I’ve been away from the blog for nearly a month. Moving house, conferencing, family business, university work, all competing for attention. Lots of interesting stuff has been posted since then. I’ll try to keep up a little as well.
First, at the end of November, I’ve been to the First European Communication Studies conference which was held at the Netherlands’ Royal Tropic Institute in Amsterdam. Over 500 delegates participated on such a vaste range of topics that one could be forgiven if one thought one was at some sort of learneds association conference. It was – to be honest – hugely disappointing. Because of the sheer size, the conference lacked focus, many sessions were merely gobbled together with papers that were barely related to one another. On too many occasions, papers failed to engage their research in terms of questions of relevance. Work was poorly contextualised and failed to deliver the minimum required standards of methodological soundness. Finally, there was a strong presence of extremely empiricist work, making any form of wider engagement virtually impossible. In a sense, if what was generally going at this conference was supposed to be a measure of the standard of European Communications Research than I fear for the latter.
There were quite exceptions of course and I have not been able to attend the majority of sessions (one can only be at one place at the time). It is clear, however, that working within a domain marked as ‘commnications studies’ is extremely difficult and unfulfilling if one desires to develop a theoretically sophisticated research agenda, or try to broaden the scope of questioning away from a highly decontextualised instrumentalist understanding of communication. At the same time, we are in desperate need of theoretical innovation as the world of media and communications are transforming rapidly.
Thankfully, I did not have to stay in a conference hotel. Instead, I had to commute by train and – I can only presume some providence here – the Netherlands were hit by bad weather. As a result my journeys were prolongued and this gave me a chance to finish reading ‘RUA TV?: Heidegger and the Televisual’ (edited by Tony Fry). This was a truly great book – one of the best on television I’ve ever read. Perhaps anything one encounters on media and communciations after reading this book might become a bit disappointing.