People are spending increasingly more time on social media platforms, with Facebook being the biggest and most successful. Historically, media technologies have for long been considered of importance for the structuration and the experience of time in general. In this article, we investigate the technological affordances of Facebook for the temporal experiences of its users. Relying on a case study of a Facebook page dedicated to media memories, we link user experiences to technological and institutional affordances. By doing so, we seek to answer the question of how a business model and an infrastructure that largely build on immediacy and newness are experienced and negotiated by users that engage in a multiplicity of durations and time layers in their everyday lives. Drawing on a platform analysis, in-depth interviews and a survey among the users of the page “DT64—Das Jugendradio der DDR,” we develop the concept of “social media time” while considering notions of the archive, flow, and narrative, which contribute to shedding light on how specific media technologies afford specific temporalities. We conclude by discussing the consequences for the users and society at large.

In music radio broadcasting, radio personalities (presenters, hosts, DJs) have traditionally been of critical importance to programming success. In this article, I seek to add to the understanding of contemporary developments within radio, especially music radio, through focusing on the presenter from a political economy perspective. How do new business models and technologies affect the performances and forms of talk developed by presenters in contemporary radio? What new roles are assigned to presenters in commercial music radio? How are work practices and labor relations affected? The article shows how media convergence has impacted the work of radio personalities in traditional broadcasting.

This thesis is a study of how the Swedish media company MTG Radio has developed new strategies and production practices in relation to technological change, new competition and media convergence during the first decade of the 2000s. During this period the media landscape in general has been marked by digitization, the rise of new media platforms and competition from new media companies. The study engages in an ethnographical perspective on media production, but also takes its starting point in political-economic theories on media work (Banks 2007, Hesmondhalgh & Baker 2011, Ryan 1992) in order to raise questions about the relation between technological and organizational changes and relations of power in production. Empirically, the thesis builds on interviews with production staff as well as an analysis of production documents and content produced by MTG Radio.

The analysis shows that digital production technologies contribute to anincreased automation and centralization of control over editorial decisions, and hence to “de-skilling” (Braverman 1974/1999, Örnebring 2010). On the other hand, strategies of multiplatform production and the organizational changes taking place contribute to an “upskilling” (Edgell 2012) and give DJs and presenters more autonomy and control within production. This strengthened autonomy involves their possibilities for reflexivity and critical self-evaluation, as well as their control over content and production. Finally, the thesis connects these results to the more overarching question of alienation, arguing that upskilling and increased autonomy do not automatically create better jobs within the media house, or necessarily represent emancipatory possibilities within media work, as has been argued in previous research and theory.

Social networking sites play many roles in the everyday lives of their users. A growing body of research suggests that platforms such as Facebook fundamentally change the way memories are performed. This article takes the former East-German youth radio DT64 as a starting point to analyse how media are remembered and how practices of remembering by music audiences might be altered with social networking sites. Drawing on in-depth interviews with former listeners and an analysis of one Facebook group dedicated to the radio station, the article suggests that SNS offer new potentials for media memories that are collaborative and take place in public. The former listeners we interviewed remain, however, sceptical and confirm only limited participation in new forms of performing media memories online. The article discusses the changing nature of media memories in the context of a changing media landscape by looking at questions of identity, temporality and alternativity.

Social networking sites (SNS) play many roles in the everyday lives of their users. A growing body of research suggests that platforms such as Facebook also fundamentally change the way memories are performed. This article takes the former East-German youth radio DT64 as a starting point to analyse how media are remembered and how practices of remembering by music audiences might be altered with social networking sites. Drawing on in-depth interviews with former listeners and an analysis of one Facebook group dedicated to the radio station, the article suggests that SNS offer new potentials for media memories that are collaborative and take place in public. The former listeners we interviewed remain, however, sceptical and confirm only limited participation in new forms of performing media memories online. Ultimately, the article discusses the changing nature of media memories in the context of a changing media landscape by looking at questions of identity, temporality and alternativity.

In much scholarly writing and in many leftist and activist accounts the enclosures of the cultural commons have been fiercely critiqued. However, during the last years, new media business models, that challenge the notion of the cultural industries as “copyright industries”, has been taking shape. A new class of entrepreneurs is instead working to expand the commons as part of their businesses. Accordingly, representatives from these new media industries, policy makers, and politicians have joined the academic and political critique of the “enclosures of the cultural common”. The paper argues that this is a shift within the dominant media policy paradigm and an attempt to integrate existing practices on the Internet, based on cooperation and sharing, into the market. By relocating the struggle from “intellectual property” to “platform economics”, the media industry can exploit the productivity of the commons while holding on to the power that comes with ownership and property.

The information society, as an ideological formation, has previously been identified as celebrating speed and ephemerality: overcoming of boundaries, destabilization of identities and the dissapearance of distance (Mosco 2004). This paper however analyzes an ideological shift within digital culture. The paper identifies this shift as accompanying new business models, associated with what is often referred to as cloud computing. The success of this computing paradigm, we claim, is dependent on the construction of a new ideology, in which information is not only identified with speed and ephemerality but also stability and durability.

Empirically the paper concerns data centers: large, dedicated buildings in which interconnected servers are used to store and process digital information, utilized for commercial or administrative purposes by governments, organizations, and companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Data-centres are what Lisa Parks have called “obscure objects of media studies” (Parks 2009:101). They are hidden, out of sight, inconspicuous and often placed far from population centres. But at the same time they are “material imaginaries” comparable to the houses of large media corporations (cf. Ericson & Riegert 2010). They are conciously inscribed in a number of symbolic and ephemeral geographies. They are discursively – and not only materially – constructed as stabile, durable, lasting and safe. The purpose of the paper is to analyse how, by whom and with what purposes.