ABSTRACT

The discussion here represents the third perspective in looking at the contempoary framework of digital media. It builds upon the summaries provided in intellectual histories as well as the discussion of the contexts of digital media practice. This section sets out an alternative path from thinking about digital media to the two perspectives already discussed; either, that digital media is continuous with existing media, or its avant-garde extension. What follows also takes up again questions of the status and impact of networks as a primary way of thinking about digital media. The ways in which the study of digital media is promoted and taught in education, what examples, thinking, ideas and subject disciplines it draws upon, is largely dependent upon how academics position themselves within or across the three perspectives outlined. The idea that digital media, or networked media is continuous with previous media organisations is the default position of sociologically-based media studies, while the idea that digital media represents a new artistic avant-garde has been taken up within art history and theory and some aspects of contemporary cultural studies. In effect each field of enquiry frames digital media as a different object, within different knowledge paradigms. Hence in sociology, digital media is framed by the overriding idea of social communication, art theory wants to look at digital media primarily as a new aesthetic medium, while in the third perspective, which overlaps with science and technology studies, digital media is overwritten as an information system. Writers associated with the third perspective, which argues that digital media should be understood as something different from old media and represents a radical break, more often demand that digital media requiries new forms of study, generating new knowledge and new methods of research. The argument for thinking that digital media requiries new modes of thinking also carries with it an urgency and appeal for academia and education to catch up with a world changing before our eyes. Such a perspective is not initself new, but is rather an extension of those who originally argued that the Internet was a radical new alternative form of communication and thinking such as Marvin Minsky, Howard Rheingold and Arthur Kroker, and requires a new study of information systems, Freidrich Kittler, Lev Manovich and Mathew Fuller and Alexander Galloway.

The time in which we had to make a case for ‘the media’ in general is well behind us. The term ‘media’ is well under way of becoming an empty signifier. In times of budget cuts, creative industries and intellectual poverty, we’ll have to push aside wishy-washy convergence approaches and go for specialised in-depth studies of networks and digital culture. The larger picture no longer provides us with critical concepts. It is time for digital media to claim autonomy and resources in order to, finally, leave the institutional margins, and catch up with society.

(Lovink 2012:74)