Steps toward cosmopolitanism in the study of media technologies

Abstract

Most scholarship on media technologies can be organized along two main dimensions of inquiry: the production or consumption of these technologies, and their content or material dimensions. This map of the field of inquiry would produce four specific research areas: the production of content, the consumption of content, the production of materiality, and the consumption of materiality. Despite their respective contributions, these silos have also resulted in important scholarly limitations. Thus, in this paper, we consider the intellectual opportunities that arise from reevaluating these traditions through the lens of cosmopolitanism, which promotes the crossing of scholarly territories in the study of media technologies in order to rethink assumptions and taken-for-granted processes. We propose some steps toward cosmopolitanism in the study of media technologies by elaborating on the theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, and design implications of conducting research at the intersection of these four areas.

Keywords:

• consumption
• content
• cosmopolitanism
• media technologies
• materiality
• production

One way to map the social and cultural study of media technologies is by organizing the scholarship along two main foci of inquiry. The first focus is on the production or consumption of these technologies, that is, how media technologies are created through particular processes and relations or how they are incorporated into the daily activities of households and organizations through various appropriation practices. The second is a focus on either content or material dimensions, that is, the understanding of media technologies as either texts infused with symbolic meaning or as technologies and cultural artifacts.

These foci can be situated within a two-dimensional map of the field of inquiry. In this way, four relatively distinct quadrants of scholarship emerge: production/content, consumption/content, production/materiality, and consumption/materiality. This division of intellectual labor has produced major insights about how media technologies are constructed, how users appropriate them, how the meaning tied to media technologies is created and interpreted, and what the consequences of their social circulation are. However, imposing a strong separation between the elements of each pair (production/consumption and content/materiality) has also resulted in important limitations in scholarship. This is because it is problematic to overlook the links between the elements of each pair. Production and consumption dynamics interpenetrate each other in ways that make it difficult to isolate them. Because they are so deeply interwoven, it is also problematic to investigate the content and material dimensions without acknowledging how they intersect.

In this paper, we envision alternative intellectual trajectories that might emerge from reevaluating these dominant assumptions through the lens of cosmopolitanism. Sociologists and scholars from other disciplines have employed the notion of cosmopolitanism to argue for a more universalistic concept of society, and to challenge political and methodological nationalism in the social theory (Beck, 2000, 2006; Fine, 2007). According to Beck, ‘The cosmopolitan perspective is an alternative imagination, an imagination of alternative ways of life and rationalities, which include the otherness of the other. It puts the negotiation of contradictory cultural experiences into the center of activities: in the political, the economic, the scientific and the social’ (2002, p. 18). Sociological work on cosmopolitanism has shown the limitations entailed by considering a given intellectual tradition as the sole ‘container of social processes’ and the ‘key-order’ for studying processes that cut across the concerns of various fields (Beck, 2002, p. 21). The main product of a cosmopolitan sociology, Beck (2002, p. 21) suggests, is creating fertile grounds for the ‘redefinition, reinvention and reorganization’ of research in the social sciences.

In a similar manner, by applying the metaphor of cosmopolitanism to the case of intellectual fields interested in the study of media technologies – such as sociology, communication, science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, and history – we argue for transcending traditions of inquiry anchored in a given set of assumptions and certainties through the exploitation of work done in other territories (what Beck refers to as ‘the otherness of the other’). Cosmopolitanism invites a reexamination of these certainties and assumptions by reconceiving them through ‘dialogical imaginations,’ that is, critical and creative explorations of the intersections between scholarly fields (Beck, 2002, p. 35). In this sense, cosmopolitanism stands in contrast to an intellectual provincialism that is committed to specific modes of inquiry without acknowledging work done in other territories. In short, a cosmopolitan sensibility promotes the crossing of territorial scholarly quadrants in the study of media technologies in order to rethink assumptions and taken-for-granted processes.

