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Media Studies

Diagnostics of a Failed Merger

Geert Lovink

Am Anfang steht das Ende, sonst wäre das Neue das Alte.

[Every beginning starts with an end, otherwise the new would be the old.]

(Radikal magazine, March 1984)

The question of how to interpret the Internet and new media is too important to be left to university course managers. Humanities-based “media studies” never had a grip on new media and Internet education. Nor did it shape the new media field by being at the forefront of early-adopter waves. Via ineffective, calcified, and divergent combinations, the container concept “media studies” tumbles literature, film, radio and television, theater, design, visual and performing arts, and new media into one jumbled, convoluted label. Humanities-based media studies did not position itself as an oasis of radical critique, nor did it make a case for dedicating itself to the past with the aim of further developing the “media archaeology” approach.

This dialogical manifesto intends to shuffle away institutional rubble. Needless to say, this is done with the interests of new media, digital culture, Internet, and software studies in mind. The time in which we could have made a case for “the media” in general is well behind us. The term “media” has become an empty signifier. The same can be said of “digital media” since everything is digital anyway. In times of budget cuts, creative industries, and intellectual poverty we must push aside wishy-washy convergence approaches and go for specialized in-depth studies of networks and digital culture. The presumed panoramic overview and historical depth suggested in the term “media” no longer provide us with critical concepts. It is time for new media to claim autonomy and resources in order to leave the institutional margins and finally catch up with society. There are at least three major obstacles to getting there: first, theory lags behind its subject and falls victim to its own general claims; second, media studies is still characterized by an awkward legacy within academia; and third, the new media landscape itself changes so rapidly that it makes a slippery object of study. I will examine these concerns before offering up some unlikely futures for the field.

When Theory Loses its Sting

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, media studies fought a losing battle to keep up with the pace of technocultural change. If we are to have any hope of catching up we must consider the digital networked realm as a distinct sphere that demands its own theoretical vocabulary and methods. Digital media studies rarely has been much of a critical intellectual project. The maniacally impulsive culture of pop has proven to be a black hole for theory talent. Instead of generating concepts at a Twitter pace, most “new media” ideas are neutralized and flattened within a general atmosphere of budget cuts and slow change. Staff within higher education are tired of reform anyway. While struggling to distance itself from vocational training, academic media research has so far failed to develop appealing schools of thought. Faced with this ever-growing gulf between theory and practice, media studies staff can do little more than fight the bureaucratic monsters that breed in their unbounded meta-discipline. Media studies is presently an abandoned construction site, crumbling under its own neglect. Do we willfully continue a failed project? Or should we acknowledge its growing cracks and celebrate its successes as we raze it to the ground and start anew? All too often the question is this: How do new media fit in? For pragmatic reasons new media scholars have thus far made a case that their field of study has an “elective affinity” with design, television, film, management, whatever . . . but it never has. This strategy of disguise has now exhausted itself.

The reason for conceptual stagnation goes back to the very notion of media studies itself. Instead of synthesizing research methods and underlying theoretical concepts into an ambitious philosophical or theoretical unity, general media studies carries the weight of a heterogeneous bag of twentieth-century paradigms, ranging from hermeneutics, mass communication, feminism, and postcolonialism to visual studies, depending on the intellectual history of the specific country. If we look at textbooks, the canon has remained steady for the past 15 years, jumping from Benjamin and Brecht, via Innes and McLuhan, to Williams, Baudrillard, and Kittler, with personal tastes for Flusser, Virilio, Ronell, and Luhmann. While none of these thinkers directly deals with contemporary issues of networked digital environments, there have been enough conceptual splinters, or found footage, within these mostly general theories to satisfy young new media scholars. These so often negative visions worked as antidotes to the unreconstructed positivism of business gurus and consultants. As long as the theory toolkit remained useful it yielded productive relationships. It was a powerful gesture to celebrate the end of the social, the political and historical. This started to change around 2001 when the speculative years ended after 9/11 and the dotcom bust. Slowly, theory became historicized. Theory is no longer a potpourri of living ideas but a fixed collection of twentieth-century canonical texts. The difference between media theory (as a concept pool) and “media archaeology” started to dissipate. The humanities heritage, once seen as a rich source of weird (while irrelevant, nonempirical, and untimely) powerful insights, started to show its weak spot: the social. What had once been a liberating feeling – finally to avoid conventional topics of social theory – returned as a rediscovery of social formations such as communities, mobs, tribes, and, yes, social networking sites.

