Advertising has played a central role in shaping the history of modern media. While often identif... more Advertising has played a central role in shaping the history of modern media. While often identified with American consumerism and the rise of the 'Information Society', motion picture advertising has been part of European visual culture since the late nineteenth century. With the global spread of ad agencies, moving image advertisements became a privileged cultural form to make people experience the qualities and uses of branded commodities, to articulate visions of a 'good life', and to incite social relationships. Abandoning a conventional delineation of fields by medium, country, or period, this book suggests a lateral view. It charts the audiovisual history of advertising by focussing on objects (products and services), screens (exhibition, programming, physical media), practices (production, marketing), and intermediaries (ad agencies). In this way, the book develops new historical, methodological, and theoretical perspectives.
Digital Media Distribution: Portals, Platforms, Pipelines, 2021
Media scholars studying online distribution often remain locked into a traditional understanding ... more Media scholars studying online distribution often remain locked into a traditional understanding of content supply. This chapter proposes to move from an interest centered on how, to whom, and by whom media content is physically distributed, toward questions of how, why, and by whom value is attributed to content. Using streamed music, specifically Spotify, to elaborate on its proposition, the chapter invites readers to consider even seemingly marginal forms of valuation such as "fake plays" or "fake likes," as relevant for understanding current distribution practices. Drawing from current research on engagement industries providing such "fakes," as well as on market theory as developed within economic sociology, the chapter emphasizes the need for a processual perspective on online markets and for better integrating studies of media markets with studies of value and valuation practices. Full book at https://nyupress.org/9781479806782/digital-media-distribution/
Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet... more Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood.
Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online.
Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.
Petrocinema presents a collection of essays concerning the close relationship between the oil ind... more Petrocinema presents a collection of essays concerning the close relationship between the oil industry and modern media—especially film. Since the early 1920s, oil extracting companies such as Standard Oil, Royal Dutch/Shell, ConocoPhillips, or Statoil have been producing and circulating moving images for various purposes including research and training, safety, process observation, or promotion. Such industrial and sponsored films include documentaries, educationals, and commercials that formed part of a larger cultural project to transform the image of oil exploitation, creating media interfaces that would allow corporations to coordinate their goals with broader cultural and societal concerns. Falling outside of the domain of conventional cinema, such films firmly belong to an emerging canon of sponsored and educational film and media that has developed over the past decade. Contributing to this burgeoning field of sponsored and educational film scholarship, chapters in this book bear on the intersecting cultural histories of oil extraction and media history by looking closely at moving image imaginaries of the oil industry, from the earliest origins or “spills” in the 20th century to today’s post industrial “petromelancholia.”
Despite the boom of media industries research over the past decade, the ethics of doing such rese... more Despite the boom of media industries research over the past decade, the ethics of doing such research has been surprisingly little discussed. While some basic ethical premises are understood to be tacitly shared – such as to build trust or protect your sources – general proceedings of ethical reasoning are lacking as much as field-specific ethical reflections. At the same time, many ethical questions remain open. Is it a problem if scholars are paid by major corporations for actively shaping a particular agenda? What kinds of access to the field are acceptable? Do we also need to strive for subjects to consent to our research? This chapter aims to develop a conceptual framework for practical judgment which seems necessary both for stimulating more public reflexivity on ethics and solving actual research dilemmas. In doing so, it surveys various understandings of ethical issues in the research field. Based on this survey, the chapter suggests to think of ethical judgment as a nexus between primary ethical norms, procedural arrangements, and forms of case-based, practical reasoning. In order to substantiate this suggestion, the chapter focusses on Production Studies.
Short think piece that considers digital media research in relation to industry and labour, publi... more Short think piece that considers digital media research in relation to industry and labour, published in Synoptique's special issue "The Labour of Media (Studies): Activisim, Education, and Industry", https://synoptique.ca
Studying the media industries means you have to deal with different kinds of tensions. This chapt... more Studying the media industries means you have to deal with different kinds of tensions. This chapter discusses the value and challenges of media industries research, focussing on the question of (digital) access. Access is a complex problem that touches upon political, strategical, ethical, and methodical choices to be made by the researcher.
Table of contents, and introduction (MIT Press, January 2019)
co-authored with Maria Eriksson, R... more Table of contents, and introduction (MIT Press, January 2019)
co-authored with Maria Eriksson, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, and Pelle Snickars. For full manuscript, see my more recent posting on this website.
This article analyzes Spotify as a media company that operates at the intersection of advertising... more This article analyzes Spotify as a media company that operates at the intersection of advertising, technology, music, and finance. In doing so, this article contributes to media industry studies as a field that investigates the relation between various industrial and economic actors. Given that the media industries, as any other industry, can be defined as a set of markets, one of which is the leading market, and to which other markets are auxiliary, the question asked is what market is leading in the case of Spotify. What the article describes as the " Spotify effect " is the company's ability to fold markets into each other: to make disappear an aggressive financial growth strategy and business setup based on ad tech engineering by creating an aura of Nordic cool and public benefit around its use of music. Spotify's financial strategy has implications for the digital distribution of cultural content more generally.
forthcoming in Jennifer Holt & Kevin Sanson (eds.), Connected Viewing: Sharing, Selling, and Streaming Media in the Digital Era (New York/London: Routledge, 2013)
While moving image advertising has been around us, everywhere, for at least a century, the topic ... more While moving image advertising has been around us, everywhere, for at least a century, the topic has tended to be overlooked by cinema studies. This far-reaching new collection makes an incisive contribution to a new field of study, by exploring the history, theory and practice of moving image advertising, and emphasising the dynamic and lasting relationships between print, film, broadcasting and advertising cultures.
"An important contribution to 'useful' cinema studies and to the history of advertising in general, this book sells itself on first-rate scholarship and descriptions of archival sources that are sure to inspire further research." -- Brian Jacobson
"This wonderful collection is further proof of the transformative perspective introduced by carefully considering non-theatrical cinema. Exemplifying archival and scholarly cooperation, Films that Sell both adds to the cinema studies canon while also showing familiar films in a new light." -- Oliver Gaycken
Multi-channel networks (MCNs) are intermediary companies that sell advertising, cross-promote aff... more Multi-channel networks (MCNs) are intermediary companies that sell advertising, cross-promote affiliated YouTube channels, and develop video brands. They have often been critisized as driving YouTube’s commercialization, a seemingly recent phenomenon that sees hithertho informal practices of video making and sharing being increasingly formalized. This article challenges such beliefs about YouTube's sudden make-over, based on archival evidence that allows to reconstruct YouTube’s long commercial history, and on fresh field study data relating to one specific MCN and its content providers. Debunking the myth of “co-creation,” the article uses simple analogies – market, infrastructure, franchise – to describe how MCNs contribute establishing asymmetrical relations between users and emergent industry systems online. It demonstrates how MCNs since 2006 have streamlined and standardized production inputs, re-organized cost-per-mille (CPM) based ad sales, and redefined the value of video in line with a more general financialization of media markets. The methodological framework for this empirical inquiry into YouTube’s first decade is based on economic sociology and infrastructure studies, and the argument itself developed in line with critical research on “connected viewing,” a larger trend across the media industries to integrate digital technology and socially networked communication with traditional screen media practices.
Aggregation is central for how streaming is economically, technically, and socially organized. De... more Aggregation is central for how streaming is economically, technically, and socially organized. Developping its argument at the intersection of critical media industry studies and economic anthropology, this article argues that online aggregators have contributed to a process of devaluation that their services were designed to fight.
Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps, ed. by Jeremy Wade Morris and Sarah Murray, 2018
The chapter follows economic sociology and the anthropology of markets in arguing that App Annie ... more The chapter follows economic sociology and the anthropology of markets in arguing that App Annie does more than just simply track market activities (Callon 1998; Aspers and Dodd 2015). Its charts, lists, and rankings are fundamental in shaping the market for apps. How does App Annie contribute to describing, organizing, and maintaining the app economy? What should we make of the fact that App Annie both charts the app market and is an app on said market? The chapter argues that App Annie’s service does not so much consist in providing a program or access to market data but, instead in defining a frame for what can be known about markets, or what N. Anand and Richard A. Peterson (2000) call a “market information regime.”
Production Studies II: Cultural Studies of Global Media Industries, eds. M. Banks, B. Conor & V. Mayer (New York: Routledge, 2015)
This chapter takes political economy’s view on below the line work in U.S. runaway productions as... more This chapter takes political economy’s view on below the line work in U.S. runaway productions as a starting point for ethnographical observations regarding the sociomaterial construction of the film studio as workspace. It shows how the “biography” of props intersect with the working lives of prop-makers, and how aesthetical artifacts co-organize the production process.
Many films never make it to the screen. Rarely, however, has an unfinished work caused more inter... more Many films never make it to the screen. Rarely, however, has an unfinished work caused more interest as in the case of A Tale from Constantinople, a 1924 feature involving the young Greta Garbo, Swedish director Mauritz Stiller and a Berlin-based producer named David Schratter. Adopting a Production Studies perspective, this book contextualises the recently rediscovered shooting script with a detailed examination of the film's textual genesis and political-economical history.
