A Companion to New Media Dynamics

By John Hartley, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jan 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781118321638

Book preview

Notes on Contributors

Anders Albrechtslund is Associate Professor at the Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University, Denmark. His main research is within surveillance studies, philosophy of technology, new media, and ethics. He is a member of the Management Committee of Living in Surveillance Societies (EU COST Action, 1099–13: see www.liss-cost.eu/about-liss/description) and is taking part in the research project Surveillance in Denmark, funded by the Danish Research Council. His publications include Empowering Residents: A Theoretical Framework for Negotiating Surveillance Technologies (with Louise Nørgaard Glud, Surveillance & Society, 2010); Internet and Surveillance (ed. with Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, and Marisol Sandoval, 2011); and Participatory Surveillance in Intelligent Living and Working Environments (with Thomas Ryberg, Design Issues, 2011).

Ben Aslinger is Assistant Professor of Media and Culture in the Department of English and Media Studies at Bentley University, USA. His research focuses on popular music licensing in television and video game texts and the globalization of video game consoles. His publications include articles in the collections Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom (2008), LGBT Identity and Online New Media (2010), and Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures (2012).

Feona Attwood is a Professor in the Media Department at Middlesex University, UK. Her research is in the areas of sex in contemporary culture, with particular interests in onscenity, sexualization, new technologies, identity and the body, and controversial media. She is the editor of Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture (2009) and porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography (2010), and coeditor (with Vincent Campbell, I.Q. Hunter, and Sharon Lockyer) of Controversial Images and Sex, Media and Technology. She is also coeditor of journal special issues on Controversial Images (with Sharon Lockyer, Popular Communication, 2009), Researching and Teaching Sexually Explicit Media (with I.Q. Hunter, Sexualities, 2009), and Investigating Young People's Sexual Cultures (with Clarissa Smith, Sex Education, 2011). She is a founding member of the Onscenity Research Network.

Christoph Bieber is Professor of Political Science at the NRW School of Governance, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. The position is funded by the Johann-Wilhelm-Welker-Stiftung, where the main area of research is ethics in political management and society. Previously he was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen. His dissertation thesis on Political Projects on the Internet: Computer-Mediated Communication and the Political Public Sphere was published in 1999. He has published widely on the effects of online communication for political actors. His books include Politik digital. Online zum Wähler (2010) and Unter Piraten: Erkundungen einer neuen politischen Arena (ed. with Claus Leggewie, 2012). He blogs at http://internetundpolitik.wordpress.com and on Twitter he is known as @drbieber.

Grant Blank is the Survey Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. His special interests are statistical and qualitative methods, the political and social impact of computers and the Internet, and cultural sociology. He previously taught at American University in Washington, DC.

Erik Borra is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, as well as Digital Methods Initiative's lead developer. He holds an MSc in artificial intelligence. His research focuses on rethinking the web as a source of data for social and cultural science.

Danielle Brady is a Lecturer in Media, Culture and Mass Communications and Coordinator of Higher Degrees by Research in the School of Communications and Arts at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia. Following a previous career in research science and further postgraduate study in the arts, she has specialized in advising on research methods across a range of disciplines and in facilitating multidisciplinary research. Her research interests lie in the social study of science and technology.

Axel Bruns is Associate Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI). He is the author of Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005) and Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008), and editor of Uses of Blogs (with Joanne Jacobs, 2006). His research website is at http://snurb.info. His work focuses on the development of new research methodologies for the study of public communication in social media spaces; see http://mappingonlinepublics.net for more information.

Jean Burgess is Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. She is a coauthor of the first research monograph on YouTube—YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (2009, also translated into Polish, Portuguese, and Italian) and coeditor of Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone (2012). Her research focuses on methodological innovation in the context of the changing media ecology, especially the computational turn in media and communication studies.

Stephen Coleman is Professor of Political Communication at the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds, UK. His three most recently published books are The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory, Practice, and Policy (with Jay G. Blumler, 2009), The Media and the Public: Them and Us in Media Discourse (with Karen Ross, 2010), and Connecting Democracy: Online Consultation and the Flow of Political Communication (coedited with Peter Shane, 2011). His next book, How Voters Feel, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press and is based on research conducted for his AHRC-funded project The Road to Voting, which explores the affective and aesthetic dimensions of democratic engagement.

Kate Crawford a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, USA, and an Associate Professor in Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. For 10 years, she has published widely on the social, political, and cultural practices that surround and inform media technologies. She has conducted large-scale studies of mobile and social media use at sites around the world, including in India and Australia. Her book on technology, culture, and generational critique, Adult Themes (2006), won the Manning Clark Cultural Award. Her current projects include the long-term implications of Big Data, social news, young people's use of mobiles, and media use during disasters and other acute events.

Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK; Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne, Australia; and Honorary Professor of the University of Dundee, UK. His publications include Timeshift: On Video Culture (1991), Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture (1993), Digital Aesthetics (1998), Simulation and Social Theory (2001), The Cinema Effect (2004), and EcoMedia (2005). He is the series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press. His current research is on the history and philosophy of visual technologies, on media art history, and on ecocriticism and mediation.

Ranjana Das is a Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Leicester, UK. From 2011 to 2012 she was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Lüneburg, Germany. She completed a PhD (2008–2011) in the Department of Media and Communications at London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, where she researched media audiences and media literacies. She is Grad Student Rep for the International Communication Association (2011–2013), and was Young Scholars' (YECREA) Representative (2010–2012) on the Audience and Reception Studies Thematic Section of the European Communication Research and Education Association. Her interests lie in media audiences across a range of different genres. She has been involved with cross-national projects in Europe to do with the media and families, transforming audiences, and children and the Internet.