Unfortunately these concepts are ill prepared for the fluid media objects of our real-time era. Such analysis will by default favor visual representations (because this is what these scholars with their film, television, or art history backgrounds are trained to analyze) but neglect social and interactive dynamics. Do we truly expect to find exciting openings and applicable insights by “reading” YouTube under Spivak's guidance and watching Heroes with Žižek in your favorite interpassive mode, flowing through the national libraries with Castells, understanding Google à la Deleuze, or interpreting Twitter via Butler? Not only are these “cultural studies” outcomes predictably inadequate, the approach itself is flawed. Whereas this type of theory critique applies to many fields, it is also valid for media studies. The mechanical application of theory to the object (read X with Y), while abstractly subversive and innovative in moments, lost its critical edge some time ago. A principal function of theory – to foster socially crucial lines of questioning while energizing and supporting those who do the theorizing – has been neutered.

Many media practitioners are unaccustomed to thinking within, much less playing around with, theoretical frameworks. US scholar Henry Warwick, who teaches new media courses at Ryerson University in Toronto, says:

In a similar move, the Dutch Cultural Broadcasting Fund (“Stifo”) was renamed as the Media Fund.

The underlying problem of media studies is that “theory” no longer mesmerizes. It has lost its capacity to capture the collective imagination or to stimulate its core believers. The once progressive content simply no longer captivates audiences, especially younger ones. Some theories in certain decades were in sync with the Zeitgeist. They seemed to talk to everyone's concerns in a miraculous way. Read them 20 years later and they're dead. Go back to them 50 years later and their weirdness is quaintly charming. These days, the holy scriptures of Parisian Theory are often perceived as indifferent text machines that exist for one sole reason: to legitimize academic positions. They are stating the obvious in a crypto-code that is meant for aliens. How did we end up in such a sorry state? Why is media theory a dead horse? Due to the drifting definition of media, “postmodern” theories have become outmoded very quickly. There is no sense in applying McLuhan or Derrida to Wikipedia, for instance. In the past, media theory, when combined with speculative metaphysics and wide conceptual landscapes, provided a way out of the provincial atmosphere in English and Germanic literature departments, but this is no longer the status quo that media studies must engage with. The out-of-context, speculative conceptualization that set apart these original text-based hermeneutics of literary theory has been replaced by neoliberal managers who tidily control research output through academic journals, thereby banning more experimental and speculative modes of writing such as essays that cross genres and disciplines.

According to Australian-US media theorist McKenzie Wark, who teaches at the New School in New York, “people will do some great work on few resources if they believe in it. And they will do better work. It's no accident our canon is full of people who were marginal: Marx, Benjamin, Debord, Baudrillard. They did not have National Science Foundation grants, they had passion. They had ‘colourful biographies’” (personal communication, June 6, 2009). Lev Manovich, working out of San Diego, California, where he heads a software studies center, explains that theory of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s is often not very relevant “because commercial culture and computers today run on many principles of this theory – from irony and the self-referentiality of advertising to ‘rhizomatic’ networks. So to use many of these theoretical concepts is to state the obvious” (personal communication, January 1, 2010).

Exodus from Media Studies

If the study of new media wants to mature and reach its potential to match the actual scale and diversity of its object of study, it must divorce itself from “old media” and go solo. We long ago passed the point where it is necessary to explain the use of the computer, what “digital” is, and the Net to less technologically adept scholars. Instead of fighting over diminishing resources, it is time to throw caution to the wind and go for uncompromised growth. The grand synergies of the multi-, hyper-, and cross-media approaches may have worked as business concepts in hyped-up demo-or-die corporate culture, but in the publish-or-perish environment of academia, these synthesizing approaches have only delayed new media research. Hollywood films such as The Lawnmower Man and The Matrix never had much to say about the existing global new media culture. At best they were interesting fantasies about how to escape the boring, busy neoliberal (“There Is No Alternative”) lives people are caught up with. In retrospect, cyberculture has been a subcultural trap for those interested in body politics and visual representation, but a dead-end for Internet and new media theory. We need to say no to the “representation” school of media studies that reduces all issues to comparative aspects of imagery – not because we have resolved the Media Question and surpassed all of its issues, but because we need the speed and scaling-up that such independence can grant.

