Sean Cubitt (seanc@waikato.ac.nz) is Professor of Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He has published widely on contemporary arts, media and culture. His books include The Cinema Effect (MIT 2004), EcoMedia (Rodopi,2005) and (as co-editor) How To Study the Event Film: The Lord of the Rings, A Case Study (Manchester University Press, 2006).

Abstract

Democratic Materials

Shuffle mode on the iPod suggests two orders of democracy: democracy of access and the ideal of a democratized art, here underlined by the chance encounter with a composition which shares with Schönberg the idea that all notes are equal. New auditory forms like podcasting thus raise questions about the future, and insofar as the characteristics of composition are democratic, the specific question: what might democracy become in the twenty-first century? The problem of periodizing the ‘new’ in ‘new media’ is one which also implies an exploration of what future orientations inhabit contemporary media, their inter-relationships and uses, an inquiry which in turn demands reflection on the possibly irresolvable but nonetheless central debate between continuity and rupture in the immediate past. The specific task of humanities scholarship in the study of new media is to work in these terrains, between historical, textual and technological hermeneutics on the one hand, and the ethics and politics implicit in new media on the other. This essay is intended to indicate why they need to be articulated into a working whole and to suggest that the materials we work with in creation, and in critical work, are in some way bound up with the idea of a democratic project in an increasingly mediated world.