“Computer was a bad name for it. It might just as well have been called an Oogabooga Box.” – Ted Nelson

In the first two columns I wrote here for FlowTV I argued that “New Media” was not a particularly useful term for describing the field; indeed, I argued that it may in fact obscure more than it reveals. What I suggested is that this field of study is neither about “media” nor about something “new.” Both in the comments section and in conversations I had subsquent to these pieces being published, others have, correctly, pointed out that it is easier to say what something should not be called than to actually propose what it ought to be called. So, I thought I would take this final column to propose what I think this field of study should be called: “Oogabooga Studies.”

First, it is probably worth pointing out that the quote from which I take this idea, by Ted Nelson, appears only in partial form in the above epigraph. Nelson went on to suggest that this name would be appropriate because, “that way, at least, we could get the fear out in the open and laugh at it.” It seems to me that Nelson’s suggestion here is that the absurdity of the name “Oogabooga” would help to highlight the fact that the word “computer” was being used in an overly general way, importing with it a host of prejudices and concerns that ultimately are masking more important questions. In that regard, I want to borrow Nelson’s idea and suggest that we call the field Oogabooga Studies as it would call attention both to the way that the word “media” is being used in an overly general and non-descriptive way, and the fact that the current terminology carries with it a host of prejudices and concerns that might not be appropriate to the object and field of inquiry, misdirecting our approach.

Why I propose the name Oogabooga Studies:

1. The principle advantage of adopting the name Oogabooga Studies would be to highlight the fact that this field of inquiry is a clear break with other models. This is not to suggest that one needs to throw off all that we have learned in the past, the years of useful, thoughtful, nuanced approaches to studying how people communicate via media. Indeed, those who follow what I write or have taken my courses know that I think history is crucial for understanding Oogabooga Studies. But I think that calling the field “New Media” suggests that “media studies” is the principal or primary framework from which we should understand Oogabooga; that is, as an evolution in the study of media, when in fact Oogabooga might be something else. When we use the word “media” or “communication” I think the hidden word is often “broadcast,” a term which implies that this new moment can be understood as an evolution of the one prior, and which hides the ways in which those paradigms are heterogenous to understanding the contemporary moment. “Media” and “Communication” are Gutenberg Parenthesis words which end up framing analysis in terms of the old in unfortunate ways. By picking a nonsense signifier, we could open up the debate to figure out exactly what we are talking about here, rather than prejudicing our results from the beginning.

2. This is not a discipline, or at least not in the way that academia currently understands or uses the term. Hierarchically organized taxonomic classification systems are themselves a thing of the past (or are becoming increasingly so), despite academia’s insistence on maintaining them. Taxonomic classification is, as with the terms “media” and “communication,” an effect of looking at the world from a print-based, analog perspective. I think that to correctly understand Oogabooga requires inquiry from a range of what are traditionally understood as academic disciplines. Media studies suggests that the siloing of inquiry can continue and that just receiving a digital facelift/update for the contemporary is adequate. To correctly analyze the contemporary transitional moment requires a range of scholars, from an array of disciplinary approaches. Situating the field within media or communications departments makes such collaboration and multi-perspectival analysis difficult if not impossible. An Oogabooga Studies program would have legal scholars, computer scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and media studies scholars. Oogabooga Studies would be something more like what Mark Taylor proposes with “Water Studies,” or if you prefer, the more detailed “Unit Operational Academic Practice” Ian Bogost outlines in Unit Operations.

3. Using the term “new media” as an umbrella term tends to hide the degree to which there is a diversity of objects being studied. (To be clear I think Literature and Cultural Studies have this problem too, but renaming them might be a bit larger of a taskmany more faculty have those terms in their respective titles.) Media Studies might describe a relatively homogenous field of study, i.e. broadcast communication, but there is now so much diversity in the field of Oogabooga I think it would be useful to get a little more specific about the objects of study. Although the interests overlap, studying World of Warcraft strikes me as substantially different from studying Web Design and PHP. Right now the term Media Studies is serving as an umbrella term for all of this without yielding any specificity. By replacing Media Studies with Oogabooga people would then have to specify more narrowly what they are working on. If we are going to use an umbrella term that groups together a bunch of heterogenous things we might as well use a nonsense one so there is no expectation of a unified field.

