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New Media & Society
http://nms.sagepub.com
And lead us not into thinking the new is new: a bibliographic case for new
media history
Benjamin Peters
New Media Society 2009; 11; 13
DOI: 10.1177/1461444808099572
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http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/1-2/13
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new media & society
Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC
Vol11(1&2): 13–30 [DOI: 10.1177/1461444808099572]
ARTICLE
And lead us not into
thinking the new is new:
a bibliographic case for
new media history
BENJAMIN PETERS
Columbia University, USA
Abstract
Must the concept of the study of new media seem so
thoroughly ordinary? What does it mean to study new media
other than to study media that exist now? Prompted by the
10th anniversary of New Media & Society, this article aims to
help rethink and elongate the history of new media studies by
merging new media studies and media history literatures.The
recursive definition and use of the term ‘new media’ are
reviewed. New media need to be understood not as emerging
digital communication technologies, so much as media with
uncertain terms and uses. Moreover, by recognizing that new
media studies quickly become history and that most media
history is already new media history, this article calls for a use of
both literatures to focus on the renewable nature of media in
history. It reflects on a complementary attitude toward history
meant to help usher in a sounder future of the study of the past.
Key words
bibliography • digital media • historiography • language
• literature review • media history • New Media & Society
• new media history • new media studies
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New Media & Society 11(1&2)
‘The past,’ [the student] thought, ‘is linked with the present by an
unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.’ And it seemed
to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he
touched one end the other quivered. (Chekhov, 1985[1894]: 95)
INTRODUCTION
It is by now mundane to suggest that the human interest in new
media is old – that in fact the history of new media is ancient. That even
the most recent media have contingent and intelligible histories seems by
now wholly commonsensical.Yet, the response that there is in fact
something new afoot can sound, at times, equally valid and tired. One
emphasizes historical continuity, the other change. Of course, both are
partly right, but either emphasis alone is only one part of the modern
dialectic of history, a pattern of back-and-forth in play ever since
Thucydides wrote his history in opposition to Herodotus. While Hegel
(1892[1837]) has asserted that the whole of history itself advances through
dialectic tensions, it stands to reason that at least the writing of history does
so. The way in which scholars understand history colors and shapes the
evolving and contingent enterprise of understanding media, and specifically
to study new media is to ride squarely atop the ever-unfolding crest
between the past and the present.
This article reflects on the use and misuse of the term ‘new media’ over the
last few decades of scholarship, traces some concrete guidelines (namely, the
recurrence of ideas in media as a lighthouse for those struggling to find their
way through the currents of media change), and outlines an attitude toward
the practice of history compatible with a combination of the best of new
media studies and media history scholarship.
There is no doubt some insight to be gained from a brief rehearsal of the
continuity and change debate: the tension between, on the one side, that
history is always past and, on the other, that new media are importantly now.
On the one hand, at its extreme, the continuity argument of history holds
that all things at all times are, have been and will forever more remain
inseparably related and similar. In this view, modern humans live out life on
the theatre of the richest of all datasets, the ever-present past; our language,
habits, tools and environment all follow the course of historical forces
unfolding in the present.The modern moment may not be predetermined
but it is contingent on pre-existing contexts: the career of the conventional
historian depends on it. On the other hand, those scholars prone to quote the
preacher in Ecclesiastes, that there is nothing new under the sun, similarly
may overlook the pressing and genuine problems that sustain contemporary
media scholarship.We face daily dramatic and mundane ruptures, shifts and
epistemological breaks in modern life.There is much to celebrate about and
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Peters: A bibliographic case for new media history
learn from the fact that today is not yesterday. Even (and the conclusion
suggests, perhaps especially) top historians admit that devoting a career to the
past is a circuitous path to understanding the present. New media matter and
they matter now.
Alone, neither continuity nor change approaches to media history are fully
satisfactory. However, viewed together, they complement one another: the
historian’s eye for contingent change can lead to a fuller understanding of the
contemporary relevance of media; so too can new media scholars engage the
present more forcefully with historiographical cautions in mind.We must
push beyond the commonsense fact that history is past and that new media is
now. Consider instead that new media once made the historical record
possible and that ever since, history writing takes place importantly in the
present.The insight that new media are ancient and history writing happens
now helps to open a new chapter on the union of new media studies and
media history.
