Caring through Networked Tinkering

NECS 2023 – Care

15 June 2023, University of Oslo

 

The recently published care manifesto (2020) defines care as … “our individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material, and emotional conditions that allow the vast majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive  along with the planet itself.” Casting a wide net of universal ambitions, care is used here to refer to not only the care given and received within families, or in professional child, elderly and medical care, or the care administered in schools and education. Rather, care is meaningfully extended to privacy, culture, the economy, and, not least, the environment. While screen media does not figure prominently in this definition, it nevertheless plays an important role, not so much by it being in the picture but by providing the frame. From ecomedia to telephilia and from cinematic ethics to surveillance, notions of care underpin many key debates in cinema and media studies. Whether it be caring for people, animals, or the environmentor caring for objects and legacies, we ask: what does care allow us to protect and/or preserve? And, conversely, what can be committed, permitted, or excused in the name of care?

Media is crucial in shaping the ways in which care is experienced, practised and understood in todays societies. When the authors of the manifesto locate the urgency in redressing care in what they call the current reign of carelessness, few of us will be hard-pressed for examples in which this reign is articulated in a heavily mediated form. To offer one such instance, when private health insurances now offer customised care, which promise tailormade policies fitting individual needs this supposed responsiveness to personal needs also suggests the abolishment of the principle of the provision of care for all. And yet, examples to the contrary also abound. As the increased focus on sustainability, inclusivity, empathy, and ethics in cinema and media studies indicates, we also live in an age of widespread politico-cultural pushes for care in the face of adversity.

Seldom has there been more talk about care than at our current historical juncture. The self-explanatory notion of care as commodity is now widespread in media discourses, where rhetorical figures compete with more progressive, social-democratic notions of care, as for example that of a new green deal. Despite this omnipresence, such discourses cover only a part of medias contribution to and participation in this embattled field. Whereas advertising as a careful besiegement has long contributed to ones entitlement to being cared for and to seeking out care products, media themselves have increasingly been seen to take on the role of carerswhether in the form of corporate digital media platforms or as the ethical turn in film theory suggests, through their aesthetic capacity to elicit other-oriented, cultural-political reflection. Moreover, as numerous social justice movements mobilised by digital platforms have demonstrated, there is an urgent need to interrogate for whom exactly our media industries care.

Evidently, the meaning of care does not exhaust itself in the notion of provision. Rather, care falls squarely between the poles of provision and protection. Protecting what we love, or what we deem important, is fundamental to screen culturesit is the basis of many philias and the impetus for preserving the archive. But which media artefacts do we protect, and which legacies do we preserve? In a heavily interconnected world, caring for one thing often implies carelessness with respect to others.

In other fora the tension between provision and protection is more overt. Providing what others need brings these others in ones care, and social media platforms with their terms and conditions have weathered sustained critique about how little they protect the people they are providing services for. This notion of carelessness similarly finds itself at the centre of media-studies debates on surveillance, presenting a harsh reality for those who consider big data analysis in the service of counterterrorism deserving of our consternation. Advances in artificial intelligence similarly present the bleak potentials of self-operative administration of care and carelessness. The economy of attention has become a political economy of care, centred on the question of who should receive our scarce resources. As is apparent, it is our media  contemporary film and television, journalism or social media  which both represents and facilitates these emergent hierarchies, serving as a platform to investigate how the individual or a population is subjugated by systems of care. In the same manner that we pay equal attention to both its actors and subjects, we must explore how this economy of care is both mediated through and expressed by our media, inclusive of its associated paradoxes and contradictions.

In the spirit of care-ful scholarship and politics, thinking and acting, necs and the screen cultures initiative at the department of media and communication, university of oslo, invite cinema and media scholars to come together to think about care and its implications across film and media history and into the digitally mediatised cultures of the 21st century.