Encompassing a comprehensive range of practices involved in producing, circulating and consuming 'news' and recognizing the various ways in which individuals and groups may find out, follow and discuss local issues and events, The Mediated City critiques thinking that takes the centrality of certain news media as an unquestioned starting point. By doing so, it opens up a discussion: do we know what news is? What types of media constitute it? And why does it matter?
Encompassing a comprehensive range of practices involved in producing, circulating and consuming 'news' and recognizing the various ways in which individuals and groups may find out, follow and discuss local issues and events, The Mediated City critiques thinking that takes the centrality of certain news media as an unquestioned starting point. By doing so, it opens up a discussion: do we know what news is? What types of media constitute it? And why does it matter?
The Mediated City: The News in a Post-Industrial Context
264
The Mediated City: The News in a Post-Industrial Context
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Overview
Encompassing a comprehensive range of practices involved in producing, circulating and consuming 'news' and recognizing the various ways in which individuals and groups may find out, follow and discuss local issues and events, The Mediated City critiques thinking that takes the centrality of certain news media as an unquestioned starting point. By doing so, it opens up a discussion: do we know what news is? What types of media constitute it? And why does it matter?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783608195 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Jay G. Blumler is an emeritus professor of public communication at the University of Leeds and emeritus professor of journalism at the University of Maryland.
Stephen Coleman is professor of political communication in the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds.
Julie Firmstone is associate professor at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds.
Giles Moss is lecturer in media policy in the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds.
Katy Parry is a lecturer in media and communication at the University of Leeds.
Judith Stamper is associate professor of broadcast journalism at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds.
Nancy Thumim is a lecturer in media and communication at the University of Leeds.
Stephen Coleman is Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. He is a leading figure of Political Communiation Studies, whose books include (with K. Ross) The Media and the Public: Them and Us in Media Discourse (2010) and (with J.G. Blumler)The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory, Practice and Policy (2009).
Katy Parry is Professor of Media and Politics at the University of Leeds, UK. Her work focuses on visual politics and activism, images of war, and media representations of (post-)military experience. Her books include Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture (2019), co-authored with Giorgia Aiello, and Spaces of War, War of Spaces (Bloomsbury, 2020), co-edited with Sarah Maltby, Ben O'Loughlin and Laura Roselle. She is a co-editor of the journal Media, War&Conflict.
Read an Excerpt
The Mediated City
The News in a Post-Industrial Context
By Stephen Coleman, Nancy Thumim, Chris Birchall, Julie Firmstone, Giles Moss, Katy Parry, Judith Stamper, Jay G. Blumler
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2016 Stephen ColemanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78360-819-5
CHAPTER 1
MAKING SENSE OF/IN THE CITY
Communicating community
How does a city come to imagine itself? How does it tell itself stories, circulate news, create events, store its memories and come to terms with difference and diversity? Unlike the simple communities of pre-modernity in which everyone stood a chance of knowing everyone else, modern cities are vast, spatially dispersed and culturally fragmented clusters of attachments, interdependencies and institutions. More than just a place, the city is a way of sensing the zones and boundaries of potential and permissible social interaction. Simmel (Frisby and Featherstone 1997) famously regarded the city as a space of inexhaustible temporal acceleration and affective overstimulation: 'With each crossing of the street, with tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life, with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life.' The contemporary urban sociologist Richard Sennett, reflecting upon the sensual over-abundance of the city, observes that 'if something begins to disturb or touch me, I need only keep on walking to stop feeling'. Cities, for Sennett, are labyrinths of overwhelming impressions in which 'The eye sees differences to which it reacts with indifference ... My senses are flooded by images, but the difference in value between one image and another becomes as fleeting as my own movement: difference becomes a mere parade of variety.'
In small-scale communities, the social is conspicuous and events are hard to miss. Cities, in contrast, are spaces of overexposure, where experience is fragmented and every impression must compete for attention. It is impossible to 'take in' the city as a whole. The vastness of the city is apprehended through a series of encounters with 'no-go areas', which are avoided by all, except those who must live or work in them, 'must-go' areas, such as the centres and intersections that claim to connect and define the city, administrative areas, which are constructed by bureaucrats in order to manage discrete populations, and 'outside' areas from whence come strangers. City dwellers learn a range of strategies for attending and avoiding; being seen and remaining invisible; acknowledging, evading and resisting the rules. Among the most significant of these tactics for urban living is the acquisition of local knowledge: knowing what you need to know because everyone else knows it; knowing what others do not know, thereby giving you an advantage in relation to them; knowing how to maintain personal boundaries; knowing how to socialize; knowing how to search for a better quality of knowing.
