Is there a ‘field’ of media research? – The ‘fragmentation’ issue revisited

It is clear that the amount of scholarly attention given, internationally, to different aspects of ‘the media’ has grown enormously, a situation reflected in some of the contributions to the recent special issue of this journal (‘Back to the Future’, 35.1, 2013). A steady increase over the years has turned into a far more rapid development over the last decade. Even in areas inclined in the past to marginalise if not completely ignore questions of media systems and communicative practice, such as political science, there has been a turn towards more sustained engagement, conceptually and empirically, while across other areas, including literary studies, modern languages, geography, history and economics, there has been a strengthening of research focus. It has widely been noted that one important factor lying behind this growth has been the arrival, and then the quick achievement of massive political, cultural and economic presence, of ‘new media’ or ‘social media’. This has not only made addressing matters of mediation more obviously necessary across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (perhaps under headings like ‘digital humanities’, ‘digital society’ and ‘digital culture’) as well as beyond, it has also brought in new ways of thinking about ‘the media’ (see Couldry, 2009 on the changing use of this collective noun), of positioning the media within frameworks of ideas and of investigating them.

Both the growth in diverse forms of attention to ‘older’ media and the widespread interest in the ‘new’ and the ‘emergent’ have helped to raise more sharply the question of whether it makes sense to talk about a ‘field’ of media research at all. For many years, expressed anxieties about the ‘fragmentation of the field’, sometimes with suggested corrections to this tendency, have been aired at international and national events, including ICA conferences. Over twenty years ago, David Swanson’s short essay (Swanson, 1993) provided a classic account of some of the issues as they then affected developments at ‘subfield’ level in the USA. Most recently, in a provocative piece looking at a range of shifts affecting the area and its institutionalisation, particularly but not exclusively in Nordic countries, Stig Hjarvard has written of a ‘half-baked discipline’. He makes this striking claim not by way of critical dismissal but, taking the metaphor of baking more seriously, by way of suggesting that it needs some more time before it can gain the appropriate level of consolidation and coherence (Hjarvard, 2012). However, he notes the severe challenges to this process posed by the sub-specialisation which is part of the growth described above and he proposes some ways in which increased cross-connection might be encouraged. ¹

I will come back to these ‘remedies’ later but I wonder if it might it not be better, in the circumstances obtaining at present and those likely to emerge, to acknowledge straight away that rather than a field subject to fragmentation there is now something more like a number of fields? To recognise that, despite overlaps, these draw on rather different conceptual resources, position themselves within diverse interdisciplinary coordinates, hold different aspects of the media as objects of primary interest and have relationships in which disjunction and mutual indifference are becoming as prominent as dialogue. In other words, to concede that plurality and dispersal have already gone beyond what even the most expanded idea of ‘unity’, and a sense of ‘subfields’ within the singularity of ‘the field’, can contain.

I leave aside here the category of ‘discipline’, where the requirements of internal coherence within the logics of research would seem to be more stringent, notwithstanding the breadth and internal variety of many established disciplines. This has not stopped the regular description of media and communications study as a ‘discipline’ of course, albeit one which, as in Hjarvard’s account, is still in the making (or ‘baking’). However if, as I am arguing, ‘field’ is a questionable category for the current range of research practice then ‘discipline’ would certainly seem to be so, quite apart from the rather regressive sense it carries of an older, more complacent and stable, division of learning. It is interesting that Swanson in 1993 completely rejected ambitions towards discipline-hood as based on mistaken judgement and likely to lead to ‘much energy being wasted’ (Swanson, 1993: 169).

These questions obviously turn on terms of classification but they are not to be judged as secondary, nominal matters for that reason. Matters to do with the intellectual identity of research into media, and the location of this research within the shifting, broader pattern of the production and circulation of academic knowledge, are at issue. We can certainly see the dynamics of segregation and not just ‘diversity’ as a feature of the whole history of media research, with particularly strong fault-lines between arts and social science perspectives. However, as Hjarvard also observes, the emerging profile seems quite distinctive in the pattern being established.

