are increasingly under surveillance and policed, although in reality the differences between these services is far from obvious. Our thesis is that we are currently experiencing a temporary postponement of the law, in the context of Web 2.0. Agamben’s work on the state of exception is here used to theorize the informational economy as an ongoing dispossession, under the guise of ‘networked production’. This dispossession is seen as a parallel to the concept of ‘primitive accumulation’, as a means of moving things from the exterior to the interior of the capitalist economy. This theory lets us problematize the concept of free labor, the metaphor of the enclosure, and puts into question the dichotomy between copyright and cultural commons.

In much scholarly writing and in many leftist and activist accounts the enclosures of the cultural commons have been fiercely critiqued. However, during the last years, new media business models, that challenge the notion of the cultural industries as “copyright industries”, has been taking shape. A new class of entrepreneurs is instead working to expand the commons as part of their businesses. Accordingly, representatives from these new media industries, policy makers, and politicians have joined the academic and political critique of the “enclosures of the cultural common”. The paper argues that this is a shift within the dominant media policy paradigm and an attempt to integrate existing practices on the Internet, based on cooperation and sharing, into the market. By relocating the struggle from “intellectual property” to “platform economics”, the media industry can exploit the productivity of the commons while holding on to the power that comes with ownership and property.

This chapter explores the production of representations of classed identities and of the consequences of social inequalities on Reality Television. Although misrepresentations and shaming of working-class persons on Reality Television have been analysed in previous research, there is a lack of attempts at trying to understand and explain the existence of these representations within the genre, especially through research on the production of Reality Television. This chapter employs a socio-cognitive perspective on media production through which we seek to explain how the socially situated perspective of media producers is translated into the products that come out of media institutions.

In this article, we address the history of Nordic media research through a case study of the formation of media research in Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s and the role that The Board for Psychological Defence played in the formation of Swedish academic media re-search during the Cold War era. Based on archival research, we find that the impact of the psychological defence on Swedish media research was mainly concentrated to one Swedish university, and that the impact on the theoretical and methodological development of the discipline has been rather limited. This distinguishes the Swedish case from what has been argued in historical research on the development of media and communication research in the US.

The information society, as an ideological formation, has previously been identified as celebrating speed and ephemerality: overcoming of boundaries, destabilization of identities and the dissapearance of distance (Mosco 2004). This paper however analyzes an ideological shift within digital culture. The paper identifies this shift as accompanying new business models, associated with what is often referred to as cloud computing. The success of this computing paradigm, we claim, is dependent on the construction of a new ideology, in which information is not only identified with speed and ephemerality but also stability and durability.

Empirically the paper concerns data centers: large, dedicated buildings in which interconnected servers are used to store and process digital information, utilized for commercial or administrative purposes by governments, organizations, and companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Data-centres are what Lisa Parks have called “obscure objects of media studies” (Parks 2009:101). They are hidden, out of sight, inconspicuous and often placed far from population centres. But at the same time they are “material imaginaries” comparable to the houses of large media corporations (cf. Ericson & Riegert 2010). They are conciously inscribed in a number of symbolic and ephemeral geographies. They are discursively – and not only materially – constructed as stabile, durable, lasting and safe. The purpose of the paper is to analyse how, by whom and with what purposes.

The question of voice is a central and timeless political issue. Who gets to speak? Who is silenced? Who is listening? One of the main arenas for voice in modern, advanced democracies is the media. Media infrastructures, technologies, institutions and organizations are a precondition for political voice in large-scale societies, but are also an important factor in distributing the possibilities for voice among different groups and sectors of the population. In this article, we take on the question of voice in relation to social class and aim to analyse how the medium of television gives voice to people from different social classes. This study operationalizes the theoretical notion of voice by asking the following questions: who has the opportunity to appear and speak on television, to whom do they speak and under what circumstances does this communication occur? Based on a content analysis of television in Sweden, the results from this study show that voice is distributed in a highly unequal manner. It also shows that the relations enacted by television appearances conform to the social hierarchy. Whereas people from the ruling class frequently speak to people from the working and middle classes, they are rarely spoken to by members of a class that is positioned below their own. Television thus constructs a social hierarchy of voice and authority that reproduces and legitimizes already existing social hierarchies.

