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). While some scholars have bemoaned the loss of focus on process and effects, especially on milestone studies (DeFleur, 1998), others find the breadth and porous contours to be conducive to a worthwhile intellectual pursuit (Sterne, 2005). To be sure, between 1998 and the present, there has been a huge growth in interpretive and critical approaches, which have nonetheless 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. Indeed, efforts to map out the diversity of 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. The terrain of 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 also, if we chose to, we can 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.
Nonetheless, 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) through the invitation offered by seductive content in a dynamically converging and synergized media environment (see Mazzarella, Volume 3, Content and Representation). The effects of these technologies and content continue to be measured and studied (see Scharrer, Volume 5, Media Effects/Media Psychology). While media platforms and patterns of production are converging, enduring tendencies toward concentration of ownership and control of media industries coexist with the emergence of new patterns of 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).
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. Yet we must not forget that even as I write this introduction at the very end of 2011, fully 50% of the global population have intermittent access to electricity. Mobile telephony may be widely spread, but the radio remains the most reliable global medium (see the Journal of Radio Studies). Beyond the fact that it 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 into 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 continue to read any of the absolutely 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.
The fact is that 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 and Mazzarella, Volume 3, the study of media has been multi-modal and heterogeneous. Theoretical and methodological complexity has grown since the Payne Fund Studies. International, transnational, and global perspectives have become absolutely essential. Not that they ever were not, but now that media are produced, consumed, and circulated transnationally, media studies has to take this into account. Inclusivity of the heterogeneous components of the population in regard to the media 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. As such 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 spoke for themselves, as if there were no mediation, is often the tactic taken 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 six 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 in turn produced original chapters. All volume editors were asked, indeed implored, to compose a table of contents that was inclusive in many ways. First, inclusivity in terms of global topics was paramount, and we strived for inclusivity in terms of authors and global regions as well. This, as I have discussed elsewhere (Valdivia, 2011b), 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 paradigm inclusivity. Insofar as it was possible, we included scholars using quantitative and qualitative approaches, sometimes both of them at the same time. Obviously the Media Effects/Media Psychology volume focused solely on the social scientific tradition, while both the Content and Representation and Audience and Interpretation volumes included scholarship using both approaches. A third element of inclusivity was gender, race, and sexuality diversity. Cutting across as a focus that can be conducted in the research included in any of the six volumes of this project is the work of transnational feminism and globalizing 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. Now the review process is turned over to you, the reader.
Media Studies Today
As an organizing principle for this book, I have followed since 2003 the structure provided by many different editions of Denis McQuail's Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction. Dating back to the first edition in 1983 and up to the sixth edition in 2010, whose name has 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 be since these components were teased out more for scholarly inquiry than because they are discrete and differentiated – 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 tease out the media experience into a number of areas.
The volumes of this encyclopedia match the 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, and futures. We will later add a “methods” volume to complete the encyclopedia. While these areas are teased out for the purposes of research, there is great cross-pollination by scholars in 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. In fact, many of the major trends in current research encompass holistic media studies approaches. Among these contemporarily salient research projects are network analysis (e.g., Castells, 2009, 2010; Chan, 2007, 2011, forthcoming; Gilbert, Karahalios, & Sandvig, 2010); girl studies (Banet-Weiser, 2011; Durham, 2004; Projansky, 2007a, 2007b, 2010; Valdivia, 2008, 2009, 2011a); transnational feminism (Hegde, 2006; Molina Guzmán, 2010; Valdivia, 2011b); and neoliberalism as an under-girding framework of analysis (Banet-Weiser, 2011; Hay, 2000, 2010, 2011; Hoerl & Kelly, 2010; McCarthy, Pitton, Kim, & Monge, 2009). McCarthy (2011) expands the focus of neoliberalism in media to the educational system and the efforts of many cities, such as Chicago, to become a cosmopolitan, globally vibrant center 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) provide a comprehensive introduction to the political implications of postfeminist culture, while Molina Guzmán and Valdivia (2004) apply the intersectional approach to the study of celebrity Latinas. Joseph (2010), in her provocatively entitled “Tyra Banks is Fat!” (a title that, to be fair, comes 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 Latina body, both spectacular and everyday. The politics of the post appears in all elements of media studies as these scholars foreground media studies even as they situate their work within a broader context of geopolitics and the dynamically changing mediascapes. While it may be fashionable to suggest the end of media studies, just as others have previously declared the end of history or of ideology, what this encyclopedia convincingly illustrates is 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 at first may 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 (1994), co-author, with Kevin Barnhurst, of The Form of News: A History (2001), and co-author 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 on history 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, alerts us to the fact that even our use of the word media in relation to communications is quite recent.
Nerone's volume includes normative and historical approaches. Historical research, drawing on normative frameworks or not, continues to offer media studies scholars great insight and tools with which to understand contemporary media. Furthermore, there is great diversity within historical approaches to media studies. Beyond cultural memory and special effects as components of media history, we are also witnessing an explosion of careful work that revisits the archive, data, and documentation. 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 volume on history so elegantly 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 (co-edited with M. J. Banks and 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 the more critical analysis of neo-Marxist political economy now 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, an approach that resonates with globally used approaches in our field. The tension between structure and agency pervades this fine volume. Mayer remarks that “[I]f 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.
Sharon Mazzarella, a prolific scholar of issues of youth and the media, leads us through the wide world of “content and representation.” 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 of those 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, the social media website, 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/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. Unsurprisingly, this area of research continues to be plentiful.
Radhika Parameswaran edits Volume 4 on audience and interpretation. Parameswaran's research includes two long articles in 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. As such she constructs a volume worthy of her areas of expertise, with plenty of chapters illustrating global and gender issues. This volume also bears the traces 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 1980s to mid-1990s, 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. In the contemporary moment, audience studies is vibrant and innovative. Whether we look at fans or online digital communities, to mention just two of the 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.
Erica Scharrer guides us through the fifth core component of media studies, media effects and media psychology, the dominant paradigm in the United States as well as in other global settings such as the Netherlands, and 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 on media effects/media psychology 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. Many of us were schooled in a critique of the “hypodermic needle” model, though we have since learned that the media sometimes have or generate direct effects. Why else does a multibillion dollar advertising industry exist in the United States? 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.
Finally for now,2 the encyclopedia concludes with Volume 6 on media studies futures edited by Kelly Gates. Gates's own research is the veritable 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 the content of this volume will be the stuff of the present, or maybe even the recent 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 Internet, gaming, social media, mobile telephone in a converged media form, biopolitics, and digitalization 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 of the chapters in this volume could be retrofitted into the other five 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.
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. 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), we are simultaneously linked to its history and its future. As a diverse heterogeneous field that is global, interdisciplinary, intersectional, multi-methodological, I cannot imagine a more exciting and potentially liberatory academic enterprise to be involved with.
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 A Methods volume is projected to be released at a later date, edited by Fabienne Darling – Wolf.
3 Few people know that Gates submitted 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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