The new situation is not being produced entirely by factors specific to research on media. A broader dynamic is at work in the economy of knowledge, in the expansion and intensification of academic activity. This is clearly evident in the growth of the number of journals, a development in which ‘niche’ positioning is for obvious reasons becoming a more productive route than replication of established broader provision, although there is a good deal of that going on too. More academics are writing more and, in many contexts, they are being required to write more – there is a boom in academic productivity driven as much by the growth in the academic economy and its professionalised imperatives as by any individualised motivation. It is essentially a supply-led rather than a demand-led phenomenon, so that providing new outlets for the publication of writing is in some tension with the business of finding readers who want to read it and who will lobby their libraries to buy access to it. Many of these readers are also real or aspirant writers of course, so they are involved both in supply-side and demand-side relations. With the growing profusion of material to read, it is not surprising that academic reading has become more tightly strategic, readers often targeting their reading around the themes upon which they are also writing, giving priority to those places in which they have published and/or hope to publish in the future. This has always been an aspect of academic reading, but the new terms of academic productivity, and the more instrumental economy of time they encourage, have increased its sway. However, even for those with extra energy and inquisitiveness, and an effective system of regular online surveillance, it has often become impossible to keep up with academic production around topics receiving intensive attention (e.g. new media and citizenship; media and memory; the changing forms of television news) on other than on a selective basis. Despite the attractions of making connections across a wider academic landscape, staying ‘close to home’, even if the ‘home’ is a quite recently established one and is constructed from interdisciplinary resources, has provided one obvious way of being selective in order to give direction to research initiatives and some sense of a readership to writing.

The furthering of academic inquiry inevitably involves intensification of focus and deepening of analysis. The old remark about ‘knowing more and more about less and less’ captures, if glibly, some consequences of this. As areas of research develop, a centripetal effect is created, the consequent insularities of which can only be balanced, if at all, by sustained phases of cross-connection and orientation within the larger intellectual landscape.

The history of media research (see, for instance, the chapters in Park and Pooley 2008 for recent perspectives) is recognised as having a distinctive profile insofar as work on ‘mass communication’ and then ‘media’ does not have its primary home in a specific discipline, unlike many other, though certainly not all, emergent fields. Initially, it is positioned within, and then as an outgrowth of, sociology and social psychology. However, an influential humanities body of work emerges in the 1960s (including in versions of cultural studies) in ways which, within different national academic orders, receive various levels of assimilation as a contributory strand to the earlier one or as, in effect, an alternative approach to this. A range of studies, particularly in Europe, were influenced by versions of a ‘critical’ perspective, often taking a Marxian stance towards established power at the levels of economic and ideological processes. From the 1990s this gave way in some measure to less confident and less direct forms of critique, with the influence of postmodernist thinking about power and identity apparent and a certain re-positioning of the media as agencies whose complexity of operations and consequences, within a capitalism many of whose terms had become ‘normalised’, was seen by some if not by all to deserve a cooler, more descriptively precise, approach, partly convergent with earlier and continuing social science perspectives.

As Swanson (1993) among many others notes, media research has always had issues with establishing any common agreement about the ‘significant’ in the object of research inquiry and the ‘proper’ in terms of concepts and methods. Deciding what conference to attend, which journal to send your manuscript to and (even) what examiner to invite to assess a doctoral dissertation, requires for success some sense of these differences, existing underneath the general designation of media research. The risks of encountering not just a stimulating, provocative difference but a ‘difference beyond dialogue’ are generally judged well worth taking care to avoid. It has been widely noted that, at various stages, work on media has needed to import much of its theoretical and analytic apparatus from ‘outside’ and consequently the pattern of what has been imported from where and what has not has remained a regular point of variation and dispute. Most large conferences on media research show these tensions and variations, even if some of them (as within the ICA) are able to manage out too disruptive or incoherent a situation emerging by ‘sectionalisation’ at the level of groups, panels and strands.

National variations also clearly continue to be in evidence, reflecting in part not only the variables of national media systems (and to some extent the location of media professional training within Higher Education) but the specific disciplinary mix that has fed into the development of media research and helped to form the routes it has taken. The United States has continued an identifiably separate trajectory of ‘communications research’ more confidently than any other country, often in the process developing a US-centric approach to themes and ideas which has had a strong tendency to exclude engagement with work from abroad, although this is now being replaced by a firmer, if selective, sense of the international and the global. The growth of studies in Asia, Africa and South America is showing evidence of clear, geographically specific approaches alongside the use of established US and European reference points. Among other instances, articles in the volumes of Media, Culture & Society over the last few years would bear ample witness to this.

