Introduction

Media Studies Futures, Past and Present

Kelly Gates

Media Studies Futures, Past and Present

Having a group of scholars comment on key topics and issues for the future of media studies in a printed and bound book seems paradoxical today, given the slow pace of book publishing and the seeming inadequacies of the print form to capture the world of networked media environments. The book form itself, once known primarily as a bound collection of printed pages, is being refashioned for digital networks, in complex relationship with changes occurring in modes of publishing and distribution as well as authoring, writing, and reading practices. Even before the Kindle, the Nook, and the iPad, digital technologies were transforming the book from the inside out, as writers adopted word processors, and as printers moved to screen-based forms of movable type. Google's massive project of book remediation, while in some ways breathing new life into old bound books, has also pushed the world of books that much further toward a total transition from print to screen. Now, even old printed books can be refashioned in networked form, complete with embedded hyperlinks. The bound paper analog form of the book seems an archaic place to be discussing the future of media.

Before moving too far along the path of an apology for the form this collection of printed essays takes, I want to instead qualify the volume's title. The aim of compiling a collection of work under the heading of Media Studies Futures is not to make a definitive statement about the directions the field is taking. Rather, the goal of this volume is to bring together works that collectively challenge any monolithic statement about the future of media and media studies. The principle unifying point that emerges from the diverse body of thought gathered here is that media studies needs to take seriously the fact that radical uncertainty and contingency are the only features that define where media and media studies are headed.

There are both risks and rewards in defining the future of the field and its objects of analysis in this indeterminate way. Without a doubt, people who make it their business to study media need to engage in debates about the future. We should put forth visions of that future that embody the values we hold dear, investing the field with the strongest possible chance of renewed relevancy. But lest we merely adopt the language of actors with very different stakes in what the future of media will look like, we should examine the direction of the field with a reflexive sensibility. In other words, media studies practitioners need to engage in this debate fully cognizant that there is not one future of media or media studies, but many possible futures, and those futures are impossible to know or determine in advance. In the wise words of the late James Carey and his colleague John Quirk, the future “never quite makes its entrance into history” – it is by definition a time that is always awaited but never arrives (Carey & Quirk, 1973, p. 485).

Taking a cue from Carey and Quirk, we can find valuable lessons about the future and its uncertainties by looking to the past, or, more specifically, to the history of the future. In his historical analysis of how people perceived the future in the “culture of space and time” (in the West during the period 1880–1918), Steven Kern (1983/2003) emphasizes the wisdom of French physicists and philosophers of the time, like Emile Meyerson, Henri Bergson, and Jean-Marie Guyau, each of whom in their own way insisted that an uncertain, open future was essential to the very possibility of human freedom. In their view, a predictable and certain future did not portend well for the idea of free will or the possibility that people might be able to actively change their circumstances.

In 1931, the New York Times asked a selection of prominent figures of the day about their projections for the future “eighty years hence.” In his contribution, Henry Ford made the interesting and tentative suggestion that “perhaps our most progressive step will be the discovery that we have not made so much progress as the clatter of the times would suggest.” Ford insisted that “the only profit of life is life itself,” and hoped optimistically that “the coming eighty years will see us more successful in passing around the real profit of life.” It is of course 80 years later, and it is difficult to conclude in these tough times that the real profit of life has been passed around. For every example in that regard, there are many counterexamples. But there is at least one qualified example worthy of note that might support Ford's hopeful vision, even if it was not precisely what he had in mind. When the New York Times published this feature, it included only the views of elite white men. Predictably, if not very prophetically, none of the writers had a single word to say about the changes that might occur in gender relations, or the advances in status that middle-class women would make. Perhaps the “modern woman” was able to make such progress during this period precisely because few bothered to foretell how far she would go.

Of course, contemplating the future presents endless paradoxes. One of the reasons why people are so interested in trying to predict the future is to give themselves a feeling of control over their fate (Ropeik, 2010). Presently, the inventor Ray Kurzweil perhaps best embodies the figure of the futurologist, driven by an intense desire to predict and control the future. He famously forecasts that the world is headed toward “the singularity,” an event horizon when humans will completely merge with computers, giving birth to a new superhuman race of hyper-intelligent cyborgs. Although some dismiss Kurzweil as an Internet-age quack, others are more receptive, including the likes of Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page (Vance, 2010). A documentary about Kurzweil, called Transcendent Man (Robert Ptolemy, 2009), portrays him as a person profoundly motivated by a desire to control his fate and especially to beat death. The film also depicts him as the quintessential technological utopian. For David Golumbia (2009), author of The Cultural Logic of Computation and a contributor to this volume, Kurzweil's ideas are profoundly shaped by a “computationalist ideology.” For Kurzweil, everything is already computation, so it only makes sense that the future is computable as well. Even better, every worldly problem will eventually be solvable with more processing power and well-designed computer programs.

Computers and computation are deeply implicated in future-prediction, so much so that we cannot talk about the future without taking them into consideration. Nor can we fully understand the relationship between computerization and social change without considering the ways computation is used to actively envision and intervene on the future – from the computer-generated imagery used to portray the future in science fiction films, to the computational algorithms used to predict the behavior of the financial markets. Simulation technologies in particular are designed precisely for this purpose, using computational analysis to render virtual representations of ostensible future realities. Simulations have become so commonplace that Baudrillard's once-provocative statement – that simulation has rendered reality obsolete – seems almost quaint today, the basis of countless movie plotlines (Baudrillard, 1983). Hollywood has produced enough copies of The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski, 1999) by now that the simulation trope itself has become a precession of simulacra. Seeing yet another simulation story cannot help but make us nostalgic for a time when the idea seemed original. In fact, as William Bogard (1996) has argued, the logic of simulation is deeply imbued with a sense of sentimental recollection, positing the future as essentially a course of events that has already happened. For all of the hype surrounding its future-predicting potential, notes Bogard, simulation technology is “more about a kind of nostalgia or melancholy for the future; it produces a sense that the future is not ahead but in some fundamental way already over” (p. 23).

Whether they invoke nostalgia, great expectation, or resignation, many of the stories about the future that late capitalist societies tell themselves are formulated via computation, and manifested in digital media of some form. And while the veracity of the output is uncertain, it cannot help but have an influence on both ideas about the future and important future-shaping decisions being made in the present.

But even before computerization, the future and its prediction was a familiar story. According to the philosopher Langdon Winner (1996), the basic tendency of modernism to convey the future as already decided could be found throughout the twentieth century, as the terms of the social contract were defined according to the priorities of capitalist economic development. In the prevailing version of the future on offer, “people were to be propelled forward by forces larger than themselves into a world that was rational, dynamic, prosperous, and harmonious” (Winner, 1996, p. 67). At the 1939 New York World's Fair, for example, the future was presented to visitors as a spectacular experience – a perfectly functioning technological environment portrayed as a foregone conclusion:

By presenting a particular vision of the future as inevitable and nonnegotiable, the spectacle of the Fair defused any public criticism that might emerge from people who saw this future as threatening their livelihoods, values, or traditions. The spectacular version of the future on display also helped undermine the possibility that other individuals and groups might have a say in that future design, or offer alternative visions worthy of consideration.

