Media Studies
The Interdiscipline of the Present and the Future
Media studies is a rapidly growing, widely relevant, and evolving field – an interdiscipline (Valdivia, 2003). The release of the final volume on Research Methods in Media Studies highlights the tone of this International Encyclopedia of Media Studies. DeFleur (1998) bemoaned the loss of focus on process and effects, especially on milestone studies, yet this methods volume of the encyclopedia illustrates that milestones and focus on processes and effects are alive and well. Sterne (2005) correctly finds the porosity and dynamism in the field to be one of its greatest strengths. Between 1998 and the present, there has been a huge growth in interpretive and critical approaches, as illustrated in all of the volumes in this encyclopedia. Nonetheless qualitative approaches have flourished in the margins as the effects paradigm – the stuff of milestones – has firmly retained its central place in the field, at least in the United States and the Netherlands. As Darling-Wolf in this latest volume of the encyclopedia, Research Methods in Media Studies, attests, “the formidable question of method” is an indication of the relevance, dynamism, and evolution of the field. Indeed, efforts to map out the diversity of research and methods in the field of communication (Craig, 1999, 2001), which we might call the broader umbrella for media studies, yield a multiplicity of sometimes overlapping and other times mutually exclusive approaches. Contemporary media studies acknowledges that most of us live in intensely mediated environments, so that Livingstone (2009) writes on the mediation of everything, and Hay (2000) writes of refrigerator studies. The former expands on how media and communication are “ever more crucial in today's world” (Livingstone, 2009, p. 13), and the latter asks us – as a field over a decade ago, while continuing to encourage us (Hay, 2010, 2011) – to consider the broader web of networks to which other technologies, such as refrigerators and toasters, contribute in terms of routines and practices that serve to mediate the world for us. The latter line of questioning has proven immensely prescient as many of us live in highly networked webs of media and communication, where not only can our location be pinpointed at any given moment thanks to elements in our mobile technology, but we can also, if we so choose, broadcast a narrative of our location and other audiovisual bits of information constantly to many – such as our hundreds of Facebook friends and Twitter or Tumblr followers.
Whether we are talking of old media technologies or institutions (see Nerone, Volume 1, Media History and the Foundations of Media Studies), we are witnessing the constitution of new audiences and a shift in traditional audiences (see Parameswaran, Volume 4, Audience and Interpretation in Media Studies, and Darling-Wolf, Volume 7, Research Methods in Media Studies) through the invitation offered by seductive content in a dynamically converging and synergized media environment. The effects of these technologies and content continue to be measured and studied (see Scharrer, Volume 5, Media Effects/Media Psychology) in many ways (see Darling-Wolf, Volume 7, Research Methods in Media Studies). While media platforms and patterns of production are converging, enduring tendencies toward the concentration of ownership and control of media industries coexist with the emergence of new labor practices and updated forms of exploitation (see Mayer, Volume 2, Media Production, as well as some chapters in Gates, Volume 6, Media Studies Futures). This is not surprising given the rapidly expanding new media and communications technologies, many of whose functions replicate previous technologies while other uses (and abuses) bring new possibilities, utopian and dystopian, to the fore (see Gates, Volume 6). Unexpected global locations of nodes of influences result in previously unsuspected transnational alliances and networks (Castells, 2009). Process and inquiry (see Darling-Wolf, Volume 7) evolve as an effort to take into consideration the complex interrelationality of locations, media, audiences, and effects.
As an early caveat to this triumphal celebration of media, I must remind readers that most of the above sentiment refers to a media-rich group that luxuriates in a wealth of networks and technologies. Even as I amend this introduction in late May 2013, fully 50% of the global population have intermittent access to electricity. For instance, news of Myanmar joining the global grid are accompanied by the fact that nearly nobody in that country has access to the Internet and electricity is patchy there at best. Mobile telephony may be widespread, but the radio remains the most reliable global medium (see the Journal of Radio Studies). Beyond the fact that radio is cheap, it neither relies on nor requires electricity or literacy, in English or any language. Furthermore, despite our current fixation with digital, wireless, and mobile media technologies, in times of crisis – whether natural such as a huge earthquake or in wartime – when the electric networks are down and we are thrown back on to old school forms of media and communication, radio returns to its central location as a reliable and essential medium. So before you continue reading this introduction or any of the seven outstanding volumes of this encyclopedia project, go out and buy yourself a radio – one that is both electric and battery-powered. You might never need it, but if you do, you will be very relieved to have it.
