André Jansson

Karlstads Universitet · Department of Geography, Media and Communication

This article explores the formation of and future avenues for geomedia studies. Drawing on a citation network analysis, we map the development of the interdisciplinary research terrain from its origins and identify central citation clusters. The term “geomedia” has been used in the humanities and social sciences since at least the early 2010s. Subs...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused what we might think of as a “natural experiment in deep mediatization” as people were more or less forced to alter their lives from one day to the other. This report presents the results from a representative Swedish survey conducted in 2021 that mapped how the COVID-19 pandemic affected people’s usage of media and digi...

People adopt geographical strategies to distance themselves from digital sociality. Rather than merely turning off devices, they engage in a broader, more durable project of disentangling. This effort responds to the homogenizing, standardizing forces of connective media and their coercive entanglements: socially normalized routines of personal med...

Logistics is a relatively hidden subject in tourism studies. This theoretical article advances a logistical approach to the study of tourism in the platform economy. It is argued that the platform economy rests on logistical accumulation, which means that human practices are not just predicted but ultimately steered in order to generate profitable...

This article introduces the special issue “Gentrification and the right to the geomedia city.” The aim of the special issue is to make up for the lack of research on how gentrification is shaped and underpinned by the normalization of various media platforms that currently define urban life—and what these media mean to the resistance to gentrificat...

Research on music streaming has so far tended to normalize a view of streaming as an individual activity solely oriented towards the platform. However, as streaming media have become integral to everyday life and a key metaphor for digital society, we should pay attention to how streaming activities are embedded into social power relations. Further...

Disconnecting from digital media is often mentioned in the public debate as a way of improving quality of life, productivity, sustainability, and so forth. However, not everyone can afford to disconnect, and media morality varies across social space. Based on data from a national Swedish survey (2019), this chapter applies correspondence analysis a...

Disconnection is a research topic that attracts increasing amounts of attention. However, there is a lack of research on how different forms of disconnection are related to the production of space and place. This chapter introduces the volume Disentangling: The Geographies of Digital Disconnection , which gathers 12 chapters from different discipli...

After the rapid rise of digital networking in the 2000s and 2010s, we are now seeing a rise of interest in how people can disentangle their lives from the increasingly pervasive networks of digital communications. This edited volume contributes to the turn toward digital disconnection research by bringing together an interdisciplinary group of auth...

‘Checking in’ at or ‘tagging’ oneself to various places on social media constitute online representations that contribute to the classification, or ‘making’, of places. At the same time, users are also classified based on what they (show that they) do where. In this paper, we deploy Bourdieusian cultural sociology to the realm of place-exposing geo...

Based on a literature review, this article shows that current mediatization scholarship is characterized by what Pike (1967) refers to as etic accounts. These accounts forward theoretical categories on media-related social change to conclude that our age is characterized by deepened and expanded media reliance. However, such theoretical extrapolati...

This article elaborates the post-tourist de-differentiation thesis in the light of digitalization and the coming of transmedia as the dominant mode of cultural circulation. It is argued that transmedia extends and provides new facets to the de-differentiation of tourism and social life. Based on an overview of previous research, three versions of t...

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; historic...

While the ‘media city’ has gained academic attention for over a decade, the role of the media in urban gentrification processes has been an overlooked issue. Due to the rapid expansion of geomedia technologies, for example, app-based social media and location-based services on mobile platforms, there is a growing need to address this area from a cr...

In Transmedia Work Karin Fast and André Jansson explore several key questions that frame the study of the social and cultural implications of a digital, connected workforce. How might we understand 'privilege' and 'precariousness' in today's digitalized work market? What does it mean to be a privileged worker under the so-called connectivity impera...

Through the appropriation of new media people can extend their capabilities as autonomous human beings. At the same time, however, mediatization means that new forms of social and technological dependence emerge, accompanied by experiences of frustration, stress, and anxiety. Such experiences can be identified above all within the realm of mediatiz...

Industrial ruins, abandoned places and landscapes of urban decay have to an increasing extent come to surface in popular representations of towns and cities. Their appearances are widely circulated also through various social media platforms and online networks. Together, these “cultures of circulation” weave an increasingly complex imaginary textu...

Through the appropriation of new media people can extend their capabilities as autonomous human beings. At the same time, however, mediatization means that new forms of social and technological dependence emerge, accompanied by experiences of frustration, stress and anxiety. Against this background, this paper assesses the prospects of employing me...

This editorial introduces a thematic issue on "Rethinking Media and Social Space". By critically rethinking the relationship between media and social space this issue takes initial steps towards ensuring that media studies is appropriate for a mediatized world. Contemporary societies are permeated by media that play important roles in how people ma...

The article explores how the culture of spreadable social media affects post-tourism, and, by extension, the boundaries of tourism. Post-tourism is understood as a generalized social condition that entails de-differentiation between tourism and other social realms as well as a complex set of reactions against this predominant trend. Through a case...

This book introduces and develops the concept of geomedia studies as the name of a particular subfield of communication geography. Despite the accelerating societal relevance of 'geomedia' technologies for the production of various spaces, mobilities, and power-relations, and the unquestionable emergence of a vibrant research field that deals with...

