This paper seeks to offer a timely assessment of developments at the intersection between risk and new media. The paper is prompted by the observation that while advances and trends in new media technology, its use, and impacts, are currently generating widespread activity and interest, further recognition and critical attention is needed to trace out and examine their dynamic features, operations, and implications for risk related practices and social inquiry. The paper employs the concept of ‘liquidity’ (Bauman 2001; 2005; 2007; 2013a; 2013b) as an overarching analytic to provoke further critical reflection of the heterogeneous and fluid nature of contemporary new media and risk relations to emphasise the fundamental shift in how risk is now commonly experienced, expressed, and remediated. Particularly, we outline three key properties, ‘multimodality’, ‘instrumentality’, and ‘techno-cultural implication’, that characteristically shape the dynamic contours, flux and centrality of risk to new media practices. Finally, the paper concludes with discussion of the scope and scale of the problems, opportunities and research challenges newly posed and prompted by the converging and diverging ways in which liquidity underpins intersections between risk and new media, and points to some salient knowledge gaps and opportunities that invite further critical inquiry.