{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.01691542288557214, 'fraction_numerical': 0.001990049751243781, 'mean_word_length': 5.020958083832335, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Pushing at the Boundaries of New Media Studies

One of my first pieces of research in what we know now as ‘new media studies’ was an ethnographic investigation of a group of women who were trying to build and sustain a social network using the early discussion list programmes and web interfaces. Much of the data that I collected was as much to do with the battles involved in representing same-sex and nonmainstream sexualities in the increasingly hostile politics of North America, as it was about the struggles for access to online resources. When I began my work I was rather naively tempted to think of my fieldsite as being ‘in cyberspace’ and my participants as constituting a ‘virtual community’. That was in 1993, and one of the successes of new media studies since then has been to problematize such assumptions, both theoretically and through empirical research. Contemporary work shows that it is tricky to divide the ‘virtual’ from the ‘real’ in any simplistic way. We no longer take for granted that our fieldsites are located within one undifferentiated global network, or that access to the hardware is the same as participating in the network society. However, in selecting books for this review, I have been reflecting on the extent to which new media studies has still failed to think through the importance of non-normative identities. Certainly there are some excellent articles and monographs. Nevertheless, a researcher just setting out in the field would be hard pressed to find any body of work which worked through the epistemological and methodological implications of the multiplicities, incongruities and partialities of knowledge outside mainstream social groups and cultural locations, even though such thinking has been of central importance in allied disciplines such as sociology and cultural studies. Therefore, this review article will focus on the strengths of two approaches to new media – material culture studies and feminist technoscience studies – new media & society