William H. Dutton is Professor of Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford, and Fellow of Balliol College, UK. Before coming to Oxford in 2002, he was Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, USA, where he is an Emeritus Professor. In the UK, he was a Fulbright Scholar, National Director of the UK's Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PICT), and founding director of the OII during its first decade. He is editing a handbook of Internet Studies and writing a book on the network society's Fifth Estate.

Emily Easton is a PhD student in Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. She holds an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and has taught in the Cultural Studies Department at Columbia College Chicago. Her research interests lie at the intersections of cultural capital, cultural consumption, and technology. She has coauthored Harnessing Social Technology in Students' Transition to College: Facebook's Role in Student Adjustment and Persistence (with R. Gray, J. Vitak, and N. Ellison, 2012).

Cherian George is Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Singapore. His research focuses on journalism and politics, including online alternative media. He is the author of Contentious Journalism: Towards Democratic Discourse in Malaysia and Singapore (2006). A former journalist with The Straits Times, Singapore, he blogs at Journalism.sg and Airconditionednation.com. He has a PhD in communication from Stanford University and a Masters from Columbia University's graduate school of journalism.

Tarleton Gillespie is Associate Professor in the Communication Department of Cornell University, USA, with affiliations in the Department of Information Science and the Department of Science and Technology Studies. His research examines the ways in which public discourse is structured by legal, political, and economic arrangements. His first book, Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (2007), on the debates about digital copyright and the implications of technological regulation, was chosen as Outstanding Book by the International Communication Association. His second book will examine how the content guidelines imposed by online media platforms, social networking sites, and smartphone app stores set the terms for what counts as appropriate user contributions, and will ask how this private governance of cultural values has broader implications for freedom of expression and the character of public discourse.

Gerard Goggin is Professor of Media and Communications in the Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney, Australia. He is widely published on the cultural and social dynamics of new media, with books including Digital Disability (2003), Virtual Nation: The Internet in Australia (2005), Cell Phone Culture (2006), Internationalizing Internet Studies (2009), Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media (2009), Global Mobile Media (2011), New Technologies and the Media (2012), and Mobile Technology and Place (2012).

Lelia Green is Professor of Communications at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia, and Co-Chief Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI). She is the author of The Internet: An Introduction to New Media (2010), which includes work arising from two projects funded by the Australian Research Council to investigate schoolchildren's use of the Internet in the context of their family life and that of their peers. She is a collaborating researcher with the EU Kids Online project in Europe. In 2010 the CCI funded its Risk and Representation program, comprising Lelia Green, Catharine Lumby (UNSW), and John Hartley (QUT), and conducted research in Australia to parallel that carried out in Europe by the EU Kids Online network.

Alexander Halavais is Associate Professor of Sociology at Arizona State University, USA, where he teaches in a graduate program in Interactive Communications. He also serves as the Technical Director of the Digital Media and Learning Hub, and as President of the Association of Internet Researchers. His research addresses questions of social change and social media, and particularly questions of attention, metrics, and learning. His book Search Engine Society (2008) discussed the ways in which search is changing us individually and socially. His work explores the role of formal metrics in guiding attention and social change. He blogs at alex.halavais.net and tweets as @halavais.

John Hartley, AM, is Professor of Cultural Science and Director of the Centre for Culture & Technology, Curtin University; Researcher at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (Australia); and Professor in the School of Journalism, Media & Cultural Studies (JOMEC), Cardiff University (Wales). He is former Dean of the Creative Industries Faculty, and ARC Federation Fellow at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. His research interests include cultural, media, and communication studies; creative industries; and cultural science. He has published 24 books and over 200 papers, including Creative Industries (ed. 2005), Television Truths (2008), Story Circle (ed. 2009), The Uses of Digital Literacy (2009/10), and Digital Futures for Cultural and Media Studies (2012). He is founding editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies (Sage), and a member of the ARC College of Experts.

Bernie Hogan is Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. His research focuses on the relationship between technologically mediated social cues (such as friend lists, real names, address books, etc.), social identity, and network structure. Hogan has also focused on novel techniques for the capture and analysis of online social networks. His work has been featured in Information, Communication & Society, City & Community, Field Methods, Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, and several edited collections. He is working on identity and social conflict on Wikipedia and crossnational perceptions of social norms in online dating.

Indrek Ibrus is a researcher at Tallinn University's Estonian Institute of Humanities. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science with a thesis on the evolutionary dynamics of mobile web-media forms. He received his MPhil from the University of Oslo, Norway. His research interests include the practices of crossmedia content production, the evolution of transmedia narratives, and the forms of the ubiquitous and device-agnostic web. He is also investigating the possibility of dialogue between disciplinarily distant evolutionary approaches to media change (evolutionary economics, cultural semiotics, complexity theory, political economies of media) with the purpose of working toward a transdisciplinary approach to media innovation.

Jeffrey P. Jones is Director of the Institute of Humanities at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, USA. He is the author of Entertaining Politics: Satirical Television and Political Engagement (2nd edn., 2010) and coeditor of The Essential HBO Reader (2008) and Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (2009). With Geoffrey Baym, he is also coeditor of News Parody and Political Satire Across the Globe (2012).

Charles Leadbeater is an independent author based in London, UK. He is the author of several books about the rise of the web and cultural industries, from Living on Thin Air (1998) to We-Think: Mass Innovation Not Mass Production (2008). The Independents: The Rise of Cultural Entrepreneurs, was published by Demos, the London think-tank. His most recent book is Innovation in Education: Lessons from Pioneers Around the World (2011). His website is charlesleadbeater.net.

