reading journal
New media as a subject
T hroughout writing this book we have been conscious of adding one more volume to the growing literature on the subject. ‘New media’ is becoming the preferred term for a range of media practices that employ digital technologies and the
computer in some way or another. New media is also emerging as a key institutional term in education and culture. New media is the title of university departments and degrees and the title of a distinct canon of artistic practice. This makes new media an academic and intellectual subject as well as a practice. As such, a growing body of writing is emerging that constitutes the history and theory of the subject and its objects and practices in the wider world. As writers we are also readers of the work of others in this developing field and we have come to the view that part of our task is to provide something of a useful summary of the field.
New media or digital media?
There are a growing number of digital media titles on the bookshelves and in some important respects there is an overlap between work being described as new media and that defined as digital media. The main problem with the term ‘digital media’ is that it has a tendency to privilege technology itself as the defining aspect of a medium, as if all digital media practice will be first and foremost about, or will reflect, the character of digital technology. In contrast, the term ‘new media’ signals more about the contem- porary cultural concepts and contexts of media practices than it does about simply a new set of technologies. It is important and absolutely central to this way of thinking that technologies and cultural and expressive practices are thought of as inseparable. The relationship between technologies and cultural and media practices needs to be understood as linked at every stage, from invention to development and use. While this book has adopted the term new media over that of digital media, it is important to add that new media builds in its own redundancy. It takes little mental effort to reflect that all media must have been new at some point in their history and the question is then quickly begged: when will new media stop being new and become old or just media? The general answer is, of course, that new media will become old media when some- thing else comes along that is significantly different. Superficially, the term ‘new media’ suggests that at the core of its meaning it is its ‘newness’, or novelty, that interests and
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excites. But novelty is by nature ephemeral and the excitement of the new quickly wears thin. The new, by definition, has not stood the test of time, but historically we are aware that the new can also indicate a set of more radical and fundamental shifts and changes in the ways in which human affairs are conducted. Hindsight has taught us that the twentieth century contains a catalogue of ‘the new’ in many areas of everyday life as well as in extraordinary scientific and cultural achievement. Indeed, the twentieth century was established on the legacy of progress bequeathed by the industrial revolution. Ideas about the newness of new media and its technological base are deeply rooted in the historical notion of social and scientific progress.
New media and electronic media
Electronic media also has a bearing upon our use of the term ‘new media’. Electronic media privileges the power source of a group of related technologies as its defining feature. Electronic media groups together all those media that are dependent upon and structured through the medium of the science and technology of electrical transmission. At this general level electronic media is also a historical term for grouping together a characteristic element of electronic communication, which developed from the late nine- teenth century and includes the media of telegraphy, telephone, radio, television and computing. Electronic media can be considered as a transparent transmission system for the content of previous human communication media, the medium itself being consid- ered a neutral carrying system for sound and image. Conversely, electronic media can also be considered to profoundly shape its content, so that, for example, radio repre- sents the one-way transmission of a disembodied human voice, whereas speech could be considered as embodied in a two-way human interaction. Marshall McLuhan (1964) generalises this understanding to the idea that the content of any medium is always another medium, that is to say that the content of writing is speech and that speech is the content of telegraphy. The term ‘electronic media’ also connotes many things about the characteristic of the communications which are electronically based. McLuhan also articulates that since the content of any medium is always another medium then the medium is also, always, the message. From this thinking it is possible to say that the content of electronic media is electricity. An example here would be electronic music. We all know and accept, as a matter of course, that the majority of music we listen to is recorded and transmitted using electronic and, increasingly, digital technologies. We still demand a high degree of high-fidelity to an original source of sound in our music technology. At the same time we also accept that there is a category, or genre, of music that we distinguish by the overall organisation of sound as electronic. We also know that electronic music is something quite different from music produced by acoustic instruments that have been electrified and amplified. We long ago accepted that elec- tronic amplification of instruments and the human voice changed – mediated – the sound we heard. But in listening to electronic music we expect to hear sounds that have been made by a specifically electronic instrument, namely that range of music technologies that come under the banner of synthesisers.
‘Electronic media’ is a useful term for categorising those cultural media forms that have emerged as a sub-set or genre within a larger practice: art or music on the one hand, printing on the other. The use of language to create new terms, by which we can mark out significant changes in our experience of cultural products, does tell us some- thing about how we are thinking about those changes. For example, it is interesting that,
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while we are happy to think of electronic music, art or print journals, we don’t think of electronic film or electronic photography. So, at one level, the term ‘electronic media’ distinguishes little other than telling us that electricity is the basis for the medium, in the literal sense of the materials and machines that drive a given cultural media; the daily newspaper, for instance, has an electronic version. Like digital media, electronic media foregrounds the technological means as the defining feature of our experience of a medium.
