Abstract
Doug Underwood, Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss, University of Illinois Press: Urbana, Chicago and Springfield, 2011; 256 pp.: US$50.00
Stories of violence, suffering and loss help sell both newspapers and novels. In this study, focus is turned on the appeal of such stories for journalists, journalists-turned-novelists or literary figures, and their readers and audiences. Doug Underwood has already published, four years ago, a valuable study of journalism and the novel since the early 18th century, and in building on that earlier study here, he argues that the intersection of journalism and fiction writing is a fruitful place to study the role of trauma in literary expression. Across an equally wide time-span, he attends to 150 journalist-literary figures in British and American history, examining the influence of such experiences as childhood neglect or abandonment, abusive parenting or guardianship, alcoholism, exposure to wartime events and suchlike in their lives and in their writing. It is clear that personal loss, distress and crisis have had a formative effect in shaping the personalities of such figures. On the positive side they have been an important contributory factor in the production of durable artistic achievements; on the negative side they are at the root of various personal problems, such as drug and alcohol abuse, aberrational feelings, relationship difficulties and mental health issues. At worst they have led to suicide; at best they have found expressive outlet in spellbinding writing. The two-sidedness of all this is clearly related to Freud’s distinction between ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’, with the latter process being contingent on the ability to successfully develop a narrative structure as a framework for ‘handling’ or coming to terms with traumatic experience. For Underwood, the deepest insights into the impact of tragic or extreme events is to be found in the book-length memoirs and autobiographical writings of journalist-literary figures, and it is these accordingly that are closely read. There are four chapters in the book. The first deals with childhood history and the long-term consequences of traumatic experiences, while the second discusses the occupational pressures of journalism, the experiences of those in historically marginalized groups and the investigation of social problems or cases of social injustice. In the third chapter, Underwood examines journalist-literary figures as military correspondents and observers of wartime combat. This also involves the code of courageous conduct that is germane to this field of news reporting, the ability to deal with potentially traumatizing experience having become the hallmark of a successful news professional on or near the frontline by the early 20th century. The fallout from such experiences in journalism is explored in the final chapter. This includes depression, addiction, compulsive behaviour patterns and general mental health difficulties. This is a fascinating book. Underwood relates his study to recent research in trauma studies without succumbing to the excesses or absurdities evident among some at the literary studies side of this field. He discusses such well-known journalist-literary figures as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene and Truman Capote. Chronicling Trauma is a truly worthwhile study, and will interest scholars across the humanities and social sciences.
Levi Obijiofer and Folker Hanusch, Journalism Across Cultures: An Introduction, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 2011; 236 pp.: £55.00
Cross-national comparative surveys of particular sectors of media and cultural production are clearly a developing trend in media studies. The nation-centric study seems increasingly old-fashioned, having been surpassed by the increasingly interdependent and interconnected world of contemporary times. In journalism studies, this is compounded by previous failures to take into account the journalism of non-western cultures and to acknowledge broad political differences across the globe. The trend is confirmed by Levi Obijiofer and Folker Hanusch’s Journalism Across Cultures, for among other things it takes on board the various frameworks informing different models of journalism education and training around the world. In striving to move away from ratification of the dominant western version of mainstream journalism, the authors focus broadly on a range of journalistic cultures. Obijiofer and Hanusch start with a critical appraisal of past and contemporary media models and theories of the press, from Siebert, Peterson and Schramm onwards, before moving on to journalistic practices and role perceptions, journalism education around the world, gender and journalism, foreign news reporting, the news coverage of war and conflict, and the challenges to contemporary journalism coming from commercial pressures and forces – the prioritization of business interests over public interests. In a final chapter, they turn to the impact of new technologies on contemporary journalistic practices and the leading assumptions about them. Obijiofer and Hanusch have produced a useful introduction to comparative studies of news journalism across the globe. It is perhaps in its comparative scope that its value most lies, for it does indeed seem to move beyond the limits of many previous studies (at least pre-Hallin and Mancini) and so overcome the rather parochial identity which now appears to characterize them.
