Per Wisselgren

Solveig Jülich

Anders Ekström

FRANS LUNDGREN

This book argues for a historical perspective on issues relating to the notion of participatory media. Working from a broad concept of media – including essays on the 19th century press, early sound media, photography, exhibitions, television and the internet – the book offers a broad empirical approach to different modes of audience participation from the mid 19th century to the present. Using the insights from the historical case studies, the book also explores some of the key concepts in discussions on the politics of participation, arguing for a theoretical perspective sensitive to the asymmetries that characterize the distribution of agency in the relationship between media and users. Scholarly discussions on participatory media now occur in several fields. This book argues that all of these discussions are all too often obscured by a rhetoric of newness, assuming that participatory media is something unique in history, radical and revolutionary. By challenging the historiography implicit in this rhetoric, the book also engages in a discussion of issues of more general relevance to the multidisciplinary field of media history.

Politics and Publics, 1750–2000

History of Participatory Media

The social sciences have, ever since they were first established as academic disciplines, played a foundational role in most spheres of modern society - in policy-making, education, the media and public debate - and hence also, indirectly, for our self-understanding as social beings. The Social Scientific Gaze examines the discursive formation of academic social science in the historical context of the 'social question', that is, the protracted and wide-ranging discussions on the social problems of modernity that were being debated with increased intensity during the nineteenth century. Empirically, the study focuses on the Lorén Foundation, a combined private funding agency and early research institute, which was set up in 1885 to promote the rise of Swedish social science and to investigate the social question. Comprising an heuristic case, the close analysis of the Foundation makes it possible not only to reconstruct its basic ideas and practices, but also to situate its activities in broader historical and sociological context. The Social Scientific Gaze argues that the rise of Swedish social science may be seen not only as an 'answer' to the social 'question', but also as one attempt alongside others - including contemporary social literature, the philantropic reform movement, and the introduction of modern social policy - to conceptualize, mobilize and regulate the social sphere. In this process it is furthermore shown how an ambigious yet distinct 'social scientific gaze' was discursively articulated.

Per Wisselgren

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