One indication of the intensified segregation of work on media can be seen in the use of the label ‘studies’ to follow designated areas of interest, even if the ways in which this is grounded in teaching as well as (and sometimes rather than) research often remain a little uncertain. The two principal established framings for work are, of course, ‘communication’ or ‘communications’ (with their rather complicating inclusion of work on areas other than media) and ‘media’ (which has more richly imprecise indications both of topic and of approach than the older ‘mass communication’). Sometimes the two are coupled in ways which have an element of calculated tautology. In uncertain relation to these ‘core’ labels there has developed a number of other groupings operating at various levels. ‘Television studies’, while aligned to the sociologically aware spaces of ‘media research’ has a relationship with ‘film studies’, an area of humanities-oriented inquiry giving close attention to textuality and aesthetics. ‘Journalism studies’ emerged many years ago, often indicating a degree of independence warranted by its connection with journalist training and the kind of research agenda this generated, although a great deal of what is now published under the heading would not conform easily to the idea of a professionally rather than academically related sense of the relevant.

Other uses of ‘studies’ indicate what can be seen as a strengthening ‘aspectualism’ in media inquiry, in which one dimension of media practices and processes is given intensive and often exclusive attention. So, for instance, we have ‘audience studies’, ‘documentary studies’ and ‘policy studies’. At one level, this indicates the desirable concentration of effort necessary to make headway, empirically and conceptually, on particular issues. At another level, however, such aspectualism indicates the move towards that centripetal orientation and relative autonomy which is, I believe, a dominant tendency in the pattern.

The most striking new collectivity to emerge, one which is now developing alternative labels as the original one has become seriously dated, has undoubtedly been ‘new media studies’. This is not an ‘aspectual’ label but one grounded in the recognition of specific technologies and practices. The rapid growth of analysis, writing and debate in this area across a range of disciplinary spaces has provided work with the confidence to position itself with a marked degree of independence in relation to all the existing groupings. In particular, the relationship between ‘old media studies’ and ‘new media studies’ has been posed, raising questions about the precise nature of the convergence and/or the disjunction both between the phenomena being investigated and the ideas and methods being used to carry this out. Studies in new media have sometimes given the impression of having paid less attention to the long history of studying ‘mass communication’ than they might have done, as if the radical new terms of mediation being explored rendered irrelevant earlier concepts and approaches, often presumed to be compromised by their no longer tenable assumptions about stability, rationality and linearity. But such intellectual foreshortening can lead to something close to duplication, in which perceptions, ideas and findings very close to those which emerged and were debated in earlier work (concerning for example, the profile of media power in relation to political power, the interplay of production and consumption relations, the hazards of researching ‘influence’) have been expressed in new terms as if they were entirely novel. They have not shown the benefits that firm connection with a longer tradition of investigation and argument might have brought.

It is worth noting that in addition to the constraints on cross-connection introduced by more intensive forms of ‘aspectualism’ and by constraints on academic time, there is the core factor of comprehensibility, already alluded to. To what extent is it possible even to understand the work that is being carried out in other, albeit adjacent, academic spaces concerned with media? Here, the division between humanities and social science perspectives remains significant, but overlying this division a number of specialist areas have develop a vocabulary of conceptualisation and analysis which is esoteric and opaque to many of those working outside of them, even if these are also academics carrying out research on the media. Sometimes this is because the primary connection is made with a source discipline not assimilated within the ‘mix’ which has variously constituted the international media research field across its national varieties. An example here might be media linguistics which, while it has produced some excellent work that has been read within, and informed, a broad range of study and debate, has often positioned itself as essentially an outgrowth of linguistics, requiring itself to speak to, and be deemed acceptable by, core thinking within that discipline rather than to make itself accessible to a wider community.

I want to return now to the question of ‘duplication’. I have suggested that across the range of work on media, there is a good deal of replication and ‘near replication’, both in relation to the work of the past and across concurrent studies. This claim is made not as an accusation of scholarly negligence but as recognition of the objective conditions in which an increased volume of scholarly production occurs across an increased diversity of specialist spaces drawn towards stronger internalist drives. Sometimes the replication occurs because of a complete ignorance of work going on elsewhere which, were it known about, would be engaged with. Sometimes it occurs in a situation where there is no real interest in knowing what is going on ‘elsewhere’, where such work might be seen either as ‘irrelevant’ or indeed, if engaged with, as introducing serious complications into the plans of research and publication being pursued. We must remember that the production of contemporary academic knowledge is defined as much by competition as it is by cooperation and that competitive behaviour often involves ‘willed ignorance’ as well as strict cost-benefit calculations in order to sustain a flow of productivity. What are the consequences of these circumstances for the pattern of theoretical development?

