Beyond New Media

Beyond New Media: Discourse and Critique in a Polymediated Age brings together a host of differing positions on media in order to explore how those positions can inform one another and how we can build a basis for future engagements with media theory, research, and practice. In order to do so, Herbig, Herrmann, and Tyma have brought together a number of media scholars with differing paradigmatic backgrounds, including critical, postmodern, gender, rhetorical, narrative, and interpretive social science theoretical perspectives. Similarly, contributors' disciplinary backgrounds are diverse, spanning interpersonal communication, media studies, organizational communication, instructional design, rhetoric, mass communication, gender studies, popular culture studies, informatics, and persuasion. Although each of these scholars brings with them a unique perspective on media's role in people's lives, what binds them together is the belief that meaningful discourse about media must be an ongoing conversation that is open to critique and revision in a rapidly changing mediated culture. The media theories that have dominated our thinking and research about media do not adequately describe our complex relationship to media(tion) in everyday lives. In this collection, the contributors debate the relative applicability of existing theories and set out to develop a new approach: polymediation.