EDITORIAL

Whats changed about

new media? Introduction
to the fth anniversary
issue of new media &
society
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LEAH A. LIEVROUW
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
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The inaugural issue of new media & society, which was published in
spring 1999, launched the journal with a special section of short articles
under the title: Whats New About New Media? The contributors provided
wide-ranging and sometimes divergent answers to the question. However, a
common theme among the articles was uncertainty, a sense that it was still
early days for new media, particularly the internet. Until new media
technologies became more broadly available and stable, many authors were
reluctant to make any general claims about their development or
consequences.
Five years ago, although the internet had long been established, the world
wide web was still relatively new. Web browsers had begun to change the
ways in which internet users could interact or seek information online. The
dot.com boom and the new economy, fuelled by visions of ubiquitous e-
commerce and new forms of work, leisure, and wealth, was well underway
in developed nations. Economic and cultural globalization seemed an
inescapable outcome of the growth of networked telecommunications,
computing, and traditional media. Concerns about the digital divide were
just beginning to be heard, and the millennium bug seemed to be the most
serious technological or security threat looming on the horizon.
Over a year ago, the editors of new media & society agreed that the fth
anniversary issue would be an ideal opportunity to reect on progress in
new media research, scholarship, and creative work since the journal began.
new media & society
Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
Vol6(1):915 DOI: 10.1177/1461444804039898
www.sagepublications.com
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9
So in this issue, we ask: Whats changed about new media? Reviews Editor
Keith Hampton and I invited an outstanding and diverse group of colleagues
to respond. The contributions include articles that deal with the question
directly, as well as review articles in which authors have chosen books or
other works that, in their view, represent the best of recent new media
scholarship.
If there is a single difference between the whats new collection in 1999
and the present whats changed collection, it is that the earlier hesitation
about the role and signicance of new media has given way to much more
condence. We all have ve more years of experience with new media
technologies and genres than in 1999. Information and communication
technologies (ICTs) have become part of everyday life for people in
developed societies and are gradually diffusing through other parts of the
world.
A couple of clear and consistent themes have emerged from this
retrospective exercise, regardless of the particular issues or contexts that our
contributing authors address. In the remainder of this introduction, I
describe and discuss these themes, and then conclude with some general
observations about whats changed about new media and the state of new
media studies today.
THE MAINSTREAMING OF NEW MEDIA AND ITS
CONSEQUENCES
Perhaps the most striking thing about the contributions to this special issue
is that virtually every piece remarks on what might be called the
mainstreaming of new media. A variety of media technologies, forms, and
content, often lumped together under the single (and misleadingly
homogenizing) rubric of the internet, have become a commonplace part of
work, education, leisure, culture, and politics. The ubiquity of new media
has resulted in their being taken for granted. The rst four articles, by Steve
Graham, Susan Herring, Andrew Feenberg and Maria Bakardjieva, and Lee
Rainie and Peter Bell, focus particularly on this point. In Steve Grahams
provocative term, we have witnessed the banalization of the internet; as
Susan Herring puts it, computer-mediated communication (CMC) is
slouching toward the ordinary.
In this new, ordinary incarnation, it is difcult to draw any broad
conclusions about new media. Andrew Feenberg and Maria Bakardjieva note
that, although certain forms of mediated interaction (such as email and
instant messaging) are genuinely novel technologies of social interaction,
there is nonetheless no overarching killer implication of online interaction,
as individualism was for print or the global village was for television,
because online interaction takes so many diverse and overlapping forms.
Likewise, Susan Herring notes the variety of CMC forms, but contends that
New Media & Society 6(1)
10
an important factor in which forms are used, and how, is the fact that most
are now accessed via web browsers.
One consequence of new medias mainstream status is that users
expectations about them have become at once more expansive and more
routine. The continuities between conventional and new media have
become more obvious, in contrast to the novelty, discontinuity, and breaks
with the past that preoccupied new media scholars a decade ago. By and
large, the contributors view technological change as an incremental process
today, in which the latest innovations tend to be variations or elaborations
of existing systems and infrastructures, rather than radical departures. Lee
Rainie and Peter Bell of the Pew Internet & American Life Project report
that, despite the fact that the US online population has stopped growing
and has stabilized, Americans expectations about online resources have
nonetheless soared as they have learned to take the internet for granted.
The mainstreaming of new media has had important repercussions on the
arts and humanities as well, as reected in the next ve contributions, by
David Silver, Peter Lunenfeld, Mark Amerika, Michael Joyce, and Thomas
Swiss and Jane Hanna respectively. In his book review essay, Silver recounts
the importance of cultural and critical theory in new media studies in recent
years. In his experimental artist article, Amerika observes that the formerly
open and experimental spaces for creating art that were afforded by new
media in the 1990s have now been largely institutionalized. Swiss and
Hanna argue that mediation has expanded the horizons of poetry as a form
and practice, and propose that art museums should collect these new forms
of poetry as they do other artworks. Joyce traces the ways in which the
internet and hypertext have been normalized in literary studies and creative
writing. Lunenfeld argues that, because computer-based media are now so
common and because they are basically tools for selecting, capturing,
shaping, and manipulating information, their familiarity has encouraged
greater awareness and expectations of design in the culture at large.
