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Rethinking the distinctions between old and new media: Introduction

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-07-02, 13:04 authored by Frederik Lesage, Simone NataleSimone Natale
Recent approaches to media change have convincingly shown that distinctions between old and new media are inadequate to describe the complexity of present and past technological configurations. Yet, oldness and newness remain powerful ways to describe and understand media change, and continue to direct present-day perceptions and interactions with a wide range of technologies - from vinyl records to AI voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa. How can one refuse rigid definitions of old and new, while at the same time retaining the usefulness and pertinence of these concepts for the study and analysis of media change? This introduction to the special issue entitled “Rethinking the Distinctions between Old and New Media” aims to answers this question by taking up the notion of biography. We argue that the recurrence of oldness and newness as categories to describe media is strictly related to the fact that interactions with media are embedded within a biographical understanding of time, which refers both to the lifecourse of people or objects and to the narratives that are created and disseminated about them. Employing this approach entails considering the history of a medium against the history of the changing definitions that are attributed to it, and more broadly, to considering time not only as such but also against the narratives that makes it thinkable and understandable.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Convergence: the journal of research into new media technologies

Volume

25

Issue

4

Pages

575 - 589

Citation

LESAGE, F. and NATALE, S., 2019. Rethinking the distinctions between old and new media: Introduction. Convergence: the journal of research into new media technologies, 25 (4), pp.575-589.

Publisher

© the Authors. Published by SAGE Publications

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Acceptance date

2019-06-24

Publication date

2019-07-16

Copyright date

2019

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Convergence: the journal of research into new media technologies and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856519863364. Users who receive access to an article through a repository are reminded that the article is protected by copyright. Users may download and save a local copy of an article accessed in an institutional repository for the user's personal reference.

ISSN

1354-8565

Language

  • en