Introduction to Digital Media

Alessandro Delfanti, Adam Arvidsson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119276395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

New and updated English translation of the highly successful book on digital media

This book introduces readers to the vast and rich world of digital media. It provides a strong starting point for understanding digital media's social and political significance to our culture and the culture of others—drawing on an emergent and increasingly rich set of empirical and theoretical studies on the role and development of digital media in contemporary societies. Touching on the core points behind the discipline, the book addresses a wide range of topics, including media economics, online cooperation, open source, social media, software production, globalization, brands, marketing, the cultural industry, labor, and consumption.

Presented in six sections—Media and Digital Technologies; The Information Society; Cultures and Identities; Digital Collaboration; Public Sphere and Power; Digital Economies—the book offers in-depth chapter coverage of new and old media; network infrastructure; networked economy and globalization; the history of information technologies; the evolution of networks; sociality and digital media; media and identity; collaborative media; open source and innovation; politics and democracy; social movements; surveillance and control; digital capitalism; global inequalities and development; and more.

• Delivers a reliable, compact and quick introduction to the core issues analyzed by digital culture studies and sociology of information societies
• Interweaves main topics and theories with several examples and up-to-date case studies, often linked to our everyday lives on the internet, as well as suggestions for further readings
• Anchors examples to discussions of the main sociological, political, and anthropological theoretical approaches at stake to help students make sense of the changes brought about by digital media
• Uses critical sociological and political theory alongside every day examples to discuss concepts such as online sociality, digital labor, digital value creation, and the reputation economy

Clear and concise throughout, Introduction to Digital Media is an excellent primer for those teaching and studying digital culture and media.

Part I
Frameworks

1
Media and Digital Technologies

Digital media have become part of everyday life. In order to understand the consequences of this, we need not only consider the technological features of digital media. We must also analyze the social, political, and economic contexts within which digital media have emerged. Technologies are not neutral, but have complex histories that weave together social, cultural, and political factors with technical and material possibilities. The social sciences have developed various approaches aimed at understanding the relation between technology and society, and the ways in which they influence each other and co‐evolve.

1.1 The Digital Environment

Contemporary societies are marked by the omnipresence and pervasiveness of digital media. Through the mass diffusion of personal computers, smartphones, tablets and other mobile technologies, and an accompanying near‐ubiquitous connectivity, in the last two decades digital media have entered into the daily life of ordinary people. Processes of mediatization, that is the increasing presence of media in all aspects of life, have pushed social theorists to propose that we live what Mark Deuze calls media lives (2012). The digital media environment that we live in is widespread, fluid, and highly efficient. Indeed we have come to take digital connectivity for granted. We only note its absence: when we are disconnected, it is stressful and problematic. Think of when your phone stops working as the train you are riding goes into a tunnel. Furthermore, the billions of microprocessors and computers diffused worldwide are used in a wide range of human activities, from agriculture to industrial production, services, entertainment, and education. Overall, the transformations introduced by digital technologies are changing the ways in which we produce and distribute information and knowledge, as well as the ways in which we work and socialize. Mediatization is indeed a process with far‐reaching consequences. On the one hand, as media studies scholars Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp put it, the term refers to “the increasing temporal, spatial and social spread of mediated communication”: we are surrounded by more and more media technologies in all aspects of our lives, in many different contexts, and across time and space. On the other, the concept stresses “the social and cultural differences that mediated communications make at higher levels of organizational complexity,” which means that the outcome of such processes goes far beyond human communication and invests all human relations (2017, p. 35). In sum, digital media have become so pervasive that the changes, challenges, and opportunities that they bring along assume a ubiquitous reach. Media theorist Felix Stalder describes this as the “digital condition,” a state in which computer networks have become “the key infrastructure for virtually all aspects of life” (2018, p. vii). This deep shift means that we now need to rethink the significance of terms like “democracy,” “participation,” “work,” “property,” and “power” in the light of the transformations linked to the emergence of digital technologies.

The evolution of computers is part of the history of the information society, which began centuries ago with the idea that information about social and economic facts could be collected, stored, and calculated. But the history of the electronic computers and computer networks that constitute digital media goes back several decades too (see Sections 2.4 and 2.5). Yet some recent events were crucial to give shape to the internet and computers we know today. The spread of digital media has grown steadily since the 1980s. Since then, we have seen the diffusion of (relatively) cheap and easy‐to‐use personal computers, themselves an effect of the evolution of microprocessor technology. The introduction of the World Wide Web in the 1990s brought internet connectivity into most homes and businesses in the advanced economies. The 2000s gave us the collaborative web: software and online platforms that allow all users to produce and distribute digital content. More recently, mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets have transformed the daily experience of the internet, further integrating digital media into the flow of everyday life. In 2018, in the US, Canada, Italy, and many other Western countries, about 90% of the population use the internet on a daily basis, and almost as many own a smartphone. Globally, the number of internet users has passed four billion, or more than half of the world's population. The spread of digital media has been explosive. From 2000 to 2018 internet users increased 10‐fold, and the massive spread of smartphones and internet use in areas like Asia, Africa, and South America in the last decade has changed the geography of the information society. China alone has 700 million internet users, and the rate of penetration has recently passed 50%. This challenges established assumptions about development and is rearranging the global role of some countries and areas of the world.¹