Media are everywhere, and nearly everyone shares lifelong experience with and expertise on particular forms of media. Dating back to the 1920s – as identified both in Nerone, Volume 1 (Media History and the Foundations of Media Studies), and in Mazzarella, Volume 3 (Content and Representation) – the study of media has been multimodal and heterogeneous. Theoretical and methodological complexity has grown since the Payne Fund Studies (see this volume). International, transnational, and global perspectives have become absolutely essential. Not that they were ever not, but media studies scholars now document the fact that media are produced, consumed, and circulated transnationally. Media inclusivity of a heterogeneous population has also grown. Scholarship that was once nationally bound and focused on White middle-class males has expanded to take into consideration gender, nation, region, age, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and class. Furthermore, as both Downing (2003) and Castells (2010) remind us, we must not forget the importance of religion in the contemporary world, as many armed conflicts revolve around religion, and media content, production, audiences, and effects are interlaced with religious impulses.
Media studies is an interdiscipline. It draws on and benefits from a number of contributing fields such as history, philosophy, psychology, political science, education, literature, and sociology. Yet even as it draws on those many fields, it is its own area of studies. Too often other fields, whose interdisciplinarity takes them into media studies, see this interdiscipline as new – as in, “Oh look, we just discovered that we ought to look at media.” Our field becomes the direct object of other scholars' deployment of the myth of discovery. Just like Columbus discovered “America,”1 scholars from other fields continue to “discover” media and media studies. A century's worth of theories and research disappears in the process, and many of us often find ourselves in other disciplines' conferences listening to presentations that implicitly suggest direct effects, transparency, mimetic images, and so on. Transparency, when media content, industries, audiences, and practices are treated as if they speak for themselves, as if there were no mediation, is a tactic often used by scholars outside our discipline. What we as a field contribute to the understanding of culture and society is, at the very least, that mediation is complex and that understanding mediation helps us to uncover patterns of power, distribution, and potential justice. Media studies is about unearthing and maximizing the democratic potential of practices, institutions, technologies, and audiences that pervade our contemporary life.
Nonetheless, as Gates reminds us in her introduction to Volume 6, 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 media” capture a general sense of current transformations, but what are some productive ways of parsing out the complex dimensions and issues that these terms encompass? By paying careful attention to issues of history and context, this encyclopedia seeks to trouble the usage of these terms even as they are used rather carelessly in popular culture and public policy.
The seven separate volumes of this encyclopedia were present as six separate sections in A Companion to Media Studies (Blackwell, 2003), the volume that provides the model for this encyclopedia and that was, in turn, modeled after McQuail's Mass Communication Theory. The editors of the individual volumes put together a stellar cast of authors who produced original chapters. All volume editors were asked to compose an inclusive table of contents. First, inclusivity in terms of global topics was paramount, and we strived for inclusivity in terms of authors and global regions as well. As I have discussed elsewhere (Valdivia, 2011b), this is not as easy as it sounds. Differential access to the latest research, culturally different approaches to writing and developing an argument, resources that might enable a given scholar or team to develop a project and get it ready for publication, and so on, are all variables that effectively discriminate in favor of those of us in well-funded research universities in wealthy countries. We recruited some scholars whose work we translated into English, and all editors worked assiduously to cast as global a network as possible.
Another element of inclusivity was paradigm diversity. Schooled at the Institute of Communications Research (ICR) at the University of Illinois, I am the recipient of an educational tradition that highly values paradigmatic inclusivity. We included scholars using quantitative and qualitative approaches, sometimes both of them at the same time. Obviously the Media Effects/Media Psychology volume (5) focused solely on the social scientific tradition, while the Content and Representation (3), Audience and Interpretation (4), and Research Methods (7) volumes included scholarship using both approaches. A third element of inclusivity was gender, race, and sexuality. Cutting across – as a focus that can be conducted in the research included in any of the seven volumes of this project is the work of transnational feminism and global gender studies (Hegde, 2006). Editors sought scholarship that would include these vectors of difference, as media studies really makes no sense without their consideration. Yet even within each of these categories we encounter new gaps that merit more research. For example, as Mazzarella mentions in the introduction to Volume 3:
the reader might notice that the volume is heavy with studies of cultural representations of females. Indeed, seven chapters deal with some aspect of this topic, while only one deals with masculinity. Yet this is representative of the field, as studies of media portrayals of women and girls have been very prolific, and media studies scholars have only recently begun to seriously study mediated portrayals of masculinity(ies) (Mazzarella, 2008).
