Jonas Andersson
Jonas Andersson is a PhD student and Visiting Tutor in the Department of Media & Communications, Goldsmiths. His primary research interests are new media in a historical context, media audiences and everyday media use, and issues to do with subculture/artisanic media production. He is a music producer, record digger and occasional music journalist himself.
Jonas has a BA from Stockholm University and an MA in Transnational Communications & Global Media from Goldsmiths. His work to date has focused on barriers of entry and distinctions of knowledge and cultural capital in online shopping websites and file-sharing networks.
Papers presented
Contemporary Cultures of Time and Space at Copenhagen Doctoral School for Cultural Studies, June 2005.
Sounds of the Overground: A postgraduate colloquium on ubiquitous music and music in everyday life at University of Liverpool’s Centre for Popular Music, May 2006.
Publications
"The Pirate Bay and the ethos of sharing" in Hadzi, Adnan et al. (2006) Deptford.TV Diaries, London: Openmute Publishing [PDF]
"The metamorphosis of music-listening and the (alleged) obliteration of the aura", forthcoming
Website:
http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/j-andersson
Jonas Andersson's research project concerns peer-to-peer-based file-sharing as a highly material activity being contested discursively and in legal-moral terms. Peer-to-peer-based [p2p] file-sharing can be defined as the mass-scale, Internet-mediated exchange of digitized copies of cultural objects [films, music, software etc.] without the permission of the copyright-holders. The phenomenon is described and framed in mainstream media discourse almost exclusively along conflictual terms, as an alleged struggle, a ‘copyfight,’ between file-sharers (some of whom occasionally are referred to as ‘pirates’) and the entertainment industry.
The linguistic mode of analysis which follows from Jonas’s choice of method – email-mediated in-depth interviews and reflexive participation – prompts an emphasis on user pragmatism / rationales for use which is obviously directly related to these normative discourses saturating the phenomenon. The standpoint is one that is highly critical of the arguments of both sides, ultimately asking the question what justifies these arguments. The research shows that they directly rely on differing assumptions, understandings and experiences of the technology in question. The arguments on each side explicitly invoke aspects of the human agencies as well as the material agencies embedded in this technology. In short, the standpoint is thus one which is initially grounded in the social constructionism of traditional media studies, but intends to bridge this limited account through seriously considering the constantly inherent material dimensions of the phenomenon at hand.