4. This would capture a sense of the playful rather than defaulting to the serious. One of the things that strikes me as important, which I think can all too often be lost in academic inquiry, is the way in which this new moment carries with it at its core, at least for now, a sense of playful irreverence (see Remix culture). I am not sure our “serious” ways of understanding things are adequate to the task.

Image Credits:

1. Ted Nelson
2. Ian Bogost
3. Remix

Please feel free to comment.

“It’s getting late early.” – Yogi Berra1

A few weeks ago while discussing search engines and knowledge organization with my undergrads I made a rather startling discovery. During the framing moments of our conversation, wanting to be able to draw comparisons between different classification systems, I asked the group how many of them had used a card catalog. Then, a strange thing happened. No, it was not the fact that only a handful ever had — this I suspected — but rather that a few asked, “What is a card catalog?” A bit taken aback, I started to explain, to which one student responded, “Oh, I have seen them in old movies.” (Thanks to Ghostbusters my explanation was made a bit easier.) And so here is my concern, in the same way that I argued the issue is not “media,” I want to make the more important claim that what we are talking about here is not “new,” and the continued use of the term “new” is at best less than rigorous, and at worst dangerous.

As the “card catalog” example suggests, there is certainly not anything “new” about using computers to organize information or the ubiquitous Google search box. I have been teaching “digital stuff” for about eight years now and in those eight years I have noted a rather significant shift. While it used to be the case that when we would discuss the internet, social media, and the digital network, students would approach it with a certain lack of familiarity — “What is this strange object before us?” Now they simply take it in stride. There is nothing particularly strange/odd or even noteworthy to many of them about the practice of having a Facebook page. (Indeed this is the second semester in a row where nearly all of my students have a Facebook page.) I used to approach teaching these matters as the question of looking at the strange and contextualizing it in terms of the familiar. I now find that my job is to take the familiar and make it strange, or as Siva Vaidhyanathan observed during an online discussion about this issue, “I use the ‘I’m teaching fish about the ocean’ perspective. I try to make it weird again.”2

I do not mean here to suggest all of that nonsense about digital natives versus non-digital natives; indeed I am actually suggesting something quite the opposite: students are not digital natives who possess some unique set of skills whereby they can magically manipulate the network and gadgets to do whatever they want with outstanding acumen, rather that students are for the large part unreflective about the way they use these network technologies, and what is more are unreflective about the ways in which their use (or our use) has already been historically determined and shaped, an unreflective response which gives up power and control over to these systems.

And so this is my problem with the word, “new.” It suggests that what is happening, the profound shift from a social and cultural structure whose primary form of archivization is analog to one which is digitally networked has not already been significantly shaped by a past. In the first instance as Armand Mattelart convincingly argues, the networking of the world has a longer historical trajectory than simply the last 20 years.3 But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the social customs, cultural norms, and legal institutions which have come to shape the way that we are using the digital network are not particularly new, and are by the day becoming increasingly more established and codified. Back in the days of Amiga and OS/2 you might have been able to convince me that there was something new going on, but when we are now at the point where three players dominate the Operating System market, with Microsoft owning 90% share, we are no longer at the moment of the new, we are at the moment of the historically established. When Facebook has 350 million plus active users it is no longer a cultural outlier, it is the norm.

The problem with the word “new” is it tends to convey a sense of the different, a recent change, as in, “Do you like my new haircut?” as opposed to the already established and significantly integrated. The internet has been around since the 1960s; there is nothing “new” about it. And, even if one is talking about the internet as widely used and publicly available, the timeline is at least ten years. Now ten years might seem “new” in the world of academia where any literature written after 1900 is considered contemporary, but in the cultural, legal, and social realms, ten years is at least two generations.