The aim of this volume is to promote a more open and inclusive discussion of the future possibilities for media and media studies, challenging rather than participating in dominant tendencies to lay claim to a particular future. The book draws together leading and emerging scholars in the field of communication and media studies to address, directly or by default, the problem of how to study and make sense of media at the current conjuncture. The chapters are not meant to be prophesizing so much as provisional and exploratory. They highlight some of the major challenges and opportunities facing scholars, students, activists, and other parties concerned with understanding our changing media forms and environments, and realizing their more democratic possibilities. Some authors advocate for paradigm shifts in the field of media studies, while others take more targeted approaches, focusing on specific industrial, technological, or cultural contexts. The essays are grouped into seven sections: (1) theory, methods, and pedagogy; (2) social and mobile media; (3) media industries and infrastructures; (4) journalism and media policy; (5) interactivity, affect, and media subjectivities; (6) children and youth cultures; and (7) sustainability. There are many themes and conversations that cut across these sections, and many other possible ways that the work could be subdivided – around issues of time and space, labor and work, materiality and immateriality, convergence and remediation, access and inequality, to name a few. Before explaining the chosen subdivisions in more detail, it will be helpful to first consider what we mean by “media” in a world where media are virtually everywhere.

Defining the Media in Media Studies

One central question for both the present and future of media studies concerns the very definition of media: what counts as media now that it no longer makes sense to limit the term to film, television, audio, and print? Does it still make sense to refer to a broad concept or category of “media”? If the more appropriate terms are “digital media” or “new media,” then what do these terms encompass? Terms like “convergence,” “remediation,” “interactivity,” and “user-generated content” capture a general sense of current transformations, but what are some productive ways of parsing out the varied meanings and phenomena that these terms invoke?

Jonathan Sterne (2007) makes an important distinction with respect to “new” media. Most people typically think of computers and digital media forms as new media, in contrast to earlier analog forms. But in reality, digital computers have been around for decades. “In a weird, recursive way, new media are ‘new’ primarily with reference to themselves,” writes Sterne. “Today, computer and other digital hardware displace their own counterparts more than anything else” (p. 19). Sterne suggests that we distinguish two models of “newness” in relation to media change: “(1) the ‘newness’ of a medium with respect to other media, and (2) the so-called state of the art in design and function within a given medium” (p. 18). For example, the Apple iPad and a host of also-ran digital tablets currently count as the newest in new media. But even the iPad, released in April 2010, is not really brand new anymore. What is new is each new model that Apple releases, which renders the earlier versions stylistically obsolete. Although a seemingly smart business model, this approach requires Apple and its competitors to negotiate a precarious balancing act, lest even the most avid of early adopters begin to suffer from newness fatigue. After all, how many new devices can people buy before newness itself begins to seem old?

As Sterne's distinction between these two models of “newness” suggests, media studies needs to be careful to avoid reifying the concept of “new” media. Not only can “new” mean different things, but what we call “conventional media” remain important and relevant, not only as objects for historical comparison but also as institutions and technological forms with their own – albeit uncertain and indeterminate – futures. The media most often singled out in this regard are books, newspapers, and television. We hear a lot about the imminent obsolescence of paper bound books these days; nevertheless, more printed books continue to be produced each year than the year before. As Harvard librarian Robert Darnton (2010) has noted, “I have been invited to so many conferences on ‘The Death of the Book’ that I suspect it is very much alive” (p. 22). This is not to suggest that the business of book publishing is flourishing, or that libraries have nothing to worry about. But there is a reason why Google is expending so much energy on the digitization of bound books (one imagines a small army of manual labor). For their part, newspapers also are clearly in trouble, but the New York Times still has 50 times the number of newsroom employees as the online-only Huffington Post (Alterman, 2008). One suspects that if and when the professional writing dries up, business ventures that now rely on “immaterial labor,” or labor paid for with someone else's dime, will realize that the best writers and reporters are the ones who do it for a living.

Just as Darnton is skeptical about the death of the book, others likewise find rumors about the death of television to be greatly exaggerated. While many people now watch television shows on their computers and other devices instead of their television sets, alternative modes of reception do not mean that TV per se is disappearing. “TV still dominates as a mode of production, distribution, and reception of the very genres that it helped create,” notes Toby Miller (2011). “Time-shifting and platform choice are versions of what has long been the dominant norm – watching material produced and bought by television networks” (Miller, 2011). In fact, the loudest claims about the death of broadcasting in the early 2000s came from mobile network operators competing for a share of the television market, as Max Dawson shows in his contribution to this volume. The mobile industry players portrayed broadcasters as irrelevant and outdated in order to position themselves as the proper custodians of the broadcast spectrum. In her chapter, Lisa Parks likewise emphasizes that the analog spectrum is not a relic of the past but instead contested terrain for the future of media, a fact that clearly runs counter to prevailing assertions about the digital TV transition.

In short, in order to avoid reifying the “new” in “new media,” media studies needs to steer clear of echoing industry rhetoric on the distinction between new and old. Our research agendas need to avoid celebrating recent innovations as radically different and inherently better, and instead engage in forms of analysis that offer more nuanced insights about the relationship between technological change and social change. It is certainly worthwhile to start with new media forms and consider how older media fit into their genealogies. But it is likewise productive to consider what the emergence of new media forms tells us about the meaning and experience of existing media. A telephone only becomes a “landline,” for example, when comparing it to newer and more mobile versions of telephony. In other words, the new level of mobility afforded by and designed into networked digital devices helps us think anew about the situated, localized character of wired, over-distance communication. In fact, the way new communicative devices are integrated into our lives gives us cause to revisit the most basic and fascinating forms of face-to-face “interactivity.” This is not to suggest that we should view the past through the lens of the present. Instead, we need to recognize the deeply embedded ways that the past is still with us in the present. Further, understanding the shape of things in the past provides a better purchase on the shape of things in the present, and lessons learned from the past, even if learned in painstaking ways, provide invaluable guides for the future.

Mark Coté's contribution to this volume provides a noteworthy example. Coté looks to the very distant past (and those who study it) for insights about the forms of mobility and sociality enabled by new location-aware technologies. He asks what we can learn about our location-aware online activities via “a prehistoric turn,” considering a moment in Paleolithic time when the very possibility of being human emerged in interaction with stone tools. From the very beginning of human experience, a direct, constitutive relationship took shape between what was distinctively human activity and the development and use of technologies. It may seem like a stretch to compare a rudimentary stone tool to a digital media device, but such tools did in fact mediate humans' relationship with their environment, conceivably providing a way for users to view themselves as actively engaged with their surroundings and conditions of existence. (Of course, they probably didn't think about it exactly in these terms, not yet having the language to do so.)

It is not necessary to go back as far as Coté does to gain insights about the media forms and practices that appear new today. Lev Manovich has an especially keen eye for identifying the revival of earlier dimensions of media in newer digital forms. In “What is Digital Cinema?” he notes how the first version of QuickTime bore a striking resemblance to Edison's nineteenth-century Kinetoscope, for example (Manovich, 1995).¹ Both viewing devices were capable of displaying only very short motion pictures, played on a loop in a tiny frame suitable for only one viewer at a time. To insist on the newness of QuickTime when it was introduced in 1991 was to overlook the way it revisited an earlier moment of motion picture display – a moment characterized by the convergence of photography, animation techniques, live vaudeville acts, and urban commercial amusements. Further, to see QuickTime as somehow superior or more sophisticated than the Kinetoscope risks being seduced by the digital sublime. Nor does it make sense to draw a linear path from the earlier form to the latter, as if one innovation inevitably led to the other. Why would a linear, advancing path of technological progress lead to such a similar form a hundred years later?