For a proper study of the Internet and other rapidly growing sectors, such as mobiles, geo-media, and games, we must demerge and liberate the “digital” from its confinement in general media studies. Digital network education and research need to declare independence. We must leave behind the tired dialectic of old and new and the dull atmosphere of competition with print and broadcasting. Instead of negotiating to death over broad resemblances, we need to define the specificities of these emerging platforms. Literary analogies do not translate into topical knowledge that can be mobilized inside the politics and aesthetics of the daily “protocol-istic” fights that go on around us. There is and always will be remediation, as it is implicit in the digital realm. No one claims to start with a blank page; but the age of infancy is over. Whatever constitutes the “death(s) of cinema” or “the end(s) of television” are other people's business.¹ We need to study in detail the specificities of digital, networked modes of working, real-time pressures and the mobile dimension of today's media experience. It is time to take the Internet, computer games, and mobile phones, now loosely gathered under this broad umbrella subject “new media,” on their own terms. Instead of wasting time on the destiny of printed newspapers, our attention is urgently needed in fields such as location-based services, cloud computing, search, online video, and the “Internet of things.”² The debate about “free” and sustainable models for the Internet economy has reached mainstream audiences yet there is very little theoretical grounding, be it positive or negative, to help guide us through these fluctuating times.

Let us also look at the underlying metaphor that drives media studies: the idea of the “merger,” in this case of disciplines and platforms, driven by the multidisciplinary dream that “we are all working on the same page anyway.” CNET author Steve Tobak (2007) fittingly sums up the fate of doomed mergers in the business world: “Some failed so spectacularly that the combined company went down the tubes, others resulted in the demise of the executive(s) that masterminded them, some later reversed themselves, and others were just plain dumb ideas that were doomed from the start.” So what's the destiny of media studies? “A 2004 study by Bain & Company found that 70 percent of mergers failed to increase shareholder value. More recently, a 2007 study by the Hay Group and the Sorbonne found that more than 90 percent of mergers in Europe fail to reach financial goals” (Voigt, 2009).

One can reject the banal translation of business lingo to academia, but why would this be so different in education? Due to constant reshuffling, the programs and departments we're talking about here are not exactly marriages (which have a failure rate of 40–50% themselves). What if the supposed communalities and synergies between old and new media simply do not materialize? Note how Time Warner is undoing its merger with AOL, “allowing Time Warner to concentrate on creating television shows, movies and other content without having AOL hanging like an albatross around its neck” (Lafayette, 2009). With a push toward vocational training, stagnation in cultural studies, and a distaste for theory in general, film and television studies programs can only make defensive gestures toward the ever–expanding digital realm. All is lost if this or that merger between disciplines and programs doesn't work out.

The future of media studies instead rests on its capacity to avoid these forced synergies toward “screen cultures” or “visual studies” and to set out on a path to invent new institutional forms that connect with the collaborative and self-organizational culture of teaching and research networks. Unless media studies makes such a move it will join the vanishing objects that it assumes as constitutive of media in society. What exactly would be lost by trying a new approach? Is it not time to just say farewell and move on? Perhaps in some institutional contexts a collapse of media studies and media and communications makes sense (even most insiders have no clue where the disciplinary boundaries between humanities and social science have to be drawn anyway). In other cases it could be more interesting to merge with art and art history programs, thereby strengthening the still weak “technical” arm of visual studies. In rare cases one could even think of moving new media into computer science, but there are no examples worldwide that “cultural” approaches are welcome in that well-resourced (and therefore) introverted and self-satisfied context.

Unfortunately there is an unspoken attitude of indifference, if not of superiority, from contemporary cultural theory toward new media. Are we repeating the high–low divide yet again?³ What is the price of ignoring the specific exigencies of a medium by heavy-handedly applying the works of Freud, Lacan, and Foucault to media products in desperate attempts to gain scientific recognition?⁴ These uses of theory, practiced in cultural studies programs and art academies around the globe, can also be read as leftovers from the 1990s when there was an abundance of speculative theory and not enough empirical data and (digital) methods. A decade later we have to renegotiate how much technical programming knowledge humanities researchers need as a basic skill. To what extent should you write software to be truly creative with digital means? Should writing code be required in undergraduate media programs? Explain it to your nephew: media studies is not cultural studies, not visual studies, not communication studies. But what is it, then?