We begin by examining the advantages and limitations of conducting research situated within each one of the four quadrants mentioned above. Then, the second part of this essay discusses the theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, and design implications of conducting research at the intersection of both production and consumption, and content and materiality. This discussion stresses the potential that imagining alternative intellectual trajectories holds for the ‘redefinition, reinvention and reorganization’ of the space of inquiry on media technologies as a whole (Beck, 2002, p. 21).

Four quadrants of scholarship on media technologies

Scholarship on the production of content has typically been the domain of sociological research on media industries and institutions, and the political economy of communication (Gans, 1979; Gitlin, 2000; Mosco & McKercher, 2008; Wasko, 1982). Research in this tradition has shed light on the social, cultural, political, and organizational dimensions involved in the production of information. Gitlin's (2000) study of how prime time shows in the United States are produced illustrates work in this quadrant. According to Gitlin, three sets of factors shape how these shows are created: the decisions of executives, usually informed by statistics derived from ratings, tests, and shares, and scheduling theories and established formulas; the industrial complex, regulated through rules and structures (such as an oligopolistic structure, back-end deals, and commitments with suppliers and agents); and a particular context, informed by political, commercial, and religious forces. By opening the black box of prime time television production, Gitlin sheds new light on factors such as roles, norms, traditions, rituals, power, and symbols at play in the making of media content.

Research on the consumption of content has often been the purview of anthropological, sociological, and cultural studies of media audiences (Bird, 2003; Jin, 2011; Morley, 1980; Radway, 1984). This body of work has discussed how audiences appropriate media artifacts and analyzed the interpretive strategies deployed by users to make sense of the content conveyed through these artifacts. According to Livingstone (2004), ‘Viewers’ interpretations diverge depending on the symbolic resources associated with their socioeconomic position, gender, ethnicity and so forth’ (p. 79). In their classic analysis of the reception of Dallas in various ethnic communities, Liebes and Katz (1993) demonstrated that the meaning of the show varied according to the emotional and cognitive investment of these ethnic groups. Whereas some of them tended to assume the reality of the media text, others tended to highlight the constructed nature of the text.

Scholarship on the production of media artifacts has often been the province of sociological and historical analyses of the construction of technology and some work in the political economy of communication (Abbate, 2000; Bijker, 2010; Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987; Mosco, 1982; Sterne, 2003). Constructionist scholars have conceptualized media technologies as ‘a crystallized set of social and material relations’ (Sterne, 2006, p. 826) or a ‘relational effect’ (Law, 2010, p. 173). For example, in his analysis of the cultural origins of sound reproduction, Sterne (2003) examined how certain practices and audile techniques crystallized in specific technologies. He also discussed how these technologies became ‘sound media’ by entering a network of industries, institutions, and practices. According to Sterne (2003), ‘Sound-reproduced technologies are artifacts of particular practices and relations ‘all the way down’ […] The history of sound technology offers a route into a field of conjunctures among material, economic, technical, ideational, practical, and environmental changes’ (p. 7). Sterne thus illuminated the social, cultural, and political dynamics that underpin the construction of artifacts such as sound technologies.

Finally, sociological, psychological, communication, and historical scholarships have examined the consumption of media technologies and their wider circulation in society (Katz & Rice, 2002; Ling, 2008; Marvin, 1988; Sproull & Kiesler, 1991). Work in the traditions of medium theory and media ecology, for example, has long been devoted to understanding the significance of artifacts and technological features for communication processes (McLuhan, 1968; Meyrowitz, 1985; Scolari, 2012; Strate, 2006). For scholars in the diffusion of innovations framework, the consumption of media technologies is largely shaped by features such as the relative advantage of an innovation; its compatibility with the adopter's context; its simplicity or complexity; how easily it can be tried or tested before adoption; and the degree to which it can be observed by others (Rice & Rogers, 1980; Rogers, 2003; Valente & Rogers, 1995). Consumption is also shaped by the social system or context in which the adoption process takes place and the communication means used to make the innovation known. Some scholars have also considered the relationships between consumption dynamics and the materiality of media technologies through the lens of the theory of affordances (Gibson, 1979; Jensen, 2010).

