508702

research-article2013
MCS35810.1177/0163443713508702<italic>Media, Culture & Society</italic>Corner

Crosscurrents

Media, Culture & Society

Is there a ‘field’ of media

35(8) 1011­–1018
© The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
research? – The ‘fragmentation’ sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0163443713508702
issue revisited mcs.sagepub.com

John Corner
University of Leeds, UK

It is clear that the amount of scholarly attention given, internationally, to different aspects
of ‘the media’ has grown enormously, a situation reflected in some of the contributions
to the recent special issue of this journal (‘Back to the Future’, 35.1, 2013). A steady
increase over the years has turned into a far more rapid development over the last decade.
Even in areas inclined in the past to marginalise if not completely ignore questions of
media systems and communicative practice, such as political science, there has been a
turn towards more sustained engagement, conceptually and empirically, while across
other areas, including literary studies, modern languages, geography, history and eco-
nomics, there has been a strengthening of research focus. It has widely been noted that
one important factor lying behind this growth has been the arrival, and then the quick
achievement of massive political, cultural and economic presence, of ‘new media’ or
‘social media’. This has not only made addressing matters of mediation more obviously
necessary across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (per-
haps under headings like ‘digital humanities’, ‘digital society’ and ‘digital culture’) as
well as beyond, it has also brought in new ways of thinking about ‘the media’ (see
Couldry, 2009 on the changing use of this collective noun), of positioning the media
within frameworks of ideas and of investigating them.
Both the growth in diverse forms of attention to ‘older’ media and the widespread
interest in the ‘new’ and the ‘emergent’ have helped to raise more sharply the question of
whether it makes sense to talk about a ‘field’ of media research at all. For many years,
expressed anxieties about the ‘fragmentation of the field’, sometimes with suggested
corrections to this tendency, have been aired at international and national events, includ-
ing ICA conferences. Over twenty years ago, David Swanson’s short essay (Swanson,
1993) provided a classic account of some of the issues as they then affected develop-
ments at ‘subfield’ level in the USA. Most recently, in a provocative piece looking at a

Corresponding author:
John Corner, Communication Studies, Clothworkers’ Building North, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.
Email: j.r.corner@leeds.ac.uk
1012 Media, Culture & Society 35(8)

range of shifts affecting the area and its institutionalisation, particularly but not exclu-
sively in Nordic countries, Stig Hjarvard has written of a ‘half-baked discipline’. He
makes this striking claim not by way of critical dismissal but, taking the metaphor of
baking more seriously, by way of suggesting that it needs some more time before it can
gain the appropriate level of consolidation and coherence (Hjarvard, 2012). However, he
notes the severe challenges to this process posed by the sub-specialisation which is part
of the growth described above and he proposes some ways in which increased cross-
connection might be encouraged.1
I will come back to these ‘remedies’ later but I wonder if it might it not be better, in
the circumstances obtaining at present and those likely to emerge, to acknowledge
straight away that rather than a field subject to fragmentation there is now something
more like a number of fields? To recognise that, despite overlaps, these draw on rather
different conceptual resources, position themselves within diverse interdisciplinary
coordinates, hold different aspects of the media as objects of primary interest and have
relationships in which disjunction and mutual indifference are becoming as prominent as
dialogue. In other words, to concede that plurality and dispersal have already gone
beyond what even the most expanded idea of ‘unity’, and a sense of ‘subfields’ within the
singularity of ‘the field’, can contain.
I leave aside here the category of ‘discipline’, where the requirements of internal
coherence within the logics of research would seem to be more stringent, notwithstand-
ing the breadth and internal variety of many established disciplines. This has not stopped
the regular description of media and communications study as a ‘discipline’ of course,
albeit one which, as in Hjarvard’s account, is still in the making (or ‘baking’). However
if, as I am arguing, ‘field’ is a questionable category for the current range of research
practice then ‘discipline’ would certainly seem to be so, quite apart from the rather
regressive sense it carries of an older, more complacent and stable, division of learning.
It is interesting that Swanson in 1993 completely rejected ambitions towards discipline-
hood as based on mistaken judgement and likely to lead to ‘much energy being wasted’
(Swanson, 1993: 169).
These questions obviously turn on terms of classification but they are not to be judged
as secondary, nominal matters for that reason. Matters to do with the intellectual identity
of research into media, and the location of this research within the shifting, broader pat-
tern of the production and circulation of academic knowledge, are at issue. We can cer-
tainly see the dynamics of segregation and not just ‘diversity’ as a feature of the whole
history of media research, with particularly strong fault-lines between arts and social
science perspectives. However, as Hjarvard also observes, the emerging profile seems
quite distinctive in the pattern being established.
The new situation is not being produced entirely by factors specific to research on
media. A broader dynamic is at work in the economy of knowledge, in the expansion and
intensification of academic activity. This is clearly evident in the growth of the number
of journals, a development in which ‘niche’ positioning is for obvious reasons becoming
a more productive route than replication of established broader provision, although there
is a good deal of that going on too. More academics are writing more and, in many con-
texts, they are being required to write more – there is a boom in academic productivity
driven as much by the growth in the academic economy and its professionalised
Corner 1013

