ABSTRACT
Research on new media has long been an important component of media studies. The beginning of media research in the U.S. and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was arguably largely driven by concerns about the presumed influence of the new media (radio and film) during that era. The panic caused by CBS's Invasion from Mars—that legendary story known by every undergraduate student of communication studies these days—had to be understood not only against the social and political contexts of the 1930s, but also in relation to the relative novelty of radio broadcasting at the time. In other words, a large part of the earliest communication research was arguably “new media research” without being labeled as such.
