Table of Contents
Week 1 – Introduction: How Do New Things Happen?
Negroponte (1996) – The DNA of Information (m)
Bits and Atoms
- While we are undoubtedly in an information age, most information is delivered to us in the
form of atoms: newspapers, magazines, and books
Bits: the publisher of a book in the information delivery business
Atoms: the manufacturing business
- The information superhighway is about the global movement of weightless bits at the speed
of light.
, - As one industry after another looks at itself in the mirror and asks about its future in a digital
world, that future is driven almost 100 percent by the ability of that company's product or
services to be rendered in digital form.
What is a Bit Anyhow?
- A bit is the smallest atomic element in the DNA of information, practically a 0 or 1
- Digitizing a signal = to take samples of it, which, if closely spaced, can be used to play back a
seemingly perfect replica.
- There are many merits to digitization e.g. data compression and error correction, which is
important in the delivery of information through a costly or noisy channel BUT we are
discovering that the consequences of being digital are far more important than those.
- The economy of bits is driven in part by the constraints of the medium on which it is stored
or through which it is delivered e.g. a color image might be digitized at very high resolution
for final print copy but used at a lower resolution for a computer-aided page layout system.
- Bandwidth = the number of bits that can be transmitted per second through a given channel
(like copper wire, radio spectrum, or optical fiber)
When All Media Are Bits
- Better and more efficient delivery of what already exists is what most media executives think
and talk about in the context of being digital BUT wholly new content will emerge from being
digital, as will new players, new economic models, and a likely cottage industry of
information and entertainment providers.
- When all media is digital—because bits are bits—two fundamental and immediate results
will be observed.
Commingled bits: bits commingle effortlessly i.e. they start to get mixed up and can
be used and reused together or separately
Multimedia = The mixing of audio, video, and data
Bits-about-bits: a new kind of bit is born which tells you about the other bits,
typically “headers” e.g. a table of contents or a description of the data that follow
Where Intelligence Lives
- One way to look at the future of being digital is to ask if the quality of one medium can be
transported to another e.g. can the television experience be more like the newspaper
experience?
- The intelligence of computers can live in two different places
The transmitter: a small subset of bits has been filtered, selected, prepared and
delivered especially for you e.g. as if you had your own staff of writers and the NY
Times were publishing a single newspaper tailored to your interests.
The receiver: the (dumb) transmitter is indiscriminately sending all the bits to
everybody. e.g. the NY Times broadcasts a very large number of bits, perhaps five
thousand different stories, from which your appliance grabs a select few, depending
on your interests, habits, or plans for that day
Negroponte (1996) – Epilogue: An Age of Optimism
- The next decade will see: IP abuse, invasion of our privacy, digital vandalism, software piracy,
data thievery, loss of jobs, seamless digital workplaces, global manipulation and storage of
bits
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, - The digital age has four very powerful qualities that will result in its ultimate triumph:
decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering (link to week 2 Andrejevic)
Decentralizing: made possible by low-cost, mass-produced personal computers
Globalizing: Governments fifty years from now will be both larger and smaller e.g.
Europe finds itself dividing itself into smaller ethnic entities while trying to unite
economically
New generations are released from the limitation of geographic proximity as
the sole basis of friendship, collaboration, play, and neighborhood
Harmonizing: a new generation is emerging from the digital landscape free of many
of the old prejudices. Enterprises start collaborating instead of competing. Common
language
Empowering: The access, the mobility and the ability to effect change. As children
appropriate a global information resource, and as they discover that only adults need
learners permits, we are bound to find new hope and dignity in places where very
little existed before.
Marvin (1988) – Introduction (f)
- The last quarter of the nineteenth century has a special importance for students of modern
media history because of the invention of five proto-mass media of the twentieth century:
the telephone, phonograph, electric light, wireless, and cinema
- The present study modestly attempts to push back those beginnings [the starting point for
Anglo-American electric media was usually film/broadcasting] to the late nineteenth century,
when Anglo-American culture was fascinated by the communicative possibilities of the
telegraph, the telephone, and the incandescent lamp—choices that may come as a surprise
to contemporary sensibilities focused on twentieth-century mass media.
