School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemThe distinctiveness of digital criticism( 2000)The core concern of media studies today is the material form of mediation. In whichever direction we take our analyses, the specificity of the discipline lies in its attention to the detailed functioning of textuality. The sociology of communication, the political economy of the media, the philosophy of media aesthetics are distinctive subdisciplines of other, older, fields of research. What distinguishes ours is the irreducible materiality of mediation. We can perhaps feel that we are less prone to overgeneralisation, mythmaking and simple errors of fact because of that attention; and that we are in a better position to make statements about audiences, institutions, economies, societies, cultures and aesthetics because we have spent long years, both individually and as a research community, looking at the minutiae of historical and contemporary media. And yet we seem to have betrayed the digital media not only in the failure to archive electronic media but intellectually too: in the half-acceptance of a view that the digital media in some way effective dematerialisethe older media. Once dematerialised, media can no longer fall into our field or, alternatively, we are confronted with the proposal that we abandon the central object of our studies, the materiality of the text, and remake ourselves in the theoreticis mould with which the US academy in particular greeted the embarrassingly political discourses of 1970s 'Screen Theory'. As literary theory has pursued the dematerialisation of the book, print, paper and inks in the abstraction of the text, so media studies faces a choice between dematerialising and rematerialising its object.
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ItemThe MIT Media Lab: techno dream factory or alienation as a way of life?( 2003)This article critically analyses the work and the ethos of the MIT Media Lab in the context of globalizing capital and the ICT revolution. It argues that the Media Lab owes its tremendous success in part to the public relations strategies of its founder, Nicholas Negroponte, and to the very real need for the Lab's products to 'fill in the gaps' left by the broad and irregular dynamics of globalization and the ICT revolution. The Media Lab and its research products insert information technologies into the interstices of cultural, social and temporal life, stitching together an 'informational ecology' of interconnectivity. This ecology has its own temporality, a synchronized 'chronoscopic' temporality or real-time duration that obliterates the many other temporalities that interpenetrate our lives and give them meaning. It is argued the 'informational ecology' of interconnectivity constructed by the Media Lab and many other emulative 'start-ups', lead not to a world of 'diversity' as Negropontean philosophy insists, but a one-dimensional world of alienation.
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ItemLibrary(Sage, 2006)The modern library derives from a vision of public service developed in the 19th century. At various times in the past a commercial service, an educational resource, a religious domain and a political institution, the library today exists in various forms, including all these but in addition the professional libraries held by law firms and scientific or technological associations, multimedia lending libraries and certain areas of the world-wide web.
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ItemBattling over the 'truth'(Lawrence and Wishart, 2004)Controversy surrounded the legitimacy of the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq and the apparent deception of Congress and Parliament. Crucial to this controversy are two debates which touch on the relationship between the media and society. First, the management of the narratives of war raises questions about the ‘truth claims’ of news and documentary programme making. Second, the accusations of ‘spin’ allude to the role of the media in the creation and maintenance of an informed citizenry. The reporting of the rescue of Jessica Lynch, and the marginalisation of dissenting and ‘other’ voices, suggests that partial coverage of events threatens the very values of citizenship and democracy.
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ItemNet results: knowledge, information and learning on the Internet( 2001)This paper considers the rapid uptake of information technologies in the higher education sector, in particular the increasing use of the Internet as a resource for academic research. It argues that very little fundamental research is currently being undertaken into the consequences of Internet research, and poses some serious questions that may arise unless serious efforts are put into assessing the nature of the process. The paper puts forward arguments indicating that Internet researched papers in the humanities and social sciences are increasingly devoid of reflexivity and criticality. The author puts forward the argument that in a worst case scenario, the higher education sector in the developed economies is producing not only a generation of students who lack ‘cultural literacy’ and the problems that arise from this, but over the long-term this will pose serious problems for the functioning of a healthy civic-democratic society.
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ItemTime and knowledge in the information ecology( 2002)This article considers the affects of neoliberal globalisation and the information technology revolution upon the production and dissemination of knowledge within the university. More broadly, it argues that the nexus between globalisation and computerisation is creating an ‘information ecology’, a growing environment of interconnectivity that has speed and commercialism as its principal dynamics. The paper argues that such an environment is creating a new ‘knowledge epoch’, one that valorises, more than ever before, instrumentalised knowledge over critical forms, and is producing a society that is increasingly unable to think reflexively about the issues and challenges that confront an increasingly complex world.
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ItemLiquid space and time( 2006)This article theorises the effects of the mobile phone phenomenon upon the spatial and temporal dynamics of everyday life. It contends that more than any other connectable networkable device, the mobile phone transforms the experience of space and time for individuals and collectivities. Moreover, its importance seems set to become even more central as it rapidly transforms from simple voice-carrier to powerful communicating device that will allow the transmission and reception of increasingly rich data that includes video, Internet and data-processing uses. This transformation, I argue, serves to liquify time and space. The mobile phone, as a part of an array of networkable devices and applications that make up the ‘network society’, brings what David Harvey calls ‘space-time’ compression to new levels of intensity. In so doing it is shaping a new form of subjectivity – a ‘virtual self’ – that has the potential to either trap or liberate.