Pioneering Communities - The quantified Self and Maker Movement as collective Actors of profound Mediatization

• Duration: 2018 – 2023
• Project lead: Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp

Project management: Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp (ZeMKI, University of Bremen)

External collaborations: Prof. Dr. Nick Couldry (LSE), Prof. Dr. Sonia Livingstone (LSE), Dr. Mark Taylor (University of Sheffield), Prof. Dr. Gina Neff (University of Oxford), Prof. Dr. Michaela Pfadenhauer (University of Vienna), Prof. Dr. Fred Turner (Stanford University)

Funding: German Research Foundation (DFG)

Over the past decade, pioneering media-related communities have emerged that resemble both social movements and think tanks, striving to influence change in media, culture and society. Striking examples of this are the Quantified Self and Maker movements. Quantified self focuses on digital practices of self-measurement, while the maker movement focuses on the collaborative development of digital production and manufacturing methods in open workshops known as makerspaces. The project aims to examine how these pioneering communities are promoted by the changing media environment by comparing Germany and the UK. This raises the question of what potential for change the pioneering communities’ conceptions of collectivity themselves have and how this is negotiated in public discourse.

As pioneering communities, the Quantified Self and Maker movements are complex transnational and transcultural networks that seek to support and establish technology-based notions of collectivity. Their social impact consists of a complex process of technology diffusion and journalistic coverage rather than the unilateral enforcement of their social vision.

The project investigates the pioneer communities on three levels: In the first step, the communicative figurations of the two focused pioneering communities and their power relations are reconstructed comparatively. Secondly, it explores their concepts of media-related collectivity and social transformation. In their own perspective, the pioneering communities understand these as blueprints for possible change. Thirdly, the project explores the public discourse on these pioneering communities and compares the results with their own structures and concepts.
Methodologically, the project is based on a media ethnographic analysis of the two pioneering communities (including sorting methods, crawler and qualitative network analyses), a qualitative content analysis of their presented concepts of collectivity and transformation as well as a qualitative long-term content analysis of the reporting on them in print and online media. The research will be conducted primarily in Germany and the UK, with Berlin and London as the European hubs of the two pioneering communities. In addition, research will take place in the American Bay Area around San Francisco as its origin as well as at selected European events.

Selected publications:

• Couldry, N. / Hepp, A. (2017): The mediated construction of reality. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Gerhard, U., & Hepp, A. (2018). Appropriating digital traces of self-quantification: Contextualising ‘pragmatic’ and ‘enthusiast’ self-trackers. International Journal of Communication, 11, 683-700. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6581/2260
• Hepp, A. (2016): Pioneer communities: Collective actors of deep mediatisation. In: Media, Culture & Society, 38 (6), S. 918-933. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716664484
• Hepp, A. (2018): What makes a Maker? Curating a pioneer community through franchising. In: Nordisk Tidsskrift for Informationsvidenskab og Kulturformidling, 7 (2). https://doi.org/10.7146/ntik.v7i2.111283
• Hepp, Andreas (2020): Deep Mediatization. London: Routledge.
• Hepp, Andreas (2020): Artificial companions, social bots and work bots: communicative robots as research objects of media and communication studies. In: Media, Culture & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720916412
• Hepp, Andreas (2020): The fragility of curating a pioneer community: Deep mediatization and the spread of the Quantified Self and Maker movements. In: International Journal of Cultural Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920922867
• Hepp, A. (2021): Auf dem Weg zur digitalen Gesellschaft: Über die tiefgreifende Mediatisierung der sozialen Welt. Köln: Halem-Verlag.
• Hepp, A. (2022): Jenseits der Disruption. Zum Lebenszyklus von Pioniergemeinschaften und ihrer Rolle beim Entstehen einer „digitalen Gesellschaft“. Köln Z Soziol 74, 231–255. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-022-00835-6
• Hepp, A., Alpen, S. & Simon, P. (2021): Beyond empowerment, experimentation and reasoning: The public discourse around the Quantified Self movement. In: Communication 46(1), S. 27-51. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2019-0189
• Hepp, A., Benz, S. & Simon, P. (2021): Zwischen Utopie und Dystopie: Wie der öffentliche Diskurs über die Maker und Quantified-Self-Bewegung die Pioniergemeinschaften zu Treibern tiefgreifender Mediatisierung macht. In: M&K Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft 69(2), S. 270-298. https://doi.org/10.5771/1615-634X-2021-2-211
• Hepp, A., Loosen, W., Kühn, H., Solbach, P. & Kramp, L. (2021): Die Figuration des Pionierjournalismus in Deutschland. In: M&K Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft 69(4), S. 551-577. https://doi.org/10.5771/1615-634X-2021-4-551
• Hepp, A., & Schmitz, A. (2022): The limits of the Maker ideology: local Makerspaces, experimental practices, and COVID-19. Continuum, 36(2), 199–213. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2021.2003755
• Schmitz, A., Kirschner, H., Hepp, A. (2022). Transnational Networks of Influence: The Twitter Presence of the Quantified Self and Maker Movements’ Organizational Elites. In: Hepp, A., Jarke, J., Kramp, L. (eds) New Perspectives in Critical Data Studies. Transforming Communications – Studies in Cross-Media Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. 47-74. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96180-0_3
• Hepp, A. (2023): The lab, the space and the meetup: locating technological experimentation in everyday life. JCOM 22(03), A05. https://doi.org/10.22323/2.22030205
• Hepp, A., Schmitz, A. (2023): Local Ambivalences Toward the Maker Ideology: Makerspaces, the Maker Mindset, and the Maker Movement. International Journal of Communication, 17. 4196–4216.
• Hepp, A., Schmitz. A., & Schneider, N. (2023): Afterlives of the Californian Ideology. Tech Movements, Pioneer Communities, and Imaginaries of Digital Futures – Introduction. International Journal of Communication, 17. 4142–4160.
• Hepp, A. (2024): Curators of digital futures: The life cycle of pioneer communities. New Media & Society, Online First. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241253766