This article proceeds by outlining, first, the potential and problems of the
term ‘new media’, presenting two working definitions for the term and a
five-step cycle of new media evolution, from obscurity to obviousness and
back again. Second, it reviews the literature to make three points: that media
scholarship can benefit from thinking of media as renewable (rather than as
only new or not), that most media history is already new media history and
that the strength of new media studies and media history lies in their merger.
Lastly, the conclusion reflects on what a fresh understanding of renewable
media may contribute to the media scholar’s sense of history as an at-once
cautious and imaginative enterprise.
TERMINOLOGICAL POTENTIAL AND THE PROBLEM OF NEW
MEDIA
It is a running joke among peers that securing the ideal position in
industry, the academy, or otherwise will depend on working the term
‘new media’ into the first sentence of one’s elevator pitch introduction.
This joke, like most, is an uncomfortable half-truth. Those already working
on supposedly new media-related topics smile and nod knowingly, while
those less inclined to study cutting-edge issues of computer-mediated
communication (CMC), information and communication technologies
(ICTs) and digital media alternate between giggling nervously and outright
grumbling. The mistake lies not with those interested in new media per se,
but in a shared failure of historical imagination. With a little conceptual
attuning, the term ‘new media’ can seed rich ways of rethinking the whole
enterprise of media history: in brief, that the idea of new media belongs
primarily to media historians. Media historians should be seizing upon, and
certainly not begrudging, the relatively recent discovery of the term.
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New Media & Society 11(1&2)
The term ‘new media’ began in the latter-half of the 20th-century.The
Oxford English Dictionary attributes its first use to the master wordsmith,
showman and communication scholar Marshall McLuhan (1960) in the
Journal of Economic History. However, McLuhan used the term at least as early
as 1953 in a Queen’s Quarterly article on Harold Innis (McLuhan, 1953),
which doubly roots the origins of new media theory in Canada. McLuhan
first uses it in association with technical characteristics such as ‘electronic
information gathering’ and ‘global reach’ which, although novel at the time,
seem almost thoroughly ordinary to most users of digital media in the early
21st century. Of course, the growth of message transmission in volume,
distance, speed and capacity is important. However, a technical basis for
understanding media belongs more squarely to postwar sciences of
information theory and signal engineering than it does to the social scientific
study of emerging media.
Although McLuhan may be the origin for the misplaced technical
emphasis, his association of the term with global commerce in 1960 appears
increasingly on target. Since the early 1990s, it has grown exponentially in
use. A simple tally of the number of times it appears in LexisNexis Englishlanguage world publications shows only a trickle of hits between 1972 and
1990.The number then rises slowly in the early 1990s, increases sharply in
the late 1990s, peaks at more than 1000 mentions per day in 2000 and then
plateaus at slightly less than peak strength in the years shortly thereafter.The
term ‘new media’ came of age with the arrival and maturing of the new
millennium. As Elihu Katz wonderfully observed, God gave television to the
social sciences and film to the humanities (Pooley, 2005) – business, it seems,
has inherited new media, while historians content themselves with handme-downs.
Most Anglophone students use ‘new media’ as a vague umbrella term for
emerging communication technologies which happen to be digital. However,
as of summer 2008, resources such as Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) and
Google (www.google.com) indicate a consistent association of the term not
with the emergent quality but the digital construction of those media.To this
new media historians must protest:‘new’ does not mean ‘digital’, or at least it
cannot mean that for long; at the current pace of technological change, soon
‘digital’ will become ordinary and then ‘old’.To be clear: the scholarship on
the rise of the digit as a modern cultural trope is already deep-seated and
fascinating (Siegert, 2003;Turner, 2005, 2006) but to keep it that way, scholars
must look beyond the technical constitution of a medium as the best proxy
for sustaining interest in it.Technological construction is only a temporary
approximation for a medium’s modern relevance.Yoking new media scholarship
to digital technologies speeds the term – and the work that relies on it –
toward conceptual obsolescence.
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Peters: A bibliographic case for new media history
Consider Roger Silverstone’s characteristically compelling introductory
remarks in the 1999 inaugural issue of this journal. In response to the
question ‘What’s new about new media?’, he writes:
[T]he new is new.The technologies that have emerged in recent years,
principally but not exclusively digital technologies, are new.They do new things.
