The media ecology that is reshaping around the global data network is already affecting our communication practices, quite dramatically. When major shifts in media have occurred in the past, anything we might consider scholarly work has changed along with other social practices.

The new media environment can be expected to change humanities and social science research in many different ways, and just for starters:

• by altering audiences for scholarship and participation in production of scholarly work.


• by altering the phenomena under study in ways that force reconceptualization (case-in-point: new media challenging the idea that "mediatization" is something that happened once with the rise of broadcast media).
  


• by exposing the need for new research tools (such as macrosopes and computational modeling).


• by presenting an environment so rich in metaphors that people spontaneously
  imagine new possibilities, whether or not there is a "need" for them.
  
  
• by transforming the preexisting political, economic and cultural power structures that shape the progress and direction of scholarship.

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