The contributions and limitations of scholarship in this map can also be discussed by thinking the territory of inquiry not in terms of quadrants, but rather in terms of cardinal points (Figure 1). Seen in this way, scholarship located ‘north of the equator’, devoted either to studying production or consumption dynamics, is largely characterized by a relative disregard for the role of materiality in shaping – and being shaped by – content configurations. Conversely, research situated ‘south of the equator’, be it about production or consumption, shares the opposite problem, namely a significant disregard for the role of content configurations in influencing – and being influenced by – technology design and use practices of various sorts. In contrast to these assumptions, some studies reveal that materiality and content are deeply interconnected in either the production or the consumption of media technologies (Hayles, 2005; Jensen, 2010; Pinch & Trocco, 2002; Silverstone, 1994; Williams, 1975). In this body of work, media technologies are envisioned as what we have called ‘texto-material assemblages’, that is, bundles of content and materiality (Siles & Boczkowski, 2012), or what Hayles refers to as ‘technotexts’, that is, ‘[W]orks that strengthen, foreground, and thematize the connections between themselves as material artifacts and the imaginative realm of verbal/semiotic signifiers they instantiate’ (Hayles, 2002, p. 25). These studies suggest that the production and consumption of both materiality and content can be and often are shaped by the other dimension. Thus, for instance, the above-mentioned study by Gitlin leaves unanswered the question about whether content production dynamics were affected by issues such as the material conditions in the workplace, the broad infrastructure of media production, and the technologies deployed to know about the audience. Similarly, as Thompson's (2002) account of the entanglements of jazz as a music genre and the material conditions of urban life suggests, technological and sound production can be co-constructed in powerful ways. Thus, key in the history of sound technologies and their transformation into ‘sound media’ are the music and audio genres that have developed in response to the availability of formats, and that in turn might have triggered changes in the technology. By separating materiality and content, work that explores either one dimension without paying attention to the other has typically overlooked how these two dimensions intersect and why that matters. Thus, for example, theoretical frameworks devoted to the analysis of how either content or material features acquire stable forms (as either genres or artifacts) might be limited by their inattention to the constitutive entanglement of these two dimensions.

Figure 1. A four-quadrant map of the field of inquiry.

The situation in the eastern and western regions is quite similar to the equatorial hemispheres of Figure 1. Scholarship within the western region has relied on indirect evidence of user appropriation dynamics and given these dynamics a secondary role in shaping production processes. Conversely, research on the eastern region has often considered media texts and media artifacts as stand-ins for production activities. Returning to the examples provided above, the often complex and contingent nature of the production processes that yield the content of a television program such as Dallas or that generate a particular artifact are usually overlooked, or taken to be stand-ins for the intentions of their developers – which, in turn, are neither indirectly problematized nor directly interrogated in reception studies or the diffusion of innovations framework.

However, a few studies situated at the intersection of these regions show that whether or not potential links between production and consumption are significant must be a product of the research process rather than an assumption. By conducting empirical research of both production and consumption dynamics – rather than relying on indirect accounts – these scholars show why consumption matters when production is investigated, and why production is key to making sense of consumption (Douglas, 1987; Du Gay, Hall, Jones, Mackay, & Negus, 1997; Fischer, 1992; Grindstaff, 2002). For example, in his sociological account of fame in American culture, Gamson (1994) combined an analysis of celebrity media texts, the production of celebrity, and consumption activities by audiences. According to Gamson,

Negotiating the tug-of-war led me to privilege neither audience, producer, nor text but to focus instead on the moments and mechanisms of linkage between producers, audiences, and texts […] [T]his model directs attention to the varying ways in which each constrains and affects the other. (1994, p. 202)

This example thus suggests that how individuals and groups decode media texts (such as television programs) is not only shaped by the conditions of reception, as literature on audiences indicates, but also by the social, political, and technological factors that affect the production of content in the first place. Approaches that center exclusively on ‘audiencing’ (Fiske, 1992) dynamics would fail to take into account these important factors. Similarly, the trajectory of an innovation is not only a function of the dynamics of diffusion but of the values and practices embedded in their design. Understanding how these values and practices matter would remain undertheorized unless production dynamics are also empirically examined.

