Faculty Member, School of Arts
Senior Lecturer, Media Studies
About
I'm a senior lecturer in media studies at Swansea University. My interests mostly lie within the fields of media theory, technology and history and digital media. My research has focused to date on the work of Jean Baudrillard but I've become increasingly interested in the limitations of media studies as a discipline in a digital era.
As a product of the broadcast era (and one that has limited itself to certain methodologies and approaches) I feel that media studies needs to be significantly upgraded for a post-broadcast era. An entire revision of the field - its organisation, key topics, theoretical sources, understanding of history and technology and relationship to other fields - is now required. As discussion of media has filtered into all other disciplines and many of the key texts on digital media are being produced outside our discipline with little or no reference to it this revision is necessary if media studies wants to remain relevant. It may already be too late: many of our students are outstripping their lecturers in their knowledge and navigation of the digital ecology and too many media lecturers haven't realised yet that the digital revolution has changed their world. Too many are stuck in the time-warp of endless semiotic analyses of films and TV programmes or conceptually and evidentially simplistic studies of reception. In an ironic commentary on the media they claim to study 'say what you see' and 'ask the audience' have become not just catchphrases but the methodological basis of the field. Time to leave this behind. Time to catch up with the world.
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