As well as working, sleeping and engaging in the intimacies of family and friendship, people in cities spend their time looking for, responding to and creating knowledge about their environment. They are information hunter-gatherers, foraging for knowledge, just as their ancestors chased after food.
Dewey's (1916: 5) assertion that 'There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication' provides a useful theoretical foundation for this book, the main purpose of which is to try to understand how a city talks to itself about what is new, what matters and what needs to be done. The ecological interrelationships between the environment people share (common), their connectedness (community) and the mediation of this mutual reality (communication) is the focus of our study. An ecological perspective acknowledges that cities as places are not simply uncovered or exposed through communication. On the contrary, they are products of communication; the urban space as context is made present through the contextualizing work of communication. In saying this, we are not claiming that cities are somehow inventions or fictions, engendered by strategies of communication. Nevertheless, to speak of places such New York City, Calcutta or Leeds as being real is not to say that the nature of their reality is objective or clear cut. Only through what are often competing and contradictory communications do communities emerge as meaningful places rather than dots on a map. Adopting such a constructivist perspective, we might say that cities are both a product and shaper of collective imagination. And the best way to access the collective imaginings that constitute a city is through the stories that people tell themselves, about where and how they live and the practices they pursue, as they go about making their lives in the city.
In thinking about the mediated city as being both context-dependent and context-shaping, we focus in this book upon a specific city at a particular time. The city is Leeds in the north-east of England. The time is the summer of 2011. Our aim is to bring place and time to life and connect them meaningfully to the news ecology through which they are apprehended. We begin to do so in this introductory chapter by first locating Leeds and pointing to the fluidity that surrounds its apparent fixity as a place. We then turn to the timing of our study, attempting to place it within both a long-term and more immediate historical context. The concluding sections of this chapter explore what it means to speak of a news ecology; how such an ecology has taken shape over time in Leeds; and the extent to which this ecology is in the midst of a radical transformation.
A place called Leeds
In his 1971 book Portrait of Leeds, Brian Thompson suggested that 'Leeds is much more a generalised concept place name in inverted commas; it is the city but it is also the commuter villages and the region as well' (1971). In the 2001 census, the city of Leeds was described as an 'urban subdivision' comprising an area of 42 square miles (109 square kilometres), with a population of 443,247; making it the fifth-largest city in the United Kingdom. Just over a third of the city's residents live as married couples; just under a third of residences are one-person households; and one in ten households are inhabited by lone parents. Eighty-five per cent of the population are white; 7.7 per cent are Asian (mainly from Pakistan and India) and 3.5 per cent are black (with twice as many of African than of Afro-Caribbean descent). Most people in Leeds describe themselves as Christian, but 3 per cent are Muslim, 16.8 per cent say they have no religion and the city has the UK's third-largest Jewish population, after London and Manchester.
Delineating the borders of the city is not easy. When combined with the ten surrounding towns (effectively, outer suburbs) of Farsley, Garforth, Guiseley, Horsforth, Morley, Otley, Pudsey, Rothwell, Wetherby and Yeadon, Leeds becomes a Metropolitan District, with a population of 715,402. Beyond this 'greater Leeds' conurbation is the bigger still West Yorkshire Urban Area, which includes the cities of Leeds, Bradford, Wakefield and Huddersfield, with a population of 1.5 million. Within Leeds there are eight parliamentary constituencies (but the European constituency of Yorkshire and Humber is much larger than all of these put together), thirty-one civil parishes, thirty-three council wards and five administrative 'wedges', each with its own 'inner and outer area committee'. In short, to speak of Leeds is to refer to a somewhat amorphous entity; a jumble of overlapping territorial and administrative spaces and boundaries.
Of course, people living and working in Leeds make their way through and around these confusing spaces and boundaries, experiencing Leeds as 'a generalised concept place name in inverted commas' in much the same way as they come to make sense of themselves as part of a multinational United Kingdom or European Union. As we discovered in our focus groups with Leeds residents (see Chapter 4), it is to the locally known places in which they live and work from day to day that people's deepest attachments are formed. The rest are little more than places of officialdom or passing through.
