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Returning to classic tv viewing habits

Posted on June 18, 2020June 18, 2020 by Sari Piittinen

It’s no news that the popularity of streaming services has changed the way in which most people watch tv. In recent years I, too, had become a person who sits down to watch several episodes of the same show in a row. However, some weeks ago I noticed that this wasn’t really working well anymore. The list of shows I was interested in kept growing and growing – including new seasons of tv shows that I already loved. Not to mention that many of them were rather heavily dramatic, detailed and narratively rich shows, which meant that watching more than two episodes in a row was almost a disservice to them.

I should probably mention here that tv is my favourite format of visual storytelling. I love having time to get to know and fall in love with the characters and watching stories develop and unfold over time. I’ve been a tv girl since before its current golden era started; I used to have written schedules to catch shows on the pre-streaming television, and tape shows if two favourite ones were on at the same time. Along with games, it’s been an important hobby that has enrichened my imagination.

So to fix my current tv viewing troubles, I went back in time and made a tv schedule. There’s a tv show for each day, and two shows for some days. It’s not a very strict schedule. If I don’t have time to watch tv some day, it’s ok to do it later. It may not initially seem very efficient to go back to the habit of watching only one episode a week, but I’ve had great success with progressing on several of the shows I’m interested in, rather than struggling with trying to prioritize one or three. It also allows me to really appreciate the show and what’s happening in it. Last week I finished catching up with Westworld, something that otherwise might have taken much longer even if I had the freedom to do it at any time. It’s nice to always have an idea of what to watch; no decision power is wasted because the decision has been already made.

A screenshot from Better Call Saul, Netflix

So what are the tv shows currently on my plate? Better Call Saul, The Good Fight, The Crown, Preacher, Deadwood, Rome (filling the spot freed by Westworld), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and The Chi. All of these shows are very enjoyable (the one that makes me hesitate the most is Preacher, but even that one is rather entertaining in all its ridiculousness). Better Call Saul has become one of my all-time favourites, like watching a glorious trainwreck in slow motion while simultaneously loving the train and hoping nobody gets hurt (but they will). The two I would love to highlight now are The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The Chi because in comparison to the other shows, they are the ones I’ve heard and read the least about elsewhere although they are very, very good (well, I’m only about 5 episodes into The Chi, but considering it’s highly rated I have no reason to believe it will drastically drop in quality).

A screenshot from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Amazon Prime

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is delightfully different from the other shows I’m watching. It’s about a housewife trying to break into stand-up comedy in the turn of 1950s-1960s. You might already guess that it’s hilarious. The dialogue is great, the casting for each role is perfect (including the tiniest supporting roles), and it’s a feast for the eyes with its fashion and stylistic choices. Because it’s not violent, I can even recommend it to friends who’d shudder at many of the other shows I watch. It’s definitely a show to fall in love with.

The Chi, on the contrary, is closely connected to violence in the sense that a boy’s murder starts a kind of a chain reaction of events that affects the lives of many in the community. On one hand, the viewer feels anxiety fearing the dark turn that the lives of the characters appear to be on the verge of taking, but on the other, we also see resilience and defiance against expectations, and efforts to atone for one’s actions. One of the characters I’m especially invested in is Emmett who suddenly has to take responsibility for raising his baby son. He’s a young man unequipped, unprepared, and at least at the beginning entirely unwilling to take on this role, but ends up accepting the responsibility. Where this responsibility takes him, however, remains for me to be seen (I’m still at episode 5 of season 1). Like in real life, the best intentions don’t seem to always have desired outcomes on this show. The narrative thread connects the characters and their stories beautifully together. The characters are complex and I can’t wait to see more of their layers peeled in time.

Since the tv schedule plan has been working so well, I’m going to keep it up for now and hopefully enjoy more of these worlds and characters, and introduce myself to new ones once I’m all caught up!

