Field Mapping: What Is the “Media” of Media Studies? 1

Generally, I am not one for broad brushstrokes. In my own research I tend to become mired in media materialities, rather than commit to meta-level extrapolations. However, when given the opportunity recently to comment on some changes in media studies over the past thirty years, I decided to give it a try. To guide me, I borrowed a technique from Charlotte Brunsdon’s (1998) chapter, “What is the ‘Television’ of Television Studies?” Reflecting on the development of a relatively new field of study, Brunsdon recognized that television scholars conceptualized and approached their object of study in a variety of ways. To demonstrate this, she critically examined the tables of contents of several influential collections, pointing out multiple approaches to TV. I will not analyze table of contents here, but I draw on Brunsdon’s model to ask: “What is the ‘Media’ of Media Studies?”

Contemporary media studies emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a hybrid field growing out of communication, literary studies, sociology, art, critical theory, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and cultural studies. Since the late 1980s, the field of media studies has expanded in the United States and beyond, both in terms of the number of departments and enrollments and in the multitude of ways “media” have been conceptualized and studied. ²

As the field of media studies has grown, it has also been shaped by a series of “all-encompassing” discourses, which emphasize media’s centrality and significance in our world, and position media as having unifying, radiating, and transformative properties. Consider, for instance, the various media ecologies approaches. In 1968 Neil (1970) Postman, borrowing the term from Marshall McLuhan, defined media ecology as “the study of media as environments” and drew attention to the complex interplay and mutual effects of humans, technology, media, and the environment. Over time Postman used this concept to point out the degradation of media ecology by commercial television, prompting some media scholars to critique Postman’s formulation for privileging the values, moral assumptions, and taste hierarchies of liberal elites.

In 2005 Matthew Fuller helpfully redefined the term in his book Media Ecologies, highlighting the technical dynamisms of media systems and their interactions, and asking,

what are the different kinds of [material] qualities in media systems with their various and particular or shared rhythms, codes, politics, capacities, predispositions and drives, and how can these be said to mix, to interrelate and to produce patterns, dangers and potentials?

(2) For Fuller, “media ecology” was less a unifying framework, and more an “explosion of activity and ideas.”

In environmentalist media research, media ecologies have been approached in still different ways, as scholars such as Cubitt (2005, 2017), Maxwell and Miller (2012), Bozak (2011), Leyda and Negra (2015), Starosielski and Walker (2016), Schwoch (2018), and Vaughn (2019) have set out to grapple with media’s relationship to natural resources, energy, pollution, sustainability, waste, supply chains, and global climate change. Their crucial analyses have expanded the conceptual radius of media studies by engaging with new materialities, indigenous cosmologies, and theories of the non-human and the anthropocene.

Suffice it to say, together these eclectic media ecology approaches position “media” as part of enveloping human and non-human conditions—respectively, as domains of moral crisis, technological dynamisms, and planetary materialisms. As such, these approaches implicitly link to John Durham Peters’ (2015) proclamation that “media are our infrastructures for being, the habitats and materials through which we act and are.”

Over the years, some media scholars, trained in approaches that emerged out of structural linguistics, narratology, formalism, semiotics, and cultural studies, have gravitated away from textual or representational approaches focused on “content” and “meaning” to engage with a broader array of media-related objects, practices, and formations. The “media” of media studies, for instance, now includes network cultures (Chun 2006; Galloway 2004; Nakamura 2002), design practices (Balsamo 2011; Spigel 2008), production cultures (Caldwell 2008; Mayer et al. 2009), gaming (Chang 2019; Taylor 2018), archeology and geology (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011; Parikka 2015), platforms (Gillespie 2010; Plantin et al. 2018), and infrastructures (Aouragh and Chakravartty 2016; Parks and Starosielski 2015), to name a few. Media studies now engages with so many different objects that it has become difficult to imagine what media studies is not.

In addition to tackling a proliferating array of objects, media scholars have recently marked an “algorithmic turn.” Books ranging from Safiya Noble’s (2018) Algorithms of Oppression to Tarleton Gillespie’s (2018) Custodians of the Internet to Jonathan Cohn’s (2019) Burden of Choice and Mark Andrejevic’s (2019) Automated Media compel us to recognize that digitization not only involves the material transformation of “media” into data; this process of transformation is articulated with new computational logics, forms of capital concentration and power, structures of racial and gender discrimination, and the future of work. The algorithmic “turn” has prompted a shift away from media spectacles to a focus on the “back ends” of systems that organize, generate, and deliver digital media products across a proliferating array of platforms and devices. This means that media scholars now have to think not only about the sociohistorical and industrial contexts and meanings of TV shows like Empire, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Chernobyl, they also have to consider how collaborative filtering algorithms are working to rank and facilitate online access to them (Johnson 2019). Media scholars not only closely examine social media posts, they also use data visualization software to demonstrate how hashtags and collective political sentiments (whether #arabspring, #blacklives matter, or #metoo) “trend” over time and across territories (Sakr 2015). And in studying media distribution, media scholars not only need to be able to describe the technical geographies of satellite and cable networks, they also must now learn about data centers and cloud computing (Hogan 2015; Holt and Vondereau 2015; Mayer 2019; Velkova 2016). Over the past three decades, digitization and datafication have extended and altered the kinds of knowledges media scholars need in order to research and teach in the field, and prepare students for work and life beyond campus.