Beyond topographical or demographic conceptions of place, which reduce the city to contours and statistics, there is a historical sense of place that seeps through the built environment. To stand for a few moments in Millennium Square in the centre of Leeds is to be surrounded by iconic reminders of the city's Victorian grandeur: the City Museum, built in 1819, the Town Hall, built in 1858, the General Infirmary, built in 1869, and the Carriageworks, built in 1848 as the home of the West Riding Carriage Manufactory. These imposing edifices evoke memories of the city's former glory as the capital of Yorkshire's newly industrialized West Riding and global centre of the prosperous wool industry. Leeds was the first industrial city in the world's first industrial nation and traces of that imperial grandeur are everywhere, both in terms of the now incongruent arrogance emanating from the institutional architecture of a rising ruling class, and the urban chasms opened up by the ruins of post-industrialism. As a classical manufacturing city rooted in the dynamics of mass production and distribution, Leeds was hit hard by the demise of an economic infrastructure geared to making tangible, durable commodities. Its replacement by an amorphous financial services sector, prone to the vagaries of boom and bust cycles, the decomposition of once-cohesive neighbourhoods and the absorption of their populations into the soulless inner city, and the cumulative reconfiguration of the local by global forces that can be neither controlled nor avoided, have left Leeds, like many other large Western cities, facing something of an identity crisis. Its monumentalized red-brick confidence casts a shadow over the sprawling city, or 'urban subdivision', or 'metropolitan district', somehow rebuking it for its post-industrial inertia.
The elusiveness of a singular Leeds identity generates a sense of disorientation. Asked to say what characterizes the city, the manager of the local BBC radio station could only point to its indeterminacy: 'It's really broad ... we have diverse communities. We have a diversity of rich and poor. It's an amalgam of lots of different things. And it's not like a place, like Otley or Ilkley or ... even Bradford ... It's very eclectic.'
Cities like Leeds, which once thrived because of what they made and sold, are now increasingly dependent for their positions in the world upon how they are imagined, both by those living within them and others who might be magnetically drawn to their aura. The creation of city reputations has become a major industry, turning geography into a performative project. Local governments pursue 'urban branding' strategies at huge cost with a view to making their city appear to be the coolest, smartest, most connected, cutting-edge or upwardly mobile place to be. Thrift (2008: 172)has observed astutely that 'As cities are increasingly expected to have "buzz", to be "creative", and to generally bring forth powers of invention and intuition, all of which can be forged into economic weapons, so the active engineering of the affective register of cities has been highlighted as the talent of transformation.'
The project of semioticizing (Law and Urry 2004) Leeds as a city has been taken up by an organization called Marketing Leeds, which 'aims to raise the profile of Leeds as a vibrant, dynamic, internationally competitive city and as the gateway to Yorkshire and the UK' by creating 'innovative marketing and promotional campaigns and events to support the delivery of real economic impact and the creation of wealth for the region'. Their 'Live It Love It' campaign is an attempt to engender symbolic capital by working on the image of Leeds to the point that its representation overwhelms what is being signified. As the campaign website puts it,
The brand reflects an overarching simple proposition based on people's passion for their city. Particularly for the people of Leeds–there is no arguing with the sentiment. What is common with all Leeds advocates is a shared pride and passion for their city. All who experience Leeds–its diversity, lifestyle, warmth, people and quality of life–share the same belief: if you spend time in the city, you grow to love it. Our brand serves many purposes: it is a promise, a call to action, and a statement of pride. How it is interpreted will depend upon who we are talking to, and where we are talking to them. Within Leeds, it is a proud vindication. To our wider audiences, it is an intriguing promise, and a call to action.
However, Emma Bearman, who produces one of the city's most popular blogs, is uncomfortable with such branding, and especially its themes of rhetorical and semiotic focus upon retail and finance: 'Where does that leave us? Because, as citizens, we don't actually feel that the marketing message which is pumped out externally resonates with what we experience.'