imperatives as by any individualised motivation. It is essentially a supply-led rather than

a demand-led phenomenon, so that providing new outlets for the publication of writing
is in some tension with the business of finding readers who want to read it and who will
lobby their libraries to buy access to it. Many of these readers are also real or aspirant
writers of course, so they are involved both in supply-side and demand-side relations.
With the growing profusion of material to read, it is not surprising that academic reading
has become more tightly strategic, readers often targeting their reading around the themes
upon which they are also writing, giving priority to those places in which they have pub-
lished and/or hope to publish in the future. This has always been an aspect of academic
reading, but the new terms of academic productivity, and the more instrumental economy
of time they encourage, have increased its sway. However, even for those with extra
energy and inquisitiveness, and an effective system of regular online surveillance, it has
often become impossible to keep up with academic production around topics receiving
intensive attention (e.g. new media and citizenship; media and memory; the changing
forms of television news) on other than on a selective basis. Despite the attractions of
making connections across a wider academic landscape, staying ‘close to home’, even if
the ‘home’ is a quite recently established one and is constructed from interdisciplinary
resources, has provided one obvious way of being selective in order to give direction to
research initiatives and some sense of a readership to writing.
The furthering of academic inquiry inevitably involves intensification of focus and
deepening of analysis. The old remark about ‘knowing more and more about less and
less’ captures, if glibly, some consequences of this. As areas of research develop, a cen-
tripetal effect is created, the consequent insularities of which can only be balanced, if at
all, by sustained phases of cross-connection and orientation within the larger intellectual
landscape.
The history of media research (see, for instance, the chapters in Park and Pooley 2008
for recent perspectives) is recognised as having a distinctive profile insofar as work on
‘mass communication’ and then ‘media’ does not have its primary home in a specific
discipline, unlike many other, though certainly not all, emergent fields. Initially, it is
positioned within, and then as an outgrowth of, sociology and social psychology.
However, an influential humanities body of work emerges in the 1960s (including in ver-
sions of cultural studies) in ways which, within different national academic orders,
receive various levels of assimilation as a contributory strand to the earlier one or as, in
effect, an alternative approach to this. A range of studies, particularly in Europe, were
influenced by versions of a ‘critical’ perspective, often taking a Marxian stance towards
established power at the levels of economic and ideological processes. From the 1990s
this gave way in some measure to less confident and less direct forms of critique, with
the influence of postmodernist thinking about power and identity apparent and a certain
re-positioning of the media as agencies whose complexity of operations and conse-
quences, within a capitalism many of whose terms had become ‘normalised’, was seen
by some if not by all to deserve a cooler, more descriptively precise, approach, partly
convergent with earlier and continuing social science perspectives.
As Swanson (1993) among many others notes, media research has always had issues
with establishing any common agreement about the ‘significant’ in the object of research
inquiry and the ‘proper’ in terms of concepts and methods. Deciding what conference to
1014 Media, Culture & Society 35(8)

