[Air-L] Basic intro/survey article on "what is new media?"

[Chris Chesher]

Hi Daren,

For historical interest, here is a short piece I wrote for the first  
fibreculture reader in 2001 called 'What is new media research?'


Chris



What is New Media Research?

Chris Chesher, 2001

First published in Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned  
Rossiter, David Teh,, Michele Willson (eds), Politics of a Digitial  
Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory,  
Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, 2001.



All professions and disciplines today are doing research in new media:  
interaction designers, e-business specialists, hypertext authors,  
network architects, computer scientists, online educators,  
philosophers and media theorists. The question for specialists in New  
Media research is: what distinguishes their work from everyone else's?

Within each of these traditions there are many who are just getting on  
with using or building new media, without engaging specifically with  
how these media are new. But there are some, within each of these  
disciplines, who are interested in a more critical and theoretical New  
Media Studies.

But what defines New Media research? What distinguishes it from new  
media production, on the one hand, and from other fields of social,  
cultural or theoretical research, on the other? Is it the object of  
study, the methodology, or something else?

I don't think New Media research is defined by its object of study.  
This tradition is less effective if it begins beforehand by selecting  
one particular technology. A techno-centric approach closes off more  
than it opens up. If a new technology emerges, or an old one mutates  
into something different, 'Internet' researchers, for example, could  
fast become irrelevant.

Identifying a research tradition solely with a technology could also  
easily mean having no attention to which methodological framework is  
appropriate. To start with the Internet as the object of study could  
easily end up with an (in)discipline with no history, no  
methodological conventions, and no common trajectories of inquiry.

However, I don't think New Media Research is defined by any single  
methodology, either. The fact that no single discipline has dominated  
New Media Research is a strength of the tradition that has emerged  
over the past two decades. The best work in the field is  
multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary. The  
question is not how to build a new discipline with clear parameters  
and boundaries, but how to sustain and foster more research of this  
kind without deciding in advance what it should actually do.

New media research is a radically minoritarian academic tradition. It  
aspires to no distinctive identity, nor is it driven by a vision of  
its own future. It is distinguished by its heterogeneity,  
characterised by its diversity. The best work produces not incremental  
advances, but genuine surprises. These surprises tend to emerge from a  
localised attention to something specific cast into a relation with  
something more abstract.

What defines the new media research paradigm that I identify with,  
then, is generated out of a somewhat undefinable ethical impulse. It  
is driven by an imperative to trace productive critical trajectories  
into the most compelling and specific spaces of contemporary techno- 
cultural change.

New media studies concentrates particularly on the inseparable  
processes of technological and cultural innovation. The most mundane  
of these developments interest me more than to the more isolated  
bleeding edge work in research labs or avant-gardens. In popular  
culture, I am interested in the emerging uses of the web, electronic  
mail, iMode, and multiplayer computer games, DVD, SMS, digital  
television, and new cinematic paradigms.

The approaches I prefer are horizontal rather than vertical, finding  
connections between things that are most often considered different  
and unrelated: a tactic that Guattari refers to as 'transversalist'. 
[1] This means more than putting developments into context, because  
there is no possibility of studying anything cultural outside of its  
'context'. It means dealing with the significance of social power  
relationships in textual analysis. It means not bracketing off the  
specificities of technical change from social processes.

A transversalist approach means not only historicising innovations,  
but also recognising and conceptualising novelty itself. To define how  
something is new is not equivalent to claiming that it represents  
progress. The cliched association of all technological change with a  
transcendent conception of 'progress' informs not only marketing  
pitches and policy-makers, but many critics of 'progress'. Change has  
no intrinsic moral value. It is always local, contested, and multi- 
layered. This means that change need not be an explicit objective in  
itself. Unlike ‘progress’, change is inevitable, singular,

New media are nothing new. McLuhan and Ong's overarching epochal  
images of ages of orality and literacy make too much of grand  
divisions between eras.[2] Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation  
helps mark out continuities between old and new media, even if it  
tends to be conservative (as Anna Munster observes).[3] Lev Manovich’s  
Language of New Media is notable for translating ‘old’ media into the  
language of new media.[4] My own work on ‘invocational media’  
identifies computers as a new mechanism that technically captured the  
ancient magical cultural practice of invocation.[5]

I am advocating a New Media Studies (as opposed to Traditional Media  
Studies) that starts with an expectation of constant (but minor)  
innovation. The alternative, of starting with a stabilised medium  
(Television Studies; Cinema Studies; Internet Studies) cab be a recipe  
for marginalisation and retreat into formalism.

