Just as the title above suggests, it is difficult to address health issues without considering the role of the media and everyday life; the time and space when health is produced and cared for or put ...at risk and exposed. In the introduction to this special issue, ‘Media and health in everyday life’, we will discuss the three components of the theme. We will offer some definitions, but also problematise the conceptual underpinnings and highlight the intertwinement of the three. We set off by reflecting on health. Then we will engage with ideas around the notion of everyday life. In the final section, we add the component of the media before we present and summarise the nine contributions to the special issue and clarify to what extent they add to our understanding of the theme.
Journalism researchers have tended to study journalistic roles from within a Western framework oriented toward the media’s contribution to democracy and citizenship. In so doing, journalism ...scholarship often failed to account for the realities in non-democratic and non-Western contexts, as well as for forms of journalism beyond political news. Based on the framework of discursive institutionalism, we conceptualize journalistic roles as discursive constructions of journalism’s identity and place in society. These roles have sedimented in journalism’s institutional norms and practices and are subject to discursive (re)creation, (re)interpretation, appropriation, and contestation. We argue that journalists exercise important roles in two domains: political life and everyday life. For the domain of political life, we identify 18 roles addressing six essential needs of political life: informational-instructive, analytical-deliberative, critical-monitorial, advocative-radical, developmental-educative, and collaborative-facilitative. In the domain of everyday life, journalists carry out roles that map onto three areas: consumption, identity, and emotion.
The Feeling of Numbers Kennedy, Helen; Hill, Rosemary Lucy
Sociology (Oxford),
08/2018, Volume:
52, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article highlights the role that emotions play in engagements with data and their visualisation. To date, the relationship between data and emotions has rarely been noted, in part because data ...studies have not attended to everyday engagements with data. We draw on an empirical study to show a wide range of emotional engagements with diverse aspects of data and their visualisation, and so demonstrate the importance of emotions as vital components of making sense of data. We nuance the argument that regimes of datafication, in which numbers, metrics and statistics dominate, are characterised by a renewed faith in objectivity and rationality, arguing that in datafied times, it is not only numbers but also the feeling of numbers that is important. We build on the sociology of (a) emotions and (b) the everyday to do this, and in so doing, we contribute to the development of a sociology of data.
In May 2018 over 200 people from around the world met at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom to participate in a conference on 'Data Justice" hosted by the Data Justice Lab. They included ...scholars from a range of disciplines stretching across media studies, geography, computer science, law, philosophy, sociology and politics as well as civil society groups and professionals working at the intersection of technology and society. The conference marked a clear recognition that the way data is generated, collected and used in society and everyday life has become an increasingly prominent and contentious issue. Developments in 'smart' technologies, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence are now an integral part of how societies are organised and decisions made, both in rhetoric and in practice. How we come to understand the world, what services we are able to access, where we are able to go, what we are able to do, and the way we are governed all potentially feature data practices that shape the terms and conditions for our participation in society.
This paper concerns the ways in which futures are enacted, and thus mobilized, by publics, participants and practitioners, and especially by social scientists. In particular, the paper is interested ...in the assortment of futures within which we are seemingly embroiled, and how we analytically deal with the proliferation of futures. This is approached through the dramatization of futures as ‘Big’ or ‘Little’ in which change is more or less widespread and far-reaching. The aim is to chart some of the ways in which Big Futures are analytically or rhetorically transformed into Little and vice versa, and thus to throw into relief the mutability of futures per se. This discussion is developed by drawing on a particular area of social scientific inquiry, namely the ‘public understanding of science’ (PUS) which also includes the field of ‘public engagement with science and technology’ (PEST). The role for Big Futures (indexed by ‘controversiality’) in this field, and the Big Future claims made by PUS/PEST practitioners are contrasted to the Little Futures of everyday life. With the aid of a ‘speculative’ sensibility, Little Futures are then shown to be potential sources of Big Futures. The paper ends with a preliminary attempt to theorize the complex interactions of Big and Little Futures through Isabelle Stengers’ (2010) notion of an ‘ecology of practices’.
This article analyzes the domestication of WhatsApp among Argentine individuals going through young, middle, and late adulthood, drawing on 158 semi-structured interviews and a 700-person survey. ...Findings show variance in domestication processes related to the different life stages that users belong to. Young adults (18–34 years, in our sample) adopt WhatsApp as a taken-for-granted platform where sociability is mainly produced in groups with friends and enacted through an “always on” availability. Middle adults (35–59 years) appropriate this platform partly shaped by a constellation of work and care responsibilities. Late adults (60 years and older) find in WhatsApp a connection with younger generations in addition to age peers, while enacting less continuous modes of availability than those in other life stages. We propose that considering life stages in domestication processes contributes to unpacking broader dynamics of the social mediation of everyday life.
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