Cyberstudies
New media also has an overlap with cyberculture and its academic counterpart cyber- studies, which refer to those writings dedicated to the discussion and description of how people are using the Internet and the World Wide Web. There are several strands to the discourse of cyberspace. Technically cyberspace can be defined simply as a worldwide network of computer networks that use the TCP/IP protocols to facilitate data trans- mission and exchange. Culturally, and in terms of the popular imagination, William Gibson’s fictional definition of cyberspace as ‘a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators’ (1986: 51) extends the idea of cyberspace to the social and psychological meanings of the operations and exchanges between users of the network of computers. In addition we would also have to include cybernetics, as a branch of learning that brings together theories and studies on communication and control as a part of cyberstudies. The term ‘cybernetics’ gained currency in its use by Norbert Wiener to define studies in the interaction of goals, predictions, actions, feed- back and response in human and machine systems. Cyberspace encompasses interests in human–machine interaction and in the human presence within computer data systems. Studies of the current cultural practices focus upon screen-based textual or graphic inter- action and communication in online multi-user communications, email or gaming. However, research, sponsored by governmental or commercial agencies for military or civic purposes, is interested in the development of human–machine interaction and human presence within computer data systems in more far reaching ways. Research in artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent software agents (IA), together with advanced robotics, moves along the lines of the creation of cyborgs as various kinds of hybrids between humans and machines. Research into the human presence and interaction within computer data systems takes a number of current forms through the development of more complex simulators, which can create highly immersive virtual or simulated ‘real’ environments. In addition, current research is focusing upon the augmentation of reality (AR), through the use of computer data systems and wireless receiving systems to deliver new levels of spatially specific information. From the perspective of new media prac- tice, cyborgs, robots and virtual reality largely remain the province of advanced research, while the concepts and, indeed, the language, operate within the cultural currency of the techno-imaginary.
New media and cyberspace
Clearly, what happens in cyberspace is directly related to new media, which, as you will remember, is defined here more widely as the media and cultural practices of working with computers. We have included key case studies of art projects that are
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based upon the Internet and which, therefore, at one level can be considered projects in cyberspace. Cyber-theory and cybercultural studies have rapidly developed analyses and descriptions of online communication as a parallel virtual world. Bell (Bell and Kennedy 2000) offers a broad definition of cyberstudies as consisting of ‘domains of digital communication and information technologies’, which include ‘the Internet, email, chat rooms, MUDs, digital imaging systems, virtual reality, new biomedical technologies, artificial life and interactive digital entertainment systems’. Such an inclusive definition unites around technological systems and our interaction with them. Bell is quick to point out that, in his terms, these are all ‘technocultural constructions’ in which the place of human imagination and presentation remain central. Bell’s emphasis is squarely upon the cultural use and value of technological systems, and the inclusive definition of cyber- studies offered by him above places cyberstudies as an extension of the established academic arena of cultural studies. In a similar way, new media is to media studies what cyberstudies is to cultural studies. Put another way, the current need to understand the impact of new digital technologies upon established cultural and media practices and organisations is also changing cultural and media studies as a subject.
The difference between cultural and media studies approaches to new media
While media and cultural studies are closely related, they are also historically distinct in their focus of attention as well as in their methods. Traditionally media studies focused upon five key aspects of the production and consumption of broadcast and print media: the institutions, industries, media, texts and audiences. Within this framework media studies developed specific studies of radio, television, newspapers, magazines and cinema, although cinema has had another academic context in film studies. This divi- sion of media into production and consumption and into discrete stages and specific forms also produced two distinct types of analysis. The first type of analysis consisted of empirical studies, largely drawing upon the research methodologies of social science, which sought to find out (a) the effects of media upon individuals and groups, and (b) the ways in which ownership, regulatory legislation and industrial production shaped media products. The second type of analysis drew upon distinctly different traditions in linguistics, literature and philosophy, in order to analyse the media object itself. Such analysis separated out the media ‘text’ from its immediate context of production and consumption in order to look in detail at how meaning was constructed. We could simplify these traditions and say that media studies in Europe and North America has for the last twenty years primarily focused upon two things, the economic and social organisation of public media and media products as textual representations. The intro- duction of new technologies in mainstream media production, initially in the print industry, then in music production and, later, in broadcasting, required media studies to reconsider questions of technology. The rapid development of the Internet and the World Wide Web from the mid-1990s required media studies to consider a wholly new medium. It is not surprising that media studies initially approached the study of cyberspace primarily as a new, global form of communication based upon the network of networked computers. Media studies as an academic discipline is continuing to adapt to the conver- gence of media in digital forms as well as extensions of new media and, not unnaturally, it is building upon its existing frameworks of study, types of analysis, theories and concepts.1
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