On the other hand, there is a danger that if New Media researchers  
refuse to ground themselves on any shared vision of their project,  
disparate individual researchers could become institutionally isolated  
and irrelevant. That's where there might seem to be some advantage in  
the tactic of identifying as teaching or researching 'Internet  
Studies', 'multimedia', 'interactive media', 'computer-mediated  
communication' or whatever. The trouble with these medium-specific  
terms is that they date so quickly.

The term I keep returning to is 'New Media'. While this term has the  
connotation of referring to computer-based media (undeniably the most  
significant technological lineage in play today), it does not exclude  
non-computer innovations. Taking this name marks a break  
(generational / methodological / conceptual) with 20th century Media  
Studies, without disavowing that tradition. It is time to stop  
hesitating about other terms, and define what New Media studies  
actually means (for now).

New Media Studies has close relationships with several disciplinary  
approaches, but every new media researcher has their own attachments.  
For me, these include dealing with Media Studies (from Innis, McLuhan,  
Ong[6], and more recent work directly on computer media[7]) Cultural  
Studies (Raymond Williams on)[8], some areas of philosophy (such as  
Deleuze and Guattari[9], Heidegger[10], Derrida[11]), Science and  
Technology studies (actor network theory)[12], Film Studies, parts of  
sociology[13] and history[14], human interface design[15], new media  
art[16]... it's hard to stop once you get started! But there is  
something distinctive and specific about New Media research.

The paradigm for New Media research might characterised as  
intellectual distributed processing: a decentred, polyvocal and  
contingent set of approaches to conceptualising the operations of  
media technologies in cultural and social change. The heterogeneity of  
approaches begins with the very definition of ‘media technology’ — the  
refusal to offer a final definition might be seen as a blindness at  
the centre of New Media’s vision.

Researchers in local places define the connections between their  
detailed attention to the specifics of particular technocultural  
assemblages with far wider conceptual, social, machinic, ecological  
(and other) processes. Any expression of this research (in any genre  
of writing, or other new media) is in itself a performance that seeks  
to intervene somehow at some level in these processes.

Those who perform New Media research tend to operate in intimate  
relationships with a range of new media practices. Whether one  
researcher’s particular performance is motivated by pedagogical,  
artistic, and even administrative drives, the text that emerges is  
often only functioning in one among several modes with which that  
researcher is comfortable. Academic writing is certainly an important  
discipline. However, for New Media researchers it is complicated by  
its close relation to other genres and modes of expression.

The need to define, or celebrate, New Media research does not apply so  
much to the way that research should be done. The work itself is not  
in particular need of strategic intervention. The need for action  
relates to the complex, yet potentially extraordinarily influential  
position that New Media research has within institutions.

Researchers should identify more clearly as having a distinctive  
tradition in their own right, rather than continuing to work around  
the edges of other disciplines. This does not mean that they should  
become more homogeneous. It means they should develop the self- 
confidence to assert the distinctiveness and usefulness of their own  
(and other peoples') projects, and to develop strategies to build  
forums and avenues for future work specifically dealing with new  
media, new cultures and new technologies.

Asserting a New Media tradition or field certainly is partly about  
establishing a brand. As Mitchell Whitelaw suggested, a brand is ‘a  
tactically engineered identity which serves a heterogeneous network of  
interests’.[17] For me, the New Media research brand already has a  
remarkable power and credibility. The good work in the area tends to  
make work on the same themes in other discourses look weak indeed.

However, it also means that New Media researchers should take  
collective responsibility for creating our own ‘apparatuses of  
capture’.[18] The work of building infrastructures — physical,  
electronic, financial, interpersonal, semiotic — is something of a  
quite different nature from the research itself. Sometimes it means  
applying knowledge to putting New Media into practice in the  
interests  of expanding the tradition’s influence (while remaining  
aware of the ethics of the manner in which this is done). Other times  
it means working within institutions — applying for research funding  
etc. New Media Researchers as a group can work strategically and  
collaboratively, rather than competitively, to build these structures,  
in teaching and in research.