Seemingly quitting academics

Posted on May 16, 2020February 26, 2021 by Sari Piittinen

In the beginning of this year, I decided to give an academic career track a 6 months’ chance during which I would apply for research funding and academic positions, and if none of them worked out, I’d seriously consider moving on. I’ve now received a rejection for all my funding applications this spring and have started to apply for non-academic positions…

…Quite happily. The more I’ve thought about it, I don’t think an academic career track would make me a very happy person. I’m passionate about doing research, sure, but the constant competition, rejections, and job insecurity – when I’m already prone to unfairly comparing myself to others – is never going to create a healthy mental and emotional state for me. What the academia is so far constantly telling me is that I’m not good enough. Not enough experience of this or that, not enough networks (especially international ones), not enough publications… Which is, pardon my French, bullshit because I’m a hard worker and fully capable of anything that the work requires. So why not leave behind this toxic unrequited love and look for a position in which my skills are appreciated? It may not be easily and quickly found, but I still have more hope to find a position like that than to be successful with funding applications (which are like playing lottery, if it took weeks to prepare a lottery ticket) or battling for scarce academic positions with equally capable peers (who may have more impressive CVs).

Right now, I honestly just want to have a job with some new challenges that will give me something new to focus on, but at the same time, will allow me to enjoy my freetime guilt-free, as I think I may not have been able to fully do for the past six years. When you’re a researcher, there’s always something you should be doing.

I feel like I’ve somehow always known that things would end this way, with me and the academic world. There have always been “requirements” for doing the work that I haven’t been, well, okay with. I think it’s ridiculous that weekends become time to do parts of the work there was no time to do during the week, without extra pay. I have no interest in staying abroad for lengthy periods of time to prove I’m an international master scholar. I’m okay with teaching, but it’s always been clear to me I’m not as passionate about it as many of my peers who do a wonderful job connecting with their students. But more than anything, I’m just not interested in constant individual competition and comparison to others. Even when I play video games with my friends, I never play against them – we play co-operative games as a team. That’s because I’m not interested in proving that I’m better than others, I just want to be important and useful for my team. But in the academics, you have to be the one with the best stats and scores to have a chance at… you know, having a career, getting paid. I want to be the best for my team, I don’t want to be the best, period. There’s a difference.

And the thing is, outside academia, I think people appreciate team thinking. I want to be a team’s healer, tank, damage dealer, whatever position I fit best; not the person who grinds the game 12 hours a day to max all these skills and may still not even get a chance to enter the match because someone else grinded 13 hours. I’m exhausted by the academia, but also energised by the thought that somewhere out there, a team might be able to recognize my skills and invite me to join them.

Besides, I’ve got cats to feed. And there are so many content creators I want to be able to support, and currently can’t, because I don’t have the extra money. It’s hecking killing me. I need to have an income so I can give other people theirs.

The good thing to come from this is that I’ll probably feel free to start blogging about very non-academic topics here as well. I’ve always enjoyed writing down my thoughts on random topics and have had a diary/journal/blog online, on and off, since I was 15. Now I can turn this into my new platform for doing it. Should be fun.

Reading papers: Professional wrestling

Posted on March 4, 2020 by Sari Piittinen

Asuka at WWE Live in Glasgow in 2017, photo by Russell Stewart

I recently came across an issue of The Popular Culture Studies Journal in 2018 that had a special section dedicated to professional wrestling studies. It has 16 whopping texts about the topic and I’ve only scratched the surface so far, but I already want to get started writing down some of my thoughts.

Pro wrestling is something that I’ve been watching on and off for over ten years now. (“On and off” means that there were some years in between when I barely watched anything, and periods when I watched wrestling shows every week.) I’ve been well aware of how it’s perceived as a culturally “inferior” form of entertainment, lowbrow, something that an academic person like myself ought to never be caught watching and enjoying. (I’m of course joking here.) But as I’ve watched it, I’ve found it a fascinating phenomenon in many ways, and even if right now it seems unlikely I’ll ever study it, well, in an alternative timeline I already would have. Back in the day when I was deciding the topic for my MA thesis, one of my options was to study how pro wrestling commentary on WWE’s shows is translated into Finnish, since (heavily edited) RAW and SmackDown had been aired on Finnish tv for a while at that point. And yes, some of the translations were ..interesting. My interest in Japanese culture ended up beating WWE for my MA thesis topic, but things could have easily turned out differently.

