CAT, Backward and Forward: Renewing the Agenda

• In Event: The History and Future of the Communication and Technology Division

Abstract

Founded in the early 1980s as the Human Communication and Technology division of ICA, the fortunes of CAT have roughly paralleled the dramatic rise of interest in networked telecommunications and computing -- framed as "new media" -- within communication research and media studies over time. It has grown from an obscure, almost fringe area of study in a field dominated by mass communication effects research, to a topic that today dominates virtually every specialization and subfield in the communication discipline. Early CAT research was extraordinarily expansive and cross-disciplinary, ranging from micro-scale studies of presence, interactivity, disinhibition, self-representation, and small group process, to middle-range analyses of technology adoption, use, and reinvention in diverse cultures and communities, to macro-scale examinations of the broad social, economic, occupational, and power implications of the "information society." By the late 1990s CAT was already one of the largest divisions in ICA and the single largest association of academic new media researchers in its own right.

However, as its objects of study and questions have become commonplace features of everyday life, CAT's intellectual agenda has become more diffuse, and the work of its contributors selectively appropriated both inside and outside the communication discipline. Their 35 years of findings and insights are at increasing risk of being trivialized, sidelined, or disregarded outright. Thus, this is an opportune time to revisit CAT's accomplishments as well as its key "habits of mind," and to consider how these might point the way forward for the Division and CAT studies.

A few to begin with: first, CAT's basic foundation in the network tradition and perspective on the study of society, technology and communication that extends back to Simmel and Moreno; second, a socio-technical perspective that rejects both technological and social determinism, and regards communicative action and technology as fundamentally and inextricably co-producing; and third, the rejection of conceptual binaries that continue to define and limit the traditional institutions of the communication discipline -- interpersonal vs. mediated, administrative vs. critical, micro vs. macro, content vs. channel, production vs. consumption, and so on.

Author

• Leah A. Lievrouw, U of California, Los Angeles