From USC Metamorphosis Project StaffDear colleagues,
I am posting this on behalf of Sandra Ball-Rokeach and the Metamorphosis Project at the University of Southern California…
We have found the following Web site particularly helpful in trying to better understand the ethnic and minority media landscape in countries of the European Union. The site and its contents are the result of EU-funded program, EMTEL II, which was directed by the late Roger Silverstone at the London School of Economics and Myria Georgiou who now is at Leeds University, in the UK. There are some great reports, case studies, etc. that you can download from here. The URL is: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/EMTEL/main1.html
Here is an excerpt from the Web site and the overview of the program:
“The EMTEL program emerges from, and will contribute significantly to, an increasingly important body of social scientific work that has its starting point the need at address technological and media change as a social process.
The society in which European now live is one impregnated by technologies, and especially those that we know as communication and information technologies. These technologies and services are deeply embedded in the fabric of everyday life. Digitalization is having an increasingly significant impact on the conduct of everyday life, and our mediated and non-mediated relationships to each other are having, in their turn, significant consequences for the ways new information and communication technologies and services are being developed and used.
EMTEL research and training is grounded in this radical and interdisciplinary approach to innovation. It recognizes the significant shift in the centre of gravity in the process of innovation from production to consumption (Silverstone and Hirsch, 1994). It also recognizes that the inter-relationship between technological and social change requires new forms of analysis and theory, as well as more sensitive methodologies, if its full complexities are to be understood.
Information and communication technologies have both material and symbolic significance. They have functional and aesthetic characteristics. They change the world in which they are introduced. But they also changed by that world and by the ways in which users confront them.
We speak of domestication (Lie and Sorensen, 1996). By that is meant the capacity of individuals, families, households and other institutions to bring new technologies and services into their own culture, to make them their own. Domestication involves concerns with the learning of skills, practice, and the construction of meaning. It is a dialectical process, for these technologies and services change the way things are done in everyday life.
Evidence suggests that, rhetoric apart, the process of technological change runs neither in a smooth nor in a straight line. Some products never reach market, or when they do, do not always succeed. Users and consumers impose their own meanings and practices on those technologies and services that do reach market. The home computer, the answerphone, e-mail, the mobile telephone have all had unpredictable careers as consumer goods. The information and communication industry currently manifests many examples of the ways in which, as it converges both technologically and industrially, uncertainties prevail: the struggle over the portal and over integrated mobile communications are cases in point (Mansell and Silverstone, 1996).
The research on which this program of work is based is interdisciplinary. It recognizes that the relationship between social and technological change in this area has political as well as economic implications, and cultural as well as social implications. It draws on the appropriate and relevant social science disciplines. It recognizes that the particular character of European society requires a comparative approach, sensitive to differences across States but also rigorous enough to recognize similarities. And it recognizes the need to combine both qualitative and quantitative methodologies (Dutton, 1999).
Recent work from EMTEL researchers and others has involved the definition of a new field of research: new media and society. This has been represented in the publication of new international journal with that title on whose editorial board a number of EMTEL members sit. It addresses the implications of technological change, and especially the digitalization of new media, from an interdisciplinary social scientific perspective. Sociology, economics, political science and anthropology contribute to this research agenda whose aim it is to make sense, and to enable the guidance, of the innovation process. This process involves convergence: of technologies, industries and patterns of use. It also involves changing relationship between the global and the local as sites for social, economic and political activity, as well as the changing relationship between public and private spaces. It involves, finally, changes not just in industrial structures but also in the structures that underpin everyday life: those of community and family, work and leisure.
The theory that drives this innovative work draws on, and extends, work undertaken in recent years in the social shaping of technology, in the anthropology of everyday life, in the study of the regulation of new media, and in the market analysis of new media industries and products. The aim of the proposed EMTEL research is to build on this converging field of academic and policy oriented research.
This research is seen as urgent. The rapid spread of access to the Internet within European households and institutions; the explosion in television, cable and satellite channel availability, the rapid advances in mobile telephony, are together changing the communicative infrastructure of Europe, with potentially profound but unknown consequences for everyday life. The issues to be addressed, those of access to new media technologies and services, but also those of participation in economic and political life possibly transformed by those technologies and services, are of vital importance. They have consequences for the European communication and information industry struggling to maintain or enhance its position in the global marketplace. And they have consequences too for the governance of the Union.
The study of these issues requires a focus on the users of new media in a number of different contexts and from a number of different, but interrelated perspectives. EMTEL research will therefore consider the user as an active participant in the innovation process. It will consider the temporal and spatial co-ordinates of everyday life, and how those both constrain, and are affected by, the emergence of new media. It will examine both inclusion in, and exclusion from, the Information Society and their cultural and social consequences. It will examine the emergence of new forms of consumption and political action that are seen to be being facilitated by the new media. It will investigate the relationship between supply and demand in the new world of e-commerce. It will address how such technologically informed social changes affect the quality of life.
At this crucial point in the emergence of the Information Society it is essential that European social scientists achieve a firm grasp on the both the frame and the detail of the consequences of new media change for consumers and citizens in the Union (Ducatel, Webster and Hermann, 1999). It is EMTEL’s intention to provide an informed and critical analysis of these changes and to extend our understanding of the processes involved through new empirical research, developed theory and advanced methodologies.”
