Considering how important media have become in the lives of people and institutions, media studies ought to be treated more seriously — especially now that we are at a historical inflection point, as I noted to Stanford’s communication department class of 2004. The following paragraphs were sent to me by a media studies major in New Zealand. They are part of an article by Sean Cubitt, to be published in New Review of Film and Television Studies vol 3 no 1 sometime next year in a special issue on media pedagogies.

Historically,the media have been addressed in almost all the humanities and social sciences. Subject areas from psychology to art history. politics to language departments, have taught specialist courses in aspects of media for several decades. The purpose of a distinct Media Studies department is not only to single out media as object of study, nor to amalgamate the various approaches to media, nor yet to plug the gaps left by other approaches, though each of these tasks informs the work of media departments. What singles Media Studies out is the conviction that in the enquiry into what it is to be human, nothing is more worthy of study than human communications and,hence, of the media which are their material form. This is an ambitious project: as ambitious as the project of sociology. The difference is that the object of sociology ‚Äö√Ñ√¨ society ‚Äö√Ñ√¨ is a contended and controversial category whose existence has been repeatedly thrown into question, while the reality of the media is undoubted, even by those, like Jean Baudrillard, who believe that media substitute for and destroy communication, rather than enable it. Like sociology, and indeed like geography, Media Studies is necessarily catholic in its methods. At its best, it is a dialogue, simultaneously affirming and contesting its own premises, between specialisms whose core emphasis is that the material form of human communications matter. Students and researchers in Media Studies necessarily enquire into the technologies, the political economies, the techniques, the meanings and the psychological engagement of media makers, distributors and audiences. The distinctive task of Media Studies is to bring these specialisms into dialogue: to ensure that critical hermeneutics is informed by political economy; that psychology respects the technical constructions of media; that the analysis of media power is confronted with the analysis of its technological infrastructure. From our point of view, the humanities comprise specialist sub-disciplines of Media Studies, engaging in language and linguistic media, musical, artistic and design media. Where we observe in the older specialisms weaknesses, we seek to repair them: the disdain for the popular, the disinterest in political economy, the distrust of ‘antiquarian’ enquiry into the materiality of media forms. Unlike colleagues in some disciplines, we cannot exclude international, transnational and global histories ,cultures, networks, and concepts from our research and teaching. We observe that the objects studied in the social sciences are media, and that the forms in which they are reported are mediated too. Media Studies has reflexive analytical and creative traditions which address such phenomena, from electronic financial flows to weaponry, as media of human communication. While we recognise the analytical power of distinguishing cultural from social, aesthetic from psychological, spatial from temporal dimensions, we also understand our role in synthesising these analytic categories in the material of mediation.

Core to the ‘critical and creative’ philosophy which we want to present in this paper is the principle that it is not adequate only to describe what exists. As researchers and as teachers, we pursue the critique of the actual and the creation of alternatives. In common with many social sciences and some humanities disciplines, media departments in general offer a variety of scholarly and professional qualifications. As opposed to studio-based and vocational courses, Media Studies challeges of increasingly career-oriented students and industry-oriented policy-makers with the fact that not only do we have new texts every night: we have a new medium, on average, about once every eighteen months. The task of Media Studies is therefore to provide the bases for careers in a field where work opportunities that our students will expect to fill do not yet exist. The creators of mobile phone applications, DVD interfaces, internet applications and computer games today are people who studied in the era of terrestrial television and 35mm film. Likewise policy-makers in telecommunications and creative industries and communications managers in public service and commercial workplaces face complexities scarcely dreamt of before the era of WSIS, WIPO and TRIPS. Our task is to bring to the future producers and citizens of a mediated world the best and most relevant knowledge that we can and to generate it in forms that will retain their relevance over the forty or fifty years of working life that our students can look forward to. Our students need not only to understand but to be creative performers of media, in any 21st century workplace. We are ethically bound to ensure that they are equipped to use or invent alternatives to the existing structures and practices of human communication.