1.3 Fields of Social Sciences in Locative and Situational Media Studies

In social studies, media ethnography in the more narrow sense and ethnographic studies of central aspects of the postindustrial and globalized societies on a world-wide scale increasingly overlap; by now local and situational media studies and ethnography in postindustrial (and postcolonial) organizations and institutions have created a consistent study field proliferating in an unexpected way both in cultural and in social studies. A paradigm for this convergence are the ethnographic laboratory studies (Knorr-Cetina 1984, 1995; Latour/Woolgar 1979) in which the representation of social and cultural processes of negotiation have already for thirty years coincided with characterizing and theorizing media and with inscribing these processes of negotiation. The current discussion of the Actor-Network-Theory in germanophone sociology, ethnology and media sciences (Kneer/Schroer/Schüttpelz 2008) is a direct follow-up of the already long established ethnographic convergence that originated in the sociology of sciences and technology (Potthast, 2007), but that had been recognized and in part also had been radicalized methodologically in ethnology already from early on.

The current situation has consequences not only for those disciplines that so far have not done much research in locative and situational media but also for the venerable disciplines in participating observation. In political science for instance, hardly any empirical studies are to be found that analyze the political public sphere and the use of media on the local level. Within the paradigm of the research done nationally in the past, there are only a few studies that analyze the use of media of local political actors. Those are for example studies on local election campaigns or on the direct communication between campaign headquarters, delegates and local party members (Römmele, 2002; Althaus, 2003; Schatilow, 2006), or on generating a local public community by using local media (Jarren, 1980, 1992; Dorer/Baratsis, 1995; Guedes, Bailey/Cammaerts/Carpentier, 2008; Atton, 2002). Only when digital media were introduced and applied for intensifying communicative feedback between governmental actors and citizens analyzing media use on the local level gained importance within political science (Barko Germany, 2008). Reforms of administrative practices in the sense of a transformation from 'new public management' to 'governance-networks' have led to a shift in political science research and a stronger focus on questions of local civic commitment (Vetter, 2008), bottom-up processes of participation (Lübcke/Lührs, 2008; Schmidt, 2003, Coenen 2005; Kubicek/Lippa/Westholm, 2009), and forms of local grassroots-journalism (Gillmor, 2004; Engesser/Wimmer, 2009). Democratic innovations are expected from the introduction of internet-based forms of civic participation, for example the adaptation of "21st century town hall meetings" that are widely held in the USA or consensus conferences that are held in Denmark to involve citizens in processes of technology assessment (Hendriks, 2010). These new forms of citizen participation prove to be a complex combination of online and offline spaces illustrating that the potential of democratization depends on its specific media design (Wright/Street, 2008).

Ethnographic methods were discovered for political science only in the course of an opening up of the discipline to cultural studies; this happened first when public media rituals like party conventions and inaugural celebrations were analyzed (Müller, 2002), and later when political participation on the micro-level was considered as a situated media practice as in the analyses of Dahlgren (2007), Cornwall (2002), and Couldry/Livingstone/Markham (2007). Moreover, ethnographic studies on the use of activists of the 'indymedia'-network (Hamm 2002, 2006) as well as studies on the communicative exchange and collaboration of political consumers in net-based protest campaigns and social networks (Baringhorst, 2009; Baringhorst/Kneip, 2010) have let to the assumption that 'locally' and 'in situ' the dominant differentiation between the public and the private sphere, which is so important for liberal democracies, proves to be just as problematic as does the differentiation between the political and the private use of media.

For about twenty years, media ethnology is characterized by developing and carrying out locative and situational media research. Ethnological beginnings in analyzing media institutions and practices have been differentiating and multiplying ever since Spitulnik published his survey on the ethnology of mass media in 1993 and when the early pioneer work of Hortense Powdermaker (1950), a student of Malinowski's, appeared. And in the wake of the ethnological imperative of participating observation it could be shown early on (Abu Lughod, 1989 as a pioneer) that production and reception, creation and distribution can be appropriately analyzed and situated socio-technologically only in toto. This simultaneously underlines the relational status as well as the circulation of media (Appadurai, 1996, Krings, 2005, Meyer, 2006, Wendl, 2004a), making processes of commodification and transnational networking of media institutions topical (Fuglesang, 1994; Larkin, 1997; Mankekar, 1999; Rajagopal, 2001; McLagan, 2002; Wilk, 2002; Mazzarella, 2003). Regionally organized and intercontinentally circulating visual media were analyzed (Behrend, 2003; Morris, 2002; Pinney, 1997), as were print media (Kirsch, 2007, 2008), telecommunikative media (Hahn/Kibora, 2008), mass media (Armbrust, 2000; Eickelman/Anderson, 1999; Schulz, 2007a), and new (digital) media (Brosius, 2005; Sökefeld, 2002). Of special interest became their indigenous adoption and use (Ginsburg, 1991, 1997; Turner, 1991, 1992; Aufderheide, 1995), not, however, without fundamentally discussing terms like "adoption" or the differentiation between "artifact" and "use" (Behrend/Wendl, 1998; Pinney, 2004; Larkin, 2008). From early on, not only was the role of media in the forming of social relations and identities discussed but also their importance for creating communality in a local, national, or supranational context (Prins, 1989; Manuel, 1993; Naficy, 1993; Liechty, 1994; Rofel, 1994; Tacchi, 1998). They focused on the role of individual media for national and mostly postcolonial cultural politics (Manuel, 1993; Danielson, 1997; Schulz, 2007c; Askew, 2002; Abu-Lughod, 2005) increasingly working on the production, maintenance and (re-)shaping of social spaces of transnational groups (Kosnick, 2007, Vertovec, 2004). It also became increasingly important to do research in the use of technological media regarding mediatization as an independent cultural practice (Hirschkind, 2006; Meyer/Moors, 2006; Schulz, 2006). With this, not only the "cultural concretion" of media (Wendl, 2004b) with its translations became the focus, but it lastly also opened up the terms media and mediatization (Keifenheim, 2000; de Vries/Weber, 2001; Stolow, 2005). Clear parallels emerged regarding the germanophone discussion on "cultural techniques" (Schüttpelz, 2006). The productivity of locative and situational research is proven by this development in theoretical considerations which recently have been focusing on important continuities between technological and personal, body- and spirit-oriented media (Behrend 2005; Meyer 2009; Behrend/Dreschke/Zillinger 2011) that still remain to be creatively reviewed in ethnology itself so that present and future ethnographic research can be adequately carried out and developed. (Dracklé, 2005).