Finally, we return to Leah A. Lievrouw article 'Materiality and Media in Communication and Technology Studies: An Unfinished Project' (pp 21-51)

Here are the text and questions for close reading. I hope that these questions will help you to find a way to extend your schemes. We'll discuss them in the exam.

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Thus the main purpose of the following discussion is to explore how the material nature of communication and media technologies has been conceptualized at the intersection of STS and communication studies. On one hand, two decades of debates have encouraged STS researchers to theorize technology as simultaneously and inextricably social and material, to see both aspects as co-determining, and to attend as closely to the physical design and configuration of objects as to the beliefs and social circumstances of their creators and users. Among communication scholars, on the other hand, the physical, material features of technology are still more likely to be explained as outcomes or products of abstract social forces, cultural discourses, or economic logics—or as all of these together. Only secondarily, if at all, are material artifacts and devices themselves considered to have anything like a parallel power to influence human action, society, and culture, or do scholars insist as strongly on the influence or "agency" of material objects and artifacts as that of human actors and institutions. Even where devices themselves are the main focus, as in some social histories of media technologies, they are often analyzed from interpretive points of view that privilege the signifying or discursive aspects of technological artifacts over the concrete, embodied quality of crafting and using them.

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Materiality itself is a complex, multidimensional idea, and open to a variety of interpretations, emphases, and disciplinary assumptions. It has been invoked to describe phenomena as diverse as the economic and institutional power of media industries and markets, cultural practices like art making and religious rituals, and the microscale utterances and turn-taking of speech and interpersonal interaction. Obviously all these levels and shades of meaning cannot be adequately addressed in a single chapter. Therefore, for the purposes of the present discussion I use a much narrower conception based on the three-part definition noted previously, where communication technology is conceived as the articulation of artifacts, practices, and social arrangements (Lievrouw and Livingstone 2006). All three elements are interwoven and mutually determining, but here I focus on the first element, to define materiality as the physical character and existence of objects and artifacts that makes them useful and usable for certain purposes under particular conditions.

Such a definition foregrounds the materiality of artifacts, of things, not to deny the materiality of practices or social or institutional forms, but to consider how communication technology studies might also engage more fully with the materiality of the devices themselves without necessarily opening itself to charges of simple technological determinism.
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Artifacts and Materiality in STS
<...> Bruno Latour has captured the idea in a single apt phrase: "tech- nology is society made durable" (Latour 1991). The need to account for the presence and durability of material artifacts, and to approach artifacts, social, political, and economic conditions, and cultural practices alike as part of a "seamless web" (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987) has produced a lively debate in technology studies about what might be called technological determinism 2.0: how to recognize and account for the materiality of technology without losing sight of the specific conditions, actions, and understandings that generate and sustain it. As Sally Wyatt has observed, "Our guilty secret in STS is that really we are all technological determinists. If we were not, we would have no object of analysis; our raison d'etre would disappear" (Wyatt 2008, 175).

Autonomous Technology
Langdon Winner is among the most notable critics of strong social constructivism in STS, and his concept of autonomous technology is one of the most widely disputed concepts in technology studies (Winner 1977, 1980, 2001). One of Winner's important influences, the French philosopher and avowed technological determinist Jacques Ellul, argued that technology, suffused with modern rationality, logic, and efficiency, becomes an irresistible and autonomous force that drives social action, relationships, and knowledge (Ellul 1964, 1980). Winner takes this a step further, to propose that technological artifacts are the embodiment of the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions of their development and creation. Once built, they are the physical manifestation of those conditions, and have both intended and unintended consequences to which users and society must adapt. Winner's autonomous technology is "technology that has grown so big and so complex that it is no longer amenable to social con- trol" (Wyatt 2008, 175).

