The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk

Bishnupriya Ghosh, Bhaskar Sarkar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317268222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection presents new work in risk media studies from critical humanities perspectives. Defining, historicizing, and consolidating current scholarship, the volume seeks to shape an emerging field, signposting its generative insights while examining its implicit assumptions.

When and under what conditions does risk emerge? How is risk mediated? Who are the targets of risk media? Who manages risk? Who lives with it? Who are most in danger? Such questions—the what, how, who, when, and why of risk media—inform the scope of this volume. With roots in critical media studies and science and technology studies, it hopes to inspire new questions, perspectives, frameworks, and analytical tools not only for risk, media, and communication studies, but also for social and cultural theories.

Editors Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar bring together contributors who elucidate and interrogate risk media's varied histories and futures. This book is meant for students and scholars of media and communication studies, science and technology studies, and the interdisciplinary humanities, looking either to deepen their engagement with risk media or to broaden their knowledge of this emerging field.

1

MEDIA AND RISK

An Introduction

Bishnupriya Ghosh, Bhaskar Sarkar

The impetus for this volume came from our participation in two research residencies: “Speculative Globalities” (Irvine, spring 2009) and “Risk@Humanities” (Ithaca, 2012–2013).¹ During our stint at Cornell, two visiting senior scholars from two distinct disciplinary formations caught our attention with their presentations on risks associated with the HIV–AIDS crisis: William Leiss et al.’s, one of the foremost experts on risk communication and policy, and Michael Warner, known for his seminal work on queer theory and the public sphere. Prior to their visits, we read Leiss’ (2008) co-authored study of the Canadian policy debates around blood donation from MSM (Men Who have Sex With Men) groups, and Warner’s (1995) controversial first-person piece in The Village Voice on negotiating risky sexual practices in the pre-antiretroviral era.² While both addressed individual and social entanglements, there were clear differences in the way they approached questions of moral responsibility and ethical obligations in handling risk. In many ways, these differences brought us to this project.

In the co-authored article, Leiss et al. considered alternative time-frames for MSM donor deferral (policyspeak centered on abstinence) to replace the then-current lifetime ban on blood donation from MSM. Should members of this community be allowed to donate blood, if they practiced abstinence for ten years, five years, or even one year? Leiss understood the lifetime moratorium, which made blood bank shortages worse, as hailing back to the panic around contaminated supplies during the early years of the HIV–AIDS crisis. However, one year seemed too short a period to get rid of a “residual risk” even after “various safeguards for blood [were] applied” (58). In his estimation, the ten- or five-year deferrals seemed safe enough.³ In the lively discussion that followed, the points of disagreement reflected a generation gap around making abstinence a policy instrument, and called attention to divergent assumptions about the constitution of risky social groups, the veracity of survey-driven evidence, and problems of “knowing” intimate sexual practices. Seminar participants also questioned the moral imagination underlying such studies, a normalizing imagination which shadows biopolitical governmentality. When pressed, Leiss insisted on the transparency of communication between reasonable and responsible folks, especially in the context of a social crisis. This liberal investment in the well-informed and committed citizen– subject, an idealization of post-enlightenment political theory, keeps at bay the uncertainties of behavior, disclosure, data collection, and knowledge.

A few months later, we had the opportunity to discuss with Michael Warner his reflections on negotiating desire, especially risky sexual behavior, in the midst of an epidemic. Writing in 1995, Warner poses the question—“how much risk is acceptable?”—from the perspective of a gay male subject. This essentially trans-individual perspective, which embodies the daily heartbreaks and struggles of living in the shadow of death, troubles all normative imaginations with their proscriptions and prescriptions, including melancholic attempts from within the gay community at denouncing promiscuity, closing down bathhouses, and extolling abstinence. Warner presents his own risky behavior to underscore the impossibility of fully regulating lived sexual practices—those everyday becomings whose value to individuals is not calculable. His point is that the standard discourses of risky behavior cannot address non-normative subjectivities, their self-evaluations, or their ethical self-relations.

Both Warner and Leiss engage similar questions of ethical risk management. For Leiss, the MSM donor deferral policy represents not the contest between right and wrong, but the contest between two rights: the right to receive uncontaminated blood squares off against the right to be free of unreasonable discrimination. When risk is low, what amount of precaution is reasonable and what amount of risk is acceptable? Leiss’ notion of community is predicated on the marking out of MSM groups as the source of risk for the collective. Warner writes from within the eye of the storm, as it were: as a gay male subject figuring out what remains of a life whose self-defining practices threaten its continuity, he implodes the identitarian collectivity to embrace the singularity of experience. It is the singular that turns quantification into an infeasible undertaking. And yet, so much of social scientific research on risk, even when it attends to the qualitative dimensions, slips into a will to quantify. Policy studies that work with survey data about population groups to make biopolitical interventions cannot avoid the aggregation of non-normative singularities into an isolable particularity. This instrumentalizing reduction delivers the normative as a manageable target. Warner foregrounds indeterminacy as a constitutive element of risky phenomena: that is, the persistence of the uncertain in the social despite all attempts at rational governance.