A Blurry Heritage

This brings us to the second problem, one that is implied in the first: media studies had little coherence as a field or a discourse from the beginning, and it has always been accused of faddishness and hot air even before taking off. What is lacking in media studies is a Geburtsmythos (birth myth).⁵ As an academic genre, it sprang out of the heads of education consultants and bureaucrats and blended into unrelated departments and intellectual cultures, in order to scale up output. Unlike cultural studies, which can claim its emergence from the social conflicts and confusion of postwar Britain, media studies has been a managerial construct from the beginning, a half-heartedly positioned, top-down merger between literature, theater, communication studies, and a handful of others, depending on the local situation.⁶ Because of technology's maladroit initial phases, media studies was given second-class citizenship in the academic society: neither inside nor outside. It is vocational enough to play a role in the media business; tough yet not sophisticated when compared to philosophy. In retrospect, it would perhaps have been a better proposition to situate media studies as an offshoot from literature studies (as still happens in certain places), which is the birthing ground of most media theory, from McLuhan to Kittler (and where I received my PhD from at the University of Melbourne).

Media studies exists in a variety of precarious positions. It is found nestled between media and communication programs with a social science emphasis, within fast-growing and economically successful vocational training at universities of applied science due to the growing importance of MBAs in the recent reawakening of the social sciences, and inside the creative industries paradigm. Last but not least, there is computer science, which, despite declining student numbers due to outsourcing IT services to India and other countries, receives hundreds of millions of Euros in funding.

This situation was made worse by the fact that very few people, if any, foresaw the ensuing IT explosion as software and its infrastructure imposed itself on all sectors of society. Instead of firing up debates and developing critical concepts, crucial time was wasted on the unproductive question of how “new media” could be integrated into “old media” departments.⁷ The genealogy of the computer, rooted as it is in mathematics, the military, and cybernetics, still hasn't found an equivalent to the art history approach of visual studies, which collapses painting, photography, film, and Internet into one analysis. The visual studies perspective does not privilege the (technical) carrier concept as in media studies. The parallel histories of code and the image make it a difficult task to bring them together in one curriculum only to pretend to students that they are all one and the same, namely “media.” Convergence, in its latest incarnation as “cross-media,” “screen studies,” and “trans media,” has always been criticized for its reductionist business approach. Not everything can, or should, be reduced to zeros and ones, much in the same way that human experience cannot be reduced to “visual culture.” There is more to media than reception. As Matthew Fuller states: “If we instead emphasize production, whether this is as practice-based research, or a Deleuzian emphasis on expression, the problem of genealogy gains a different inflection” (personal communication, June 30, 2009). Would any regular user of technological media consider it an astute decision to lump TV, radio, and fine arts alongside the mobile phone, Twitter, and Google? Users are actively participating and sharing on a daily basis. Where is such a classification in our highest educational institutions most likely to lead us: to the avant-garde edge of expertise or to some backwater thought-swamp?

Yet compared to the growing demand in the labor market for new media expertise, the academic sphere's focus on and development of the new/digital media discipline has been startlingly negligent. Why would communication studies, literature programs, film, television, and cultural studies, themselves often only a few decades old, welcome an aggressive predator in their midst? Whereas on the technical-infrastructural level much has happened, the public perception of “old” and “new” media has only grown further apart. Throughout society serious frictions and conflicts are on the rise around such notions as intellectual property rights, online language politics, and techno-libertarianism, yet the supposed new media intellectual experts play a very small role in such conversations. This is particularly distressing as arts and humanities departments face serious competition from anthropology, sociology, information studies, science-technology-society (STS) programs, and even management and organization degrees. It is time for the humanities' new media community to set off the alarms. There is a serious case to be made for approaches that are rooted in the history of ideas, for approaches that stress the importance of aesthetics and critical conceptual thinking to reflect the current state of affairs. Society is asking critical questions that land squarely at the feet of new media: what are the social implications for the production of online subjectivities? What are the politics of information visualization? How are global relations and local cultures going to manage the information tidal waves? What effects can we expect from corporate walled gardens and national webs?⁸

The diminishing role of linguistic theory, along with the shrinking presence of humanities and stagnating staff numbers, doesn't help either. At this moment, we can look back on a decade of hard work by new media pioneers to set up programs that yielded only modest results. They started building a comprehensive body of critical concepts and related case studies, yet there is still a lack of classic texts produced between the years 2001 to 2009. Few books and art works can match the vital energy and speculative madness of the 1990s. Despite its shortcomings, Manovich's Language of New Media. published in 1999, remains one of the few canonical texts known to outsiders. But even this text, in retrospect, tells us more about 1990s multimedia culture than the Google age of blogs, Twitter, and social networking sites. And look at The New Media Reader. an otherwise quite useful series of texts edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort that functions now as a historical reference. Why does this anthology end with the invention of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s? It is telling that my intellectual hero of the digital age is an urban sociologist, Saskia Sassen. The canon of critical Internet studies has yet to be written, particularly as an academic textbook,⁹ but Mute Magazine's anthology Proud to be Flesh is certainly a good start. Who is bringing the radical critique of the networked world that has been developed over the past 15 years into other contexts? Will it in the end boil down to the mainstream concern that our brains and our bodies can no longer cope, and collapse under the pressure of information overload?