As Sally Wyatt (2008) has noted, Winner's perspective has propelled a series of "skirmishes" within STS. Constructivist critics (see Joerges 1999) charge that Winner's most famous case study—Robert Moses' plan to build bridge overpasses between New York and Long Island that were too low for buses to pass under them, creating a not-so-subtle barrier to poor and working class visitors to the city (Winner 1980)—misrepresents Moses' project, and overstates the power of artifacts to exert and enforce political values and power. Others decry Winner's avowedly political commitments and his reliance on "old safe dichotomies of critical theory and Marxism [which oppose] society, social interests, and politics, on the one side, and technology, artefacts, and machines, on the other" (Pinch 1996, 34). Ultimately, they argue, there is no fixed or stable interpretation of what technologies represent or what they are for (Joerges 1999; Woolgar and Cooper 1999).

For his part, Winner criticizes strong social constructivists for being more interested in the abstract conceptual origins of technologies than in their pragmatic consequences, for focusing on the seemingly endless con-tingency of negotiations among "relevant social groups" and their agnosticism about those groups' contending and competing interests, and for neglecting entrenched technologies' concrete, enduring effects (Winner 2001). The proper study of technology, he says, requires a rigorously critical perspective and normative commitments that enable analysts to identify not only the social processes that negotiate and shape technology, but also, first, which technological choices are actually made and implemented, and second, how members of democratic societies can participate and intervene in those choices. The answers depend on a view of materiality in which physical artifacts and practices manifest and perpetuate the designer's values, beliefs, assumptions, privileges, and preferences, and once in place, are relatively closed to continued reframing or reinterpretation.

Technological Momentum
Technological momentum has been advanced by Thomas Hughes (1983, 1987, 1994) to account for the dual social and material nature of technology. Based on historical studies of electrical power systems and other large technical systems, Hughes rejects both technological and social determinism: "both approaches suffer from a failure to encompass the complexity of technological change" (Hughes 1994, 102). Instead, he suggests a cycle of mutual shaping in which social and material components are joined into complex, networked relationships. "Cultures of technology" grow up around certain technological systems and create momentum, "the propensity of technologies to develop along previously defined trajectories unless and until deflected by some powerful external force or hobbled by some internal inconsistency" (Constant 1987, 229).

Technological momentum is not singular or unidirectional, but diversified and open to contingency. It encompasses "acquired skill and knowledge, special-purpose machines and processes, enormous physical structures, and organizational bureaucracy" (Hughes 1994, 108). Successful engineers like Thomas Edison are "heterogeneous," working not only with "inanimate physical materials, but on and through people, texts, devices, city councils, architectures, economics and all the rest" (Law 1991, 9).

Hughes disagrees with Winner's concept of autonomous technology. "Technological systems, even after prolonged growth and consolidation, do not become autonomous; they acquire momentum. . . . Momentum does not contradict the doctrine of social construction of technology, and it does not support the erroneous belief in technological determinism" (Hughes 1987, 76, 80). Nonetheless, once technological systems become stabilized and acquire momentum, the artifacts generated by and enmeshed in those systems can exert influence, just as social action influences them. Remark- ing on the Muscle Shoals (later Wilson) Dam project built as part of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Hughes notes, "This durable artifact acted over time like a magnetic field, attracting plans and projects suited to its characteristics. Systems of artifacts are not neutral forces; they tend to shape the environment in particular ways" (Hughes 1994, 111).

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Actor Networks
Perhaps the best-known approach to technology studies among researchers outside STS is associated with Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, John Law, and their colleagues (Latour 2005; Law and Hassard 1999). Actor-network theory (ANT) maps relationships among material entities and artifacts, human actors, and the ideas or symbols associated with them as "heterogeneous" and open sociotechnical networks. Human actors and material artifacts or actants are nodes in interlinked webs of relations, with the ability to exert multiplex influence on other relationships and nodes in the network. The actor-network perspective resists the "purification" of issues or practices into singular categories like nature, science, politics, culture, or even place: all these categories, and more, are necessarily and simultaneously implicated in a given network (Latour 1993). The insistence on heterogeneity, especially the idea that material artifacts and objects can be agents within networks of relations among humans and knowledge, is perhaps the most controversial aspect of ANT, and most firmly places the materiality of things at the center of the theory.