Andrew Lih is a new media researcher and technology journalist, and Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, USA, where he directs the new media program. He is the author of The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia (2009) and is a noted expert on online collaboration and participatory journalism. In his previous life as a software engineer, he worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories and was a principal/founder of Mediabridge Infosystems, creator of the first online city guide for New York City (ny.com).

Sonia Livingstone is Professor of Social Psychology, Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. Her research examines children, young people, and the Internet; media and digital literacies; the mediated public sphere; audience reception for diverse television genres; Internet use and policy; public understanding of communications regulation; and research methods in media and communications. She is the author or editor of sixteen books and many academic articles and chapters, including Audiences and Publics (ed., 2005), The Handbook of New Media (ed. with Leah Lievrouw, 2006), The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture (ed. with Kirsten Drotner, 2008), Children and the Internet (2009), Media Consumption and Public Engagement (with Nick Couldry and Tim Markham, 2010), Children, Risk and Safety Online (ed. with Leslie Haddon and Anke Goerzig, 2012), and Media Regulation: Governance and the Interests of Citizens and Consumers (with Peter Lunt, 2012).

Alice E. Marwick is an Assistant Professor at Fordham University, USA, in the department of Communication and Media Studies and a research affiliate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her work looks at online identity and consumer culture through lenses of privacy, consumption, and celebrity. She is currently working on two ethnographic projects, one examining youth technology use and the other looking at femininity and domesticity in social media such as fashion blogs, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Her book, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Self-Branding in Web 2.0, is forthcoming from Yale University Press. She has a PhD from New York University's Department of Media, Culture and Communication, and was previously a postdoctoral researcher in social media at Microsoft Research New England.

Willard McCarty is Professor of Humanities Computing, King's College London, UK, and Professor in the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics, University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is the editor of the British journal Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (2008–), founding editor of the online seminar Humanist (1987–), and founding convenor of the London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship (2006–). He was the 2005 recipient of the Canadian Award for Outstanding Achievement (Computing in the Arts and Humanities), the 2006 Richard W. Lyman Award (Rockefeller Foundation), and the 2013 Roberto Busa Award (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations). He is the editor of Text and Genre in Reconstruction (2010) and author of the first comprehensive theoretical treatment of his field, Humanities Computing (2005). He lectures widely in Europe, North America, and Australia. See mccarty.org.uk.

Sabine Niederer is the Director of CREATE-IT, the applied research center of the School for Design and Communication at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. She is also coordinator of the Digital Methods Initiative, the new media PhD program at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. In her PhD project she studied the technicity of online content, such as the nonhuman content agents that coauthor online content (e.g., Twitter bots, Wikipedia bots), in an analysis of climate change skepticism on the web. From 2004 until 2012, Sabine worked at the Institute of Network Cultures, with Director Geert Lovink.

Zizi Papacharissi is Professor and Head of the Communication Department at the University of Illinois-Chicago, USA. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. Her book, A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age (2010) discusses how online media redefine our understanding of public and private in late-modern democracies. She has also edited a volume on online social networks, A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (2010). She is the author of three books and over 40 journal articles, book chapters, and reviews, and editor of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media (from 2012).

Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK, and Adjunct Professor of Digital Culture Theory at University of Turku, Finland. He is the author of Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2007), Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010), and What is Media Archaeology? (2012). His coedited books include The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalous Objects from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (2009) and Media Archaeology (2011). Homepage and blog can be found at jussiparikka.net.

Mark Pesce has been exploring the frontiers of media and technology for 30 years, fusing virtual reality with the World Wide Web to coinvent VRML in 1994. He is Honorary Associate in Digital Culture at the University of Sydney, Australia, and chaired the Emerging Media and Interactive Design programs at both the University of Southern California School of Cinema (USA) and the Australian Film Television and Radio School (Sydney, Australia). Pesce was for seven years a panelist and judge on the hit ABC series The New Inventors. He regularly contributes to ABC websites and has a monthly column in NETT magazine. He is working on his sixth book, The Next Billion Seconds.

Thomas Pettitt is Associate Professor in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the Institute for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark. He teaches courses on early English literature and theater, Shakespeare, and Folklore in the undergraduate and graduate programs in English Studies and Comparative Literature. His research seeks to integrate popular vernacular traditions (tales and legends, songs and ballads, customs and entertainments) into a more embracing history of English and European verbal and performance cultures. He has published extensively in these fields, including two contributions (on customs and fairytales respectively) to the Blackwell Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (2010). The encounter with the notion of a Gutenberg Parenthesis has prompted the disconcerting perception that much of this can be construed as media history, and may have contemporary relevance.

John Quiggin is ARC Federation Fellow in Economics and Political Science at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is prominent both as a research economist and as a commentator on Australian economic policy. He has produced over a thousand publications, including five books and over 300 journal articles and book chapters, in many fields of economics and other social sciences. He has been an active contributor to Australian public debate in a wide range of media. He is a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review, to which he also contributes review and feature articles. He frequently comments on policy issues for radio and TV. He was one of the first Australian academics to present publications on a website (now at www.uq.edu.au/economics/johnquiggin). In 2002, he commenced publication of a blog (now at http://johnquiggin.com) that provides daily comments on a wide range of topics.

Penelope Robinson is Research Officer at the University of Sydney, Australia, with a PhD in sociology from the University of Western Sydney, Australia, and a BA (Hons) in gender studies. Her doctoral thesis examined the role of popular culture in marking a generation and in shaping young women's relationship with feminism. Her research interests include social and generational change, new media cultures, feminist cultural studies, and theories of postfeminism.

