[Air-L] Does Comm Sci notice the internet?

Daren Carroll Brabham daren.brabham at utah.edu
Mon Feb 9 15:48:25 PST 2009


I think communication broadly (both mass comm. and speech comm.) is a natural home for new media/Internet studies, a discipline (that ought to be) focused on process and human exchange through various means.  However, I think technological dinosaurs roam the halls of many journalism & mass comm. departments, professors who are experts in the areas of radio, television, and print but who for whatever reason have not kept up with new media technologies and refuse to do so, citing that area of study as "something other people do."  I think most journalism & mass comm. folks appreciate the importance of new media, if only because they recognize that print is giving way to pixels and that it's hard to imagine the mass media operating without regard to the Internet these days.  But appreciation for new media technology is not a substitute for knowing it and doing it, and the journalism & mass comm. departments that fail to get up to speed or hire tech-savvy folks will both crumble AND produce graduates who will enter the workforce unable to compete in a digital media world.  The bigger threat that new media pose to journalism & mass comm. programs, of course, is that some mass comm. programs are hiring so-called Internet scholars who can't build basic Web pages themselves.  It's like the TV critic who never watches TV or the social movement scholar who's never been on a non-profit board or volunteered before.  These programs will continue to teach print newswriting and "new media and society" courses separately, for instance, rather than to integrate them into coherent convergence journalism curricula.
 
The speech comm. folks are worse off, I think.  Some rhetoricians have taken to the Internet and video games, fascinated by these new "texts," but many have not.  And the ongoing critique of rhetorical criticism is its tendency to stray from production, ownership, and audience reception in favor of a myopic view of the text itself, a myopia that does no service to the complex realities of the new media landscape.  Organizational comm. folks generally have yet to embrace the fact that new media have fundamentally restructured the notion of the organization, the nature of labor, and other hallowed topics.  Many org. comm. scholars are still stuck in the outmoded concept of The Organization, writing about new media (if at all) as some "thing out there" that organizations interact with.  The innovation and the organizational behavior folks in business studies are way ahead of organizational comm. folks in terms of understanding new media.  The interpersonal communication scholars are handling new media well, but they're still stuck in the rut of figuring out how face-to-face interpersonal theories are relevant to mediated interactions.  Necessary work, but not thrilling to me personally :-)
 
Communication *ought* to be a great place for new media to flourish, and indeed some comm. programs around the world are doing great work in new media...but not enough of them are.  In my opinion, it's the library/info. science folks and the art and architecture folks who are generally doing the most important work in new media studies.  Even the business scholars are ahead of the curve.  Communication has fought hard to become a "serious," recognized discipline, and it has developed a rigid disciplinary posture to prop up its ego.  As such, it is quickly abandoning its eclectic, flexible, innovative beginnings...abandoning technologies and technological issues that are themselves eclectic, flexible, and innovative.  (And, by the way, I definitely wouldn't go looking to Journal of Communication for thoughts on interdisciplinarity and innovation...actually I'd say the journals of ICA, NCA, and AEJMC are all on a different plane than Convergence, New Media & Society, ICS, and other journals).
 
This is only MY humble opinion of course, and I recognize I've painted the discipline in very broad strokes...but it's a topic I happened to have pondered myself lately as I navigate my research identity with the realities of my department.  I'd love to hear others' thoughts.
 
db
 
---
Daren C. Brabham
Graduate Teaching Fellow
Department of Communication
University of Utah
255 S. Central Campus Dr., Rm. 2400
Salt Lake City, UT  84112
phone:  (801) 633-4796
daren.brabham at utah.edu
www.darenbrabham.com <http://www.darenbrabham.com/> 



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