The FibreCulture mailing list has been excellent as a catalyst for  
21st century Australian New Media researchers to establish  
infrastructures connecting its dispersed community of scholars. Over  
the next few years it will be important to find ways to solidify some  
of these relationships.

Therefore I propose the ‘Network for New Media Research’. This Network  
should be developed as both a brand and as an infrastructure,  
providing a contingent encircling around self-identified New Media  
researchers. It may be manifest in many expressions — as websites,  
physical sites, conferences or events, but all with a strategic  
impulse to enhance communication, advocacy and productivity in the New  
Media tradition/field/discipline.

For a start, the School of Media and Communications at UNSW (in  
conjunction with UTS Humanities) recently submitted a proposal to  
DETYA’s Systemic Infrastructure Initiative to establish a Network Hub  
at the Australian Technology Park in Redfern. Irrespective of whether  
the proposal is supported, the Network for New Media Research could  
function as a locus of identification.

To speak positively about New Media research may avoid this term  
falling as another casualty into the graveyard of yesterday’s buzz  
words — multimedia; hypertext/media/; digital-everything and virtual- 
everything else etc. An opportunistically generated, but  
interconnected infrastructure will raise the profile of New Media  
research and teaching across Australia, opening up spaces in which the  
research can follow its own unpredictable and irreducible trajectories.

[1] Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis. An ethico-political paradigm, (Sydney:  
Power Publications, 1995), 33–57.

[2] Walter Ong, Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word  
(London, New York: Methuen, 1982); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding  
media. The extensions of man. (London and New York: Ark, 1964)

[3] Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation. Understanding  
new media (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1999)

[4] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,  
2001)

[5] Chris Chesher, Computers as invocational media (unpublished PhD  
thesis, Macquarie University 2001). Excerpt available at: http://mdcm.arts.unsw.edu.au/homepage/StaffPages/Chesher/index.html

[6] McLuhan op cit; Ong op cit; Harold Innis, Empire and  
communications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950); Innis, Harold,  
The bias of communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951)

[7] Mayer, Paul A, Computer Media and Communication: A Reader (Oxford:  
Oxford University Press, 2000); Friedrich Kittler and John Johnson  
(ed), Literature, media, information systems (Netherlands: G+B Arts,  
1997)

[8] see Storey, John, What is cultural studies? A Reader (London and  
New York: Arnold and St Martin’s Press, 1996)

[9] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand plateaus  
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Gilles Deleuze and  
Felix Guattari, What is philosophy? (London and New York: Verso, 1994)

[10] Martin Heidegger, The question concerning technology, and other  
essays (New York: Garland Pub., 1977)

[11] Jacques Derrida, of Grammatology (Baltimore Maryland: The John  
Hopkins University Press, 1976); Jacques Derrida, Archive fever  
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998)

[12] John Law, Actor Network Theory and After (Sociological Review  
Monograph Series) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) Bruno Latour, We have  
never been modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)  
Bruno Latour, “Technology is society made durable” in John Law, A  
Sociology of monsters. Essays on power, technology and domination  
(London: Routledge, 1991) pp.103–131. Also see John Law’s ANT reading  
list: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/antres.html

[13] Manuel Castells, The Rise of the network society (Massachusetts:  
Blackwell, 1996)

[14] Paul Ceruzzi, A history of modern computing (Cambridge, Mass and  
London, England: The MIT Press, 1998)

[15] Brenda Laurel, The art of human interface design (Reading, MA:  
Addison Wesley Publishing, 1990)

[16] R. L. Rutsky, High Techne: Art and Technology from the Machine  
Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Press, 1999)

[17] Mitchell Whitelaw ‘Re: ::fibreculture:: What is New Media  
Research?’ (Fibreculture post 18 Oct 2001)

[18] Deleuze and Guattari 1987 op cit, 424–474.



--
Dr Chris Chesher
Director of Digital Cultures Program
Senior Lecturer
School of Letters, Art, and Media
Room S314 John Woolley Building A20
University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia
CRICOS Number: 00026A

Phone: +61 2 9036 6173 Fax: +61 2 9351 2434
Mobile: +61 (0)404095480
e-mail: chris.chesher at arts.usyd.edu.au
Web: http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/digitalcultures