It is also a little hilarious that I’m continuously interested in research topics that are or have been considered lowbrow – digital games, the gothic, let’s play videos, carnival, and here pro wrestling… Not sure it’s a blessing or a curse to identify interesting phenomena in topics that appear to need to be justified over and over again for others who struggle to see their value. This challenge is certainly recognized and addressed by the pro wrestling scholars in the issue. In the introduction, Castleberry, Reinhard, Foy & Olson summarise so well why pro wrestling is right now an interesting resource for observing sociocultural issues that I’ll make an exception and quote it:

“Fake news is kayfabe, online performativity is a work, and social media campaigns can be top-down manipulated or bottom-up inspirational. The genre of pro wrestling is more than a physical story form. It articulates class struggle and personifies the negotiation of power—sometimes fair but oftentimes stacked against the just, the virtuous, the universal underdog.” (pages 65-66)

In other words… The fictional storyworld ‘bubbles’ of pro wrestling don’t seem too different from groups that establish their own concepts of truth, or the questioning of truth in today’s society. Online performativity is everywhere in different forms, including gameplay streaming, vlogging and blogging, review videos, or self-help advice… And in these different types of content, people do things or take on roles that are specifically intended for the performance and not something they would otherwise do. Some popular phenomena are backed by powerful institutions, while others begin their success on a grassroot level (see, for example, environmentalist movements). Certain social groups are either perceived as, or hope to be perceived as, underdogs, and gain supporters who wish to combat the perceived unjust division of power. Basically, despite its fictional setting, the concepts and phenomena that take place in pro wrestling are not at all divorced from reality, especially now when anyone can become an online performer and create their own narrative that is simultaneously fictional and realistic.

One particularly fascinating concept is kayfabe, as discussed by Eero Laine in the paper “Professional Wrestling Scholarship: Legitimacy and Kayfabe”. Kayfabe is based on the assumption that everyday events are somehow directed by those in power in the backstage, resulting in a simultaneously cynical and optimistically speculative view of the world. In wrestling, it has to do with how writers and powerful figures like Vince McMahon make decisions of how wrestlers are portrayed and what kinds of stories they’re allowed to tell. But even outside the world of pro wrestling, it seems a very fruitful approach for analysing the performances and theatricality in politics, business, the media, and so on. It might be combined, for example, with critical discourse analysis, which is especially focused on relations of power, dominance and inequality. I’ve witnessed a kind of deeply cynical kayfabe element even in the way gamers talk about games, their development, and any kind of failure at addressing player concerns (for example, when games have glitches that aren’t immediately fixed by the game developer) – there is a kind of big bad making decisions behind the scenes. There’s something here worth exploring, I think.

Reading papers: Cognitive linguistic and multimodal methods

Posted on February 21, 2020 by Sari Piittinen

The article I’ve read this time is “The visual basis of linguistic meaning and its implications for critical discourse studies: Integrating cognitive linguistic and multimodal methods” by Christopher Hart, published in Discourse & Society in 2016 (find it here). This is the first non-media studies article during this little article reading experiment of mine!

The disclaimer:
I don’t aim to write ‘academic reviews’ of these papers, but very informal and subjective thoughts about how these papers or chapters could influence my own work. I even avoid direct quotes of the text to also make it visually more apparent that this is not an academic text.

I was drawn to this paper because of my continued interest in multimodality and, well, the intriguing wording of ‘visual basis of linguistic meaning’. However, the ‘cognitive linguistic’ aspect of it intimidated me a little; the term ‘cognitive’ tends to make me think of all things psychological and things that happen inside a person’s mind, which is not really what I’ve been studying so far. Sure, I’ve analysed meanings produced in discourse, but I’ve tried to be careful not to step over the line to make suggestions about what people think when they are experiencing this or that. These are two different things.

I think partially because of the fear that I was stepping over into (to me) unexplored area of research it took me a lot longer to finish reading this paper than the previous ones. There’s nothing wrong with the paper or how it was written (on the contrary, it demonstrates its arguments and examples well). I’m just experiencing that good ol’ impostor syndrome and sometimes encountering something that isn’t immediately and easily understandable to me makes me question my intelligence, and that is destructive for my motivation to keep reading. Especially if I feel like it’s something that I should easily understand, which is the case here considering my educational background… Anyway. Just trying to be open about my challenges because how else to improve?

The paper discusses what cognitive linguistic critical discourse studies (CL-CDS) has to offer in combination with multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), how to explore connections between language, image and ideology, and how multimodal information is encoded by mental representations that are invoked by language use. Some of it is familiar to anyone who’s dealt with discourse studies before, but with suggested new uses and perspectives.