Alex Bentley, Mark Earls and Michael J O’Brien, I’ll Have What She’s Having: Mapping Social Behaviour, The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 2011; 146 pp.: £15.95
Ah, we all know where the title of this book comes from, and assuming this is perhaps a calculated ploy to give potential readers a certain frisson of embarrassed amusement as they recall Sally (Meg Ryan) and her faked orgasm as she sits opposite her male friend in a Lower East Side delicatessen. The somewhat elderly woman nearby who says to the waiter, following this performance, ‘I’ll have what she’s having’, caps the whole scene wonderfully. Use of it in the title is entirely appropriate as the authors of this book use it as a parable of social learning, which is their main topic: how learning shapes behaviour in every conceivable aspect, from individuals on outwards. They show how we use other people’s brains to think for us and to store knowledge about the world. For this and other reasons they then predicate their mapping of social behaviour on the ‘we’ rather than the ‘me’ perspective. The book covers such issues as the propagation of buzzwords and the spread of ideas, game theory and the swine flu scare, but what comes across most strongly is how difficult it is to change social behaviour once it is established, and how much of what we do is, hard though it is to admit it, derived from copying and imitating other people. We are all, it seems, blatant if unconscious plagiarists. This is not entirely to be lamented, for if we were all free and willing to behave as we want, there would be a great deal more conflict at every level of social life. Yet something remains missing after we have put the book down and pondered over the discussion. It is certainly a salutary counter to the idealistic model of the human subject that has developed throughout modernity as someone who is self-defining and self-realizing. The emphasis in the book is instead on how we are all influenced by, and learn from, our peers to ‘have what she’s having’. This is fine, but what perhaps is missing is a satisfactory account of creative process. No theory of learning or behaviour seems able properly to explain such process, only the diffusion of any resulting innovation. If this is an unacknowledged omission or weakness in respect of this account, Bentley, Earls and O’Brien have nevertheless provided a clearly written, reader-friendly discussion of this important aspect of collective life.
Richard Guthrie, Publishing: Principles and Practice, Sage: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington, DC, 2011; 240 pp.: £19.99
This is, indubitably, a handy guide. It takes you through the ins and outs of the publishing industry and highlights all the main features that are involved. It also offers an outline of publishing roles and practices, leading trade principles and procedures, and the major aspects of the law as it applies to publishing. Richard Guthrie begins with a short history of the book as a communications medium, and ends with an account of digital publishing and how new digital forms seem to be changing the world of publishing and reading. So far the printed book has survived the advances and convergences of digital communications, but now that such devices as the Kindle are selling widely, and e-books are on the rise, this may change. Guthrie gives us other clear and accessible chapters on the publishing process, the Anglophone model of publishing, the rise of corporate publishing, copyright and publishing law, rights and contracts, marketing and promotion. The book as a whole is a commendable introduction to publishing. It is reliable, up-to-date and written with obvious authority.
Ted Gournelos and Viveca Greene (eds), A Decade of Dark Humour, University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, 2011; 253 pp.: US$55.00
Humour may seem the least suitable way of confronting catastrophe and disaster. This certainly seemed the case to many Americans in the immediate wake of the events of 11 September 2001. Yet ironic or humorous expression did not thenceforth dwindle away; the events of that day seem instead to have made such expression more significant and imperative than ever. This is what is clearly shown in this edited collection on comedy and post-9/11 America. Humour and satire have been central to shaping responses to 9/11 and its aftermath. Not that this has necessarily been easy or without danger. The British comedian Shazia Mirza was certainly brave in walking out on stage with the opener: ‘My name is Shazia Mirza. At least that is what it says on my pilot’s licence.’ In editing the book, Ted Gournelos and Viveca Greene divide it into three sections. The first of these attends to the instability of political discourse after 9/11 and attempts to address the events with humour in their immediate wake. There was, for example, a noted ambivalence: sympathy for the victims on the one hand, scepticism about the starkness of the ‘us’/’them’ divisions being hugely embraced by white America. The second part of the book takes us into the ‘war on terror’, with discussion of such texts as Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s Team America: World Police. The final section is given over to rethinking post-9/11 politics and draws on the uncertainty of popular cultural uses of irony, humour and satire, with satirists, for example, having to navigate between accusations of either triviality or treason. The collection as a whole demonstrates the various ways in which social dissent can be expressed through humour, so challenging neoliberal rhetoric and informing alternative political viewpoints.