The rise of masculinity studies follows feminist studies as a logical move once we realize that femininity is socially constructed. Indeed, this is a process that this collection of volumes entices us to accomplish: a greater degree of preciseness to this complex concept of media studies, which all of us who work within the interdiscipline intellectually seek to explicate.
As a final note about process, these volumes have been peer reviewed in an innovative manner for an edited collection. First, each table of contents was submitted to the peer review of a senior scholar within that area of the field and edited accordingly. Then, as the chapters came in, within each volume authors reviewed other chapters. Ideally, each chapter was reviewed by two other authors as well as by its editors. As the overall editor of the project, I carefully reviewed all volume editor introductory chapters in addition to the table of contents. Now the review process is turned over to you, the reader.
Media Studies Today
As an organizing principle for this book, since 2003 I have followed the structure provided by many different editions of Denis McQuail's Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction. From the first edition in 1983 up to the sixth edition in 2010, whose name changed, appropriately enough, to McQuail's Mass Communication Theory, Denis McQuail provided a manageable way of dividing up the field into components that, while overlapping – as they had to since these components were teased out more for scholarly inquiry than because of discrete differentiation – provided a useful way to look at the breadth of study of the media. We all experience media as an integrated experience. Media inherit values and histories that are in turn explicitly or implicitly incorporated into their production; then we either consume and/or interpret media in relation to regimes of representation, with particular audiences and interpretive tactics in mind, with some desired effects over which we have little control, and contributing to a future that – like effects – we wish we could influence but really cannot. Still, for the purposes of research, we decompose the media experience into a number of areas.
The volumes of this encyclopedia match sections of the Companion, which used McQuail's schema and added the “Futures” section. Thus we have history, production, content and representation, audience and interpretation, media effects/media psychology, futures, and methods. While these areas are separated for the purposes of research, there is great cross-pollination by scholars within media studies. We find that some scholars use both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, or at least rely on both. We also find that many scholars write about two or more of the six areas mentioned above. For example, a scholar such as Francombe (2010) combines the study of representation with attention to issues of labor. Durham (2004) combines analysis representation with exploration of audience and interpretation. These are two recent pieces of scholarship that illustrate overlaps.
Major trends in current research apply holistic media studies approaches. Among these contemporarily salient research projects are network analysis (e.g., Castells, 2009, 2010; Chan, 2007, 2011; Gilbert, Karahalios, & Sandvig, 2010); girl studies (Banet-Weiser, 2011; Durham, 2004; Projansky, 2007a, 2007b, 2010; Valdivia, 2008a, 2009a, 2011a); transnational feminism (Hegde, 2006; Molina-Guzmán, 2010; Valdivia, 2011b); and neoliberalism as an undergirding framework of analysis (Banet-Weiser, 2011; Hay, 2000, 2010, 2011; Hoerl & Kelly, 2010; McCarthy, Pitton, Kim, & Monge, 2009). For example, McCarthy (2011) expands the focus of neoliberalism in the media to the educational system and the efforts of many cities, such as Chicago, to become cosmopolitan, globally vibrant centers of economic activity, thus linking media studies to educational policy studies.
Many of these recent research tendencies converge in the critical examination of the “posts.” Scholars develop amazing analyses demonstrating the potential of an intersectional approach that uses race, ethnicity, gender, ability, sexuality, and class all at once, for people experience these elements in an integrated manner. Roopali Mukherjee's The Racial Order of Things (2006) set the bar for intersectional analysis of the “post-soul” era. Tasker and Negra (2007) provided a comprehensive introduction to the political implications of postfeminist culture, while Molina-Guzmán and Valdivia (2004) applied the intersectional approach to the study of celebrity Latinas. Joseph (2010), in her provocatively entitled “Tyra Banks is Fat!” (a title straight out of tabloid magazines and television coverage), explores the implicit racism and sexism of the postracial and postfeminist veneer of reality television in general, and Tyra Banks's brand in particular. Molina-Guzmán (2010) explores the transnational deployment and commodification of the spectacular and everyday Latina body. In exploring the politics of the “post,” these scholars foreground media studies even as they situate their work within a broader context of geopolitics and dynamically changing mediascapes. This encyclopedia convincingly illustrates the field's ability to expand as new practices, technologies, and institutions arise. As many of the editors and contributors will document, “new media” is a misnomer as neither the technology nor the uses or assemblages are so new (see Morley, 2006). What may at first seem to be epochal breaks are revealed by many of the contributors to be far more continuous elements in relation to history, culture, and media.