A question very much tied to debates about the so-called death of old media concerns the relevancy of “old” media studies. How useful are the concepts, theories, and methodologies developed in the days before the rise of the Internet and digital media for understanding the new media landscape? For some, the answer is not useful at all: everything about media studies before the Internet is tired, outdated, and inadequate, best left as a pile of historical detritus in the trash heap with printed books and newspapers, celluloid film, and analog televisions. In their contribution to this volume, Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter are adamant that conventional film and media studies – especially the old emphasis on visual representations – make no sense for studying social, mobile, and real-time interactive media. For them, the overreliance on outmoded theory has led media studies down a dark path of conceptual stagnation, and the field now suffers from an incapacity to make sense of the social and interactive dynamics of the digital networked realm – a distinct sphere that demands its own theory and methods.

Whether one finds established media theory and method useful or not, media studies cannot escape the brute fact that digitization and computerization have upended the field's objects of analysis, seriously complicating what exactly “media” is. How does one study “media” when media are so many different things? As a set of social and technological processes, the proliferation of networked digital media is related in complicated ways to changes in forms of social organization, communication, human identity, and subjectivity, and media studies needs to find ways of making sense of how this is happening and what it means. Still, I would suggest that digital media studies should avoid creating a straw man out of the analysis of visual representation characteristic of a particular segment of scholarship, especially when the broader field has long drawn on a wide range of approaches beyond semiotics and textual analysis. If scholars were to divorce themselves entirely from earlier media and established theory and method in media studies – if that were even possible – vital comparative perspectives would be lost, and along with them a host of potentially valuable insights, not only on the past but also on the range of future possibilities.

Part 1: The Future of Media Studies: Theory, Method, Pedagogy

Part 1 of this volume contains essays that address some of the major theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical issues of critical concern for the future of media studies. If the field is going to have a future at all, what should that future look like? What are the questions that need to be raised and addressed in order to situate the field in a position of relevancy and vitality, as a living, breathing space of new and compelling ideas and interventions? Although the six chapters collected in this section by no means exhaust the range of perspectives, taken together they provide productive points of departure. What these authors share in common is a strong conviction that theory, research, and pedagogy on the new media landscape must be radically rethought in ways that either substantively build upon or depart substantially from established approaches to studying conventional media. Networked digital media penetrate virtually every sphere of social life, and the challenge of media studies is to make sense of mediated environments in ways that matter.

Importantly, each author in Part 1 reflects on the intellectual labor and experiences of media studies scholars. Each proposes particular ways that people who study the media might reinvent approaches to their work – especially their research, writing, and pedagogy – thereby reinvigorating their thinking and transforming media studies from the inside out. Who should we take ourselves to be, as theorists, researchers, writers, and teachers, as well as producers, consumers, or users of media ourselves? How do media studies scholars go about inventing new and useful concepts to explain distributed, networked media environments? Collaboration seems critically necessary, advocated by nearly everyone, but how should collaborative research take shape? What are the terms of entry for collaboration, and when and how do academic researchers collaborate with non-academics? Given the conservative disciplinary structure of academic institutions, is the academy in fact the wrong place to try to do innovative and relevant work? And if not there, then where? What sort of institutional spaces do members of the media studies world need to construct for themselves, and where will they find the resources to do so?

Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter raise many of these questions in the two chapters that open this volume, provocatively arguing that the field of media studies has yet to develop a theory of itself. Audience studies investigated fandom and the production of meaning, textual analysis preoccupied itself with signification processes attached to content, and political economy turned its gaze on institutional power. Medium theory, while close to these authors' own interests, still falls short as they see it, because it established a continuum between old and new media without considering how media forms themselves can give rise to the production of new concepts. In their view, media studies desperately needs new concept production, born out of both online and offline collaborative efforts. To develop new concepts, media researchers should begin with reflexive mediation, examining how they use their objects of study in the research methodology itself. They insist on the need for nonrepresentational analysis – moving the agenda beyond the analysis of visual representation to mobile media, miniaturization, smart technologies, and the integration of media into urban environments.

Changes in media brought on by distributed digital networks and their associated institutions, devices, and practices present particular challenges and opportunities for media studies education. The challenges are formidable, as anyone trying to teach in the field of media studies senses intuitively. The problems are often defined as generational, since many students live, work, and play in more immersive, or at least very different, media environments than their teachers. But the pedagogical challenges go beyond age differences, extending all the way to the structural changes that are wrenching higher education and dismantling the social contract it once offered to the middle class. As David Noble has noted, technological changes in higher education are deeply tied to its privatization and commercialization, with technology functioning as both “a vehicle and a disarming disguise” (Noble, 2003, p. 26). While new technologies provide tools for collaborative learning and distance education, these new pedagogical models have placed a considerable strain on an already stressed system of higher education. Debates over the relative merits of online learning, open courseware, and other new instructional technologies are far from resolved. What new approaches do we need for teaching not only about but also with digital media? What forms of media literacy are most important for students growing up in hyper-mediated environments? How much should media studies curricula be given over to instruction in practical media production skills and web design, or, for that matter, computer science and software engineering?

Alexandra Juhasz's contribution to this volume addresses some of these pedagogical issues, offering an analysis of her own hands-on effort to teach about, and literally on, YouTube – an experiment she began in 2007 at Pfizer College in California. Since there was essentially no academic writing about YouTube at the time, and since the purpose was to explore the possibilities and limitations of the YouTube platform, Juhasz stipulated that all the material for the course would come from YouTube itself. Her chapter highlights a few of the sometimes exciting, sometimes painful results of this experiment.

Juhasz's chapter also offers valuable insights on transformations taking place in writing and publishing in media studies. Her experience teaching a course on YouTube, which she repeated in 2008 and 2010, in turn became a research, writing, and publishing experiment. Juhasz published Learning from YouTube as a born-digital “video-book” with MIT Press. As a series of “re-posted” blog entries that she wrote while engaging in these activities, interspersed with her reflections about the experience after-the-fact, the printed chapter itself enacts the messy process of mediation from print to digital and back again.

Contributors to Part 1 also address the formidable questions of methodology raised by the emergence of new media forms and infrastructures, and the multiple levels of convergence that define the media landscape. What sorts of new methodologies will need to be devised to analyze this changing landscape? The sheer quantity of media available seems to overwhelm the possibility of conducting effective studies that can be generalized beyond very limited contexts. People with adequate connectivity have access to a dizzying array of media forms and content.

In his contribution, Lev Manovich offers his vision for a new methodological approach that will allow for the management of precisely this problem of media quantity. The methodology he proposes – called “media visualization” – is designed for analyzing large collections of visual data. Where information visualization involves translating the world into numbers and then visualizing the relationships between those numbers, media visualization involves translating a set of images into another image – one that can reveal patterns that might not otherwise be apparent. Using open source image processing software normally used in medical research and other scientific fields, Manovich and his collaborators have designed a set of tools for media visualization that can be used by other researchers interested in exploring large sets of images.

Focusing on the future of digital game studies, Mia Consalvo also considers the problem of methodology at length. New methods are needed, as the digital game industry has evolved at a phenomenal rate. Game studies can no longer consider console games or the Western market as its primary areas of focus. Social games, casual games, virtual worlds, indie games, and online games all expand the boundaries of what count as games. In addition, markets such as those in China and Korea, and game development companies in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, are challenging the dominance of Western and Japanese firms. How is game studies responding to such changes? How is the field coalescing, now that there are dedicated journals, book series, conferences, and academic programs spread around the globe? Consalvo surveys how game studies scholarship has evolved, what approaches have become dominant, and what views have emerged about the “proper” way to do game studies research.

