German Media Studies: A Critical Update

Abstract

This essay outlines a program for updating German media studies by reformatting, repartitioning, and potentially rebooting German media theory. As a temporary placeholder, German media studies 2.0 describes current transatlantic research committed to fixing bugs and patching vulnerabilities that emerged from historical encounters between media and critique, ideology and epistemology, and the Frankfurt School and the Kittler Network. To update German media studies in a critical mode, we need to keep defining our concepts and delimiting our disciplines, accounting for the effects of media change on our research methods, and negotiating our field’s complex relations to culture, history, and politics.