The paper gives a short introduction to MDA and how there’s been a need to develop a toolkit, like ones used in linguistics/grammatics, to describe the communication of ideas, attitudes and identities in non-linguistic forms. This is actually something I’ve had some methodological anxiety about, since I’m supposed to be analysing gestures, expressions, etc. in video material in the near future. It seems very difficult to find tools for describing what different non-linguistic means of expressing meaning might actually mean. If someone has a sarcastic smile on their face, am I allowed to suggest it’s a sarcastic smile, and if so, based on what reasoning? In linguistics, there are specific grammatical means and contextual information that we can use to support our arguments. I’m still struggling to understand how to do that credibly with non-linguistic communication. This paper, at least, helps orientate my thinking somewhat, for example, through the conceptualizations of image as co-text and context: how linked language usage and images match, and how previously encountered semiotic experiences reflect in simulated experiences.

One especially interesting part for me was the argument concerning how the encoding of orientational values, at the level of simulation, encourages us to experience an event as if we were in the shoes of the agent or patient (in a text). So for example, a person or group involved in an event (like being threatened by a shooter) can be positioned as the patient – as the one on the receiving end of an action – so that the viewer interprets the action as a personal threat rather than something neutrally reported. Basically, by deciding whom to portray as the agent or patient we’re also making decisions of who are to be perceived as ‘one of us’ or as ‘other’, and something like danger can be perceived as personal or impersonal. (At least that’s how I understand it.) Doing this kind of analysis in language is familiar to me, but in images, not so much. I see the benefits of using this kind of approach to the analysis of news media, in particular, but not necessarily the kind of data that I have currently collected, aside from acknowledging the positioning of participants as performers or audience and what that suggests about their perceived importance for the content. However, since we’re already speaking of simulation, I wonder if someone would one day do a close analysis of, for example, how different types of game characters are visually positioned during scenes and still images (when the player does not control the camera) and what this suggests about their ideological connotations.

I probably failed to discuss the main points that the article strove to make, but like I said, I’ve been going through some challenges and am still taking it all in. At least I managed to blog about it!

Academic unemployment

Posted on February 3, 2020February 3, 2020 by Sari Piittinen

Being unemployed can be generally stressful – I have experience of both non-academic and academic unemployment. With the former, I mean the time after my receiving my MA degree when I wasn’t yet pursuing an academic career, and with the latter I mean the time after receiving my doctoral degree and falling in love with doing research. In this blog post, I’m going to talk about the hardships of being unemployed and interested in an academic career, although some of it may overlap with experiences of unemployment generally.

How to talk about being unemployed?

One of the annoying parts about unemployment is dealing with questions about your employment situation. The thing is, almost always the reaction from others is an overtly pitying response, which makes you feel like your situation is indeed pitiful and terrible. And you don’t know how to respond yourself, because of course the situation is terrible in some ways (such as lacking a stable income), but why should we think that if we don’t have a job or research funding, our lives are basically on hold, meaningless and filled with sadness? I don’t think I should be depressed just because I’m in a bad employment situation right now. But the general response to news about unemployment is always negative. I’ve noticed myself trying to combat this with cringeworthy responses like “oh, no, I don’t have anything lined up right now, but besides that I’M DOING GREAT!” This may have weirded out some people…

It really feels difficult to have an honest conversation about unemployment. Admitting that it feels good to sleep late in the morning makes you feel guilty. Admitting that it’s crappy that the only reason to go outside is to get groceries feels depressing. You’re not really ‘allowed’ to think about the potential few upsides of unemployment because it means you’re a lazy bum leeching on the society, or something, but only focusing on the negative is incredibly self-destructive and serves nobody. I’m still working on this issue. I feel like periodic unemployment in the current world is just going to be a thing I can’t avoid, and I refuse to hate my life for it. Is that wrong? Can I honestly and openly say that without shooting myself in the leg?

What I can do is find ways to make my life meaningful during this time. I have an action plan that includes projects like starting this blog. I’m reading research papers I wouldn’t otherwise have the time to read. I’m continuing and polishing up research projects that I started last fall when I had a temporary postdoc contract at the university. And, of course, I’m working on funding applications and keep my eyes open for any positions that I could apply for. I don’t think these activities are only valuable and meaningful if I’m simultaneosly employed. I don’t think they are pitiful, depressing and sad.