Richard Rogers is University Professor and holds the Chair in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is Director of Govcom.org, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other info-political tools, and the Digital Methods Initiative, which reworks methods for Internet research.

Tony D. Sampson is a London-based academic and writer. He lectures on new technology, affective experience, and interactive design at the University of East London. He received his PhD from the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. He is a coeditor of The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital Culture (with Jussi Parikka, 2009) and the author of Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (2012) (his virality blog is at http://viralcontagion.wordpress.com).

Jan-Hinrik Schmidt is Senior Researcher for digital interactive media and political communication at the Hans-Bredow-Institute, an independent media research institute based in Hamburg, Germany. After studying sociology at Bamberg University, Germany, and West Virginia University, USA, he gained his PhD in 2004. His research interests focus on the characteristics, practices, and social consequences of online-based communication and the social web. Additionally, he is researching uses of digital games. He is the author of several monographs, journal papers, book chapters, and research reports; a reviewer for various conferences and journals; and a member of the editorial board of the open-access online journal kommunikation@gesellschaft as well as the print journal Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft. Further information is available on his weblog at schmidtmitdete.de.

Theresa M. Senft is the author of Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks (2008) and a coauthor of History of the Internet: A Chronology, 1843 to the Present (1999). She is a coeditor of the Routledge Handbook of Social Media and coedited a special issue of Women & Performance devoted to the theme sexuality & cyberspace. Her thoughts have appeared in media venues such as The New York Times and in a recent talk at TED London. Formerly a Senior Lecturer at the University of East London, UK, she is currently on faculty at the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York University, USA.

Pelle Snickars works as Head of Research at the Swedish National Library. He has published numerous edited books on media history as well as on digital media. Recent anthologies include After the Pirate Bay (2010, in Swedish), The YouTube Reader (2009), Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media (2012), and The Myth of the Net (2012, in Swedish). He is currently completing a web book manuscript, with the working title Heritage as Data. For more information, see http://pellesnickars.se.

Peter Swirski is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, USA and Honorary Professor in American Studies at Jinan University, China. His research ranges from American Literature and American Studies to interdisciplinary studies in literature, philosophy, and science, and the work of the late writer and philosopher Stanislaw Lem. He has been featured on European, Russian, and Chinese TV and on the BBC World Service Radio, and is the author of twelve books including the bestselling From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005) and the National Book Award-nominated Ars Americana, Ars Politica (2010).

Esther Weltevrede is a PhD candidate with the Digital Methods Initiative, the New Media PhD program at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where she also teaches. Her research interests include national web studies as well as platform and engine politics.

Patrik Wikström is Associate Professor at Northeastern University, USA, where he teaches in a graduate program in Music Industry Leadership. His work primarily focuses on innovation and learning in music and media organizations. He is the author of The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud (2009) and has published his research in journals such as Technovation, International Journal of Media Management, Journal of Media Business Studies, Journal of Music Business Studies, and Popular Music and Society. He has previously served as a faculty member at Karlstad University, Jönköping International Business School, and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

Basile Zimmermann is Assistant Professor in Chinese Studies at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where he teaches contemporary China studies and conducts research in the fields of Chinese Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Sociology of Art. His research projects are on electronic music in Beijing, Chinese social networking site design, online advertisement in China, and methodology in Chinese Studies.

Acknowledgments

This project could not have been attempted or completed without the combined efforts of many people.

Jayne Fargnoli—and her team—at Wiley-Blackwell commissioned the book and then trusted us to produce a slightly different one, thereby proving the importance of dynamics in the publishing of new media studies.

Nicki Hall project-managed us, our authors, and the manuscript with a competence and commitment that always went well beyond the call of duty and a cheerful optimism that frequently went well beyond the empirical evidence. However, with her help and professionalism we came in on time and on budget, as they say. Nicki has been a longstanding colleague at QUT, and as always she has made working on a complex project with many personalities a simple pleasure.

The Australian Research Council, whose financial support provided us with time, research assistance, and institutional support, through several schemes: Discovery Project DP0879596: Australian Television and Popular Memory: New Approaches to the Cultural History of the Media in the Project of Nation-Building (Hartley); Discovery Project DP1094281: New Media and Public Communication: Mapping Australian User-Created Content in Online Social Networks (Bruns and Burgess); and The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation SR0590002 (the CCI) (Hartley, Burgess, Bruns).

We are especially indebted to the 43 brilliant, argumentative, and scarily knowledgeable globally dispersed colleagues who we are now able to claim as coauthors. Thanks so much to you all. What an interesting book you have written!

Introducing Dynamics

A New Approach to New Media

John Hartley, Jean Burgess, and Axel Bruns

What's New…?

The term new media has been in play for decades now, and one might be forgiven for wondering how much longer digital forms and platforms can really be called new, or even what the scholarship of new media contributes to knowledge. Is it possible to say new things about new media? We think so. This Companion not only demonstrates the variety, salience, and importance of new media studies but also proposes a distinctive approach to the topic: an approach we call new media dynamics. In this view, what's interesting about new media is not novelty as such but dynamism. Capitalism, technology, social networks, and media all evolve and change, sometimes to our delight, sometimes our dismay. This incessant process of disruption, renewal, and eventual (if often partial) replacement is now one of humanity's central experiences.

This cutting-edge collection brings together a stellar array of the world's top researchers, cultural entrepreneurs, and emerging scholars to give the dynamics of new media their first full-length, multidisciplinary, historical, and critical treatment. Across 34 chapters, an international line-up of the very best authors reflects on the historical, technical, cultural, and political changes that underlie the emergence of new media, as existing patterns and assumptions are challenged by the forces of creative destruction and innovation, both economic and cultural. At the same time they show that familiar themes and problems carry through from old media—questions of identity, sexuality, politics, relationships, and meaning.

