2.3 Reflexivity of Media Studies

The study of media will remain a turbulent field. This is due to the fact that the academic involvement with media and their socio-technological development invokes the expertise in all three established academic formations, repeatedly leading to new encounters: natural and engineering sciences, social sciences, the humanities and cultural studies introduce their own expertise. The attempts to unravel the entanglement of these three fields of expertise for media studies, to calm it down or to divide them dogmatically have proven to be counterproductive for the scientific community. Nevertheless, this complex situation demands methodological mediation between the academic formations and their forms of socialization. It becomes apparent to what extent the new media-ethnographic methods are generated from fields of knowledge and disciplines that have been practicing this kind of mediation for years, namely science and technology studies, international ethnology ("anthropology"), traditions in micro-sociology and conversation analysis bridging these fields to information technologies (Suchman, 1987, 2007) but also the recent expansion of international geography by way of postindustrial field studies (Crang/Cook 2007). These bridges and their qualitative research are gradually coming to the fore since the analysis of the current development in digital media increasingly has to be managed without social, technical or socio-technical units of analysis. Therefore, quite often quantitative surveys or the evaluation of literature do not help with orientation. The fluctuation repeatedly mentioned above and the turbulences caused by it have in the process precipitated a 'mobile groundedness' in studies as well as in the objects, persons and data analyzed.

This character of groundedness should not be confounded with a naive representational object reference. In all the studies presented and proposed the aim here is to heighten the reflexivity of media studies and their objects. The term "reflexivity" however contains the praxeological meaning (Rawls 2008) handed down following Harold Garfinkel (1967); it has become familiar in the current discussions by way of the easily misunderstood "Follow the actors!" of the Actor-Network-Theory. For locative and situational media studies (as well as in locative and situational media!) reflexivity is not created by comparing theories, not by being reduced to technology or a discourse, not through an aesthetic or text-analogous referential immanence and neither by insinuating some knowledge of the actors that simply has to be generalized. Rather, reflexivity is created by concretely indicating the resources through which individuals, media, and artifacts are able to gradually interact with each other in an emergent manner within event sequences, operational chains, or crisis situations. "In exactly the ways in which a setting is organized, it consists of methods whereby its members are provided with accounts of the setting as countable, storyable, proverbial, comparable, picturable, representable – i.e., accountable events" (Garfinkel 1967: 34). It is only recently that this lesson has been spread in media studies in a lasting way. It will be possible to replace the often holistic fixation on individual media and their approach as ready-made media by a more precise knowledge of the media as processes, of the media in action only by recognizing this somewhat different type of reflexivity.

This approach also calls for historicizing media and communication studies, as well as reflecting on the history of science. As Hans-Jörg Rheinberger claims, localizable experimental spaces require that epistemic events appear at first as "arrangements of material traces" in a series of chains of representation (Rheinberger 2001: 24, 113). It is possible that media appear alongside these epistemic events since, after all, "efforts aiming at knowledge" about them (Rheinberger, 2001: 22) were made through experiments and field research (Hensel, 2009). From a feminist perspective and by reflecting the theory of situational and locative knowledge, Donna Haraway has asked the question of the "agency" of things that are no longer objects of a sovereign subject but agents whose options of activity are dependent on the media surrounding them and on the possibility of linking them with other actors (Haraway, 1988). Knowledge of things, according to her, is always "situated knowledge" (581). It is situated in so far as the interaction between human and non-human actors can only be controlled through media. From a historical perspective it can be held that since the nineteenth century media have emerged by way of experimental observation and that the emergence of the "agency" of media has been increasingly understood as an experimental testing, namely since the nineteenth century in industrial studies (Bowker, 1994; Schüttpelz, 2009) and in the experimental arrangements of social studies since the twentieth century, in which the "media of social studies" (Ziegaus, 2009: 18) were caused to study media and to represent them (Orr, 1999; Pethes, 2004; Schneider/Otto, 2007). 

In the history of media it is mostly left out that the knowledge of media has been gained in specific places and through the arrangement of often unique laboratory conditions and that it therefore was characterized by this placement. The results have entered the textbooks as knowledge independent of place and situation. Reviewing the research history, location and situatedness of this knowledge can be restituted with the help of media (Broeckmann/Nadarajan, 2009). It can be shown, for example, how European mass psychology meets the reform movement of the movies originating in New York, resulting in the mapping of a new place, the city of Chicago (Otto 2010); or that the media laboratories for industrial and warfare research have emerged from a respective regional and urban history (Roch 2009). It will be possible in this way to trace the seeming 'placelessness' of modern mass media and technical media as effects of generalization and globalized standardization of locally linked laboratory conditions, in other words, as a development that generalizes the laboratory into the world and vice versa (Latour, 1988). This kind of reflection embraces both the phenomena and the discourses of media. Locative and situational media studies can analyze the history of media in connection with historicizing their implicit and explicit, non-academic and academic media studies.

As related to corpus and detail as these studies have to be conducted, they nevertheless do not lead to a situation abstaining from media theory. In the course of spreading qualitative media studies, an implicit media theoretical consensus has already emerged by now that can be followed across all the disciplines and methods involved and the new Research Training Group can moderate it through this interdisciplinary exchange also for German media studies. Lately, a whole series of presuppositions of the earlier 'holistic' theories of media and modernization have been progressively revised. Instead of defining media as historical causes as conclusively as possible, a somewhat more skeptical research has been established against the interest of other research done in cultural studies that sees media less as causes and rather as temporarily consolidated historical effects of cultural techniques. Against the heritage in philosophy of history of the earlier media studies, and against the underlining of technical functionality, by now social, cultural and technical theories have gained acceptance that subvert all a priori division between micro- and macro-analyses, between structure and agency and between technical functionality and social relations. Now a differentiated review at the places of media reception and media production, in everyday life and in the work of media, and at the place of speech acts in media and of linguistic interaction is answering the classical theories of the modern public sphere and its public. And its criticism and challenge is answering to the application and often subconscious adoption of sociological and technological theories of modernization in the place of media practice and by now in all ethnographically analyzed places and all ethnographically scrutinized institutions of the global world. The consensus of all these revisions lies in underlining the practice-theoretical intersection between media and technology theories as well as media and sociology theories. The Research Training Group will contribute in deepening this practice-theoretical consensus through interdisciplinary and international discussions; this consensus is manifested in the spectrum of locative and situational methods and their intersections in terms of content delineated in this paper, a spectrum that has only been discussed rarely between the different communities of practice so far. It therefore continues to be challenged to discuss the so far only implicit media theoretical consequences and to clarify them for the wider interdisciplinary public in media studies.