From broadcast media to distributed systems–John Hartley’s ‘cultural science’ and the future of ‘old’ cultural studies

Abstract

The paper assesses the significance for media and cultural studies of the collaborative interdisciplinary project initiated by John Hartley in the mid 2000s under the rubric of ‘cultural science’. It suggests that, in the case at least of Hartley’s own work, the project could be understood as an attempt to pivot cultural studies from an engagement with centre-periphery conceptual schemas associated with print and broadcast media to an idea of distributed systems. The way it does so is very revealing as to prospects of the concept of culture in the wake of half a century of neoliberal institutional reform. The paper finds the claim to scientificity confused and misleading, inhibiting engagement from what Hartley now calls ‘old’ cultural studies. However, the lines of argument can be pushed further than cultural science has itself been prepared to do, opening new possibilities for cultural studies and new possibilities for how we might imagine our collective future.