Many regions of the world are unrepresented in the work collected in this volume, a problem that reflects and reproduces one of the most difficult problems haunting media studies, and one that must play centrally going forward: the dominance of the Global North in defining the field and its priorities. This problem is deeply tied to the intractable problem of unequal access. The term “digital divide,” coined in the 1990s, remains an apt metaphor for capturing a variety of inequalities that continue to define the digital media landscape at all levels, from the global to the local. Latin American and other scholars in the developing parts of the world have never enjoyed the privilege of losing sight of this problem. As Raúl Trejo Delarbre shows in his contribution, most Latin American Internet researchers have tried to navigate a middle ground between bleak prognostications about ingrained and exacerbating inequalities on the one hand, and overly optimistic claims about the radical potential of the Internet to alleviate inequality on the other. In reality, issues of access are often complex and multifaceted, as suggested by the spread of Internet cafés and other sites of public access to the Internet in Latin American countries. The overall picture of digital media access across Latin America and other developing regions is not easy to measure, complicated as it is by patchwork efforts at the local and national levels, on the part of both public and private actors, to “connect” those who remain unconnected. Still, it remains true that the benefits of the digital economy have not been equally bestowed. Euphoric promises made about the Internet's potential to eradicate inequalities have proven profoundly off the mark.

Part 2: Social and Mobile Media Futures

As little as 20 years ago, it would have been hard to predict the rapid emergence of social media phenomena like Facebook and YouTube, or the lightning-speed global diffusion of mobile systems and devices. Part 2 of Media Studies Futures takes up some of the issues and topics of concern to the present and future of social and mobile media. While “social media” are usually understood to refer to web-based platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and “mobile media” to iPhones, Droids, and other branded and networked devices that people carry with them everywhere they go, in fact this distinction is a tenuous one, as the chapters in this section suggest. Our own daily experiences with social and mobile media are themselves rife with blurry distinctions – between sociality and mobility, work and play, public and private, online and off. As I sit here working in a coffee shop, I can access Facebook and any number of other online social media platforms from either my computer or my mobile phone. Although only the smartphone has an embedded location-sensing device that can automatically pinpoint where I am, I could easily “check in” on my computer if I felt like letting my nearly 300 Facebook “friends” know my whereabouts.

Location awareness is not only about being social or communicating with “friends.” Our varied uses of these platforms also generate valuable data about our behaviors and preferences, to be analyzed by an increasingly ubiquitous and sophisticated market research surveillance apparatus. Strangely enough, this fact does not seem to prevent Facebook's hundreds of millions of users from continuing to log on and disclose their private activities on a regular basis. Especially among younger users, there seems to be a decided lack of concern, or at most ambivalence, about the semipublic display of private life, or the impact that public display might have on their future lives. Nor do many of us who pass our time on social network sites (young or old) seem all that concerned about whether the hours we spend there count as labor or leisure. In light of the significant social implications of these blurring boundaries, it seems relevant to question what it is that attracts people to hours of social and mobile media use. Indeed, it seems as important to ask how today's social and mobile media orient users toward the future as it is to consider what the future of these current new media forms might be.

The literature on social and mobile media can be subdivided in myriad ways, but it is hard to bypass one major division between research that focuses on users and uses from an ethnographic perspective, and work that attends to the institutional, technological, and political-economic dimensions of social and mobile media systems. Where scholars like danah boyd (2007) are primarily concerned with user experiences and forms of interaction in online social networks, for example, scholars like Mark Andrejevic (2007) are instead concerned with the forms of institutional and peer-to-peer surveillance that mobile devices and online social network platforms enable. Still, work that falls on either side of this divide is admittedly wide ranging, and there is certainly much work that does not fit neatly into either “camp.” Andrejevic's analysis of peer-to-peer or lateral surveillance can certainly be classified as a study of uses. And even Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture (2006), which celebrates the forms of user empowerment that new media afford, does not ignore entirely the role of media corporations and their economic interests. Nevertheless the divide is apparent: where Jenkins sees a “participatory culture,” Andrejevic sees a “digital enclosure.”

The chapters in Part 2 of this volume represent work that straddles the divide between users and infrastructures, participation and enclosure. In his contribution, Mark Coté examines the forms of sociality and mobility afforded by digital networked media and new location-aware technologies by drawing on Italian autonomism and its central concept of “immaterial labor.”² Coté aims to recover our online social media activities from their capitalist appropriation, at least for a moment, so that the creative and constructive capacities of these activities can be better understood. In fact, Coté writes, in the activities of online social networks we can see very clearly what Marx insisted all along – that commodities are always born of social relations. The practice of “checking in” via social media platforms like Yelp or Facebook Places generates informational commodities of special value in a digital economy, providing a rather transparent example of the way capitalism continues to parasitically sustain itself by colonizing what are essentially social activities. Such activities, whether taking place online or off, push beyond the boundaries of what capitalism is capable of subsuming.

Adriana de Souza e Silva and Eric Gordon likewise examine the rise of location-based networked services, exploring ambivalent user attitudes toward these technologies. Although many people are concerned about the extent to which location-based services enable institutions to track their movements and whereabouts, these services also provide us with a sense of awareness and control over the spaces we move through and occupy. The fact that location-aware systems can be used for these different, seemingly cross-purposes points to the new forms of “differential mobility” they enable, enhancing mobility for some while immobilizing others (Wood & Graham, 2005). New media devices and their infrastructures are reconfiguring how people move through and experience their spatial environments, shaping in complicated ways the social construction of space and the variable levels of control individuals have over their movements and surroundings.

In her chapter on changing models of public health communication about pandemics, Lisa Cartwright shifts the focus from locality to temporality as a key dimension of social media and their uses. What the 2009 “swine flu” campaign made clear was that “the days of using the pamphlet, the billboard, and the television public service announcement as primary means of health communication were over.” Cartwright traces the viral social mediation of the H1N1 pandemic, showing how the fearful possibility of imminent disease threat that the virus presented – the possibility of a rapid viral “outbreak” – was well suited to the temporal mode of social media. The emerging, social media-based paradigm of public health communication is built on strategies of anticipatory surveillance and preemptive mediation, favoring a logic of emergency and rapid emergence. Unfortunately, Cartwright explains, such an approach renders invisible other deadly disease epidemics, such as Hepatitis C, that unfold in bodies and populations at a much slower pace. Like other contributors to this volume, Cartwright's chapter highlights the inescapable fact that the material world of bodies and other living organisms still matters, interacting in complicated ways with the hardware and software of social media. The uses of social media are situated, embodied practices.

While common assumptions hold that the significant innovations leading to the rise of social and mobile media were born in places like Harvard dorm rooms, in fact this represents a decidedly narrow view of innovation and the dynamics of the global digital economy. Too often, the contributions of vast swaths of the planet have gone largely ignored. Even astute insights about the role of immaterial labor in the digital economy assume a level of connectivity – as well as a mode and amount of leisure time – that most of the world's inhabitants do not enjoy. In their contribution to this volume, Cara Wallis, Jack Linchuan Qiu, and Rich Ling focus on grassroots forms of innovation found in the developing world – local practices that have been instrumental to the global diffusion of mobile devices and infrastructures. With a special emphasis on China, they examine alternative economies of mobile phone use, manufacture, service, and repair – very material forms of labor – that have emerged in the Global South. The information have-less engage in what the authors call “subsistence tinkering,” devising their own technical means of enhancing the functionality and prolonging the life of mobile handsets. These tinkering practices represent a new level of flexible manufacturing, as an alternative mobile handset culture arises out of the necessity and ingenuity of those who might otherwise fall on the unconnected side of the digital divide.

