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Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovation in Digital Domains

Posted on: Tuesday, 14 September 2004, 06:00 CDT

Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovation in Digital Domains. Gunnar Liestol, Andrew Morrison, and Terje Rasmussen, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 554 pp. $42.95 hbk.

It may seem premature to revisit media that journalism and mass communication curricula and scholarship still curiously refer to as "new." Just a decade since Netscape and AOL popularized the World Wide Web, communication schools and departments still are grappling with how to conceptualize digital media, including such vaguely ideological terms as convergence, interactivity, and hypermedia. Since these media and, more accurately in many cases, genres or formats cut across so many fields of study, a multidisciplinary lens through which to revisit their roles in culture, communication, pedagogy, and scholarship seems appropriate.

Up to the task is a team of mostly Scandinavian scholars and practitioners who produced Digital Media Revisited, a dazzling and often dizzying examination of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks applied in research on digital media during the past ten years. The book's essays, critiques, and case studies address, in the editors' words, "the two-way shuttle of insights between theorizing and experimenting," and it is the shuttling back to theorizing from experimenting that is the premise for this series of "second encounters."

Perhaps the greatest of the book's many strengths is its interdisciplinarity, which also is, unavoidably, its chief weakness. The interlinking of theories and cross-pollinating of fields of study liberates for the task very different and sometimes surprising libraries of theory and commentary, methodological approaches, and vocabularies, lexicons, and metaphors. The volume's twenty authors choose not to recognize academic dividing walls, liberally borrowing from, among other fields, literary theory, informatics, philosophy, gender studies, media studies, and semiotics. The result easily could have been heuristic chaos. It is not. In fact, the book's architecture, arraying chapters into four thematic sections- education and interdisciplinarity, design and aesthetics, rhetoric and interpretation, and social theory and ethics-provides a plausible blueprint for a university of the future, one that actually achieves the Utopian balance of theory and practice.

In a wonderfully interdisciplinary treatment, Ragnhild Tronstad, for example, dexterously applies the metaphors of theater to explore the proposed worlds of multiuser dungeons (MUDs), providing readers with one of the volume's better examples of rhetorical convergence. And Anders Fagerjord, who refers to the book's approach as a kind of conceptual convergence, convincingly re-defines the term convergence as applied in digital contexts by exploding accepted models, by looking beyond computer protocols and into the process of convergent symbolic practices, and by deconstructing news Web sites in the United States and in Norway. After absorbing Fagerjord's critique of remediation theory, many readers will probably want to re-read Jay David Bolter, who is credited with remediation theory's currency and whose opening chapter provocatively prescribes the circular relationship or interconnectedness between theory and practice that is the book's de facto creed.

The combinatorial approach delivers on the editors' promise to offer a "lattice of related questions and perspectives arising out of the intersection of theory and practice." It can in part because so many of the chapter authors are, as Bolter recommends, practitioners in and producers of digital media themselves.

The editors deliver on another promise, as well, which is to describe and interpret rather than to preach or prescribe. First encounters are briefly recounted and then revisited. George Landow, for example, uses his chapter, one of the more practical in the book, to revisit hypermedia applications as used at the University of Singapore. Landow articulates the spirit of the collection when he describes the role of theory as applied to new information technologies as similar to the graphite particles and ultraviolet light that "make previously invisible fingerprints and other unexpected traces suddenly appear. Innovation creates new aspects of ourselves and theory reveals them."

Though entirely validated by the result, the book's interdisciplinary approach does carry a cost. When a reader is asked to toggle between Derrida and Duchamp, Baudrillard and Barthes, Kant and Kierkegaard, it is going to be difficult to develop and sustain any kind of practical momentum, especially since critical/cultural perspectives and methods dominate the volume's 562 pages. The philosophical and classic cultural studies references are valid, mostly, but their abundance often obscures. With such an orientation, the perhaps inevitable poststructuralist emphasis, too, is a barrier, in this case, to the interdisciplinarity and conceptual convergence the editors had in mind.

Disappointing is the lack of social scientific research considered by the authors. In the chapters that explore notions of interactivity, for example, useful though they may be, no mention is made of the important research done by the likes of Sally McMillan, Sheizaf Rafaeli, John Pavlik, and Jane Singer. Also conspicuously absent from the collection is any reference to blogging, but then the form did not exist ten years ago.

Minor quibbles. With such diversity, with so many reasons to re- think even the terms and underlying assumptions used to try to understand digital media and their still-unrealized potential as tools and as artifacts for research, the next revisiting, the authors' "third encounters," already is anticipated.

BRIAN CARROLL

Berry College

Copyright Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Summer 2004

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