Shaheed Nick Mohammed, Communication and the Globalisation of Culture: Beyond Tradition and Borders, Lexington Books: Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto and Plymouth, UK, 2011; 189 pp.: £39.00
Anyone working in media or cultural studies is keenly aware of the danger to local cultures posed by the globalizing juggernaut of transnational corporations. While acknowledging the prevalent fear of cultural erosion, in this book Shaheed Nick Mohammed claims that this is often predicated on analytically unsustainable assumptions of local or traditional cultures as pure or organic. He argues that cultural change and development has often been the result of domination of one kind or another, whether through direct imposition, indirect influence, control over structures of trade and exchange, or market saturation. Today, for him, cultural globalization is less the consequence of the evil machinations of multinationals, and more that of our increasing ability to question, challenge and, where desired, discard the shibboleths and hallowed values of traditional, parochial cultures. This growing ability is for him at one with the ethos of expanding our possibilities in the modern world, and is so despite the anachronistic power of organized religion and the protection of this power from serious questioning and debate. Thus the thesis, more or less. Mohammed is to be applauded for being willing to step back and develop a different take on cultural globalization, but the problem is that for much of the time he whizzes past particular cases, examples and areas of scholarship at such a fast rate of knots that certain lines of argument are not sufficiently established and certain questions and issues not sufficiently pursued. This is not to say that culture as a concept should not be subject to periodic rethinking, particularly in view of the huge semantic baggage it is made to carry, but rather that this demands a more thorough digging through of particular aspects of it or of the problems associated with its study.
Adrienne Russell, Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition, Polity: Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, 2011; 168 pp.: £14.99
In this book Adrienne Russell steps along the hazardous line of writing about a period of rapid and fluid change while the change is still happening. The period she covers is the last 20 years, during which time the web has arisen and presented certain challenges to conventional or mainstream journalism. Clearly, what has happened over this period can be described and to some extent assessed but what the consequences will be and how long-lasting current changes will prove are questions that admit only speculation and guesswork. It is the inevitability of this that makes any contemporary history not only a risk-prone endeavour but also under threat of imminent supersession. Russell sees the participatory character of networked journalism as the future, having already advanced to the point where this is guaranteed, but since no one has yet been there, in time yet to come, it is somewhat premature to set down any recent shifts as the ways things will be. Three key features of networked journalism are identified: amateur, niche and special interest, and an aesthetics of parody, remix and appropriation. The book is organized around these features, with chapters on networked news publics as participants in the newsmaking process, the narrative of decline in the scope and quality of mainstream news journalism and challenges to this from new forms of civic expression, including news parodies and satire. Russell draws on personal interviews with journalists working in six different countries. The book is clearly written and does provide a useful outline of recent changes, but it remains to be seen whether what seems emergent now is what will become established even 20 years hence. Trying to catch history as it is currently happening is like trying to hold water in your hand.
Chris Paterson, The International Television News Agencies: The World from London, Peter Lang: New York, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Bern, Frankfurt, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna and Oxford, 2011; 200 pp.: US$33.95
Since the 1950s, a select handful of London-based companies have produced or globally distributed most of the televised images of international events that are now regarded as having attained iconic status. Surprisingly, they have been more or less neglected in media studies. Chris Paterson’s intention is to redress this situation and tell us the story of a system of news production that has contributed centrally to the visual construction of the world for over half a century. At its heart currently are Reuters Television and Associated Press Television News (APTN). These two agencies are ‘wholesalers’ of visuals, sounds and textual information who supply the ‘packagers’ or ‘retailers’, though much of what passes from sites along this secondary tier, whether they are television networks or news websites, is only superficially modified from the output of the news agencies. Reuters and APTN have thus had a crucial yet unacknowledged role in historically recent processes of globalization. Paterson offers important chapters on the images which they feed daily to the world’s broadcasters, the different stages in their historical development, the production process in the TV news agencies and their reporting of conflict. A final chapter offers some conclusions and recommendations. The book mixes historical research and ethnographic findings and observations with theoretical considerations of various kinds. It is at once a tribute to the small number of unsung journalists who work in London’s television news agencies, and a critique of the harm to public understanding which may result from the limited news selections and frames they offer and the current system in which they operate. Paterson has produced the first substantial study of international news agencies since Oliver Boyd-Barrett’s 1980 book on news agencies. It is likely to be the most significant reference on international television news agencies for a good while to come.