Part 3: Media Industry and Infrastructure Futures

Nothing demonstrates the transformations that have wrenched the media industries over the last several decades better than the fate of the recording industry, an object of analysis unfortunately unrepresented in this volume. One would be hard-pressed to make a case for this industry's bright future, which is not to suggest that the situation is completely hopeless for music and musicians. The hardship that the recording industry has suffered has been arguably beneficial in some ways for the music world, at least for live music and for avid listeners with good connectivity. Full of wins for some and losses for others, the case of the recording industry, while unique in many respects, nonetheless underscores the profound changes that have occurred in the media industries and their infrastructures along with the rollout of digital media and distributed networks. Part 3 of Media Studies Futures draws attention to these media industry and infrastructural changes, as well as changes in the broader economy (in Greg Elmer and Andy Opel's contribution), as objects of vital concern to media studies. Although these chapters focus largely on the US context, they nevertheless lay out some vital issues of global relevance.

While the idea of convergence is typically used to refer to the merging of one or more media technologies, like television and the World Wide Web, it also applies at the level of industry and infrastructure, with the same number of caveats and complications. Among media and IT industry stakeholders, one finds a complex picture of interests and strategies that converge one minute and conflict the next. As Dan Schiller (2007) has argued, although it is often claimed that media convergence occurs “through intrinsic technological imperative,” in reality it stems from a combination of industry strategy, public policy, and directed developments in science and technology (p. 103). Among the most powerful forces shaping and accelerating the convergence of different media are the conflicts and negotiations hashed out in the media and IT industries, along with a host of decisions about infrastructures and their regulation that are typically made by engineers and policymakers with little or no public input.

For its part, the commercial film industry is undergoing a makeover at all levels, from production to distribution to exhibition. The transition to digital cinema has been far from a simple matter of designing more sophisticated special effects. In his contribution to this volume, Charles Acland discusses the future of cinema through the career of filmmaker and “technological auteur” James Cameron. Holding the distinction of producing and directing the two top-grossing films of all time to date, Cameron is widely seen as the embodiment of success in the Hollywood film industry. Although no filmmaker works alone, Cameron receives wide recognition for making a major, single-handed impact on the technological and aesthetic trajectory of commercial cinema. For Acland, Cameron's film career, oeuvre, and obsession with pushing the technological limits of film provide an avenue to understanding the dynamics and directions of the cinema industry. While Cameron is famous for his “game-changing” films like Avatar, Acland argues that it is also necessary to consider the way he has used his documentary projects as instruments for promoting particular directions in the development of film technology. In the projects and persona of James Cameron, Acland argues, we find the technological imperative that guides the future of cinema.

If the transition to digital cinema requires careful analysis of the changing dynamics of the film industry, the transition from analog to digital television is another major “infrastructural changeover” that demands the attention of the field. In her contribution to this volume, Lisa Parks examines this changeover, emphasizing the importance of studying media infrastructures, in all their physicality and unsightliness, for what they reveal about “i ssues of materiality, distribution, environment, visualization, and social power.” Although often overlooked and impossible to study in their entirety, media and IT infrastructures provide the basis for the very possibility and functionality of the mediated environments we inhabit. Parks looks at the ways that various actors – government agencies, trade, and community organizations – communicated with the public in an effort to prepare them for the infrastructural transition in the United States, and how these efforts gave citizens cause to consider where their television signals come from, who owns and controls them, and the policies that regulate them. The public education and converter-box coupon campaigns also brought to the surface the socioeconomic disparities and uneven geographies of the digital TV transition, especially in the ways these campaigns addressed fixed-income and minority communities.

Max Dawson's contribution brings mobile media into the analysis of television industry and infrastructural changes, focusing on the institutional conflicts between broadcasters and mobile network operators over control of mobile television. During the early 2000s, both broadcasters and mobile communications companies put mobile television at the center of the agenda for their respective industries' futures. Although they initially pursued diverging paths for mobile television provision, their industry strategies eventually collided. While they continued to utilize different transmission and reception technologies, the business model and user experience that each offered shared too much in common for either industry's comfort. Here Dawson uses Bolter and Grusin's (1999) concept of remediation to explain not only the technological changes in television, but also the refashioning of television's protocols broadly defined, including its uses, business models, contents, regulations, and cultural meanings. While the industries have now moved on from this confrontation, Dawson argues, “mobile television was for broadcasters and mobile companies a proxy battle in the much larger war over spectrum and policy concessions.” Battles over the future of media convergences will play out in precisely these spaces where once-established institutional boundaries are crossed.

Greg Elmer and Andy Opel's contribution is a departure from the other chapters in this section but nevertheless speaks to the dynamics of industries and their relevance to the future of media studies, in this case addressing how the future is premediated in the logic of financialization. Building on Richard Grusin's (2010) notion of premediation and James Carey's analysis of the way the telegraph invented the future as a new domain of market activity, Elmer and Opel examine the future-orientation of the financial markets and the extension of the logic of futures markets to other domains of social life. Like Lisa Cartwright's analysis of the temporal dimensions of social media and disease pandemics, they bring to the fore issues of temporality and prediction, the “anticipatory mediation” (Cartwright's term) that permeates networked digital culture. Like Lovink and Rossiter, they call for nonrepresentational media studies – for them, conventional representational analysis is ill-equipped to make sense of data-intensive mechanisms like futures markets, which aim to bypass conventional forms of signification and to “actively discredit political forms of representation.” Elmer and Opel's chapter offers an innovative and compelling approach to understanding media temporality, the financial logic permeating politics, and the reorientation of subjective action around futures and speculation.

Part 4: Journalism and Media Policy Futures

In prevailing assessments of the winners and losers in the digital economy, there is one victim that may be suffering worse than the recording industry. In the race to obsolescence, the US newspaper seems to be eclipsing all other “old” media. In a New Yorker profile on “the death and life of the American newspaper,” Eric Alterman (2008) recounts an episode of The Simpsons in which a cartoon version of Dan Rather introduces a debate panel featuring “Ron Lehar, a print journalist from the Washington Post.” Heckling the panelists, Bart's bully-turned-friend Nelson Muntz shouts out, “Haw Haw! Your medium is dying!” Principal Skinner proceeds to admonish him for the outburst, but Alterman insists that Nelson is right: “Newspapers are dying; the evidence of diminishment in economic vitality, editorial quality, depth, and over-all number of papers is everywhere.” While the Internet offers an endless stream of blogs covering every topic imaginable, the replacement of underwritten professional journalism with the free labor of amateur writers and wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting marks a turn of vital concern to the future of media and media studies.

The US newspaper and its journalism profession are in a great deal of trouble. However, as scholars studying this issue carefully insist, it is not necessarily the Internet's fault. Just as not everyone agrees that file sharing is entirely to blame for the recording industry's woes, not everyone sees the rise of the blogosphere or Craigslist as the principal culprits of the newspaper crisis. Robert McChesney and John Nichols (2010) in particular argue that neither the Internet nor the financial crisis is the major cause of the steep decline in the status and viability of US newspapers. Instead, these factors have accelerated a process that dates to the 1970s, when corporate ownership and consolidation of newspapers began in earnest. “Go back and read a daily newspaper published in a medium-size American city in the 1960s,” they note, “and you will be awed by the rich mix of international, national and local news coverage and by the frequency with which ‘outsiders’ – civil rights campaigners, antiwar activists and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader – ended up on the front page” (p. 32). While it is nice to think that we can find a similar rich mix of coverage and perspectives online, since after all we have the whole World Wide Web at our fingertips, there are big questions about whether the Internet is really filling the void left by the disintegrating newspaper press, especially at the local level.

