Access to full-text SAGE journal articles that have been carefully selected to support and expand on the concepts presented in each chapter. Journal articles can act as an ideal resource to help support your assignments and studies.

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Article 1: Peters, Benjamin. 2009. “And lead us not into thinking the new is new: a bibliographic case for new media history.” New Media and Society. 11(1&2): 13-30.

Abstract: Must the concept of the study of new media seem so thoroughly ordinary? What does it mean to study new media other than to study media that exist now? Prompted by the 10th anniversary of New Media & Society, this article aims to help rethink and elongate the history of new media studies by merging new media studies and media history literatures. The recursive definition and use of the term `new media' are reviewed. New media need to be understood not as emerging digital communication technologies, so much as media with uncertain terms and uses. Moreover, by recognizing that new media studies quickly become history and that most media history is already new media history, this article calls for a use of both literatures to focus on the renewable nature of media in history. It reflects on a complementary attitude toward history meant to help usher in a sounder future of the study of the past.

1. How is new media in some ways a continuation of old media? How can we use old ways of studying media to help us understand new forms?
2. How is this article embracing a sociological perspective of media? Use terms and concepts from Chapter 1.
3. How does your perspective about new media change when you consider that old media was once new media too?
4. What are the five periods that most modern media pass through?
5. What are the author’s two definitions for mass media?
6. Why is most media history already new media history, according to Peters?

Article 2: Deuze, Mark. 2011 “Media Life.” Media Culture and Society. 33(1): 137-148.

No Abstract Available.

1. Why does Deuze think that a key development for media studies in the future will be the “disappearance of media”?
2. What does it mean to see ourselves as living a media life, rather than living “with” media?
3. What is The Truman Show Delusion? Can you relate to this in your own life?
4. How does the current relationship between media and the human condition amplify broader trends in society? Do you agree that these trends are important? Why or why not?

Article 3: Groening, Stephen. 2010. “From ‘a box in the theater of the world’ to ‘the world as your living room’: cellular phones, television and mobile privatization.” 12(8): 1331-1347.

Abstract: The ability to receive and view television programs (and other moving image material) on the cellular phone should be seen as part of a larger system of asserting private space in an environment that is crowded with both people and technology. I begin with Walter Benjamin’s notion that the rise of the private individual can be indexed to the set of practices that transform the dwelling place into an interiorization of the external world through the collection of images and objects while at the same time acting as a place of refuge from the external world. Linking those observations to Raymond Williams’ notion of mobile privatization, I argue that the contradictory impulses of moving through the world while retreating from it are the product of economic and social structures which act to isolate individuals from each other while connecting them to the products of corporate media, and do not arise from any inherent traits within cellular phone technology.

1. How has the nature of television watching changed with the advent of mobile technologies? What does this have to do with the individual and the experience of television watching as compared to “old” media?
2. How can the convergence of new technology and television be understood within the model of the social world presented in Chapter 1?
3. In what ways does the author show individual relationships to their television being shaped by mass media? What levels of analysis is the author examining: relationships between institutions, relationships within an institution, or relationships between and institution and the public?