Pioneer Communities: The Quantified Self and Maker Movement as Collective Actors of Deep Mediatization

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Andreas Hepp
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2017 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 394861196

The past decade has seen the rise of collectivities that act as hybrids of social movements and think tanks and strive to shape the intertwined change of media, culture and society: pioneer communities. Based on particular forms of collectivity, they build a bridge between media development and the everyday use of media and promote technological changes. Distinctive present examples are the Quantified Self and Maker movements. The aim of the project is to conduct a comparative investigation of how the changing media environment enables these two pioneer communities in Germany and the UK, and how at the same time the change of the media environment is advanced by them, their imagined and practiced concepts of media-related collectivity and societal transformation, as well as the public discourse surrounding them. The Quantified Self and Maker pioneer communities build complex transnational and transcultural networks that support the technology-based imagined concepts of collectivity they want to establish: collectivities related to digital practices of the self and digital practices of manufacturing. Pioneer communities are characterised by a remarkable tension: While they are - at least at their core - closely interwoven communities with strong concepts of belonging and power-relations, they unfold their social influence on collectivity building and societal transformation additionally via a much more open public discourse. Therefore, it is less a unidirectional diffusion of their media-related imagined concepts of collectivity and societal transformation but rather a complicated process of spreading technologies and journalistic coverage that builds the basis of their influence. The project will investigate this on three levels. First, it aims to reconstruct comparatively the communicative figurations of the two pioneer communities and their power-relations. Second, it will investigate their imagined concepts of media-related collectivity and societal transformation. In their very own perspective, the pioneer communities' conceptions in this respect are blueprints of possible transformation. Third, it investigates the public discourse surrounding these pioneer communities and compares the findings with their own structures and conceptions. Methodologically, the analysis is based on a media ethnography of the pioneer communities (including sorting methods, as well as crawler and qualitative network analysis), a qualitative content analysis of their imagined concepts of collectivity and societal transformation, and a longitudinal qualitative content analysis of the print, television and online media coverage they receive. The research will be conducted mainly in Germany and the UK with a focus on Berlin and London as two main European hubs for pioneer communities. As a further context of this, the origins of the pioneer communities in the US San Francisco Bay Area and important events in Europe are investigated.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants