8/14/2019 New Media Divergence: The Problem of a Fragmented Disciplinary Discourse

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New Media Divergence: The Problem of a Fragmented Disciplinary Discourse

The impact of new media on our society, and on the humanities in particular, hasbeen widely recognized and researched, yet many faculty in the humanities seem toresist considering formal qualities of new media texts and technologies or theirimpact on our culture. Computer generated imagery, databases, graphical userinterfaces, and software in general constitute current media texts and affect ourlives even more profoundly as literature, cinema or Television might have Such

areas as digital art and literature, code poetry, and computational music havebeen studied by scholars for the last ten years, and study of the computers'cultural impact has gone on longer. However, this knowledge has been slow toreach the larger academy in more than a superficial way. New media texts arerarely discussed outside of meetings, journals, and programs that focus on newmedia. This ghetto-ization means that the texts are only studied or accessed byspecialists and are unlikely to reach the general population of scholars, which inturn keeps new media texts from reaching more scholars or students in the future.But, new media are just new texts in media culture and therefore inevitablyimportant subjects of research for anybody dealing with texts in general.

The aesthetic components of new media have been thoroughly explored throughdiscussions of post-humanism; historical examinations of algorithmic poetry

extending from contemporary work all the way back to the Qaballah; carefulcharting of the evolution of terms and concepts from film theory into new media;and many other approaches to these texts. However, most scholars, in the U.S. atleast, who do not specialize in new media remain unaware not only of this work onnew media, but of new approaches to "old" media spawned from the novelperspectives generated in the new media studies. Further, though many theorieshave been advanced, such as those describing convergence, the wealth of networks,and virtual communities have celebrated the power of users to effect change andleverage collective intelligence, in the last few years a more critical, nuancedview has emerged. Some scholars examining media ecologies explore ways thatdifferent technologies are used in specific contexts, leading to specific impactson the user groups. Others study how groups existing largely outside ournetworked society have been affected by their "paranodal" position; many take a

more skeptical stance on the connection between participatory media (Web 2.0) andenhanced civic functioning; while some have suggested that Foucault's notion ofthe dispositif may be combined with Actor Network Theory to better understand thecomplex relations between communities, technologies, and cultural meanings, andhave proposed a new category of "produsage" to describe the way users nowcontribute to new media production. However, many scholars outside of new mediastudies remain unaware of these developments, and disciplinary discussion remainsbogged down in repetition.

In this presentation then, I outline some of the most recent trends in new mediascholarship, the segregation of certain approaches to certain branches of thehumanities, and suggest ways that new media in general and its socio-culturalimpact in particular might be better and more widely addressed, both in literature

and in composition/rhetoric.