It always feels like you’re the only one

Of course you should never compare yourself to others, but receiving your PhD and watching others receive theirs and immediately and successfully move on to new projects can definitely make you feel like you’re the one weirdo who can’t seem to win the lottery “that everyone else does”. In reality, other postdocs that are experiencing what you are are probably doing the same thing as you – keeping quiet about their situation because it’s humiliating to not have anything going on “when everyone else is”.

Last summer I was able to meet another postdoc who had been unemployed since receiving her PhD. This person was super qualified and motivated with fascinating research interests (dare I say, like myself); if there was any sense in academic employment, she’d be snatched away and hired immediately. It may be terrible to say that seeing someone else in the same situation did make me feel better because I’d really come to believe I was somehow inherently worse than others for not being successful with any of my applications so far. But this person wasn’t worse than others, and neither am I. We just haven’t been in the right place at the right time, answering to a specific need that someone with the power to make decisions was looking to address. And there must be more of us – we’re just somewhere out there, struggling individually.

‘Free labour’

What’s especially troubling about academic unemployment is that you’re always expected to be producing new research, whether you’re paid for it or not. If you don’t, you don’t look active, don’t have enough publications to be considered for positions – I’m not sure how closely publication lists are checked in funding applications, but you need to look like you know your stuff. And this is something I’ve found really difficult to swallow, even if I typically end up doing research-related things anyway because I can’t help myself. While the long-term unemployed on other fields also usually have to be active somehow to remain employable (I also did voluntary studies and attended training events after my MA) it’s probably not comparable to the expectation to publish top research in top journals with limited tools. Which leads us to…

On the outside looking in

An unemployed scholar is usually also locked out of access to journals and electronic materials, as well as many academic events that require you to have funding or a contract to participate. So somehow you’re expected to stay up to date without access to readings, and stay relevant without face-to-face contact to other researchers. Conferences aren’t free either; for the unemployed, travelling a longer distance is not an option, and the participation fees alone can be hundreds of euros. How many are willing or able to dig into their personal savings just to show the world that they’re still out there, trying their best? It can easily become a vicious cycle of not being able to do your research propely because you don’t have access to the materials and community, and not receiving chances to become employed or funded because of it. I’m currently expected to add more references to one of my projects, and I’m genuinely a bit scared because the references I need might be locked behind a paywall.

I’m complaining because these issues are fixable. There could be even more focus on open access publishing so that everyone can read the research, not just the ones with the best affiliations. Academic events could clearly state in their invitations that, for example, alumni are also welcome, whether they are currently officially affiliated with the university or not. (And these invitations wouldn’t be posted on staff-only email lists.) And discounts could exist not only for students, but also for those unemployed or with a low income. I understand that nothing is free, but it’s also lame for events to benefit from the participation of those without monetary support from the university.

I started the post talking about how I didn’t want to focus on the negativity of the experience of unemployment, but then ended up writing a lot about what gives me anxiety, stress, frustration, or even angers me about it. (Oops!) Maybe someone in the same situation will read this and at least be able to feel like they’re not alone. I do hope that my period of unemployment will soon be over and for longer than a few months; a break of even just two years from uncertainty would be luxurious at this point (as a PhD student, I always got funding for one year at a time, always learning about it in December – it’s not a very healthy way to live). Until then, I’ll keep finding ways to make things interesting and meaningful, and keep my brain active!

Reading papers: Processual approach to media, communication and social change theorization

Posted on February 3, 2020February 3, 2020 by Sari Piittinen

The article I read this time is “Theorizing media, communication and social change: towards a processual approach” by Sabina Mihelj and James Stanyer, published in Media, Culture & Society in 2019 (find it here). It seems the papers are numbered in such a way that I’ll be doing papers from one journal at a time, so I guess we’ll be continuing with media studies until an article from a different journal pops up!