…about New Media?

Everyone thinks they know what they mean by the term new media, but in practice it will always be a shifting, contingent term. New describes something real, since inventions continually appear, but it always remains incomplete and contestable, with different media included and excluded in any given usage and over time.

However, the term persists in both ordinary language and scholarly work, not least because new forms and platforms emerged in the 1990s and 2000s that seriously disrupted the established and mainstream media of the day, and thus put into crisis an existing field of research and teaching as well. Broadcast media (radio, television, film) and popular publishing (newspapers, magazines, books) had been reasonably coherent industries, and stable objects of study, for a generation and more. The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web, with their attendant digital, networked, and online platforms, and transmedia forms that took the media out of the household and into mobile devices, changed what people thought they were talking about when they used the word media. What counts as new in this context are those media that depart most radically from the broadcast or mass-media model.

Here it becomes clear that the term media is as troublesome as the term new, because some of the most disruptive innovations do not resemble media at all, compared with their predecessors. Further, even though their position has stabilized, it is not always clear whether a given form, platform, or application can be termed a medium. This is not only a definitional problem; it is also a feature of the commercial and regulatory environment, where some unwisely disregarded upstart venture suddenly (it seems) achieves global scale and threatens the viability of existing players, including international firms and whole media sectors. In other words, new media cannot be seen as part of a gradualist process of incremental development or competitive advantage among established organizations and forms. Instead, they demonstrate the Schumpeterian process of creative destruction of individual firms and tried-and-trusted business plans (Schumpeter 1942) that have continued to operate on the inherited industrial model of broadcast media, mass communication, and popular culture.

It follows that examples of new media will always reflect the date on which the list is generated, so attention must be paid to historical changes—not only in the succession of origination, adoption, retention, and eventual decay of new media as such but also in the scholarly field, which needs to be as dynamic and nimble as its analytical quarry. New media studies, then, requires a reconfiguration of disciplinary approaches and new interdisciplinary collaborations. It is also just as important to study the process of disruptive renewal as it is to identify the distinctive features of each new media form—to make dynamics part of the object of study. Hence the inclusion of that term in our title.

Dynamics are both endogenous, referring to rapid change over time within a given new medium, and exogenous, referring to the turbulent relations across a range of different media—say, between broadcast TV or printed newspapers on the one hand and online video such as YouTube or the blogosphere on the other. Given the often fraught relations across different platforms, the single-platform structural analysis familiar in media studies is not sufficient to explain what's happening in new media. A heightened focus on the dynamics of new media enables us also to draw more explicitly on the growing contribution to new media studies that is being made by fields that have a rich history of studying dynamic processes and systems from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. An undercurrent of ideas gleaned from areas as diverse as evolutionary science, economics, network analytics, physics, and mathematics informs many of the contributions to this volume and—as a dynamic field in its own right—new media studies itself is currently undergoing a process of rapid adoption and adaptation of these outside influences. What results from this process of change are revised and—we believe—more powerful and more flexible conceptual tools for the continuing investigation of new media and their place in the world.

The Dynamics of the Book

A Companion to New Media Dynamics takes a pragmatic stance toward definitional matters; therefore

counting as new those media that are associated with the postbroadcast era of interactive or participatory communication using networked, digital, online affordances;

counting as media those applications that have achieved sufficient ubiquity across populations and territories to be usable by ordinary consumers (as opposed to specialist experts), especially where such popular scale is itself productive of new or unanticipated possibilities;

including the dynamics of change as part of the object of study, and developing theoretical and conceptual frameworks that not only account for but also anticipate further change; and

reflexively understanding the disruptive renewal of intellectual paradigms as an inevitable component of the field of study.

The guiding principle is thus to assist in the process of adjusting to the creative destruction of inherited media and cultural studies while explaining emergent media forms and formats. This is especially important in the context of formal education, where there is an inevitable tension between the need for a stable curriculum (achieved by establishing a canon of selected forms, approaches, and methods) and teaching the latest developments, which while absolutely essential can seem to be uncoordinated or ad hoc unless these novelties are introduced as part of a graspable sequence.

Similarly, while not tied to the needs of replicable courseware (including choosing appropriate forms of pedagogy, syllabus, and assessment), research also requires an explicit conceptual framework and a theorized perspective if it is to make a meaningful contribution to scholarship more generally. The challenge therefore is to see the field and the object of study alike as open, dynamic, and unpredictable, but to have a coherent and explicit approach to both. This Companion provides such an approach to its account of new media. While open and pragmatic about what particular phenomena might count as new media for the time being, it presents a coherent overall approach that amounts to a new way of doing media and cultural studies—one that enables the emergence of new explanatory frameworks more suited to the realities under scrutiny.

In order to do justice to both openness and coherence, the Companion includes interdisciplinary contributions encompassing the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and creative arts; it addresses a wide range of issues, from the ownership and regulation of new media (including questions of intellectual property and digital rights management) to their form and cultural uses (including questions of access, agency, and consumer co-creation).

Further, we have sought authors where we have found expertise. Our authors represent a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds—and most work across disciplinary boundaries within their own contributions. We have also sought authors who are active in the development of new media, whether from a business, technical, or activist perspective, so not all of the chapters are academic business as usual. Some are written by practitioners. As well, there is a refreshing mix of senior and emergent scholars, often collaborating with one another, so that a full sense of the dynamics of renewal in the field itself can be glimpsed in the differences and connections between the contributors. We believe that this mix of disciplines, institutional positions, and professional perspectives is itself an essential component of new media studies.