Steps toward cosmopolitanism in the study of media technologies

So far, this article has discussed the possibilities afforded and the constraints entailed by conducting research within specific quadrants. In what follows, we begin exploring what adopting a cosmopolitan sensibility implies. As noted above, the metaphor of cosmopolitanism is used here to investigate and exploit the ‘multitude of interconnections’ that arises when the intersections of these quadrants are explored (Beck, 2004, p. 131). We suggest steps toward cosmopolitanism in the study of media technologies by elaborating on the theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, and design implications of integrating the study of both content and materiality, and both production and consumption.

Theory development

Intellectual tendencies of a rather provincial type have somewhat limited research conducted within individual quadrants in the sense that major questions and explanations developed outside of one particular quadrant that might be relevant to account for processes across the quadrants have remained largely unexplored. A crucial expression of this provincial attitude has been the disciplinarization of research on media technologies. Returning to our cartographic metaphor, some approaches that account for the social and cultural lifecycle of media technologies have remained confined within the borders of disciplinary territories. For instance, whereas the study of the production and consumption of artifacts has often been the purview of sociological and historical accounts of technology, the reception and the political economy of media texts have usually been the province of communication, anthropological, and psychological studies (Boczkowski & Lievrouw, 2007; Wajcman & Jones, 2012). This is not to suggest that scholars have not examined work done in other quadrants, but rather that when they have done so, they have incorporated insights from them mostly to supplement their approaches rather than exploited them to rethink their theoretical apparatuses.

Despite their many contributions, provincialism and disciplinarization have come at the price of heuristic power and theoretical innovation. In contrast, cosmopolitanism in the study of media technologies seeks to illuminate research problems that cut across the concerns of scholars in different territories and to rethink work that is done in the space of inquiry. This requires not only recognizing work done in other fields and attempting to integrate it, but also envisioning this work as an opportunity to rethink established notions within disciplinary fields to expand the repertoire of conceptual tools. A significant result of this cosmopolitan attitude would be an inter- or trans-disciplinary orientation toward inquiry on the lifecycle of media technologies. To be sure, the problems of disciplinarization have been the subject of much previous discussion and debate. By proposing a cosmopolitan lens, we seek to highlight its potential as a partial solution to some longstanding shortcomings in scholarship rather than point to its novelty.

Implementing this attitude in practice would entail building on existing theoretical frameworks and traditions to investigate processes and outcomes that are usually taken for granted in other territories. For example, the study of user agency provides a fruitful site for an exercise of this kind. The division of intellectual labor to investigate this issue reveals the disciplinary loyalties that we discussed above. Sociologists of technology have conceptualized users as part of ‘relevant social groups’ (Pinch & Bijker, 1987) that share a common interpretation of the meaning of an artifact. Alternatively, researchers in communication studies have envisioned these users as ‘interpretive communities’, that is, groupings that express social, political, and cultural interests through shared interpretations of media texts (Jensen, 1990). In his investigation of early blog users in the late 1990s, Siles (2012) bridged these two concepts together by showing that these users were both a relevant social group and an interpretive community. The material appropriation practices and interpretive strategies of these users were mutually constitutive. Siles concluded:

The linkage of artifact and content […] lay at the heart of the formation of weblog users as a community. In this sense, the investigation of user communities can benefit from an analytical approach that combines the analysis of the processes of attributing meaning to artifacts (as relevant social groups), the dynamics of producing and interpreting the content that these artifacts enable (as interpretive communities), and the interdependence of these activities. (2012, p. 794)

To tie these activities together, Siles (2011) relied on the notion of articulation, a central idea in cultural studies. Articulation helped to theorize how linking the materiality and the content of these websites was fundamental in the co-construction of blogs and their users.