The emergence and success of technologies that process information in digital formats have brought about profound changes in the way the media works. Thanks to the ability to integrate and interact with most other existing technologies, digital media have assumed a key role in the organization of communication and information flows. These changes have an impact on the overall ecology of the media. According to this metaphor, new life‐forms like search engines, social networks, and mobile phone operators grow and prosper. They thrive on new survival strategies. For example, social media provide free services in exchange of user data. At the same time, older organisms adapt and change within this new ecology. Newspapers use social media to distribute their content and compete for reader attention. Political parties use the internet to experiment with new communication strategies. Governments exploit their power over digital infrastructures to enact new forms of censorship and social control. Law scholar Yochai Benkler (2006) has suggested that we have witnessed the birth of a new digital environment. This environment is marked by new possibilities, challenges, conflicts, and controversies. Among those there are issues related to copyright, ownership, and management of the technological infrastructure of the internet, organization of work, freedom of information and censorship, and social and political participation. The increasingly central role of digital media in the ecology of information and communication has made them an important political and economic battleground. In today's society, digital technologies come to mediate social relationships and are crucial to the construction of individual identities. The emergence of a digital public sphere, in the form of a multitude of platforms and practices that enable masses of people to collaborate in the creation of content and information, is a phenomenon with implications that go far beyond technology. This has inspired radically diverse visions of the future that this book will explore in the coming chapters. The rest of this chapter discusses the cycles of evolution of media, and lays the ground for an analysis of the socio‐technical characteristics of digital media, including their infrastructural features. Finally, the last section provides an overview of some of the most important theories of the relation between technology and society.

1.2 New and Old Media

In early scholarship about the rise of digital media, the definition “new media” was used to describe information and communication technologies based on digital code. “New media” signified the set of media technologies that had emerged since the last decades of the twentieth century. This distinguished them from “old media,” which was a definition used to identify traditional mass media like television, newspapers, or radio. While stressing such difference, one of the most influential theorists of the time, Lev Manovich, described new media not only in terms of their underlying technologies, but also through an analysis of their aesthetics, cultures, and media practices: their “language” (2001). Doing so allowed him to discuss the emergence of computer‐based media as part of a long cultural and technological history which involves expressive forms such as cinema, press, or visual art, while stressing the new possibilities offered by digital media. Almost 20 years later, today's media studies scholarship would see equating digital media and “new media” as problematic in many ways. To be sure, digital media have certain common characteristics that distinguish them from analog media (see Section 1.3). Yet media that have emerged in the last 40 years or so are based on heterogeneous computing technologies and are very different from each other. Think of the radical difference between two digital technologies such as GPS navigators and digital cameras. Furthermore, digital computers have by now been around for many decades. They are not really “new” anymore. The term “new” also implied a linear view of the evolution of the media, which can lead people to overlook the context in which they emerge and think that they are somehow better than the “old” ones. Conversely, old media are sometimes held to be better than new media, as older technologies can be represented as more authentic. For example, many claim to have a deeper relationship with books than with e‐books, or with vinyl records than with MP3 files.

Yet this does not mean that the difference between old and new media is uninteresting. For example, when studying media evolution, we must acknowledge that all media are “new” when they have just been introduced. The press is a dated technology by now, but at the time of its introduction it had a revolutionary impact on the transformation of modern societies. And yet today we tend to think of the press as a taken‐for‐granted “old” media technology. The notion of newness also usually entails certain visions of the future in which the “new” media play a key part. These visions can be hopeful or bleak. This has happened throughout history. It happened with the novel, with the telegraph, with movies, and with television. To some extent, such new media have changed the way in which people go about their everyday life, but often the hopes (or fears) attached to them turn out to be exaggerated. Finally, when new media are introduced they do not replace old media, but rather integrate or change them. The introduction of television has not caused the disappearance of the newspaper. The introduction of the tablet did not cause the disappearance of the book. Rather, books evolved into different technological formats. This process of evolution, called remediation, entails competition as well as coevolution and cooperation among different media (Bolter and Grusin 2000). A practice, content, or format can be re‐mediated by a new technology that mimics or reworks previous formats. For example, the design of some web radio receivers reproduces 1950s radio sets. Wikipedia mirrors and is structured like a traditional encyclopedia, so that cross‐references between entries allow a non‐linear reading path, although this is made possible via hyperlinking technologies rather than by manually turning the pages. Some social media look like the cut‐and‐paste fanzines of the 1980s, produced with scissors and Xerox copiers. After all, even the first printed books of early modern Europe resembled manuscripts. In turn, the e‐book is technologically very different from the printed book, but readers will immediately recognize the common genealogy, anchored in common features like the pages, cover, or table of contents, which make the reading experience similar. Overall new media do not come out of nowhere, but rather evolve from existing practices and media technologies. The concept of remediation allows the recognition that the history of media is a continuous, non‐linear process that can go in several directions, as old and new media continue to influence each other. For example, newer formats can provide co...