About This Book

Knowledge’s containers stabilize the world, putting bounds and limits to things that might otherwise run out of control. Infrastructures are not glamorous, but they anchor our existence. Of course, no container of the world is ever fully adequate. Leaks point to a universe larger than we can grasp. Any understanding of the world that is too well ordered is probably not true to the world. There are more things in the world than order. Truth is precisely what keeps breaking our best ideas and dearest prejudices. But too much smashing of the vessels leaves all of us vulnerable, especially the weak. That order can be both stifling and precious is perhaps an oddly consoling thought as we sit on edge, waiting to see what will happen next.

—Kenneth Cmiel and John Durham Peters, Promiscuous Knowledge^[1]

This is the second edition of New Media Futures, which is published as part of a foundational course in the New Media Program at Oregon State University. That program is designed assuming that social research, media management, and media production are of equal importance in undergraduate media education. Key people in developing the program were either new media first or came to new media with a background in speech. Because of this speech background, communication as a discipline tended to include public address, family/relationships, media, and organizational communication. While we have continued an emphasis on production over the years since the first edition, our focus has turned more toward the psychological dimension of relational communication. This is not a journalism or mass communication book first and foremost.

Over the course of revising this edition, I had the good fortune to work on rebuilding the general education program at Oregon State. This involved extensive faculty negotiations, review of hundreds of courses, and was incredibly rewarding. The Core Education Committee with its many skilled experts expanded my world as I engaged such diverse ways of thinking. I would like to thank my co-chairs and leadership colleagues especially for putting up with me during this process and teaching me so much: McKenzie Huber (director of general education and an expert in general education), Kelsey Emard (geography), Rene Reitsma (business information systems), Kaplan Yalcin (geology), and Heath Henry (assessment). General education at its best offers students the chance to acquire knowledge/skills in areas they need, to experience intellectual promiscuity (how dare a student get coffee with the idea of a different career?), and to see models (scholars and how they literally exist) of different ways of thinking in the form of scholars. When a course is reviewed for general education inclusion, it is submitted to exacting scrutiny, as it should be. We have made a promise to students that we bring our best in general education to show them possible worlds that they never were presented in high school. These reviews offer a powerful critique of disciplinary chauvinism, this bringing us back to the point above, that general education (and education in general) is not about broadening horizons; it is about cross-fertilizing the imagination, creating hybrids, having fun. We want a nuclear engineer thinking about poetry, and the poet calculating an eigenvector centrality; we want the danger and the excess of investing our time in knowledge that is wasted. When we design a great general education course, it can be understood in context by any educator doing their diligence. In writing any textbook that covers such an expanse, there is a risk of making broad meta-disciplinary claims and being labeled at best a dilettante. This book takes the risk to write broadly, but it does so with a sense of modesty and wonder that opens up space for more questions, research, and coursework all over the university.

To engage disciplinary connections, I focus on what intersections mean for communication research and how communication might enrich those spaces. My general disposition is not interdisciplinary. If “interdisciplinarity” refers to work that connects fully formed, fascinating regimes of expertise, I am all in. Often interdisciplinarity seems to be an excuse for not engaging the disciplines involved, but this is not always the case. Let me speak here in defense of silos. I do not want my grain not in a silo. Left on the ground, grain will rot in the rain and be riddled with rodents. Silos store and feed grain into powerful milling systems, which yield flour. Silos are critical logistical technology. Grain doesn’t flow smoothly out of a silo; powerful augers move it, creating flows that might suck in people walking on the surface of the grain, and nothing good happens at that point. In much the same way, academic silos can crush us, but this does not justify letting our food spoil. In short, I want all the disciplines to be storing their grain, running their mills, and nourishing inquiry. We should be careful with silos; we shouldn’t knock them down.

If silos are so great, why write a book like this? Most academic disciplinary clusters include some work on new media, a positive and productive development. The challenge is that these networks of faculty are not first and foremost engaged in new media research; thus it is up to every group to take up the charge and engage in research. In some key cases, there will never be uptake of key elements of the argument in other disciplines, especially high-prestige fields. This is endemic to academic work.

It is possible that there will be a third edition of this book in 2033. I have invested a great deal of time in this edition, time that could have been spent writing more articles to sit behind paywalls. I would also thank my coauthors and advisees for tolerating me throwing time at this book, including Rafale Arellano, Dan Hickey, Ash Estevan, and Atilla Hallsby. Thanks also go to my wife, Emily, and children Elvisa, Julian, Harry, and Frank.

My employer (and the state government of Oregon) truly values Open Educational Resources (OER); I am lucky. Many of you reading are not. The greatest threat to OER is a lack of suitable materials. Please use this book, and if you can, let me know that you are using it. Performance metrics are key for convincing other institutions to value this work in Promotion and Tenure processes. Most of all, I hope you enjoy this book and find it stimulating.

A Disclaimer; or, A Celebration of Limits

There are so many things that could be in this book, and many things are not in this book. For instance, this book does not include a comprehensive history of television programming. Television criticism and the entire theoretical mechanism of television studies are simply not in this book, nor is cinema as understood in film studies. This book does not offer a robust take on professionalization and journalism. There is no supplement or additional material coming. If you use this book as an instructor, please add the content you need to make it a helpful resource.

The threads developed in this book tend to be overtly about the future: future studies, methods for understanding future information, and possibilities for future media. Our accounting here runs from Python to Proust, attention to artificial intelligence, a futuristic soup to nuts.

Some ideas that may appear to be excluded are in fact here but filed under different conceptual headings. For example, public sphere theory is addressed at length, just as a subset of theories of attention; fake news is discussed within information, affect theory within memory. Within these clusters the weaving of social science and critical/cultural studies is tight, and the purpose of the writing is to connect circuits and drive conversation. It is entirely possible some of those circuits are short, liable to sparking. The question of the desirability of an academic structure fire is also an open question.