Walkthrough: videogames and technocultural form - Seth Giddings

new media and new media studies
I will use the term ‘new media studies’ to denote an emergent academic discipline to which this thesis is a
contribution. There are a cluster of disciplines that overlap and inform each other, with some evidence of the
emergence of canonical texts, methods and objects of study. There are a few journals (Convergence, New
Media and Society) and large-scale research projects (for example the ESRC-funded Virtual Society?). Our
book New Media: a critical introduction (Lister et al 2003) is one of the few to comprehensively interrogate
new media from a Media Studies and Cultural Studies framework.
The term ‘new media’ itself is not used universally. Whilst in parts of the culture industry it denotes
creative work with digital technology (for instance, the ‘new media’ jobs section in The Guardian), in North
American universities and academic publishing it can refer to computer-based art (for example Wardrip-
Fruin & Harrigan The New Media Reader (2003), and the Center for New Media at the University of
California, Berkeley). In educational, media sociological, and some political economy, discourses, the term
information and communication technologies (ICTs) is preferred (Silverstone & Hirsch 1992), whilst the
object of study for some in the social science and communication studies is Computer-Mediated
Communication (Jones 1995, Thurlow, Lengel & Tomic 2004). Other sources that deal more closely with
popular new media forms and texts (and that use the term ‘new media’) include Bolter and Grusin (1999)
and Darley (2000). These are more closely related to Media Studies than Cultural Studies inflections (see
below), concerned as they are with media texts and images rather than directly with the cultures of their use
or consumption.
The title of David Silver’s brief topography of this ‘meta-field’ in New Media and Society indicates
the heterogeneity: ‘Internet/cyberculture/digital culture/new media/fill-in-the-blank studies’ (Silver 2004).
Each of these disciplinary and terminological varieties of course draw the boundaries, and pinpoint the
centres, of their research differently.
cyberculture, critical cybercultural studies & cyberpunk
The term cyberculture again brackets together a diverse range of theoretical approaches to new cultural
technologies, and it cannot be easily separated from ‘new media studies’ as it has provided many theoretical
and descriptive resources (and at times a convenient target or straw man) to the latter. The two share a
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