Plenary| If Everything is Mediated, What is Distinctive About the Field of Communication?

“I believe that the intellectually serious study of communication should be transformative for the social sciences,” said Craig Calhoun in his keynote to the 2011 ICA Annual Conference in Boston, thereby capturing in a single sentence our ambitions for the field (intellectual! transformative!) and yet also our doubts (serious? should?). Three years ago, in my presidential address to the 2008 ICA Annual Conference in Montreal, I argued, relatedly, that everything is mediated—from childhood to war, politics to sex, science to religion—and more so than ever before. As media and communication technologies increasingly shape every sphere of social life from the global and public to the most intimate, from the weirdest niche fandom to the hugely profitable mass market, it is arguable that claims once reserved for historically embedded forms of mediation (notably, language, myth, laws, money) now also apply to the texts and technologies of the converging digital environment. Nothing escapes their imprint. Nothing remains unmediated, in the raw. No strict boundary can be drawn between the offline and the online. Knowledge is power, and in the knowledge society the power to represent is all. Why, then, the doubt? Surely, widespread recognition from other social sciences and humanities departments is imminent, and they will all beat a path to our door to gain our accumulated wisdom. As Calhoun suggests, we believe both that the time of media and communications has come, and yet we have no expectation of such appreciative audiences. Indeed, we often bemoan the fact that rarely do scholars from other disciplines come to us or our journals for advice on how to study the media; rather, they seem to us to reinvent the wheel, neglect our intellectual tradition of analysis and findings, tread on our toes. We also worry that, despite being “cash cows” for our institutions, we lack the authority to set the wider agenda—within or beyond the university. The substance of Calhoun’s lecture seeks to unpack the reasons why, and he offers much for us to ponder and debate. He debunks some myths—for example, although the field’s heterogeneity makes it exciting, this is not the reason for any lack of coherence (economics, too, is diverse in its topics), and nor is any lack of a single method (for no field has this, and nor should it). The field’s diversity goes deeper than the range of topics it examines, however. Perhaps because the field of communication is both relatively new and yet so central to the social sciences and humanities, it is largely populated by immigrants from other more established fields which, although leaving us with some divided loyalties, also generates the intellectual pleasures of multi- and interdisciplinarity. Contrary to the dominant view in the disciplines that many of us have left, communication scholars are ready to

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