1.2.1 Living in a Datafied World

Chapters in Part I address the ways new communication tools and infrastructures fuel the collection and analysis of unprecedented amounts of personal data. In this “datafied” environment, digital platforms play host to a widening array of political, commercial, professional, and social interactions, producing digital footprints that are the object of pervasive corporate and government collection and surveillance. While data have long been a byproduct of political, economic, and social activities, their volume and value have vastly increased due to the advancement in technologies that manage so-called big data, or large data sets that can be manipulated to reveal the patterns and associations of our concerns and behavior, and to make predictions about what we will be concerned about and how we will behave in the future. A growing number of scholars therefore argue that big data not only measure but also shape reality (Hintz et al., 2018; Turow, 2012; Zuboff, 2019).

These developments can be viewed on a number of discrete fronts. Industries use data obtained from our digital lives to better understand and target customer preferences. Banks and insurance companies use data to predict customer risk profiles. Police use such information to predict crime. So-called smart cities gather data through sensors to improve the efficiency and sustainability of urban spaces by measuring traffic patterns, air quality variations, public transportation efficiencies, and the behavior of its publics. Data activists use data to make visible social problems that are being ignored or denied. For example, the group Freedom for ImmigrantsFootnote ¹ maintains data on the US immigration detention system gathered from government offices, a national call hotline, and a network of volunteer detention-center visitors.

While technology developers, digital rights groups, and surveillance experts have long been concerned with the implications of mass corporate and government surveillance, it was not until whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed the surveillance activities of US and UK intelligence agencies in 2013 that pervasive collection of personal data became a prominent issue of public concern (Hintz et al., 2018). The Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed that the company harvested the personal Facebook data of 87 million users in an effort to manipulate how they vote, marked another high point of attention around the issue (Reference CadwalladrCadwalladr, 2018). The story revealed the ways data collection and sorting practices have transformed election campaigns and other political communication strategies through the use of psychometric data to micro-target advertisements, amounting to covert and deceitful messaging, including massive efforts to dissuade people from voting (Howard and Bradshaw, 2017).

The chapters included here focus on the ways personal data is used as a source of profit as well as a proxy for public opinion. In his chapter, “The Corporate Reconfiguration of the Social World,” Nick Couldry explores the challenges for scholars approaching the contours of a social world in which every layer, as he puts it, has been “reconfigured… so that it becomes ‘naturally’ extractable for profit.” Couldry argues we are living less through a new phase of capitalism and more through a new phase of colonialism. Rather than appropriating land or bodies, the new colonists appropriate data. He argues that data collection is so pervasive that it has become a basic “condition of human life.”

As a central point, Couldry considers the normative values that ought to drive communication researchers engaged with corporations. He suggests scholars recognize Facebook’s response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for example, as an unabashed attempt to camouflage continued and concerted antidemocratic practices that serve to bolster economic and social trends that benefit the company. CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly apologized for his company’s involvement with Cambridge Analytica on CNN, calling it an “issue,” a “mistake,” and a “breach of trust.” But the extended use of personal data is not a departure from but rather the foundation of Facebook’s business model. That is, Facebook is not a victim of but rather an accomplice to Cambridge Analytica crimes. Couldry encourages media scholars to be at the forefront of the effort to break down the contradictions between what networked-era data companies say and what they do.

Melissa Aronczyk’s chapter, “Public Communication in a Promotional Culture,” also explores the implications of a datafied life. By illustrating the gap between the principles and practices of corporate data mining, Aronczyk takes up what Couldry (2015) has elsewhere called “the myth of us,” or the belief that our exchanges on social media platforms are a natural form of social connection rather than a manufactured arrangement for the creation of economic value. Her critique of datafication focuses less on the fact of its existence, or on how data are deployed in the service of promotional culture, and more on what we assume we can know about public opinion through data. She argues that the data collected by private media companies are often relevant only to specific behaviors carried out in a predetermined context. It reflects behaviors shaped less by user interests, concerns, or habits than by the way the system is engineered to maximize attention and profit and to adhere to security and privacy regulations. These factors, Aronczyk argues, create data sets that are highly specific to conditions of their collection and that cannot – and indeed should not – stand in for any more general public opinion. She suggests that personal data is “a tool but not a condition of public life.” By examining how the United Nations uses data sets donated by private companies to address their agenda for climate mitigation, for example, she questions the reliability of that data for making inferences about human behavior. More broadly, Aronczyk interrogates the wisdom of taking our cues from corporations by adopting the same assumption they make about what their data mean. “As media and communication scholars increasingly turn their attention to the inequities of our digital platforms,” she writes, “we need to devote more energy to investigating the disparities between the affordances of these platforms and the actual social and cultural truths of the people using them.”