This time I was interested in this paper, first, because I didn’t know what a ‘processual approach’ concretely means, and second, because ‘social change’ or change in general is a kind of a hot topic I’ve heard researchers mention a lot in the past five years or so, but I don’t really have any knowledge about how it’s studied and has been studied in the past. The paper by Mihelj and Stanyer both discusses how the topic has been approached in five research journals between 1951 and 2015, and suggests an approach for future use, so in a way it’s a rather nifty study to come across for someone with my gap in knowledge. We can say that this article gave me more information about research on media, communication and social change, but unlike the two papers I blogged about previously, it’s not something I could see myself applying to my work in the near future (just because I’m not working on a topic like this). So, it benefitted my general knowledge instead.

In the longitudinal look at research journals, Mihelj and Stanyer discovered two main approaches to theorizing social change (which could both also appear in the same study): media/communication as an agent of social change, and media/communication as an environment for social change. These approaches also had several subcategories; examples for the latter approach are transnationalization, commercialization and democratization. The paper identifies key differences between the two approaches – for example, the focus on micro-changes that affect individuals for the former, and changes on the macrolevel that may take decades or even centuries to complete for the latter.

What the two approaches have in common is that they privilege outcomes instead of processes – hence the authors’ interest in introducing a processual approach and typology. Basically, this approach perceives society as a process and change as natural, and suggests that any order or structures that exist are temporary and by-products of change. So, instead of highlighting the outcomes of structural changes, for example, the process of how this happens has received less attention. Mihelj and Stanyer point out that research that focuses on outcomes can’t help but become outdated quickly; in contrast, focus on processes especially in the contemporary unpredictable, complex changes, as I understand it, would produce information and discussions that can be continued and applied for a long time to come. The paper also suggests a focus on examining gradual shifts over a long period.

To someone reading about these approaches for the first time, even just the longitudinal (decades or even centuries long) research sounds very ambitious and overwhelming, although I’m aware that such tasks have been undertaken by many throughout history. Most of my studies have sought to examine closely rather specific and in-the-moment phenomena, although of course they connect to a larger picture, culture, society and a history of developments. I just haven’t explored those developments too much because I haven’t approached those topics from the viewpoint of social change. The shift to focusing on processes sounds intriguing to me. I can’t straight away imagine what the concrete steps and tools would be for doing this kind of research; how to identify the ways in which causes of change interact and combine to create change over time. This isn’t something that I need to figure out right now, either, but is certainly food for thought, and who knows, might influence the way in which I perceive phenomena – as something constantly in-process, which also goes along with the perception of how, for example, aspects of identity are continuously negotiated and (re)constructed in discourse. It’s interesting how papers that don’t seem to immediately benefit my own work still manage to poke my brain.

Public examination (PhD): Female folk singers in the media

Posted on January 23, 2020 by Sari Piittinen

Today I went to Noora Karjalainen’s public examination for her dissertation entitled “Woman, Artist, Other: Female Folk Singers in the Media”. As the title suggests, the study has to do with the media representation of female folk singers, but is approached through the lens of cultural remembering – which I understand as an active process of making sense of media texts based on existing texts (and representations). Basically, we make sense of stuff based on how stuff has been presented to us previously, but our understanding also changes the more stuff we see/hear/experience. The examination was a success, and I was happy to come home with an extra copy of the dissertation, which you can also read online here!

I want to highlight Karjalainen’s concept of the ‘Cosy Other’ here, since I’ve found it interesting ever since I first heard about it in her presenation at a seminar over a year ago. The Cosy Other, shortly put, is one that is simultaneously familiar and foreign; different, but not too different. It differs from how Others and Othering are usually conceptualized – in my own studies, I’ve linked the concept to monstrosity and exclusion, for example. The Other is typically something undesirable, threatening; an outsider. Here, otherness is constructed mainly through gender and musicianship (woman as artist) but also the genre of music (folk in relation to pop music). Additionally, the female folk singers are represented as near-mythical, ones with a special connection to their origins and land; in a way, some of the Othering aspects become glamorised. The ‘cosiness’ then comes from representing these Others in a favourable, intriguing, and perhaps even comforting way (because of nostalgia).

To me, this concept doesn’t only reveal interesting things about how female folk singers are represented in the media, but also seems a fruitful tool for exploring different types of contexts. For example, the opponent, Taru Leppänen, asked how a folk singer’s race or age might influence the ‘Cosy Otherness’ in their media representation. Is being the Cosy Other only possible for certain types of people in specific contexts? If not, how does the way in which the Cosy Other is constructed in these contexts differ? These, to me, are exciting questions that I hope will be explored in the future. Perhaps the Cosy Other could even be applied to how certain types of characters are portrayed in fiction (of course, my first thought is video games…).

