Transvaluing media studies: or, beyond the myth of the mediated centre

Abstract

Media studies has become too close to, and too distant from, media, its object of analysis: too close, in that media studies readily reproduces one picture of what media are, that only makes sense if you stand close up to the highly centralised media forms we have until recently taken for granted; too distant, in that this myopia prevents media studies from grasping the broader landscape of how media do, and do not, figure in people's lives.In this chapter, I will, first, diagnose several forms of this problem which each contribute to a phenomenon stretching well beyond media studies: the social construction I call 'the myth of the mediated centre' (cf Couldry, 2003).I will then describe how the landscape of media studies might look, if it were free of that myth, offering, if not a new paradigm for media studies, at least a new map of its possibilities for those tired of the old one.

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