This article deals with the streaming of online video, along a line of comparison to the music in... more This article deals with the streaming of online video, along a line of comparison to the music industry. Based on qualitative empirical research conducted in Sweden and other European countries, the article focuses on one particular aspect of streamed media, aggregation, since aggregation is central for how streaming is economically, technically, and socially organized. Developing its argument at the intersection of critical media industry studies and economic anthropology, the article argues that online aggregators have contributed to a process of devaluation that their services were designed to fight.
Bo Florin, Patrick Vonderau and Yvonne Zimmermann, Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Culture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), 2019
Advertising is regularly described as a central institution of society. But the term is often mer... more Advertising is regularly described as a central institution of society. But the term is often merely used as a placeholder to avoid a more detailed historical account of the way advertising practices are organized. Based on a thorough examination of the Charles Wilp Collection at Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin, the chapter provides an historical account of Wilp’s (1932-2005) work in German advertising during the 1960s and 70s. It also proposes a definition of screen advertising and an analytical heuristics for describing moving image advertisements.
Der Text widmet sich der Funktion digitaler Methoden in der filmwissenschaftlichen Analyse von Fi... more Der Text widmet sich der Funktion digitaler Methoden in der filmwissenschaftlichen Analyse von Filmen. Was wird unter „digital tools“ verstanden, seit wann gibt es und wie verbreitet sind sie? Mithilfe eines historischen Überblicks zeigt das Kapitel zunächst, aus welchen Gründen Ansätze der computergestützten Filmanalyse im Zeitraum 1985–2005 in der Filmwissenschaft entwickelt worden sind. In einem zweiten Schritt wird vor dem Hintergrund dieser Historisierung die Gemengelage der gegenwärtig unter dem Schlagwort Big Data versammelten Phänomene kritisch in den Blick genommen. Dabei wird deutlich, dass Verfahren zur Quantifizierung der Filmanalyse heute paradoxerweise eine geringere Rolle spielen, als sie dies noch vor zwanzig Jahren taten.
Advertising has played a central role in shaping the history of modern media. While often identif... more Advertising has played a central role in shaping the history of modern media. While often identified with American consumerism and the rise of the 'Information Society', motion picture advertising has been part of European visual culture since the late nineteenth century. With the global spread of ad agencies, moving image advertisements became a privileged cultural form to make people experience the qualities and uses of branded commodities, to articulate visions of a 'good life', and to incite social relationships. Abandoning a conventional delineation of fields by medium, country, or period, this book suggests a lateral view. It charts the audiovisual history of advertising by focussing on objects (products and services), screens (exhibition, programming, physical media), practices (production, marketing), and intermediaries (ad agencies). In this way, the book develops new historical, methodological, and theoretical perspectives.
Digital Media Distribution: Portals, Platforms, Pipelines, 2021
Media scholars studying online distribution often remain locked into a traditional understanding ... more Media scholars studying online distribution often remain locked into a traditional understanding of content supply. This chapter proposes to move from an interest centered on how, to whom, and by whom media content is physically distributed, toward questions of how, why, and by whom value is attributed to content. Using streamed music, specifically Spotify, to elaborate on its proposition, the chapter invites readers to consider even seemingly marginal forms of valuation such as "fake plays" or "fake likes," as relevant for understanding current distribution practices. Drawing from current research on engagement industries providing such "fakes," as well as on market theory as developed within economic sociology, the chapter emphasizes the need for a processual perspective on online markets and for better integrating studies of media markets with studies of value and valuation practices. Full book at https://nyupress.org/9781479806782/digital-media-distribution/
Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet... more Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood.
Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online.
Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.
Petrocinema presents a collection of essays concerning the close relationship between the oil ind... more Petrocinema presents a collection of essays concerning the close relationship between the oil industry and modern media—especially film. Since the early 1920s, oil extracting companies such as Standard Oil, Royal Dutch/Shell, ConocoPhillips, or Statoil have been producing and circulating moving images for various purposes including research and training, safety, process observation, or promotion. Such industrial and sponsored films include documentaries, educationals, and commercials that formed part of a larger cultural project to transform the image of oil exploitation, creating media interfaces that would allow corporations to coordinate their goals with broader cultural and societal concerns. Falling outside of the domain of conventional cinema, such films firmly belong to an emerging canon of sponsored and educational film and media that has developed over the past decade. Contributing to this burgeoning field of sponsored and educational film scholarship, chapters in this book bear on the intersecting cultural histories of oil extraction and media history by looking closely at moving image imaginaries of the oil industry, from the earliest origins or “spills” in the 20th century to today’s post industrial “petromelancholia.”
