A Companion to New Media Dynamics

John Hartley, Jean Burgess, Axel Bruns, John Hartley, Jean Burgess, Axel Bruns

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781119000860, 9781444332247
• eBook ISBN: 9781118321638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A Companion to New Media Dynamics presents a state-of-the-art collection of multidisciplinary readings that examine the origins, evolution, and cultural underpinnings of the media of the digital age in terms of dynamic change

• Presents a state-of-the-art collection of original readings relating to new media in terms of dynamic change
• Features interdisciplinary contributions encompassing the sciences, social sciences, humanities and creative arts
• Addresses a wide range of issues from the ownership and regulation of new media to their form and cultural uses
• Provides readers with a glimpse of new media dynamics at three levels of scale: the 'macro' or system level; the 'meso' or institutional level; and 'micro' or agency level

Part 1
Approaches and Antecedents

Chapter 1
Media Studies and New Media Studies

Sean Cubitt

History and Geography

Media studies lies at a crossroads between several disciplines, as reflected in the multiple names of academic departments dealing in media. This typically undisciplined discipline arose in a concatenation, still unresolved, of scholars from several traditions in the humanities and social sciences—ethnographers of everyday life, US and European communications scholars, interpersonal and commercial communications specialists, literary scholars, sociologists of subcultures—and today includes a range of activities whose approaches include economics and political economy, regulation, technology, textual analysis, aesthetics, and audience studies. There is no single canon of defining theoretical works, and only a loose assumption as to which media are to be studied, often defined by institutional matters: which media are studied may be circumscribed by the existence of journalism, pubishing, photography, or music schools claiming title to those media forms, as more frequently art history, literary, and linguistic studies bracket off their specific media formations. By media studies we presume the study of the technical media as they have arisen since the nineteenth century, in four broad categories: print, recording, broadcasting, and telecommunications. Given the typical shapes of neighboring disciplines studying specific media such as literature and music, a common concentration has been on industry, governance, and audience, with a specific address to aesthetics only in the case of the technical media. A specific change then for new media studies has been that the genres and business models once regarded as proper to each of these categories have, with the rise of digital media, converged aesthetically and economically. This has not posed a significant challenge to most of the schools of enquiry that have grown up over the past century that have taken technical media as their focus. In fact, the hybrid origins of the field of study have tended to produce a surprisingly holistic sense of mission: to understand media we need to understand their materiality as objects and systems, as economies and polities, in their operations in the social, cultural, economic, and political lives of the people whose thoughts and passions they mediate. Though we are constrained to use the phrase, few media studies researchers care for the expression “the impact of media on…”: mediation is the material form in which we exchange wealth, exercise power, and reproduce our species. The convergence of previously somewhat discrete media and corporations might be understood as creating the possibility of thinking this way about media; or we might believe that the idea of universal mediation is common to both phenomena, and perhaps an aspect of our stage of social evolution. Either way, the holistic approach is by now integral to media studies' confrontation with and assimilation into new media.

Discussions of new media must include some definition of the new. In media studies, that newness can be given a practical date: October 13, 1993, the date of the release of the Mosaic web browser, which opened up network computing for the mass participation of the later 1990s and the new century. Other dates might work as cleanly—the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, perhaps—but do not entail the common-sense awareness that emerged in the ensuing months that something massive and life-changing had begun. Prior phases, as far as mainstream media studies is concerned, constitute a prehistory of the popular or mass uptake (depending on the school of thought involved) that turned laboratory or experimental formats into technical media of the scale and significance of the press or television. 1993 can, then, serve as the watershed of the new in media studies.