1.2.2 Journalism in Times of Change

Authors in Part II turn their attention to the challenges and opportunities for journalism in the contemporary era. On this front, few would dispute that journalists confront major challenges. Nearly every news organization is undergoing some form of restructuring. This is discussed most prominently among “legacy” news media, which employ the majority of professional journalists, and for whom traditional revenue sources are declining or threatened, as is the case for many public service media (Reference Nielsen and SelvaNielsen and Selva, 2019). Yet even so-called new (e.g., online) or what we might think of as “newish” (e.g., cable) media outlets find themselves undergoing restructuring of one sort or another. In January 2019, for example, three prominent US-based digital startups – Buzzfeed, Vice, and Huffington Post – laid off hundreds of journalists in an effort to reduce costs (Reference PeiserPeiser, 2019). While the empirical specifics vary across organizations and national contexts, uncertainty is a core feature of contemporary journalism, both with respect to the work that journalists ought to be doing and the types of organizational and political economic structures that might realistically support such work.

To be sure, these challenges come with a number of possible upsides. Technology-enabled collaboration among journalists – as seen in the Panama Papers, for example – allows for the creation of reporting that would otherwise be too costly for a single organization to pursue on its own (Reference SambrookSambrook, 2018). New publishing ventures, moreover, have the potential to expand the range of voices and viewpoints in the news, in part by cultivating relationships with civil society actors or historically underrepresented groups (Reference RussellRussell, 2016). Civic engagement is also in some ways being deepened, with members of the public, at least in some circumstances, using digital tools to create, circulate, and interact with news to a much greater degree than previously possible (Reference Lance and SegerbergBennett and Segerberg, 2013).

Yet risks also clearly abound. A small number of platform companies now function as the primary gateway for journalists to reach their audiences (Reference HindmanHindman, 2018). The attention economies these companies produce are marked by deep asymmetries between the limited few outlets or individuals that capture attention and the vast majority that do not. This is a problem not only for the journalists and news organizations that fail to capture such attention (and thus end up receiving small or diminishing audience shares); it also increases the tendency of each subsequent development in journalism to orient itself to whatever provides the best chances of capturing attention in such an economy. In other cases, the risk is that economically weakened news organizations will find themselves “captured” by political or business power-holders (Schiffrin, 2017). Beyond business models, the same tools that might deepen civic engagement can also be used to spread propaganda and “disinformation” (Reference PhilipsPhillips, 2018).

The challenges that confront journalism also interact with some of the already-mentioned broader social transformations. Deepening political polarization in many countries dovetails with partisan attacks on the news media, as does rising authoritarianism (Reference MasonMason, 2018; Reference YesilYesil, 2016). This polarization interacts with rising inequality – in terms of income as well as educational attainment – as members of the public self-select news that affirms their views or, in some cases, ignore the news altogether (Reference ClarkeClarke, 2014; Reference StroudStroud, 2011). Reduced trust in government, combined with sustained political efforts by some to see markets as arbiters of social worth, also overshadow the view that journalism is a public good in some national contexts (Reference PickardPickard, 2017).

The contributors to this part situate their pressing questions in relation to these transformations. In his chapter, “Press Freedom and Its Context,” Daniel Hallin notes that the concept of press freedom seems especially salient in a range of contemporary contexts, with political leaders in multiple countries openly rejecting it as a worthwhile principle, and the spread of online propaganda everywhere raising questions about what press freedom ought to mean in practice. Yet the concept, as he points it, “has never been the subject of a particularly well-developed body of either theory or empirical research” among communication scholars (p. 54). Drawing in part on his own engagements as an advisor producing press freedom ratings for the Americas for Freedom House, he explores the history of the concept, its measurement, and discusses some problems associated with using a standardized measure to capture diverse empirical realities. Rather than provide an essential definition, Hallin’s chapter offers guidance on how to think about the concept in ways that take seriously the empirical details of particular contexts while also remaining aware of the concept’s necessary limitations.