In response to this dead-end situation, young and ambitious thinkers deliberately avoid media studies, be it in film, television, or new media. Career-wise, it is better to position one's CV inside visual arts, sociology, or philosophy, or to specialize straight away on the history and discourse of print, film, and television.¹⁰ In this crisis era, the Green New Deal has taken over the role of future science from hard-core ICT, which, at least in the West, has begun to suffer from outsourcing and a bad gender reputation. Research funds flow instead in the direction of electric cars, wind energy, and the like. Rather than being celebrated as a hotspot for the cool, media studies is seen as a dumping ground for scattered, overworked mid-career academics who have many reasons to complain about lack of funding, inspiration, and lasting values. For many its “nerd” image is no longer funny. For those positioned inside shrinking humanities faculties there has been only one way to go – down a dizzying spiral into the maelstrom. The globalization of higher education and increasing competition between disciplines over diminishing funds and gifted students has only further exacerbated the sense of crisis in the adolescent years of new media education and research. In order to tackle these challenges we need to develop an art of “collective assistance” for growth spurts, because the next metamorphosis of the new media field is immanent even amidst the danger of conceptual weakness and uncertainty. Are the new media players in this climate of stasis ready for the next Great Leap forward?

Keeping Up with the Googles

Apart from the difficult institutional politics of new media research, another more general problem is rearing its head. We come to the third element of difficulty characterizing the state of the arts of new media within media studies: increasingly, new media research is running far behind the Zeitgeist, and has the tendency to write history instead of writing critical theory that can intervene in emerging processes. The timeline for academic research is so long and still so focused on book production that there is less and less room for real-time interventions, let alone contributions from the arts and humanities to co-design tomorrow's technologies and societies. Twitter easily outpaces CNN and other global news agencies while social science and humanities research dropped out of the technological race ages ago. What is research in a real-time society? We can no longer run away from this question, nor sum up, yet again, all of the institutional restraints we're facing. Strategies used by hard sciences to acquire the largest investments in “fundamental research” are encouraging, but also wildly unrealistic, as they cannot easily generate immediate practical outcomes. Arts and humanities continue to suffer while the hard sciences, on average, claim 85% of research funds. Facing such a radical imbalance, it is hard to collaborate on an equal basis. Have all the ethical problems of CERN, data mining, and biotechnology been adequately confronted? Do we simply want to leave it to governments and corporations to patrol themselves? In this climate, can theory and aesthetics regain leading positions as visionary activities, whether positive or negative? How ironic that in times of much talk over the “creative city” and its “creative industries,” the arts and humanities continue to get less and less money. Perhaps these are not the right strategies to prove one's engagement and the urgency of the topic and the approach. Wouldn't it be better to start doing untimely research?

In an email conversation, Henry Warwick noted the following:

Talking to pioneers in new media education and research, one can witness a let's-wait-and-see attitude creeping in as Generation X comes of age; a culture of complaint infuses the conversation. The critique of neoliberalism and free market capitalism may be sharp and correct, but underneath we hear tired voices. After 10 to 15 years of hard work spent building up digital and interactive programs, many lost their vitality and are no longer able to make bold initiatives that break new ground. A defensive mode kicks in. Should one aim for greater institutional recognition or see institutionalization per se as a source of the stagnation? The system is crushing spirits that have only been rewarded with a few crumbs. The “digital” faculty is new, usually untenured, and not backed by professorships or PhD programs, and, as a consequence, their positions are precarious. They are “built to flip,” as they would say in the late 1990s. The underlying assumption is clear: newness will not last; as a fad the digital will fade. The structural precarity that sets in as a consequence is threatening and unwelcome, especially as the obvious work of dealing with spouses or partners who also have careers, raise kids, and pay mortgages comes into play. What is lacking is a long-term vision that these fields will become powerful, an idea that is frightening. Neither going for the big ride on the back of capital, nor for the radical refusal, new media artists, programmers, and critics are confronted with diminishing opportunities while the field at large expands far beyond their reach. What and where is the expertise? If we are to escape from this stagnation, we must locate the rotten, ineffectual parts and practices and cut them out before we open the collaborative wikis. It takes a radical change in culture to stop thinking as a default response in institutional terms. Is theory itself, with all the baggage it entails as a term, a necessary core element of the work to be done?