Cumulatively, within and between the individual contributions, the Companion advances a new approach to new media that explains their generative potential, marketized adoption, and corporate retention; their multifarious and often mashed-up forms; and their value, both economic and cultural, as widely available means by which knowledge and entertainment may mingle and grow in volatile times.

The book is suitable for different levels of use and for different types of pedagogical approaches. Its own structure provides a coherent syllabus for use as courseware. The range of topics, authors, and debates provides an overview of the best new writing in the field for graduate education. The interdisciplinary mix offers new methodological skills for research training. The book promotes multivalent graduate attributes among those who understand the dynamics of cultural change, including critical, research, interdisciplinary, practical, and conceptual skills.

The chapters are organized into three Parts, moving from the consideration of large-scale conceptual and disciplinary issues to more detailed, localized, or specialist concerns in later sections. As a result, the chapters in Part 1 tend to be longer essays while those in Parts 2 and 3 are shorter treatments across a wider field of topics. We hope this mix of styles will successfully encompass the significance as well as the variety of new media dynamics, while showing how the problems that arise in specific circumstances can also be seen as part of a larger fabric of explanation. Overall, then, we hope to give readers a glimpse of new media dynamics at three levels of scale: the macro or system level; the meso or institutional level; and the micro or agency (personal or enterprise) level.

Part 1: Approaches and Antecedents

This section gives the scholarly context and lays out the approaches and terminology that have shaped the field and will continue to do so. The eight chapters, written by leading authors from different disciplinary perspectives, establish how new media have thus far been approached in each case.

These chapters address the history of new media, contextualizing contemporary new media studies with preceding periods of rapid and significant technological and cultural change. They also attend to the history of new media studies. In doing so, the authors reflect on their own disciplines' contributions to the development of new media studies, and how interdisciplinary collaboration might be needed to do justice to the field as a whole.

While recognizing certain very long-term continuities, this Part also establishes how contemporary new media differ from old—in particular, how user-created content, social network markets, and enterprising agency (both individual and organizational) have challenged and reconfigured longstanding distinctions between producer and consumer, expert and amateur, culture and market, knowledge and entertainment.

In Chapter 1, Sean Cubitt provides a magisterial overview of the historical coevolution of the textual, technological, and political dynamics of media systems, and media studies—which, as he points out, has always been in itself a dynamic site of disciplinary collision and crossfertilization. In the contemporary era, he argues, the network is no longer emergent but rather has become the terrain upon which high-stakes struggles over the governance and the future of new media and politics writ large are being waged, leaving new media studies with plenty more to do.

In Chapter 2, Willard McCarty, a pioneer in the field of digital humanities, notes that projecting the future by extrapolating from current technologies—even new ones—is a mug's game. Instead, he recommends a historical approach in order to identify what is shaping the cultural forms of the digital era. He traces clues of a profound disquiet about digital technologies going back to the beginning of the computing era. Seeking to learn how change actually works, specifically in the field of digital humanities, he recommends that we look to the sciences of our times for an analogy that preserves otherness and forceful change but substitutes interaction for impact and assertive self-identity for passive victimhood, in order to get beyond the current phase of knowledge jukeboxes and reach for an understanding of digital media that is fully immersive: not a gauntlet to be run but a true medium—as water is to the swimmer, gravity to the dancer, or wood to the carver.

In Chapter 3, Thomas Pettitt considers the dynamics of emergent media from a long-run historical perspective, leading him to consider a rather different model of historical sequence (and thus of the dynamics of newness) to the linear succession of progressive phases or stages. Instead, he suggests that certain new media may be seen as an interlude, an interruption (like a parenthetical insertion into a sentence) that is followed by what he calls a restoration of earlier features of cultural mediation, only now at a more advanced level of technology. Pettitt considers different traditions of conceptualization that see the era of print—the Gutenberg parenthesis—as one such interruption; a line of argument or topos that he proceeds to critique and deconstruct.

Peter Swirski continues the theme of comparing book culture with new media culture in Chapter 4, showing that, despite dire predictions, book publishing is growing, not collapsing, around the world, as part of what he calls the age of infoglut. Swirski considers the implications for literary or highbrow publishing and for scholarly and scientific publishing, and the impact of various forms of Internet publishing, not least on the theory of mind, the human ability to infer what other people feel, think, and know. Swirski finds that our ability to think in stories is unimpaired, citing the power of the word over the number, of the narrative over the database. He moves on to an optimistic conclusion about the literary system in the light of these developments.

In Chapter 5, John Quiggin examines the economics of new media, as well as the impact of new media on the economy as such. Indeed, he concludes that a more thorough theorization of new media economics would lead to a radical transformation of the way in which we understand the economy—but that this is a project yet to be attempted in any seriousness.

In Chapter 6, Sonia Livingstone and Ranjana Das approach the question of new media dynamics from the perspective of one of the media's core constituencies—the audience. They build on the intertwined histories of both audiences and audience research to argue for the vital and ongoing importance of reception-oriented audience practices such as meaning-making and interpretive work even in contemporary new media environments.

Grant Blank and William Dutton focus on the dynamics of Internet access in Chapter 7, using the results of representative survey data collected for the Oxford Internet Institute and its international partners. They analyze the very agents of dynamic change—the next-generation users of the Internet, who are not simply children and teenagers but those who use next-generation equipment (such as the mobile phone or tablet) to access the Internet from multiple locations and devices—this amounts to 44 percent of Internet users in the UK in 2011. The implications of these changes are not just technical: next-generation users are much more likely to be producers as well as consumers than previously; they listen to music online, play games online, download music, watch videos online, and download, as well as upload, videos or music files. Not surprisingly, compared with previous users they see the Internet as essential.