As with social networks among people, relationships among nodes within actor networks are continuously reconstituted by the agents themselves. These dynamic relationships enable technological systems to evolve, stabilize, break down, or reorganize in new and unexpected ways. Taking their cue from Hughes, ANT scholars have examined large or intricate technical systems (see Callon 1986, 1999; Latour 1996; Law 1987; Mol 2002), and count heterogeneity, networks, and the systems perspective as impor- tant influences (Law 1987).
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Co-Production
A fourth concept not only suggests that science and technology are simultaneously material and social, but also aims to elaborate the dynamics of the relationship, especially as a means for confronting authority and intervening in technological controversies and policy. According to Sheila Jasanoff, its most notable proponent, co-production is the simultaneous creation of knowledge and artifacts/practices, which actually constitutes social life: "the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it. Knowledge and its material embodiments are at once products of social work and constitutive of forms of social life" (Jasanoff 2004, 2).

In co-production, knowledge is fundamentally material: "Knowledge . . . crystalliz[es] in certain ontological states—organizational, material, embodied—that become objects of study in their own right" (Jasanoff 2004, 3). In some ways, co-production echoes Winner's contention that artifacts manifest the values and assumptions (that is, knowledge) of their creators, but extends this insight to social practices and organizational forms. And like autonomous technology, co-production is concerned with the practical governance of science and technology (Irwin 2008). It rematerializes power, so that it is no longer an abstract "force" or institutional "structure," but is actually instantiated and observable in the physical forms of social practices, relations, and material objects and artifacts. <...>

Jasanoff suggests that co-production can be found in four "sites" or processes: making identities, making institutions, making discourses, and making representations. In the social sciences, cultural studies, and the humanities, these phenomena are often treated as abstract concepts that are independent of their particular manifestations or physical forms. Jasanoff, however, insists that such material forms actually constitute identity, institutions, discourses, and representations. Identity, for example, is mani- fested in modes of dress, speech, food, kinship relationships, and so on. Discourses are articulated in political campaigns, architecture, publishing, conversation, stock prices, or monthly bills for Internet services. Institutions exist in the form of legal codes, educational practices, configurations of space, or social roles. Representations convert concepts into concrete form, as when terrorism is equated with an image of a hooded street fighter, or genetically modified crops are labeled "Frankenfood." In each case the physical forms and objects constitute the ideas in question; such manifestations can be parsed and analyzed, and new ones crafted as needed.

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These four sketches allow us to consider how materiality, particularly with respect to technology artifacts, figures across them all. First, and most obviously, all four frameworks attempt to theorize the physical character, presence, or durability of technological devices and objects as a factor on par with social, cultural, or political negotiation and construction. They do not deny or downplay social construction, but attempt to join the material and the social as essential, and essentially co-determining, elements in technological change.

Second, all the frameworks, to varying degrees, emphasize the heterogeneity of technology, that is, as a multifaceted and dynamic phenomenon that entails and imbricates not just artifacts, social practices and relationships, and knowledge, but a variety of all these elements. If, as Latour and his colleagues say, analysts must "follow the actors," this means dealing with a host of interconnected artifacts and social forma- tions as well as people (Latour 1987).

Third, all four frameworks address the stabilization or standardization of material objects as a key mechanism for explaining their influence. Social studies of technology often highlight technological innovation and the origins of particular devices or systems; these early stages, after all, are more likely to be dominated by social construction processes, negotiations, and contingent, contested meanings and understandings. However, the frameworks presented here pay as much attention to technological stabilization and routinization processes in which the artifacts themselves (whether due to habit, physical inertia or scale, sunk costs, network effects, or reliability) acquire the capacity to shape social practices and organize action.

