Karin Fast

University of Oslo · Department of Media and Communication

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-regula...

The maturation of mobile, convergent, and place-contingent technologies has inspired researchers from different fields to re-imagine the relationship between geography and media. Recently, the linking of site-specific media and mediatized places culminated in the overarching concept that sits at the midpoint of this special issue: geomedia. While t...

Current research suggests that coworking spaces (CWS) both respond to and legitimize work precarization. This is an important critique. Less acknowledged, however, is the fact that CWS also (re)produce eliteness. Thus, to the aim of offering perspectives that remain underrepresented in CWS research, I here scrutinize CWS as promotors of class privi...

In post-digital capitalism, digital disconnection is not merely a “luxury” but also an obligation. Aiming to re-contextualize digital disconnection outside of digital detox resorts, social media, and elitist activism, this article asks how the ongoing disconnection turn affects how we (think about) work. With cues taken from digital disconnection s...

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...

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...

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...

Geomedia technologies represent an advanced set of digital media devices, hardwares, and softwares. Previous research indicates that these place contingent technologies are currently gaining significant social relevance, and contribute to the shaping of contemporary public lives and spaces. However, research has yet to empirically examine how, and...

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...

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 discur-sively constructed. The relevance of constructivist approaches to mediatisation has been explicated, e.g., by K...

Attempts to define journalism are often normative in nature but do not add to our theoretical understanding of what journalism is. There is a need for journalism scholarship to recognize explicitly that journalism is a space in which participants are not equal—or even similar—in terms of status, influence, work tasks, and working conditions. This p...

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...

If we accept the notion that technology and the social are mutually constitutive, then it matters how different social groups “talk about” mobile media, their affordances, and the social space in which they exist. Needless to say, ICT corporations have an interest in selling the technology they produce. However, just like the early telephone manufa...

Our contemporary popular culture is at the same time unprecedentedly intriguing and hard-grasped. When trying to describe the vast landscape of branded, interconnected commodities that largely constitute this culture, it is easy to run out of words. While we have grown accustomed to saying that new media accelerate the pace of this culture, we rema...

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...

Technologies influence how people understand time and space. This paper aims to phenomenologically understand how the ability to be, and the expectations of being, constantly connected with both family and workplace via various media and communication technologies make highly mobile subjects experience the spatiotemporal conditions and dilemmas of...

This study sets out to provide an understanding of internationally mobile elites from a perspective that takes into account the social costs that come with being away from localized, everyday life. We show that mobile elites are often reluctant travellers and employ Bude and Dürrschmidt’s notion of ‘transclusion’ to understand the often-unrecognize...

The study of transmedia storytelling has in recent years turned towards a more historicized understanding of its object of study, and also shifted to a wider perspective on narrative and narrative elements, focusing more on the transmediality of story-worlds and world-building rather than just narratives (‘plots’) in the stricter sense. This articl...

Over the last decade, mobile media technologies have come to transform the ways in which we organize life and work. Inventions like the smartphone and the spreading of free Wi-Fi networks – technologies which allow us to “stay connected” while on the move – affect how we plan and perform our everyday activities as well as how we handle relationship...

This study sets out provide an understanding of internationally mobile life-conducts from a perspective that takes into account social costs that come with being away from localized, everyday life. We show that mobile elites are oftentimes reluctant travellers. A way of coping with the existential dilemmas of being away is to stay connected with fa...

Over the last decade, free labor has emerged as a key analytical tool for understanding new or semi-new forms of labor in the contemporary digital economy. This paper critiques and develops this concept, with specific reference to work in the media industries, by presenting a historically grounded typology of free labor that also highlights some of...

Durable media franchises are inevitably sites of change. For creative or commercial purposes, they tend to change both in terms of what commodities they hold and what stories they contain. This paper analyses Hasbro’s Transformers by way of a combined theoretical framework that considers franchise changes in relation to both ‘world-building’ and ‘b...

A contemporary debate in media studies concerns participation and empowerment, and to what extent digital media shift power to the citizens. This study assesses the long-term viability of par-ticipatory journalism using Swedish content and user data. Inclusion of comments and blog-links on news sites increased from 2007 to 2010, and decreased rathe...

This conference paper presents two case studies of transmedial entertainment, one of the pulp franchise The Shadow and one of the contemporary franchise Transformers. The article argues that previous studies of transmedia entertainment have focused too much on narrative in a strict sense (plot/story), ignoring the interplay between the contexts of...

The report Mediatization of Culture and Everyday Life commissioned by the sector committee Mediatization of culture and everyday life of the Riksbanken Jubileumsfond provides a comprehensive overview of current Swedish mediatization research focusing on culture and everyday life in and beyond the field of media and communication studies. Based on a...

Today’s converging entertainment industry creates ‘transmedial’ brand worlds in which consumers are expected to become immersed. Integrated marketing campaigns connected to these worlds encourage various kinds of consumer productivity and invite consumers to partake in brand-building processes. Consumers, thus, are increasingly counted on to act as...