Connect and Divide - The Practice Turn in Media Studies

Media divide and connect simultaneously: they act as intermediaries between otherwise disconnected entities, and as a "middle" that mediates, but also shields different entities from each other. This ambiguity gives rise to conflicting interpretations, and it evokes all those figures that give a first clue about this janus-faced relationship of "connect and divide": gate-keeper, parasite, amongst others. If we give accounts of media before and after their mediated action, we refer to persons and organizations, automatisms and artifacts, signals and inscriptions, and we seem to find it easy to refer to their distinct potentials and dis/abilities. But within the interaction - the "middle" of media itself seems to be distributed right across the mix of material, semiotic and personal entities involved, and the location of agency is hard to pin down. In case of breakdown we have to disentangle the mix; in case of smooth operations action becomes all the more distributed and potent ially untraceable - which makes its attribution a matter of the simultaneously occuring distribution of (official and unofficial) knowledge, labour and power. The empirical and historical investigation of this two-faced relationship of "connect and divide" has thus resulted in a veritable "practice turn in media studies."



The publication studies four aspects of the practice turn in media studies: Media history from a praxeological perspective, the practice turn in religion and media studies, the connecting and dividing lines of media theories concerning gender and post_colonial agencies, and a historical and theoretical examination of the current relationship of media theory and practice theory.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

9 - 11 Connect and Divide: The Practice Turn in Media Studies13 - 15 Introduction: Unobservable Practices? Methodologies of Media History (Monika Dommann)17 - 38 How to Coordinate Digital Accounting? (Sebastian Gießmann)39 - 54 On Practices and Other Paper Tigers (Fabian Grütter)55 - 68 "I like the Beach Boys!" (Philipp Goll)69 - 81 (Dis-)manufacturing Bonds (Anna Echterhölter)83 - 90 From Documentary Practices to WikiLeaks (Monika Dommann, Lisa Gitelman)91 - 97 Introduction: Religion Is as Religion Does (Jeremy Stolow)99 - 111 The Mass Miracle: Healing Touch and Other "Special Effects" of Radio Prayer (Anderson Blanton)113 - 129 Auditory Revelations: Spiritualism, Technology, and Sound (Anthony Enns)131 - 144 Religion, Media, and the Practice Turn (John Durham Peters, Jeremy Stolow)145 - 154 Introduction: Connecting and Dividing Media Theories (Ulrike Bergermann)155 - 171 Grunts and Monsters: Gay Men's Online Media Practices (Peter Rehberg)173 - 188 New Materialism Meets Practice Turn (Andrea Seier)189 - 207 Decolonizing Media Studies: Settler-Colonialism and Subaltern Counter-Environments (Sourayan Mookerjea, Anne Winkler)209 - 225 Sweet Trap, Dangerous Method (Karin Harrasser)227 - 236 Practice is a Screen. Minor Assemblages of Gender, Race, and Global Media (Ulrike Bergermann, Rey Chow)237 - 245 Introduction: Media Theory Before and After the Practice Turn (Erhard Schüttpelz)247 - 261 New Labor, Old Questions: Practices of Collaboration with Robots (Dawid Kasprowicz)263 - 276 A Question of Style! Body-Camera Usages in Snowboarding (Daniel Rode, Martin Stern)277 - 294 Privacies in Practice (Carsten Ochs)295 - 305 A Media Ecology of the Soul: Play in Child Psychiatry (Katja Rothe)307 - 316 Practice in the History of Computing (Thomas Haigh, Erhard Schüttpelz)