I was interested in Dean's comments on the ideas below. Two things he says are particularly worth picking up upon because they're central to the claim that we need an updated media studies ... they are the question of a historical perspective and whether a new media 'revolution' has taken place...
As Dean says: "The problem with a lot of new media critique, hyperbole and upgrade culture is that, like the cyclops, it lacks parallax. It looks monocularly just at the now and is prepared to junk genealogy, archaeology, etc. etc. When it does look for the patterns, tracing and mapping genealogies, the notion of revolution looks less and less appropriate."
What follows isn't an argument with Dean, it's merely taking his ideas as a starting point for my own arguments ...
1. First, the question of media history in media studies:
This is interesting to me because I consider my interests to include both new media and media history. To me the two seem inextricably linked: If you have any interest in media history then it should encompass the continuing transformations we can see around us today. In practice I'm not sure that happens. Though there are notable exceptions, many media historians I've read seem closed off to new media. Also we have to recognise that media history is badly served within media studies. Not many departments offer media history modules whilst the history that is taught is almost exclusively the history of those mass media/broadcast forms such as print, cinema, television and radio, as if 'media' began in the mid 15th C and only encompasses select technologies. Look at books on 'media representations' to see how useless our field is on the question of history - apparently images are historically new, mostly magazine advertisements or film or TV images and are best approached through semiology ... I wonder if the people of Byzantium would agree? ... Thus the entire history of image making and its anthropological, philosophical, theological and political and cultural significance in the west as well as in non-western countries and traditions is utterly elided ... The result is that we're producing an a-historical media studies, or at least one that's stunted in its scope to mass/broadcast forms ... which is just what we should expect from a media studies formed in the era of mass media - from a Media Studies 1.0 ... A Media Studies 2.0 needs to be more historical, learning from the longer history of media forms and processes.
Other media histories don't appear in our field. To understand the history of new media - of computers, of the net, of mobile phones, of video games - you have to go to books on popular science, IT, technology, cultural history and cultural studies. You won't find many written by media studies lecturers or from within the discipline. I have a long standing passion for the field of (what is badly described as) 'pre-cinema'. I love panoramas, dioramas, peepshows, magic lanterns, stereoscopes, optical toys etc. and I teach these to my students. You won't find these even mentioned in most media studies textbooks or discussions. The texts are written instead by historians, by experts outside the field and by the collectors. I had to become a collector in order to understand these forms and in order to teach them to my students (I've now built up a good collection of stereoscopes, lanterns, daguerreotypes etc. I use in my classes), because mainstream media studies could tell me nothing about them. Again, therefore, like the history of the image in media representations, entire media worlds and forms don't exist in our discipline ...
I've also just finished a module on Reality TV and the books within the field were so predictable. Almost without exception they provide excellent histories of the idea of Reality TV in relation to television and cinema but their consideration of other forms was so limited. In the end the best lecture I gave was using Vanessa Schwartz's Spectacular Realities (she's a history professor), using her examples of the late 19th C panorama, of the wax museums and of the public exhibition of dead bodies at the Paris morgue in the late 19th C to demonstrate the drive for the real as entertainment preceding 'modern' mass media forms. No media studies texts even thought of discussing anything like that ... But, hey, these are media studies text books on Reality TV that don't even mention Baudrillard so what can you expect ...
Ultimately media studies' ignorance of media history is important because it is related to and reinforces the field's ignorance of new media. Missing out on most of the history of media it also fails to see how new forms are emerging today. Media history, however, is essential for new media studies. New media need contextualising in the history of media forms and the history of what these forms were attempting to accomplish. Only that grand view can inform us of what is happening today and where it might go. To understand the drive for HD and stereo TV, for immersive video games and VR you have to understand the panorama, the stereoscope, the zogroscope, the mareorama ...
Although there should be a close relationship between new media and media history, more commonly media history is deployed in the field to dismiss any need to look at new media: If we can historicise it enough then there's no revolution so we can all go back to sleep; If we can show how earlier aspects of the form or its processes existed then we don't need to consider anything as new. It's lazy. Ideally media history should be used to show us how new media revive or remediate older forms and functions and to show us how these new forms may be new or have new effects and consequences.