Our discussion of these public engagements with risk by two reputed scholars brings to the fore several dimensions of isolating, measuring, assessing, and managing risk: in this case, the erasure of difference and the occlusion of uncertainty. Crucially, it also highlights the processes of mediation which shape the seemingly value-neutral survey and the highly personal testimonial. While attentive to variation, the first continues to bulldoze difference within the social group in order to establish its core identity, a reduction that then allows for stereotyping and pathologizing “a lifestyle.” This erasure of difference typifies risk management that disavows radical uncertainties. In contrast, the testimonial historicizes the subject in terms of its concrete locations and practices, insisting on the non-normative nature of subjectivity. Lifestyles are inimitably different, even within a avowedly localized context such as New York’s West Village. In the first case, mediation abstracts and isolates particularities, producing a standardization of even non-normative population types. In the second, any such standardization is ruled out. The testimonial form refuses the censorship of communities in crisis by recording the episodic oscillation of carnal expressions caught between the protection of the self and the intractability, even resilience, of desire.

The essays in this volume collectively explore the conjunction of risk and media/mediation. Everyday life is replete with instances of such a conjunction. For many contemporary subjects, the day begins with a highly communicative morning run: lightweight wearable devices register and record vital statistics such as heartbeat and blood pressure levels. The body appears in discrete quantified fragments, generating information streams that track latent damage. One may live for years with imperfect lungs or increased blood pressure, but when one receives and processes embodied signals of those states, they become legible as risk. A large market for digital health apps offers techno-moderns all kinds of options for reading and interpreting these signals. Personalized biosensors, connectivity infrastructures, and data storage facilities organize the dispersed labor of biomedical self-tracking within a brisk economy, presenting new risks. Beyond the consumerist care of the self, “self-quant” communities build and organize platforms, protocols, and technologies in order to modulate risk at the most intimate scales.⁴ Every now and then, a crisis erupts in the techno-economic complex of personalized risk mediation to explode all illusions of individualized control over the quantified self. In a recent privacy scandal, Facebook agreed to shut down its Onavo VPN because the Onavo app had mined user health data from smartphones, including screenshots of Amazon purchase histories. Apple instantly blocked the Facebook Research app from its App store, and Facebook removed the app from the Google Play Store.⁵ The furor once more drew attention to the data mining that aggregates and sells consumer information. For consumers, techno-economic integration enables connectivity as well as vulnerability; again and again, the individual user suddenly becomes aware of her statistical capture as population aggregate. These intricate functions of the human–machinic apparatus—from reading embodied signals to sensing technological vulnerability—highlight the centrality of mediation to risk. This is what the present volume is about.

Why Media and Risk?

Risk is the qualitative perception of possible harm. Conceptions of danger or peril prevail across cultures and hearken to ancient times. With the expansion of speculative trade and commerce in the early modern period, risk began to circulate primarily in its economic sense: potential harm rendered as financial loss. With the emergence of probabilistic knowledge in the eighteenth century and its institutionalization in the nineteenth, risk became a bona fide calculative rationality: specialized instruments facilitated quantitative analyses of the possibility and extent of future loss. Whether a venture was high risk or low risk depended not on probabilities alone but on the expected returns.⁶ The twentieth century was the century of risk management and speculation: the basis for the rapid expansion of stock markets and venture capital, such enterprises were so successful that a hubris of control took hold of capitalist societies. The triumph of increasingly sophisticated financial instruments mobilized riskier ventures, capitalizing on risk for bigger gains and aggravating the very volatility that they sought to mitigate. Just as better mountain climbing gears encourage more dangerous expeditions, so too, living with and seeking out intensified risks became a driving force for the twentieth-century zeitgeist. As Joseph Schumpeter noted, capitalism expands through innovations, through the “creative destruction” of extant systems. The sprawling speculative economies of the late twentieth century led to spectacular growth; yet the unbridled opportunism of these decades, feeding off pyramid and Ponzi schemes and runaway derivatives based on formulas that nobody quite understood, led to greater instabilities. In the twenty-first century, new uncertainties arising from increased market volatilities, technological instabilities, and environmental damage posed challenges to the efficacies of the risk calculus. As modern fictions of stable advancement and progress began to unravel, and discourses of precarity, catastrophe, and doomsday proliferated, uncertainty became intrinsic to contemporary life. This profound shift was as cognitive as it was affective.

As this rough and ready account indicates, mediated risk has become inimical to our lives. Whether it dwells in recursive events such as credit card hacks, weather warnings, or travel alerts, risk media channel and intensify perceptions. By risk media, we mean all the forms and processes that arise from the conjunction of risk and media/mediation. On the one hand, risk media constitute and communicate risk: without mediation, there are no risk perceptions. On the other, media and mediation often introduce new dangers or intensify already existing risks.

