Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2009

This paper argues that media studies needs to be upgraded to reflect contemporary changes in digital media. It argues that media studies was a product and reflection of the broadcast-era of media, being formed in and analysing a specific historical period of media production, distribution and consumption. The rise of digital media, the transformation of old media into a digital form and ongoing developments in digital technology take us into a post-broadcast era, defined by new alignments of productive and distributive power and media consumption and use. This requires an upgraded Media Studies 2.0, marked by the revision and updating of existing disciplinary knowledge; the foregrounding of contemporary changes and the development of new categories and concepts to understand these, and the open-sourcing of the discipline itself laying open its foundation, assumptions and biases to enable its public to continually rewrite and improve its knowledge, to ensure its continued relevance in a rapidly changing era.

When it comes to the revolutionary promise of participatory media, the challenge faced by the proponents and practitioners of a Critical Media Studies 2.0 is not to assert (in all too familiar rhetoric) that, everything has changed, but rather to explain why, even in the face of dramatic technological transformation, power relations remain largely unaltered. This essay explores some of the ways in which the social context has shifted to absorb and deflect the critical potential of interactive media and traces the outlines of a critical project for Media Studies in the digital era. In particular, it argues that the automatic equation of interactivity with political critique and democratic empowerment represents an outdated way of thinking about the social role of information and communication technologies. Interactivity isn't automatically political it needs to be made political if it is to live up to its promised potential. Consequently, critical Media Studies needs to develop new practices of sense making, an updated theory of exploitation, and a political economy for the digital era.

Whatever Media Studies 2.0 involves, one thing is certain, there is a need to confront and deal with new technologies, most notably computers and computer networks. Despite the fact that the discipline has largely marginalized these innovations, there has been some effort to incorporate the computer into both the theories and practices of media studies. This has been accomplished, at least in the United States, through the development of what is now called computer-mediated communication (CMC). CMC, which effectively understands the computer as a medium of human communication, does not necessarily institute a significant paradigm shift in media studies but accommodates the new technologies to existing structures, methodologies, and models. This essay contests and critiques this approach. It reviews the development of CMC, identifies its structural limitations, and provides an alternative understanding of the computer that has the potential to reorient the discipline in a much more radical fashion.

This paper probes a moment in the history of Media Studies education. My study enters iTunes U to explore how teaching, learning and scholarship are defined and operate in this environment. Podcasting is neither celebrated nor vilified, but situated within a much longer history of sound in education. Instead of positioning the iPod as a rupture in music, commerce and downloading practices thereby triggering the historical redundancy of analogue sound this platform becomes an opportunity to reconfigure the function of sound in media education. The interest remains, not Media Studies 2.0 or 1.0, but media literacy. Such a phrase and study does not require a designation or an imperative for platform migration. The development of media literacy remains contiguous, gradual, considered, contemporary, passionate and planned.

The notion of Media Studies 2.0 is reassessed in the light of both past and present Critical Theory. It is argued that Media Studies 2.0 risks repeating the mistakes of earlier media studies by failing to engage adequately with stubbornly relevant critiques of mass society. A more sustained recognition and interrogation of Critical Theory's analysis of technological processes is called for. Whilst writers such as Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj iek are presented as possible examples of a Critical Theory 2.0 to compensate for the worst excesses of Media Studies 2.0, it is suggested that there is still much to be learnt from such Critical Theory 1.0 figures as Adorno, Heidegger, and Kracauer.

Audience research, this paper suggests, is an excellent field to test the claims of Media Studies 2.0. Moreover, 2.0 claims are a good means to review qualitative audience research itself too. Working from a broad strokes analysis of the theory, politics and method of interpretative research with audiences, it is argued that the new media ecology demands new roles of researchers, and an open approach to audiencehood as practice and innovative research method. The paper ends with a case study of the co-creation project of a research team and a Moroccan-Dutch Internet community-writing team working together on an Internet telenovela.

This paper responds to calls in the last two years for a Media Studies 2.0 that would reformulate the discipline to take account of the radical changes in Media practices brought about by digital technologies and their cultures. Whilst agreeing on the pace and scale of change this paper argues that Media Studies as a broad interdisciplinary area has many traditions which are readily equipped to deal with the contemporary situation. In particular it argues through a number of case studies for a discipline that finds fruitful conjunctions of traditional and novel forms of critical analysis.

This article responds to the articles about Media Studies 2.0 featured in this special issue of Interactions. Key features of Media Studies 2.0 are restated: (1) Considerable changes in the media ecosystem, where internet-based technologies now blur the range of places where users can encounter, interact with and contribute to media content; (2) The collapse of separate categories of producer and audience, as growing numbers of people become creators and curators of digital media; (3) A turn away from professional media productions, towards the everyday participatory and creative possibilities of today's media.

The article notes William Merrin's sophisticated contributions to this debate, and goes on to consider some of the criticisms made about Media Studies 2.0. It notes that commentary in this field tends towards either celebration or condemnation of new technologies, and suggests that a more measured discussion of the role of media in people's lives might prove more illuminating.

Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses, Jussi Parikka, (2007) New York: Peter Lang, ISBN 978-0-8204-8837-0 Paperback, 18.00