In Chapter 8, Richard Rogers, Esther Weltevrede, Erik Borra, and Sabine Niederer translate into practice Rogers' own call for the development of natively digital methods for the study of the societal role and impact of new media. They propose an approach to conceptualizing, demarcating and analyzing a national web, using Iran as a case study; a move that usefully—and revealingly—territorializes the study of new media dynamics.

Part 2: Issues and Identities

This Part contains 12 chapters subdivided into six sections: Agency, Mobility, Enterprise, Search, Network, and Surveillance. The subsections reflect the proposed conceptual shift away from linear models of communication (from producer to consumer) and structural models of power toward complex and dynamic systems of culture, knowledge, and control. For instance, where studies of broadcast media tend to subdivide the field into producer, text, and audience, we offer agency, network, and enterprise—and these categories are themselves complicated by mobility, search, and surveillance. We have used this arrangement to organize issues into a coherence based on social network markets (Potts et al. 2008), in order to give shape to the discussion. Critical, feminist, and other approaches associated with new social movements inform this section without signposting or isolating each point of difference. Concerns with cultural diversity are integrated into the substance of the collection, and at the same time do not assume a uniform antimarket stance among authors (or any other agent).

Agency

In Chapter 9, Zizi Papacharissi and Emily Easton apply Bourdieu's concept of habitus to understand how the permanent novelty of new media, and the social architectures associated with such media, generate a specific set of dispositions among their users. Ultimately, they point to the importance of digital fluency, and to the persistence of class distinctions between digital haves and have-nots: those without fluency lose agency, and fluency is a product of class. In Chapter 10, Andrew Lih points to the crossroads at which Wikipedia now finds itself: at a point where the task of capturing the low-hanging fruit (the well-documented fields of human knowledge) is nearly complete, and where it is time to tackle the more difficult challenge of capturing oral history and folk knowledge. But he remains optimistic that the right groundwork is in place: a coming golden age of discovery and feature storytelling… will be facilitated by an Internet-connected, multimedia-capable crowd distributed around the globe.

Mobility

In Chapter 11, Gerard Goggin weaves together the scholarship around mobility, as a broadly pervasive dynamic of modernity, with a detailed reading of the interdependent role played by the new technologies of mobility—mobile phones and other cellular devices. In doing so he traces the shift (in which smartphones such as the iPhone are playing a central role) toward an era not only of mobile technologies but of mobile media. Ben Aslinger focuses in Chapter 12 on a different kind of mobility: the migration of computer or video games (and the devices upon which they are played) into all manner of new domestic and public spaces via a proliferation of devices and (mobile) platforms, discussing how locations for play might add to or challenge definitions of domestic space that place television at the center.

Enterprise

In Chapter 13, Charles Leadbeater distinguishes three main strands of cultural entrepreneurs in the twentieth century—dubbed the improvers, entertainers, and shockers—and adds a fourth archetype, emerging with the digital age: the makers. Makers, he suggests, return us to an older, preindustrial approach to culture: culture as connected, part of life, rather than separate from it; something we do with one another rather than having done for and to us. In Chapter 14, Patrik Wikström shows how media organizations forced to adapt to a rapidly changing market environment are able to draw on the experience of other industries (chiefly, information technology) to understand these challenges. The key problem for these industries, he suggests, is that increasingly active media audiences infuse a similar multisided logic into these markets: old producer/consumer logics no longer hold.

Search

Alexander Halavais suggests in Chapter 15 that search engines and their impact on society deserve our undivided attention. He points to the tension between the push toward ever greater personalization of access to content and the role of these global, mechanized gatekeepers of information. In Chapter 16, Pelle Snickars addresses the problem of archives and access given the contemporary data deluge and the proliferation of navigation methods (browsing, recommendation engines, and folksonomies) that extend well beyond the search paradigm. He discusses the new computational logics required in order to facilitate access to deep data both on the web and in more traditional institutional libraries and archives.

Network

In Chapter 17, Indrek Ibrus considers the evolutionary dynamics of media by examining the historical trajectory of the mobile web. Highlighting divergences, path dependencies, and convergences in this sociotechnological developmental history, he points to the key complexities in establishing an evolutionary perspective on such multifaceted processes. In Chapter 18, Bernie Hogan tackles one of the most pressing issues for contemporary Internet governance—the nature of identity in the context of the growing dominance of social networking sites such as Facebook. In particular, he critiques from the perspective of communication rights the rise of the real-name web and the uncertain futures of anonymity and pseudonymity.

Surveillance

In Chapter 19, in responding to contemporary concerns about online privacy, data-mining, and surveillance in social network sites, Anders Albrechtslund proposes a new conceptual model of surveillance: participatory surveillance. Albrechtslund uses this model to describe the complexity of power relations in an environment where, via the architectures and practices associated with platforms such as Facebook, we are always simultaneously both watcher and watched, listened-to and listening in. In Chapter 20, Christoph Bieber uses WikiLeaks as a case that points to the growing political power of code and coding: beyond the media furor around the site and its enigmatic founder, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks shows how new media platforms can shift regime behavior, as Assange himself has put it.