This brief example shows that cosmopolitanism in the study of media technologies demands an attitude toward theory development that includes an open mind in terms of using existing notions from different traditions of inquiry, an awareness of their advantages and limitations, and a willingness to combine these notions in an innovative manner. The next subsection shows that this attitude is also resonant with strategies for conducting the empirical research that provides the material for such theoretical work.

Methodological strategies

The constitution of bodies of knowledge in each of the four quadrants has usually involved the deployment of specific research methods. Scholars have usually turned to ethnographic methods to study production (Hess, 2001). Although researchers have conducted ethnographies to analyze consumption dynamics, most work in the eastern region of our map has turned to surveys and interviews as their methods of choice (Dillman, 2007). Moreover, technology scholars have made artifacts and technological systems their privileged units of analysis (Bijker, 2010). In contrast, media researchers have typically used different kinds of content analysis techniques to examine media texts (Krippendorff, 2004).

A cosmopolitan perspective would require combining methods of different capabilities in order to generate data that enables examination of the issues that connect various quadrants. Beck refers to such strategies as ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ (Beck, 2006; Beck & Sznaider, 2006). Methodological cosmopolitanism may be defined as an empirical sensibility toward the use of multiple methods on the links between production and consumption, and materiality and content in the lifecycle of media technologies. The goal of cosmopolitanism is not simply to add methods with different strengths within a single study but to combine them into an empirical apparatus that can capture the interpenetration of the relevant dimensions of media technologies within a given project.

An example of methodological cosmopolitanism is Boczkowski (2010)’s research design for his study of homogenization in the news. Combining insights from the sociology of work, organizations, media, and culture, the research design blended data obtained from ethnography, content analysis, and server logs to show not only the mutual shaping of production and consumption, but also how the content and materiality affect each other. One of the findings from the study is that the increase of imitation in journalistic work affects disproportionally more hard news than other types of content, such as soft news, editorials, and various forms of commentary. The ethnography of news production revealed that this was a combination of new technological possibilities that make it easier for journalists to monitor and replicate the work of competitors and divergent organizational and cultural dynamics that shape the production of various types of content. However, because of its organizational focus, the ethnography could not yield conclusive knowledge about whether it affected this organization in particular or the wider journalistic field more generally. Boczkowski combined this ethnographic account with a content analysis of the evolution of news stories across the main print and online news outlets in the Argentine journalistic field. Therefore:

Had the inquiry looked solely inside the newsroom, it would have been able to only speculate about the field-level implications of the production processes for the news that circulates in society. Had the study concentrated exclusively on the homogenization of news products, it would have been more difficult to determine that homogenization resulted from an expansion of imitation in production (other processes could have generated greater similarity in the news) and to make sense of the timing and thematic composition of the trend. (Boczkowski, 2010, p. 174)

As this example suggests, a cosmopolitan sensibility creates the grounds for triangulation as a methodological principle by illuminating areas and issues that need to be investigated when the intersections of traditionally separated research territories are explored.

Pedagogical opportunities

The classroom setting is a critical locale for developing scholarship within and across intellectual fields. Consistent with the theoretical and methodological preferences espoused by scholars in accounting for the dynamics of production, consumption, materiality, and content, teaching in academic institutions has tended to reproduce the borders of the quadrants described above. But since teaching also plays a crucial role in helping to generate new intellectual agendas, envisioning novel pedagogical approaches to the study of media technologies is an important means to further develop a cosmopolitan sensibility in this domain of inquiry.