They give us new powers.They create new consequence for us as human
beings.They bend minds.They transform institutions.They liberate.They
oppress … Novelty is, at this point, our problem. (1999: 10; emphasis in original)
Of course, Silverstone is right, at least in part: digital media do these things
and there is an undeniable urgency to study contemporary digital media.We
are awash in them (Gitlin, 2003). However, five years later in her 2004
introduction to this journal, Leah Lievrouw responds to the prompt ‘What’s
changed about new media?’, with the following:
If there is a single difference between the ‘what’s new’ collection in 1999 and
the present ‘what’s changed’ collection, it is that the earlier hesitation about the
role and significance of new media has given way to much more confidence …
virtually every piece [in this journal issue] remarks on what might be called the
‘mainstreaming’ of new media. [The internet has become] banal [and CMC is]
slouching toward the ordinary. (Lievrouw, 2004: 10)
What was new then is no longer now: the (digital) media identified as new in
1999 are more or less ordinary, commonplace and understood by 2009.
Of course, there is ample room for many types of new media study. Not
only can technical, presentist and historical work coexist in the same field,
they can and should at times coexist in the same scholar – all the more reason
to work for the cross-fertilization of intellectual fields. In short, the concept
of ‘new media’ cannot refer to any particular set of technologies: the term
must sustain fascination across time and space divisions, history and social
groups.The present 10-year anniversary special issue of New Media & Society
sounds a timely response to Silverstone’s call ‘to confront history and
historiography, theory and methodology, both in the context of adjucating
between evolution and revolution and in framing our judgments about cause
and effect’ (1999: 11) and, in the process, offers a performative corrective to
his fine phrase: novelty must be, at all points of history, not only this one, our
problem.
TOWARD TWO DEFINITIONS OF ‘NEW MEDIA’
The ‘new’ part of new media may be what makes workable the merger of
new media studies and media history scholarship.The term needs to be
rethought: moreover, it needs to be continually rethought.That is, ‘new
media’ needs a definition that demands that the novelty of media be
repeatedly re-examined: a definition that lives in the time and place of its
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New Media & Society 11(1&2)
making.The principle of recurrent change is reflected in the two provisional
definitions that follow: first, new media can be understood as emerging
communication and information technologies undergoing a historical process
of contestation, negotiation and institutionalization. Here of course, the
phrase ‘communication and information technologies’ playfully reverses the
term ICTs in the hopes of pushing beyond the transmission of information
to include any environment that constructs and coordinates meaning. In
addition, the terms ‘contestation’, ‘negotiation’ and ‘institutionalization’ are
meant to suggest ways to think through how media arc from social obscurity
to invention, innovation, obviousness and obsolescence.The arc concept is
sketched below.
Many scholars have worked on the problem of charting, naming and
conceptualizing the sweeping trajectories of media evolution: the work of
Joseph Schumpeter (1934), Eric Von Hipple (1990, 2005), Norbert Wiener
(1993), Everett Rogers (1995) and Rudolph Stöber (2004), for example, all
offer schematic looks at the influences that make media more or less new.
Synthesizing and adapting their work into a piece of intellectual scaffolding
(for temporary use and thorough dismantling), this article suggests that most
modern media pass through the following five periods:
1. technical invention – during which media are recognized rarely as
‘new’ and usually thought of as ‘old plus’;
2. cultural innovation – during which media develop new social uses;
3. legal regulation – during which the interested parties explicitly
contest and negotiate for media power;
4. economic distribution – which continues until media become
5. social mainstream – the point at which media are no longer new.
Then, facing a new and improved version of itself, a medium may fade
from obviousness to obsolescence, sometimes disappearing entirely from social
memory. Of course, not all media make it through all, let alone any, of these
stages. However, at some point, historical forces – perhaps through a
breakthrough in use, technology, law or socio-economic demand – spark the
core idea of a medium (e.g. the telegraph or television) to express itself in
new form and the next cycle begins anew.
The second definition of new media is much simpler:‘new media are media
we do not yet know how to talk about’.They are uncertain objects, their
terms are unclear; their use, purpose and impact are not yet fully understood.
