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Media Resistance: Protest, Dislike, Abstention

  • April 2017
DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-46499-2
  • Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
  • ISBN: 978-3-319-46498-5
Authors:
Trine Syvertsen at University of Oslo
Trine Syvertsen
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Abstract

DOWNLOAD FREE FROM PALGRAVE WEBSITE http://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783319464985#otherversion=9783319464992 The media have always been disliked, despised and resisted. Protests have been grounded in claims that the media destroy culture, morality, enlightenment, democracy, community and health. The book explores media resistance as an integrated part of culture, instead of seeing it as incidents of moral or media panic. Drawing on political and organizational sources, personal testimonies, fiction and non-fiction bestsellers as well as dystopian films, the book shows how the media are placed in a villainous and disruptive role The book takes a historical perspective, looking at early resistance to books, print, cinema, radio and comics in the 1800s and 1900s; resistance to television in the late 1900s; and resistance to online and social media from around 2000
2017 MEDIA RESISTANCE HELE BO
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Chapters (7)

Media Resistance: Connecting the Dots
Full-text available
Chapter
  • Feb 2017
  • Media Resistance
  • pp.1-14
The chapter introduces the analysis of media resistance and presents the research questions: What is at stake for resisters, how did media resistance inspire organized action and how is media resistance sustained? Media resisters are often seen as moralists, Luddites, laggards or cultural pessimists, but this book argues that media resistance is grounded in broadly shared values: Morality, culture, enlightenment, democracy, community and health.
Resistance to Early Mass Media
Full-text available
Chapter
  • Feb 2017
  • Media Resistance
  • pp.15-33
Media resistance was shaped by industrialization and urbanization, and the debates over mass society and mass culture. The chapter reviews resistance to early mass media: print and books, serial fiction, cinema, radio and comics, and show how these media were seen to undermine morality, culture, enlightenment, democracy, community and health. The chapter discusses campaigns and protests against early mass media and shows that a common feature was a struggle for political and institutional control, prohibition or censorship.
Evil Media in Dystopian Fiction
Full-text available
Chapter
  • Feb 2017
  • Media Resistance
  • pp.35-53
Media resistance is a recurring theme in contemporary culture, and comprises familiar concerns that can be used to create speculative and readable stories and plots. The chapter discusses key works of dystopic fiction that have inspired media resistance until today: Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). All three novels portray authoritarian societies where the growth of mass media represents a danger to civilization. The screen media (cinema and television) are depicted as particularly bad, whereas print culture and books are depicted as representing hope for humanity.
“Get a Life!” Anti-Television Agitation and Activism
Full-text available
Chapter
  • Feb 2017
  • Media Resistance
  • pp.55-76
No modern medium has been detested as much as television. The chapter reviews key works by Mary Whitehouse, Marie Winn, Jerry Mander and Neil Postman deeming television to be a cause of social ills in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Television was seen to undermine democracy, community and enlightenment, obstructing a moral lifestyle, and impairing mental and physical health. The chapter discusses collective action against television through movements such as TV-Free America, the British White dot and Adbusters. While anti-television activism did not inspire a general rejection of television, TV-Turnoff Week from the mid-1990s became a way for organizations, professions, communities and individuals to demonstrate their resentment and point to television as an explanation for social change to the worse.
“Caught in the Net”: Online and Social Media Disappointment and Detox
Full-text available
Chapter
  • Feb 2017
  • Media Resistance
  • pp.77-97
Internet was eagerly awaited as a liberation from television. Yet, a decade into the new century, warnings about the negative consequences of online and social media proliferated. Critics claim that social and online media undermine broadly shared values: morality, culture, enlightenment, democracy, community and health. With increasingly ubiquitous media, the chapter argues that it is difficult to propose political measures to restrict media. However, a parallel development is the emergence of self-help guides, websites and confessionals inspiring users to media detox and abstention.
What if Resisters were Right? Speculations about Bad Media in Popular Films
Full-text available
Chapter
  • Feb 2017
  • Media Resistance
  • pp.99-117
Media resistance is a recurring theme in contemporary culture, and inspire fiction writers as well as film-makers. This chapter discusses dystopian films where media are portrayed as evil, dangerous or bad in other ways. Being there (1979), Videodrome (1983), The Truman Show (1998), Disconnect (2012) and Her (2013) reflect criticism of network television, video and cable, reality television, social and online media, and virtual reality. The films aid the discussion in the book by providing speculative answers to the question: What if resisters were right? What would our world look like if their warnings came true?