Media Studies in the Netherlands

Let us zoom in further on the Netherlands where the “new media” departments in Utrecht and Amsterdam are fighting uphill battles of their own. With few exceptions, the national academic research grant-giving body NWO has failed to earmark new media (from an arts and humanities perspective) as a priority. This is the main reason academic new media programs in the Netherlands remain tiny compared to the booming vocational schools within the universities of applied sciences (hogescholen), which were actively supported to start separate degrees aimed at high enrollment growth. Instead of expanding to match the pace of the growth of the Internet (including games and mobile telephony), these academic new media initiatives had to push themselves into existing departments that were less than excited to support a competing program in times of shrinking opportunities.

The anthology Digital Material (Van den Boomen, Lammes, Lehman, Raessens, & Schäfer, 2009), presented in May 2009 to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of media studies in Utrecht, does not claim to have a program either.¹¹ It merely proposes a summary of the Media Question in the form of the pragmatic and rather artificial concept “digital materiality.” Basically, the common point of differentiation is in the method and approach, not in the platform. Even the divergence of research is celebrated as heterogeneous (much in the Rosi Braidotti fashion), and keep in mind that there is no Utrecht or Amsterdam School of New Media Research. While some praise this lack of unity, others see it as a lost opportunity, in particular for the countless students who must leave the country because there is still no new media PhD program or even a research master's degree in the Netherlands. If we want to keep new media small, then create multidisciplinary teams with dispersed interests – divide and conquer. What we now have is a slowly expanding, haphazard cloud of scholars, doing interesting but comparatively unsupported work in light of the magnitude and potential societal implications of the field. How will new media research leave this vicious circle and make the quantum leap to catch up with society?

What we lack is the capacity, or the collective will, to set up bold and coherent programs, departments, and eventually entire schools based on future scenarios that could make an all-too-obvious claim: all that is digital and networked is going to be with us and will not disappear overnight. Nevertheless, if new media programs are to assume their critical function we must demand a space to build up exactly such bold initiatives. We should note positively the increased interest in new media tools and methods (for instance Richard Rogers's Digital Methods Initiative in Amsterdam and Lev Manovich's Cultural Analytics in San Diego), but in observing current technological development, this interest is hugely undernourished. Furthermore, tools and methods are a far cry from the vision that is so sorely needed in response to the question of where to take new media studies as a whole. The method is the message. Let's turn now to proposals from within the field itself.

The Quantitative Turn

The “quantitative turn,” perhaps the most current and co-opted “best answer” put forth by media studies, does not present itself as a program; at best, it is a clever response inside digital humanities to understand and utilize the latest technological affordances. If we say “text has become searchable” and “images have become computable” it means that we can explore another layer of knowledge, namely patterns that become visible in comparison to other works. This comparative approach puts the work in a larger context that transcends unique expression. The work of Adorno and Horkheimer shows that quantitative research, such as the Princeton Radio Project, and qualitative analysis, such as the Dialectics of Enlightenment, can very well be done by one and the same person. There is no decision to be made here. While there is no obligation in cultural analysis to use tools (and is it even uncertain that the research results of data mining and info-visualization will be useful at all), we should note the process of tool development as cultural prototyping beyond good or evil. Many questions still remain. Do we need these tools to understand wider trends? Are there other ways to think globally? Why do we need large data sets and patterns in the first place? Is there indeed a crisis of the “readability” of society? Previous generations thought that they could decode the signs of the times through a single novel, film, or song, but is this method still valid? Hasn't it become too easy to instantly deconstruct the gender-race-class interest of the single-author work? It is just one opinion; why bother with only one judgment (or symptom)?

The uncertainty over the status of any single cultural expression in mass society has further fueled this trend toward “the larger picture.” According to Alex Galloway,

Whereas in the roaring mid-nineties there was a glimpse of hope that a new media bohemia could take up the role that Galloway points to, the dotcom wave all but strangled independent theory production. In such an environment as exists now, how do we best utilize the ever-widening range of coding practices, from unconferencing to barcamps, from bricolabs to book sprints? Do we really accept that the highest levels of expertise are locked up behind the doors of Google, Monsanto, and Equifax?