Matthew Powers and Sandra Vera-Zambrano use the challenges facing journalism to revisit an old question concerning journalists’ purposes in their chapter: “What Are Journalists for Today?” Rather than provide a normative answer to the question, they draw on their comparative research of journalists in France and the United States to argue that what journalists are for depends on the position one occupies in the field. Some tell stories as a way to inform publics, hold elites accountable, and cultivate empathy, while others focus on accurately reporting the facts and engaging their audiences. They argue that these are not merely individual choices but instead reflect differences in social origins, professional trajectories, and national contexts. In calling attention to the hierarchical nature of journalists’ purposes, they argue that, while contemporary journalists might face similar pressures, those pressures do not impact everyone in the same way, and that the diversity of these responses and the particular kind of varied approaches to the work they reveal are in part what helps reproduce a class-based social order.

In their chapter, “Noise and the Values of News,” Stephanie Craft and Morten Stinus Kristensen pose the question of whether news values – that is, journalistic judgments regarding the merits of a given piece of information – can serve a contemporary media environment that is chaotic, crowded, and noisy. Drawing on examples from the 2016 American presidential campaign, they argue that values like impact, conflict, and novelty are increasingly incompatible with a media environment that demands and rewards sharing news incrementally and repeatedly, treating every new piece of information with “breaking news” intensity. These mismatched values are further fueled by commercial pressures that favor such values, as well as by “bad faith” actors who seek to game these values to steer coverage in ways that promote their causes or muddy public understanding of core issues. Rather than advocating for a return to a romanticized “simpler” time of journalistic gatekeeping power and professional authority over news, Craft and Kristensen argue that journalists and journalism educators alike need to rethink some of the basic premises of journalistic norms and practices, with the aim of developing news values that are better able to provide the public with the information necessary for political life to function.

1.2.3 Media and Problems of Inclusion

The chapters in Part III take on the problems of creating and sustaining inclusive media content and, more broadly, media environments. They stem from the observation that the legitimacy of contemporary societies, especially those which are or profess to be democratic, rests in important ways on their claim to being inclusive. It is “the people” as citizens – rather than subjects of someone’s rule – that are said to possess the decisive voice in organizing such systems. The very idea of who counts as a citizen is thus both a recurrent issue and the object of ongoing struggles (Reference GaxieGaxie, 1993). Media have long played a contradictory role in such struggles. On the one hand, by providing publics with information they need as well as a forum that exposes those publics to a range of viewpoints, they can and sometimes do serve as a vehicle for greater inclusion and integration across multiple lines of social difference (Reference HabermasHabermas, 1989). On the other hand, media are also regularly found to exclude and marginalize individuals and groups, contributing to, rather than diminishing, exclusionary social tendencies (Reference ClarkeClarke, 2014).

The advent of the World Wide Web and the spread of digital communication led many scholars to imagine that such tools, as well as the practices associated with them, might serve as forces for inclusion and integration. Across a wide range of empirical settings, scholars documented ways that new technological-enabled social action appeared more egalitarian than prior modes of social organization (Reference BenklerBenkler, 2006; Reference Bimber, Flanagin and StohlBimber et al., 2012). Related lines of research suggested that such tools might also offer individuals and groups novel ways of redressing exclusion, in part by bypassing or strategically interacting with media that might otherwise exclude their messages (Reference CastellsCastells, 2009; Reference Jackson, Bailey and WellesJackson, Bailey and Foucault Welles, 2020). Taken together, this and related lines of scholarship helped chart the course for research that evaluates the degree to which such tools did indeed foster greater inclusion or deeper forms of engagement.

Today, enthusiasm about the inclusive nature of contemporary media appears in some ways to be overstated. Many now worry about the various ways in which the media remain exclusionary and indeed sometimes exacerbate various forms of exclusion across multiple lines of social difference (Reference SunsteinSunstein, 2017). One particular concern pertains to exclusion from production and consumption of media. Scholars note that journalists are increasingly well-educated (Reference Hanitzsch, Hanusch, Ramaprasad and de BeerHanitzsch et al., 2019) and that the makers of digital tools are comprised disproportionately of men (Reference NobleNoble, 2018). The products they create, therefore, tend to reflect the standpoints from which they see the world, which often occlude perspectives and experiences of those occupying other positions in class, gender, racial, or other social hierarchies. Such exclusion is pernicious in part because it is misrecognized as the result of things deserved rather than of the unequal distribution of opportunities.

Current discussions have also seen a revival of long-standing concerns about whether media can strengthen voice – thus acting as a force for inclusion – without also subjecting those voices to manipulation. Scholars note that many members of the public have good reasons for feeling dissatisfied and excluded from contemporary public life. Globalized capitalism not only contributes to rising inequalities; it also threatens the sense of status enjoyed by some members of the public and their sense of belonging to a larger community (Reference HorschildHorschild, 2016). Yet these sentiments are also manipulated to serve a range of ulterior motives, which in the process contribute to exclusion rather than inclusion.

