ABSTRACT
This essay will endeavor to ask specific questions about grand transformations—and claims about such transformations—in the contemporary media environment. The contemporary media environment has on occasion been promoted to be unprecedented: in its tendencies toward and dynamics of convergence, in its scale of socioeconomic impact, in its capacity to rerender and reimagine the worlds of representation and mediated expression. Considering such a dramatic purchase on the present, but also on the anxious and awed imagination of its futures, what are the challenges, perhaps even the demands, of work in media history and historiography in this context? Which access to a historicized past affords what range of critical distance or consonance regarding this media environment? What is at stake in positing and investigating these relationships? What role can such work play in better understanding our present, and the variegated tendril holds of new media discourse on the future?