Samhälleliga kriser som Corona-pandemin är, i det det moderna mediesamhället, också medie- ochinformationskriser. En central fråga är medborgarnas tillit och förtroende till medierna. Globalt sett har tilliten till medierna minskat under senare år. Sverige sticker ut med en högre grad av tillit (även på detta område) men vi ser också en ökad polarisering där utbildningsnivå och politisk åskådning samt medievanor tycks bidra till en sjunkande grad av tillit i vissa delar av befolkningen. Vid samhälleliga kriser finns ett omfattande behov av korrekt och fungerande informationsspridning, samtidigt som förekomsten av desinformation, “fake news” och ryktesspridning ökar kraftigt. Detta projekt syftar till att studera tilliten till medierna under Corona-krisen. Projektet erbjuder en unik forskningsdesign (med dagböcker och djupintervjuer) som möjliggör rikhaltig och nyanserad förståelse för hur tilliten till medier och samhällsinformation ser ut, hur den formas, vilka faktorer som påverkar den och hur den utvecklas under ett längre krisförlopp. Projektet bidrar till en teoretisk och metodologisk nyorientering inom tillitsforskningen samtidigt som vi genom projektet skapar kunskap som är direkt användbar för myndigheter och andra samhällsaktörer som vill stärka förtroendet för medierna och nå ut med relevant information till medborgarna under en samhällskris.

The article engages with the notion of the smart prison to develop an understanding of emerging temporalities of digital technologies. The prison context serves here as a magnifying glass that makes certain contradictions and paradoxes of the digital imperative visible. Starting with a brief discussion of smart technology discourses, the article explores the temporalities of real-timeness, prediction and pre-emption that are entangled with digital technologies. Analysing the Spartan RFID tracking tool, the use of algorithms in prison administration and a mobile phone application used in Swedish probation, the article identifies a desynchronization between the temporalities of the incarcerated individuals’ lived experience and the (imagined) temporalities of the smart prison. The findings point to developments that are relevant for the smart, digital society beyond the prison walls.

People are spending increasingly more time on social media platforms, with Facebook being the biggest and most successful. Historically, media technologies have for long been considered of importance for the structuration and the experience of time in general. In this article, we investigate the technological affordances of Facebook for the temporal experiences of its users. Relying on a case study of a Facebook page dedicated to media memories, we link user experiences to technological and institutional affordances. By doing so, we seek to answer the question of how a business model and an infrastructure that largely build on immediacy and newness are experienced and negotiated by users that engage in a multiplicity of durations and time layers in their everyday lives. Drawing on a platform analysis, in-depth interviews and a survey among the users of the page “DT64—Das Jugendradio der DDR,” we develop the concept of “social media time” while considering notions of the archive, flow, and narrative, which contribute to shedding light on how specific media technologies afford specific temporalities. We conclude by discussing the consequences for the users and society at large.

Förhållandet mellan fängelser och medier utforskas i en ny bok av medieforskarna Anne Kaun och Fredrik Stiernstedt. I boken Prison Media – Work, Architecture and Technology Development används såväl historiska som nutida exempel för att analysera hur fängelser varit – och är – av central betydelse för utvecklingen av mediesystem och kommunikationsinfrastrukturer, men också hur fängelser i sig själva kan förstås som en slags medier. 

Social networking sites play many roles in the everyday lives of their users. A growing body of research suggests that platforms such as Facebook fundamentally change the way memories are performed. This article takes the former East-German youth radio DT64 as a starting point to analyse how media are remembered and how practices of remembering by music audiences might be altered with social networking sites. Drawing on in-depth interviews with former listeners and an analysis of one Facebook group dedicated to the radio station, the article suggests that SNS offer new potentials for media memories that are collaborative and take place in public. The former listeners we interviewed remain, however, sceptical and confirm only limited participation in new forms of performing media memories online. The article discusses the changing nature of media memories in the context of a changing media landscape by looking at questions of identity, temporality and alternativity.