The authors in this part take up distinct aspects of these problems. Rodney Benson, in “Journalism and Inclusion,” asks whether news organizations, in their search for sustainable business models, are acting increasingly as a force for exclusion. In some cases, he writes, the exclusion is economic, as happens when subscriptions are too expensive for audience members who might otherwise consume such news. In other cases, the exclusion is cultural, which can be seen in publications freely available to all but that in fact only attract the interest of those with proportionally larger volumes of economic and cultural resources than the average member of the public. He calls for scholars to see exclusion as socially organized and to aid in the search for solutions to the problem of “civic” inclusion, which he imagines will include media literacy initiatives, newsroom recruitment to ensure better representation of people from diverse backgrounds, government policies to support independent media, and a range of other initiatives.

Charlton McIlwain in “Afrotechtopolis: How Computing Technology Maintains Racial Order” examines the way digital technologies reinforce racialized social hierarchies. He argues that cultural histories of the Internet typically exclude black history and that such an oversight makes it difficult to grasp how racial representations and institutional structures have long shaped computing systems. Sketching a history that extends back at least to the 1960s, he shows that governments and corporations have long sought to develop technologies that would thwart any attempts at challenging racialized hierarchies and that such efforts can be seen today, as in the revelation that IBM used New York Police Department surveillance footage to develop technology that uses skin color to search for criminal suspects. He argues that any effort to challenge racialized social hierarchies has to consider the technological grounds on which their struggles are waged. While acknowledging that digital tools have been immensely useful for recent movements like Black Lives Matter, he argues that any effort to address technologically enabled racialized hierarchies, which he terms Afrotechtopolis, must develop its own technologies.

In her chapter, “Exploiting Subalternity in the Name of Counter-Hegemonic Communication: Turkey’s Global Media Outreach Initiatives,” Bilge Yesil asks how scholars should grapple with the communication initiatives that advocate for inclusion on some issues while remaining antidemocratic and highly exclusionary in other key respects. Taking the case of Turkey’s governing party, she explores a wide-ranging media ecology – a state-financed public broadcaster and news agency, government-aligned English-language dailies, NGO digital efforts – that purports to speak on behalf of subaltern groups (Muslim refugees, African Americans, Palestinians) in the global public sphere. She argues that such efforts cannot be read as simply antihegemonic; rather, they must be understood as instrumental uses of “subaltern” discourses (while abandoning the principles historically associated with it). Yesil’s analysis demonstrates why scholarship examining authoritarian and populist communication needs to look beyond simply the ways such actors speak and polarize publics, and instead grasp how these efforts aim to legitimate themselves while neutralizing their critics. In doing so, she calls attention to the way inclusion–exclusion dynamics are not merely single-nation stories but rather are constructed in part through transnational relations among nation-states.

1.2.4 Engagement with and through Media

The chapters in Part IV take on issues related to how people engage with media and one another through media. They are based on the assumption that democracies are not sustainable unless they foster informed and engaged publics. And just as early forms of the web were celebrated for their potential for inclusion, the widespread adoption of digital communication at the turn of the century prompted scholars concerned with public life to celebrate the way they imagined digital tools would strengthen democratic communication and the robustness of the public sphere. Reference BenklerYochai Benkler (2006), for example, argued networked publics could engender a shift away from commercial media and centrally organized knowledge production toward “nonmarket” and distributed production. Similarly, Henry Jenkins (2006) described a more socially distributed intelligence, which he saw growing in the activities of, for example, spoiler groups watching the reality television show Survivor. The information environment created through networked engagement, he said, extended beyond entertainment writing: “By pooling information and tapping grassroots expertise, by debating evidence and scrutinizing all available information, and perhaps most powerfully, by challenging one another’s assumptions, the blogging community is spoiling the American government” (332). Like discourses surrounding inclusion, today optimistic analyses of engagement have given way to more measured assessments, as the stark realities of antidemocratic uses of digital platforms have come to light. The consequences of digitization, as well as previously mentioned challenges to journalism and new conditions for inclusion, set the stage for new avenues through which to engage with one another, with media, and with governing institutions, as well as new ways for such engagement to be manipulated.