Editors and Volumes
We begin with normative theories and history. John Nerone, author of Violence Against the Press: Policing the Public Sphere in US History (1995), coauthor, with Kevin Barnhurst, of The Form of News: A History (2002), and editor of Last Rights: Revisiting Four Theories of the Press (1995), as well as author of many other journal articles and book chapters, is the perfect historian to lead us through this fertile terrain of scholarship. Volume 1 underscores that while all media have long histories, historians agree neither on the definitive tale of origin nor on the particular historical approach. Moreover, Nerone, the careful historian, reminds us that even our use of the word “media” in relation to communications is quite recent.
Nerone's volume includes normative and historical approaches. These overlapping areas of study continue to inform the interdiscipline, and my singling out of a few representative recent pieces of scholarship below is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather illustrative of the ongoing work. For example, Christians (2010) continues his leadership in the field of media ethics as he strives to expand the framework from a Western individualist universalism toward a communitarian model that takes into account a broader number of regions and countries. Similarly, Hartley (2007) takes us to China's Super Voice Girl, its version of American Idol that is the US version of the British Pop Idol, to chart the global expansion of reality television. Plebiscitary industries and the loose equation of reactive entertainment votes with civic participation in a democratic process are issues at the core of contemporary discussions, or rather popular celebrations, of the democratizing influence of market-driven free labor from constructed audiences. In particular Hartley singles out China, where the political regime continues its very hands-on approach to issues of popular discussions even as the media are becoming increasingly commercialized and adapting Western genres. Indeed, the entire deployment of reality television overlaps with discourses of neoliberalism as it shifts responsibility from the state and the collective to the moral labor of individuals (Hay, 2010, 2011; McCarthy et al., 2009; see also Bailey, 2011; Banet-Weiser, 2011), though this is an intrinsically contradictory position in places such as China where the state insists on making decisions, especially regarding media content regulation, even as it shifts moral and economic responsibility to individuals.
Historical research continues to offer media studies great insight and tools with which to understand contemporary media as well as a great diversity of approaches. Contemporarily studies of memory provide a welcome contribution to media studies. Not surprisingly, Brockus (2004) examines the location of Disney in the US collective cultural memory and national identity. Disney studies is one way of charting US media industries, content, and audiences, especially in terms of media convergence and synergy at a global level. Another topic, special effects, something nearly all Hollywood blockbusters rely on, has received nearly no historical attention from media scholars until Turnock (2009, 2010), began to develop a history of special effects dating back to the production of Star Wars and the Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) studio, which became the standard for special effects even to this day.
Beyond cultural memory and special effects as components of media history, we are also witnessing an explosion of work revisiting the archive, data, and documentation. For instance, Gitelman (2006) takes a fresh approach to the study of history, pointing out that even the archives are already mediated, linking them to the so-called “new” media. While there is much talk about new media, a well-versed media scholar, whose training includes a historical overview, will remember Marvin's (1988) brilliant admonition that old media were once new, and so will our contemporary media be tomorrow's old stuff. In addition to Gitelman, Robertson (2009) and Kafka (2009) take us back to technologies that we might not even think of as such, to address issues that are absolutely elemental in the contemporary setting of surveillance, global (im)mobility, and access to and record of any information. Robertson (2009, 2010) instructs us on the pedagogy and deployment of identity technologies, as the passport becomes a document that vouches for our national identity and indeed our very existence. Furthermore, the passport charts the evolution of border crossings, exclusive national belonging, and record keeping of national populations as central tasks of the modern nation-state. Hadlaw (2011) takes an old school look at early twentieth-century ads for AT&T telephones which literally instructed readers not only how to use the new technology, but also why speed and time had to be reconceptualized as connected to the marketplace, capital accumulation, and surplus value. This historical work transitions us into the Production volume (2), as telephone consumers had to be taught to prioritize elements of daily life that were previously seen as natural and noncommodifiable. Similarly, Kafka (2009) brilliantly studies that most elemental component of media – paper. It seems like such a simple task: how do we study the construction and use of paper, the “bureau” in bureaucratization, the work of scribes? Kafka concludes that: “As scholars continue to research the history of paperwork, we need to keep in mind that we are defending not only the ‘historical record,’ but the political one” (2009, p. 352). Indeed, these are the perfect words to keep in mind as we read the elegant volume on History crafted by John Nerone.