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Media Studies
Media systems have preoccupied communication researchers since the early twentieth century, when broadcasting and cinema began to take their place alongside publishing as powerful institutions and shapers of popular culture and politics. The power of newspapers to influence public opinion and elections had long been part of political culture in the Europe, North America, and elsewhere. However, the introduction of commercial radio and cinema in the 1920s and 30s, and their use by revolutionary and fascist movements and regimes during this period, aroused fears that these new media technologies, and not just the messages they carried, might have some inherent and irresistible power to move mass audiences to disruptive action, to influence the morals and behavior of marginal or susceptible groups like children, immigrants, women, workers, or the poor, or to enhance the per- suasive power of charismatic but dangerous or anti-authoritarian leaders.

After World War II, television became the main focus of similar concerns and research investigations into media "effects" on audience psychology, values and mores, decency, economic expectations, cultural practices, and political opinions. In the 1990s and 2000s, the explosive growth of personal computing and Internet access and use among the general pub- lic, fostered by the introduction of web browsers, search engines, and the conversion of the Internet from a nonprofit infrastructure for research and education to a privately operated platform and distribution system for commerce, consumption, and entertainment, would provide yet another media stage upon which the same types of social and cultural anxieties would be replayed.

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Media Effects
The study of media "effects" is one of the oldest and most foundational areas within the communication discipline, dating back to classic studies of newspapers and public opinion (Lippmann 1922), propaganda in war-time and domestic political discourse (Bernays 1928; Lasswell 1927), the Payne Fund studies of the influence of motion pictures on children's attitudes and behavior (Blumer 1933; Peterson and Thurstone 1933), the role of mass media in elections (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944) and in the reinforcement of popular taste and culture (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1948). <...>
Harold Lasswell formulated the basically linear view of the communication process that prevailed at the time as "who says what in which channel to whom with what effects" (Lasswell 1948). Paul Berlo (1960) adapted Shannon and Weaver's "communication theory" to elaborate a new, but also linear, model in which discrete, "encoded" messages are transmitted from senders, through channels, to receivers who "decode" them, with the possibility of feedback (a model now enshrined in most introductory communication textbooks as "SMCR," for sender-message- channel-receiver).2 Although widely criticized, linear models and the concept of channel as an intervening element in "real" human communication have proven to be remarkably resilient, at least in introductory textbooks.

<...>. Broadly speaking, media effects research explores the ways that media may influence or even determine cognitive, attitudi- nal, and behavioral change; which types of media have which effects; and whether people choose and use different media for different purposes. It is important to note, however, that although "channel" is often used as a variable in classical effects research, in practice channel and content are frequently conflated, as in studies of "radio plays," "television soap operas," or "newspaper political reporting."

These basic questions (and the conflation of channel and content) have carried over into the Internet era in computer-mediated communication research (CMC), which examines the effects of various computer-based communication technologies on interpersonal interaction, group pro- cesses, and organizing rather than on mass "audiences" (Thurlow, Lengel, and Tomic 2004; Walther, Gay, and Hancock 2005).
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Communication Networks
A second technology-oriented tradition in communication research takes a broadly sociological view, emphasizing the role of social structures, net- works, and relations in the communication process (Burt 1982; Rogers and Kincaid 1981; Wellman and Berkowitz 1988). Interpersonal relationships are conceived as communication networks through which people share information, seek and share advice, form affiliations and loyalties, build communities and trust, and so on; and these networks are often supported and sustained by communication technologies. In early network studies, social influence was often framed as a kind of "contagion" process in which new ideas and practices spread from person to person.