Indeed, the rise of commercial platforms has led to what Reference PasqualeFrank Pasquale (2017) calls the “automated public sphere,” in which platforms like Facebook and Google have come to control the type and quality of content, turning engagement into data points, and ordering content based on market considerations rather than public interest. Those who focused on the engagement potential of the Internet did, however, give prominence to a more nuanced understanding of public engagement that challenges traditional notions of participation in the public sphere.

Indeed, while the notion of the public sphere – Jürgen Habermas’s theoretical communication space located between state and private spheres – has been central to conceptualizing democratic engagement, it is also regularly criticized for, among other things, its emphasis on rationality as the dominant arbitrator of any issue. In what has been called the “emotional turn” in media studies that began in the early 2000s, affect is seen not as the opposite of reason but rather as an essential and complementary ingredient in the creation of political subjectivities (Reference PapacharissiPapacharissi, 2015; Reference Wahl-JorgensenWahl-Jorgensen, 2019). Making emotions visible and gauging their impact on political decision-making is therefore key to understanding how people engage and to what effect. Zizi Papacharissi (2017) finds, for example, that while affective publics can be distracting and misinformed, they can also make positive contributions to public discourse by disrupting dominant narratives. Affect, of course, has also been weaponized in political campaigns, exploited by ratings-hungry media companies, and leveraged by attention-seeking technology platforms that sort users into affective categories and shape content and feeds to fuel more emotional engagement for political or commercial gain.

Chapters in this part address engagement not as an ideal or flawed side effect of the current networked media environment, but rather as a fluid process in which human agency remains central. Hartmut Wessler, in his chapter “Constructive Engagement across Deep Divides: What It Entails and How It Changes Our Role as Communication Scholars,” focuses on what constructive engagement might look like, rather than on the polarization and echo chambers and other conditions that stack the deck against constructive engagement. Wessler identifies three ways current scholarship can be shifted to better address the topic: first, to move from research that emphasizes voice to the practices associated with listening; second, to turn from disruptive conflict toward identifying the potential for integrative conflict; and third, by moving from modes of argumentation to research that examines the “self-transcendent emotions” that fuel constructive interaction with individuals across social divides. The chapter suggests that focusing on constructive engagement can link long-standing concerns articulated by theorists like Habermas focused on rational-critical deliberation with efforts made by social theorists like Georg Simmel, Lewis Coser, and Helmut Dubiel to highlight the integrative and constructive potential of robust but contained conflicts.

Lynn Clark explores youth engagement in her chapter, “Fostering Engagement in an Era of Dissipating Publics,” pointing out that youth engagement is less about issues of public concern and more about how youth publics coalesce and dissipate around particular events and issues. She argues that through practices of curation made possible with mobile phones and social media platform feeds, young people create anchoring narratives that can serve as reminders for themselves and for others of past engagements with news and with current events. These anchors or artifacts of individual and collective engagement with current events and issues can be generative in ways that hold potential for the coalescing of future publics. She asks: “How can the phenomena that we have known as journalism work to better trigger and support those processes of coalescing youthful publics in the face of constant dissipation?” In order to better understand coalescing and dissipating youth publics, she suggests we need to direct our concerns away from worries about apathetic and misinformed young people and toward concerns about fixing the systems that seem incapable of listening and responding to their lived experiences. Young people may be news consumers, but our responsibilities to them extend beyond hoping that they will one day replace today’s reading, listening, or viewing news audiences. She argues that scholars need to know more about how news and information can contribute to developing their critical consciousness and sense of political efficacy, which may be related to how and when they engage in sharing, inserting themselves into, and creating news.

1.2.5 The Role of Scholars

The authors in Part V of the book assert that the need for scholarly engagement in public life has reached new levels of urgency. Public intellectuals are often celebrated as a bridge spanning the distance between the academy and society, but scholarly public engagement can take many forms, including participating in collaborative popular- or public-culture projects, creating alternative ways of communicating research findings, and focusing work on topics of direct relevance in the world beyond the academy. Engagement in many of its various forms is an idea that scholars support, and there are recurrent efforts across the social sciences and humanities to define and promote the notion that researchers have a responsibility to narrow the distance between themselves and the public and contribute to solving social problems.