Most media historians will unhesitatingly point to the hundreds of millions of radio
and television sets that are bought by consumers and promoted by vast industries
BUT
New electric media in the 19th century were already sources of endless fascination
and fear, and provided constant fodder for social experimentation
- This study introduces issues that may be overlooked when the social history of these media is
framed exclusively by the instrument-centered perspective that governs its conventional
starting point.
- It argues that the early history of electric media is less the evolution of technical efficiencies
in communication than a series of arenas for negotiating issues crucial to the conduct of
social life; among them, who is inside and outside, who may speak, who may not, and who
has authority and may be believed.
- (move away from technological determinism) Here, the focus of communication is shifted
from the instrument to the drama in which existing groups perpetually negotiate power,
authority, representation, and knowledge with whatever resources are available New
media intrude on these negotiations by providing new platforms on which old groups
confront one another. Old habits of transacting between groups are projected onto new
technologies that alter, or seem to alter, critical social distances.
- Discussions of electrical and other new forms of communication in the late nineteenth
century begin from specific cultural and class assumptions about what communication ought
to be like among particular groups of people.
- This study focuses especially on two inventions on this list that have been regarded as least
relevant to twentieth-century media history.
The electric light: ordinarily not thought of in connection with communication at all
The telephone: has not been considered a medium of mass communication.
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, Nevertheless, the telephone was the first electric medium to enter the home
and unsettle customary ways of dividing the private person and family from
the more public setting of the community
- Focused on the point of mass production, artefactual communications history has failed to
recognize that electricians were as deeply involved in the field of cultural production as in
the field of technical production link to the construction of algorithms (in music)
- The ambivalence that so much characterizes contemporary regard for electronic media did
not originate with twentieth-century radio and television, but in threats to social interaction
set up by their nineteenth-century prototypes.
- We can learn a great deal about how electricians and other social groups constructed the
social world by observing their uses of texts, and their evaluation of others' uses as well.
- Media are constructed complexes of habits, beliefs, and procedures embedded in elaborate
cultural codes of communication.
- New media, broadly understood to include the use of new communications technology for
old or new purposes, new ways of using old technologies, and, in principle, all other
possibilities for the exchange of social meaning, are always introduced into a pattern of
tension created by the coexistence of old and new, which is far richer than any single
medium that becomes a focus of interest because it is novel.
Douglas (2010) – Some Thoughts on the Question “How Do New Things
Happen?” (f)
- Today I offer one possibly idiosyncratic view of how we have thought about this question
[how do new things happen] over time, and what our approaches have meant
- The trends/debates I want to reflect on today are
The rise of social constructivism
My own oscillations (moving back and forth) around technological determinism
Insurgent (rebellious/revolutionary) uses of technologies by everyday people
Technology and gender
The irony of technology
- In the 1970s scholars began to emphasize the evolutionary and collaborative nature of
invention, the importance of failures and false starts, and began focusing on technological
systems as opposed to singular devices + scholars started to doubt technological
determinism the social construction of technology (SCOT) emerged
Social construction of technology (SCOT) = a research approach to study technical
change in society, both in historical and in contemporaneous studies + a theory
about the development of technology and its relation to society.
- I saw another [apart from everyday users] crucial actor, or social group, that played an
absolutely pivotal role in the rise of wireless telegraphy and its evolution into radio: the press
Here I sought to add something to the social construction rubric: the role of ideology
The role of ideology: the prevailing and evolving common sense about a technology,
as consolidated through media frameworks
- The question that remains crucial to keep in our purview: how have subcultures, some of
them with minimal political, economic, or social power, used technologies in unanticipated,
even insurgent ways that alter the course of history
- Another subject that has been paid attention to is that of gender e.g. it was simply a given
that technology was a male province but why?
- Critique on social constructivism
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