Has amnesia been a consistent aspect of media studies? This talk argues this may be so drawing upon the insight of Peters and Kleis Nielson (2013: 257) that new media are things we don’t know what to do with and ‘media we do not know how to talk about’. A sense of crisis always accomponies this sense of the newness of the media. Key moments have shaped this history: the sociology of mass communication (associated with Columbia University, NY); the moment of Media Studies and Cultural Studies 1 (associated with the UK and the Universities of Birmingham and Westminster) and Media Studies 2 (connected to Web 2.0) dating from the beginning of the millenium. At each of these moments (new) media embodied both promise and danger as an object of study against a backdrop of global crisis. This contribution asks whether media studies has been trapped by a ‘presentism’ that fails to engage with earlier traditions of commumication theory and should undertake some unforgetting.

中文翻译：

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媒体学术研究一直是新媒体研究

健忘症是否一直是媒体研究的始终如一？这篇演讲认为，这可能是因为借鉴了Peters和Kleis Nielson（2013：257）的见识，以至于新媒体是我们不知道该如何处理的事物，而“媒体我们不知道该如何谈论”。危机感总是伴随着媒体的新颖感。关键时刻塑造了这段历史：大众传播社会学（与纽约哥伦比亚大学相关）；媒体研究和文化研究1（与英国以及伯明翰和威斯敏斯特大学相关）和媒体研究2（与Web 2.0相关）的历史可以追溯到千年之初。在每一个时刻（新的），媒体都将希望和危险同时体现为全球危机背景下的研究对象。