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Identifying innovative and commanding work that directs or redirects research and scholarship in communication studies is more difficult than for many other areas. This is so, I maintain, precisely because ours is not a discipline. Those of us who prefer the concept of a “field” to describe the broad focus of our efforts use the term in two ways. One is the common usage, the conventional sense of an area of study. The other, the one I prefer, is more metaphorical. Used in this sense our activity can be described as attempts to make our way across broad expanses. Some areas are marked and fenced, clearly bounded. Sometimes these areas are even more severely restricted as in the culture of my youth. Hunters knew that land owners could place signs along the boundaries of their property, identifying it as “Posted.” This meant that no hunter could legally cross onto that land, or could do so only with special permission. (To pre-figure some of my later comments, I will suggest here that in intellectual activity, it is often the poachers, those who transgress such boundaries, who end up providing truly innovative scholarship and research.) Other areas of “the field” are open, however, inviting all who would so attempt to explore, map, and measure. These open areas, of course, are not without their own dangers. Those who venture there may find themselves in swamps or bogs, buried forever in questions without answers. But other areas are well-defined, cultivated, planted, and fertilized. Here, planting and re-planting occurs in familiar furrows. For the most part, successful work in such areas is best described as improvement and refinement, and this is significant, because even here there is no such thing as a predictable harvest. But our work is not defined by metaphors. Our focus is on hard problems, on issues related to the lived experience of citizens throughout the world. Communication technologies, the messages, meanings and issues carried within them, and the problems and promises attendant to those complex phenomena are among the most fundamental and important in societies and cultures everywhere. At one time, perhaps, many of us felt assured of how best to study those issues, problems, and promises. We could measure and evaluate the content of media messages, consider the effects of mediated material, the policies regulating practices, the economics, both classical and political, enabling and restraining communication. Later approaches challenged these boundaries. They focused PLENARY SESSION I

Plenary Session I. Research at the Forefront of Media Science. Searching for Landmarks at the Forefront of Media Research