One of the most important concepts in this stream is diffusion of innovations (Rogers 2003), which theorizes the communication and adoption of novel ideas and practices within social systems. <...>

Critical/Cultural Media Studies
Another stream of research takes a critical or cultural approach to the study of communication and technology. Here, two traditions have been particu- larly influential. One, sometimes referred to as "British media studies" or the Birmingham School of cultural studies, is grounded in the work of Ray- mond Williams (1974), Stuart Hall (1980, 1997), Richard Hoggart, and their colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the Univer- sity of Birmingham between the 1960s and its closure in 2002. Informed by neo-Marxist Frankfurt School critical theory, political economy of media industries and institutions as producers of systems and content, and a phe- nomenological, interpretive approach to the consumption and reception of media forms and content (typically construed as "readings" of media "texts"), Birmingham School scholarship seeks to reveal and challenge established media institutions and power by demonstrating how existing media products (systems and content) and industries shape popular understandings of culture and politics; how media support or undermine social and cultural values such as social and economic access, diversity, fairness, and equity; and how people may reinterpret, redefine, and ultimately reform media culture for themselves. An important feature of "British" critical/cultural media studies is the critique of "administrative" research, that is, research that claims scientific objectivity or policy neutrality, but that serves to reinforce the status quo or the biases and interests of established institutions, markets, or states (Lazarsfeld 1941; Melody and Mansell 1983).

A key development in the Birmingham School tradition related to new media technologies has been domestication theory, developed by the late Roger Silverstone and his colleagues at the University of Sussex and the London School of Economics (Haddon 2006; Hartmann 2005; Silverstone 2005, 2006). Domestication research examines how people consume and appropriate media and communication technologies in their everyday lives, particularly in the home. Taking a page from STS as well as Raymond Williams's critique of strong social/cultural determinism (Williams 1974, 13), domestication research rejects both technological determinism and strong social constructivism in favor of a heterogeneous view of households as sociotechnical networks in which technology and action are mutually shaped. <...>

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Medium Theory
A fourth major stream of research dealing with communication technologies dates to the work of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and their colleagues at the University of Toronto in the 1950s and 1960s, dubbed the "Toronto School" of communication research. These scholars, and their contemporary intellectual successors, are perhaps unique in communication and media studies for their unapologetic focus on the material features or "biases" of media and communication technologies, and the consequences of that materiality for societies and civilizations over the long his- torical term. Joshua Meyrowitz has characterized this stream as "medium theory," to "differentiate it from most other 'media theory' . . . medium theorists ask: What are the relatively fixed features of each means of communicating and how do these features make the medium physically, psychologically, and socially different from other media and from face-to-face interaction?" (Meyrowitz 1994, 50).

Often characterized as marginal, Canadian "outsiders" to mainstream (that is, American) communication research (Flayhan 2005; Katz 2007) as well as British and U.S. cultural studies (Grosswiler 2005), many of the most renowned Toronto School scholars, including McLuhan, Eric Havelock, Northrop Frye, and Walter Ong, were humanists—historians and literary/ cultural critics—rather than social scientists. <...>

Technology and Mediation

The problem of bringing "things" in, then, remains a challenge in communication technology studies. Elsewhere, I have proposed mediation as a framework for understanding the mutually constitutive elements of new media technology (Lievrouw 2009, 2011, 2012). Here, I expand on this approach to suggest how it might help resituate the materiality of devices and objects in studies of media and communication technology.

Mediation can be understood as an ongoing, articulated, and mutually determining relationship among three components of communication technology infrastructure and three corresponding processes or modes of change (see figure 2.1). Artifacts—material devices and objects—enable, extend, or constrain people's abilities to communicate, and develop through a process of reconfiguration. People engage in communicative practices or action, some of which may employ those devices; practices change in an ongoing process of remediation of interaction, expression, and cultural works. Social arrangements—patterns of relations, organizing, and institutional structure—form and develop in concert with the artifacts and practices through a process of reformation. Reconfiguration, remediation, and reformation reflect several common meanings of "mediation" in English, specifically, the insertion of technological channels in the human communication process; interpersonal intercession, intervention, or negotiation in interaction; and the reflexive, continuous self-organization (and reorganization) of society and institutions which define, classify, circulate, and regulate power and knowledge.

