New Media: New Pleasures? STeM Working Paper, Dublin City University

This paper is based on the findings of a DCU funded pilot project which ran from Oct. 03-March 04. Developed by Dr. Aphra Kerr, Dr. Pat Brereton and Dr. Roddy Flynn, all members of the STeM research centre, they benefited considerably from the presence of Julian Kücklich, a visiting PhD student, funded under the EU's Marie Curie Programme. The project team all have experience researching and teaching about traditional and new media and their theoretical expertise ranges from political economy of the media to cultural studies, literary theory and social theory. The project was funded by the Research Advisory Panel in DCU and builds on previous STeM projects including Computer Games: Production, Texts and Users (00-03), gamedevelopers.ie (03-04), European Media Technology and Everyday Life (00-03), Cost A20; The Impact of the Internet on the Mass Media in Europe (00-2003) and Transformations in Irish Broadcasting (02-03), as well as previous Marie Curie student projects on interactive television and the internet (see http://www.stem.dcu.ie/ ) This project was motivated by one core question: do new media provide new pleasures to their users? The answer has important implications for designers of new media, regulators and media educators. However the question is deceptively simple and brings with it three inter-related but complex challenges which this pilot project set out to explore: 1.How do we define pleasure and where do we situate our work in relation to previous work on pleasure? 2.Can we differentiate between the pleasures provided by traditional media like cinema and new media like DVDs? 3.Can established research methods capture the pleasures provided by new media