attend, which journal to send your manuscript to and (even) what examiner to invite to
assess a doctoral dissertation, requires for success some sense of these differences, exist-
ing underneath the general designation of media research. The risks of encountering not
just a stimulating, provocative difference but a ‘difference beyond dialogue’ are gener-
ally judged well worth taking care to avoid. It has been widely noted that, at various
stages, work on media has needed to import much of its theoretical and analytic appara-
tus from ‘outside’ and consequently the pattern of what has been imported from where
and what has not has remained a regular point of variation and dispute. Most large con-
ferences on media research show these tensions and variations, even if some of them (as
within the ICA) are able to manage out too disruptive or incoherent a situation emerging
by ‘sectionalisation’ at the level of groups, panels and strands.
National variations also clearly continue to be in evidence, reflecting in part not only
the variables of national media systems (and to some extent the location of media profes-
sional training within Higher Education) but the specific disciplinary mix that has fed
into the development of media research and helped to form the routes it has taken. The
United States has continued an identifiably separate trajectory of ‘communications
research’ more confidently than any other country, often in the process developing a
US-centric approach to themes and ideas which has had a strong tendency to exclude
engagement with work from abroad, although this is now being replaced by a firmer, if
selective, sense of the international and the global. The growth of studies in Asia, Africa
and South America is showing evidence of clear, geographically specific approaches
alongside the use of established US and European reference points. Among other
instances, articles in the volumes of Media, Culture & Society over the last few years
would bear ample witness to this.
One indication of the intensified segregation of work on media can be seen in the use
of the label ‘studies’ to follow designated areas of interest, even if the ways in which this
is grounded in teaching as well as (and sometimes rather than) research often remain a
little uncertain. The two principal established framings for work are, of course, ‘com-
munication’ or ‘communications’ (with their rather complicating inclusion of work on
areas other than media) and ‘media’ (which has more richly imprecise indications both
of topic and of approach than the older ‘mass communication’). Sometimes the two are
coupled in ways which have an element of calculated tautology. In uncertain relation to
these ‘core’ labels there has developed a number of other groupings operating at various
levels. ‘Television studies’, while aligned to the sociologically aware spaces of ‘media
research’ has a relationship with ‘film studies’, an area of humanities-oriented inquiry
giving close attention to textuality and aesthetics. ‘Journalism studies’ emerged many
years ago, often indicating a degree of independence warranted by its connection with
journalist training and the kind of research agenda this generated, although a great deal
of what is now published under the heading would not conform easily to the idea of a
professionally rather than academically related sense of the relevant.
Other uses of ‘studies’ indicate what can be seen as a strengthening ‘aspectualism’ in
media inquiry, in which one dimension of media practices and processes is given inten-
sive and often exclusive attention. So, for instance, we have ‘audience studies’, ‘docu-
mentary studies’ and ‘policy studies’. At one level, this indicates the desirable
concentration of effort necessary to make headway, empirically and conceptually, on
Corner 1015

