Points of departure: Reflections on New Media & Society and the next 25 years in new media studies

There is no other way to put it: since appearing in 1999, New Media & Society has been an astonishing academic-publishing success story. Its rise and stellar reputation have grown in parallel with several pivotal shifts in perspective about new/digital media within communication research, media studies and related fields, and in society at large as they have all come to terms with the changing media landscape, for better or worse. I’ll begin with some context: I served in the chief editorial “quartet” of NM&S for 5 years early in the journal’s history (to date I have been the only female member of NM&S’s core editorial group, though many distinguished female scholars have been members of the Editorial Board). In 2001 I stepped in as the fourth when our colleague Rohan Samarajiva took a high-level telecommunications policy post with the republic of Sri Lanka, and later founded the LIRNEasia communications policy think tank. The invitation may have come at the suggestion of our commissioning editor at SAGE, Julia Hall, with whom I was already working on the first edition of the Handbook of New Media, co-edited with Sonia Livingstone (2002). However, in 2006, after the heartbreaking, untimely death of our partner Roger Silverstone,1 my tenure ended when the decision was made to replace the original four-person editorial model and concentrate principal editorial duties with Nick Jankowski at the University of Nijmegen and Steve Jones at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Eventually, Nick handed over the reins to Steve, who remains the chief Editor. Throughout its run I have continued as a member of the Editorial Board or as an occasional reviewer for NM&S, and it has a special place for me among the many journals about new media that have proliferated in the communication field in the intervening years. To mark the 25th anniversary of the journal’s launch, I want to briefly address the perspectival shifts mentioned above. In my view, together they represent a fundamental change in orientation in the study of communication, wrought by new media—changes that began before the journal began publication, but have become central concerns in communication study, duly documented in the pages of NM&S. The first shift concerns the “positioning” of new/digital media studies and scholarship within the communication discipline and cognate areas such as media sociology. NM&S has played a major role in bringing this about. One consequence of the introduction of “new media” as a distinct research front in the 1970s and 1980s was the recognition of 1143427 NMS0010.1177/14614448221143427new media & societyEditorial research-article2022