And yet, for all of the insights that a materialist-cultural analysis has to bring to the study of new media, I agree with Horn that there is always a certain temptation (and danger) to privilege the material over the cultural, as I believe has been done in some rather short-sighted comments[16] regarding the current status and continuing significance of screen-oriented cultural studies and post-structuralist approaches. So while, on one level, staunchly materialist and anti-humanist approaches are understandable given the longstanding history of "vapor theory"[17] in continental philosophy from Kant to Baudrillard, I prefer the hybridity of the media studies approach because it is able to recognize the particular materiality of informatics, while at the same time avoiding the somewhat over-zealous, contemporary tendency to "position computer science as a kind of absolute truth, a given which can explain to us how culture works in software society."[18] For, as Wendy Chun reminds us in her essay "Did Somebody Say New Media?", neither German media archeology nor Anglo-oriented cultural and interface studies are sufficient on their own: while media archeologists are particularly adept at detailing the institutional underpinnings, "non-discursive practices," and "logics and physics of hardware and software," they also often appear as "hardware-maniac, assembler-devoted and anti-interface ascetics …blind to content and user practices." [19] And conversely, while more traditional cultural studies and formalist approaches to new media have been invaluable in laying a foundation for our understanding of the political and cultural experience of the user, their "relentless critiques of technological determinism" often belie an ignorance of the particular agency of technological materiality and its crucial intersection with questions of power.[20] Therefore, in attempting to navigate the various pitfalls of remaining tied to either of these two camps, I will by necessity remain wedded to the hybridity and mobility of a media studies analysis as it fits my purpose, while at the same never making any pretensions towards trying to simply "cover everything."

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