Method readings: Multimodal discourse analysis

Posted on January 17, 2020 by Sari Piittinen

A recent reading on research methodology that has turned out to be rather impactful to me is Norris’s new book, Systematically Working With Multimodal Data: Research Methods in Multimodal Discourse Analysis, published just 2019. For a good while now, I’ve been trying to find a toolkit for making sense of how meanings are communicated on videos – a systematic toolkit that would help me deal with the overwhelming material that one video can contain. While first reading it, I had somewhat mixed feelings about multimodal discourse analysis (MDA). On one hand, it was intimidating to read about the level of detail in transcription that noted someone’s hand going up and down three times when they scratched their nose – that is, I’m not sure whether the level of detail that MDA goes into in transcribing lower-level mediated actions (‘a mode’s smallest pragmatic meaning unit’) is what I’m looking for in my research. On the other hand, now that I know of such a systematic and detailed way of transcribing and noting actions in videos, it seems impossible not to want to use it for absolutely everything (although perhaps combined with some other approach). And it does help that MDA guides you to focus on multimodally transcribing only the parts that are relevant to answering your research question, since it would take too much time and might even be counter productive to transcribe the whole video. The book specifically warns you not to start immediately transcribing (especially speech because this puts the focus on spoken language), but to first to take notes, get an overall understanding of the present higher-level mediated actions (for example, Skyping is one), and then decide which parts are relevant for a detailed micro analysis.

The step-by-step guidelines offered by the book are clear and helpful, but also a bit overwhelming initially, since when the process is broken down to pieces, it seems there are endless steps to the analysis. Once one actually starts doing it, it may not turn out to be that bad, especially after some experience and having figured out, for example, which programs to use for transcription.

I’m almost certain that I’ll end up making use of MDA as suggested by Norris sooner or later; I’ve included it as part of the methodology in my recent chapter proposals and funding applications because although MDA alone doesn’t seem enough to answer the questions I aim to answer, it seems such a valuable tool for working with video data.

Reading papers: Reception studies and discourse theory

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Sari Piittinen

I’ve decided to give a try to reading all the random research articles and chapters I’ve collected from the past few years and writing down some thoughts on each one. (Good luck with that, huh??) This leads us to the disclaimer that I should probably post on each update:

I don’t aim to write ‘academic reviews’ of these papers, but very informal and subjective thoughts about how these papers or chapters could influence my own work. I even avoid direct quotes of the text to also make it visually more apparent that this is not an academic text.

The first paper I’ve read is “The right to die: a Belgian case study combining reception studies and discourse theory” by Leen Van Brussel, published in Media, Culture & Society in 2018 (find it here).

What drew me to this paper were reception studies and discourse theory mentioned in the title. The paper is about the field of media studies which isn’t exactly my field – I’m certainly interested in studying media, but I’m not familiar with the specific tools and theory of the field of media studies, to clarify! However, I believe I could find use for some of the approaches and concepts of media studies, which is why broadening my views seems like a good idea.

Also, with my background in linguistics, I’m very familiar with the concept of discourse, but as a methodological approach it’s usually referred to as discourse studies or discourse analysis. The use of discourse theory, specifically, made me curious to see whether this media studies approach is much different from the approaches I’m used to. (While it underlines discourse that goes beyond the linguistic, there are certainly discourse analytic approaches that also take context and multimodality into consideration, so in that sense it’s similar. With that being said, some of the tools presented in this paper were new to me, so clearly there is some homework to be done.) Reception studies is also something I’ve wanted to learn more about, since I’m interested in studying player experiences of video games. Therefore, understanding better how to study the ways in which people make sense of and experience different types of media texts sounds pretty important. Finally, I was also interested in the combination of two approaches (reception studies and discourse theory) that Van Brussel says has not been used much before; I’m all for finding new ways to combine approaches, I’m often tempted to do such things myself, and am inspired by the innovativeness of others!

The study examines what people say in response to media texts about euthanasia, but instead of euthanasia, I’m more interested in the approaches and concepts that the author is working with and how they conducted the study. This can be a kind of a difference between an academic reader and a non-academic publication: the latter is usually only interested in the results, but for the sake of improving my professional toolkit, I’m intested in how those results were achieved. (With that being said, euthanasia was a very interesting topic for this paper and I happily read all of the analysis!)