I think a relatively weak level of cumulative progress on general theoretical matters is one of the consequences, a point noted by Hjarvard as well as a number of previous commentators on ‘the field’. That is say, there is a dispersal of conceptual engagement, such that sustained and steady interconnection, including through critique, around agreed issues of focus begins to be displaced by a profusion of conceptually active spaces, each having its own nodal reference points. Mutual indifference or even sometimes a degree of enmity between the different spaces reinforces this.

Perhaps the conceptual framing which has enjoyed the widest reference, critique and elaboration across different spaces of media research over the last 30 years has been the ‘public sphere’, although as Lunt and Livingstone point out (2013) there has been a widespread tendency to focus on the earlier articulations of this idea by Habermas and not to connect with the revisions and adjustments made since. Notwithstanding this point, ‘public sphere’ has been a datum concept for a broad range of criticisms of current media practice, giving a normative frame (variously positioned as realistic or idealistic in character) which has served as a reference point for a number of different studies of production, forms, reception and of historical and national contexts. Even so, this has by no means been a ‘field-wide’ notion, and debate about its potential and limitations has failed to influence the conceptual and analytic vocabulary of many inquiries positioned outside of the self-consciously political and ‘critical’.

Hjarvard, despite the clarity of his recognition of the forces of disconnection working against it, believes that a ‘a focus on the processes of mediatisation may help us to continue the development of our field into a discipline’ (2012: 33), picking up on his earlier point that shifting the emphasis from ‘mediation to mediatisation may help keep track of some of the key questions and topics that may still render media and communication studies a candidate for a research discipline’ (2012: 28). I have some difficulty in sharing his belief, quite apart from my doubts about quite what being a (finally) successful ‘candidate’ for ‘research discipline’ status entails, in terms of a promotion within some wider context of categorical recognition. Indeed, as I have indicated in this note, even the ‘lower’ status of ‘field’ seems to be radically open to question. It is not a field that is routinely ‘known to itself’ in many of its ground level practices. It is more a rhetorical construct (often affectively loaded as an identity-referent – ‘our field’) used to invoke some kind of unity across an increased dispersal. That wider registration of the complex penetration of the media into the practices and institutions of everyday life that the term ‘mediatization’ indicates (for instance, in Lundby, 2009) seems more likely to aid the further divergence of analytic pathways rather than to help firm up some common items for a more coherent (‘disciplinary’) agenda. Moreover, the broader crosscurrents of inter-disciplinarity at work in the humanities and social sciences are making the area specificity of media research harder rather than easier to sustain across the sheer variety of intellectual practice involved. No longer is media research made distinctive by the contrast which its refreshing inter-disciplinarity makes against the conventionalised rigidities of surrounding activity.

Some routes taken in media research will undoubtedly show the intellectual robustness, expansiveness of reference, and therefore the wide dissemination and use of what they ‘find out’, which has characterised some of the best work on media to date. Other routes will inevitably operate much more in ‘enclave’ mode, emphasising intra-connection over inter-connection and being quite narrowly selective in what they import from elsewhere in media research let alone from other academic spheres. They will seek to acquire their academic capital by emphasising their intensive speciality more than their accessibility and relevance to other parts of the landscape of knowledge, let alone to the world beyond academia. Routine interconnections will tend towards the contingent, arising from specific requirements, rather than the systemic, although some events, like major conferences, will encourage an occasional wider view. Increasingly, even the broader journals will be accessed for specific items rather than ‘browsed’ with an interest in new work across a range. No encompassing ‘logics of field’ will inform many of the inquiries undertaken whatever their localised coherence, nor will such a logics be readily available as an interpretative frame in making full sense of what has been found out from a position outside the specific research area. To say this is not to deny that work of real quality and significance will continue to be produced, work comparable with the finest scholarship anywhere. Nor is it to accuse researchers of some regrettable tendencies in themselves which they should correct. It is simply to recognise the scope and scale of what is now happening under the heading of ‘media and communications research’ and to recognise, too, the broader pattern of shifts in the nature and conduct of academic inquiry.