The three chapters in Part 4 address various dimensions of the crisis in journalism in the United States, calling for a variety of measures to repair the problem. Two of the contributors are based in the United States and write about the US context. Martin Eide, from the University of Bergen, Norway, focuses largely on the institution of journalism in the US context as well, but briefly considers it in comparison to the Scandinavian “Democratic Corporatist” model.

In his contribution, Richard Campbell examines the resurgence of partisanship in the US press, seeing it as essentially a reflection and response to market forces. For the news media, muting political leanings to reach a mass audience makes no sense when such an audience no longer exists. (See Jack Bratich's contribution to this volume.) Instead, media organizations see more money to be made by targeting and catering to niche markets, including those based on partisan allegiances. In this new partisan marketplace for news, we see the decline of the “objective” ideal in US journalism that dominated throughout the twentieth century. The new era of partisan news – also called the “journalism of assertion” – is marked by the deterioration of the “journalism of verification,” which kept watch over the state and private institutions in the era of nonpartisan reporting. In order to recover the democratic role of the press, Campbell argues, journalism needs to reinvigorate the “news of verification” and develop livelier alternatives to the static formulas of reporting characteristic of commercial television news and the nonpartisan press.

For Martin Eide, an essential challenge for journalism studies – in a time when the phenomenon and concept of journalism is more contested than ever before – is the question of journalistic agency. To explore this question, Eide argues, journalism studies can find useful insights in scholarly work on the problematic of structuring. While some argue that journalism is an activity that anyone with an Internet connection can engage in, Eide defends the institutional perspective: the view that journalism is not just an activity but an institution with a vital role to play in democratic governance, and thus one that requires professional training and full-time jobs. The institution of journalism clearly has an important history, Eide maintains, and it is the institution that must be conceived as having a viable future. In short, for journalists to be accountable to the publics they serve, they need to have agency, and in order to have agency they need institutional support.

In his chapter, Victor Pickard places the crisis in journalism in the broader context of media policy, arguing for a more active role for media studies in media policy debates and policymaking. By situating this gap between media studies and media policy within historical, intellectual, and ideological contexts, he proposes possible strategies for bridging the two areas. He addresses some of the challenges and opportunities for scholars to intervene in core media policy debates in the coming years, including discussions about the future of journalism, media ownership, public media, and Internet policies like Net Neutrality. According to Pickard, media studies and communication scholars have a special role to play in helping to advance policy that enables greater democratic potentials for all of society.

Part 5: Interactivity, Affect, and the Future of Media Subjectivities

In his essay “Who Will We Be in Cyberspace?” Langdon Winner (1996) notes that, as society invents new technologies, it also invents and reinvents people: “To invent a new technology requires that (in some way or another) society also invents the kinds of people who will use it; older practices, relationships, and ways of defining people's identities fall by the wayside; new practices, relationships, and identities take root” (p. 64). The situation is of course more complicated than this, since we also design new technologies in order to help us do particular things and be particular kinds of people, and since these changes play out in unpredictable ways, with plenty of unintended consequences. But it nonetheless holds true that human beings are in some ways invented and reinvented along with the invention of new technologies. We had to learn to become people who drive cars, type on keyboards, and take photographs, to name a few examples, and these devices have contributed to major changes in our ways of life and who we take ourselves to be.

In the domain of personal photography, certain human beings began documenting their lives in images around the turn of the previous century. Many of us now have cameras that we carry around wherever we go, and those cameras are connected to telecommunications networks that allow us to share the images with other people. We do this either in semi-public mode, as on Facebook or Flickr, or person-to-person, as when we text images to others in order to share particular moments or experiences. Much of this image-sharing behavior is utterly banal, like the photographs people take of food and flowers and other mundane things they encounter in their daily lives. But these banal moments of digital media use matter. They speak to the formation of media subjectivities, how we use media technologies to organize our lives, and how the forms they take can offer either productive possibilities or more limiting constraints, or often both at the same time.

This tension between autonomy and constraint raises an important issue concerning the prevailing model of media device and software development embodied in popular devices like the iPhone and the iPad – that is, the relative merits of their closed form with respect to issues of user agency. Jonathan Zittrain (2008) refers to the closed, proprietary form of device and network design as the “appliance model,” which he contrasts with the more open and “generative model” of early PCs and Internet development. Software code gives devices like the iPad their functionality, and the closed model of design makes them especially user friendly and reliable. However, these nicely functioning devices assume a particular kind of user and form of media subjectivity. Specifically, they do not encourage users to know anything about the underlying code that supports their functionality, or to participate in the development of that code, other than in indirect and circumscribed ways. There are of course open source alternatives, but only a very small percentage of people on the planet have the skills necessary to program their own devices.

Part 5 addresses a set of issues of central concern to the future of media studies: the invention of new media subjectivities. Opening the discussion, Jack Bratich considers the crisis of “the audience” and its radical renegotiation in the interregnum – the moment of transition that “the people formerly known as the audience” now precariously occupy. He asks: how are media subjects brought into being, rendered knowable, and made into objects of intervention? To address this question, Bratich argues, the field of media studies needs to revisit and reopen earlier ways of conceptualizing and problematizing the audience: masses and publics, consumers, receivers, spectators, social identities, active audiences (decoders), and fans. In his analysis of the audience, we again encounter Italian autonomism and the attempt to theorize social and creative activities as they push beyond and otherwise avoid being fully captured by capital. From a Deleuzian perspective, there is no predicting what will happen when bodies mingle together and engage in affective relations with one another. Bratich proposes the concept of “interactivism” as a way of rethinking media subjectivities post-audience, where bodies interact and form collectivities through new modes of interaction, both actual and virtual.

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen is likewise concerned with rethinking the concepts used to define collectivities – in this case the public and mediated public participation. She calls for more attention to emotion as a mobilizing force in politics, compensating for what she sees as a profound “epistemological deficit” in political communication research. Surveying some of the work that is already beginning to fill in this theoretical gap, she explains how the rational, dispassionate citizen at the heart of liberal democratic theory is being radically rethought, as the affective turn in cultural studies and the humanities spills over into the social sciences, and into political science in particular. Especially for scholars studying social movements, the question of affective engagements in politics has become a central concern. Drawing on the distinction Brian Massumi (2002) makes between emotion and affect, Wahl-Jorgensen argues that conceptualizing emotion as the narrativized interpretation of affective experience enables a better understanding of its deeply politicized and politicizing dimensions. And although emotion can have destructive political consequences, Wahl-Jorgensen explains, it also has integrative possibilities and enables the empathy necessary for more diplomatic forms of political deliberation.

David Golumbia offers another vital contribution to the discussion of new media subjectivities, focusing on the operations of computationalist ideology – the view that everything in reality is ultimately made up of computation. As noted earlier, this ideology is found in crystallized form in the work of Ray Kurzweil. Golumbia provides a thorough vetting of Kurzweil's ideas, including his version of the “uploading” story, or the familiar trope that human beings are on the verge of transcending embodied existence and migrating into a world where human minds become computers that inhabit realities much like those seen in videogames. According to Golumbia, works of science fiction like Dollhouse, Battlestar Galactica, and Gamer demonstrate the conceptual flaws in the uploading story. Specifically, they show how ideas about the technological transcendence of material, bodily constraints rely not on actual advances in science and technology, but on distortions beyond any recognizable limits of our conceptions of the human, the mind, and the body.

