Nick is a member of the Department of Media Communications at Goldsmiths University of London. He is a participant in the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre and is the author or editor of nine books including The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age, Inside Culture, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach, Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World (coedited with James Curran) and Media Events in a Global Age (co-edited with Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz). His most recent book is Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism.
What one insight from your field, approach, method, findings etc. do you think is most important for scholars working in this topical area?
My instinctive response is that there is no one insight, approach, method, etc. that can be usefully selected, since the complexity of issues raised by digital cultural production means that it is the interconnections between many insights, methods, approaches, that are crucial—and that the crucial thing is not to celebrate any one particular insight, but to work collectively towards better questions!
What are two issues that are not adequately treated within current work on cultural production in the digital age in your field or in others?
What is the cultural/practical/social demand for new forms of cultural production, and how will this grow, stabilise, be sustained, etc? (It seems to me most commentary concentrates on changes in cultural ‘supply,’ but there is much less commentary on the demand that over the long-term will determine the difference that increased supply will make.)
Are humanistic values such as justice, equality, democracy or (insert preferred humanistic value here) currently served by cultural production in a digital networked environment?
The question of ‘justice’ in relation to all media and cultural production is very difficult and under-theorised, in my view. I suspect there are problems of injustice in relation to media and cultural resources but a huge amount of new work is needed, I think, to clarify what they are. As to democracy, the only way to approach this, in my view, is first, via the issues of sustainability raised above on question 2, and then by looking into what we understand as the conditions of democratization (I find Charles Tilly’s work for instance helpful here).