Volume 2, Media Production, is composed by Vicki Mayer. Among the many publications by Mayer, we can list Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (2011), Producing Dreams, Consuming Youth: Mexican Americans and Mass Media (2003), and Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (coedited with M. J. Banks & M. T. Caldwell, 2009). Mayer begins her volume by reminding us that “[M]edia production is frequently the most invisible aspect of our relationships with media. In the storm of media messages we encounter, we rarely consider where they came from, who made them, and how.” We expect to find, and we are not disappointed, a combination of keen attention paid to the sociological approach to our field, something about which McQuail had previously written in Towards a Sociology of Mass Communications (1969), and critical neo-Marxist political economy accompanied by a focus on labor issues in the global setting. Moreover, as explicitly stated in one of her book titles, Mayer paradigmatically maintains a dialogue between political economy and cultural studies, which resonates with globally used approaches in our field. The tension between structure and agency pervades this volume. Mayer remarks that
if the focus on social structures has implicated the modern state in the study of media production, the focus on the agency that people exert over media production implicates the modern project to create enlightened subjects who can embody, perform, reflect on, and actually become media producers.
So the new production studies is global by necessity as transnational ownership and production of media industries cannot be denied; blends political economy and cultural studies; foregrounds issues of labor, both above and below the line; and takes up issues of networks, intellectual property, and subjectivity as producers are constructed in terms of categories of identity.
Production is a wide-ranging area of studies. A few examples of the state of the art in production studies follow. Chan takes up the challenge laid down by Castells and many other network scholars, and pursues a couple of case studies in Peru. The first one explores software networks (Chan, 2007) and the latter investigates ceramic production and regimes of intellectual property in relation to efforts to market that traditional craft globally (Chan 2011). Intellectual property is an important component of any discussion of production and the global circulation of media or of any form of cultural products, as Boateng (2011) has demonstrated in relation to textile production in Ghana. Both Boateng and Chan have shown that unequal power between the global North and South have widespread implications in terms of how Western-originated notions of intellectual property are deployed over global regions whose own traditions do not necessarily match individualist and market-driven definitions.
Looking at a very different type of media and group of media consumers and producers, which yet resonate with many of the production issues brought out by Boateng and Chan, Banet-Weiser (2011) connects girls' YouTube video productions with neoliberal tendencies of marketing the self within heteronormative, market-driven forms of representation. The labor investment implicit in these forms of digital interventions is also discussed in some chapters of Volume 6 on futures. Additionally, the Banet-Weiser project combines production with representation research, and provides an ideal transition into discussing Volume 3 on content and representation.
Sharon Mazzarella, a prolific scholar of youth and the media, leads us through the wide world of Content and Representation. The author or editor of books including Girl Wide Web 2.0: Revisiting Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity (2010), 20 Questions about Youth and Media (2007), Girl Wide Web: Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity (2005), and Growing Up Girls: Popular Culture and the Construction of Identity (2001), Mazzarella is a rigorously trained social scientist who also pursues qualitative research. As such she is the ideal editor for this volume, which is respectful of both methodological approaches. Indeed, for many a budding media studies scholar, content and representation provide the first point of entry, as these are the aspects of media that we experience most directly. Although, of course, all media have normative implications, histories, and a complex web of production, most people focus on the finished product: the television show, the movie, the blog, someone's Facebook page, the YouTube video, the song, the newspaper, the advertisement, the catalogue. Content analysis is alluring yet amazingly difficult to carry out. Representational analysis also bears the sophistication of a range of theories. Neither is an easy task, and quantitative approaches complement interpretive studies. Mazzarella presents a persuasive argument as to why content or representational analysis remains an essential component of media studies and why projects that are well carried out tell us much about the world and the circuit of culture.
