Digital Media and Disciplinarity

This article asks two related questions: Is digital media studies a discipline, and should scholars within the field desire to move toward disciplinarity? Drawing on the writings of Michel Foucualt and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as several Anglo-American cultural studies of disciplinarity, the essay argues that digital media studies has not yet constituted a truly novel scholarly discourse. Because of that, our reasons for disciplinizing—to the extent that it is possible to choose to become a discipline—would be largely strategic. Given that the field is already successfully reproducing itself, the symbolic benefits of becoming a discipline are relatively limited, and such a move would also have significant intellectual costs.

Keywords:

• cultural studies
• digital media studies
• disciplinarity
• discipline
• Internet studies
• Michel Foucault
• new media studies
• Pierre Bourdieu
• sociology of knowledge

Many thanks to Carrie Rentschler, Lisa Nakamura, Nancy Baym, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Notes

1. Throughout this article I use “we” in a naive fashion. It is meant only as a “hail” to the reader, not to imply an existing, coherent bloc of digital media scholars.

2. It's a devil's choice in naming alternatives at the moment. I chose “digital media studies” over three additional terms because it is broad, descriptive of a common thread across widely varying research programs, and inclusive. “New media studies” implies a value judgment (think about how the word “new” gets used in the context of advertising or scholarship) and a periodization that I want to question. “Cyberculture studies” is nicely inclusive, though the only people I know who self-identify as cyberculture scholars are humanists. More to the point, I'm not sure we should assume, definitionally, that digital media create a coherent or separate cultural domain. “ICT studies,” meanwhile, seems to be a term largely used by people with a social science or policy orientation. To be fair, “digital media studies” has its problems as well, as Lev Manovich (2001) has clearly detailed, and he's probably right. One other point to make here is that I mean to define digital media studies as an academic field. By digital media studies I refer to the field and its scholarship as it exists in the university. While there are intellectuals outside the academic system, they are just that—not part of the system of disciplines within the university. Artists, activists, corporate research and development (R&D) people, and teenage hackers all have important things to teach scholars, to be sure, but their work and, more importantly, their working conditions are fundamentally different from the work and conditions for scholars.

3. “Exclusion” has come to have an exclusively negative connotation in some scholarly quarters. I don't mean it that way; just as a musician must exclude some notes from the scale to make a good melody, a scholar must exclude some approaches and ideas in order to create meaningful knowledge. That said, I am fully aware that such practices can have social costs if scholars are not self-reflexive about the relationship between their intellectual and institutional lives. I consider that further, later in this article.

4. John Mowitt (1992) has argued that the “text” exceeds the disciplinarity of literary study, but his argument is actually an attack on disciplines as such. One can find analogous arguments in most other fields of the humanities and social sciences. My question here is somewhat different: Given an existing institutional field of disciplines and interdisciplines, what is the best course of action for digital media scholars right now?

5. Like Fuller, Bourdieu sees this less as a value judgment than as an attitudinal or justificatory orientation.