Stina Bengtsson

NODE Panel with Stina Bengtsson
followed by a Conversation with Karin Fast and Paul Adams

Chair: Henrik Örnebring

Navigare necesse est: What does it mean to (have to) navigate our digital media world?

Navigation is a concept that today is often used to describe media users’ mundane practices and approaches to the contemporary media world. Many articles and books during the last couple of years have used ‘navigation’ to describe what ordinary people do with news, data, algorithms and AI. The idea of navigation is often used as a way of discussing ordinary media practices in relation to the cross-platform, or high-choice, media landscape, as well as media use from a broader everyday life perspective. Brita Ytre-Arne (2023), in her recent book Media Use in Digital Everyday Life puts forward navigation as a metaphor to describe how people use media ‘to orient [themselves] as [they] move through [their] everyday lives’, underlining the routinized dimensions of media use across, and in between, social domains, and the role of digital technologies in this: practically and specifically, but also socially and existentially (2023, pp. 8-9). Other recent publications have use navigation equal to mundane media practices as well as to describe media users’ struggles to curate and make sense of their own media practices. Navigation is a metaphor for how we move spatially in the digital media environment, but also for what living in shifting digital media environments feels like. This presentation takes a closer look at the recent uses within media and communication studies of the concept of navigation and its different variations and discusses what the mundane practices of navigating digital media tells us about the existential experience of living in our contemporary media culture.

Stina Bengtsson is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. She has through her career been engaged in understanding how people coexist with media from phenomenological, material, spatial and ethical perspectives. In her work she often approaches media experiences from a detailed micro perspective, aiming at understanding how the media, as practices, technologies and texts play a fundamental role in everyday life, and how it shapes and is shaped by meaning-making processes and everyday practices. Some of her most recent publications are the co-authored book Navigating the News: Young People, Digital Culture and Everyday Life (2024), articles such as The Meanings of Social Media Use in Everyday Life: Filling Empty Slots, Everyday Transformations, and Mood Management (2023), A Phenomenology of News: Understanding News in Digital Culture (2021), and the co-edited volume Classics in Media Theory (2024).

Commentators:

Karin Fast, PhD, is Professor of Media and Communication Studies and Research Coordinator at the Centre for Geomedia Studies, Karlstad University. Her books include The Digital Backlash and the Paradoxes of Disconnection (2024), Transmedia Work: Privilege and Precariousness in Digital Modernity (2019), and Geomedia Studies: Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds (2018). She has published her research in journals such as New Media & Society, Communication Theory, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Digital Geography and Society, and Space and Culture. Her current research includes the project Hot Desks in Cool Places: Coworking Spaces as Post-Digital Industry and Movement (Swedish Research Council).

Paul Adams is the Erich W. Zimmermann Regents Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the Human Geography editor for the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and was the founder of the Media and Communication Specialty Group in the American Association of Geographers. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1993) and has taught at Virginia Tech, SUNY-Albany, and Texas A&M University. He has also held visiting research and teaching appointments at McGill University and University of Montreal (Canada), the University of Bergen (Norway), Karlstad University (Sweden), University of Canterbury (New Zealand), and Johannes Gutenberg University (Germany). He has published over 60 peer reviewed articles and chapters and 8 sole-authored and co-authored books, including Geographies of Media and Communication (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), which won the James W. Carey Media Research Award and has been translated into Chinese.

Chair:

Henrik Örnebring is Professor of Media and Communication at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University. He is the author/editor of four books and numerous articles and book chapters on journalism. His main research interests are journalism history, comparative journalism studies, and journalistic work practices and working conditions across time and space. His most recent book (Journalistic Autonomy: The Genealogy of a Concept, with Michael Karlsson) won the 2023 Tankard Book Award and the 2024 ICA Journalism Studies Division Book Award.

With the support of NODE – The Ander Centre for Research on News and Opinion in the Digital Era