Despite the boom of media industries research over the past decade, the ethics of doing such rese... more Despite the boom of media industries research over the past decade, the ethics of doing such research has been surprisingly little discussed. While some basic ethical premises are understood to be tacitly shared – such as to build trust or protect your sources – general proceedings of ethical reasoning are lacking as much as field-specific ethical reflections. At the same time, many ethical questions remain open. Is it a problem if scholars are paid by major corporations for actively shaping a particular agenda? What kinds of access to the field are acceptable? Do we also need to strive for subjects to consent to our research? This chapter aims to develop a conceptual framework for practical judgment which seems necessary both for stimulating more public reflexivity on ethics and solving actual research dilemmas. In doing so, it surveys various understandings of ethical issues in the research field. Based on this survey, the chapter suggests to think of ethical judgment as a nexus between primary ethical norms, procedural arrangements, and forms of case-based, practical reasoning. In order to substantiate this suggestion, the chapter focusses on Production Studies.
Short think piece that considers digital media research in relation to industry and labour, publi... more Short think piece that considers digital media research in relation to industry and labour, published in Synoptique's special issue "The Labour of Media (Studies): Activisim, Education, and Industry", https://synoptique.ca
Studying the media industries means you have to deal with different kinds of tensions. This chapt... more Studying the media industries means you have to deal with different kinds of tensions. This chapter discusses the value and challenges of media industries research, focussing on the question of (digital) access. Access is a complex problem that touches upon political, strategical, ethical, and methodical choices to be made by the researcher.
Table of contents, and introduction (MIT Press, January 2019)
co-authored with Maria Eriksson, R... more Table of contents, and introduction (MIT Press, January 2019)
co-authored with Maria Eriksson, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, and Pelle Snickars. For full manuscript, see my more recent posting on this website.
This article analyzes Spotify as a media company that operates at the intersection of advertising... more This article analyzes Spotify as a media company that operates at the intersection of advertising, technology, music, and finance. In doing so, this article contributes to media industry studies as a field that investigates the relation between various industrial and economic actors. Given that the media industries, as any other industry, can be defined as a set of markets, one of which is the leading market, and to which other markets are auxiliary, the question asked is what market is leading in the case of Spotify. What the article describes as the " Spotify effect " is the company's ability to fold markets into each other: to make disappear an aggressive financial growth strategy and business setup based on ad tech engineering by creating an aura of Nordic cool and public benefit around its use of music. Spotify's financial strategy has implications for the digital distribution of cultural content more generally.
forthcoming in Jennifer Holt & Kevin Sanson (eds.), Connected Viewing: Sharing, Selling, and Streaming Media in the Digital Era (New York/London: Routledge, 2013)
While moving image advertising has been around us, everywhere, for at least a century, the topic ... more While moving image advertising has been around us, everywhere, for at least a century, the topic has tended to be overlooked by cinema studies. This far-reaching new collection makes an incisive contribution to a new field of study, by exploring the history, theory and practice of moving image advertising, and emphasising the dynamic and lasting relationships between print, film, broadcasting and advertising cultures.
"An important contribution to 'useful' cinema studies and to the history of advertising in general, this book sells itself on first-rate scholarship and descriptions of archival sources that are sure to inspire further research." -- Brian Jacobson
"This wonderful collection is further proof of the transformative perspective introduced by carefully considering non-theatrical cinema. Exemplifying archival and scholarly cooperation, Films that Sell both adds to the cinema studies canon while also showing familiar films in a new light." -- Oliver Gaycken
Multi-channel networks (MCNs) are intermediary companies that sell advertising, cross-promote aff... more Multi-channel networks (MCNs) are intermediary companies that sell advertising, cross-promote affiliated YouTube channels, and develop video brands. They have often been critisized as driving YouTube’s commercialization, a seemingly recent phenomenon that sees hithertho informal practices of video making and sharing being increasingly formalized. This article challenges such beliefs about YouTube's sudden make-over, based on archival evidence that allows to reconstruct YouTube’s long commercial history, and on fresh field study data relating to one specific MCN and its content providers. Debunking the myth of “co-creation,” the article uses simple analogies – market, infrastructure, franchise – to describe how MCNs contribute establishing asymmetrical relations between users and emergent industry systems online. It demonstrates how MCNs since 2006 have streamlined and standardized production inputs, re-organized cost-per-mille (CPM) based ad sales, and redefined the value of video in line with a more general financialization of media markets. The methodological framework for this empirical inquiry into YouTube’s first decade is based on economic sociology and infrastructure studies, and the argument itself developed in line with critical research on “connected viewing,” a larger trend across the media industries to integrate digital technology and socially networked communication with traditional screen media practices.
Aggregation is central for how streaming is economically, technically, and socially organized. De... more Aggregation is central for how streaming is economically, technically, and socially organized. Developping its argument at the intersection of critical media industry studies and economic anthropology, this article argues that online aggregators have contributed to a process of devaluation that their services were designed to fight.
Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps, ed. by Jeremy Wade Morris and Sarah Murray, 2018
The chapter follows economic sociology and the anthropology of markets in arguing that App Annie ... more The chapter follows economic sociology and the anthropology of markets in arguing that App Annie does more than just simply track market activities (Callon 1998; Aspers and Dodd 2015). Its charts, lists, and rankings are fundamental in shaping the market for apps. How does App Annie contribute to describing, organizing, and maintaining the app economy? What should we make of the fact that App Annie both charts the app market and is an app on said market? The chapter argues that App Annie’s service does not so much consist in providing a program or access to market data but, instead in defining a frame for what can be known about markets, or what N. Anand and Richard A. Peterson (2000) call a “market information regime.”
Production Studies II: Cultural Studies of Global Media Industries, eds. M. Banks, B. Conor & V. Mayer (New York: Routledge, 2015)
This chapter takes political economy’s view on below the line work in U.S. runaway productions as... more This chapter takes political economy’s view on below the line work in U.S. runaway productions as a starting point for ethnographical observations regarding the sociomaterial construction of the film studio as workspace. It shows how the “biography” of props intersect with the working lives of prop-makers, and how aesthetical artifacts co-organize the production process.
Many films never make it to the screen. Rarely, however, has an unfinished work caused more inter... more Many films never make it to the screen. Rarely, however, has an unfinished work caused more interest as in the case of A Tale from Constantinople, a 1924 feature involving the young Greta Garbo, Swedish director Mauritz Stiller and a Berlin-based producer named David Schratter. Adopting a Production Studies perspective, this book contextualises the recently rediscovered shooting script with a detailed examination of the film's textual genesis and political-economical history.
This article deals with the streaming of online video, along a line of comparison to the music in... more This article deals with the streaming of online video, along a line of comparison to the music industry. Based on qualitative empirical research conducted in Sweden and other European countries, the article focuses on one particular aspect of streamed media, aggregation, since aggregation is central for how streaming is economically, technically, and socially organized. Developing its argument at the intersection of critical media industry studies and economic anthropology, the article argues that online aggregators have contributed to a process of devaluation that their services were designed to fight.
Bo Florin, Patrick Vonderau and Yvonne Zimmermann, Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Culture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), 2019
Advertising is regularly described as a central institution of society. But the term is often mer... more Advertising is regularly described as a central institution of society. But the term is often merely used as a placeholder to avoid a more detailed historical account of the way advertising practices are organized. Based on a thorough examination of the Charles Wilp Collection at Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin, the chapter provides an historical account of Wilp’s (1932-2005) work in German advertising during the 1960s and 70s. It also proposes a definition of screen advertising and an analytical heuristics for describing moving image advertisements.
Der Text widmet sich der Funktion digitaler Methoden in der filmwissenschaftlichen Analyse von Fi... more Der Text widmet sich der Funktion digitaler Methoden in der filmwissenschaftlichen Analyse von Filmen. Was wird unter „digital tools“ verstanden, seit wann gibt es und wie verbreitet sind sie? Mithilfe eines historischen Überblicks zeigt das Kapitel zunächst, aus welchen Gründen Ansätze der computergestützten Filmanalyse im Zeitraum 1985–2005 in der Filmwissenschaft entwickelt worden sind. In einem zweiten Schritt wird vor dem Hintergrund dieser Historisierung die Gemengelage der gegenwärtig unter dem Schlagwort Big Data versammelten Phänomene kritisch in den Blick genommen. Dabei wird deutlich, dass Verfahren zur Quantifizierung der Filmanalyse heute paradoxerweise eine geringere Rolle spielen, als sie dies noch vor zwanzig Jahren taten.
1924 kam Greta Garbo aus Stockholm nach Berlin, um in dem Großfilm der Trianon, DIE ODALISKE VON ... more 1924 kam Greta Garbo aus Stockholm nach Berlin, um in dem Großfilm der Trianon, DIE ODALISKE VON SMOLNY unter der Regie von Mauritz Stiller mitzuwirken. Kaum weniger spektakulär als der Plot dieses Films war der Skandal, der sich um die Produktion des schwedischen Stars drehte und Garbos deutsche Karriere vorzeitig beendete. Bilder vom Norden erzählt die Geschichte der spannungsvollen Beziehung zweier Filmnationen, die Weltgeltung beanspruchten und mehr als einmal miteinander in Konflikt gerieten.