In the penultimate chapter in Part 5, Lisa Nakamura makes an important contribution to her own groundbreaking work on the forms that race and racism take online, this time through an analysis of player speech in multi-user online games. “Trash talk” is a regular part of interaction in multi-user online games, and at times it can take virulently racist and sexist forms. Whether that sort of talk should matter has been an object of debate among players. As Nakamura shows, many players are expressing a growing resistance to this culture. Her chapter looks at born-digital media campaigns against racism, sexism, and homophobia including blogs, YouTube videos, and other web-based media, examining how they document, archive, and critique instances of racism, sexism, and homophobia in live gameplay as well as within the texts of games themselves.

Finally, Marisa Brandt's contribution returns to Bratich's question about the ways subjects are brought into being and made objects of intervention along with changes in media forms. Her chapter examines the application of virtual reality (VR) systems as therapeutic tools for treating soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). VR therapy for PTSD has taken shape in response to a critical contemporary conjuncture: (1) a group of US youth raised on videogames and other types of digital media, (2) who were just sent to fight in violent conflicts, and (3) now represent a new generation of veterans with PTSD. Brandt makes the case for why media studies should be interested in this therapeutic practice: it is being used to intervene on the bodies and psychological lives of affected veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq – members of a generation living through a unique, and uniquely violent and crisis-riven, historical moment. In short, there are reasons why we are seeing the death of the audience, increased attention to affective politics, a preoccupation with the uploading fantasy, racism in online multi-user gameplay, and the emergence of something called “virtual reality exposure therapy” now: media are changing, modes of sociality are changing, forms of subjectivation are changing, and human bodies and subjectivities are changing.

Part 6: Whose Future? Children, Youth Cultures, and Digital Media

Children's media use and the role of media in the formation of youth identities and youth cultures are issues that have long been of interest to communication, cultural, and media studies. Perhaps more than any other area of research, this work garners a great deal of attention beyond the walls of academia, among policymakers and the general public. The work has broad interest with good reason. Not only are the lives and well-being of children and youth vital concerns in their own right, but young people's experiences are also a barometer of things to come. In studies of language death, for example, linguists focus on how well children are learning the key pronunciations and components of the language (Crystal, 2000). One indicator that a spoken language may be disappearing can be found when the children of the culture are not fully learning its sound system, failing to pronounce particular phonemes.

Studying the way children and youth use digital media likewise reveals a great deal about profound experiential and cultural changes occurring in societies along with the proliferation of distributed networks and digital devices. (The fact that English is the dominant language on the Internet is suggestive of the significant threat it may be posing to linguistic diversity globally.³) A 2009 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 93% of US teens use the Internet. Of course, this general statistic does not tell us anything about the kinds of activities that teens engage in online, or what kind of connectivity teens from different social groups have. Only 32% of US teens accessed the Internet through cable, according to the survey, and 10% were still using a dial-up connection (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2009). Another 11% accessed the Internet using wireless via mobile devices – hardly an adequate substitute for a high-speed wired connection – pointing to what Susan Crawford (2011) refers to as the “new digital divide.” “While we still talk about ‘the’ Internet,” she writes, “we increasingly have two separate access marketplaces: high-speed wired and second-class wireless. High-speed access is a superhighway for those who can afford it, while racial minorities and poorer and rural Americans must make do with a bike path” (Crawford, 2011). Clearly, it is not sufficient to ask only whether children have access to digital media or not, but how they are accessing it, and what effects different levels and types of access have on their lives and their futures.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project does extensive research on children and teens' use of digital media in the United States. The chapters in Part 6 of this volume examine uses of social and mobile media by children and youth in Latin America, in Australia and Japan, and across the South Asian diasporas.

Virtual communities and online social networks function as forms of visibility, recognition, and social inclusion for many young people in Latin American countries, as Rosalía Winocur and Carolina Aguerre explain in their chapter. They consider how, faced with the difficulties of access to entry in the traditional institutions of Latin America – particularly those related to training, employment, and access to power – young people adopt information and communication technologies (ICTs) in order to create alternative avenues to inclusion. By developing flexible and mobile strategies of ICT use and generating their own informal circuits of inclusion at the margins, young people may find avenues to gain access to the formal channels and privileged spaces of ICTs. In short, these authors argue that the Internet and mobile platforms function as compensatory symbolic substitutes for the lack of real power that these young people have.

In their contribution, Radhika Gajjala and Yeon Ju Oh examine the significant role that digitally produced and circulated media now play in the formation of South Asian diasporas. Their chapter examines the techno-mediation of South Asian diasporas through “machinima,” focusing on several examples of South Asian digital diasporic production. These distinctively South Asian examples of machinima demonstrate how the circulation and remixing of Bollywood media provide nostalgic, affective engagements for diasporic South Asian youth. At the same time, they provide the means through which members of these diasporas perform important cultural labor for the Indian state and culture industries.

Damien Spry, in his chapter on the politics of childhood and mobile media in Australia and Japan, examines public discourses about the increasingly ubiquitous presence of mobile media in the lives of children. Spry analyzes legislative, regulatory, and normative reactions to the apparent risks to children in their exposure to the unregulated, adult worlds of sex, violence, and money, via the use of mobile media. Using case studies from classrooms, courtrooms, and government offices in Australia and Japan, Spry considers the politicization of young people's mobile media use, focusing on “childhood” and “new media” as discursive sites where the hopes and fears about future generations are powerfully expressed.

Part 7: What Future? Or, the Unsustainable Present

The final section of Media Studies Futures deals with an issue of vital concern not only for the future of media and media studies, but for the future in the broadest sense: the urgency of the global ecological crisis. What we face today in the era of global capitalism is an alarming proliferation of what Anthony Giddens (1999) calls “manufactured risks”: risks resulting not from natural forces external to human activity but from human development itself, especially from the progression of science and technology. While the media are the sites at which environmental issues are debated and made visible on a global scale, the media and IT industries also play their own special role in the manufacture of environmental risks. As Jonathan Sterne (2007) writes, “the entire edifice of new communication technology is a giant trash heap waiting to happen, a monument to the hubris of computing and the peculiar shape of digital capitalism” (p. 17).

While media studies has a track record of examining the structural conditions of media production and consumption, the field has been largely complicit in contributing to the “public secret” of media-generated waste and the ecological impact of the media and IT industries. It has for years analyzed media from many directions but has paid almost no attention to their material environmental impact. Given the visibility of environmental issues, it is not surprising to see commercial cinema promoting eco-conscious messages, including futuristic blockbusters like WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) and Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). But the size of the carbon footprint made in the production, distribution, and consumption of these films (and their merchandising) still goes largely overlooked in media studies. The disconnect between the messages of these films and their structural conditions of production and consumption speaks volumes about the need for a more materialist media studies and a more literal form of “media ecology.”⁴ Media ecologists argue that media studies needs to decenter media, considering media forms as embedded in mediated environments rather than as isolated devices abstracted from the context and contingencies of their development and use. This is certainly advisable, and many people make this argument today. But this should also require media studies to read these environments literally. As we transition from analog to digital television and buy new laptops, mobile devices, and other media gadgets at a rapid rate, and as the cultural industries continue to consume massive amounts of energy and produce massive amounts of waste, media studies needs to address issues of environmental sustainability more directly.