This mutual determination of risk and media is one of the core features of modern societies that compel an acute awareness of living with risk. The sociologist Ulrich Beck (1986) argues that the modalities of living with risk have become habitual to modern industrial societies; on the other hand, the constant incidence and identification of risks prime modern consciousness to find risk cues everywhere.⁷ A society in which the processes of modernization have proliferated and intensified risks comes to see itself over time as a “risk society.” But how are the risks registered—how does that society “see itself” as such? And what kind of agency arises from such self-recognition? This is where risk media come in. The most common example of risk media are statistical data and their visual representations. In rendering and vivifying inert numbers into compelling patterns, even feelings, risk media galvanize preparedness. People prepare to safeguard themselves according to their exigencies and capacities: middle-class homeowners stock up on batteries, canned food, and water; the 1 percent invest in exploratory plans for interplanetary settlements as planetary damage accrues; and the undocumented consolidate fugitive networks in the absence of social security dispensations. One of Beck’s main insights concerns present risks of which we remain unaware. Invisible pollutants, he argues, seep into skin, membrane, and organ, but such infiltration remains latent until the lungs throw a spasm or the skin breaks out in rashes, until harm becomes palpable as symptom. When more “cases” emerge in a demographic field, the deepening sense of collective harm instigates public scrutiny, facilitating macro-level recognition of a risk pattern. The data collection and case studies that follow impel a self-reflexive impression of imminent danger. Mediation is constitutive of this intensified risk perception.

Media/Mediation

Risk is virtual, an outcome always on the horizon. We require mediation to render risk legible. Risk perceptions depend on mediatized forms, from tables, bar diagrams, and graphs (generated via regression analyses) to color-coded emergency alerts (chromatic transcriptions of threat levels) to geospatial models (generated by live-tracking of winds, currents, moving landmass, etc.). Risk mobilizes media technologies and infrastructures: expanding air traffic control grids or sharing surveillance intel, for instance, seek to contain risks. And yet, such expansions and connections often exacerbate the spread of risks: leaked information or a localized glitch in air traffic control can turn into a massive catastrophe. Designed to mitigate, warn, and shield, these media fields of risk bring a sense of anxiety into daily life—the feeling of being caught in a grid, of constant vulnerability, of not knowing when and where a new threat will emerge. Mediation can therefore amplify and accentuate risk: think of swift-moving conspiracy theories, thickening gossip cultures, and the speedy virality of social media. Further, media technologies penetrate all aspects of planetary life so thoroughly at the current juncture that media environments become inherently risky. Whether it is the extractive technologies whose invasive probes transform the ocean floor; or the digital reengineering of genetic codes that render biological matter malleable; or indeed data mining and bot activity online that manipulate social relations, media, in recreating geological stratum, biological substrate, or social affiliations, also renders them more volatile. Mediation, then, indicates processes or events that are not reducible to media technologies or forms: it intervenes in extra-medial ontologies. As a creative process, rewriting genetic codes changes biological matter; equally creative are the collective micro-actions of sharing, tweeting, and annotating that turn the original record (such as the video of a brutal beheading or lynching) into a social force. These ontologies have ambiguous and complex impacts: the modified genetic codes promise great medical benefits, but they also have capacities for social harm (e.g., the dangers associated with eugenic experiments); likewise, a violent video may circulate as an extreme instance of social aggression and fuel copycat aspirations that transform what is portrayed in the video into a potential risk scenario for many. That is to say, risk communication remains a subset of risk mediation.

In recent years, theorists of media have focused on mediation not just as an epistemological event—in the sense of reflection, representation, or even figuration—but also as a process that transforms actual lived worlds. This has led them to interrogate some of the foundational dualisms of western philosophy: subject/object, ideal/material, human/nonhuman, natural/artificial, and so on. While such oppositions have traditionally provided the basis for media studies arguments about subjects making media, or media violence impacting subjects, or artificial intelligence taking over human consciousness, now they seem archaic. In the wake of digital media, genomics, and an intensifying environmental crisis, we have become hyper-aware of the interpenetration of the biological, the digital, and the geological. The interpenetration itself is nothing new: it is just that the new scientific insights and technological inventions call attention to entanglements of human–nonhuman and living–nonliving relations. For Sarah Kember and Johanna Zylinska (2014), the accelerated thoroughfare between information and flesh exemplify such entanglement. However, they remind us that humans and nonhumans have always co-emerged with technology; put differently, technologies are “media,” dynamic substances with their own material properties, that enable the human lived worlds. The invention of fire or the wheel, for instance, irrevocably changed not just human lives but human–nonhuman relations. The same is true of the Internet. Mediation, then, is the process or event in which humans emerge with technology.

But before such new materialist invocations of mediation, there was the cultural materialist conceptualization of the term. In its most influential articulation, Raymond Williams (1985) already departs from the political valence of mediation as arbitration or indeed just the interaction of two opposing forces. Rather, he draws our attention to the materiality of the interaction that is “substantial,” with “for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Media and Risk: An Introduction
• Part I Historical Perspectives
• Part II Expertise
• Part III Times
• Part IV Scale
• Part V Virtuality
• Part VI Affect
• Part VII Legitimacy
• Part VIII Disciplinary Modulations
• Index