Statements of this kind are controversial, not only because other competing dates might serve but also because media historiography is a central and hotly debated aspect of media studies. Among the most cited texts in the field, Walter Benjamin's “Work of Art” essay (1969, 2003) and Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media 1964 both established periodization as a major feature of media studies, the former distinguishing handcraft from mechanical; the latter distinguishing oral, alphabetic, print, and electronic media as distinct epochs of human history. While McLuhan's ostensible technological determinism has been warmly debated ever since, the fundamental notion that the history of media is important to understanding contemporary media formations has become doctrinal. Political historians intersect with communications specialists in key works in the British tradition of Thompson (1963), Williams (1958, 1961), and Anderson (1983), and rather differently in key works the European tradition such as Mattelart (1994, 1996, 2000) and Debray (1996, 2000, 2004). A significant reorientation of these analytical studies has come in the wake of digitization (though not specifically because of it) in the form of media archeology, an approach to historiography that takes as its problem the origins of the contemporary. Leading figures Lisa Gitelman (1999, 2006), Oliver Grau (2003), Erkki Huhtamo (2005, 2006), Jussi Parikka (2007, 2012), Jonathan Sterne (2003), Siegfried Zielinski (1999, 2006), and perhaps the best-known exponent, Friedrich Kittler (1997, 1999, 2010), differ in many respects but share a passion for meticulous scholarship, a readiness to understand technical detail, an openness to long durations, and a sense of the contingency of media evolution that learns from but cuts across the orientation to progress that characterized McLuhan's work. The arrival of new media brought about a serious reconsideration of the mathematical as well as engineering bases of computing, and a fascination with ostensibly marginal media that, however, have had important reverberations in contemporary media: technologies as varied as spirographs (Huhtamo 2007) and filing systems (Vismann, 2008).

In many instances, media archeology points toward continuities between earlier and contemporary forms of media, based on specific discoveries in visual perception (e.g., the phi-effect, previously thought of as persistence of vision) or the physics of light (lens design from Galileo to Zeiss Ikon). Relatively few media archeologists also attend to the structure of the industries involved in developing, standardizing, and disseminating media innovations (although film historians provide a counter example: see Crafton 1997; Gomery 2005). But, while individual, often national, industries have received significant attention, the lack of archeological enquiry into the histories of regulatory instruments and institutions has been a significant lacuna, one that has begun to weigh on more recent attempts to theorize the interplay of influences in the formation of emergent media forms among engineers, corporations, governments, and international agencies such as the International Telecommunications Union. As a result, important critical insights into the evolution and changing capabilities and orientations of such bodies have received less attention than have the technologies they serve to constrain and regulate (see MacLean 2003 for an example of how such historical research can inform present policy). Since one of the most imposing results of new media dynamics has been the increasingly rapid globalization of communications infrastructures, and increasing dependence on them for economic, political, social, and cultural globalizations, the lack of work historicizing the new terrain of global media governance is a specific weakness in contemporary media studies, albeit one that is being addressed, if tangentially, in the context of significant new work on Internet and telecommunications governance in the international field (Chakravartty and Sarikakis 2006; Goldsmith and Wu 2008; deNardis 2009; Collins 2010).

The relative poverty of institutional histories can perhaps be explained by a double phenomenon coinciding with the emergence of new media networks in the 1990s. Under the influence of postmodern critique, the thesis that history was becoming a cipher encouraged a new spatial emphasis in media analysis. Meanwhile, the acceleration of both global flows and everyday life tended to reduce the felt importance of time, and to replace it with (often troubled) new orientations to space and place. The most influential study of these phenomena remains the three-volume The Information Age by Manuel Castells (2000 [1996], 2004 [1997], 2000 [1998]). Building on foundations of substantial empirical research, Castells conceptualized the network as the central form of globalization in the late twentieth century. Drawing on world systems theory but challenging theorists for whom the decline of the nation state as a political force and the fixed relation of core to periphery were doctrine, Castells—along with other leaders in the geographical turn such as David Harvey (1989) and Saskia Sassen (1991, 1994)—emphasized the space–time compression of the new media landscape, the rise of flexible accumulation in post-Fordist, informationalized industries, and the cosmopolitanism of corporate elites, in a world in which access to the speed of networks connected such elites from city to city, bypassing both rural and industrial hinterlands and the urban poor. While the point had been made theoretically before (e.g., by Virilio 1986), the mass of data supporting the hypothesis deepened the theory by opening up new insights into the different modes in which place (e.g., Augé 1995) and time (e.g., Hassan 2003) are experienced in the global network. The geographical turn also coincided with the rise of postcolonial challenges to entrenched cultural studies analyses, which knocked on into media studies. De-Westernizing media studies (Curran and Park 2000) became a significant project in its own right, not least as new media began to shift from t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introducing Dynamics
• Part 1: Approaches and Antecedents
• Part 2: Issues and Identities
• Part 3: Forms, Platforms, and Practices
• Index
• End User License Agreement