Can the quantitative or computational turn revitalize media theory? According to Manovich:

Outlook Toward a New Program

Instead of time and again trying to enforce the paradigms of film and television studies onto new media, we could also turn to other disciplines that have been overlooked in the process. For some that would be computer science and mathematics. For Manovich, it's design:

Also instead of creating artificial mergers, Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey (2009) have proposed the intriguing “Evil Media Studies,” not so much as a discipline but as a “manner of working with a set of informal practices and bodies of knowledge,” which they have characterized as “stratagems.” They suggest the following possibilities:

These programmatic statements can be used to counter corporate literature, academic conventions, and other self-satisfied statements about how beneficial “media” can be (but actually aren't in the messy reality of everyday life).

Evil or not, it is time to leave behind academic constraints and open up collective imagination. It is time to cut back conversations on local limitations and see what the common goals are. There are more than enough tools and platforms available (though few know how to use them fluidly). All too often we constrain ourselves according to “their” rules in the naïve belief that a positive attitude on our side will enlarge the room for negotiation. In no case is this clearer than when new media theorists, artists, and activists are faced with tight intellectual property rules enforced by academia and the corporate publishing industry. What we see happening is subversive characters blindly signing away all their rights to Sage, Elsevier Reed, and other publishing giants. Why? With the Open Access movement gaining such momentum, it makes you wonder when civil disobedience in this area will finally take hold and the cases of micro-resistance (which do happen) reach critical mass. It is time we say “no” to restrictive publishing contracts and organize ourselves. Let's stop complaining and develop another publishing culture, one that is more up-to-speed with the times, and update how we ourselves think about our field. While not completely relinquishing the “brand” of media studies, McKenzie Wark suggests an alternative perspective for locating the developments of the field within the spectrum of history:

Over in New York, McKenzie Wark intends to revolutionize media studies. “I am inclined to think it is an intellectual struggle within that space. The age of infancy is over, yes, and with it our innocence. Positioning an intellectual project is about resources, about picking fights, about finding allies” (personal communication, June 9, 2009). As part of this dialogue, Toby Miller, chair of Cultural and Media Studies at the University of California, Riverside, sees media studies dominated by three topics: ownership and control, content, and audiences. “Media Studies 1.0 panics about citizens and consumers as audiences, whereas Media Studies 2.0 celebrates them. I would prefer a panic-free, critical, and internationalist Media Studies 3.0” (Miller, 2008 – p. 215). According to Miller (2008 – p. 221), the old versions of media studies are tied to nativist and imperialist epistemologies that must be transcended. He proposes a Media Studies 3.0 that will blend

We need a global perspective for media studies as a productive force that goes beyond a mere study of new media's impact in these places. New media should be seen as an integrated system where its users contribute to the vital core of the technology itself. This approach not only needs spiritual support but also needs to be implemented. The humanities perspective, for example, cuts deeper and addresses other registers. The critique here demands full autonomy (from BA to PhD programs, to put it in edu talk), before we can speak again of interdisciplinary collaborations. Another approach would be to develop new organizational forms altogether. What are the tactical resources necessary for contemporary “organized networks,” distributed think tanks, and temporary media labs to do their work? Much of the technical infrastructure is already at (y)our disposal – sometimes for free, and in other cases purchased for a handful of hard currency. Even though theory lays the foundation, this path can only be followed through with praxis. It is all about concepts, demos, betas, versions, and meeting face to face, which is the most precious and expensive part of the operation.

According to German media theorist Florian Cramer, who teaches and conducts research at the Rotterdam Piet Zwart Institute, it is one of the terrible legacies of media studies to play the prophecy/futurology game. According to Cramer,

What we really need, says Cramer, is critical studies of the contemporary uses and cultures of electronic and digital information technology.

Let's not call for Media Studies 2.0, or 3.0, for that matter. We are not talking about a next generation, let alone a mere upgrade of the current institutional setup. The main players within media studies do not need to be informed about the potentials of Web 2.0; we have to presume they are well aware of the possibilities. This is not the time to put demands on the table of Those Who Rule. What we need to do is reimagine the social modes of philosophical inquiry itself. Too much energy has already been wasted on the question of how “new media” could possibly fit into institutional arrangements. An entire generation has lost the way in a confusing uphill battle through the institutions, while the world's frisky vitality has gone digital. What do we have to show for all this expended energy? Are computers and the Internet absorbing so much creative libido that there is little left to change the bricks-and-mortar in which traditional life took place? What happens if we cultivate more self-awareness amongst new media theorists and practitioners? What happens if we place ourselves as actors in the New Media Saga and relate to neighboring media technologies in a frank and ultimately sovereign manner?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Matthew Fuller, Alexander Galloway, Josephine Berry, McKenzie Wark, Toby Miller, Florian Cramer, Mirko Tobias Schäfer, and Lev Manovich for their dialogues with the text-in-progress and also to Henry Warwick and Tim Syth for their editorial support.

