On the Cutting Edge, or Otherwise, of Media and Communication Research

Research at the forefront, new fields for research, the cutting edge? Given this rather ambitious and possibly grandiose brief, I began by asking around among my colleagues for their views, I kept my ears open at the recent ICA in San Francisco, so as to listen out for the new ideas in the air before they reached the always-delayed publication stage, and I scanned recent issues of the media and communication journals. But while the ICA was full of interesting ideas and people, I did not detect any major new orientations. Similarly, my colleagues looked rather blank when asked for the cutting edge in media research. And the journals are, by and large, publishing the same kinds of articles on the same kinds of subjects as they always do. In this brief paper, I offer some general remarks about the state of media and communications research, using audience research as my example. These remarks focus on the disciplinary status and ambitions of media and communications research, and are certainly not intended as any kind of attack media and communications research or researchers: there is a huge amount of interesting, valuable, productive and thoughtprovoking research going on across many fronts, though in the main, I see it as contributing more to the task of consolidation rather than of innovation. By contrast, if we consider how the study of media and communications fits into the rest of social and cultural debate, there are, I suggest, two widely acknowledged cutting edges, both of which have a strong interface with media and communications. One states that social theory is where the action is: obvious and important examples include the theory of late modernity, globalisation, the public sphere, individualisation, network society, post-Colonial theory and ethnic or cultural diaspora. Primarily but not entirely arising from the engagement between continental philosophy and sociological theory, this interdisciplinary enterprise is generating a new set of concepts for thinking about the importance of media and communications, among other things, in a globalised world (Giddens, 1991; Thompson, 1995). The other states that new technological developments in media, information and communication technologies now lead social research: hence the return of medium theory, the shift towards studies of users rather than of audiences, research on interactivity at the interface between interpersonal and mass PLENARY SESSION I