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.