Such uncertainty can attend both cutting-edge technologies (e.g. cloud or
quantum computing) as well as, perhaps more importantly, everyday mass
media. For example, it seems harder to talk about television today than it was
20 years ago:YouTube (www.youtube.com), videophones and online cable
programming are renewing it. In a strange way, the typewriter can be as new
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Peters: A bibliographic case for new media history
to me as the personal digital assistant (PDA), although it is likely that any
present cross-generational study will show that the typewriter is, on a whole, a
more stable object of discourse. However, this will remain true only until at
some point in the future both the typewriter and PDA are equally forgotten
and ready for renewal.The novelty of new media is a function of our account
of who is talking and who is remembering.
In short, new media are, by definition, definitional puzzles.These two
provisional definitions may be used together to suggest useful concepts as well
as categories for study, such as actors (inventors, early adopters, advertisers),
social mass influences (public opinion, democratic legal norms, popular
demand) and institutions (press, courts, markets). Perhaps the key conceptual
question of new media – for whom and when are which media new – asks
scholars to engage and become those who openly struggle to classify, name
and codify media.The assertion that new media scholarship is recursive and
self-reflexive in design will surprise few: for even as we hope to advance
social understanding of media, we recognize that our success will only help to
make ordinary the very things whose novelty attracted widespread attention
in the first place.
LITERATURE REVIEW
New media history and the idea of media renewability
Examples of consciously and unconsciously new media history scholarship are
legion. Among them, Lev Manovich’s (2001) compelling and popular work
The Language of New Media is among the first in a recent wave of books to
draw out explicitly a longer history of new media using digital media
scholarship.The accomplishment of bringing to light the work of new media
history overshadows the work’s reliance on a technical definition of new
media. A leading new media scholar in cinema and visual arts, Manovich
defines new media as computing and cinema technologies that share five
characteristics: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability
and transcoding, writing at one point ‘a new media object can be described
formally (mathematically)’ (2001: 27). His approach has serious virtues: his
elegant yet short history traces these characteristics back to Charles Babbage’s
‘analytical engine’ and the daguerreotype in the 1830s, and makes substantial
contributions to digital media scholarship along the way. He also sees in
almost two centuries of digital media a spellbinding shift in the structure of
information from narrative to database form.The recent rash of concern
about the construction and future of narrative, he suggests, may be a result of
the fact that for the first time we can observe narrative from outside it.
Yet whatever its brilliance, Manovich’s historical work wholly mistakes
digital visual media for new media and, in the process, leaves too little room
for questions of how contemporary media share affinities with their
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predecessors. Surely numerical representation, modularity, automation,
variability and transcoding do not capture the singular essence of 19thcentury new media developments in radio, magnetism, mesmerism, artificial
intelligence and acoustics? No single definition could or should do all this.
Manovich’s work also reasserts the dominance of the eye as the subject and
tool for studying new media in cinema and visual arts. Stimulating work by
Siegfred Zielenski (2006) and Jonathan Crary (1992) takes important steps
toward a multisensory, if still heavily visual, study of the arts.While in
Manovich’s case, the eye may rightfully rule visual arts, media studies need
not cling to that sensory experience as its dominant paradigm.
Instead, equal attention should be paid to emerging sound studies
surrounding new media (Millard, 1995; Sterne, 2003;Thompson, 2002;
Wurtzler, 2007) as well as the developing research of touch, taste, smell, heat,
pain, location, balance and other sensory experiences (Taussig, 1993). Of
particular note is Jonathan Sterne’s (2003) The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of
Sound Reproduction, which provides historical and philosophical foundations
for rethinking the modern place of sound and communications as a whole, as
an act of the many rather than the single, isolated individual. Sterne’s nudge
of the field of communications and media history away from an exclusively
visual focus is reminiscient of the even more expansive work done by a
recent wave of German scholars that spans, often at once, metaphysics, physics
and the humanities (Hagen, 2005; Kraemer, 2008; Siegert, 2003): from the
human physique of pain and pleasure in media (Winkler, 1998) to
examinations of media as historical records themselves; from card catalogs
and paper (Krajewski, 2008), to paper machines (Dotzler, 1996) to files
(Vismann, 2008). (Many articles by the aforementioned scholars are available
online in both German and English.)
