Roger Silverstone who has died at the age of 61 was an outstanding contributor to the field of media and communications studies. He was deeply committed to understanding the power of the media and its centrality in our lives.
In the 1980s his ideas for research on innovation, culture and new
information and communication technologies received the support of the
UK Economic and Social Research Council. His was one of six research
centres to be funded at Brunel University under a ten year Programme on
Information and Communication Technologies. In 1991 he moved to Sussex
University as Professor of Media Studies, founding the Graduate
Research Centre for Culture and Communication, a new interdisciplinary
programme. After joining the London School of Economics in 1998 as its
first Professor of Media and Communications, he built with his
colleagues what would become a new Department of Media and
Communications. Launched in August 2003 it has grown in three years to
embrace a thriving suite of taught and research postgraduate programmes
with strong links to the disciplines in the LSE, to institutes in
London specialising in journalism and the arts, and to universities in
the US and China.
Roger’s political acumen was keenly felt.
Within the LSE it was not a simple matter to give birth to a new
department, especially not one that would promote interdisciplinarity.
Roger not only won the resources for it in a highly competitive setting
but, under his stewardship, initial resistances melted away. Once
initiated, he encouraged many new projects through which he sought to
etch the distinctive boundaries of the LSE’s contribution to the field
of media and communications.
His enthusiasm for the research
projects of the PhD students he supervised, and those whom he mentored
through his leadership of PhD programmes, was remarkable. He might
offer criticism – constructively demanding explanations of theoretical
and empirical arguments - but he was quick to give his support
intellectually and often just simply as a human being. He sometimes
encouraged research – supervised by his colleagues - in areas where he
would modestly claim to know very little – yet he actively acknowledged
and welcomed differences in perspective. With his beginnings in
geography and sociology – and possibly as a result of his early direct
contact with broadcast production - he welcomed those whose training
was professional or disciplinary into the fold – awkwardly sometimes,
but always asserting that challenges to disciplinary wisdom should be
the foundation of our research excellence.
Through his interest
in the way people domesticate new technologies within their homes and
beyond ‘their front doors’ as he often said, he led several generations
of researchers across Europe in the European Media Technology and
Everyday Life Network to ask and answer why people persist in using
technologies and the media in unexpected ways. He had a particular
fascination with media that are produced and consumed by diaspora
communities, often including junior researchers in this work. He
brought a profoundly critical perspective to the way media are
regulated and to the goals of regulation, especially as the media have
become global. His work provoked and will continue to require a
critical assessment of the morality of media and, therefore, of the
nature of its regulation.
Connections – social and technical –
seemed to fascinate him; he would often ask his colleagues and students
to think about why we make connections and why we abandon them, and
with what consequences. He was interested in the boundaries between the
public and the private and the way older and newer media are implicated
in changing those boundaries. A central theme in his work was power and
its distribution and, where necessary, its redistribution. He wrote
about ‘proper distance’ and about how our mediated understandings of
others can be either inspiring or damaging in urban places and in
public or private spaces.
Roger had a facility for crafting words
and his work has been translated into many languages making it
accessible to growing numbers of researchers around the world who are
interested in our field. His answers to the question, why should we
study the media were imaginative and always challenging. He was the
standard bearer for so many facets of what we can and should be called
upon to do in the academy, looking outward to policy and inward to
pedagogy – always strengthening, building and contributing. His sense
of what might be needed in any given moment was acute, his capacity for
work enormous, and his sense of humour a privilege to experience. He
was an immensely private person, maintaining always a distance that
made it feasible for him to challenge us to think about values and
ethics and the media as being fundamental to all that we teach and
research. His very particular provocations and his enduring friendship
are irreplaceable and are enormously missed by his colleagues and
students.
He was the author of many books including The Message of Television (1981), Framing Science: The Making of a Television Documentary (1985), Television and Everyday Life (1994), Why Study the Media? (1999) and, most recently, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis
(2006). He is survived by his wife, Jennifer, a psychoanalytic
psychotherapist, their children, Daniel, Elizabeth and William, and
their four grandchildren.
Morality and Media in the 21st Century - a panel in celebration of the work of Professor Roger Silverstone was held at the London School of Economics on 16 October 2006. Read more...
Professor Roger Silverstone, born 15 June 1945; died 16 July 2006.
Professor Robin Mansell, President IAMCR
Department of Media and Communications
London School of Economics