2. New Media have a history and they are revolutionary.
Very simply, we can trace the history of the computer, for example, back through the introduction of PCs, through developments in processing, storage, networking, interfaces, etc., back through the WWII machines, back through the relay machines, back to Hollerith and Babbage and maybe, even, to Jacquard and his punch card looms. We should trace this history and understand it, just like we should understand the history of the net, of the mobile phone, of video games, of the telephone, of the telegraph, of the discovery and theorisation of electricity etc. We should understand all these separate histories and their historical effects and impact etc. But the fact that there is such a history - whether we read it linearly, through traditional historical methods, or construct our reading of it through the tools of genealogy and archaeology - does not conjure away the possibility that a revolution can/has taken place.
The idea of a new media 'revolution' is justifiable as soon as we understand that these forms with their own history become revolutionary when they reach a certain point of critical mass; when they have a concentrated cultural, political and social impact and when they begin to produce important interrelationships. Ok, we can conjure away any sense of the internet as a 'revolution' if we want to by emphasising its origins in 1969, when the first node went online, but the fact remains that the net did became a popularly efficacious - and thus a transformative - medium in the early-mid 1990s, when it began to infiltrate the popular consciousness and began to be used by a broader public. A historical approach can be used to simply dismiss such 'moments' by endlessly historicising them but this would be a misuse of history. The same goes for other new media. Agar provides a great history of the mobile phone but the mobile phone's cultural power only really manifested itself when it began to become ubiquitous (for us) in the mid to late 1990s ... So what I'm saying is that histories exist but revolutions still happen and that they happen when media forms go 'critical' ... and when forms go critical together we certainly have a revolution ...
This interlinked critical mass of technologies is what we're seeing today and this is why a new media revolution is happening. What we're seeing is the cultural, critical mass of three processes - the digitalisation of previously analogue content (and thus the convergence of forms upon the digital), the centrality of computer processing power and the rise of networked computing (allowing forms to communicate with each other and cross traditional barriers). What this adds up to is a revolution in which previously separate media forms become translated into a digital form and content; in which our media experiences (sound, images, motion, alphabetic information etc.) become available on digital platforms and cross digital platforms in a way they barely could before and begin to impact upon and spur on each other. The transhumanists talk about the 'singularity' or the 'spike' - about how exponential developments feed on and drive on themselves. Even if we're not heading for that singularity, contemporary media developments take on an interconnected and exponential form once they become digital, feeding on, adding to and playing off each other...
McLuhan used metaphors derived from physics to describe the incredible 'explosion' of cultural energy caused by the 'fusion' of forms - from the evolution of media and their 'hybridisation'. It's an idea that works well today: the 'mobile phone' is no more a 'phone' than a computer is a 'computer' - it is a hybrid digital device, built upon computer processing technology, that incorporates and hybridises the phone, the TV, the net, the video-camera, the camera, whilst remediating and hybridising the letter and the telegraph in the text message etc. and its all singing and all dancing ability to cross all these media explains the remarkable cultural energies it has produced, the waves of which continue to sweep over us ...
Of course this hybridisation causes problems for McLuhan and for the traditional media studies' distinction of form and content. Does TV remain TV if it's available on a phone? Surely radio isn't radio if it's available on a computer or TV? - it no longer uses broadcast radio waves and has no geographic limits and its sensory balance is altered ... So has media form dissolved into simply being a word for types of 'content' on digital platforms, in which case we only have one 'form' today - that of the computer ... and even my fridge and car are now computers ...?
I don't think we've begun to think through these questions yet. I do know that we're not in a position to begin thinking about them until we see what's happening... To continue the lyrical theme of Dylan's 'Ballad of a Thin Man', Dean picks up on - "Well, you walk into the room, like a camel and then you frown /You put your eyes in your pocket, and your nose on the ground".
Time to get those eyes out.
The revolution has already happened and Media Studies 1.0 has to change.
'Wake up. It's Time to die'.
William Merrin