Given the dip in humanities enrollments in recent years, I have often wondered whether “data sciences” degrees, which have flourished on U.S. campuses over the past decade, will begin to attract students who once gravitated to “media studies” degrees. Crucial new research on critical data studies is happening at private and independent institutes such as the Microsoft Social Media Collective, AI Now, and Data and Society. ³ The question of how to sustain the emergent, interdisciplinary field of media studies and keep it responsive to its milieu is important. Scholars and students who gravitate to media studies tend to be interested in the arts, storytelling, cultural history, aesthetics, ideology, and the politics of representation, but media studies prospects are increasingly tantalized by the lure of “big data,” “ubiquitous computing,” and “AI.” These buzz words too have become “all-encompassing” discourses aligned with new forms and sites of value, power/knowledge, and employability. Since academic fields are not exempt from the forces of supply and demand, it is significant that media studies scholars have already begun to consider “data” as an object and problematic in their research and teaching. They have historicized its emergence, critiqued its prominence, and questioned its relation to media culture. Lisa Gitelman (2013), for instance, has pointed out that Raw Data is an Oxymoron. Wolfgang Ernst (2012) and Laura Marks (2010), in their respective work, have shown that data archaeologies are part of the deep time of media, dating back to ancient Greece and Islamic cultures. Joe Turow (2017) has demonstrated that Aisles Have Eyes merchandisers are constantly gathering data about consumers in spaces of commerce. And Simone Browne (2015) has crucially argued that when it comes to understanding surveillance and race, Dark Matters.

While the foundational assumptions, methodological frameworks, and mindsets of media studies and data sciences differ, curious co-existences can morph into lively collaborations rather than turf battles. We need as much intellectual collaboration as possible to address key issues of our times, whether they include Big Tech’s conglomeration, intensifying surveillance and threats to civil rights; fake news, deep fakes, and Tweeting Presidents; mediated fundamentalisms, conservative populisms, and authoritarianisms; or the relation of the global media economy to global climate change.

Since the “media” of media studies is increasingly thought about, materialized, and industrialized as “data,” we must also ask: How can media studies keep up with the speed, opacity, and deregulation of Big Tech and digital capitalism? When a research group in Sweden tried to tackle this question by using “backend investigations”—the researchers created a fake record label to peer under the hood of Spotify’s financial dealings—and published a book called Spotify Teardown (Erickson et al. 2019), Spotify executives complained to the Swedish Research Council about research ethics violations and tried to halt the project’s funding. Such situations have led some to suggest that media scholars are now contending with a problematic referred to as “the unresearchable”—Big Tech companies know more and more about us users and we know less and less about them, as corporate records are off limits to scholars, journalists, and policymakers.

While media researchers have long faced challenges accessing the internal records of private media companies, at least, historically, the FCC was a bit more active in fulfilling its regulatory obligations. Today, the new media giants—platform owners such as Google and Facebook—have successfully convinced the government that they are merely conduits or intermediaries rather than content providers, which has placed their regulatory oversight into chaos and allowed them to, thus far, escape FCC regulation. The FTC has allowed companies to “self-regulate,” and has occasionally stepped in and levied fines against Facebook, for example, but most see those measures as unlikely to create any meaningful change in company practices. As it stands, Big Tech’s “self-regulation” practices are protected as proprietary corporate information, presented as carefully packaged testimony at congressional hearings, publicized in constantly updated and hard to read terms of service agreements, or performed by globally outsourced content moderators. Such conditions suggest that the “where” of media regulation has shifted in the age of Big Tech, an issue that Jennifer Holt, in her book (forthcoming), Cloud Policy, is tackling head on.

The focus on the digital in media studies over the past two decades has also revived and expanded media industries research as scholars have provided vital overviews and analysis of industrial shifts (Hesmondhalgh 2019; Lotz 2008), exploring everything from the so-called “distribution revolution” (Curtin et al. 2014) in legacy media companies and practices of “connected viewing” (Holt and Sanson 2013) to creative labor (Curtin and Sanson 2016; Gray and Suri 2019; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011) to a host of new players in the global media economy, including Al Jazeera, Telemundo, 10 Cent, Alibaba, Tik Tok, and many others.

Perhaps the most obvious “all encompassing” discourse in media studies that I have not yet addressed is that of global media, or media globalization, an area that includes research on the emergence of national media systems and imagined communities, critical analyses of media imperialism, postcolonial/exilic/diasporic media, hybrid cultures, and mediated glocalities (Appadurai 1996; Canclini 1995; Miller and Kraidy 2016; Naficy 1998; Shohat and Stam 1994; Thussu 2009). Published work has challenged media scholars to problematize the “global” as a site of power, capital concentration, and contradictions that demand nuanced specification, contextualization, and analysis. We need to continue asking, what are the “media” of media studies beyond societies of affluence? How are media technologies and infrastructures imagined, materially organized, and reinvented in and across diverse transnational contexts?

As media scholars, our objects of study have transformed, mutated, and proliferated. The forces of globalization and digitization compel us to think about and situate media within and across various territories, temporalities, and cultures. Rather than lock the “media” of media studies in a straightjacket, media scholars have tested and played with this term across diverse fields including archeology, geology, geography, politics, and computing—and have theorized mediation as acts of excavation, layering, inscription, archiving/storage, and transmission. Given the multivalent position of “media” in media studies, what institutional tactics should be considered at this juncture to foster and further the field?