As an aesthetic, economic, and cultural practice, advertising has played a pivotal role in shapin... more As an aesthetic, economic, and cultural practice, advertising has played a pivotal role in shaping the history of virtually every modern communications medium. In its ubiquity and everyday ephemerality, avantgardist designs, and persuasive rhetorics advertising over the course of the last century has become an epitome of modernity as much as of pop culture; it is inextricably connected to capitalism, material cultures, lifestyles, and media histories. Bringing together archivists and adacemics, Films that Sell is the very first volume that is specifically dedicated to the history of moving image advertising. This book contains an original collection of historical, conceptual and archival contributions written by international experts in the field, and is complemented with collection presentations and an annotated bibliography.
Im Zeitalter des Blockbuster-Kinos kosten Filmwerbung und Filmvermarktung fast ebensoviel wie ein... more Im Zeitalter des Blockbuster-Kinos kosten Filmwerbung und Filmvermarktung fast ebensoviel wie ein Film selbst. Intensität und Volumen der Kampagnen entscheiden über Marktanteile und damit auch über die Chancen kleinerer Filme, überhaupt gesehen zu werden. Verleihfirmen stilisieren ihre Produkte zu Ereignissen mit allumfassender Medienpräsenz. Filmwerbung ist zu einem allgegenwärtigen Medieninhalt geworden, dessen ökonomische und kulturelle Bedeutung kaum überschätzt werden kann. Als erster deutschsprachiger Sammelband vereint Demnächst in ihrem Kino Erstübersetzungen und Originalbeiträge von Autoren aus Europa und den USA.
YouTube has come to epitomize the possibilities of digital culture. With more than seventy millio... more YouTube has come to epitomize the possibilities of digital culture. With more than seventy million unique users a month and approximately eighty million videos online, this brand-name video distribution platform holds the richest repository of popular culture on the Internet. As the fastest growing site in the history of the Web, YouTube promises endless new opportunities for amateur video, political campaigning, entertainment formats, and viral marketing—a clip culture that has seemed to outpace both cinema and television.
The YouTube Reader is the first full-length book to explore YouTube as an industry, archive, and cultural form. This remarkable volume brings together renowned film and media scholars to debate the problems and potential of "broadcasting yourself." The YouTube Reader takes on claims of newness, immediacy, and popularity with sytematic and theoretically informed arguments, offering a closer look at the available texts on YouTube and the policies and norms that govern their access and use.
The iPhone has revolutionized not only how people communicate but also how we consume and produce... more The iPhone has revolutionized not only how people communicate but also how we consume and produce culture. Combining traditional and social media with mobile connectivity, smartphones have redefined and expanded the dimensions of everyday life, allowing individuals to personalize media as they move and process constant flows of data. Today, millions of consumers love and live by their iPhones, but what are the implications of its special technology on society, media, and culture?
Featuring an eclectic mix of original essays, Moving Data explores the iPhone as technological prototype, lifestyle gadget, and platform for media creativity. Media experts, cultural critics, and scholars consider the device’s newness and usability—even its “lickability”—and its “biographical” story. The book illuminates patterns of consumption; the fate of solitude against smartphone ubiquity; the economy of the App Store and its perceived “crisis of choice”; and the distance between the accessibility of digital information and the protocols governing its use. Alternating between critical and conceptual analyses, essays link the design of participatory media to the iPhone’s technological features and sharing routines, and they follow the extent to which the pleasures of gesture-based interfaces are redefining media use and sensory experience. They also consider how user-led innovations, collaborative mapping, and creative empowerment are understood and reconciled through changes in mobile surveillance, personal rights, and prescriptive social software. Presenting a range of perspectives and arguments, this book reorients the practice and study of media critique.
The history of industrial films - an orphan genre of twentieth-century cinema composed of governm... more The history of industrial films - an orphan genre of twentieth-century cinema composed of government-produced and industrially sponsored movies that sought to achieve the goals of their sponsors, rather than the creative artists involved - seems to have left no trace in filmic cultural discourse. At its height the industrial film industry employed thousands, produced several trade journals and festival circuits, engaged with giants of twentieth-century industry like Shell and AT & T, and featured the talents of iconic actors and directors such as Buster Keaton, John Grierson and Alain Resnais. This is the first full-length book, anthology, and annotated bibliography to analyze the industrial film and its remarkable history. Exploring the potential of the industrial film to uncover renewed and unexplored areas of media studies, this remarkable volume brings together renowned scholars such as Rick Prelinger and Thomas Elsaesser in a discussion of the radical potential and new possibilities in considering the history of this unexplored corporate medium.