Alex Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture, Polity: Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, 2011; 193 pp.: £15.99
The term ‘information age’ is a facile way of demarcating what is supposed to be a distinct period of history, such distinctiveness being coterminous with ‘age’. It assumes that it is only within this period that information has gained such priority, or at the least, it encourages such an assumption, and what then follows is the misconception that the contemporary period is radically, if not utterly different from previous periods. We stand blinded in the headbeam of discontinuities. Alex Goody offers an important counter in this book by looking at how literary writers across the past century have responded to repeated waves of new technology. Various literary and artistic movements engage with the technological imperative of the 20th century, Futurism and Vorticism being just two obvious examples. Science fiction seems propelled by such an imperative, but far more broadly, technology seems to have been for many writers the key to gaining purchase and perspective on the modern world. Goody has produced here a wide-ranging exploration of the modern technological imaginary. We move from telegraphy through to hypertext, and as we do she proves an informed and insightful guide, not least because, right from the outset, her opposition to the lazy fatuity of easy historical labels is readily apparent.
Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero (eds), Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorialising Traumatic Death, Berghahn Books: New York and Oxford, 2011; 374 pp.: US$120.00
There have long been official forms of commemoration, whether in monuments, statues, dedicatory plaques or cenotaphs, but grassroots processes of memorialization seem relatively recent, and continuously on the increase. In going to work or taking a Sunday stroll, coming across some half-wilted flowers stuck in a milkbottle, a sodden teddy or other personal memorabilia, and a message covered in transparent plastic, left by a tree or lamppost alongside a busy road, is a common enough occurrence. Grassroots memorials like these do not just refer to individuals tragically killed in one way or another; the reference can also be collective, as happened after 9/11, the Columbine school massacre and the Timothy McVeigh bombing in Oklahoma. This edited collection presents a series of cases of makeshift memorials and commemorative bricolage, bringing together death, memory, mourning, and sometimes expressing social dissent or discontent as well as grief. Improvised memorials are composite objects in public space serving a definite performative function. The case studies cover such events as the Bloody Sunday annual demonstrations in Derry, Columbine, the murders of Mafia victims in Palermo, the Theo van Gogh memorial site in Amsterdam, fatal traffic accidents, ‘ghost bikes’, Carlo Giuliani memorials in Genoa, commemorations of the 1999 floods in Venezuela, mourning for Pope John Paul II in Polish cities, the Bali bombing, the Madrid train bombings and of course, 9/11, analytical commentary on the grassroots memorials for this having already been included in Marita Sturken’s Tourists of History (2007). It would have been good to find someone using vernacular memorialization as a way of critically interrogating Pierre Nora’s broad thesis concerning lieux de mémoire, but the range of events and processes embraced by the book is undoubtedly wide, and one cannot have everything. Grassroots memorials are now well-nigh ubiquitous, yet they have so far received little critical attention in social and cultural analysis. This book makes amends for that. Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero provide a useful overview at the start, and beyond that are to be congratulated for bringing together a fine bunch of essays.
Simon Downs, The Graphic Communication Handbook, Routledge: London and New York, 2012; 368 pp.: £24.99
This is an expansive and expertly designed introduction to the graphics industry that takes fully into account all that is now possible in graphics design that was simply unattainable 20 or 30 years ago. You can learn about the industry, trace the historical development of graphic design and work through each stage of a graphics job. It is not really a book to be read cover to cover. More one to consult on particular issues or topics. It is full of excellent advice and as a general resource is definitely recommended.
Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz, Television Studies, Polity: Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, 2012; 178 pp.: £15.99
This introductory textbook fills something of a gap, for a first-step guide to television studies seems to be missing from literature in this field. Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz offer just four chapters, but they are all substantial and cover the key categories of programmes, audiences, institutions and contexts. The book is clearly written and set out without ever being oversimplified. The origins, establishment and development of television studies are traced, and all the various approaches that characterize it are delineated and discussed. Gray and Lotz provide for undergraduate students a sure-footed and wide-ranging guide to studying television. It is a useful addition to Polity’s growing Short Introductions list.
Miles White, From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap and the Performance of Masculinity, University of Illinois Press: Urbana, Chicago and Springfield, 2011; 163 pp.: £14.99
Black contributions to the development of American popular music have been of crucial importance. Even when African-American forms of music have not been part of the mainstream, they have had a symbolic presence of enormous significance, and when they have exerted a more direct influence, they have usually reshaped the identity of American music. In this book, Miles White ranges from minstrelsy to hip-hop in exploring the importance not only of black cultural expression, but also representations of black masculinity and perceptions of black male subjectivity in the American racial imagination. Both minstrelsy and hip-hop have privileged the performance of masculinity and male identity. For White this involves, inter alia, rejection of the feminine as well as the continuing demonization of black male youth, particularly in relation to hardcore styles of hip-hop. There is a definite continuity in the bad ‘nigger’ figure running from late 19th-/early 20th-century ‘coon’ songs to late 20th-/early 21st-century hardcore rap music. Around this figure of racial masquerade, fear and fascination run in varying measures, showing how the black male body has been annexed for pleasure and gain while at the same time it is coded as malevolent and, as often as not, criminal. The consequences are threefold: reduction, fetishization and commodification. White traces each of these carefully across black/white divisions, bringing in discussion of the white performance of blackness, from Elvis to Eminem. He has written a useful contribution to scholarly work on ‘race’, gender and popular music.
Alec Charles and Gavin Stewart (eds), The End of Journalism, Peter Lang: Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt am Main, New York and Vienna, 2011; 240 pp.: £32.00
Journalism is changing. It may be true to say that journalism is always changing, with every decade over the past century showing clear and definite shifts and developments, but at present it seems to be doing so more rapidly and markedly than before. Whether this amounts to a sea-change is impossible, at present, to know, but it is certainly worth opening up discussion of the changes that are happening now, as a result of, for example, the contributions made by, and the consequences possibly flowing from, online journalism, mobile journalism and citizen journalism, to use perhaps the three most common tags attached to recent developments. That is the purpose of this edited collection. The discussion is important because it is difficult to get the measure of these developments. Are they really so innovative, do they really represent an alternative to mainstream journalism and are they really so unmediated as some people claim? It is nevertheless obvious that they are modifying journalistic practice even as they are, to some extent, being absorbed by existing institutions. The collection ranges over various forms and conditions of production and reception in newsmaking, and asks how journalism may continue to mediate between people and power in modern democracies. Just under half of the contributors work at the University of Bedfordshire, which is no doubt a result of the fact that the book derives from a conference at this university in October 2008. The ‘end’ of journalism sounds rather apocalyptic, but if the collection stimulates some rethinking of the ends of journalism, it will have fulfilled its purpose.
Olexiy Khabyuk and Manfred Kops (eds), Public Service Broadcasting: A German–Ukrainian Exchange of Opinions, Lit Verlag GmbH & Co, KG/Lit Verlag Dr W Hopf: Zurich, Berlin and Vienna, 2011; 241 pp.: £19.50
Collected herein are the proceedings of two conferences organized by the Institute for Broadcasting Economics at Cologne University and the Kyiv-Mohyla School of Journalism at the National University in Ukraine. The purpose of both was to explore the ins and outs of establishing public service broadcasting in Ukraine and by this means providing support for the process of democratization. This raises the question as to whether public service broadcasting is evidence of a democracy coming to fruition, as it was in Britain where its establishment coincided with the achievement of mass enfranchisement, or whether it can help foster the process of democratization in its more incipient stages or assist in the process of freeing the media from undemocratic influence by the state, as it did in Germany during the period of postwar reconstruction. The two conferences, both held in 2010, aimed to consider the German dual media order in relation to possible routes forward for the Ukrainian democratization process. The first conference focused on German broadcasting, and the second on broadcasting in Ukraine. As the two editors of these proceedings recognize, ‘there are no standard solutions for the design of media orders, as social, political, cultural and economic frameworks vary greatly from country to country’, but that is no barrier to an exchange of views across national boundaries or to the comparison between media orders for the sake of exploring new options and possibilities. These proceedings attest to that. They provide a useful record of this exchange and comparative exercise. It will be of interest to students of media systems in Europe and beyond.
