Abstract
As I close out my last year as reviews editor for New Media & Society, I wish to share my reflections concerning my 17 years in this position.
I am struck by how much the job of reviews editor has been shaped by some of the unique features of the journal itself. Some properties of the journal are widely known. Certainly, the journal’s publication metrics—number of submissions per year, number of articles published per year, impact factor, and so on—are indicators that New Media & Society is big and important and so on. Far more important than these matters is the ethos that informs every aspect of the journal’s functioning, an ethos that has been shaped by the journal’s editor, Steve Jones (and credit here is also due to Nick Jankowski, who worked alongside us for years). Steve has fostered a culture of voluntarism that pervades New Media & Society, and that gives the journal true vigor and effervescence. This is non-alienated academic labor. The idea at the journal has long been that the point is not to gatekeep or limit scholarship, nor to game the system to max out publication metrics for some reputational status, nor to simply make a “well-run” journal regardless of intellectual commitments. The most stunning aspect of New Media & Society is that it is guided from the bottom up by an effort to foster curiosity and enthusiasm in the study of new media. The paucity of cynicism in day-to-day practice at the journal has been nothing short of stunning to a cynic such as me.
The journal’s ethos derives almost entirely from Steve Jones himself. In the last 17 years, I have seen Steve shape New Media & Society into a journal that reflects the kinds of belief in scholarship we all should share. Without a shred of polluting ambition, and with an abundance of enthusiasm for the possibilities that new media scholarship can have, Steve has shown us all how good things cannot happen without steadfast dedication. There is a lesson here for all of us in academe.
As reviews editor, I have occupied a rare perch from which to regard the world of new media scholarship. The last 17 years seen a tremendous increase in the amount of scholarship about new media, and at the same time the scholarship has become more vigorously global, and frequently more urgent in its tone as scholarship attempts to come to terms with the heightened crises of the 21st century. When we at the journal determined that we would start to run review articles—manuscripts dedicated to providing overviews of subfields in new media study—my life as a reviews editor became even more interesting. Even a cursory glance at the review articles we have been publishing in the last decade provides a revealing glimpse into the unparalleled vigor of this field of study.
I have mentioned the voluntarist ethos of New Media & Society, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the work of the authors whose work I have edited. Book reviews and review essays are not a widely rewarded type of publication, but even without external rewards for the authors, I have been lucky to work with hundreds of different book review and review essay authors. I would like to take this chance to thank all of the authors for the work they have done. Book reviews are an indicator that we scholars take each other’s work seriously, and it is the authors of these reviews whose work I must credit here. Without an interest in the ideas at play, there simply is no scholarship worthy of the name. I would like to close by expressing my heartfelt gratitude to all the authors who have made the reviews section something I have been proud to be a part of. Thank you.