Introduction to the Updated Student Edition

In that volume, we and our contributing authors made numerous observations about the history, role, functions, meanings and implications of new media technologies and uses across a diverse range of social, cultural and institutional settings.Perhaps the most accurate was our sense of how rapidly the study of networked information and communication technologies was spreading across disciplines, specialities and perspectives.If anything, the proliferation and fragmentation of work we identified has accelerated since the first edition appeared in print.In the introduction (which is included in the present volume), we argued that the intellectual eclecticism and openness of new media studies was one of its great strengths, difficult as it might be to survey or synthesize the field from any single point of view.We offered the Handbook then, as we do now, as our effort to counter the 'Balkanization' of new media studies that was dividing the field into dozens of specialized, noncommunicating academic niches.Some of the changes anticipated in the first edition were fairly predictable.New media (with 'the Internet' at the top of the list as a kind of archetype) have become everyday technologies, thoroughly embedded and routinised in the societies where they are most widely used.New media have not replaced older media, any more than broadcasting replaced print in the mid-20th century.Rather, people's information and communication environments have become ever more individualized and commodified, integrating print, audio, still and moving images, broadcasting, telecommunications, computing, and other modes and channels of communication and information sharing. How to Use the Updated Student EditionWith this Updated Student Edition of the Handbook, we depart from the usual model in academic publishing of simply reproducing the first edition in soft cover.Nor have we put together an entirely new second edition.The book still provides a current and comprehensive