Ideas about "New Media (Studies)"

by David Ogborn

These notes started as speaking notes to share with the pro-seminar in the PhD program in Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies (CNMCS) at McMaster, during a session entitled "What is New Media (Studies)?" (15 Nov 2022). I might continue to update, expand, tweak, delete this material as part of this web garden, so it might depart from the original text (more and more with the passage of time).

Preamble

“New media” seems to be a very slippery signifier – operating in different ways at different times across multiple codes (codes, in the sense of mutually exclusive possibilities from a given range of terms). The recent genealogy of the term in this department is one place to start. Once upon a time there was an undergraduate program in Multimedia, and at about the same time, an undergraduate program in Communication Studies, both of them programs without a long-term “home” department. The creation of a new department of Communication Studies and Multimedia solved that problem, but no one really liked the word Multimedia (for very long), so when an MA program was launched by the new department (first cohort 2009) it was called Communication and New Media, instead. When, eight years later, the PhD program was launched (first cohort 2017), it inherited those names plus a third name from our partner department (ECS), thus Communication, New Media and Cultural Studies (CNMCS). Finally, most recently (2021), the relevant undergraduate program changed its name to Media Arts, and the department became Communication Studies and Media Arts.

So, at least very locally, one salient, available meaning of this chain of terms (multimedia, new media, media arts) is to make a distinction between groups of people in a workplace, and then to refer to one such group, engaged with the relevant undergrad program and exploring the artistic use of a range of media formats that include photography, video, audio, web design, games, VR, etc. While this meaning is certainly locally available – I think it might be thought of as a “negotiated” or “corporate” code in the sense of the four types of codes in Stuart Hall’s oft-cited essay on encoding/decoding (Hall 1973) – I don't think it is very helpful to put too much weight on it. It undercuts the potential for collaboration between these groups, and it’s not particularly legible outside of this context. The concept Gena [Zuroski] brought to us of “Coteries vs. Collectives” might apply here as well – new media (multimedia – media arts) could (just) be a coterie within the neo-liberal university... so let’s “turn outwards” instead.

...[We Google “new media”]…

One of the refrains we might notice there is an association between new media and the computational. I note that the idea that what was/is distinctive about new media has to do with the computational was emphasized in Lev Manovich’s 2001 The Language of New Media, a text that was widely read and cited during the first decade of the 2000s (when the name Communication and New Media was chosen for the MA program that would give two names to this PhD program...). Many Google results seem to directly echo this text. I’m not sure how much I would particularly champion this text now, but one of the very helpful things I think it does do is articulate a connection between what was then being called new media and the artistic avant-garde of the 20th century (at first, in the form of special attention to Soviet media artist avant la lettre Dziga Vertov). Will come back to that connection in a moment.

More Google experiments (try it yourselves!): If I google “new media conference” I find little in the way of meaningful results. If I google “new media program” or “new media studies” I find all kind of results that are references to undergrad and MA programs that have something in common with our programs here. That's a bit curious, right? – lots of people teaching a field that doesn’t seem to particularly have conferences of its own, or at least not that use the term in their name... If we pay close attention to “new media studies” results they seem to have so much in common with “communication studies” that it seems like this is just an alternate term for what “we” might call communication studies – which seems to be even more the case if we drop the “new” and just look for “media studies”. A search for “new media journal” yields some real academic journals as results, many of them with the term new media in combination with something else. I could be wrong, but my unofficial guess is that a systematic review of how this term appears in journal and book titles might show a preponderance of anchoring in the 2000s, as the Internet began to visibly insert itself into commerce, social relationships, education, etc.

At this point, I return us to my initial assertion about new media as a slippery signifier... If we trust Google search results, it seems to often have something to do with computation (and a chain of terms around computation including “digital media”, “the Internet”). It seems to sometimes have a relationship to art (as in Manovich’s all-too-canonical text) but not always (as in “new media studies”). It is often difficult to differentiate it from communication studies...

Despite all this murkiness, I think the question is a good one, still: what meaning are we, “turning outwards”, going to give to the “new media” in “Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies”? Everyone in this room has at least some stake in the question – those words are going to continue to appear next to our names in various ways. So in a moment I’m going to sketch a very abstract answer to the question, and then follow it up with twelve ideas that “fill out” this very abstract structure, for me, for now. My hope is that the structure provokes something for you as well, for now, whether you hold on to it for later or not, and that some of the specific ideas and the thinkers associated with them might be good conversation starters. Here’s the answer, in the form of a question:

What if we were to think of “new media” as being the set of questions and challenges that emerge around the 4-way intersection of the computational, the political, the artistic, and “the new”?

At this point, I think it will help to briefly position myself in a few ways. I am a cishet-man, and a white settler who has lived in various parts of four different relatively “rich” countries – Australia, Canada, the United States, and Italy. I have been playing – intensely - with music, games, and programming since 1984, when I was seven years old – and I have been able to form a career around those same “hands on” activities that never cease to sustain my curiosity. As a university student, I was immersed successively, in the tradition of jazz improvisation, European “contemporary classical music”, a heyday of the free and open source software movement, and then various North American and European subcultures of electronic music (some focused on the sound “recording”, some on performance). For the past decade and a bit (roughly since starting at McMaster in Fall 2009), my work has been focused on collaborative live coding: making generative music and visual art in participatory groups, and making software and platforms to support such activities.