Mediatization and Mobile Lives: A Critical Approach contributes to a complex, situated and critical understanding of what mediatization means and how it works in contemporary life. The book explores the tension between the extended capabilities offered by media technology and growing media reliance, focusing particularly on mobile middle-class live...

Industrial ruins, abandoned places and landscapes of urban decay have to an increasing extent come to surface in popular representations of towns and cities. Today it is not only filmmakers and photographers that explore and utilize the ghostly ambience of these leftover spaces. Their appearances are widely circulated also through various social me...

This article introduces the Special Issue Mobile Elites: Sojourners, Dwellers and Homecomers, in which five articles look into the hidden frictions and social and emotional costs involved in privileged forms of mobility. Such existentially oriented aspects of globalization are still relatively underresearched. It is argued that cultural studies hol...

This article provides a Bourdieusian analysis of the mediatized lifeworlds of so-called elite cosmopolitans. Based on interviews with Nordic expatriates employed by United Nations organizations in Geneva, the study looks at how the increasing dependence on new media influences the field of United Nations organizations and the trajectories of cosmop...

Although there are human geographers who have previously written on matters of media and communication, and those in media and communication studies who have previously written on geographical issues, this is the first book-length dialogue in which experienced theorists and researchers from these different fields address each other directly and eng...

Based on the interdisciplinary experience of a Swedish research committee, this article discusses critical conceptual issues raised by the current debate on mediatization – a concept that holds great potential to constitute a space for synthesized understandings of media-related social transformations. In contrast to other, more metaphorical constr...

The aim of this paper is to assess the value of cultural materialism for developing a cultural critique of mediatization. The cultural materialist perspective helps us discerning where mediatization “begins”, which is essentially a response to the dilemma of identifying what is not mediatization in the realm of culture and everyday life. The argume...

This article presents a quantitative analysis of how different socio-cultural factors, including lifestyle, affect the extent to which different media are perceived as indispensable for maintaining close relations with family and friends. Through applying ‘indispensability’ as an indicator of the mediatization of social life, the study provides a c...

The everyday uses of networked media technologies, especially social media, have revolutionized the classical model of top-down surveillance. This article sketches the contours of an emerging culture of interveillance where non-hierarchical and non-systematic monitoring practices are part of everyday life. It also introduces a critical perspective...

The institutional and meta-processual dimensions of surveillance have been scrutinized extensively in literature. In these accounts, the subjective, individual level has often been invoked in relation to subject–object, surveillor–surveilled dualities and in terms of the kinds of subjectivity modern and late-modern institutions engender. The experi...

“Polymedia”, a concept introduced by Madianou and Miller (2012), refers to the everyday conditions of abundant media resources. Whereas such conditions imply that the classificatory processes concerning media as cultural properties become increasingly complex, few studies have tried to produce a general picture of how interpersonal media practices...

This article develops a Bourdieusian approach to mediatization. It is argued that the Bourdieusian theories of doxa and fields can make valuable contributions to a critical perspective on mediatization, one that moves beyond the divides between institutionalist, social-constructivist and materialist understandings (e.g., Bourdieu, 1972/1977). Media...

Technological convergence and altered dynamics of content circulation, what is here referred to as “transmedia textures”, change the ways in which news is consumed. This is in regard to both how individuals navigate and orient themselves through representational spaces and flows, and how their media practices amalgamate with other activities in eve...

Cosmopolitanism and the Media explores the diverse implications of today's digital media environment in relation to people's worldviews and social practices. The book presents an account of the relationship between cosmopolitanized lifeworlds and forces of surveillance, control and mobility, as well as a critique of social power and reproduction in...

The global political rhetoric of “us” versus “them” in the aftermath of 9/11 had significant consequences (particularly for Muslim cornmunities), opening up new debates and discursive frames for renegotiating identity, belonging and multiculturalism — to which we return in the final chapter. The role of media and popular communication remains vital...

Over the past decade, there has been a noted increase in publications addressing political and legal cosmopolitanisms. There is clearly a need for (and a gap to be filled by) more examples of critically oriented empirical analyses that intervene in the debate and address the prospects of the “cosmopolitan vision” from a media and communication stud...

Studies on cultural citizenship and communicative processes (see Miller, 1998, 2006; Chaney, 2002) have long pointed to the generative power of popular media and other cultural forms (e.g. film, television, sports, museums) in reshaping contemporary social conceptualizations of democracy, citizenship, morality and politics, amongst other notions. I...

There is today much evidence that the cosmopolitan ethos is associated with geographical mobility. Both quantitative and qualitative studies have shown that extensive travel, (trans)migration and/or longer stays in foreign places can be taken as predictors of cosmopolitan values (Mau et al., 2008; Pichler, 2008; Kennedy, 2009; Mau, 2010; Jansson, 2...

No human being is born cosmopolitan. Still, some individuals are more likely than others to develop the outlooks and skills that we associate with cosmopolitanism. Empirical studies point to the importance of social background (e.g. Phillips and Smith, 2008; Kennedy, 2009; Meuleman and Savage, 2013), suggesting that habitus (Bourdieu, 1980/1990) pl...

