Last Saturday at Mt. Holyoke College I introduced a good-sized group of faculty from the Five Colleges (UMass, Smith, Amherst, Mt. Holyoke, and Hampshire College) to sociable media. It was hard getting from Boston to South Hadley in a brutal snowstorm that basically rendered driving impossible. Jenny and I staid in a hotel on the way called "The Castle" to wait out the bad weather. The concierge whose jacket showed strong signs of wear, just like most of the hotel, proudly announced that the "castle" was already 30 years old to which I could not help but responding-- "like most castles."

The next morning it was a pleasure to meet the faculty that came from fields like Comparative Literature, Art, Dance, English, and Film Studies. Most of them taught "new media" on some level and were interested in learning more. I enjoyed the challenge of framing my presentation for a group of academics whose main expertise was not in "new media." I started out by highlighting two definitions of "new media" that I find most beneficial and then moved on from examples to actual web-based initiatives to theoretical reflections. The particular instances of sociable media may well disappear (today's "YouSpace" is tomorrow's "MyTube") but networked sociality will only gain in importance. Without grounding our thinking in examples, however fleeting they may be, it is all too easy to slide into utopian or dystopian generalizations. I started my lecture by describing my first memorable web-based encounter: sitting in a small room in San Francisco, with a dial-up connection on a Toshiba laptop, I spent hours with a Texan woman in her mid sixties in a chat room. She told me all about her vacations in Mississippi, which she and her husband spend sleeping on the back of their pickup truck. It is more than unlikely that I would have ever had this conversation face to face.

It was interesting to reflect on the question that were asked on Saturday. For many scholars the question is how they can integrate "new media" into their teaching and research. It's a scary step to take as one leaves one's disciplinary comfort zone. Which place does "new media" take in the highly disciplinary realm of academia that is so invested in specialization?Today, the line between theoretician and artist blurs, which is a tough sell in most university contexts. A few months ago I wrote a short piece responding to these questions: "Death of the Artist?". For most scholars it is the goal to define a small area within which they can claim expertise. It is often seen as a virtue to be able to call a clearly labeled field one's own. Thus far "new media" has resisted that somewhat. Increasingly, however, fields within "new media" get defined. Labels like Robotics or Virtual Reality establish themselves more and more, stepping away from interdisciplinarity that marked much of the beginnings of "new media" in the university. An effective cultural practice in fields like VR requires years of technical training. However, from my perspective, the most interesting work comes out of areas that are little defined-- areas which are completely marginal (and often underfunded) within academia. I agree with Ute Meta Bauer when she states that the "job that I am doing has not been invented yet." Perhaps in a few years we will see the emergence of intentionally interdisciplinary new media programs that focus on the intersections between, for example, sociable media and robotics.  

I used ProfCast to record this lecture at Mt. Holyoke College. You can download the presentation (audio and slides, ".m4b" file, 20.8 MB or ".mov" file, 20.8 MB).