Authors in this final part consider scholars’ relationships to contemporary publics, challenging media researchers to make their work more relevant and collaborative and suggesting concrete ways to do so. Seth Lewis takes on what he calls the conundrum of the field’s double-sided struggle for relevance: how media studies gets lost among academic disciplines, on one side, and how it fails to connect with publics, on the other. In his chapter entitled “What Is Communication Research For? Wrestling with the Relevance of What We Do,” Lewis scrutinizes the disconnect between the field of media studies and people’s deeply mediated lived experience. He approaches the topic in three ways: first, conceptually, considering what questions scholars are asking and not asking as a way to explore the assumptions, worldviews, and theories driving the research that does and does not get done; second, methodologically, delving into how scholars ask questions, to which groups of people, and gathering what kinds of data; third, communicatively, asking for whom scholars undertake their work, looking particularly at how research is being communicated to multiple audiences and with what normative aims. Lewis highlights sources of disconnection by exploring well-researched media topics of central concern to publics – media bias, information inequality, and religious faith. He demonstrates the field’s failure to provide the public with satisfactory responses.

In “Communication as Translation: Notes toward a New Conceptualization of Communication,” Guobin Yang argues that scholars need to transform their approaches to knowledge and knowledge production. He suggests that taking a view of communication as translation, as opposed to transmission, community, or ritual, makes central a recognition of difference. Drawing on Reference BenjaminWalter Benjamin (1968), he argues that, like translators, communication researchers can never overemphasize the ethos of openness and receptiveness to difference inherent to the work and the centrality to media scholarship of pedagogies on listening, learning, and attunement. The role of the communication scholar, he argues, is not just to translate the experiences of those we study, but also to learn from those experiences. “We should cultivate methodological orientations and sensibilities that let human subjects teach us about their experiences, rather than explaining to them in academic jargon about their own experiences.”

In “What Are We Fighting For? Academia or the Humility of Knowledge,” Nabil Echchaibi challenges the conviction of Edward Said and others that intellectuals comprise an elite class that alone possess a unique capacity to raise difficult questions and challenge the status quo. These thinkers, he argues, “remain acutely silent about whether the public can talk back to intellectuals, to inform, question, and improve their knowledge and practice.” Drawing on his own collaborative work with scholars and artists on the questions of immigration, borders, and frontiers, Echchaibi suggests that scholarship is enriched when subjects are invited in as collaborators. He invites scholars to collectively reimagine our research as a collaboration across a diverse set of expertise and genres, work that embraces the obliqueness of knowledge with the hope of producing an “other” form of knowledge that goes beyond the intellectual boundaries and epistemic and linguistic limitations that shape media scholarship. Rather than making our work more accessible to the public, he argues, we should be working with publics in order to transform our work to be more relevant and therefore more readily heard to publics beyond academia.

1.2.6 Media Research and Mediated Shifts and Crises

In his epilogue to the book, Silvio Waisbord extends the discussion of how media scholarship might best engage publics and how it might best intervene in shaping media and public life. Given the scope and scale of current change in the communication landscape, Waisbord calls on media scholars to revisit the analytical scaffolding and normative arguments that form the basis of the field. He calls on scholars to acknowledge and work to better understand the reality of fragmented media ecologies, heterogeneous forms of public engagement, and fractured public knowledge as we work to find “viable courses of action to build more democratic and just societies.”

Like the authors in the final part on public scholarship, Waisbord argues that media scholars face unique challenges today and that they carry an ethical obligation to engage with their research objects in order to help meet those challenges on behalf of the public. To be sure, the authors in this volume differ in their assessment of the nature of these challenges. Indeed, when they came together in person to share their essays, they came to no consensus on how to label, much less meet, the challenges facing contemporary mediated societies. Some suggested that the “shifting landscape of public communication” – the banner under which we initially met – would be more accurately replaced by one that described the foundations of media and public life as “crumbling beneath our feet.” They said we were living through a crisis and that our efforts as scholars to make sense of and engage in the crisis should address it as such. “But a crisis compared to what?” others asked, pointing to societies that have long endured authoritarianism, propaganda, economic instability, mass surveillance, and political and economic graft. They argued that recognizing a crisis requires context – that is, some background understanding of what constitutes normal and for whom such normalcy exists. Authors in the volume, therefore, describe very different approaches to negotiating the relationship between scholarly engagement and detachment and how they relate to the groups they study. One area of consensus, however, seemed to form around the idea that social transformations, whether characterized via the language of “crisis” or “shift,” demand scholars move beyond existing frameworks – that research paradigms and core concepts that shaped our understanding of media and public life in the past must also be refined to better serve research and analysis of the contemporary moment. This book is thus the product of deep concern, thoughtful deliberation, and sometimes heated debate. The editors hope it helps move the field in a productive way towards better understanding the massive challenges that confront media and public life today.