This paper takes as it starting point the tension identified in the conference’s call for papers which speculates whether recent political events such as the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and the diverse range of global anti-austerity protests should be understood as new forms of power or simply “an intensification of the old battlelines.” It argues that such political events are an articulation of the trajectory plotted by contemporary accounts of power, but which the majority of political science scholarship has arguably overlooked in recent years. Such a reality, the paper contends, represents both a crisis as well as an opportunity for political scientists, media and communications and social movement/activism researchers.

1. Re-Assembling Mediated Power:
Exploring the moment of crisis and opportunity
Simon Collister
Royal Holloway, University of London
Full paper available. Email me at simon.collister@gmail.com
Twitter: @simoncollister | www.simoncollister.com

2. Point of origin
• Snapshot into an early
section of my PhD
• Interested in how
power is mediated
within contemporary
communications networks
• Hope to focus initial Contact me:
analysis on anti-austerity simon.collister@gmail.com
social movements www.simoncollister.com
@simoncollister

3. Introduction
• Theories of mediated power
facing moment of crisis
• Evolution of power outstripped
accounts of mediated power
• Limiting analysis of
contemporary mediated politics
• Need to identify opportunities
for mapping mediated power’s
engagement with contemporary
theories of power

4. Today’s aim
1. Plot the comparative trajectories of power and
media research
2. Identify limitations of current approaches to
mediated power
3. Outline a revised model for analysing mediated
power in an age of networked movements

5. It might be a bit…

6. Trajectories of Power

7. Three traditions of power
1. Conflictual
2. Consensual
3. Constituative

8. Conflictual tradition
• Wedded to positivist, observable
democratic power where “A gets B
to do something they wouldn’t
otherwise have done” (Dahl 1957)
• Augmented by Bachrach & Baratz
(1962) who argued for inclusion of
“non-decision making power” – i.e.
institutional bias
• Critiqued by Lukes who identified a
Marxian false-consciousess exerting
a “contradiction between the
interests of those exercising power
and the real interests of those they
exclude” (1974, 28)

9. Consensual tradition
• Lukes’ focus on ‘power over’
conceals power’s ability to
dominate by creating consensus
• Lukes’ admits as much (2005) and
points to Gramsci’s hegemony as
founding theory
• Duality of social structure/
agency developed further by
Giddens’ ‘Theory of Structuration’
and Bourdieu’s Field and Habitus

10. Constitutive tradition
• Foucault identifies ‘productive
power’ “rooted in the whole
network of the social” and
constituting society discursively
and disciplining apparatuses or
‘dispositifs’. (Foucault 1983)
• This networked approach to power
developed by Deleuze (& Guattari)
and Actor-Network Theorists, such
as Latour, Callon and Law
• Accounts for how social field is
continually produced and
transformed through the
association and interaction of
actors (Law 1998, 2)

11. Evolution of
Media & Power

12. Three approaches to media & power
1. Liberal-pluralism
2. Critical tradition
3. Networked approaches

13. Media and Liberal Pluralism
• Media power lies in watchdog
function and supporting democratic
discourse - typified by Habermas’
public sphere (1996)
• Idealised vision challenged by
professionalisation of media and
political actors and media
commercialisation (Blumler and
Kavanagh 1999)
• ‘Strategic news management’
undermined by internet-empowered
non-institutional media actors, e.g.
bloggers, citizen journalists

14. The Critical Tradition
• Early political economic critiques
delivered by Marx & Engels (1932);
later Horkheimer and Adorno (1947)
• Contemporary analyses introduced
subtler accounts of globalised media
industry exerting power through
lifestyle or non-contentious content
(Curran 2002; McChesney 2004)
• Stuart Hall’s cultural critiques (1986)
further identified media power as
contested; actively shaped by
cultural encodings/decodings

15. Networked approaches
• Networks are “archetypal
form of contemporary social
and technical organisation”
(Livingstone 2005, 12)
• Approaches wedded to an
outdated “elite-mass media-
audience paradigm” (Davis
2007)
• Media “hybridity” proposed
as conceptual escape route
(Chadwick 2011)

16. Media hybridity
• Emergent and networked
hybridity challenges notions of
elites, institutional
actors, mainstream media and
notion homogenous audiences
(Chadwick 2011a; 2011b; 2013)
• Hybridity characterised by a
“betweenness” with mediated
power operating through
interaction between old and
new; material and immaterial
actors

17. The material turn
• Media research increasingly
influenced by materialist turn in
humanities and social
sciences, viz. Deleuze & Guattari
and Actor-Network Theory
• Terranova (2004) suggests
representation accounts for
half of communication
• Can be infrastructure,
physical space, algorithms, etc

18. Where does this leave us?
• Lacuna around how networked
communications and
materialist ontology is shaping
contemporary mediation
• Emerging concept of media
‘hybridity’ can be combined
with media’s ‘material turn’
• Presents opportunity for
developing analytical model
capable of investigating
contemporary mediated
politics

19. Where to go from here?

20. Framing Theory
• Dominant media and
communications research
theory (Bryant and Miron
2004)
• Central to mediated power
(Caragee and Roefs 2004)
• Functions as ‘bridging project’
(Reese 2001) allowing us to
use it as building block for
developing new approaches
to mediated power

21. Assemblage Theory
• Propose ‘bridging’
framing with
Assemblage Theory
(DeLanda 2006)
• Assemblage Theory is
an ontological schema
for interpreting reality
based on Deleuzian
concept

22. Framing & assemblages (1)
• Processes of assembly
operating on two
fundamental axes:
1. Territorialization <>
Deterritorialization
2. Material<>Expressive
• Offers dynamic and
materialist framework to
augment Reese’s notion of
framing as gaining/losing
organising value?

23. Framing & assemblages (2)
• Additional sub-processes
contest stability, identity &
durability of frames-as-assemblages
• Exterior relations connect
assemblage parts creating
non-linear emergence
• Coding stabilises identity &
universal singularities structure
enduring frames-as-assemblage’s
“long-term tendencies”

24. Putting this to work
• Currently analysing of NUS’ #Demo2012 to understand how
demonstration was framed through assemblage of material
and expressive actors, objects and content

25. Frames-as-assemblages analysis (1)
• Conduct analysis of three distinct milieux in
which mediation processes occur
• Applying:
– content analysis of social and traditional media
– enthnographic observation of media events
– follow-up interviews

26. Frames-as-assemblages analysis (2)

27. Understanding mediated power
• Short-term: Analyse mediated
power by accounting for the
material & expressive components
territorializing and coding frames-as-
assemblages
• Longer-term: identify & map ‘ideal
types’ of frames-as-assemblages or
process of production to gain insight
into mediated power’s longer-term
tendencies behind the hybrid media
environment

28. Questions & Feedback?
simon.collister@gmail.com
www.simoncollister.com
@simoncollister