What’s New?

Abstract

New media is of course the great disruptor. So, too, should be its study. Television Studies’ and Media Studies’ embrace of the “new” and their continuing focus on new media forms, practices, and technologies is not itself anything new. The new has a history and is, in fact, a historically specific category. All media were once new, the new regularly remediates the old, and because the “new” is a product and effect of industrial modernity, there has never been a time when we were not confronted with new media and new technologies. The fact of the history of both new media and its study, therefore, is worth revisiting so that we may be more reflective and skeptical in approaching the latest, newest media things. The implications of unreflective emphasis on the new are only becoming more urgent and the potential for dire consequences increasingly apparent.