The institutional and (meta)processual dimensions of surveillance have been scrutinized extensively in literature (e.g. Foucault’s [1975/1979] panopticism; Haggerty and Ericson’s [2000] “surveillant assemblages”, to name but two), with the subjective, individual level often being invoked in relation to subject-object and surveillor-surveilled duali...

Any book on cosmopolitanism remains an unfinished project with open-ended future scenarios rather than a complete discussion. One of the primary goals of the book has been to build upon and give flesh and bone to some of the grand narratives and abstract ideals (often backed by mere anecdotal evidence), which have been influential in the cosmopolit...

Recent (trans)media innovations, such as the smartphone and social networking sites, have drastically altered the conditions of everyday life in affluent societies. Such developments have on the one hand contributed to potentially expanding lifeworlds and extended social affordances in terms of mobility and social connectivity. On the other hand, r...

This chapter approaches mediatization as a movement through which media technologies and related artifacts becomeindispensable to people in their everyday lives, and places and practices become materially adapted to the existence of media. This perspective emanates from a broader conceptualization of mediatization as a meta‐process involving interc...

https://www.amazon.com/Media-Surveillance-Identity-Perspectives-Formations/dp/1433118793

With the current saturation of digital devices in contemporary society, the boundaries between humans and machines have become increasingly blurred. This digitalization of everyday life both obscures and reminds us of the fact that identity, agency and power cannot be attributed to the individual or the machine alone: rather, they are the outcome o...

The article investigates the discursive trope of ‘People of the Real World’ (PRW) as it was launched by the leader of the Swedish Christian Democrats, Göran Hägglund, during a political campaign week on the Island of Gotland in 2009. Sociological and cultural theories of local vs. cosmopolitan identity, of emotions, and of space, are used to analys...

Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's triadic model of social space, this article reconstructs mediatization as a sociospatial concept. Such a reconstruction corresponds to a holistic, nonmedia-centric view of mediatization, and provides an analytical framework for generating complex and critical understandings of the media's role in the production of socia...

What does it take to carry out media ethnography in times and spaces of cosmopolitanization? How can ethnography reach beyond nationally or otherwise territorially bounded theories and methodologies, towards a new set of cosmopolitan approaches that manage to account for globalized logics of symbolic power? This article explores whether and how cos...

The urban/rural divide constitutes a socially pervasive lived space, corresponding to what Cresswell calls a moral geography. In modern society, the symbolic association of urbanism, globalism, and mediatization defines the dominant metaphysics of flow, which can be distinguished from the more sedentarist metaphysics of fixity, largely representing...

Even though the field of surveillance studies has expanded during the last decade, there is still a need for studies that empirically explain and contextualize people’s perceptions of the increasingly mediatized ‘surveillance society’. This article provides a ‘middle range’ social theorization, following Giddens, as well as an updated empirical acc...

We call for a fundamental restructuring of research paradigms in geography and media/communication studies to form a bridge between core concerns of the 2 disciplines. This endeavor responds to contemporary historical changes: mediated/mediatized mobility, technological convergence, interactivity, new communication interfaces, and the automation of...

The significance of mediatization in countryside settings is an under-researched topic in media studies. In this paper, based on qualitative fieldwork carried out in two rural areas in Sweden, we study how mediatization integrates the prospects of cosmopolitan social change. The current phase of the mediatization process, which imposes a more dynam...

The role of pornography in contemporary media societies constitutes one of the under-researched areas in media and communication studies. The purpose of this article is to explore the potentiality latent in the user-porn-related Internet domains, blogs and forums – as extensions of offline agency and sociality – for motivating communicative action...

What does the implementation of new communication networks mean for the spa-tial coherence and social sustainability of rural communities? This paper takes its key from Wittel’s discussion of network sociality, understood as the opposite of Gemeinschaft. Wittel’s argument may inform our understanding of how commu-nicative patterns in rural communit...

This article introduces the themed issue on “Communication and Space.” Beginning with Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia and Ulrich Beck's theory of cosmopolitan society the article discusses the analytical potential of a spatial approach within media and communication studies. Through the spatial approach, which regards communication as a mu...

In this article, we show how the abstract city — media representations of city panoramas and the factual physical silhouette standing in for the city itself in the distance — is constituted as an emotive geography and how the production of such vistas is a political project, whose aim is to activate a future gaze . Through analysing two cities — Mo...

The aim of the essay is twofold: First, through a literary exposé, André Jansson tries to come to terms with the meaning of cultural identity. How shall the concept be theoretically defined? And how shall it be distinguished from the general concept of identity, and from more particular (and often very recklessly used) types, such as collective ide...

This article outlines how the visual and spatial structure of Montreal's Expo 67, its texture, encapsulated a “future gaze” and how this encapsulation project was related to the overarching transformations of Montreal. Expo 67 was a sight, an experience-scape, and a mediator of Montreal as a future world metropolis. The article discusses how differ...