For instance, a typical graduate curriculum in the interdisciplinary field of STS usually involves courses on key theories to analyze the technology–society relationship, as well as the history, sociology, and politics of science and technology. More recently, courses have also incorporated more systematic training on how to investigate the role of users in shaping technological change. As a result, STS students usually develop skills in the use of case studies and qualitative methods such as ethnography and archival research. In contrast, a representative curriculum for graduate training in communication and media studies generally includes extensive preparation on the study of how media texts are produced and consumed. It also incorporates training on theories of cultural production, political economy, and audience and reception analysis. Quantitative and qualitative techniques are normally taught, with the former often receiving more weight in graduate training.

Cosmopolitanism in the study of media technologies requires extending these practices through the design of particular curricula and specific courses that help students learn how to explore the intersections of production and consumption, and content and materiality. At the curricular level, courses can analyze the lifecycle of media technologies through the lenses of each of the four quadrants discussed above. In addition, specific courses can be designed to integrate scholarship from various quadrants. This would require providing students with training of a plurality of techniques and the sensibility to know how to combine them in productive and creative ways.

At the course-specific level, it would be critical to develop classes that bring together scholarship in at least two, if not all four, of the quadrants together, and problematize the benefits and limitations of the respective scholarships with an eye to exploring the possible articulations across them. Boczkowski conducted an experience of this kind during two years at Northwestern University. This graduate seminar began with four sessions that addressed the scholarship within each quadrant separately, to help students identify the advantages and disadvantages of conducting research that segregates production from consumption and materiality from content. In the following weeks, the course explored studies that bridged either the production/consumption or the materiality/content divide, or both. As the seminar unfolded, students were required to think about potential research projects at the center of the four research quadrants. These projects crystalized in a research design that was part of the required activities that the students had to produce for the class. Projects were in turn collectively discussed and further developed in the final weeks of the seminar. This brief example shows the generative capacity of cosmopolitanism in graduate student training.

Design dynamics

Scholars and developers have increasingly acknowledged the role of users in designing media technologies (Bardini, 2000; Oudshoorn & Pinch, 2003). Research on ‘participatory design’ has helped to illuminate how a multiplicity of users and actors can engage in the design and development of media technologies. Despite these valuable contributions, most work in this tradition has focused on consumption and materiality and failed to fully address the significance of production and content for design matters.

Regarding production dynamics, work in the sociology and history of technology and the political economy of communication shows that organizational processes in the production and distribution of media technologies significantly shape their use. Designers and developers would thus benefit from a better understanding of how both artifacts and texts are produced, distributed, and commercialized. Cosmopolitanism envisions design as a process shaped by the dynamics that variously connect the production and the consumption of media technologies, rather than an isolated moment or phase. Thus, this perspective seeks to understand the design of media technologies by looking at how production is structured and organized, how these technologies circulate, and how they reach user groups through different means and at different moments of development.

Researchers have also emphasized how following the ‘biography’ or the ‘journey’ of an artifact might help identify loci for influencing its development (Hyysalo, 2010; Rip & Schot, 2002). Considering these processes can contribute to identify crucial moments, sites, and dynamics that mark the lifecycle of media technologies. These processes point to what Schot and de la Bruhèze (2003) conceptualize as ‘mediation junctions’, that is, sites

of mutual articulation and alignment of product characteristics and user requirements […] influenced not only by the work of producers and users but also by the work of mediators and by the existence of institutional loci and arenas for mediation work. (p. 230)

In this sense, a cosmopolitan recognition of how production and consumption intersect helps to shed light on how agency is distributed between designers, bundles of artifacts and texts, users, and intermediaries.

Designers and analysts of media technologies have often considered content as secondary to issues of materiality. When assessing the value of the actor-network theory for participatory design, Callon (2004) argued that, ‘Intellectual achievements, ideas, projects, plans, production of information [in design], are through and through material processes. Technologies shape their content’ (p. 7). In a similar manner, scholars have often used the notion of affordances, one of the most generative ideas in scholarship on design, to refer to the materiality of media technologies (Norman, 1988). But analyses of how users take advantage of a media artifact's affordances to create and interpret content, and how these practices might shape design processes, have been rather scarce. Thus, while acknowledging that technologies shape their content, as Callon suggests, a cosmopolitan sensibility to design would also seek to understand how content shapes its technologies. Content dynamics should be considered as a constitutive dimension of the process of design, rather being implicitly treated as a supplement to materiality.