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Materiality and communication technology: mediation framework.

• Circle segments represent three elements of infrastructure (labels outside the circle) and corresponding modes of change (labels and arrows inside the circle)

• Example cases graphed as "profiles" across three sectors:

• Twitter feeds (adaptable devices, limited choice of action, open regulatory climate)

• Broadcast/cable television (stable devices, routinized practices, restricted regulatory and institutional environment)

Change processes are more stable toward the center of the figure and more dynamic toward the periphery.

This tripartite scheme aligns broadly with Dahlberg's three areas of new media studies (technology, uses, and social context). It also echoes the analytic trio of text, production and audience that is central to critical/cultural media studies. However, the triad of artifacts, practices, and arrangements is more inclusive, and more explicitly oriented toward the material, observable character of technology, than these other frameworks. For example, arrangements denotes the pragmatic, observable process of making and remaking social relations, and includes a wider range of patterned formations, from interpersonal networks and roles to whole-society institutional forms and structures, than is suggested by either "social context" or "audience." Artifacts foregrounds the material, made nature of communication technologies, which is nearly missing in the notion of "texts," and to some degree obscured by the blanket term "technology," which from a mutual shaping perspective would include all the elements of infrastructure comprised in mediation. Practices is a concrete way to describe communicative action, especially compared with "production" (which implies a distant industrial or institutional process) or interpretive, discursive ideas of "reading" or "reception." It also encompasses a wider repertoire of communicative action than the narrowly instrumental concept of "uses."

All three elements and their corresponding processes articulate and influence one another. Artifacts are made, implemented, and remade (that is, reconfigured) according to people's purposes and actions, as well as the social structures and institutional sanctions that enable or constrain them. For example, people want, and may themselves craft, software applications and devices that are easy to use, reliable, secure, and safe. Institutional authorities demand that systems comply with (or even automatically enforce) an expanding range of privacy laws, intellectual property claims, national security and law enforcement directives, competitive rivalries among firms and trade blocs, and cultural/ethical norms.

Similarly, devices and systems that exist in a given time and place shape users' practices and larger social expectations about what the artifacts can do, what they are for, and what people might actually do with them (that is, practices are remediated). For example, the Internet has become a venue for interpersonal interaction and personal expression as well as straightforward information seeking or the consumption of media products. Facebook members, Twitter users, or subscribers to location-based services like foursquare may worry about how the services gather, aggregate, and share data about them. But many of those same individuals may also readily offer real-time information about their location, or surrender other detailed personal information, if they consider it a fair exchange for the conveniences a service provides, or if authorities assure them that the collection of such information is a necessary and appropriate means to control terrorism, fraud, and so on.

Social and institutional formations also respond and adapt to available systems and devices and to communication practices and norms; that is, they are open to reformation. For example, technology platforms and media products are often designed to be incompatible with those of competitors (the Kindle, Nook, and iPad e-readers; European vs. North American mobile telephone standards). Digital rights-management technologies physically restrict access to and certain uses of various types of media content. The size, responsibilities, and political power of state and private security and law enforcement agencies have vastly expanded in parallel with the proliferation of systems for surveillance, data capture, storage, and analysis, and sharply increased citizen demands for public safety and shelter from risk.

In sum, the articulations among artifacts/reconfiguration, practices/remediation, and social arrangements/reformation are dynamic. Each builds on and reinforces the others; a shift in one aspect can generate corresponding shifts in the other two. This may or may not be a welcome prospect: from the progressive-left or libertarian perspective, preoccupations with risk, safety, control, reliability, and security, and resulting moves toward increasingly monitored, standardized, filtered, regulated, and exclusionary communication systems, actions, and patterns of social and institutional organizing, may look like a vicious circle or regressive feedback loop. On the other hand, articulations also create gaps, spaces of alternative action, or opportunities for pushback, and help ensure that communication technologies remain open to new or unanticipated uses, forms, and understandings.