This area of research, as is to be expected, continues to be fruitful. The few research projects I mention speak to some of the pressing issues discussed in contemporary life, including ones mentioned earlier, especially girl studies, neoliberal critique, and the politics of the “post.” A major theme is the neoliberal global regime that contours the parameters for so much of what is discussed in the popular media, sometimes discursively enabling a witch hunt of anyone who dares mention that systemic issues might be at play. For instance, Bailey (2011) examines how actor Isaiah Washington, formerly of Grey's Anatomy, was made to pay for his neoliberal faux pas when he dared to suggest that racism was at work in the public incident that constructed him as homophobic. Given the moral economy of neoliberalism, the individual has to assume responsibility for any “sin” and follow a path of therapeutic care of the self. Washington's assertion that some of the controversy had to do with racism attempted to shift the analysis to a structural and systemic issue, a move that is not supported within neoliberalism. Thus Washington was coded as the nonrepentant, faulty neoliberal subject. Bailey's representational analysis foregrounds the construction of masculinity vis-à-vis discourses of sexuality and race. Another area of studies explores the battleground over the construction of the sign of “girls.” Chesney-Lind and Irwin (2004) reflect on the moral panic construction of contemporary girlhood, constructed as either bad or mean and neither providing a progressive possibility for this demographic category. Projansky's (2007a, 2007b, 2010) brilliant scholarship details that girls studies is neither new nor homogeneous, nor does it even refer to an age-specific category, as the term “girl” is still loosely used in a sexist culture. Chess (2010) illustrates the gendered deployment of contemporary gaming, including advertising, that positions boys and men as producers and girls as consumers, and returns us to the elements of the implicitly heteronormative family. Similarly Lindenfeld (2007) analyzes representations of food and reveals the articulation of discourses of race and ethnicity to family and nation. Given the explosion of food pornography2 now available to us through cable channels, magazines, websites, and within movies (not just Hollywood film), foodways scholars draw our attention to the manner in which food continues to be a primary signifier of identity and belonging (Ceisel, 2013).
As useful transitions from content and representation research into audience and interpretation, we consider Hoerl and Kelly (2010), Francombe (2010), and Durham (2004). Exploring the normative elements of the discursive construction of the ideal neoliberal girl who is interpellated into the Wii game We Cheer, Francombe (2010) and Chess (2010) provide a welcome respite from the focus on boys and gaming by studying girls' representations and audience positions in regard to this most popular type of media (see also the extensive work of Nakamura, 2009a, 2009b, 2010, and Volume 6). Similarly, Durham (2004) takes girls' media studies globally and diasporically by studying the relation between media and sexuality in the lives of South Asian immigrant girls. Hoerl and Kelly (2010) take up the postfeminist discourse that is part of the neoliberal regime of representation, wherein we are interpellated into a subjectivity of agency and choice when the latter is constructed a priori, already ruling out some of the options for which feminists have fought. In a case study of three 2007 Hollywood romantic comedies – Juno, Knocked Up, and Waitress – Hoerl and Kelly explore the representation of unmarried pregnancy and the resolutions that highlight the do-it-yourself “White spunky women will triumph over all obstacles” narrative that ignores issues of power, the economy, and of course race and class. The analyses of We Cheer!, media consumed by South Asian girls, and contemporary Hollywood film transition us from representation to audience and interpretation.
Radhika Parameswaran edits Volume 4 on audience and interpretation. Parameswaran's research includes two Journalism and Communication Monographs, “Melanin on the Margins: Advertising and the Cultural Politics of Fair/Light/White Beauty in India” (2009, co-authored with K. Cardoza) and “Global Media Events in India: Contests Over Beauty, Gender, and Nation” (2001). Her work has focused on the intersection of feminist cultural studies, gender and media globalization, South Asia, and postcolonial studies with a particular emphasis on issues of audience and interpretation. She constructs a volume worthy of her areas of expertise, with many chapters illustrating global and gender issues. This volume also bears the marks of an interdisciplinary field that includes social scientific paradigms such as uses and gratifications as well as more humanist approaches that now include global and online ethnographies. Parameswaran remarks that “audience studies has not only survived the backlash against its populist tendencies in the late eighties to midnineties, but it has also thrived and expanded to include a range of audiences, media genres, modes of audience engagement, and institutional and international sites of reception.” “Populist tendencies” refers to the “discovery” of the audience around every corner, as it were, without proper attention to issues of power and structure. Contemporarily audience studies is vibrant and innovative. Whether we look at fans or online digital communities, to mention just two of many possibilities, the construction and potential agency of the audience are major issues that continue to guide the production of media and subjectivities. Illustrative of the many philosophical quandaries undergirding the location of the audience within media studies is Jack Bratich's chapter in Volume 6, as audience analysis is part of the present and future of the field. In addition, audience connects with issues of production as it undeniably takes labor to be part of any audience.
