When We Talk about Media: Origins of the Field

In 1970, the first U.S. academic department devoted to media studies was founded in the School of Education at New York University. Within a year, another program was established just blocks away at The New School. Today, studies of media are mainstay academic concerns, but why the field formed when it did remains something of a mystery. Media and mediation are endemic to social life. Yet, not until the 1960s and 1970s do they become topics of academic inquiry: why?

In this talk, I draw on original archival research and oral histories to analyze the origins of media studies. I trace a conjuncture that shapes what we talk about when we talk about media. I situate the field’s inception within a landscape of social experimentation during a turn toward austerity. This period was marked by interest in boundary reconfigurations. Across art worlds, popular culture, and social movements, distinctions between substances, surfaces, and traditions were reworked. Individuals engaged in embodied encounters with newly heterogenous sites and ecologies. Such direct experiences provided sensational grounding for remaking selves and worlds.

At the same time, New York was fast becoming the emblem of urban decay. Cultural institutions were experiencing budget shortfalls. NYU and The New School were on the brink of bankruptcy. The city became a national reference point for limiting public support given the follies of full social inclusion. Media studies took shape as a historical literacy for explaining civilizational transformation in terms of sensory experience. This vexed epistemological position is prone to mistaking ideology for medium specificity. Understanding media as technics is an austere position. By regarding media as cultural history instead, we can ask, which social forms count as mediators? Ultimately, when we talk about media we are talking about the limits of political contestation, not the properties of technological advance.