The first chapter in this section begins the discussion of ecological crisis by extending the analysis beyond the media and IT industries. Charles Thorpe considers two interrelated developments: on the one hand, the destruction of the earth's ecosystems and species by deforestation, chemical pollution, and the effects of climate change, and on the other hand, the development of artificial forms of life in capital–intensive fields like genetic engineering, robotics, and synthetic biology. As capitalist industry devastates the existing natural world, capitalist-aligned technoscience brings into being new forms of autonomous or lifelike technologies. These twin trajectories are realizing the dystopian predictions of science fiction: a planet eviscerated of ecosystems but replete with self-generating, bioengineered life forms bred to breathe new life into the capitalist system.

In his chapter, Justin Lewis likewise underscores that the forces of capitalism are making the planet considerably less hospitable for most if its inhabitants. Lewis focuses on the role of the media and cultural industries in contributing to and promoting unsustainable models of obsolescence and hyperconsumerism. He argues that twenty-first-century consumer capitalism is failing as a model for human progress – it is no longer delivering improvements in quality of life and is fraught with economic contradictions. He focuses on three ways in which the contemporary cultural industries keep us conceptually bound to a consumerist credo. First, the media and communications industries have come to epitomize the notion of built-in obsolescence based on a perpetual consumerism. Second, our most dominant cultural industry, advertising, provides a cultural environment that makes it hard to imagine a way of being outside consumerism. Third, the capacity of journalism to question current orthodoxy is constrained by a focus on “disposable news,” displacing the more democratic function of journalism. Lewis asks how we might begin to address the failure of consumer capitalism and the complicity of the media and cultural industries, imaging a different media culture and a better, more sustainable world.

The next chapter returns to science fiction cinema as a site for visualizing and contemplating the future, in this case addressing the frightening dystopic visions of the future offered in post-apocalyptic disaster films and their metaphoric connections to the global financial crisis. Majia Holmer Nadesan examines the anxieties about global ecological devastation captured in recent cinematic disaster narratives, seeing in these films a message about the demise of liberal biopolitics. Using these cinematic themes as a springboard, Nadesan argues that financial capitalism has no interest in Western, liberal biopolitics with its focus on the welfare and productive capacities of the population. The current slate of post-apocalyptic disaster films is a cultural barometer of the malaise experienced by newly expendable populaces, increasingly confronted with their excess in relation to post-disaster capitalism.⁵

In their contribution, and the final chapter of the volume, Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller continue the discussion of the global ecological crisis and its material relationship to labor, in this case bringing us back to the media industries and their workforce of below-the-line workers.⁶ The authors examine some of the circumscribed efforts of media corporations to “go green” – creating accounting practices designed to measure the ecological impact of production, while ignoring a wide range of other polluting practices and effects. Environmentally friendly accounting practices in the creative industries are confined to site-specific budgets of individual films or studio operations, with any external environmental costs either ignored or written off as too hard to measure. As a way of envisioning a better model, Maxwell and Miller devise an imaginary world where accountants, imbued with the values of green citizenship, set off on a quest to uncover the environmental and labor conditions within the global supply chain of consumer electronics and information and communication technologies. This speculative fiction helps the authors conjure up conditions in which media producers and media studies scholars address human-centric despoliation of the Earth's ecosystems and the toxic exploitation of media workers. They propose an alternative vision of the future of media by imagining a new kind of media accountancy – and a new kind of media studies – freed from its tethers to corporate media.

Maxwell and Miller's science fiction scenario seems a fitting way to close the volume. As Donna Haraway (1991) provocatively notes in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (p. 149). At its best, science fiction raises critical questions about the potential uses and effects of science and technology. At the same time, the genre has a tendency toward technological spectacle, especially in its Hollywood blockbuster incarnations. Big-budget science fiction films that harness the latest technologies of cinematic illusion function much like World Fairs once did, offering up dramatic and convincing visions of an already-established future – a non-negotiable fate that has in some sense already happened. This tension at the heart of science fiction between social critique and technological spectacle, between cautionary tale and authoritative vision, provides a productive allegory for the tension between resistance and pleasure, labor and leisure, which characterizes most people's relationship with media. Whether we are lulled into complacency by the technological spectacle or rallied to the struggle for a more sustainable future depends to a significant extent on whether we believe that future has already been decided, or whether it is still open to negotiation.

As I have argued elsewhere, to build a lasting commitment to a more sustainable future, media studies needs to kick its addiction to “new media” (Gates, 2009). By this I do not mean to suggest that scholars should stop studying the Internet, videogames, or social and mobile media. Instead, we should be more diligent about interrogating the logic of “newness” that is driving the unsustainable, expansionist tech economy, rather than starting from the assumption that this or that form of media is “new” and therefore by definition more exciting to own, play with, and study. “By continuing to use terms such as old and new media without critical reflection or analysis,” Lisa Parks (2007) notes, “media studies scholars risk inadvertently reinforcing the imperatives of electronics manufacturers and marketers” (p. 33). The relevancy of media studies should not be measured by how skilled the field is at predicting the future, or how fast it embraces new technologies as interesting and important objects of study. Instead, its success should be measured by how open it is to a wide world of participants, and how much it contributes to “passing around the real profit of life.” After all, the field of media studies, much like most people on the planet, does not have one future but many possible futures, including no future at all.

NOTES

1 See also Huhtamo (1997), Huhtamo and Parikka (2011), and other work in the domain of “media archaeology.”

2 In Maurizio Lazzarato's (1996) definition, “immaterial labor” refers to “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity.” The concept points to changes in work processes that have occurred along with the rise of the digital economy where more and more labor involves interfacing and integrating with computers. The application of the concept to social media is typically associated with a second dimension of immaterial labor: “the activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity” (Lazzarato, 1996). These activities are not typically experienced or recognized as labor – things like “defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and more strategically, public opinion” (Lazzarato, 1996). “Immaterial labor” is not limited to the Internet, and in fact the concept helps elucidate the blurry distinction between online and offline social activities. “As a collective quality of the labor force,” writes Tiziana Terranova (2000), “immaterial labor can be understood to pervade the social body with different degrees of intensity” (p. 42). A vast pool of immaterial labor supports the major capitalist endeavors of Facebook, Google, and YouTube, as well as the lesser websites and services that populate the online world. Much like the unpaid domestic labor that women have long performed, these types of activities are typically not recognized as work precisely because there are different kinds of cultural pressures and motivations to perform them.

3 The statistics gathered by Internet World Stats (2010) suggest that while English is still dominant, speakers of other languages are gaining ground as a percentage of users of the Internet, especially Chinese. The actual language distribution of the websites on the Internet is impossible to measure.

4 On materialist approaches to studying digital media networks, see Jeremy Packer and Stephen Crofts Wiley (2012).

5 Nadesan's argument about the death of biopolitics, and Thorpe's argument about the capitalist pursuit of artificial life on a dead planet, both find support in recent work by two economists at the MIT Center for Digital Business, whose book Race Against the Machine examines the role of technology in the “jobless recovery” (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2011). Their research shows that the pace of automation in the service sector is accelerating, as technologies like robotics, computerized inventory control, and voice recognition systems take jobs that previously required uniquely human abilities. As resources continue to be directed toward improving complex automated systems, we can expect to see a precipitously declining demand for human labor in a wide variety of sectors.

6 See also Vicki Mayer (2011).

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