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

Meryl Krieger meryl.krieger at gmail.com
Tue Feb 10 06:58:53 PST 2009


Daren:

Your experience may be leading you to ignore all the places where this trend
does not hold true. I can best speak to my own experiences here at Indiana,
where both the Telecommunications folks and Communication & Culture
(formerly the Communication Studies Department, now split) both are very
conscious of new media studies, each from its own perspective, and both very
attuned with new media. Be careful about your generalizations, though I'm
sure I appreciate your frustration. It certainly limits the places I can
hunt for a job, too!

You may or may not be aware that Performance Studies also has its concerns
for new media, as does anthropology. As in any new arena (relatively
speaking), it takes a while before one can find concentrated "homes" within
academe. There are certainly many arenas for contention and difference, but
be sure you know about the many different trends in communications studies
across different levels of the Academy. Where I will agree with you
whole-heartedly is in the arena of what is published in textbooks. I find
that materials to really teach new media have to be cobbled together
frequently from a number of different publications, both scholarly and in
the popular press. Part of that is because of the understandable difficulty
of the publishing universe in staying current with new media (!) and part of
that comes out of the lamentably slow pace of the publication cycle. I think
for scholars whose areas of specialty are not new media, it would be an
extremely difficult task to present them in any kind of adequate way at this
point.

Regardless, your frustration is appreciated.

Regards,

Meryl Krieger
Ph.D. Folklore & Ethnomusicology
Associate Instructor, Department of Communication & Culture, Indiana
University
Adjunct Instructor, Ivy Tech Community College

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 6:48 PM, Daren Carroll Brabham <
daren.brabham at utah.edu> wrote:

> 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 o
>  ther 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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