In comparison with disciplines like maths or philosophy,
media studies is a very young field in academics. It started in the United States in the 1930s,
with the analysis of television and radio broadcasts, and really found its
place in the 1960s through the work of Marshall McLuhan, who coined the famous aphorism “the medium is
the message”. Initially, media studies was concerned with ‘big stuff’: TV and
radio broadcasts, or newspapers. In short: everything that reached masses. Some
of this was related to technology, as a means of distribution, but it was not
central.
The world, for media studies, was easy. There was a specific
device for each of the possible media types: a TV set or cinema for
audio-visual content, a radio for pure audio content, paper (as in newspapers,
books or magazines) for printed content. These were all nicely separated, and
could be analysed in the same manner. There was no need to differentiate the
media types very clearly, because when multiple devices are needed to consume
the different media types, the devices do the definition for you.
Media studies would then analyse the different aspects of
the media, looking at the content of each category, analysing and comparing it,
investigating who owned the corporations that produced it, how these are
controlled and regulated, and how they influence the masses they reach. It
would analyse why media affects people in a certain way, how a defined effect
could be achieved by a specific media type, and generally how media content was
created.
Most of all, media studies knew exactly what their field
was, how it was defined and where its borders were. That is past tense, because
this changed with the increased use of technology. First of all, the
differentiation between media types became more complicated: desktop computers,
laptops, tablets, smartphones, and most recently wrist watches, allow us to
play the morning show off our favourite radio station, read the guardian over
lunch, and watch the BBC evening news – all on the same device. We no longer need
one device for each of the different media types.
So media content is now differentiated by content type, not
by device. But the simplicity still isn’t coming back. Because after all that
our devices can do for us, there is still that one thing that binds them all
together, and combines all these things that used to be distributed across the
different groups in the good old days. There used to be producers and
receivers. There used to be broadcasters and the audience. And while there was
some formal or informal communication from the audience to the mass media, it
was really quite clear who belonged to which group and did what as a result. The
producers created content, the broadcasters distributed it, and the audience
received and consumed the content. This is no longer the case.
The web, especially the web 2.0, is dominated by user
generated content. There are blogs allowing every individual with a web
connection (local regulations allowed) to generate and distribute their own written
content. There are podcasts that everyone can nowadays record and publish from
their smartphones, which might be seen equivalent to radio shows. There is
YouTube, where users can upload their own videos. Some of these YouTube
channels reach an audience that some TV stations would envy. And of course there are all the platforms for
social interactions. There is Twitter and Facebook, allowing us to share links
to interesting content at a click, enabling a completely new form of distribution
of any content to masses only limited by internet access. This has sparked new
phenomena, like viral memes, or (online) mobs that form extremely fast and can
have massive influence; in positive, for example in the Arab spring, but also
negative, for example in #gamergate.
On one side, the web is seen as ‘yet another type of media’,
and added to the pile described earlier. In this case, the web is understood in
the same framework as television, radio and newspapers, and analysed and
critiqued in the same way. If the web is indeed ‘just another form of media’,
then it needs to fit and be analysed within the criteria used by ‘media studies
1.0’. The content can be deconstructed to investigate its function and wider
context. The owners can be seen in power-networks and their influence mapped.
The influence of the media text can be analysed in regards to its impact on
culture, ideology and identity. Or: nothing changes, really.
One of the actors arguing for this view is David Buckingham. He suggested that the existence
of the web alone does not mean a revolution, and that theories of ownership
and access still apply. For example, influential websites are still owned by
large corporations, so ownership cannot simply be disregarded. Potentially, the
old power-relationships that apply to the offline world are simply continued
online. Or, if they change, this in itself needs to be analysed. In regards to
media education, Buckingham argues that although children nowadays grow up with
media and might know the formats better than their teachers, they
still need to learn about the underlying concepts and wider context, in order
to become critical participants of the new media world.
On the other side, the web is seen as a revolution that does
not only change society – with its distribution, 40% of the global population connected
to it and the implied effect on societies – but also the field of media studies
itself. If the rise of the web indeed is a revolution of the media landscape,
then that revolution has to be reflected in the academic study of media itself.
Media studies has to become media studies. 2.0, to be able to analyse it
accordingly. This means that media studies has to analyse not only ownership,
but the entire audience, including the changed relationship between producers
and audience. This has been argued for example by William Merrin and David Gauntlett.
Merrin opened his blog about Media Studies 2.0 in 2006, to
collect articles for his own teaching. In his first post, he presented his idea
about Media Studies falling behind their students in the use of new media, and
no longer being able to teach it so long as the students knew more about the
topic than he himself did. He developed this thought further and proposed that the
field of media studies has to ‘upgrade’ due to the changes in media reception
that the web has brought about.
Gauntlett sees the rise of the web as a fundamental
change in how we interact with media. As a result, we cannot analyse the web
in the same way we used to analyse media content previously. The categories
themselves have changed because of the web and our interaction with it. Consumers
turn into prosumers, who are not only consuming media but interacting with it
and producing new content at the same time.
The debate about the future of media studies is extremely
interesting, and it is still ongoing. And somehow I wonder whether the
indicated definition of Media Studies 2.0 makes the field a synonym of Web
Science.
