Abstract
Media Resistance explores motives, inspirations, and forms of action of those who dislike, protest, and abstain from media. Trine Syvertsen writes the long history of media resistance as an everyday phenomenon, from the early phase of mass media to present-day digital media, drawing accordingly on diverse sources (political documents, press clippings, websites, organizational documents, personal testimonies, nonfiction best sellers, dystopic fiction, and film). Syvertsen is a professor at the Department of Media and Communication of the University of Oslo, Norway. She works in the field of media history, media policy, television, and digital media, and currently manages a project on Digitox: Intrusive media, ambivalent users and digital detox that pays particular attention to digital resistance, withdrawal, and disconnection.
The main objectives of the book are to analyze what is at stake for resisters, how media resistance inspires organized action, and how media resistance is sustained. It evaluates six motivations behind media resistance—concerns for morality, culture, enlightenment, democracy, community, and health—upon which arguments against media technology, content, and function have been articulated across different historical periods, national borders, and media platforms. Syvertsen questions the very dismissal of media dislike and abstention in Media Studies (on the grounds of conveying irrational, moralistic and simplistic accounts), and she points out that the inquiry of media resisters is as complex as is media acceptance and celebration, shedding light on how the expression and acts of resistance connect and relate.
The book is well organized, covering a broad realm of resistant practices along with the evolution of different media in the Western context (the United States, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia). It addresses the issue of resistance not only from the perspective of media reception (in print, mass literature, cinema, radio, comics, television, online and social media) but also in terms of its depiction in popular culture (dystopic fiction and film) as a source of inspiration. Chapters eloquently review resistance in various genres and types of media through examples from everyday life (campaigns, protests, movements, self-help guides, and confessionals). They equally examine emblematic dystopic novels and films in depicting themes of media skepticism and resistance. Each chapter answers two key questions—what is at stake and what to do/where hope lies—enhancing the clarity of the text; moreover, the plain language and the very engaging style of writing makes its reading very enjoyable.
The contribution to the field, probing media resistance in a retrospective perspective, is significant. It weaves together rhetoric and metaphors that skeptics and resisters employ in media doomsday predictions, questioning thus the very conceptualization of media resistance in negative forms (as moral panics). A particular strength of the book is that it evaluates, through the deployment of a range of narratives on the bad consequences of media, what is recurring and what changes over time. In this context, it showcases important developments (e.g., the shift of media resistance from the political to the personal domain—Chapter 7) and conversions (the defense of earlier media forms against newer ones—Chapters 3, 4, and 5) in parallel to media transformations. Furthermore, the book draws on cases that come from both right and left, and traces media resistance through sense-making examples (facts, anecdotes, personal experiences, and testimonies) that “talk” to the very experience of the reader.
The book provides a useful guide for understanding how media resistance is sustained in our culture; nevertheless, some limitations could be mentioned. Arguments and actions of media resistance examined in the book are explicit and powerful regarding the values of morality, culture, enlightenment, and health; but, they are underdeveloped (e.g., the methods of collective action employed by the Adbusters) and deficient (limited to expressions of disappointment about media not fulfilling their prescribed democratic role, and will to prevent the invasion of new media in personal and public spaces, while sustaining public conversation) concerning the values of democracy and community. To a great extent, this uneven reflection on the values that are at stake for resisters relates to the very perspective of the term media resistance—it is used to “discuss a range of negative actions and attitudes towards media.” Despite the fact that book focuses on generalized forms of resistance (beyond fierce reaction and fundamentalism) directed at several entities, a very important terrain of resistance is out of its spectrum: the arguments and practices that propose alternative ways of producing media and engaging in the media. This contribution to the values of democracy, community, and education/learning is critically considered, and it has been highly prolific among media activists.
Overall, the book highlights a less-trodden path in media studies, that of resistance in media reception, raising a number of challenging issues to a discipline that is criticized for being pro-media. In this context, the argument in the book for further inquiry into media resistance—“teach[ing] us something about the media, the study of media, and the choices and values perceived to be at stake in today’s media environment,” is more stimulating than its didactic scope—“in an era of ubiquitous media, we all need a measure of resistance, or at least a strategy for self-regulation, to prevent media from being too invasive.”
