School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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Spreadsheets, sitemaps and search engines: why narrative is marginal to multimedia and networked communication, and why marginality is more vital than universality

CUBITT, SEAN (British Film Institute, 2002)

Media Studies both benefits from and is overdetermined by its double origin, among sociologists increasingly convinced of the centrality of communication to modernity, and among literary schools diminishingly persuaded of the relevance of past literatures to the lived experience and likely futures of their students and themselves. The clash of cultures has been immensely fruitful. But the dialectic of humanities and social science approaches has occasionally broken down: one critical example is the failure of ‘ethnographic’ audience studies top square off with qualitative and statistically based analysis of audiences, leaving a yawning gap between micro-studies of ‘real people’ and macro-studies of whole populations. Studies of the new media are beginning to bridge the gap through the wide-scale interactive dialogues that have begun to break down the impasse. A second unfortunate effect has been the felt necessity to preface any methodological proposal with a diatribe against whatever the author perceives as the previous dominant discourse in the discipline.