Another result of new media mainstreaming is a renewed interest in
questions of power and political action as illustrated by the next group of
articles, by Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, Robin Mansell, and Andrew
Calabrese. In their recap of online activism since the Seattle protests and the
Zapatista uprising, Richard Kahn and Doug Kellner propose that new media
modalities such as web logs (blogs), wikis and mobs have made formerly
obscure activist subcultures more accessible and open to people who are
seeking diverse political opinions or new avenues for political participation.
On the other hand, Robin Mansell argues that the commonplace quality
of ICTs has led to complacency and a lack of skepticism about the ways in
which power relations are built into, and exercised through, all media,
including new media. (Similarly, Steve Graham contends that more attention
should be paid to the material and spatial nature of new media
Lievrouw: Whats changed about new media?
11
infrastructure, especially in the context of contemporary cities, in order to
reveal processes of sociotechnical power.) Andrew Calabrese observes that,
far from being technologically unregulable, new media are as much the
products of existing economic interests and political choices as other media
technologies have been in the past.
The current mainstream quality of new media is at least partly due to the
increased control of new media content, ownership, and policy debates by
conventional mass media industries, as Calabreses analysis of recent
ownership rulings by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
shows. For example, a large and expanding proportion of online content
now ows to and from conventional publishing, broadcast and cable
television, radio, motion pictures, recorded music, and so forth. As
traditional media interests control more of the content of, and access to,
new media services, the new genres tend to look more like the old. The
internet is portrayed less as a tool to foster social interaction and more as a
pipeline to deliver media products to paying, mass-style audiences.
THE INTERIORITY OF NEW MEDIA USE
The next group of contributions highlights a second main theme. Since the
mid-1990s, at about the same time as web browsers were introduced and
personalized communication devices such as personal digital assistants
(PDAs) and cellular telephones became widely popular, new media research
has been largely dominated by micro-scale, social constructivist approaches,
opposition to technological determinism, and ethnographic methodologies.
Research has focused on the local, interpersonal, domestic, experiential
we might say, on the interiority of new media uses and meanings. This shift
has been seen in the methodological development of new media studies.
Steve Schneider and Kirsten Foot observe that a major proportion of
internet studies over the last decade have focused primarily on new media
use and uses, either in the form of qualitative user studies or broad surveys
of consumption behavior. Barry Wellman reects on the growing analytic
sophistication of the eld in the course of three ages of internet studies.
The interior turn in new media research is also theoretical and can be put
into historial context. In part, it has been a reaction to the macro-scale
social research and information society studies that dominated studies of
new ICTs and society during the 1970s and 1980s. The early focus was on
large-scale economic and occupational surveys, policy and legal analyses,
organizational and management studies that is, administrative research by
technical experts, to use Melody and Mansells term (1983), which propped
up incumbent industries and political regimes. Inuential early studies, such
as those by Daniel Bell, Jacques Ellul, and Fritz Machlup, were later
criticized for their technological determinism. Popularizing authors such as
John Naisbitt and Alvin Tofer (and more recently, Howard Rheingold and
New Media & Society 6(1)
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Nicholas Negroponte) were accused of simplistic technological boosterism
in their claims of the sweeping and inevitable social, economic, and cultural
changes that would be driven by the proliferation of ICTs.
The turn is also partly attributable to the inuence of the cultural studies
(in the US) and British media studies (in the UK and Europe) traditions in
new media research since the 1990s. Once browser technology made the
internet easy to use, scholars from the humanities, arts, and critical studies
turned their attention to new media, both as instruments and products of
culture, and brought their intellectual traditions, critical stances, and
methods with them. Nina Wakefords review article illustrates that issues of
identity, gender, class, race and sexuality have prompted new media scholars
to seek new metaphors for technological experiences. Eszter Hargittai
points out that recent examinations of internet access tend to emphasize the
embedding of ICT use in social and interpersonal processes and practices.
Cultural and critical theories and perspectives, then, have clearly been a
major inuence on the interior turn in new media studies.
However, in the 1980s perhaps nothing did as much to challenge the
dominant, macro-scale technocratic perspective in new media research as the
emerging eld of science and technology studies (STS), specically its
decisive critique of technological determinism (see, e.g. Bijker and Law,
1992; Bijker et al., 1987; Mackenzie and Wajcman, 1999; Winner, 1977).
The alternative social constructivist, or social shaping of technology,
perspective in STS employed a more anthropological or micro-sociological
approach to the study of the design, diffusion, and use of technologies,
including media technologies. The anti-determinist, social shaping approach
was quickly accepted among media researchers who were more interested in
the contexts of everyday life than in technologically-driven, mass-scale social
change, and whose aim was to study the reception and understanding of
technologies, rather than their invention, production, distribution, and
management.
