Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process

1. Mediation and the Vitality of Media

1 Mediation and the Vitality of Media False Problems and False Divisions This chapter makes a case for a shift from thinking about “new media” as a set of discrete objects to understanding media, old and new, in terms of the interlocked and dynamic processes of mediation. It also outlines what is at stake in this shift from thinking about media solely as things at our disposal to recognizing our entanglement with media on a sociocultural as well as biological level. This argument will lead us to pose the following question: if media cannot be fully externalized from subjects, or “users,” then how might “we” engage with “them” differently? We will also consider the political and ethical implications of such engagements. After outlining the key debates on new media within media, communications, and cultural studies, we will turn to the work of philosophers Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler to explore the relationship between “media” and “technology” and to advance a proposition that mediation is an intrinsic condition of being-in, and becoming-with, the technological world. With this proposition, we will offer to see mediation as the underlying, and underaddressed, problem of the media. As the role of this chapter is first of all to provide a theoretical framework—a toolbox of concepts we will be working with throughout the course of this book—we will also seek to distinguish between the question of mediation and the question of media. This distinction is primarily heuristic—that is, tentative and pragmatic—and the purpose of separating mediation from media will be to clarify the relation between them. Henri Bergson’s philosophical method of division and reintegration, as reappropriated by Gilles Deleuze, will be of particular use to us here. This “method” proposes three things: (1) that we distinguish between “true” and “false” problems, (2) that we distinguish between differences in degree and differences in kind, and (3) that we consider the object of our inquiry in terms of its temporality.1 This last law, or rule, 2 Chapter 1 is the most important one for Bergson, and it will be the principal means by which we will seek to distinguish between media and mediation. Having offered a preliminary investigation of the concept of mediation, we will then present mediation as the underlying and underaddressed problem of the media. We will do so by highlighting, and then bracketing, the “false” problems and false divisions associated with debates on new media. To continue with our use of the Bergsonian heuristic, these problems and divisions are “false” not in any ontological sense related to some originary idea of truth, but rather because they limit the understanding of the complex and multifaceted phenomena and processes by imposing clear-cut distinctions and categories all too early. This process of fragmenting the world into particular categories, often arranged into sets of oppositions, is not only reductive and therefore unhelpful; it also has serious political and ethical consequences for our understanding of the world, its dynamics, and its power relations. Thinking through and against such false problems and oppositions is therefore also a political intervention into “the media”—one that is different from studies of the political economy of media and communications, for example, but that is not any less serious or important .2 In addition to the false problems (which we identify in discussions on new media that focus on a singular problem, such as newness, digitization, interactivity, convergence, or data, at the expense of all the others), the field of new media is arguably also marred by a number of “false divisions”—or what cultural theorists trained in poststructuralist thought tend to refer to as “binary oppositions.” Such false divisions that have so far shaped debates in new media studies include determinism and constructionism; technology and use; theory and practice; structure and agency; information and materiality (an extension of the division between language and materiality ); and subjectivity and objectivity. Even where these false divisions have been identified as such—and of course many writers are aware of their limited currency—it has proven difficult to avoid them.3 The reason for this difficulty partly lies with the residual effects of disciplinarity and the associated requirement to take a set of key concepts within a given discipline and then elevate them to a transcendental position, as a result of which everything else gets questioned or even dismantled except for these foundational concepts (for example, “data” and “information” in computer science; “subjectivity” in psychology; “society” in sociology). Another...