Conclusion: The Persistence of Media Resistance
Full-text available
Chapter
  • Feb 2017
  • Media Resistance
  • pp.119-131
The final chapter compares and contrasts media resistance across media, historical periods and national borders. While there is strong continuity in the values that resisters perceive to be at stake, there are also profound changes. One important change is that media resistance increasingly has moved from the political to the personal domain. Three explanations are offered for how media resistance is sustained as a strong cultural current: media resistance is flexible and adaptable, media resistance is connected with other great narratives of hope and decline, and media resisters keep a distance from (empirical) media research.
... The cultural materials featured in this article employ, embellish, and perpetuate cultural values to describe a digital life experience which threatens the purity of human connection. This focus distinguishes digital life resistance from what could be referred to as the historical "moral panic" foundation of media resistance efforts, in which technologies were maligned for changing the moral orientation of an individual (see Syvertsen 2017). Antagonistic attitudes towards digital life activities and technologies are instead organized via two macro-categories which I describe as authenticity (in the sense of both the actual and the genuine) and self-determination (in the sense of autonomy and self-control). 1 Anti-digital life actors employ culturally meaningful codes that nest under these categories to advocate for minimizing the use and effects ofdigital life technologies. ...
... For example, many studies find that feelings of "overload," in which the voluminous content flows of digital life overwhelm users' time and mental energy, animate the decision of many digital technology users to discontinue or limit their participation (Cao et al. 2020;Syvertsen 2017;Tromholt 2016). Other studies show how limited time resources and an aversion to distraction motivates disconnection and resistance behaviors (Birnholtz 2010;Maier et al. 2015). ...
... This invocation of control is not new but rather prominent in anti-media discourse historically. In her history of media resistance, Syvertsen (2017) describes how the emergence of cinema in the early twentieth century inspired "new medical metaphors, involving psychiatry and mind control." These "control" themes remain discursively active decades later when anti-television activist and psychologist Jane Healy (1990, p. 199) writes, without supporting data, how television has "a hypnotic, and possibly neurologically addictive effect on the brain." ...
“Something other than real life:” digital life resistance in the civil sphere
Article
Full-text available
  • Nov 2022
The pervasive use of digital life technologies, such as social media and smartphones, have fostered a social debate on the drawbacks of such modes of interaction and how the infiltration into social spaces by such technologies might be countered. This study employs Alexander’s civil sphere theory to study public expressions of antipathy towards digital technology communicated via online forums such as blogs and online mass media publications. Providing an innovative interpretation of technology resistance, the study departs from the well-researched realm of actors’ motivations and goals to uncover the cultural meaning that pervades resistance activities. In resisting, actors employ codes of the cultural sacred to claim meaningful attributes and identities for themselves and to malign those who engage in digital life as inhabiting profane cultural codes. Pushing beyond motivations, the findings of this study connect motivations to cultural meaning and show how two central concerns—authenticity and self-determination—structure anti-digital life discourse. In describing the discursive reiteration and application of these concepts vis-à-vis digital life, I extend the application of Alexander’s civil sphere theory to ongoing debates on technology and interpersonal communication in the digital age and, thereby, initiate the development of a cultural sociology of digital life resistance.
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... For example, Woodstock (2014) identifies three main motives of individual media refusers: wanting privacy and boundaries between public and personal spheres; fear of interpersonal relationships being undermined by communication technologies; and wanting to focus on real-time experiences and true presence by eliminating technological distractions. In some cases, the resistance reflects an ideology, such as religious (Neriya-Ben Shahar 2016) or socialist (Ribak and Rosenthal 2006), while in other cases, it is seen as an act of anti-consumerism (Portwood-Stacer 2013), anti-institutionalism Syvertsen 2017), or as a type of political protest (Casemajor et al. 2015). Another important distinction is the duration of non-use: permanent abstinence; temporary disconnection for varying periods depending on a specific time (e.g., during the Sabbath; Lieber 2020); or on a defined space (e.g., on vacation or backpacking trip; Rosenberg 2019), or periodic disconnection as part of digital detox-an increasingly popular practice that advocates for digital balance in a saturated media environment (Hesselberth 2017;Syvertsen and Enli 2020). ...
... In a sense, the hilltop youth's resistance can be seen as the convergence of all the resistances, or one that "converges" multiple layers of resistance reminiscent of former youth subcultures and other familiar forms of activist/ideological media rejection. These resistance layers include non-use as an anti-Western ideology (Ribak and Rosenthal 2006;Syvertsen 2017), where the hilltop youth view media resistance as "disconnecting from the disconnection" of Western culture. There is also non-use as an anti-bourgeois ideology (Portwood-Stacer 2013), in which the smartphone represents the fast-paced urban life that is disconnected from the back-to-nature lifestyle and the simplicity that the hilltop youth adhere to. ...
