2.1 Methodological Basis of Locative and Situational Media Studies

Independent of whether one is dealing with traditional or digital, technological or artistic media, lying at the heart of all locative and situational media studies is the ethnographic analysis of locative and situational media processes by applying locative and situational methods locally and in situ. What here is being called ethnography and ethnographic will have to be specified depending on the discipline and the method used; nevertheless one can make a note of a common denominator. The empirical basis of the locative and situational methods in social and cultural media studies has been acknowledged by now (Ayaß/Bergmann 2006; Winter 2005; Dracklé 1999; Ginsburg/Abu-Lughod/Larkin 2002; Kalthoff 2006; Bachmann/Wittel 2006; Götz 2001, Bechdolf 2001) and it has withstood the test mainly in two ways:

(a) It has become an established scholarly practice—as mainly ethnology on the one hand and the dominantly discussed variation of science and technology studies, the Actor-Network-Theory on the other have shown—to undertake micro-analyses in order to (re)construct larger contexts from local infrastructures and the stages of their interweavement from bottom up. The changes in standards—whether in media or socio-technical ones—of persons, groups and organizations can be analyzed in detail only in a micro-realm of media and their meditational steps.

(b) Locative and situational methods in the past years have proven to be indispensable in all those places in which everyday and professional media practices, social and socio-technical rhythms and their spatial organization as well as the biographical cycles of persons, artifacts, goods, and media had to be (re)constructed. Conversely, in all those areas in which ready-made elementary units can no longer be postulated as it is the case in many current developments in digital media, the established quantitative studies are encountering the epistemological limits of all that which can be recognized from the qualities and developments of their object, i.e., of the concrete use, distribution, and manufacture of media.

The yet smaller share in locative and situational research done within the germanophone media studies reflects on the one hand the lacking interest in ethnographic methods of analysis on the part of the scholars of media and communication studies until almost the late 1990s (McEachern 1998; Ruby 2000); on the other hand it shows that ethnologists, sociologists of technology studies and other ethnographic experts saw media and technology mainly as being embedded in other cultural and socio-technical contexts until the 1990s (Dickey, 1997; Pfaffenberger, 1992; Aronowitz, 1999). This situation changed in a double way when media studies were able to break away from their subject of the "massification of media" (Wilson/Peterson, 2002) while at the same time a whole plethora of new ethnographic studies emerged, which since then were addressed in an anti-reductionist way to the production, distribution, and interpretation of new and older media. Ever since, the ethnographic field of research in media is caught in a difficult, complex situation of different aims in terms of content and varied methodological genealogies that earlier were divided and by now are increasingly intertwined (Fischer, 2007). No single genealogy in ethnographic media studies—be they located in cultural studies, media anthropology and media ethnology, science and technology studies including Actor-Network-Theory, or in micro-sociological and linguistic traditions—will succeed in dominating or controlling the overall field of locative and situational media studies in the future. Instead, the current developments are pointing to a fortunate cooperation and overlapping of different approaches that, however, necessitate continued diplomatic efforts between the different disciplines, research groups and research 'scenes' in media studies.
Locative and situational media studies comprise a correlation of different groups of methods:

1. Participating observation of local processes in situ accompanied or succeeded by documentation.
2. Oral screening with interviews, conversations and group discussions.
3. Compiling a written or audiovisual corpus and a written (and audiovisual) evaluation of the ethnographic work (comprising its research products, the publications).
4. Digital ethnography that requires the constant appraisal of online and offline research in order to do justice to the specifics of the usage of mobile media and their constant alternation between virtual and physical spaces.

The evaluation, documentation, and constitution of these groups of methods will turn out differently in the disciplines and fields of research mentioned above. One can only talk of a locative and situational research in the more narrow sense of the word when participating observation is at its center or when it serves as a point of departure. This can also be the case when the collection and the evaluation of data take place temporally, spatially and personally apart from each other. However, the criterion of a locative and situational study of media can also be transferred to historical research if they focus on the praxeological interpretation of a written, visual or audiovisual corpus already in existence or newly compiled (see 3.2.2). In view of the micro-historical studies of the "Annales School" and others, historiography has systematically developed respective research efforts for decades and in the course of these has successfully revised media-historical truisms from a locative and situational point of view, for example regarding the history of printing (Johns, 1998). The respective historical studies can be found in media studies, in philology, art history, theater studies and musicology, however often without a systematic research program. The fluctuating, networked character of the latest media will undoubtedly have repercussions on the historiography of the classical modern media. They become discernible as "interludes of history" (Zielinski, 1989) in particular through their spatial sequencing and arrangement, as temporarily stable arrangements of media, institutions, and usages (Hagen, 2005). Also the notion of mass media, which since the early times of media theory have been emphasized as non-locative, anonymous, reproducible, and mass-psychologist (Kümmel/Löffler 2002), can now be revised. As a parallel to media-ethnographic methods, the awareness that the era of modern mass media cannot be understood without their locative and situational formats is by now established (Maase 1997; Fohrmann/Schütte/Vosskamp 2001)—what, for example, would have imperialism been without its world fairs (Schwarz 2009b, 2011a)?

Nonetheless, the current boom of qualitative methods also runs its own risks. Meanwhile, the danger lies less in methodological devaluation from the outside and more in the tendency of a methodological weakening and fragmentation. From the ethnological aspect in particular it has been remarked repeatedly that the term ethnography has been continually macerated; for example when any kind of compilation of interviews and open conversations has sometimes been called ethnography without subjecting the observer to the risks and the knowledge of participating activities. The development of media ethnography demands less to be successfully fragmented methodologically but to be imaginatively re-combined and widened (Dracklé 2005) by way of the alternation between online and offline worlds, by the development of multi-sited ethnography and the mobile study of mobile media, actors and efforts of transfer (Büscher/Urry/Witchger 2011). Participating observation remains at the core of all locative and situational methods. Ethnographic research continues to follow the earlier sometimes shocking intersection between subject and object, whose areas of knowledge and research operations could reach into the most intimate recesses of one's own and the other's subjectivities, of the individual and the collective ones, of dreams, insinuations and improvised interactions without losing their methodologically created character (Hauschild, 1985)—and this is also true for socio-technical and media studies (Sudnow 1978, 1983; Rottenburg 2002; Potthast 2007).