Media Studies 2.0 by William Merrin

Author:William Merrin [Merrin, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781136186073
Google: yPMjAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-03-21T05:56:08+00:00

Duck science takes off

Discussing communication studies’ creation of its own historical narrative, Jefferson Pooley (2008) points out that what was most important was not its accuracy but its existence: ‘Communication research, as a field, badly needs the glue of tradition, however invented.’ With its vocational taint and ‘messy and recently formed institutional trappings’, Pooley says, ‘the field has from the beginning endured a deficit in legitimacy’. Ferdinand Tonnies’ 1930 comment as President of the German Sociological Association, questioning the need for a separate communication studies, highlighted the problem: ‘Why would we need press research within sociology?’, he asked, ‘ We don’t need a chicken or a duck science within biology.’

The question of disciplinary legitimacy is complex, but we can see it involves both internal and external factors. Internal factors include the subject’s institutional position, its academic activities, its acceptance within the politics of the academy, and its self-identity. External factors include its broader social status and value: its acceptance by government, by employers, by the public and by prospective students and their parents.

It is easy to see that in the post-war period first of all ‘communication studies’ and then later particular variants of this, usually called ‘media studies’ or ‘media and communication studies’, successfully achieved institutional success, possessing their own departments, chairs and degree-awarding powers, and developing and engaging in academic activities, such as awarding undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, hiring qualified staff, organising conferences, developing peer-reviewed specialist journals, publishing original research and creating professional and disciplinary bodies to oversee the teaching and research interests of the subject area. The contemporary expansion of student interest has ensured media and communication studies is economically important to universities, bringing with it some degree of acceptance within university hierarchies. This leaves the question of self-identity: the subject area’s framing of its own corpus of accepted theories, knowledge and methods and its agreement upon these.

US ‘communication studies’ has found this hardest. As a truly interdisciplinary subject it has found it difficult to agree upon a central focus of ideas and approaches. In his influential 1999 paper ‘Communication as a Field’, Robert Craig summarised these accumulated problems, arguing that ‘communication studies as an identifiable field of study does not exist yet’, due to the ‘lack of consensus’ between different traditions which have had almost no contact with each other. Nevertheless, he argued, the subject had the potential to become a field if dialogue could be achieved through the seven key traditions he identified: the rhetorical, semiotic, phenomenological, cybernetic, social-psychological, socio-cultural and critical perspectives. Though his classification-schema has been reproduced in most communication textbooks, later commentators such as Wolfgang Donsbach (in his 2006 paper ‘The Identity of Communication Research’, in the Journal of Communication) remain more sceptical, denying even a ‘common object’ of research among communication scholars and emphasising the continued divisions within this ‘field’, as well as the problems of its institutional position.

In contrast, media studies has been more successful at achieving an intellectual coherence, developing, by the end of the 20th century, a distinct disciplinary identity.

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