Treating the digital network as “new” allows us to ignore it or treat is at less than critical, yet to be determined, or less than urgent, when in fact precisely the opposite is true. These digital networked technologies have so thoroughly penetrated our economic, legal, and social structures that they now form the basis of much of what we do. After the invention of the printing press it took at least a hundred years, much longer in many cases, for the norms of printing press culture to develop (pagination, title pages, copyright laws, reading practices). In this sense the printing press remained a new technology for a long time. The window for negotiating the norms of printing press culture in this respect stayed open quite a while4, but in the case of the digital network that window is much shorter and our unreflexive use of the term “new” carries the unfortunate consequence of deceiving us into believing that we have much more time than we actually do. These “new media” aren’t new; they are central and a fundamental part of our cultural, legal, and social institutions. It is time we started treating them as such.

Image Credits:
1. Card catalog
2. Apple II
3. Arpanet
4. Facebook

Please feel free to comment.

1. Although this quote is often attributed to Yogi Berra, what he actually said was, “It gets late early out there.”
2. This was said as part of a discussion on Twitter about the issue of teaching undergraduates. @sivavaid
3. Armand Mattelart, Networking the World, 1794-2000. University of Minnesota Press. 2000.
4. For a thorough examination of this history see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book. University of Chicago. 2000.

“Rhode Island is neither a road nor an island. Discuss.” -Mike Myers as Linda Richmond on Saturday Night Live

The problem with the term New Media is that neither term really succeeds in being adequately descriptive. This is not to suggest that there is not something significant about the shift from analog-supported media to ones whose substrate is the digital network, or that there is not something new in or at least markedly different about the shift from media which is primarily broadcast to ones which (at least for now) are more uniformly distributed. Rather, I want to suggest that both of those terms, “media,” and “new,” while perhaps descriptive in some respects, ultimately conceal more than they reveal. Thus their continued use prevents us from focusing on how this change from analog to digital is more than just a media shift.

Admittedly, the digital networked technologies which now form the basis of how we organize, create, sort, store, and distribute information constitute a medium, and thus are media, if we take the broad sense of the term, as in that which mediates, that which enables a transaction to occur, the substrate or means of conveyance. But in this regard a truck is the medium by which goods are brought to stores, and the word media is not generally used to mean vehicular transportation, even if the combustion engine driven platform is the means by which content is distributed. Media studies scholars do not say, “I study the media of Walmart trucks.” Even in the more narrow sense of communication though, “media” is not often the descriptive or preferred term. One does not often hear the term media applied to air, as in: We had a face to face conversation where the medium of communication was the air between us which allowed the sound waves to travel between participants in a oral exchange. In this respect language itself is even a technological medium, the means by which communication happens. In most ways, the term media is taken to mean a technological means by which communication happens.1 Thus a book is a medium; radio, film, television all are media.

And it is in this respect that I think using the term media to talk about digital technology ends up obfuscating our understanding of the profound changes that take place as we transition, from a knowledge structure whose primary means of archivization is analog to one whose substrate is both digital and networked. The term “new media” rhetorically suggests that the internet is the next media in a lineage of technological means by which communication happens. To over simplify, the suggestion would be that first is the photograph, next is radio, followed by moving pictures (silent film), from which one gets talking moving pictures (film), leading to talking moving pictures broadly distributed (television). In some respect, this is the history that Bolter and Grusin trace in Remediation: each technological moment makes a rhetorical claim to be an improvement on the one prior, mediating and presenting the real in a more realistic manner. In this sense one can have several media operating at once; newspapers, magazines, television, film, radio are all media, mediums for content distribution. When the term “new media” is deployed, it is used in this manner to suggest that the current means of communication, the digital network, is just another moment in this lineage. Whether or not one sees this as evolutionary or revolutionary really does not matter: it is treated as part of a progression. The argument that computers will become the magical black box for the presentation of all media (the uber-medium) is just one symptom of this kind of analysis.

