Review Article: Divergent critical approaches to new media

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed an upsurge of scholarship on the media that adopts an openly critical, often self-consciously radical perspective. Judging from the ostensive political and theoretical commitments of the articles being published in the major media studies journals, it would seem that critical -as opposed to 'administrative' -research is now a wellestablished presence in the field. Curiously, however, there is very little consensus among the growing army of critical media scholars about precisely what a radical or critical perspective on the media entails. Nearly everyone doing media studies these days claims to be 'critiquing' the aesthetic, cultural and ideological dimensions of the phenomena that they study, yet often scholars disagree vehemently about what it is that makes this sort of work 'critical'.Broadly speaking, critical media scholarship today falls into two different, diametrically opposed, camps. On the one hand, there is what might be labelled engaged radical media scholarship: the sort of politically-motivated research on the media which attempts to understand the world in order to change it and which is typically informed by Marxism, materialist feminism, new media & society

Towards Marxian Internet Studies

“…Steve Macek (2006) has distinguished between two forms of digital media studies: 1) analyses "typically informed by Marxism, materialist feminism, radical political economy, critical sociology, and social movement theory", 2) "postmodernist and poststructuralist media scholarship" (Macek 2006. The first approach is certainly "vastly superior to the other" (Macek 2006(Macek , 1038; see also the analyses in Artz, Macek and Cloud 2006).…”

“…The first approach is certainly "vastly superior to the other" (Macek 2006(Macek , 1038; see also the analyses in Artz, Macek and Cloud 2006). In addition, it needs to be stressed that the second approach is completely out of joint with the capitalist crisis times we have entered.…”