The cybercultural moment and the new media field

Abstract

This article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to understand the regenerative “belief in the new” in new media culture and web history. I begin by noting that discursive constructions of the web as disruptive, open, and participatory have emerged at various points in the medium’s history, and that these discourses are not as neatly tied to economic interests as most new media criticism would suggest. With this in mind, field theory is introduced as a potential framework for understanding this (re)production of a belief in the new as a dynamic of the interplay of cultural and symbolic forms of capital within the new media field. After discussing how Bourdieu’s theory might be applied to new media culture in general terms, I turn to a key moment in the emergence of the new media field—the rise of cybercultural magazines Mondo 2000 and Wired in the early 1990s—to illustrate how Bourdieu’s theory may be adapted in the study of new media history