Social networking sites (SNS) play many roles in the everyday lives of their users. A growing body of research suggests that platforms such as Facebook also fundamentally change the way memories are performed. This article takes the former East-German youth radio DT64 as a starting point to analyse how media are remembered and how practices of remembering by music audiences might be altered with social networking sites. Drawing on in-depth interviews with former listeners and an analysis of one Facebook group dedicated to the radio station, the article suggests that SNS offer new potentials for media memories that are collaborative and take place in public. The former listeners we interviewed remain, however, sceptical and confirm only limited participation in new forms of performing media memories online. Ultimately, the article discusses the changing nature of media memories in the context of a changing media landscape by looking at questions of identity, temporality and alternativity.

This chapter considers a current example of an online site for the commemoration of cultural artefacts from the former GDR, the Facebook page DT64 – Das Jugendradio der DDR that is dedicated to a former youth radio station. We analyse the page not so much as an example of persistent Ostalgia, but as an illustration of how media memories are performed in our digital age entangling individual and collective memories. The chapter discusses the changing nature of media memories in the context of an altered media ecology from a media and communications perspective by looking at questions of how users experience the performance of media memories online in relation to a given infrastructure that both allows and constraints specific media-related practices.

How prisoners serve as media laborers, while the prison serves as a testing ground for new media technologies.

Prisons are not typically known for cutting-edge media technologies. Yet from photography in the nineteenth century to AI-enhanced tracking cameras today, there is a long history of prisons being used as a testing ground for technologies that are later adopted by the general public. If we recognize the prison as a central site for the development of media technologies, how might that change our understanding of both media systems and carceral systems? Prison Media foregrounds the ways in which the prison is a model space for the control and transmission of information, a place where media is produced, and a medium in its own right.

Examining the relationship between media and prison architecture, as surveillance and communication technologies are literally built into the facilities, this study also considers the ways in which prisoners themselves often do hard labor as media workers—labor that contributes in direct and indirect ways to the latest technologies developed and sold by multinational corporations like Amazon. There is a fine line between ankle monitors and Fitbits, and Prison Media helps us make sense of today's carceral society. 

Incarcerated individuals have long contributed to crucial societal infrastructures. Frombeing leased work force building the railway in the United States to constructing canalsystems in Sweden, prisoners’ labor has been widespread as an important part ofvalue production. Part of the labor conducted by incarcerated people is related tothe production, repair, and maintenance of media devices and media infrastructuresconstituting what we call prison media work. In this article, we trace the changinglogics of prison media work historically since the inception of the modern prison at theturn of the 20th century. Based on archival material, interviews, and field observations,we outline a shift from physical manual labor toward the work of being tracked thatis constitutive of surveillance capitalism in- and outside of the prison. We argue thatprison media work holds an ambiguous position combining elements of exploitationand rehabilitation, but most importantly it is a dystopian magnifying glass of media workunder surveillance capitalism.

This article explores the ways in which prisons are imagined as sites of technology development. By attending to expos that showcase prison technologies and constitute “live theatres of technology” (L. Cornfeld, 2018), we carve out ambivalent sociotechnical imaginaries of technological backwardness that are combined with the idea of radical technological innovation to reform the justice system. In doing so, we highlight the prison as one site of technology development and actors at technology trade shows catering to the prison and security sector as platforms for technological mediators that range from corporate prison tech companies to educators as well as representatives of the criminal justice system. The expos emerge as sites where technological development is negotiated through performative sociotechnical imaginaries of prison tech.