particular issues. At another level, however, such aspectualism indicates the move
towards that centripetal orientation and relative autonomy which is, I believe, a dominant
tendency in the pattern.
The most striking new collectivity to emerge, one which is now developing alterna-
tive labels as the original one has become seriously dated, has undoubtedly been ‘new
media studies’. This is not an ‘aspectual’ label but one grounded in the recognition of
specific technologies and practices. The rapid growth of analysis, writing and debate in
this area across a range of disciplinary spaces has provided work with the confidence to
position itself with a marked degree of independence in relation to all the existing group-
ings. In particular, the relationship between ‘old media studies’ and ‘new media studies’
has been posed, raising questions about the precise nature of the convergence and/or the
disjunction both between the phenomena being investigated and the ideas and methods
being used to carry this out. Studies in new media have sometimes given the impression
of having paid less attention to the long history of studying ‘mass communication’ than
they might have done, as if the radical new terms of mediation being explored rendered
irrelevant earlier concepts and approaches, often presumed to be compromised by their
no longer tenable assumptions about stability, rationality and linearity. But such intel-
lectual foreshortening can lead to something close to duplication, in which perceptions,
ideas and findings very close to those which emerged and were debated in earlier work
(concerning for example, the profile of media power in relation to political power, the
interplay of production and consumption relations, the hazards of researching ‘influ-
ence’) have been expressed in new terms as if they were entirely novel. They have not
shown the benefits that firm connection with a longer tradition of investigation and argu-
ment might have brought.
It is worth noting that in addition to the constraints on cross-connection introduced by
more intensive forms of ‘aspectualism’ and by constraints on academic time, there is the
core factor of comprehensibility, already alluded to. To what extent is it possible even to
understand the work that is being carried out in other, albeit adjacent, academic spaces
concerned with media? Here, the division between humanities and social science per-
spectives remains significant, but overlying this division a number of specialist areas
have develop a vocabulary of conceptualisation and analysis which is esoteric and
opaque to many of those working outside of them, even if these are also academics car-
rying out research on the media. Sometimes this is because the primary connection is
made with a source discipline not assimilated within the ‘mix’ which has variously con-
stituted the international media research field across its national varieties. An example
here might be media linguistics which, while it has produced some excellent work that
has been read within, and informed, a broad range of study and debate, has often posi-
tioned itself as essentially an outgrowth of linguistics, requiring itself to speak to, and be
deemed acceptable by, core thinking within that discipline rather than to make itself
accessible to a wider community.
I want to return now to the question of ‘duplication’. I have suggested that across
the range of work on media, there is a good deal of replication and ‘near replication’,
both in relation to the work of the past and across concurrent studies. This claim is
made not as an accusation of scholarly negligence but as recognition of the objective
conditions in which an increased volume of scholarly production occurs across an
1016 Media, Culture & Society 35(8)

increased diversity of specialist spaces drawn towards stronger internalist drives.

Sometimes the replication occurs because of a complete ignorance of work going on
elsewhere which, were it known about, would be engaged with. Sometimes it occurs in
a situation where there is no real interest in knowing what is going on ‘elsewhere’,
where such work might be seen either as ‘irrelevant’ or indeed, if engaged with, as
introducing serious complications into the plans of research and publication being pur-
sued. We must remember that the production of contemporary academic knowledge is
defined as much by competition as it is by cooperation and that competitive behaviour
often involves ‘willed ignorance’ as well as strict cost-benefit calculations in order to
sustain a flow of productivity. What are the consequences of these circumstances for
the pattern of theoretical development?
I think a relatively weak level of cumulative progress on general theoretical matters is
one of the consequences, a point noted by Hjarvard as well as a number of previous com-
mentators on ‘the field’. That is say, there is a dispersal of conceptual engagement, such
that sustained and steady interconnection, including through critique, around agreed
issues of focus begins to be displaced by a profusion of conceptually active spaces, each
having its own nodal reference points. Mutual indifference or even sometimes a degree
of enmity between the different spaces reinforces this.
Perhaps the conceptual framing which has enjoyed the widest reference, critique and
elaboration across different spaces of media research over the last 30 years has been the
‘public sphere’, although as Lunt and Livingstone point out (2013) there has been a
widespread tendency to focus on the earlier articulations of this idea by Habermas and
not to connect with the revisions and adjustments made since. Notwithstanding this
point, ‘public sphere’ has been a datum concept for a broad range of criticisms of current
media practice, giving a normative frame (variously positioned as realistic or idealistic
in character) which has served as a reference point for a number of different studies of
production, forms, reception and of historical and national contexts. Even so, this has by
no means been a ‘field-wide’ notion, and debate about its potential and limitations has
failed to influence the conceptual and analytic vocabulary of many inquiries positioned
outside of the self-consciously political and ‘critical’.
Hjarvard, despite the clarity of his recognition of the forces of disconnection working
against it, believes that a ‘a focus on the processes of mediatisation may help us to con-
tinue the development of our field into a discipline’ (2012: 33), picking up on his earlier
point that shifting the emphasis from ‘mediation to mediatisation may help keep track of
some of the key questions and topics that may still render media and communication
studies a candidate for a research discipline’ (2012: 28). I have some difficulty in sharing
his belief, quite apart from my doubts about quite what being a (finally) successful ‘can-
didate’ for ‘research discipline’ status entails, in terms of a promotion within some wider
context of categorical recognition. Indeed, as I have indicated in this note, even the
‘lower’ status of ‘field’ seems to be radically open to question. It is not a field that is
routinely ‘known to itself’ in many of its ground level practices. It is more a rhetorical
construct (often affectively loaded as an identity-referent – ‘our field’) used to invoke
some kind of unity across an increased dispersal. That wider registration of the complex
penetration of the media into the practices and institutions of everyday life that the term
‘mediatization’ indicates (for instance, in Lundby, 2009) seems more likely to aid the
Corner 1017

