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Tribute to Roger SilverstoneMatt Hills aa Cardiff University , UKPublished online: 16 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Matt Hills (2007) Tribute to Roger Silverstone, Social Semiotics, 17:1, 1-4, DOI:10.1080/10350330601128032

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Tribute to Roger Silverstone

Matt Hills

As a member of the Social Semiotics Advisory Editorial Board, and a former

undergraduate and doctoral student of Roger’s at Sussex University, it has fallento me to write this short piece; partly a tribute to Roger’s inspiring, human

qualities and partly a recognition of his place in the annals of media studies.

Roger was sadly taken from us in 2006*/a sudden and shocking loss for his family,friends, colleagues, and for his current students at the London School of

Economics (LSE), as well as for all the many, many people whose lives he hadhelped to change for the better across his time as a researcher and teacher of

media and communications.Roger’s research interests were strikingly diverse, and giving just a single

shape or narrative to his work would, I think, mean doing it and him a disservice.In his final book, posthumously published, Roger outlined the various threads

running through his investigation of media and morality. They were, in no order

of priority, phenomenological, sociological, philosophical, and technological.Although his role as a Professor of Media and Communication at the LSE clearly

put him in the upper echelon of international media sociologists, Roger was not agreat respecter of disciplinary boundaries and borders, preferring to travel

widely and wisely across the world of ideas. For him, sociology did not provide allthe answers to thinking-through modern media and their place in peoples’ lives.

Instead, the discipline offered just one way, among others, of asking vitally

necessary and important questions about our society of mass-mediated symbols.And, as such, Roger was just as willing to use versions of psychoanalysis in his

work as he was to use Ulrich Beck’s theories of the cosmopolitan, or AnthonyGiddens’ structuration theory. Through it all, Roger seemed determined to evade

being classified or pigeonholed by his readers, avoiding assorted ‘‘determinisms’’and essentialisms.

From his early structuralist and textual work on television and myth, throughto his increasingly post-structuralist, sociological focus on everyday life, and on

into his explorations of European identities, media environments and ethics,

Roger was always a consummate scholar, allowing ideas room to breathe, andrespecting the empirical no more or less than the transcendental and the

abstract. In all my dealings with him as a student, I found him to be scrupulouslylacking in dogmatism and dismissiveness, always remaining open to new ways of

thinking, and always willing to engage in debate. From Roger I learnt the need,and the art, to argue my case. And I learnt that being a good scholar, most

ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online/07/010001-04# 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/10350330601128032

SOCIAL SEMIOTICS VOLUME 17 NUMBER 1 (MARCH 2007)

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importantly and centrally, is not enough. Because Roger also showed me what it

really means to teach media studies, and what it is to respect and value the ideas

and aspirations of students. There were certainly other lecturers who sought

more assiduously to entertain their students, and whose lectures were crammed

full of jokes and performances. But for Roger, teaching media studies was not

ever a popularity contest. He took the quieter route, the route of the truly

dedicated thinker, rather than that of the lecturer-entertainer indebted to their

own cult of personality.

On occasions, Roger did not suffer fools gladly, and he was surely keen not to

cater to students’ efforts to draw him into doing all the work in a seminar, but he

enjoyed challenging his students, and creating the space for genuine, meaningful

discussion. One very basic measure of his qualities as a teacher and as a man

would, I think, be the large number of students whom he inspired to take up

academia as a career and as a way of life*/I am but one example of that.

Whether measured by RAE outputs, assorted metrics, or tallies of external

funding, I suspect that each of these counters of academic productivity and

performance would fail to uncover what really matters about media studies, and

about people like Roger Silverstone. Namely, that they change peoples’

perspectives, and their hopes, and their lives. They work hard to make a

difference, however big or small; a qualitative, inspirational difference that

bean-counting can never quite ascertain nor include in its balance-sheets and

proformas.Given the close attention that he characteristically paid to all those around

him, perhaps it was no accident that an interest in phenomenology stayed with

Roger across much of his career, along with a focus on aspects of object-relations

psychoanalysis. Both represented, I would say, Roger’s heartfelt and mindful

recognition of life’s diverse energies and emotions*/of its complexities and

sentiments that might outrun merely rationalistic, contextual or socio-techno-

logical accounts. Above all, these lines of thought indicated Roger’s sense of life

as something to be fully lived, felt, and, above all, played.