Göran Bolin, Value and the Media: Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets, Ashgate: Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT, 2011; 159 pp.: £55.00
Value as a conceptual term is expansive in scope, referring to economic worth, political worth, moral worth and cultural and aesthetic worth, across the prodigious range in which it is applied. Each of these broad semantic fields are used in relation to the media, and have been for the past century or so. We can then move to more specific forms of media value, as in news value, or more general ones, as in public value (weighed against market value). Neoliberal ideology entails the subsumption of all value into economic value, and directs all creativity and cultural activity towards their benefits for the market. In taking the concept of value as his subject matter in this book, Göran Bolin argues for the significance of other forms of value beyond that associated with economic growth and entrepreneurial endeavour, seeing them as sectors of evaluation in their own right, regardless of their contribution, potential or otherwise, to economic worth. This is a vital counter to the dominance of market criteria, for as consumers we do not solely assess a TV drama or a music CD as good (or bad) value for money. It is perhaps only in the last resort of dissatisfaction that we might wish we had not wasted our money on a cultural product. Bolin’s focus is on value in light of current changes in the media industries and on how value relates to both cultural production and consumption. It is with recent and current changes that he begins, with special attention being paid to processes of marketization and digitalization, before turning to Bourdieu’s field model, and some of the criticisms to which it has been subject. Subsequent chapters discuss the business models underpinning the organization of media production, the relationship between consumers, users and producers, textual expression in multi-platform environments, and sign commodities in the circuit of media production and consumption. In these chapters, there is a good deal more than can be delineated in such a brief outline. Throughout them Bolin argues for a conception of value as a process realized only in the social relations of its negotiation, justification and validation. This is an important book, the personal culmination of two decades of Bolin’s own media and cultural research. It will be of great interest to media and cultural sociologists, and will help take forward our general thinking about this most expansive of terms.
David Buckingham, Rebekah Willett and Maria Pini, Home Truths? Video Production and Domestic Life, University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 2011; 162 pp.: US$35.00
Amateur video-making has become a familiar activity since the introduction of domestic video cameras a quarter of a century ago, yet it has been little studied. This book makes amends for its academic neglect. It derives from a three-year research project, Camcorder Cultures: Media Technology and Everyday Creativity, based at the Institute of Education, London University. The more serious and sustained side of video-making as a leisure-time pursuit has been covered in a previous publication (Buckingham and Willett, eds, Video Cultures: Media Technology and Amateur Creativity, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). The new book attends to what Richard Chalfen calls the ‘home mode’, focusing on the private world of domestic life, where the emphasis is on the content of what is recorded rather than on its aesthetic merits. Twelve households were recruited and given a video camcorder to use over a 15-month period. The use was diverse, ranging from the usual birthday parties and holiday footage to the less expected video diary, documentary and parody. The book is a thorough exploration of this diversity of use, concentrating on the various themes running across the participating households, and examining how video-making became absorbed into the structure and texture of everyday domestic life. In one of the most interesting chapters, the authors discuss the more subjective aspects of video production and reception as these are realized in relation to emotion, memory and personal identity. Here, among other things, video-taping ties together the temporal tenses of ‘this is being recorded’, ‘this was recorded’ and ‘this will be viewed’. It becomes an integral part of the processes of shared remembering and reflecting on the passing of time. David Buckingham, Rebekah Willett and Maria Pini have done more than fill the gap in our knowledge of vernacular uses of camcorders; they have also helped overcome the distrust, if not scorn, often enough directed at amateur media use in everyday life. It is as if such use is seen as inherently trivial. This is what has to be contested and turned around. The ‘home mode’ needs to be taken seriously and examined in its own right. Home Truths? moves us closer to this objective, and is to be loudly applauded for having done so.