What does digital piecework have in common with laboring in the warehouse of a large online shopping platform? How is data cleaning related to digitization work and AI training in prisons? This panel suggests bringing these diverse ways of laboring in the digital economies together by considering these practices as infrastructural labor that takes the shape of shadow work (Illich, 1981) and ghost labor (Gray & Suri, 2019). Work and labor in modern, capitalist society imply power, authority and possibility for resistance, and these dimensions are crucial for understanding why and how infrastructures are realized and how they work. Infrastructure labor is ambiguous. It is both visible and invisible depending on the specific tasks and their inherent power relations (Leigh Star & Strauss, 1999). It includes both manual and cognitive labor. It is geared towards innovation as well as repair, maintenance and servitude. The panel aims to paint the contours of infrastructural labor at the margins of digital economies pointing towards forms of alienation and resistance that have for long been part of labor relations, but that are renegotiated in the context of emerging technologies within digital economies that need human labor to be sustained and further innovated.

Previous research has concluded that the working-class is largely invisible on television. When the working-class is displayed; however, common frames highlight moral shortcomings and lack of responsibility. This study asks what difference such representations make. The study relies on cultivation analysis and a survey of the adult Swedish population to understand the extent to which heavy television viewers provide “television answers” in their descriptions of and attitudes toward the working-class. While some results are inconsistent, heavy television viewers seem more prone to view social inequalities as the result of working-class people's failure to take responsibility for their own well-being. 

As a leading scholar of the social conditions of cultural production, Pierre Bourdieu had little to say about large-scale media production. This study, however, brings the theoretical-empirical program that underpins studies of fields of cultural production within the Bourdieusian tradition to bear upon the Swedish field of television production. Two research questions are posed. First, what is the structure of the field of television production—what are the main hierarchies that divide agents in the field? Second, how do positions in the field correspond to agents’ ways of orienting themselves—how are various position-takings distributed in the field? These questions are answered with a multiple correspondence analysis with agents in the Swedish field of television production (n = 378). The field of television production is structured, first, along an incumbent-challenger axis; and second, according to an axis separating public service broadcasters and journalists rich on cultural capital from commercial broadcasters involved in drama and entertainment production. These dynamics, along with the position-takings assumed by agents in the field, are discussed.

During the last decades the Nordic media model has been challenged by neoliberal policy and welfare retrenchment. This study asks about the extent to which the values, functions and institutions of the "media welfare state" are supported by the adult Swedish citizenry, despite political mobilization against it. Drawing on a national survey (n = 2003) this study shows that the media welfare state is generally well-supported by the population. Using exploratory statistical analysis, we identify a media welfare state of mind. While widespread in the population, this attitudinal constellation is more common in older segments of the population, in the working-class, and by those who frequently use and trust public service media. The main conclusion is that support for the media welfare state primarily can be explained by political attitudes, where left-leaning and GAL-oriented individuals are more positive than people holding right-wing and TAN-attitudes.

Native advertising is often perceived as the future of both media and advertising. Notonly is it said to lead to better, more effective advertising, it is also thought to be partof the solution to journalism’s current economic crisis. Both supporters and critics areconvinced of its future success: the transition to native is supposedly both smooth andunproblematic. This chapter seeks to nuance such accounts, using the example of Sweden.There are at least three main dilemmas, or barriers – economic, ideological/organisationaland regulatory – for those who wish to ‘go native’ or in other ways maximise theinfluence of advertising upon editorial content. Analysing them suggests some avenuesfor action, including targeted protection of particular forms of media content such asnews, and greater public support for a structurally divided media system: if commercialmedia can no longer manage to uphold a ‘wall’ within their companies, then the ‘wall’might instead run through the media system at large.

Dallas Smythe’s article from 1977 is a milestone in the analysis of the political economy of the media. Here, Smythe argued that the role of communication had not been given sufficient attention within Marxist thought. Smythe formulated a materialist theory of communication, and put issues of class, capitalism, and commodification on the agenda. The article gave rise to key debate in the field of the political economy of the media and of how to understand the complex role(s) of communication within capitalism. Today, Smythe’s text has gained new significance in an era of commercial surveillance and digital commodification in the platform economy.