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KEY THINKERS PAST AND PRESENT: SERIES EDITOR'S NOTE

The Key Thinkers feature article in this issue by Zeena Feldman, on Georg Simmel, is the last one to appear in the Key Thinkers Past and Present series. The series is drawing to a close as the next generation of Internet-based technologies and corollary media products and services become more deeply embedded in everyday life, society and politics. Once new and strange – way back in the 1990s if not the decade before – these products and services are now banally familiar if not intrusive; indispensable for many and arguably desired by all nonetheless. Their direct and indirect influence on how people communicate with each other and go about their daily business is interpolated with an ongoing tension between the promise held out by (computer-)mediated, (non-)proximate communications to further longstanding ideals about global community on the one hand and, on the other, their idiosyncratic potentialities for facilitating relations of domination, control and resistance. This temporal dimension, short-term and long-term, has guided this series since its inception over a decade ago in 2000 by founding editor, Christopher May. As May notes, the series has ‘sought to conclusively demonstrate that whatever else may be happening in the information revolution, it is certainly not invalidating the insights of previous analysts of society’ (Franklin & May 2006, p. 105). On taking over the editorship of the series in 2006, I looked to further this objective at the moment when it was safe to say that the Internet, and what was then called ‘new media’ products and services, was becoming normalized, even institutionalized. Contributing authors continued to present often overlooked thinkers whose work, past and present, in their lifetime as well as our own have been ‘thinking beyond the immediate moment’ (Franklin & May 2006, p. 107). Recent years have also seen articles addressing streams of thought rather than single individuals, along with thinkers and ideas that are central to disciplines such as cybernetics, phenomenology, feminism and critical pedagogy. Whilst the aim of including non-western thinkers has been only partially successful, a characteristic of the series as a whole is that those who feature are not the ‘usual suspects’ in the current social sciences literary canon on information, communication and society; one where the names of Anglo-Euro-American thinkers predominate in university curricula, funding streams and literature lists.