Production studies has developed into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry of film and televisio... more Production studies has developed into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry of film and television "production cultures," going beyond traditional examinations of authorship and industry structure. Studying production as culture involves gathering empirical data about the lived realities of people involved in media production - about collaboration and conflicts, routines and rituals, lay theories and performative actions. This volume broadens the scope of production studies by analyzing geographic and historical alternatives to contemporary Hollywood. At the same time, it invites disciplines such as ethnography, aesthetics, or sociology of art to reconsider established concepts of film and media studies like creative agency, genesis of a film work, or transnational production.
This chapter takes political economy’s view on below the line work in U.S. runaway productions as... more This chapter takes political economy’s view on below the line work in U.S. runaway productions as a starting point for ethnographical observations regarding the sociomaterial construction of the film studio as workspace. It shows how the “biography” of props intersect with the working lives of prop-makers, and how aesthetical artifacts co-organize the production process.
Der Beitrag beschreibt zunachst die Dynamik der Theoriebildung, die das Entstehen von Genretheori... more Der Beitrag beschreibt zunachst die Dynamik der Theoriebildung, die das Entstehen von Genretheorien des Films seit etwa 1970 befeuert hat. Im Rahmen eines kritischen Uberblicks befragt er Genretheorien dann auf ihre Produktivitat, indem er drei ihrer langjahrigen Themen schlaglichtartig beleuchtet: ihr Denken in Taxonomien (klassifikatorischen Bestimmungen), Genealogien (historischen Abfolgen) und Zuschauerbeziehungen (kommunikativen Kontrakten).
As an aesthetic, economic, and cultural practice, advertising has played a pivotal role in shapin... more As an aesthetic, economic, and cultural practice, advertising has played a pivotal role in shaping the history of virtually every modern communications medium. In its ubiquity and everyday ephemerality, avantgardist designs, and persuasive rhetorics advertising over the course of the last century has become an epitome of modernity as much as of pop culture; it is inextricably connected to capitalism, material cultures, lifestyles, and media histories. Bringing together archivists and adacemics, Films that Sell is the very first volume that is specifically dedicated to the history of moving image advertising. This book contains an original collection of historical, conceptual and archival contributions written by international experts in the field, and is complemented with collection presentations and an annotated bibliography.
YouTube has come to epitomize the possibilities of digital culture. With more than seventy millio... more YouTube has come to epitomize the possibilities of digital culture. With more than seventy million unique users a month and approximately eighty million videos online, this brand-name video distribution platform holds the richest repository of popular culture on the Internet. As the fastest growing site in the history of the Web, YouTube promises endless new opportunities for amateur video, political campaigning, entertainment formats, and viral marketing—a clip culture that has seemed to outpace both cinema and television. The YouTube Reader is the first full-length book to explore YouTube as an industry, archive, and cultural form. This remarkable volume brings together renowned film and media scholars to debate the problems and potential of "broadcasting yourself." The YouTube Reader takes on claims of newness, immediacy, and popularity with sytematic and theoretically informed arguments, offering a closer look at the available texts on YouTube and the policies and norm...
Petrocinema presents a collection of essays concerning the close relationship between the oil ind... more Petrocinema presents a collection of essays concerning the close relationship between the oil industry and modern media—especially film. Since the early 1920s, oil extracting companies such as Standard Oil, Royal Dutch/Shell, ConocoPhillips, or Statoil have been producing and circulating moving images for various purposes including research and training, safety, process observation, or promotion. Such industrial and sponsored films include documentaries, educationals, and commercials that formed part of a larger cultural project to transform the image of oil exploitation, creating media interfaces that would allow corporations to coordinate their goals with broader cultural and societal concerns. Falling outside of the domain of conventional cinema, such films firmly belong to an emerging canon of sponsored and educational film and media that has developed over the past decade. Contributing to this burgeoning field of sponsored and educational film scholarship, chapters in this book...
In Die Verklarung des Gewohnlichen. Eine Philosophie der Kunst (1984 [1981]) schildert Arthur C. ... more In Die Verklarung des Gewohnlichen. Eine Philosophie der Kunst (1984 [1981]) schildert Arthur C. Danto eine Episode, die fur ihn das Ende der Geschichte der Kunst markiert und zugleich den Moment, in dem sie zu einer Art Bewusstsein ihrer selbst ubergegangen und gleichsam zu ihrer eigenen Philosophie geworden sei. Danto berichtet in seinem beruhmten Buch von einem «philosophischen Rausch» (1984, 11), der ihn 1964 in der Stable Gallery in New York erfasst habe, als er unversehens mit Nachbildungen von Kartons voller Topfreiniger der Marke Brillo konfrontiert wurde. Die Begegnung mit Andy Warhols Brillo Boxes warf fur ihn die Frage nach dem kategorialen Unterschied zwischen Kunstwerken und Objekten der Lebenswelt auf, wobei er die Kenntnis dieses Unterschieds als einen kunftig wesentlichen Bestandteil aller Kunsterfahrung ausmachte. Eben den Umstand, dass sich aus der auserlichen Eigenschaft der Brillo Box, eine genaue Nachbildung der Schwammverpackung zu sein, ihr Kunstwert nicht erk...