In summary, a cosmopolitan perspective sensitizes us to look at the technological design as a process that is linked with the dynamics traditionally studied across the quadrants, rather than a phenomenon that belongs to a single one. Such perspective will not only lead to a better understanding of the factors that inform technological design, but could also contribute to a more thorough assessment of the dynamics that shape the lifecycle of media technologies.

Concluding remarks

A central attitude of curiosity about the objects of inquiry characterized the early phase of research on both media and technology. However, as dialogues became reified into self-contained intellectual quadrants, these objects of inquiry became ends into themselves rather than means toward a goal of empirical enlightenment and theoretical development. In this way, the overall tone became one of provincialism rather than cosmopolitanism. Thus, moving forward in the study of media technologies might require, in a paradoxical fashion, also going backwards by revisiting the cosmopolitan sensibility that animated prior phases in the development of scholarship on each component of the pair, media and technology, separately.

Digital media technologies have come to play an increasingly ubiquitous role in our experience of the world. A cosmopolitan sensibility toward the study of media technologies uses the renewed curiosity about media technologies triggered by their ubiquity as a means to bring about innovative combinations of scholars and ideas from various fields. In this sense, cosmopolitanism envisions media technologies not as the destination but as a point of departure for exploring the multiple dimensions that constitute them and the significance of how these dimensions intersect.

A critical outcome of cosmopolitanism in the study of media technologies is the creation of grounds for examining relevant matters across the broader landscape of the social sciences and the humanities. Despite the centrality of media technologies in almost every aspect of contemporary social, political, cultural, and economic life, scholarship about them has not only self-segregated into the above-mentioned quadrants, but also been somewhat isolated from larger debates in the social, cultural, and behavioral theory. In other words, work on media technologies has been the concern of a set of distinct intellectual provinces, rather than also a contributor to theoretical discourses cutting across multiple objects of inquiry. But because media technologies have become, as Appadurai puts it, crucial in ‘rebuilding the fabric of reality itself’ (from an interview in Morley, 2011, p. 45), their study presents an opportunity for broader intellectual engagement in the social sciences and the humanities. Using the renewed interest in media technologies as a point of departure, cosmopolitanism affords an opportunity to move in this direction.

Acknowledgements

An extended version of this essay is forthcoming in Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality and society (Eds.), Gillespie, Boczkowski, and Foot (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press). For comments on this and the extended version, we thank the anonymous reviewers; Tarleton Gillespie, Kirsten Foot, Geof Bowker, Gina Neff, Leah Lievrouw, Jonathan Sterne, Lucy Suchman, Trevor Pinch, Michael Stern, and Shelia Cotten; students at Northwestern University who took the ‘Media Meets Technology’ seminar with the first author in the Spring 2009 and Winter 2010 quarters; and conference attendees at the 2012 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Notes on contributors

Pablo Javier Boczkowski is Professor and Director of the Program in Media, Technology and Society at Northwestern University. His research program examines the transition from print to digital media, with a focus on the organizational and occupational dynamics of contemporary journalism. He is the author of Digitizing the news: Innovation in online newspapers (MIT Press, 2004), News at work: Imitation in an age of information abundance (University of Chicago Press, 2010), joint with Eugenia Mitchelstein, The news gap: When the supply and demand of information do not meet (MIT Press, forthcoming later in 2013), and more than 30 articles in journals and edited volumes. [email: [email protected]]

Ignacio Siles is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. His doctoral dissertation examines issues pertaining to the stabilization and use of new media through an analysis of the historical development of blogs in the United States and France. He has authored articles in Communication Theory, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, Social Studies of Science, and The Information Society. [email: [email protected]]