NOTES

1 The “Ends of Television” was the title of a UvA Media Studies conference. See http://www.mediastudies.nl/vv-conferenties/conferenties-organisatie2006/End%20of%20television.html

2 University of Utrecht Media Studies teacher Mirko Tobias Schäfer disagrees: “Serious scholarship would concern itself with analysing the metaphors. I am afraid that the constant attempts to keep up with the ‘marketing machinery’ produces poor research, and will identify wrong, inappropriate objects of research” (personal communication, September 18, 2009).

3 According to Florian Cramer, “This is already happening. If you are a scholar and you only publish online, you're lowbrow; if you publish books, you're highbrow. If you are a filmmaker and you have a theatrical release on 35 mm, you're highbrow. If you release on YouTube, you're lowbrow” (personal communication, September 16, 2009).

4 This is the thesis of Jordi Wijnalda, “What is Film? Manifesto for a New Film Analysis,” Xi, 17(4), p. 6, in the student quarterly of media studies at the University of Amsterdam, April 2009 (in Dutch). Wijnalda rejects “grand theories” and calls for greater selection in the choice of theoretical frameworks. She calls for a renaissance of film aesthetics, against one-dimensional approaches that reduce film to text. In short, critics need to show more respect for their object of study. Film speaks a different language, set apart from other art forms and media.

5 An alternative history of media studies would point to the Macey and Bateson conferences and other sources from the history of cybernetics. However, written media archaeologies have not yet sufficiently incorporated these sources, and media studies is more often perceived to derive from 1970s film and theater efforts (to leave aside the social science references of media and communication).

6 The Wikipedia entry on media studies is an interesting case illustrating how poorly defined media studies is at the moment. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_studies (accessed July 25, 2012).

7 In his pamphlet Media Studies 2.0, David Gauntlett observes how amongst media studies 1.0 programs there is a “vague recognition of the internet and new digital media, as an ‘add on’ to the traditional media (to be dealt with in one self-contained segment tacked on to a Media Studies teaching module, book or degree)” (http://brianair.wordpress.com/film-theory/medi-2-0-thought-provoking-mainly-for-staff/). See also Gauntlett's forum at http://twopointzeroforum.blogspot.com/

8 Florian Cramer has noted: “The problem is that the humanities, in their orientation towards canons, are never interested in producing short-term input or knowledge. If you write a Ph.D. dissertation or monograph, you will, as a scholar, always choose a subject that will ideally ensure your eternal reputation and yield ‘timelessly’ valid criticism. This is true for all the landmarks of modern criticism, from Walter Benjamin to Auerbach's ‘Mimesis’ to Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom etc. With that goal, you will never write a book on Twitter – every professorial advisor would warn you that it would be outmoded when it's done and ruin your career. This is why the humanities are structurally conservative and not interested in cutting edge cultural issues” (personal communication, September 16, 2009).

9 Mirko Tobias Schäfer emphasizes the need to call bad research, poor teaching, and incompetent administration by its name, and not to blame media studies as such for the current situation. “Students are taught poorly; TED talks all of a sudden are mistaken for an academic conference; blog posts are quotes as if they were papers and comments are over-estimated as peer review. Visibility and attention become the new academic merits. Checking the blog-roll of so-called academic blogs is interesting; they are full of popular and admittedly witty conference speakers, but links to First Monday, Arxiv or others are rare” (personal communication, September 18, 2009).

10 According to Florian Cramer, “If I had happened to father a child at age 21, it would graduate from high school right now, and I would – if asked – give her or him the strong advice to study, rather than media studies, philosophy combined with informatics and literature or art history. It's a schizophrenia that's embedded into the whole field. All good media researchers have studied classical humanities, and I do not know one good media scholar who has graduated in media studies. The problem of studying media theory is that you're typically educated on a second-rate theory canon of McLuhan and everything that makes up the standard media theory reading lists” (personal communication, September 16, 2009).

11 See also http://www2.let.uu.nl/Solis/ogc/agendaitems/10th_anniversary_new_media.htm. The idea for this essay grew out of a short presentation that I did there, together with Florian Cramer, in which I proposed the exodus of new media out of the broadcast context of film and television studies.

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