Hilltop Youth and New Media: The Formation of a Young Religious Digital-Resistance Community
Article
Full-text available
  • Mar 2023
“Hilltop youth” is the name for young religious Jewish people in Israel who, separated from their families, are living in illegal outposts on hilltops throughout Judea and Samaria. The group’s unique religious, sociological, and ideological characteristics differentiate them from other religious communities previously studied in relation to digital culture. In this study, we offer a new angle that provides insight into the hilltop youth’s religious–ideological perception while focusing on their attitude toward new media, smartphones, and social networks, in particular, an attitude that is part of their self-definition as a separatist community. The findings present and discuss the different layers represented within the hilltop youth’s media resistance and how this media-negating ideological position shapes the group’s perception as a religious community that is a counterculture to religious and social sectors in Israel.
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... The practice of disconnection is not accidental, but it will inevitably appear with the development of Internet technology. Individuals have a motive for disconnection in a space-time situation, whether it is a temporary or permanent disconnection, including universal such as politics, economy, population, culture, and religion, and some people use social media disconnection to express their ideology (Karppi, 2011), called "digital detox" to express themselves Resistance to social media and the internet (Syvertsen, 2017). ...
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... In public discourse, problematic aspects are easily ascribed as intrinsic to new media technologies, while the values that are seemingly infringed upon tend to be considered separate to media, inherent to the different social domains in which media are used. This is not in itself new, as other historical critiques of media also connect to broader cultural debates and societal values (Syvertsen, 2017;Vanden Abeele & Mohr, 2021). What is made evident with a crossmedia everyday perspective, however, is how many different dilemmas are left to be negotiated by users in a range of micro-settings in daily life. ...
Media Use in Digital Everyday Life
Book
Full-text available
  • Feb 2023
The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. Filling a gap between classic discussions on everyday media use and recent studies of emergent technologies, this book untangles how media become meaningful to us in the everyday, connecting us to communities and publics.
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... Historically, books and literature have a high standing in Western culture, and book reading is generally associated with depth, focus and other intellectual virtues (Furedi, 2015;Manguel, 2014). Nevertheless, concerns that newer media will suppress the book are a recurring topic (Syvertsen, 2017). Moreover, during the last decade, we have seen a growing concern that people are losing their ability to concentrate for more extended periods due to the overflow of 'shallow' and easily digestible content from the Internet and smartphones (Carr, 2010;Jackson, 2018;Twenge et al., 2019). ...
How digital devices transform literary reading: The impact of e-books, audiobooks and online life on reading habits
Article
Full-text available
Literary reading is under transformation. Digital devices supplement traditional paper books with e-books and audiobooks, and at the same time, ubiquitous digital connection challenges focused reading. Based on a qualitative interview study with adult leisure readers, this article explores how affordances offered by digital technologies influence reading habits. Informants demonstrate how e-books and audiobooks enhance reading experiences, as digital affordances influence the how and the when of literary consumption. Three prominent findings are stated. (1) Readers adapt reading mode to the situation, and experienced readers have developed strategies to maximise the ultimate combination of title, format and reading conditions. (2) Digital reading favours lighter texts. This dimension is more substantial for audiobooks, relating to the wide choice of combining audiobooks with other activities. (3) Being devoted readers motivates people to develop strategies to ensure further reading. These strategies effectively make readers practically and temporally disconnect to immerse in literature.
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Political Solutions or user Responsibilization? How Politicians understand Problems Connected to Digital Overload
Article
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-regulate their digital media use – or ‘disconnect’. This relates to how connectivity platforms develop increasingly advanced techniques to keep them from logging off (Karppi 2018; Zuboff, 2019; Ytre-Arne et al., 2020). This article aims to unpack how politicians understand problems about digital overload and invasive media and to what degree they regard digital disconnection as a potential political issue. We have selected Norway as our case country because of the population’s level of digital connectivity and the tradition of media regulation in the Nordic region (Syvertsen et al., 2014). Based on 16 research interviews with politicians and think-thank experts and a document analysis of official party-political platforms, we ask to what degree the politicians experience digital overload and invasive media as problematic, and if so, whom they believe is responsible for causing and solving the problems, and what specific solutions they suggest to the issues. In addition to digital disconnection literature, we draw on theoretical perspectives from media policy, political theory, and responsibilization. Key findings indicate that politicians regard digital overload and invasive media as highly problematic. However, they are reluctant to suggest political interventions as solutions to these problems but rather place responsibility on the users and the platform industries. The politicians struggle to imagine political interventions that could help users disconnect while respecting personal authority and are doubtful about their power vis-à-vis the global tech companies. The article concludes with a critical discussion about the politicians’ acceptance of the neoliberal idea of responsibilization. This ultimately produces a reluctance to discuss disconnection as a political issue, not just an individual challenge.
