Saturday, October 6, 2012

Is media studies' theoretical toolbox becoming obsolete?

As someone who only started studying media in earnest in 2010, Gauntlett's "Media Studies 2.0" initially felt to me like a fight that was largely settled before my time. Most of his philosophy of widespread digital participation and creation changing the way media should be studying seems to be the standard, "Well, duh" framework for studying media today. Of course this participatory, networked media environment is fundamentally different from the model that's come before and needs to be approached as such. For those of us just coming into the field, that seems to be the starting assumption for our perspective on media studies.

And yet, virtually all of the theories in our field were developed in the age of traditional media. What are the most popular theoretical tools to address this dramatic shift in media structure? Gatekeeping, framing, agenda setting, uses and gratifications - all theories that were initially developed to explain a very different media environment.

It's not that those theories don't apply anymore. I don't think we should throw out all of those theories out just because the media environment has changed, and I think we need to make a concerted effort to tie new concepts to the existing body of theory in our field. But there should be a set of new theoretical concepts that are native to the era of digital media alongside the old ones that help us understand the environment we're in.

And I think some of that is because of the dominance of traditional media-studies thinking that Gauntlett refers to -- the immediate response to some new idea seems to be, "Well, isn't this [gatekeeping/agenda setting/the active audience] in a different setting?" The traditional theories are a very deeply ingrained schema in media scholars' minds, and every new theoretical concept ends up being plugged into that schema in a way that sustains it, rather than challenging or revising it. Academia is a system that makes it very difficult for big ideas that make more than incremental changes to the current ways of thinking to gain acceptance. But if that doesn't happen at some point, we'll eventually end up with a very outdated set of theoretical tools.

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