Hi Daren, For historical interest, here is a short piece I wrote for the first fibreculture reader in 2001 called 'What is new media research?' Chris What is New Media Research? Chris Chesher, 2001 First published in Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh,, Michele Willson (eds), Politics of a Digitial Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory, Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, 2001. All professions and disciplines today are doing research in new media: interaction designers, e-business specialists, hypertext authors, network architects, computer scientists, online educators, philosophers and media theorists. The question for specialists in New Media research is: what distinguishes their work from everyone else's? Within each of these traditions there are many who are just getting on with using or building new media, without engaging specifically with how these media are new. But there are some, within each of these disciplines, who are interested in a more critical and theoretical New Media Studies. But what defines New Media research? What distinguishes it from new media production, on the one hand, and from other fields of social, cultural or theoretical research, on the other? Is it the object of study, the methodology, or something else? I don't think New Media research is defined by its object of study. This tradition is less effective if it begins beforehand by selecting one particular technology. A techno-centric approach closes off more than it opens up. If a new technology emerges, or an old one mutates into something different, 'Internet' researchers, for example, could fast become irrelevant. Identifying a research tradition solely with a technology could also easily mean having no attention to which methodological framework is appropriate. To start with the Internet as the object of study could easily end up with an (in)discipline with no history, no methodological conventions, and no common trajectories of inquiry. However, I don't think New Media Research is defined by any single methodology, either. The fact that no single discipline has dominated New Media Research is a strength of the tradition that has emerged over the past two decades. The best work in the field is multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary. The question is not how to build a new discipline with clear parameters and boundaries, but how to sustain and foster more research of this kind without deciding in advance what it should actually do. New media research is a radically minoritarian academic tradition. It aspires to no distinctive identity, nor is it driven by a vision of its own future. It is distinguished by its heterogeneity, characterised by its diversity. The best work produces not incremental advances, but genuine surprises. These surprises tend to emerge from a localised attention to something specific cast into a relation with something more abstract. What defines the new media research paradigm that I identify with, then, is generated out of a somewhat undefinable ethical impulse. It is driven by an imperative to trace productive critical trajectories into the most compelling and specific spaces of contemporary techno- cultural change. New media studies concentrates particularly on the inseparable processes of technological and cultural innovation. The most mundane of these developments interest me more than to the more isolated bleeding edge work in research labs or avant-gardens. In popular culture, I am interested in the emerging uses of the web, electronic mail, iMode, and multiplayer computer games, DVD, SMS, digital television, and new cinematic paradigms. The approaches I prefer are horizontal rather than vertical, finding connections between things that are most often considered different and unrelated: a tactic that Guattari refers to as 'transversalist'. [1] This means more than putting developments into context, because there is no possibility of studying anything cultural outside of its 'context'. It means dealing with the significance of social power relationships in textual analysis. It means not bracketing off the specificities of technical change from social processes. A transversalist approach means not only historicising innovations, but also recognising and conceptualising novelty itself. To define how something is new is not equivalent to claiming that it represents progress. The cliched association of all technological change with a transcendent conception of 'progress' informs not only marketing pitches and policy-makers, but many critics of 'progress'. Change has no intrinsic moral value. It is always local, contested, and multi- layered. This means that change need not be an explicit objective in itself. Unlike ‘progress’, change is inevitable, singular, New media are nothing new. McLuhan and Ong's overarching epochal images of ages of orality and literacy make too much of grand divisions between eras.[2] Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation helps mark out continuities between old and new media, even if it tends to be conservative (as Anna Munster observes).[3] Lev Manovich’s Language of New Media is notable for translating ‘old’ media into the language of new media.[4] My own work on ‘invocational media’ identifies computers as a new mechanism that technically captured the ancient magical cultural practice of invocation.[5] I am advocating a New Media Studies (as opposed to Traditional Media Studies) that starts with an expectation of constant (but minor) innovation. The alternative, of starting with a stabilised medium (Television Studies; Cinema Studies; Internet Studies) cab be a recipe for marginalisation and retreat into formalism. On the other hand, there is a danger that if New Media researchers refuse to ground themselves on any shared vision of their project, disparate individual researchers could become institutionally isolated and irrelevant. That's where there might seem to be some advantage in the tactic of identifying as teaching or researching 'Internet Studies', 'multimedia', 'interactive media', 'computer-mediated communication' or whatever. The trouble with these medium-specific terms is that they date so quickly. The term I keep returning to is 'New Media'. While this term has the connotation of referring to computer-based media (undeniably the most significant technological lineage in play today), it does not exclude non-computer innovations. Taking this name marks a break (generational / methodological / conceptual) with 20th century Media Studies, without disavowing that tradition. It is time to stop hesitating about other terms, and define what New Media studies actually means (for now). New Media Studies has close relationships with several disciplinary approaches, but every new media researcher has their own attachments. For me, these include dealing with Media Studies (from Innis, McLuhan, Ong[6], and more recent work directly on computer media[7]) Cultural Studies (Raymond Williams on)[8], some areas of philosophy (such as Deleuze and Guattari[9], Heidegger[10], Derrida[11]), Science and Technology studies (actor network theory)[12], Film Studies, parts of sociology[13] and history[14], human interface design[15], new media art[16]... it's hard to stop once you get started! But there is something distinctive and specific about New Media research. The paradigm for New Media research might characterised as intellectual distributed processing: a decentred, polyvocal and contingent set of approaches to conceptualising the operations of media technologies in cultural and social change. The heterogeneity of approaches begins with the very definition of ‘media technology’ — the refusal to offer a final definition might be seen