Renew

Abstract

What could it possibly mean when a journal brazenly announces that its conceptual theme for an issue is the idea of "Renew"? Does it signal the first signs of panic, that M/C no longer has "it", whatever that elusive "it" might be? Could it indicate that M/C is in the first stages of deaththroes? Could it be some Stalinist or perhaps Maoist moment of cultural revolution and cleansing so that the editorial collective emerges more committed than ever to its mission? Or is it just another example of how marketing ploys have invaded all our discourses and made us appeal to idea of change in order to convince you that we are hip (as Dr Evil intoned in Austin Powers) with it and relevant to these crazy mixed-up times. Well, you would all be right. We wanted to renew the mandate of M/C. We still want to move ideas outward in our study of popular culture in all its manifestations and allow the journal to keep straddling the line between the popular and the academic. Although we have on occasion veered to the discourses of academic disciplines, we have tried to maintain a sensibility about how ideas can migrate and not be cloistered behind the professionalisation of cultural knowledge. We have provided a platform for understanding the shifts in contemporary culture as new media become more central to the rearticulation of our cultural experiences. And we have tried to maintain a thematic approach to critical engagement and allowed those concepts and themes to motivate a lateral patterning of thinking for our writers and readers. There is no question that our strategy has been successful. We have a regular and widely international readership. We have an incredibly international list of contributors to M/C which has given the journal an enviable international and national profile in the field of media and cultural studies. But we want more. We want to be more engaging, more widely read and actively making ideas move from the intellectual periphery to the cultural and political hearths. The 'renew' issue underlines this mandate and attempts to reinvigorate the journal with its original style posture and acknowledgement of its now international contributors. Part of this issue is designed as a moment of self-reflection by those first M/C writers, not so much on the journal itself but more generally on the concept of renewal. The other part of the issue is collected from submissions made to this theme from other writers. What we have produced is a powerful double-shot of perceptive ponderings on renewal in and around media and culture. Opening the issue, Adam Dodd's "'Unacceptable Renewals': The Geopolitics of Martian Cartography" uses the Mars face controversy as a looking glass through which to critique the broader science of cartography, the technologies actualising this science, and the politicised discourses of the people who practice Martian cartographies. The article demonstrates that the values of truth ascribed to cartographic objects are realised through practices that are not free-floating, but located and relocated institutionally and politically (amounting to the same thing). The geopolitics of transportation are explored in Felicity Meakins's "Reknowing the Bicycle; Renewing its Space", which considers the early impacts of the bicycle on our land- and cityscapes, before the motor car made its presence felt. With the resurgence of cycling as a means of transportation as well as recreation, Meakins suggests, some of these effects may be renewed. In "Virtual Domesticity: Renewing Cybernetic Living Environments", Nick Caldwell moves from discussing cyberspace in terms of how it manipulates the real to suggesting how the real can "colonise" cyberspace. Caldwell relates the personal computer to metaphors of domestic space, suggesting that we relate to the PC in ways which reflect our own manipulation of living space. He begins by noting the work space/computer space parallels used in the Windows operation system, through filing icons etc., and then moves to the home analogy. The manipulation of the domestic space is explained more specifically in a descriptive comparison between moving house and reinstalling Windows, spring cleaning and defragmenting, and the audio/visual control panels which bear a remarkable resemblance to the average home hi-fi system. In "Dash or Slash?: Renewing the Link between Media and Culture", M/C's outgoing Production Editor Axel Bruns ruminates on some issues that surrounded the naming of the journal nearly three years ago -- looking at the name "M/C" and the implications that pesky "/" has had for information structuring conventions on the World Wide Web and computer systems in general. What does a slash between the terms reveal about our conceptions of media and/or culture, and of the links between them? P. David Marshall's "Renewing Cultural Studies" offers two essays for the price of one. In one of them, he suggests that the project of cultural studies can be described as the study of recombinant culture, which inherently engenders its own renewals of theory, policy and practice. Following on from this, his second essay engages with the study of cultural production as it occurs on the side of the audience. New media technologies are constantly renewing the relationships between 'producer' and 'audience', enabling a far more active audience role, and a stronger focus of cultural studies on this area might also renew cultural studies' own interests. Some of the themes raised in these articles from the original M/C contributors are also taken up in the other submissions that complete this issue. In "One or Many Media?", Steven Maras also uses M/C's title slash to begin a discussion of the tensions between those treacherously similar terms 'medium', 'media', and 'the media'. In an effort to tease out the fine distinctions separating them, he traces the conceptual frameworks attached to each term, uncovering their complex interrelationships. The spirit of Marx's Grundrisse resonates throughout Janin Hadlaw's comparison of the discourses surrounding newer communications technologies with those which accompanied the emergence of the telephone. In "Plus Que Ça Change: The Telephone and the History of the Future", the material and social realities which provide the emergence of new technologies with their historical footing are also mobilised as a legitimate ground from which a notion of ongoing renewal in the field of techno-communications can be advanced. Finally, Steven Mizrach focusses on another ubiquitous form of communications technology in "Natives on the Electronic Frontier". Taking apart an older anthropological position around media and traditional culture -- that media such as television and radio destroy the authenticity and community roots of a society -- the author works through a preliminary reading of how television can be a source for the renewal of the languages and crafts of an Amerindian community. So, at the end of the first three volumes of M/C - A Journal of Media and Culture, this mixed issue with articles from a number of new as well as some of our longest-serving contributors demonstrates that we've achieved a resonance of ideas between our editorial collective and an impressive list of world-wide collaborators -- as well as, hopefully, with our readers. The coming year will see a number of significant changes in M/C, enabling us to face our future with renewed energy and continue on our mission to connect the popular and the academic; we are not going away, although we are constantly renewing ourselves with each issue and we encourage others to join in this continual process of engaged critical analysis of contemporary culture... Team M/C Citation reference for this article MLA style: Team M/C. "Editorial: 'Renew'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/edit.php>. Chicago style: Team M/C, "Editorial: 'Renew'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 6 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Team M/C. (2000) Editorial: 'Renew'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(6). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/edit.php> ([your date of access]).