2007-9 was a period of great disruption in my personal and professional life, an end to many relationships (and a beginning of new ones). For a long time thereafter I have followed an impulse to disavow the things I was engaged with “before the break”. In the ideas that follow, I notice that I am bringing together recent concerns with those of earlier parts of my life.

Ideas

The “new” in new media is a perennial, unceasing and ideological framing of art movements (and not only art movements) – that is to say, it is always rather “old”. New Media should remind us of “New Music” (1910s onwards) for which Theodor Adorno was an early and acutely, continuously critical observer (for example, in the early-ish Philosophy of New Music (1949)): a central argument was that such “new music” incorporated the political world into itself unconsciously, but thus all the more “effectively”, fundamentally and inescapably, even (and especially) when claimed to be about nothing but “new” music. We might also pay attention to the ways that claim of the “new” enters into any given work (even when the word “new” or “new media” is not used).
That argument that new media (art) cannot avoid a relationship to political choices and consequences was also made memorably by Adorno’s penpal, Walter Benjamin in the 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. The final moments of that essay pose a binary choice between an “aestheticization of politics [that would serve fascism]” and a “politicization of aesthetics”. What happens if we think of contemporary new media texts in terms of this provocative binary?
New media work, the new media artist, might articulate their work in relation to “definite political forces”, through choices (and refusals) of materials, “topics”, venues, collaborators. Luigi Nono and the Italian Communist Party, together to the end... So much that could be said here... no time to write it down.
Another possibility is for new media work to direct itself at the growth and support of “participatory cultures”. In 2006, in a report commissioned by the MacArthur foundation, Henry Jenkins championed such cultures, and the potential of “new media” to supposedly bring them about, describing them as cultures with “relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices” (2006). It is partly on this basis that I have thrown myself into live coding, the Cybernetic Orchestra, etc for the past decade or so.
However, a caution about heroic political framings of such participatory culture might be found in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s criticism of Deleuze and Foucault in the “Can the subaltern speak?” essay. Deleuze and Foucault put forward theories that position others as the “engine” of social progress, while staying very quiet about their own positioning and the relationship of their work to the “post-colonial” French state. There’s an ethical challenge here, I think, to account for the relationship of work to “the state”. Although the Canadian state is certainly not the only one in play here, we can start by asking what the interest of the Canadian state in our work is?
Another warning about heroic framings of participatory culture comes from Gabriella E. Coleman’s anthropology of the open source software movement. In Coding Freedom... Coleman describes how the mundane, hands-on activities of “hacking” (working on free software, but by gentle extension other activities of technological making and sharing) generates political “movements” at one level that are contained and co-opted at a broader level of our contemporary “liberal closure”. On the basis of this critique, we might pay attention to the way that other new media practices (beyond hacking) purport (but fail) to challenge dominant politics.
Christina Dunbar-Hester's Hacking Diversity... whose conclusion we read before this class, also picks up on this thread of things in new media spaces that purport (but fail) to challenge dominant politics. Dunbar-Hester's argument seems to say this is a predictable consequence of an over-investment in technology as such (ie. The tendency to treat it as a largely separate, well-defined area of human activity), as well as (and perhaps this is more earlier in the book) a tendency to gloss over political differences and discussions in entering into technological projects. What do we think?
There is more to computation (chain of supposedly equivalent words: software – algorithms – code...) than meets the eye. A key argument of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s second book (Programmed Visions) is that code has its own, demonic agency – it does not simply do what anyone tells it to do. As such one has to “run” and then “relate to” algorithms (code, software, computation) in order to know something (insecure) about them.
Planetary computation: Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack explores how the boundaries of computation (with which new media is often associated) are rather porous - at the end of the day it is hard (impossible, really) to distinguish computation from math from mining from metallurgy from chemistry from general social discourse, from city building, from empires and infrastructure. So, in this view, computation is everywhere in the world, and is non/pre/post-human, and much much more non-innocent than may be frequently imagined.
Is it possible to rescue the “new” from what may seem like Eurocentric moorings? I think so. Consider the “Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper” (Lewis et al).
The tradition of improvisation (and free jazz, and its connections to Afrofuturism) also represents a celebration of the new (I think of Miles Davis’ oft-cited axiom to “play what’s not there”). The improviser and new media artist George Lewis develops AI pieces in connection with free jazz improvisation, working iteratively with the same pieces, eg. Voyager, over decades.
My own positionality limits how much I should try to say about such “new” work that departs from Eurocentric jumping off points, however. Another possibility, another way to proceed is to concentrate on the specific relationships – the friendships – that might be developed through new media making. I think of this as the “Pauline Oliveros model” - as she developed and celebrated the potential for network music making as way to sustain and develop musical friendships (media art friendships?).