Jonas Andersson

My approach is historicising and cross-disciplinary, with a strong interest in the ways in which everyday life, individual human beings, organisations, and structures are interrelated with the contemporary, ever more strongly consolidated media ecology. Which actors and phenomena benefit and are disadvantaged? How do digital media structures interrelate with the rest of society?

My main field of research used to be unregulated file sharing on the internet, but over the recent decade I have shifted focus towards more contemporary developments such as platforms, apps, and mobile hardware.

Current research and teaching interests, more broadly:

● System-theoretical, legal, and political-economic perspectives on digital media – in historical context

● Media-historical approaches, fused with intellectual history (I'm particularly interested in intellectual traditions and thought collectives, and the intersection of technological imaginaries and neoliberalism)

● Sound media; music production, marketing, and dissemination (specifically, the systemic conditions involved)

My teaching and research concern the ways in which increasing digitalisation and mediation interact with everyday life and societal structures. I take an interest in critically studying platforms as structural and mediating institutions, not least in relation to civil society and civic interests, epistemology (the conditions for how knowledge is established), and the data-driven media economy. I am also interested in how the material and the semiotic interact – especially in relation to theories of agency, relationality, and civilisational processes. I'm interested, for example, in the mediation of authority and control. Authority, either through means of coercion, persuasion, legitimisation, charisma – control, through more technologically crystallised infrastructures and interfaces. Both of these approaches to authority and control, I would argue, are central to media and communications studies as a field.

This interest shines through my writings on media and communications, over the years: The ways in which outsider entrepreneurs try to attain legitimacy External link, opens in new window. or, for that matter, virtue ethics and honourability External link, opens in new window.. The structuring of social networks as webs with both (hard) algorithmic control and (soft) norms External link, opens in new window., social alliances, and so forth. The unilateral power of platforms to control access to their data External link, opens in new window., and the sociotechnical structures that this particular form of platform power External link, opens in new window. engender.

As for the risks of interpreting individual apps or platforms as if they were ‘representative’ of public opinion, this is something I have repeatedly highlighted in research reports, both in 2015 External link, opens in new window. (regarding Twitter at the time) and in 2022 External link, opens in new window. (regarding the input data for language models).

I'm no longer using Twitter as an outreach platform. Instead you can find me on Mastodon.