Martyn Thayne (class of 2008 / 2010) is pleased to announce that a revised version of his MA thesis, On Participation: A Critical New Media Analysis, has recently been published and is available here.

Here’s a quick overview:

“The recent ‘digital turn – the process of passing from an analogue mode of cultural production to a digital one – has prompted many scholars to assert a variety of paradigm shifts within the academic field of Media Studies. As traditional notions of production and consumption begin to conflate some have described digital technological practices as deeply democratic and empowering for media audiences. By merely celebrating the interactive features of ‘new media’ many new approaches fail to offer critical insight into the historical development of the contemporary socio-technical milieu and largely ignore how participatory cultures are being targeted by innovative regimes of political economy. Subsequently, I present a critique of recent work which, for the sake of this thesis and popular reference, I label Media Studies 2.0. This is a theoretical thesis that aims to contribute to the wider debates within media scholarship; not through an abstract model, but through clarifying the particular issues which have contributed to the development of digital media technologies and their social character.”

This work builds on Martyn’s growing research profile, which earlier in the year saw the publication of his article ‘Friends Like Mine: The Production of Socialised Subjectivity in the Attention Economy’ alongside the likes of Bernard Stiegler, Tiziana Terranova and Jonathan Beller. The article was included in a special volume of Culture Machine which focussed on the politics of ‘attention’ in the digital age and is available for FREE here.