Media Studies 2.0
Yesterday William Merrin presented an overview of Media Studies 2.0 at London Metropolitan University , following a recent public exchange between himself and David Gauntlett on the discussion list of the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA)
Merrin argues media studies needs an 'upgrade'. Where media studies scholars traditionally researched TV, radio, film and print as distinct, mass media, now such research agendas are difficult to sustain. Take the link between ‘television’ and crime. Once this meant episodes of The Sweeney or the fear of someone stealing your telly. But now that we can watch TV on the internet and mobile phones, people try to hack into our 'TV’ to steal our credit card details. Television is delivered in different codes on different formats and remediating other media forms. Hence Merrin questions the validity of media studies 1.0 categories.
According to Merrin, traditional concerns with audiences, institutions, and mass media were a product of a particular historical period, beginning with Lippmann's enquiries into mass media and democracy and encompassing the postwar era of mass broadcasting. The problem is that media studies scholars assume that era and its associated concerns are somehow ahistorical and permanent. Today, Merrin suggested, it is not that 'old' media have disappeared, but that each has transformed and become interconnected. This creates new matters to investigate, such as the emergence of collective intelligences, questions of materiality, sensory experience and embodied media, and new types of human engagement and participation. Now that we contribute content ourselves via blogs, video and photo posting sites, and citizen journalism, instead of producers and consumers, can we now speak of 'pro-sumers' or 'con-users'?
Merrin worries that the most valuable research on new media is being conducted outside of media studies, for instance by political scientists and sociologists (and we should add economists, management analysts, psychologists, geographers and others). As a McLuhan-ite, who starts with questions of technology and then expands to address people's usage, I wonder if Merrin's approach is part of the problem he identifies. Researchers in politics reverse his order of analysis. They begin with questions about democracy, political mobilisation, social movements and so on, then see what role media technologies play in these processes. Sociologists have their own concerns about crime, sexuality, lifecourses etc, which questions of media technologies can feed into. So if these disciplines have done the work of media studies 1.0 and are leading the way creating new categories and understandings of the world of media studies 2.0, is there any point to the field of media studies at all?
Ben O'Loughlin
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Response: Media Studies 2.0Whilst O'Loughlin offers an interesting position on a presentation by William Merrin I think he unfortunately misses the major argument of Merrin's paper...
Reader Comments (2)
Response to David Berry's reply at Stunlaw, posted as reference - see http://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2007/05/media-studies-20.html
David Berry’s response to my post on Merrin’s presentation of Media Studies 2.0 takes some interesting turns that I hope offer the basis for a productive discussion about why and how we study media. The critical issue, I would suggest, centres upon Berry’s concern that ‘old’ media studies categories ‘may become a fetter on our ability to understand media if we do not pay attention to profound changes in media’. Now is this simply a disciplinary dispute? Researchers outside media studies do not make understanding media their principle concern; an understanding of media – and profound changes in media - is a necessary step towards understanding political, economic or social processes. This leads to ontological difficulties about how and whether media are a condition of, or constitute, these political, economic and social processes. It is tricky to untangle what is explaining what. But the point I highlighted from Merrin’s presentation was his worry that by integrating the study of media into their own disciplinary agendas, researchers outside of media studies are doing a ‘better’ job of contributing to our understanding of media that media studies researchers themselves (and we can discuss what ‘better’ might mean here).
The dismissal of audience research by both Merrin and Berry becomes instructive here. Nobody is denying that the category of ‘audience’ is problematic. Additionally, political hopes that situated studies of media consumption might yield insights into (radical) audience agency have yet to be realised. But does that imply we should ignore media usage? How can we understanding ‘profound changes in media’ without attention to the role of media in society, i.e. how people experience media in their everyday lives and at critical moments? Are we supposed to limit our analysis literally to the technology ‘in’ media – to the nuts and bolts and coding? The explanation of technology itself, and perhaps the social shaping of technology, is a useful but hardly ambitious research agenda. Are we left with a phenomenology of the mousemat? The spectre of technological determinism looms above us once more.
Students come to class with greater knowledge of today’s media than most media studies professors, Merrin argued in his presentation. Their own experiences of connectivity and the collapsing of mediums provides a far richer basis for understanding media than traditional textbooks, he suggests. This seems reasonable. But if it is ok to garner the experiences of 18-25 year old university students, why is it irrelevant to study the experience of other social demographics, as media ethnographies tend to do? A ‘flight into ethnography’, a pejorative term in Berry’s lexicon, surely allows researchers not only to analyse changes in media (if we allow a definition of ‘media’ to include its usage), but also implicate media in our analysis of critical political and social issues of the day. How can you understand moral panics, terrorism, social and political disconnection, and so on without analysing people’s production and consumption of media? How can you understand media and media technologies if you don’t identify their roles in the generation of moral panics, terrorism, social and political disconnection, and on and on?
If we at least agree on a need for conceptual reconsideration, I would be very interested to know what methodologies Berry has in mind that might allow us to gain traction on the research agenda offered by Merrin, i.e. the emergence of collective intelligences, questions of materiality, sensory experience and embodied media, and new types of human engagement and participation. Can we really mobilise Silverstone’s ‘double articulation’ - i.e. investigating media technologies as both objects and as conduits for mediation – without empirical study of people’s uses of media?
Hi Ben,
Thanks for the comment. I have responded on my blog post in the comments. Trying to have a debate *across* blogs makes for tricky conversation conventions... ;-)
Best
David