Despite the boom of media industries research over the past decade, the ethics of doing such rese... more Despite the boom of media industries research over the past decade, the ethics of doing such research has been surprisingly little discussed. While some basic ethical premises are understood to be tacitly shared – such as to build trust or protect your sources – general proceedings of ethical reasoning are lacking as much as field-specific ethical reflections. At the same time, many ethical questions remain open. Is it a problem if scholars are paid by major corporations for actively shaping a particular agenda? What kinds of access to the field are acceptable? Do we also need to strive for subjects to consent to our research? This chapter aims to develop a conceptual framework for practical judgment which seems necessary both for stimulating more public reflexivity on ethics and solving actual research dilemmas. In doing so, it surveys various understandings of ethical issues in the research field. Based on this survey, the chapter suggests to think of ethical judgment as a nexus between primary ethical norms, procedural arrangements, and forms of case-based, practical reasoning. In order to substantiate this suggestion, the chapter focusses on Production Studies.
Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Cultures, 2021
Advertising has played a central role in shaping the history of modern media. While often identif... more Advertising has played a central role in shaping the history of modern media. While often identified with American consumerism and the rise of the 'Information Society', motion picture advertising has been part of European visual culture since the late nineteenth century. With the global spread of ad agencies, moving image advertisements became a privileged cultural form to make people experience the qualities and uses of branded commodities, to articulate visions of a 'good life', and to incite social relationships. Abandoning a conventional delineation of fields by medium, country, or period, this book suggests a lateral view. It charts the audiovisual history of advertising by focussing on objects (products and services), screens (exhibition, programming, physical media), practices (production, marketing), and intermediaries (ad agencies). In this way, the book develops new historical, methodological, and theoretical perspectives.
A brief guide to thesis writing in media studies, written for desperate film students at the Depa... more A brief guide to thesis writing in media studies, written for desperate film students at the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University. Colleagues: I'd be happy to learn about your own guides, and thoughts, on the subject.
Uploads
Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online.
Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.
co-authored with Maria Eriksson, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, and Pelle Snickars. For full manuscript, see my more recent posting on this website.
"An important contribution to 'useful' cinema studies and to the history of advertising in general, this book sells itself on first-rate scholarship and descriptions of archival sources that are sure to inspire further research." -- Brian Jacobson
"This wonderful collection is further proof of the transformative perspective introduced by carefully considering non-theatrical cinema. Exemplifying archival and scholarly cooperation, Films that Sell both adds to the cinema studies canon while also showing familiar films in a new light." -- Oliver Gaycken
Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online.
Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.
co-authored with Maria Eriksson, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, and Pelle Snickars. For full manuscript, see my more recent posting on this website.
"An important contribution to 'useful' cinema studies and to the history of advertising in general, this book sells itself on first-rate scholarship and descriptions of archival sources that are sure to inspire further research." -- Brian Jacobson
"This wonderful collection is further proof of the transformative perspective introduced by carefully considering non-theatrical cinema. Exemplifying archival and scholarly cooperation, Films that Sell both adds to the cinema studies canon while also showing familiar films in a new light." -- Oliver Gaycken
The YouTube Reader is the first full-length book to explore YouTube as an industry, archive, and cultural form. This remarkable volume brings together renowned film and media scholars to debate the problems and potential of "broadcasting yourself." The YouTube Reader takes on claims of newness, immediacy, and popularity with sytematic and theoretically informed arguments, offering a closer look at the available texts on YouTube and the policies and norms that govern their access and use.
Featuring an eclectic mix of original essays, Moving Data explores the iPhone as technological prototype, lifestyle gadget, and platform for media creativity. Media experts, cultural critics, and scholars consider the device’s newness and usability—even its “lickability”—and its “biographical” story. The book illuminates patterns of consumption; the fate of solitude against smartphone ubiquity; the economy of the App Store and its perceived “crisis of choice”; and the distance between the accessibility of digital information and the protocols governing its use. Alternating between critical and conceptual analyses, essays link the design of participatory media to the iPhone’s technological features and sharing routines, and they follow the extent to which the pleasures of gesture-based interfaces are redefining media use and sensory experience. They also consider how user-led innovations, collaborative mapping, and creative empowerment are understood and reconciled through changes in mobile surveillance, personal rights, and prescriptive social software. Presenting a range of perspectives and arguments, this book reorients the practice and study of media critique.