Also consider Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilizations (1934), which sets
a high standard for those inclined to grand histories of technological
influence. In combining ‘wishes, habits, ideas, goals’ with ‘industrial processes’
and technologies, he saw in the social-material complexes of ‘technics’ the
shadows of much larger civilizational changes. Consider three such technics:
clock, mining and glass. First, the clock reoriented Europe from the
cosmological sense of time as an eternal now to a unidirectional timeline (see
also Anderson, 1991; Fleck 1981[1937]; Galison, 1987, 2003). Second,
Mumford saw the mine’s dirt, smoke and danger leading to innovations in
ventilation, water pumps, furnaces, air conditioning and train cars, as well as
to free workers giving into slave-wage labor and early labor value abstraction
for the first time. Much of industrial society sprung from the earliest forms of
mining in central Germany.Third, glass in Renaissance Europe transformed
indoor life as well as the study of the outside natural world.Windows let in
the first indoor light in the winter, led to more interest in domestic
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cleanliness, personal hygiene and a mentality friendly to scientific sterilization;
glass spectacles lengthened literate life; non-conducive glass beakers, test tubes,
flasks, thermometers, lenses, prisms and slides gave the natural sciences
analytical power and stewarded in a culture tolerant of demands for external
evidence. Of course, Mumford has been faulted by Harold Innis, Marshall
McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler for relying too heavily on the intrinsic logics
of technologies, but still the study of ‘stuff ’ persists.
If there is an emerging tradition of openly self-reflexive new media history –
one that looks to the co-evolution of media and their publics – its founding
classic is arguably Carolyn Marvin’s (1988) first book When Old Technologies
Were New, which engages questions of the cultural reception of electrical
technologies, especially the telephone and (wonderfully) the electric light, in
the late 19th century. Marvin’s conclusion on Hirmondô subscription
telephone broadcasting in early 20th-century Budapest sets the stage for
future scholars to think through further how yesteryear’s new media may
re-emerge in the present.
As John Peters (2004) argues, the novelty of media often comes in
employing and combining fresh configurations of what already existed but
what was never present before. Consider how early cinema merged the
daguerreotype (early photography), magic lanterns (early slideshow
projectors) and kinetoscopes (an early individual movie projector using
perforated sequential images and a high-speed shutter); the first newspapers in
Germany combined the stagnant industries of the printing press with daily
circulation; and emergent telegraphy technology has a surprisingly long
history. As Carolyn Marvin writes:
In a historical sense, the computer is no more than an instantaneous telegraph
with a prodigious memory … all the communications inventions since have
simply been elaborations on the telegraph’s original work. (1988: 3)
Alexander Graham Bell thought of his telephone as an ‘improvement in
telegraphy’ and the radio was first called ‘ethereal telegraphy’, whose core
idea – to write across distances – appears in the optical telegraphy of military
towers and mountaintop bonfire signaling.
Following the core idea of telegraphy rather than any particular instance of
telegraph technology, Peters (2006) expands upon James Carey’s (1988) classic
telegraph essay to point out that a larger 19th-century complex of optical,
magnetic, physiological, chemical, acoustic and electromagnetic telegraphic
technologies helped to rethink body–machine metaphors (wired nerves and
organic networks), prepare the way for process-switching computing, imagine
microscopic and astronomical periods of time and led to Einsteinian insights
of space–time relativity.The long sweep of new telegraphy history, it seems, is
both ancient and spreading.
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New Media & Society 11(1&2)
It is not necessarily true that a medium need be new only once: again,
media are renewable and they tend to renew themselves in the gaps, silences and
white spaces left by the media that displaced them.While it is true that all
media were once new before they were old (i.e. widely diffused, mainstream,
standardized, no longer contested), it is also possible for a later incarnation of
the communication form of the medium to appear as new, if not newer, than
the first. In her smart Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of
Culture, Lisa Gitelman (2006) analyzes the gendered economy of the Edison
phonograph in juxtaposition with how scientists in the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency fixed a digital document with units that change
over time, and in the process she distinguishes between media as technologies
(such as the phonograph) and as institutions (such as Universal Studios) as
two ways in which to understand media in the process of media history.
