New Media

A Critical Introduction

Martin Lister, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, Kieran Kelly

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134083824
• Edizione: 2
• Argomento: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoria: Communication Studies

New Media: A Critical Introduction is a comprehensive introduction to the culture, history, technologies and theories of new media. Written especially for students, the book considers the ways in which 'new media' really are new, assesses the claims that a media and technological revolution has taken place and formulates new ways for media studies to respond to new technologies.

The authors introduce a wide variety of topics including: how to define the characteristics of new media; social and political uses of new media and new communications; new media technologies, politics and globalization; everyday life and new media; theories of interactivity, simulation, the new media economy; cybernetics, cyberculture, the history of automata and artificial life.

Substantially updated from the first edition to cover recent theoretical developments, approaches and significant technological developments, this is the best and by far the most comprehensive textbook available on this exciting and expanding subject.

At www.newmediaintro.com you will find:

• 
  
  

• additional international case studies with online references
• specially created You Tube videos on machines and digital photography
• a new 'Virtual Camera' case study, with links to short film examples
• useful links to related websites, resources and research sites
• further online reading links to specific arguments or discussion topics in the book
• links to key scholars in the field of new media.

1 New Media and New Technologies

1.1 New media: do we know what they are?

This book is a contribution to answering the question, ‘What is new about “new media”?’ It also offers ways of thinking about that question, ways of seeking answers. Here, at the outset, we ask two prior questions. First, ‘What are media anyway?’. When you place the prefix ‘new’ in front of something it is a good idea to know what you are talking about and ‘media’ has long been a slippery term (we will also have a lot to say about that in various parts of the book). Second, what, at face value and before we even begin to interrogate them, do we include as ‘new media’?

1.1.1 Media studies

For some sixty years the word ‘media’, the plural of ‘medium’, has been used as a singular collective term, as in ‘the media’ (Williams 1976: 169). When we have studied the media we usually, and fairly safely, have had in mind ‘communication media’ and the specialised and separate institutions and organisations in which people worked: print media and the press, photography, advertising, cinema, broadcasting (radio and television), publishing, and so on. The term also referred to the cultural and material products of those institutions (the distinct forms and genres of news, road movies, soap operas which took the material forms of newspapers, paperback books, films, tapes, discs: Thompson 1971: 23–24). When systematically studied (whether by the media institutions themselves as part of their market research or by media academics inquiring critically into their social and cultural significance) we paid attention to more than the point of media production which took place within these institutions. We also investigated the wider processes through which information and representations (the ‘content’) of ‘the media’ were distributed, received and consumed by audiences and were regulated and controlled by the state or the market.

We do, of course, still do this, just as some of us still watch 90-minute films, in the dark, at the cinema, or gather as families to watch in a fairly linear way an evening’s scheduled ‘broadcast’ television. But many do not consume their ‘media’ in such ways. These are old habits or practices, residual options among many other newer ones. So, we may sometimes continue to think about media in the ways we described above, but we do so within a changing context which, at the very least, challenges some of the assumed categories that description includes.

For example, in an age of trans-mediality we now see the migration of content and intellectual property across media forms, forcing all media producers to be aware of and collaborate with others. We are seeing the fragmentation of television, the blurring of boundaries (as in the rise of the ‘citizen journalist’); we have seen a shift from ‘audiences’ to ‘users’, and from ‘consumers’ to ‘producers’. The screens that we watch have become both tiny and mobile, and vast and immersive. It is argued that we now have a media economics where networks of many small, minority and niche markets replace the old ‘mass audience’ (see The Long Tail 3.13). Does the term ‘audience’ mean the same as it did in the twentieth century? Are media genres and media production skills as distinct as they used to be? Is the ‘point of production’ as squarely based in formal media institutions (large specialist corporations) as it used to be? Is the state as able to control and regulate media output as it once was? Is the photographic (lens based) image any longer distinct from (or usefully contrasted to) digital and computer generated imagery?