Whether based at Brunel University, Sussex, or the London School of

Economics and Political Science, Roger’s research recurrently focused on a

series of concerns. Media and Morality (2006; publication date given as 2007)

makes clear the moral dimension implicit in many of Roger’s earlier publications,

but it also builds on Television and Everyday Life (1994) by analysing the

specifically moral aspects of the quotidian. Media and Morality offers nothing

less than a kind of manifesto, but this description could just as well be applied to

Why Study the Media? (1999). Making the case for the media’s importance*/an

argument perhaps aimed at sectors of academia as much as at the wider

culture*/Roger’s follow-up then took all this as read, starting instead from an

assertion of the media’s global and universal role. In a sense, Roger’s work can be

read as a mirror of his career: as he moved more and more on an international,

global scene, so his work also took on an increasingly cosmopolitan character. So

while his earlier television studies work can sometimes appear to be nationally

based, his later work on media technology and identity becomes more European

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in flavour, presaging the global scope of Media and Morality. But of course, work

and life, career and context, never fit together so neatly. It might just as

meaningfully be said that Roger’s research*/far from reflecting his altered

university environments and his increasingly internationalised social, scholarly

networks*/imagined these different possibilities; its academic rigour, complex-

ity and humanity bringing his work to ever-wider readerships.In any case, despite following developments and shifts across different

paradigms, Roger’s intellectual trajectory was actually remarkably consistent,

without, of course, being overly singular. In his early work on television-as-myth

he tackles the question of how cultural realities are media-constructed, and by

the time of Media and Morality he remains very much focused on the boundary-

work carried out by media messages and images. And although the powers,

poetics and narratives of media texts are linked to myth in Roger’s structuralist

phase, these issues remain just as central in his later writings, despite the

moment of high structuralism having long since passed.One thing that Roger’s work very clearly and successfully achieved was to

move with the times of new media technology. A singular focus on television was

displaced, as mobile telephony, the Internet, and a host of associated digital

technologies crossed Roger’s theoretical horizons. Where others may have been

tempted to play safe and stay in touch with their first research specialism, Roger

showed a willingness to embrace change, not to mention an admirable

intellectual curiosity. Indeed, he once warned me that I could expect to be

pigeonholed in my own academic career, noting with some amusement that 10

years after he had left behind a certain topic, he was still being invited to give

keynote talks on that very subject. Now, academia may not always be the fastest-

moving of cultures*/but, even with that proviso, Roger’s personal interest in

media technology combined with his mental agility ensured that he was never out

of touch, out of step, with either cutting-edge media or cutting-edge media

studies.

Roger’s untimely and tragically early demise undoubtedly takes from us one of

media theory’s major contributors on the world stage; a man who always showed

a deep sense of humility, respectfulness and justice, as well as personal qualities

of playfulness, wit and charm. Where certain other senior scholars might

occasionally give off the impression of having invested heavily in their own

self-importance*/desperately seeking a place in the as-yet-unwritten textbooks

of days-to-come*/Roger steered well clear of brands of self-mythologisation and

self-aggrandisement.

And the fact that Roger left us with a completed manuscript about to be

published demonstrates one of the more poignant facts of academic publication,

of all publication*/that frequently the ideas that touch us and move us, which

get under our skins and into our minds, come from present�/absent authors; from

people whom we might form an image of, or hope to meet, but perhaps will only

get to know through the printed page, website or screen. Not so here, for I can

hear Roger’s voice as I read Media and Morality*/his finely-turned sentences

carry so well the precise cadences and rhythms of his equally careful

TRIBUTE TO ROGER SILVERSTONE 3

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speech*/and although he is not here now, and I wish he was, I shall still carry hiswords and thoughts with me. Debates and arguments have a habit of going on

in the scholarly community. Roger Silverstone’s name will go on with them.Rightly so.

Cardiff University, UK

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