Public memory for media begins to forget the messy process of new-media
formation (a combination of both technologies and institutions), she argues,
the moment that society accepts a particular use for a medium as obvious or
as no longer new. Her forcible call (Gitelman, 2006; Gitelman and Pingree,
2004) is to read forgotten media back onto their histories, thus making them
freshly intelligible. Again, media cannot die for they do not live; they molt,
transform and, as Gitelman (2006:13) puts it, achieve ‘commonsense
intelligibility’ repeatedly.
Herein lies the crux of the idea of media renewability. Each medium may
have a few basic ideas (e.g. telegraphy or distance writing) that take many forms
in material technologies.While various institutions and actors clothe a medium
in ever-changing outfits and external forms, the operative idea of a medium as
an environment for communicative action connects it back to other similar
media throughout time. (Institutions make new media new, ideas make new
media old and perhaps variation in users and uses bridges the difference.) The
idea of distance writing, for example, permeates the post, all forms of the
telegraph and the computer; distance seeing, the telescope and television;
mathematical calculation, the abacus and computer; the letter, literacy; the
mouth, oral speech; etc. Manovich (2001) and Jenkins (2006) are famous for
pointing out how ideas converge easily in digital platforms, yet their emphasis
on digital media overlooks the simple fact that all media contain, constrain and
combine fundamental ideas about what constitutes communication itself.
Media behave a lot like words, or syntactical units identifiable to those
fluent in the circumstances of their use. Peters (1980) notes that the verb ‘to
spill’ meant ‘to kill’ four centuries ago.With the rise of the verb ‘to kill’, the
verb ‘to spill’ has assumed since then a secondary but related meaning
preserved in the phrase ‘to shed blood’. In the same way, new media displace
old media of their primary meaning, leaving them with a secondary form of
meaning. Media as words reminds that users make up much of the study of
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Peters: A bibliographic case for new media history
media and that, contra organic metaphors (e.g. dead media, old media,
middle-aged media, stillborn media, etc.), media cannot die for they do not
live: rather, like grammatical units, they blur old forms of syntax, shed
circumstantial skins and incorporate neighboring grammars. Media histories
have etymologies of part-idea, part-technique, part-actors and institutions.
The simile of media as words also suggests that media scholars take
seriously at least one organic metaphor from linguistics and philosophers of
language, namely Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1953) idea of family resemblance,
which suggests how exacting definitions betray the richness found in the
overlap between categories. Perhaps it is not tighter definitions but a fuller
canvassing of the interplay between past and present media that the historical
study of new media could use most.
Why most media history is already new media history
Many media histories address a period when a particular medium was new
for the first time, and thus are, in a strong sense, already histories of new
media. For example, Susan Douglas in Inventing American Broadcasting (1989)
gives the prehistory of radio from 1899 to 1922 as it passed through
invention, innovation and regulation, literally when radio was first new. Her
second book on radio goes beyond the novelty period: Listening in: Radio and
American Imagination (1999) canvasses public response to radio over nearly the
whole 20th-century, from jazz in the 1920s to Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s.
However, even this sweeping scope overlooks how the basic communicative
form of radio – wireless broadcasting – has renewed itself in forms such as
AM and FM technologies, maritime navigation, Radar, the microwave oven,
low-power broadcasting and mobile telephony.The radio has never ceased to
be socially novel; it has simply sought new expressions. In a strong sense,
media history as a scholarly enterprise has focused too much on the first time
that media were new and overlooked iterant moments of renewed media.
Most media historians already study ‘once-new’ media but too rarely do those
studies engage with how media renew themselves overtime, a question fit for
the historically-minded new media scholar.
The gambit of recent media histories focusing on once-new media
histories could range from the work of Friedrich Kittler to Paul Starr, to
Daniel Czitrom, to say nothing of the well-known work of Manuel Castells
(1996). A close and creative reader of technical detail, Kittler (1999) spells out
in Gramophone, Film,Typewriter counter-intuitive stories buried in early 20thcentury media history, from the weapon-like aiming and shooting of the
camera to the feminine gender of early typewriters. Starr’s (2005)
encyclopedic The Creation of the Media:The Political Origins of Modern
Communication works on the post office, the press and the telegraph as
‘constitutive moments’ for rethinking the importance of political action in
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New Media & Society 11(1&2)
American