For more on these particular developments see: 3.16, 3.22, 3.23

However, we should note right now (because it will be a recurring theme in this book), that even this very brief indication of changes in the forms, production, distribution, and consumption of media is more complex than the implied division into the ‘old’ and ‘new’ suggest. This is because many of these very shifts also have their precedents, their history. There have long been minority audiences, media that escape easy regulation, hybrid genres and ‘intertexts’ etc. In this way, we are already returned to the question ‘What is “new” about “new media”?’ What is continuity, what is radical change? What is truly new, what is only apparently so?

Despite the contemporary challenges to its assumptions, the importance of our brief description of ‘media studies’ above is that it understands media as fully social institutions which are not reducible to their technologies. We still cannot say that about ‘new media’, which, even after almost thirty years, continues to suggest something less settled and known. At the very least, we face, on the one hand, a rapid and ongoing set of technological experiments and entrepreneurial initiatives; on the other, a complex set of interactions between the new technological possibilities and established media forms. Despite this the singular term ‘new media’ is applied unproblematically. Why? Here we suggest three answers. First, new media are thought of as epochal; whether as cause or effect, they are part of larger, even global, historical change. Second, there is a powerful utopian and positive ideological charge to the concept ‘new’. Third, it is a useful and inclusive ‘portmanteau’ term which avoids reducing ‘new media’ to technical or more specialist (and controversial) terms.

1.1.2 The intensity of change

The term ‘new media’ emerged to capture a sense that quite rapidly from the late 1980s on, the world of media and communications began to look quite different and this difference was not restricted to any one sector or element of that world, although the actual timing of change may have been different from medium to medium. This was the case from printing, photography, through television, to telecommunications. Of course, such media had continually been in a state of technological, institutional and cultural change or development; they never stood still. Yet, even within this state of constant flux, it seemed that the nature of change that was experienced warranted an absolute marking off from what went before. This experience of change was not, of course, confined only to the media in this period. Other, wider kinds of social and cultural change were being identified and described and had been, to varying degrees, from the 1960s onwards. The following are indicative of wider kinds of social, economic and cultural change with which new media are associated:

• A shift from modernity to postmodernity: a contested, but widely subscribed attempt to characterise deep and structural changes in societies and economies from the 1960s onwards, with correlative cultural changes. In terms of their aesthetics and economies new media are usually seen as a key marker of such change (see e.g. Harvey 1989).
• Intensifying processes of globalisation: a dissolving of national states and boundaries in terms of trade, corporate organisation, customs and cultures, identities and beliefs, in which new media have been seen as a contributory element (see e.g. Featherstone 1990).
• A replacement, in the West, of an industrial age of manufacturing by a ‘post-industrial’ information age: a shift in employment, skill, investment and profit, in the production of material goods to service and information ‘industries’ which many uses of new media are seen to epitomise (see e.g. Castells 2000).
• A decentring of established and centralised geopolitical orders: the weakening of mechanisms of power and control from Western colonial centres, facilitated by the dispersed, boundary-transgressing, networks of new communication media.

New media were caught up with and seen as part of these other kinds of change (as both cause and effect), and the sense of ‘new times’ and ‘new eras’ which followed in their wake. In this sense, the emergence of ‘new media’ as some kind of epoch-making phenomena, was, and still is, seen as part of a much larger landscape of social, technological and cultural change; in short, as part of a new technoculture.

1.1.3 The ideological connotations of the new

There is a strong sense in which the ‘new’ in new media carries the ideological force of ‘new equals better’ and it also carries with it a cluster of glamorous and exciting meanings. The ‘new’ is ‘the cutting edge’, the ‘avant-garde’, the place for forward-thinking people to be (whether they be producers, consumers, or, indeed, media academics). These connotations of ‘the new’ are derived from a modernist belief in social progress as delivered by technology. Such long-standing beliefs (they existed throughout the twentieth century and have roots in the nineteenth century and even earlier) are clearly reinscribed in new media as we invest in them. New media appear, as they have before, with claims and hopes attached; they will deliver increased productivity and educational opportunity (4.3.2) and open up new creative and communicative horizons (1.3, 1.5). Calling a range of developments ‘new’, which may or may not be new or even similar, is part of a powerful ideological movement and a narrative about progress in Western societies (1.5).