This “new media” view of network technologies has led to this particularly blinding line of thinking in media studies which suggests that in order to study the digital network, its social and cultural effects, it is sufficient to take standard tools of media analysis and simply “add in” a few new features to account for the newness of this “new media.” Many media scholars—and, I would suggest, many media studies programs—approach the study of digital network communication by relying on platforms used to analyze analog broadcast media. The assumption is that all one needs to do to critique “new media” is to utilize tools developed for the analysis of radio, television, and film, and update them for the 21st century. This is what I would refer to as the digital facelift model of scholarship: prior media analysis can be updated for the digital revolution (i.e., take some broadcast communication theory, add visual culture analysis, and sprinkle in some network theory and you are ready to go). The problem with this digital facelift model is that it does not recognize the profound degree to which old methods and means of media analysis in fact may be heterogenous to the object of analysis. I would propose that we are talking, here, about more than a change in media: we are talking about a rather significant shift in the substructure and organization of knowledge. (The digital facelift model is precisely the mistake the newspaper industry made in believing that they could continue distributing and presenting news in the way they always had, and all that they needed to do to accommodate the digital was transfer the medium of presentation over to the computer screen.) I am not suggesting that we throw out all media theory, or theory in general, and start over. Clearly all knowledge must build on prior knowledge, but I am suggesting that much of the way we organize our critique is an effect of prior media bias which might not hold in the next moment. When we inquire about the effects of digital technologies we are asking much more than how is the internet the new book, the new television, the new radio or the new whatever.

To give just one such example to demonstrate what a move away from the digital facelift model would mean, consider writing in the age of the digital networked archive. When we talk about teaching students today to write, conversations often focus on the idea of teaching students to be 21st century authors, but perhaps authorship does not apply. The author function is a particular fiction which is an outgrowth of a prior technological moment, one which perhaps is no longer appropriate in the digital network. As Foucault argues the author function is not natural but rather historical, “characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.”2 Books, magazines, television and radio programs, and film all have authors, but if we begin our inquiry of “new media” by asking, “what does it mean to be an author for this ‘new media,’” we miss the way that authorship itself is heterogenous to the new archival structure. But, even more radically, I would suggest that the term writer, reader, or even wreader all present us with prior media biases, framing the current moment in terms of the one prior. So, all of the talk about the way that the internet blurs the distinction between writer and reader, or that in the 21st century we will all be writers and readers, tends to ignore the possibility that writer and reader themselves are terms that are inadequate to the task of analyzing the digital network, because writing and reading separate out the act of composition from the act of consumption in a way that is not descriptive of the type of collaborative literacy and composition that occurs in networked spaces. The digital network in this regard is not just another media in the evolution/revolution of media, but a whole new substrate underlying the way that communication is created, presented, stored, and transmitted. The very concept of media seems to me based in a conceptual model whose purchase might not apply beyond the Gutenberg Parenthesis.3

In this respect I think we need scholarship, programs, and classes which do not begin from the standpoint of understanding the digital network as a new media, something that can be just appended to the study of other media. Radio, television, and film are media, sure, but the digital network is something far more profound, far more significant, far more troubling than simply its status as a “new medium.” (Now, I realize that at this point you might be thinking that I haven’t discussed the word “new” yet. Actually, “new” is the far more problematic of the two terms — but that exploration will have to wait until my next column.)



Click here to view the embedded video.

Image Credits:

1. Wikimedia Foundation
2. flickr: -oAk-
3. flickr: daveynin
4. Wikimedia Foundation

Please feel free to comment.

1. I do not mean to suggest here that language or air are not mediums, or that language is not a technology—clearly it is—but rather to point out that the term media carries with it a set of ideological imports that demonstrate we use it more narrowly than we might, and that, more importantly, such usage restricts our thinking about digital technologies.
2. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?.” The Foucault Reader. New York, New York:Pantheon, 1984. 101-120
3. We could talk about the distinction between public and private here as well. Thinking about the digital network as just another medium leads us to ask, “in what ways does the internet blur the distinction between public and private,” when in fact the distinction public and private themselves are what it calls into question.