The gap between slick representations of the branded city, with their inevitable suppression of the eyesores, deprivations, anxieties and conflicts that nobody is ever likely to 'grow to love', and the messy coexistence of everyday lives rooted within parts of the city that are sometimes unknown to one another, is the space in which mediation is paramount. Many different actors, with varying explicit and tacit interests, are involved in defining Leeds as a place. No single definition will ever emerge. But the success or failure of images, stories, worries, aspirations and evasions in circulating, gaining attention and taking root depends upon technologies and practices of mediation that give place its history and flavour. Local news is the first layer of such a history, the first lick of an enduring flavour.
Leeds: a post-industrial city
Cities exist not only as places in space, but also as histories in time. All across the city clocks display the passing of time. Seconds tick away, marking and maintaining an inescapable urban rhythm. At bus shelters electronic signs announce, sometimes over-optimistically, how many minutes passengers will have to wait. As each hour turns into the next, events begin and conclude. Millions of imperceptible glances at watches and mobile phones ensure that people are attuned to time. Time pervades the city. Not only local time, but the 'phantasmagoric' (Giddens 1990: 19) presence of distant events and absent actors is experienced through technologies of temporal connection, which simulate a kind of global simultaneity.
In its heyday as the first industrial city, Leeds had to learn to accommodate itself to the strange phenomenon of clock time, which, as Giddens (1991: 17) states, 'facilitated, but also presumed, deeply structured changes in the tissue of everyday life'. With the emergence of the industrial city, time ceased to be regarded as natural, irregular and task oriented, as it had been in the pre-modern economy. It became instead a standardized currency through which labour was bought and regimented, profits calculated and efficiency measured. Clocks provided a universal standard of ontological stability; symbolic evidence that amid the volatile social forces of the market, there was a regular beat to the conduct of life.
While the clock as a container of time and the city as a temporally bound space characterized industrial culture, post-industrial cities find themselves implicated in multiple, asymmetrical flows of time. Sociologists and cultural geographers have noted that with the emergence of global telecommunications networks 'voice, data, image, and video signals can flow ... at instantaneous velocity because of the near speed-of-light flows of electrons and photons' (Castells 1994). Not only are more people in touch with distant others, but there is a sense in which the instantaneity and asynchronicity of message flow is producing a temporally destabilizing effect, making the city 'disappear into the heterogeneity of advanced technology's temporal regime' (Virilio 2005: 19). While this postmodernist perspective, most commonly associated with Virilio's work on 'the over-exposed city', is suggestive insofar as it captures the disruptions to place-centred temporality generated by global networks, its more excessive rhetoric sometimes fails to register local, empirical experience. For the average resident of Leeds, life is still dominated by clock time, and when it is 9a.m. in the affluent suburbs of the city, it is exactly the same time in the more deprived housing estates. Buses and trains run according to local timetables and local news is most commonly received from daily newspapers, hourly radio bulletins or fixed-time television programmes. Mobile phones and online social networks might be 24/7 services, but they continue to be used by most people within the contexts of their parochial daytime routines rather than as ubiquitous connectors to global society (Lenhart et al. 2010, Lenhart 2012). Indeed, one of the key findings that we report in this book is that people in Leeds are still primarily conscious of and concerned about the local and immediate aspects of their everyday lives. Living within a 'financial city', dependent upon critical decisions made in distant time zones, they might be faintly aware of tremors emanating from Frankfurt or Wall Street. As members of diasporas, they might tune in to news and entertainment from lands where the hour hand is at a different point on the dial. As long-distance commuters they might need to juggle their commitments to fit in with externally regulated timetables, and as international travellers they might suffer from various forms of jet lag, but these interconnections and mobilities do not undermine their more settled preoccupations with affairs of home and family, the streets along which they walk and drive, the places of local work and consumption, and the local institutions of authority that affect their lives. In short, experience continues to be filtered through the familiarity of the local, even if it is shaped by indirect and asynchronous forces.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Mediated City by Stephen Coleman, Nancy Thumim, Chris Birchall, Julie Firmstone, Giles Moss, Katy Parry, Judith Stamper, Jay G. Blumler. Copyright © 2016 Stephen Coleman. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: A New News Ecology1. Making Sense of/in the City
2. A Week in News
3. How Citizens Receive the News
4. How People Make Sense of the City
5. The Mainstream Providers of Local News
6. Citizen News-Makers and News Practices
7. 'Down there in Chapeltown'
8. Mediating Democratic Accountability: The Case of the Care Home Closures
9. Local News: A Different Story
Appendices