This narrative is subscribed to not only by the entrepreneurs, corporations who produce the media hardware and software in question, but also by whole sections of media commentators and journalists, artists, intellectuals, technologists and administrators, educationalists and cultural activists. This apparently innocent enthusiasm for the ‘latest thing’ is rarely if ever ideologically neutral. The celebration and incessant promotion of new media and ICTs in both state and corporate sectors cannot be dissociated from the globalising neo-liberal forms of production and distribution which have been characteristic of the past twenty years.

1.1.4 Non-technical and inclusive

‘New media’ has gained currency as a term because of its useful inclusiveness. It avoids, at the expense of its generality and its ideological overtones, the reductions of some of its alternatives. It avoids the emphasis on purely technical and formal definition, as in ‘digital’ or ‘electronic’ media; the stress on a single, ill-defined and contentious quality as in ‘interactive media’, or the limitation to one set of machines and practices as in ‘computer-mediated communication’ (CMC).

So, while a person using the term ‘new media’ may have one thing in mind (the Internet), others may mean something else (digital TV, new ways of imaging the body, a virtual environment, a computer game, or a blog). All use the same term to refer to a range of phenomena. In doing so they each claim the status of ‘medium’ for what they have in mind and they all borrow the glamorous connotations of ‘newness’. It is a term with broad cultural resonance rather than a narrow technicist or specialist application.

There is, then, some kind of sense, as well as a powerful ideological charge, in the singular use of the term. It is a term that offers to recognise some big changes, technological, ideological and experiential, which actually underpin a range of different phenomena. It is, however, very general and abstract.

We might, at this point, ask whether we could readily identify some kind of fundamental change which underpins all new media—something more tangible or more scientific than the motives and contexts we have so far discussed. This is where the term ‘digital media’ is preferable for some, as it draws attention to a specific means (and its implications) of the registration, storage, and distribution of information in the form of digital binary code. However, even here, although digital media is accurate as a formal description, it presupposes an absolute break (between analogue and digital) where we will see that none in fact exists. Many digital new media are reworked and expanded versions of ‘old’ analogue media (1.2.1).

1.1.5 Distinguishing between kinds of new media

The reasons for the adoption of the abstraction ‘new media’ such as we have briefly discussed above are important. We will have cause to revisit them in other sections of this part of the book (1.3, 1.4, 1.5) as we think further about the historical and ideological dimensions of ‘newness’ and ‘media’. It is also very important to move beyond the abstraction and generality of the term; there is a need to regain and use the term in its plural sense. We need to ask what the new media are in their variety and plurality. As we do this we can see that beneath the general sense of change we need to talk about a range of different kinds of change. We also need to see that the changes in question are ones in which the ratios between the old and the new vary (1.3).

Below, as an initial step in getting clearer about this, we provide a schema that breaks down the global term ‘new media’ into some more manageable constituent parts. Bearing in mind the question marks that we have already placed over the ‘new’, we take ‘new media’ to refer to the following:

• New textual experiences: new kinds of genre and textual form, entertainment, pleasure and patterns of media consumption (computer games, simulations, special effects cinema).
• New ways of representing the world: media which, in ways that are not always clearly defined, offer new representational possibilities and experiences (immersive virtual environments, screen-based interactive multimedia).
• New relationships between subjects (users and consumers) and media technologies: changes in the use and reception of image and communication media in everyday life and in the meanings that are invested in media technologies (3.1–3.10 and 4.3).
• New experiences of the relationship between embodiment, identity and community: shifts in the personal and social experience of time, space, and place (on both local and global scales) which have implications for the ways in which we experience ourselves and our place in the world.
• New conceptions of the biological body’s relationship to technological media: challenges to received distinctions between the human and the artificial, nature and technology, body and (media as) technological prostheses, the real and the virtual (5.1 and 5.4).
• New patterns of organisation and production: wider realignments and integrations in media culture, industry, economy, access, own...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• List of case studies
• Authors’ biographies
• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction
• 1 New Media and New Technologies
• 2 New Media and Visual Culture
• 3 Networks, Users and Economics
• 4 New Media in Everyday Life
• 5 Cyberculture: Technology, Nature and Culture
• Glossary