To summarise my FEELS about the approaches: what Van Brussel is selling, I’m buying. First of all, the tools presented in this article are explained clearly and make sense. Everything was easy to read and understand. Secondly, I can see how the proposed combination of discourse theory and reception studies could have many uses, including the context of video games which is my current playfield. Very good, solid stuff.

Possibly the biggest concrete takeaway to me from this paper is the differentiation between the logic of recognition and the logic of identification when we interpret media texts. Of these, logic of recognition has to do with recognizing the socially dominant order, the hegemonic message in the text. But recognizing it doesn’t say anything about how we invest in it (or whether we agree/disagree with it, how position ourselves in relation to it). That’s where the logic of identification comes in: how we identify or dis-identify with discourses that become activated in media texts. The differentiation between the two makes it possible to examine how people produce interpretations like “these are the values, ideologies etc. that I recognize the text is constructing, and/but this is what I say about it”. Seems rather useful to me, and applicable to many different types of data.

The study shows how people can negotiate and reject discourses that are activated in the media, or how they can bring in alternative discourses. To me the interesting next step is to examine how this is done in different contexts and what types of alternative discourses people offer in them. At the same time, we’re also dependent on existing or available discourses that allow us to speak; if the discourse doesn’t exist in the society, or in the media, how can anyone say anything about it? This leads to how important it is to consider what discourses are made available to us, especially because it can be so difficult for us to see the invisible. In the linguistic sense, we can see new words and terms developed or borrowed when discourses emerge – an old example of this is perhaps the loanword sekuhara for sexual harrassment in Japanese, from 1989. However, arguably it took until the global Me Too movement (and the simple, unifying label #MeToo) of the late 2010s for the discourse to be made available again in the Japanese culture.

In any case, although I’m not technically a media scholar, I’m very interested in using the tools suggested by Van Brussel at some point, and I’m pretty psyched that I could be so inspired by the very first article that I ended up reading for this little ‘project’. Now even if I next end up reading several articles that don’t have much I could apply in my own work (although I have no doubt that they are good papers), I can always fondly remember this one.

Interest overflow

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Sari Piittinen

Being a postdoc researcher so far has been quite different from being a PhD student in the sense that my research interests have been much less limited by a specific topic. This has resulted in a bit of a controlled chaos. During this fall, I have written research plans, proposals, or articles for five distinctively different topics/projects. I’ve read and learned more about, for example:

Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque
Speedrunning video games and streamed speedrun events
Gameplay videos and streaming (as work, especially)
Player comments and reviews online
Trolling
Anti-language
Gaming literacy

And I’m still planning on familiarizing myself with readings on masculinity in gaming culture, although I have no idea if I will be able to prepare a chapter proposal in time on this topic that was suggested to me by a colleague. (I was also working on different topics in the spring and summer, but of those most relevant now is the collection and categorization of player comments that I’m now using in an article.)

It seems I’m like a kid in a candy store, sampling all the different flavours of research available to me (although, in my work, still connected to games and gaming culture) – but it would be great to be able to focus on one topic properly again. Right now, it feels like I’m chasing chances to produce publications or gain funding/employment, which means I’ll see a specific call and do the work to produce something that fits that call, even if it means starting from almost scratch. Of course, I always have some background knowledge to start with – like methodological knowledge (discourse analysis, qualitative content analysis, ethnographic work, grounded theory – I may not have done all of these specifically, but I’ve prepared to do them), and so much knowledge and experience of the gaming culture that, for example, identifying connections between typically non-gaming concepts and gaming comes to me quite naturally. That is, I can see how gaming connects to culture and society more generally, is influenced by it and influences it.

Right now, I’m employed until the end of 2019. Gaining funding or employment would also mean gaining a specific topic area to work on, most likely one that I’ve proposed and am super motivated to work on. It would be great to have that kind of direction and not feel like I have to try to please everyone, even if I’m impressed with how many different things I’ve been able to juggle during this fall. (I have some teaching duties, too!) I’m feeling more confident about my abilities, but now I need others to recognize those abilities, too. I honestly think I could do great work (and my dissertation work is proof of that), I just need a chance.