as a blindness at the centre of New Media’s vision. Researchers in local places define the connections between their detailed attention to the specifics of particular technocultural assemblages with far wider conceptual, social, machinic, ecological (and other) processes. Any expression of this research (in any genre of writing, or other new media) is in itself a performance that seeks to intervene somehow at some level in these processes. Those who perform New Media research tend to operate in intimate relationships with a range of new media practices. Whether one researcher’s particular performance is motivated by pedagogical, artistic, and even administrative drives, the text that emerges is often only functioning in one among several modes with which that researcher is comfortable. Academic writing is certainly an important discipline. However, for New Media researchers it is complicated by its close relation to other genres and modes of expression. The need to define, or celebrate, New Media research does not apply so much to the way that research should be done. The work itself is not in particular need of strategic intervention. The need for action relates to the complex, yet potentially extraordinarily influential position that New Media research has within institutions. Researchers should identify more clearly as having a distinctive tradition in their own right, rather than continuing to work around the edges of other disciplines. This does not mean that they should become more homogeneous. It means they should develop the self- confidence to assert the distinctiveness and usefulness of their own (and other peoples') projects, and to develop strategies to build forums and avenues for future work specifically dealing with new media, new cultures and new technologies. Asserting a New Media tradition or field certainly is partly about establishing a brand. As Mitchell Whitelaw suggested, a brand is ‘a tactically engineered identity which serves a heterogeneous network of interests’.[17] For me, the New Media research brand already has a remarkable power and credibility. The good work in the area tends to make work on the same themes in other discourses look weak indeed. However, it also means that New Media researchers should take collective responsibility for creating our own ‘apparatuses of capture’.[18] The work of building infrastructures — physical, electronic, financial, interpersonal, semiotic — is something of a quite different nature from the research itself. Sometimes it means applying knowledge to putting New Media into practice in the interests of expanding the tradition’s influence (while remaining aware of the ethics of the manner in which this is done). Other times it means working within institutions — applying for research funding etc. New Media Researchers as a group can work strategically and collaboratively, rather than competitively, to build these structures, in teaching and in research. The FibreCulture mailing list has been excellent as a catalyst for 21st century Australian New Media researchers to establish infrastructures connecting its dispersed community of scholars. Over the next few years it will be important to find ways to solidify some of these relationships. Therefore I propose the ‘Network for New Media Research’. This Network should be developed as both a brand and as an infrastructure, providing a contingent encircling around self-identified New Media researchers. It may be manifest in many expressions — as websites, physical sites, conferences or events, but all with a strategic impulse to enhance communication, advocacy and productivity in the New Media tradition/field/discipline. For a start, the School of Media and Communications at UNSW (in conjunction with UTS Humanities) recently submitted a proposal to DETYA’s Systemic Infrastructure Initiative to establish a Network Hub at the Australian Technology Park in Redfern. Irrespective of whether the proposal is supported, the Network for New Media Research could function as a locus of identification. To speak positively about New Media research may avoid this term falling as another casualty into the graveyard of yesterday’s buzz words — multimedia; hypertext/media/; digital-everything and virtual- everything else etc. An opportunistically generated, but interconnected infrastructure will raise the profile of New Media research and teaching across Australia, opening up spaces in which the research can follow its own unpredictable and irreducible trajectories. [1] Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis. An ethico-political paradigm, (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995), 33–57. [2] Walter Ong, Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word (London, New York: Methuen, 1982); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding media. The extensions of man. (London and New York: Ark, 1964) [3] Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation. Understanding new media (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1999) [4] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) [5] Chris Chesher, Computers as invocational media (unpublished PhD thesis, Macquarie University 2001). Excerpt available at: http://mdcm.arts.unsw.edu.au/homepage/StaffPages/Chesher/index.html [6] McLuhan op cit; Ong op cit; Harold Innis, Empire and communications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950); Innis, Harold, The bias of communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951) [7] Mayer, Paul A, Computer Media and Communication: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Friedrich Kittler and John Johnson (ed), Literature, media, information systems (Netherlands: G+B Arts, 1997) [8] see Storey, John, What is cultural studies? A Reader (London and New York: Arnold and St Martin’s Press, 1996) [9] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is philosophy? (London and New York: Verso, 1994) [10] Martin Heidegger, The question concerning technology, and other essays (New York: Garland Pub., 1977) [11] Jacques Derrida, of Grammatology (Baltimore Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976); Jacques Derrida, Archive fever (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998) [12] John Law, Actor Network Theory and After (Sociological Review Monograph Series) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) Bruno Latour, We have never been modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) Bruno Latour, “Technology is society made durable” in John Law, A Sociology of monsters. Essays on power, technology and domination (London: Routledge, 1991) pp.103–131. Also see John Law’s ANT reading list: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/antres.html [13] Manuel Castells, The Rise of the network society (Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996) [14] Paul Ceruzzi, A history of modern computing (Cambridge, Mass and London, England: The MIT Press, 1998) [15] Brenda Laurel, The art of human interface design (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Publishing, 1990) [16] R. L. Rutsky, High Techne: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Press, 1999) [17] Mitchell Whitelaw ‘Re: ::fibreculture:: What is New Media Research?’ (Fibreculture post 18 Oct 2001) [18] Deleuze and Guattari 1987 op cit, 424–474. -- Dr Chris Chesher Director of Digital Cultures Program Senior Lecturer School of Letters, Art, and Media Room S314 John Woolley Building A20 University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia CRICOS Number: 00026A Phone: +61 2 9036 6173 Fax: +61 2 9351 2434 Mobile: +61 (0)404095480 e-mail: chris.chesher@arts.usyd.edu.au Web: http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/digitalcultures