Illustrating one of the many possibilities within audience studies, Buchmann, Moore, and Fisher (2010) take up the issue of Hollywood film-induced tourism. Their case study examines the Tolkien trilogy (The Lord of the Rings movies which were filmed in New Zealand) and the tourism to that location that the movies have generated. This is a project that can fit in both audience and effects, for how can one argue that traveling to a real faraway country – as New Zealand is from the United States – for a hefty sum of money to attempt to relive the books and the movies that feature a fantastic story is not a very strong and immediate effect partly induced by particular forms of very persuasive media? Since tourism constitutes a growing percentage of many countries' gross domestic product (GDP), much of it induced through mass media, it is not surprising that a journal such as the Annals of Tourism Research includes articles that could squarely fit within a media studies journal, including this one on film-induced tourism.
Erica Scharrer guides us through the fifth volume on Media Effects/Media Psychology, the dominant paradigm in the United States as well as in other global settings such as the Netherlands, as well as the paradigm that reaps the most funding in a positivist framework that values scientific demonstration of impact. Scharrer has co-authored, with G. Comstock, Television: What's On, Who's Watching, and What It Means (1999), The Psychology of Media and Politics (2005), and Media and the American Child (2007), and, with L. Weidman and K. Bissell, a long article in Journalism and Communication Monographs, “Pointing the Finger of Blame: News Media Coverage of Popular-Culture Culpability” (2003). Scharrer brings to the volume a long-standing engagement with the social scientific paradigm in our field. A well carried out effects study tells us much about the influence of media on individuals, groups, and societies. The field of media effects, therefore, is presented with both the challenge and the opportunity to sort out these complex and potentially idiosyncratic experiences in a context in which the number of media outlets has proliferated, their use occurs at virtually any location and time of day, and their consumption and purposes intersect and converge more than ever before. Thus Scharrer asks:
Why are individuals drawn to media to such impressive degrees? How do they process and make meaning from media messages? What types of content are they both receiving and creating when spending time with media? What are the consequences of such media use? What factors and conditions help explain why individuals vary in their responses to media? And what factors and conditions may moderate or mediate such responses?
These questions require complex methodological and theoretical expertise to answer. Those of us schooled in a critique of the “hypodermic needle” model have since learned that media sometimes have or generate direct effects. Why else would a multibillion dollar advertising industry exist in the United States alone? However, we continue to marvel at the long-term cumulative effects that are far more complex than we originally anticipated. Furthermore, effects scholars, such as many of those contributing to Scharrer's volume, seek to explore how to effect positive change as well as how to avert more nefarious outcomes.
Volume 6 on Media Studies Futures is edited by Kelly Gates, whose research is the embodiment of a focus on futures. Author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance (2011) as well as co-editor with Shoshana Magnet of The New Media of Surveillance (2009), Gates studies the discursive formation of the wishful deployment of recognition technology with an “almost gleeful futurism” that suggests “if only” the systems were in place before 9/11, for instance, our present and future would be different, better, and so on.3 Futures is, by definition, a transient category, as within 10 years what is now the future might be the present or even the past. As Raymond Williams has written, we cannot anticipate what will be an emergent media form until it is post facto. The Futures volume takes up some of the issues around the Internet, gaming, social media, mobile telephone in a converged media form, biopolitics, and digitization technologies such as biometric body scans. Gates asserts that media studies needs to take seriously the possibility that radical uncertainty and contingency are the only features that define where media are and where they are headed. All the chapters in this volume could be retrofitted into the other six volumes. Yet together they compose a vision of the field as it moves forward, taking up issues that date back centuries, engaging them with theories and modes of media that only apparently represent new terrain.
Emblematic of the future of media studies research, in her ongoing and not just influential but paradigm shifting body of work, Nakamura reveals the fallacy behind claims that the Internet and digital gaming left behind the body and its racialized, gendered, and ability components (Nakamura, 2009a, 2009b, 2010). She takes us into the world of digital media and the many types of labor that they absorb – from our racialized player labor to the labor that it takes to produce the virtual and material gaming infrastructure. While gaming is not new, the ways that it becomes its own subfield due to the sheer magnitude of the industry, its widespread everyday deployment, and the millions of people daily engaged in its production and consumption, make it a focal point of our field. Similarly, Meddaugh (2010) highlights the relevance of new forms of delivering news to an audience that no longer watches traditional media or reads legacy media. Comedians such as John Stewart and Steven Colbert replace the prime-time news of yesterday as a source of information, and deliver their message through alternative cultural genres such as humor to get at a deeper truth than the “objective” news.
