Reflections on New Media/Cyberculture studies

During the first conference and in many of my conversations with people connected to Piet Zwart, the question keeps coming up about what exactly we are all doing in this field. Should we be studying the technology? The creative practices? The sociology? Thank God I'm in rhetoric--there's nothing like a meta-field to happily encompass interests (like mine) that might generously be described as broad...maybe fragmented is more accurate...

But back to the question, why do we study these things? I think that's the big question, and while we don't have to have the same answer, I don't see many people talking about the question at all. There seems to be an idea that we all have already agreed that computer tech, the internet, the web, are worth studying by definition. --Well, you could argue that anything produced by people is worth studying, certainly that's a long-standing view of cultural studies. But I think we have to make the case a bit more clearly than that. Maybe I will make this a central question in my interviews.