Some Introductory Thoughts on the Future of Media and Communications
In recent years,media studies have often focused on how contemporary digital technologies are reshaping both societies and individual consciousness.These issues inevitably raise difficult questions about the relationship of communications,media and transport and the gains and losses consequent upon media-centric perspectives.In this context,we have to ask how our field of study should be defined in relation to the disciplines of media studies,communications,cultural studies,transport geography and mobility studies-and what kind of disciplinary boundaries we want to establish or transcend.All this also raises issues about historical periodisation,and how best to conceptualise both breaks and continuities between eras.Here,I argue that we need to reverse the usual perspective on the effects of technologies and ask to what questions new technologies are the answers?In doing so,it is useful to highlight the specific characteristics of the de-regulated Post-Fordist societies which set the conditions of operation of the media of the rich northern temperate zone-which then tend to provide a universalised template for many analyses.Thus,we evidently also need to consider questions of the'De-Westernising'of the field and about how the specificities of the post-Covid pandemic period in which we live,serve to determine the context of contemporary forms of communication.
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