Also a new twist on an old tactic, in a hypercapitalist age, it seems almost impossible to imagine a space or time where not everything is bought and sold in the transnational marketplace. Boycotts seem so last century to our students. Buycotts (Pezzulo, 2011), on the other hand, provide consumers with a positive tactic – to buy products that confirm consumers' demands. This strategy works within the system to secure gains such as environmental practices. Environmental and green issues come up often in Volume 6 as many of the contributors, especially Maxwell and Miller, remind us of the massive amounts of disposable hardware, not to mention the huge carbon footprint, it takes to produce the “new media” that many of us are constantly buying to replace the previous disposable model.
Jéssica Retis's (2011) work on flows of immigrant media from Latin America via Spain and Europe to the United States complements the work on contraflows by international communications scholars highlighted by Daya Kishan Thussu (2006) in his overview of the field. For example, the work of news flows then is taken in the field of international communications as “contraflow” – the fact that the one-way flow from the West to the rest sometimes backs up and is thrown right back at the empire.
In Volume 7 Fabienne Darling-Wolf coheres the broad area of methods in media research. Darling-Wolf has a long track record of publications about issues of gender – masculinity and femininity – in Japanese media, trans-Asian communications research, and ethics and ethnography. She embodies the global and intersectional approach we strived for in this encyclopedia, and not surprisingly presents us with a globally diverse methods volume. Research methods in media studies have long been heterogeneous, though some histories of the field sometimes forget about qualitative milestone studies dating back to the 1920s. Nowadays both quantitative and qualitative approaches are much evolved. To begin with, computer-assisted multivariate analysis reduces to seconds what once took months and years. Everett Rogers once told a media studies conference held at the University of New Mexico that, upon his defending his dissertation, a member of his committee insisted on adding one more variable to the analysis. That addition took Rogers 15 more months of eight-hour computational work days! Converged technologies allow for eye tracking (Geise, Chapter 19) to be processed through computers and to generate immediate graphing and correlations. As with all work, in any field, the ease and speed of the process have to be backgrounded by the immense human labor that theoretically constructs the research project in relation to the most useful methods. This includes attention to ethics (Healey, Chapter 2). In addition to the analysis of established methodologies such as oral histories, survey research, interviews, content analysis, and the effects of audiovisual media on children, this volume includes chapters on autoethnographies, online ethnographies, and mixed methods. It is fitting to highlight the ongoing work by Jéssica Retis as it tracks the flow of Latina/o populations and Latina/o media as they circulate around the globe in reaction to economic crises. Retis charts the flow from countries like Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia to Spain as Latin American economies tanked. Once the Spanish economy declined and the political situation veered to the right – with conservative prime minister Rajoy replacing the left-of-center Zapatero – popular sentiment attempted to deal with a global crisis that could not be contained at a national level. Latina and Latinos, some of whom gained Spanish citizenship, flowed to England in general, and London in particular, and more plan yet another transatlantic crossing to the United States where they will enter as European or Spanish immigrants. They bring with them their media businesses and practices. The contraflow that was originally discussed in terms of media is now embodied by globally roaming populations, who take their media and culture with them and continue the millennial hybridization of both.
This is the state of the art of media studies. It is a field where we know better than to use the term “new” media – for all media are somewhat new but also very old in many of their aspects. It is a field where mixed methods and evolving methodologies attempt to capture the mediated experience and process of ever changing and reconstructed populations and audiences. Scholars in this encyclopedia take us back to the production of paper even as they bring us up to the latest technologies, assemblages, and institutions that arise to mediate our world. Contributors to this encyclopedia share the belief not only that media studies is an academic exercise, but also that by engaging in this important area of studies we are somehow contributing to a more just vision of the world. As the separate volumes build on each other, whether we are engaged in media at any of their analytical nodes (production, content and representation, audience and interpretation, media effects/media psychology, methods), we are simultaneously linked by its history and its future. It is a diverse heterogeneous field that is global, interdisciplinary, intersectional, multimethodological, and I cannot imagine a more exciting and potentially liberatory academic enterprise in which to be involved.
NOTES
1 In this introduction and whenever possible, this encyclopedia uses “America” to refer to a continent and “US” or “United States” to refer to the country, unless we are quoting from scholarship that uses “America” otherwise.
2 Food pornography refers to the deployment of codes of pornography – such as repetition, extreme closeups, and lingering camera shots – in the coverage of food and food preparation in so much of today's multichannel media.
3 Few people know that Gates defended her dissertation proposal the day before 9/11. What to the committee seemed like futuristic queries became the very real present within a period of 24 hours.
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