近年来，媒体研究经常关注当代数字技术如何重塑社会和个人意识。这不可避免地引发了关于传播、媒体和交通的关系以及“媒体中心主义”所带来的利弊难题。在这种情况下，我们必须提出，研究应该如何与媒体研究、传播学、文化研究、交通地理学和流动性研究等学科相关联，以及我们想要建立或超越什么样的学科界限。这也引发了关于历史分期问题的思考，以及如何最好地使用概念来说明时代之间的断裂和连续。这里，需要扭转对技术影响的通常看法，并将新技术纳入可以回答的问题中。这对强调解除管制的后福特主义社会的具体特征很有用，为富裕的北半球温带地区的媒体运营提供了条件，也为许多分析提供一个通用模板。因此，还需要考虑该领域的“去西方化”的问题，以及我们所生活的后疫情时代的特殊性如何有助于确定当代传播形式的背景。

In recent years, media studies have often focused on how contemporary digital technologies are reshaping both societies and individual consciousness. These issues inevitably raise difficult questions about the relationship of communications, media and transport and the gains and losses consequent upon media-centric perspectives. In this context, we have to ask how our field of study should be defined in relation to the disciplines of media studies, communications, cultural studies, transport geography and mobility studies-and what kind of disciplinary boundaries we want to establish or transcend. All this also raises issues about historical periodisation, and how best to conceptualise both breaks and continuities between eras. Here, I argue that we need to reverse the usual perspective on the effects of technologies and ask to what questions new technologies are the answers? In doing so, it is useful to highlight the specific characteristics of the de-regulated Post-Fordist societies which set the conditions of operation of the media of the rich northern temperate zone-which then tend to provide a universalised template for many analyses. Thus, we evidently also need to consider questions of the `De-Westernising` of the field and about how the specificities of the post-Covid pandemic period in which we live, serve to determine the context of contemporary forms of communication.