further divergence of analytic pathways rather than to help firm up some common items
for a more coherent (‘disciplinary’) agenda. Moreover, the broader crosscurrents of inter-
disciplinarity at work in the humanities and social sciences are making the area specific-
ity of media research harder rather than easier to sustain across the sheer variety of
intellectual practice involved. No longer is media research made distinctive by the con-
trast which its refreshing inter-disciplinarity makes against the conventionalised rigidi-
ties of surrounding activity.
Some routes taken in media research will undoubtedly show the intellectual robust-
ness, expansiveness of reference, and therefore the wide dissemination and use of what
they ‘find out’, which has characterised some of the best work on media to date. Other
routes will inevitably operate much more in ‘enclave’ mode, emphasising intra-connection
over inter-connection and being quite narrowly selective in what they import from else-
where in media research let alone from other academic spheres. They will seek to
acquire their academic capital by emphasising their intensive speciality more than their
accessibility and relevance to other parts of the landscape of knowledge, let alone to the
world beyond academia. Routine interconnections will tend towards the contingent,
arising from specific requirements, rather than the systemic, although some events, like
major conferences, will encourage an occasional wider view. Increasingly, even the
broader journals will be accessed for specific items rather than ‘browsed’ with an inter-
est in new work across a range. No encompassing ‘logics of field’ will inform many of
the inquiries undertaken whatever their localised coherence, nor will such a logics be
readily available as an interpretative frame in making full sense of what has been found
out from a position outside the specific research area. To say this is not to deny that
work of real quality and significance will continue to be produced, work comparable
with the finest scholarship anywhere. Nor is it to accuse researchers of some regrettable
tendencies in themselves which they should correct. It is simply to recognise the scope
and scale of what is now happening under the heading of ‘media and communications
research’ and to recognise, too, the broader pattern of shifts in the nature and conduct of
academic inquiry.

Note
1. Among those scholars who have given attention to ‘field development’ and its problems,
Nordic researchers have shown a particular cogency of analysis. Hjarvard cites Ulla Carlsson
(2005: 545) on ‘disintegration’ and discursive proliferation.

References
Carlsson U (2005) Has media and communications research become invisible? Some reflections
on a Scandinavian horizon. Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies
67(6): 543–546.
Couldry N (2009) Does the media have a future? European Journal of Communication 24(4):
437–449.
Hjarvard S (2012) Doing the right thing: media and communication studies in a mediatized world.
Nordicom Review 33(1, Suppl.): 27–33.
Lundby K (ed.) (2009) Mediatization: Concept, Changes and Consequences. New York: Peter
Lang.
1018 Media, Culture & Society 35(8)

Lunt P and Livingstone S (2013) Media studies’ fascination with the concept of the public sphere.
Media, Culture & Society 35(1): 87–96.
Park D and Pooley J (eds) (2008) The History of Media and Communications Research. New
York: Peter Lang.
Swanson D (1993) Fragmentation, the field, and the future. Journal of Communication 43(4):
163–172.
Copyright of Media, Culture & Society is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its
content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the
copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email
articles for individual use.