H1 Media technologies
Introduction
For some commentators, known as medium theorists, the properties of communication
technologies can have profound social and cultural impacts and the understanding of these
impacts should be pivotal to any guest to make sense of the media.
Classic media theories
Mcluhan: The medium is the message
‘’In operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the
personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves -
result form the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or
by any new technology’’ Mcluhan.
We can communicate across the world through electronic media, we increasingly inhabit a
global village. The central distinction made by mcluhan between different forms of media
involves two categories, hot and cool. Hot media are high definition and data intensive with
a large amount of information conveyed including books, newspapers etc. Cool media are
low in information-intensity and high in audience participation.
Kill your television
Postman had a concern about Mcluhan's theory. As a consequence, audiences, are induced
into any number of instant emotional response to the spectacles placed in front of them, but
are unlikely to understand or even remember them. Mander asserts that the theological
biases of television make attempts to regulate the use futile ‘’Far from being neutral,
television itself predetermines who shall use it, how they shall use it, what effect it will have
on individual lives and what sort or political forms will inevitably emerge.’’
Generalisation and refication
Because they regard technological features as having inevitable and predetermined social
consequences, approaches such as those of postman, Mand and Mcluhan can be labeled
technologically determinist. They assume that the inherent biases of technologies dictate
their impact, regardless of who develops and controls them, how they are used and in what
social cultural context. Technologies are then reified, that is, they are transformed by the
theories into independent objects, when in reality they are developed, manufactured,
controlled and used by people in particular social contexts.
Technologies and social contexts
Paul du gay proposes that, in order to understand the social and cultural significance of
technologies we must examine each of a series of interlinked processes which all cultural
artefacts go through:
Production - Refers to the institutional and social circumstances in which technology is
developed, manufactured and distributed.
Representation - Concerns media discourse about the technology, which can play a crucial
role in developing particular understanding of it’s purpose and meaning.
, Regulation - Refers to the various forms of control imposed by government or other bodies,
which can restrict and shape the ways technologies are used.
Consumption - Emphasis the importance of the contexts in which users engage with
technologies.
Identity - Concerns the way in which such consumption practices are intricately connected
with the development of individual and collective subjectives.
Capacities and constraints
It remains possible to develop ways of categorising different forms of established media
with respect to features that might have social or cultural significance. We might then
tentative distinguish mass media technologies, which have afforded communication with
large groups of people, form interpersonal media, more oriented to the facilitation of
small-scale interaction between two people or small groups. Likewise we might categorise
media to the extent to which they enable one-directional or interactive communications.
Synchronous media, which operate in real time could then be identified as distinct from
asynchronous media, which do no not.
Household telephone Interpersonal Sound Synchronous Interactive
medium
Newspaper Mass medium Text, still image Asynchronous One-Directional
Radio Mass medium Sound Synchronous One-Directional
Television Mass medium Video, sound, still Synchronous One-Directional
image, text
Figure 2.2 Selected properties of traditional media
Into the digital age
Features of digital media:
- Convergence
- Interactivity
- Diversification
- Mobility
The internet as solution to or cause of social ills
- Democracy and freedom
- Isolation and superficiality
H2 The evolution of media technology
The history of media technology
Over time, the printing process was improved, but for 1000 years print was media
technology.
,However, 19th-century industrialization drastically increased the pace of technological
innovation, bringing telegraph, camera, telephone, phonograph, radio, and motion pictures in
rapid succession.
Technological determinism and social construction
There have been two general approaches to understanding the role of technology in
society. The first, often referred to as ‘’technological determinism’’, suggests that
technology itself causes change, often in ways that people don’t intend and are unaware of.
The second, often referred to as ‘’social constructionism’’ emphasized that technology is
made up of inanimate objects, and ultimately people decide how to use technology.
Media’s materiality
It may seem odd to suggest that the inanimate objects making up technology can cause
anything. The obvious forms of materiality are the tangible objects and things that are
involved in the media communication - keyboards, screens, phones, paper and the like. But
materiality also includes things that we often forget have a psychical foundation. Data ar not
objects, but they exist on a hard drive.
Autonomous technology and technological momentum
Scholars in science and technology studies have a long noted that technology can ‘’take on a
life of its own’’ even through people create and use it. Langdon winner used the term
autonomous technology as ‘’a general label for all conceptions and observations to the
effect that technology is somehow out of control by human agency. Thomas hughes idea of
technological momentum suggests that a technology’s influence changes over time.
Mcluhan’s optimism
In an early work, the gutenberg galaxy, mcluhan focused of the shift from oral to print
societies, exploring the social implications of the 15th century intervention of the modern
printing press by johannes gutenberg. He argues that new media technology rework the
balance of our senses, isolating and highlighting certain senses at the expense of others. In
another work: understanding media: the extensions of man, mcluhan turned to the shift
from print to electronic media, especially television. He argued that, by delivering both
images and sound, electronic media could help reconnect the senses that had been
fragmented by print’s exclusive focus on the visual, thereby bringing us back to a kind of
preprint state of harmony.
Postman’s pessimism
According to the title of posman’s best-known work, as a society infatuated with
entertainment television that is no longer able to think seriously about social and political
issues, we are amusing ourselves to death. The telegraph, challenged the world defined
by print in three fundamental ways.
1. Because they could get information from faraway places, newspapers were full of
stories that were largely irrelevant to their readers.
2. Because the telegraph made it easy to transmit so much information, little of which
was relevant to the lives of readers, news no longer had any connection to action.
3. In privileging speed and abundance of information, the telegraph sacrificed context.
, Images have become so embedded in our consciousness, in this view that it is becoming
harder to discern the difference between image and reality. It is not that we are losing our
ability to think, it is that image-oriented pseudo-events blur the distinction between image
and reality. Pseudo events are events planned for the express purpose of producing
dramatic images that can be disseminated or reported.
The problem with such technological determinism is that it ignores people, except perhaps
as victims of an all-powerful medium. Even though it is rarely explicit, most critics of
television write about commercial television, not simply television technology.
Social constructionism
Social reality is produced in three steps:
1. People create society through ongoing processes of physical and mental activity.
2. Over time, these creations come to seem objectively real, seperate from human
activity.
3. People internalize the norms and values of their culture, thereby being influenced by
their own creation.
Telephone
Fisher contends, ‘’While a martial change as fundamental as the telephone alters the
condition of daily life, it does not determine the basic character of that life. Instead, people
turn new devices to various purposes, even ones that the producers could hardly have
foreseen or desired. As much as people adapt their lives to the changed circumstances
created by a new technology, they also adapt that technology to their lives.
Radio
For the first ten years after it’s invention, people called radio the wireless, because it’s
creator, guglielmo marconi, promoted it as a telegraph without wires. The wireless became
radiotelegraphy, then, when it bega to transmit voice instead of morse code, it became
radiotelephony, and finally just radio.
Some characteristics of the internet era
The technological infrastructure of today’s internet as several unique features with
significant social consequences:
1. The internet was designed and built to be an open, decentralized platform, accessible
to anyone using it’s basic language and protocols.
2. The internet structure was designed to five users considerable control over their
experience, it is a non specialized platform made to accommodate whatever the
users wants to do.
3. The internet is the first medium to embody digitization, the shift from analog to digital
media and convergence the blurring of boundaries among types of media
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