1
The social shaping perspective is well represented in Pablo
Boczkowskis review article, which highlights works by Lucy Suchman,
Leigh Star, Geoffrey Bowker, Paul Edwards and others working in the STS
tradition. The STS perspective is also seen in the contributions by Feenberg
and Bakardjieva, and Graham.
Clearly, the shift in new media research to a predominant focus on
micro-scale meanings and experiences of new media use and internet
ethnography can be seen as the product of several converging intellectual
trends over the last decade. Nonetheless, as Robin Mansell warns, the
current emphasis on small-scale, descriptive, qualitative studies and the
constructivist perspective may obscure larger-scale social, political and
economic developments, technological changes, and structures of power that
do in fact constrain or direct (if not determine) how ICTs are designed and
used. Most new media scholars, from whichever disciplinary background,
Lievrouw: Whats changed about new media?
13
are acutely aware of the dangers of increased concentration of ownership in
the media industries, or of durable digial divides, for example. However, by
denition, the descriptive, small-scale, qualitative studies that have
characterized new media research since the late 1990s do not articulate well
with these larger-scale problems. Indeed, as the internet and other ICTs
have become more entrenched and routinized, in some circles a swing back
from strong anti-technological determinism has begun. As Susan Herring
points out, our dependency on the internet has sunk in: The question has
now become, not does technology shape human communication, yes or no,
but rather: under what circumstances, in what ways, and to what extent?
WHATS NEXT?
In this brief sketch I have highlighted just two themes from among our
contributors many intersecting and overlapping insights, although they are
more clusters of concepts. Readers will certainly be able to identify many
more than I have included here. In a sense, the eld of new media studies,
like its objects of study, has become more established, consistent, and
organized since new media & society began publication. We have developed
distinctive methods and analytics, theoretical frameworks, and problem areas/
questions, and produced a core of inuential literature. The eld has
attracted colleagues from a remarkable range of disciplinary and institutional
backgrounds.
That said, what are the ways ahead suggested by this collection? What
problems are neglected, what skills or tools are still needed? Our
contributors make a number of suggestions: Steve Schneider and Kirsten
Foot propose web sphere analysis as a useful methodological tool for
studying the internet itself. Robin Mansell calls for a renewed application of
the principles of the political economy of the media. Thom Swiss and Jane
Hanna suggest that the cultural and institutional boundaries between poetry
and other art forms be broken down. Steve Graham sees the need for a
balanced approach to questions of both continuity and discontinuity.
As new media become embedded and indispensable throughout society,
culture, and the economy, perhaps the biggest challenge to new media
studies will be the need to shift away from thinking of ICTs as
extraordinary, and to accept and study them as normal or banal. To do so
requires a better balance between micro- and macro-level research, in which
both individual experience and whole-society/institutional inuences are
brought together to produce more robust accounts of the role and
signicance of new media in society. What has made new media new the
ongoing process of technological and cultural adaptation, reinvention, and
recombination is still going strong, but users expectations of stability and
reliability are likely to lead in the short term to more regulation,
standardization, institutionalization, and centralization of control. As just one
New Media & Society 6(1)
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example, concerns about digital media as cultural heritage, and the need to
keep legal and social records into the future, may compel more scholars to
study the collection, preservation, restoration, and access to new media
archives, just as we do for books, audio recordings, lms, and other
documents. These processes involve both individual action and institutional
resources, and to study them properly we must expand our theoretical and
methodological repertoires.
Note
1 Some of these differences are illustrated in a comparison by the author of the
diffusion of innovations and social shaping of technology perspectives on new media
development (Lievrouw, 2002).
References
Bijker, W.E. and J. Law (eds) (1992) Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in
Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bijker, W.E., T.P. Hughes and T.J. Pinch (eds) (1987) The Social Construction of Technological
Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lievrouw, L.A. (2002) Determination and Contingency in New Media Development:
Diffusion of Innovations and Social Shaping of Technology Perspectives, in L.A.
Lievrouw and S. Livingstone (eds) The Handbook of New Media, pp. 18399. London:
Sage.
Mackenzie, D. and J. Wajcman (eds) (1999) The Social Shaping of Technology (2nd edn).
Buckingham and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.
Melody, W.H. and R. Mansell (1983) The Debate over Critical Versus Administrative
Research: Circularity or Challenge?, Journal of Communication 33(3): 10317.
Winner, L. (1977) Autonomous Technology: Machines-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political
Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
LEAH LIEVROUW is Professor of Information Studies and is afliated with the Communication
Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds a PhD from the
Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Her research
examines the relationship between new information and communication technologies and
knowledge, and the social and cultural changes associated with ICTs. She is a co-editor of
new media & society, and also co-editor and contributing author for the Handbook of New
Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs (Sage, 2002, with Sonia Livingstone), as
well as Competing Visions, Complex Realities: Social Aspects of the Information Society
(Ablex, 1987, with Jorge Reina Schement), and Mediation, Information and Communication:
Information and Behavior, Vol. 3 (Transaction, 1990, with Brent Ruben).
Address: Department of Information Studies, UCLA, 216 GSE & IS Building, Box 951520, Los
Angeles, CA 900951520, USA. [email: llievrou@ucla.edu]
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