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Futureless vicissitudes: Gestural anti-consumption and the reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we challenge the prevalent idea that anti-consumption functions as an ideological act of antagonism. We enlist the work of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher to account for the reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer, a politically hollowed-out and knowingly helpless subject endemic to the futureless vicissitudes of semiocapitalist consumer culture. Drawing on netnographic data and interviews with ‘digital detoxers’, we explore how gestural – rather than transformational – anti-consumption emerges through individuals’ reflexive awareness of their political inertia, the lack of collective spirit to bring about improved conditions, and their perpetual attachment to market-based comforts and conveniences. Our analyses reveal three features that underpin the reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer’s resigned acceptance of the reigning political-ideological status quo: magical voluntarism, pragmatism and self-indulgence. In the absence of any unifying and politically-centred solidarity projects, mere gestures of resistance are undertaken towards managing personal dissatisfactions with – instead of collectively transforming – their structural conditions.
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Building Resilient Futures in the Virtual Everyday: Virtual Worlds and the Social Resilience of Teens During COVID‐19
Article
  • Dec 2022
Virtual worlds have been central to an imagined future in which advances in technology propel new social practices. The recent focus within the technology industry on the “metaverse” is the latest iteration of imagined, utopian virtual worlds which have continually surfaced in literature, film, product development, and more since the 1960s. One might say that the concept of virtual worlds is resilient—but do these proposed virtual worlds actually make society more resilient? We argue that despite their endurance, these concepts present a deterministic vision of a singular future towards which humanity is inevitably progressing, revoking the agency, desires and resilience expressed by people today in their everyday realities. Building on original ethnographic research conducted with 31 teenagers in China, Germany and the US as well as past anthropological work on using ethnography to anticipate the future and teenage online practices, this paper conceptualizes resilience as present‐day creative adaptations which propel people into more desirable futures. Virtual worlds emerge as multilayered and equiprimordial spaces for the building of social worlds, giving teenagers novel tools to build and augment their social resilience.
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Postdigital Territoriality: Disentangling from Digital Media as a Return to Place
Article
  • Oct 2022
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 media use, hybridizations of human agency with communication technologies, and digitally mediated activities that generate predictive and prescriptive products. Geographical attention to disentangling is merited by the fact that it comes in local variants and brings questions of place and human territoriality back onto the agenda in significantly new ways as part of a postdigital territoriality. We offer two vignettes revealing place’s role as protective, with its territoriality drawing a line around the self. We argue that postdigital territoriality inevitably reflects a differentiated terrain of gender, income, profession, and other elements of positionality.
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Reinterpreting ‘Luddism’: resistance to new technology in the British Industrial Revolution
Chapter
  • Jun 1995
This book compares resistance to technology across time, nations, and technologies. Three post-war examples - nuclear power, information technology, and biotechnology - are used in the analysis. The focus is on post-1945 Europe, with comparisons made with the USA, Japan, and Australia. Instead of assuming that resistance contributes to the failure of a technology, the main thesis of the book is that resistance is a constructive force in technological development, giving technology its particular shape in a particular context. Whilst many people still believe in the positive contribution made by science and technology, many have become sceptical. By exploring the idea that modernity creates effects that undermine its own foundations, forms and effects of resistance are explored in various contexts. The book presents a unique interdisciplinary study, including contributions from historians, sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists.
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Media resistance: Opportunities for practice theory and new media research
Article
  • Jan 2014
Based on in-depth qualitative interviews, this essay offers a portrait of media resisters-individuals who intentionally and significantly limit their media use and who have largely fallen outside the purview of communication research. I argue that attention to media resistance expands and enhances practice theory and research on new media use. Practice theory broadens by the acknowledgement that media resistance constitutes a significant set of behavioral responses to living in a media-saturated world. Similarly, recognition of the media resistance phenomenon can help address the pro-innovation bias of new media research. Media resisters articulate reasons for resistance that include (a) asserting boundaries between public and private life, (b) acting on concerns that technologies designed to facilitate human connection often undermine it, and (c) focusing on immediate experiences and thereby cultivating presence.
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Mass Communication and the Modern World
Chapter
  • Jan 1989
This study will conclude at the point when developments in the transmission and reception of information through satellite technology appeared to presage a revolution in national and international communications. At the same time television sets became not only the receivers of broadcast visual entertainment and news but were also connected to video-recorders and computers, becoming a new source of domestic entertainment. These developments would pose new challenges to commercial entrepreneurs, media institutions and governments, but around the same issues with which this book has been concerned. The deciding factor will be the social use of the technology, the character of the institutions in which it is placed, and the political organisation of the states of which they are part.
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