Part 3: Forms, Platforms, and Practices

This Part builds on the guiding concepts and issues identified in the previous two Parts, exploring them through a range of exemplary domains. It covers established and emerging media forms and technologies, with a focus on the ways in which, as new media, they represent multiple forms of remediation as well as technological, cultural, and social convergence. Again, this Part is subdivided into sections: Culture and Identity; Politics, Participation, and Citizenship; and Knowledge and New Generations. These three sections take up some of the traditional concerns of cultural, communication, and media studies—concerns about identity, relationships, meaning, and knowledge—and situate these questions in different new media contexts. The book ends with a nod in the direction of the new generations who, even as we speak, are busily inventing new new media, even as they play with, copy, explore, and disrupt the ones currently passing as new.

Culture and Identity

In Chapter 21, Feona Attwood charts some recent and ongoing shifts in the cultural economy of the web through the lens of sex and porn cultures, arguing from a range of examples that while it has become accepted wisdom that [professional] pornographers are lead users of ICTs, more recent developments indicate that, like the mainstream media industries, sex media are seeing the effect of the broader trend toward user-generated media content and the creation of online community. In Chapter 22, drawing on her well-known work on cam girls, which prefigures the current ascendancy of videobloggers on YouTube, Theresa Senft considers a relatively new modality of mediated identity: the branded self as microcelebrity and the ways in which this notion recasts identity as a product of the audience, not the subject. In Chapter 23, drawing on sociology, feminism, and queer theory, Alice Marwick provides a cogent overview of some of the key issues in and dominant contemporary approaches to the problem of social identity in relation to the Internet—as a product of interaction, discourse, and performance. She concludes that the back and forth between concepts of singularity and multiplicity that currently characterizes ideas and practices of identity is likely to continue for quite some time. In Chapter 24, Jan Schmidt tackles the complex concept of networked identity: a fluid, changeable identity that is highly context-dependent and expressed across a series of what he describes as personal public spheres that are formed when and where users make available information that is personally relevant to them.

Politics, Participation, and Citizenship

In Chapter 25, Stephen Coleman suggests that politics is being redefined by new media: he sees an opening up of politics taking place online. Through this, the established vocabulary and institutional logic of politics is rejected, and new, playful forms of expression and participation are injected into the political process, even in spite of sustained attempts to frustrate these changes. In Chapter 26, Cherian George presents Singapore as exhibit A for how new media are used to effect political change. He points to a dynamic, dialectical relationship between state power and Internet-assisted insurgency, evident in how Singaporean activists are using the Internet to turn the instruments of state power against the state itself. Jeffrey P. Jones discusses the impact satire is having on democratic citizenship and political participation in Chapter 27. He notes the emergence of political satire TV shows in reaction to staleness and stagnation in the news media, and positions them as examples of the use of performativity and play as tools of citizenship. In Chapter 28, Tarleton Gillespie focuses on the pervasiveness of the term platform and the distinctive moment in the evolution of the cultural economy of new media that it represents. He artfully reveals the slipperiness of the term as used by (and to refer to) web-based services such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, showing how the multivalence of the term allows platform providers and other actors to maintain an address to multiple constituencies whose interests do not always coincide. In Chapter 29, Axel Bruns traces the evolution of personal homepages, from the first hand-coded HTML pages to social network profiles. He notes the tensions between individualism and standardization, between personal identity and social embeddedness, and shows how individual personal presence now exists in the interweavings between these different models and platforms.

Knowledge and New Generations

In Chapter 30, Mark Pesce outlines the new media toolkit now available to humanity, as we enter an age of hyperconnectivity, hyperdistribution, hyperintelligence, and hyperempowerment. The new environment currently emerging, he suggests, is redefining us, our relationships, our social structures—and that process of reconfiguration has only just begun. Drawing on his own materialist analyses of instances of the Chinese web, in Chapter 31 Basile Zimmermann demonstrates how, even in the age of big data, close, descriptive accounts of discrete phenomena can produce points of comparison that are useful in understanding how cultural difference plays out in new media—not only via language but also via the design and architecture of new media platforms. In Chapter 32, Tony Sampson and Jussi Parikka point to the lessons we might learn from network dysfunctionality: from viruses, malware, astroturfing, and other bad new media practices. The network, they suggest, is the perfect environment for both the sharing of information and the dysfunctionality of viral spreading—and the same processes that drive viral dysfunctionality can also drive beneficial sharing activities. Framed against a backdrop of constant social worry about young people and the Internet—and taking forward some of the themes raised by Blank and Dutton in Part 1—in Chapter 33 Lelia Green and Danielle Brady draw on the findings of the EU and AU Kids Online projects to explore the ideas surrounding risk and young people online, and young people's own perceptions and experiences of Internet use, including risk. In Chapter 34, Kate Crawford and Penelope Robinson critique the very idea of youth as a highly significant category in such debates. They demonstrate how, throughout history, generationalism persistently recurs in discourses around new media technologies, becoming particularly marked in contemporary ideas such as digital natives and the us-and-them rhetoric that often accompanies such notions. They call for a more holistic and multifaceted approach to understanding the relations between identities and technologies.

*

Overall, the book can be used as a good companion, to whose company the reader may return to explore new media forms and devices bit by bit—from Wii to Wikipedia; Wi-Fi to WikiLeaks. Or it can be read more intensively, as a syncopated interweaving of voices and themes, each with their own rhythm and leitmotif. Like all orchestrations, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. And, true to the conversational, collaborative, and co-creative spirit of many chapters, the Companion invites readers—researchers, policymakers, entrepreneurs, students, and users—to add their own voices to the chorus.

References

Potts, J., Cunningham, S., Hartley, J., and Ormerod, P. (2008) Social Network Markets: A New Definition of the Creative Industries. Journal of Cultural Economics, 32(3), 167–185.

Schumpeter, J. (1942) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper & Bros.

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,