Readings

Defining Concepts – by M. Lister

Internet and Social Media – by Creative Commons

Internet, the introduction of digital technologies in mass communication, is changing the rules of the game and challenging the status quo. Internet is a “pull” medium, as opposed to the traditional “push” media. Internet has users, and not spectators. The Internet user looks for particular information and can be a real actor in the process of communication. Audiences in traditional Mass Media were anonymous and passive. Internet users, on the contrary, can even generate contents for the Web portals they use.

This learning unit discusses two main subjects in order to explain the impact of digital technologies in the field of mass communication:

1. The Defining Concepts of the New Communication Paradigm
2. The Power of the Digital Platforms as Instruments of Surveillance

Defining Concepts

The following summary will help you as guideline for the chapter in Lister, M. et al.; 2009, New Media. A Critical Introduction. Rutledge, London, New York. The attached reading discuss the 5 key concepts that define the new communication paradigm brought about by digital technologies

1. Digitality
2. Interactivity
3. Hypertextuality
4. Networked media
5. Virtuality

1 – Digitality (Digital versus Analogue Media)

“Analogue” refers to processes in which one set of physical data can be stored in another “analogous” physical form. The latter object can be decoded through technological devices or cultural processes so that the original properties can be reproduced (film, record, cd, TV, radio, books, etc.).

Digital processes imply that input data are not converted into another physical object, but into numbers. That means that abstract symbols replace analogous objects.

It is broadly – and inaccurately – assumed that “digital” means the conversion of physical data into binary information.

Digital means the assignation of numerical values to physical phenomena. The numerical values can be in the decimal system (0-9), which would recognize 10 different values or states.

The binary system only has two values (0-1), which make the computing easier and cheaper.

Consequences of the shift from analogous to digital media:

• Media text are “dematerialized” (as opposed to books, film, photography, etcetc.). Still, this does not mean that digital media are “immaterial”.
• Data can be compressed into very small spaces.
• It can be accessed at very high speed and in non-linear ways.
• It can be manipulated far more easier than analogue forms.

2 – Interactivity

Extractive versus immersive navigation:

• Hypertextual navigation is extractive. We normally retrieve (extract) information from a database into our computer.
• In other cases, when we navigate representations of space or simulated 3D worlds, we move into the so-called “immersive interaction”.

Registrational Interactivity:

• The terms refers to the opportunity that new media text afford their users to “write back” into the text.
• The base line of this form of interaction ids the simple activity of registration (contact information, answering questions, typing credit cards numbers, etc.).
• However, it extends to any opportunity that the user has to input to a text (Internet bulletin boards, newsgroups, Wikipedia, etc.)
• The “input” become part of the text and is available for other users.

Interactive communication:

• This term refers to the different levels of personal interaction.
• Computer mediated communication (CMC) offered unprecedented opportunities for making connections between individuals.
• There are different degrees of reciprocity, which is the factor that define the different forms of interpersonal communication.
• The degree of intimacy and reciprocity is, in a bulletin board, inferior to a free flow conversation in a chat room or the contact in social sites.

New media create a new relationship between producers and users:

• They can collaborate with audiences by finding ways to incorporate “user generated contents”.
• Traditional authors produced a text and the readers interpreted it. Interactive media designers create open media spaces with which users find their own pathways.
• Producers are moving toward “transmedial production” (a TV channel can be repurposed across a range of platforms, web-sites include discussions forums, DVDs come with additional material, including computer games, etc.)

3- Hypertextuality

“Hyper”, Greek prefix, means “above”, “beyond”, or “outside”.

“Hypertext” has come to describe a text which provides a network of links to other texts that are “outside, above, or beyond” itself. Then, we define “Hypertext” as a work which is made up from discrete units of material, each of which carries a number of pathways to other units. This work is a web of connections which the user explores using the navigational aids of the interface design.

In a digitally encoded text any part can be accessed as easily as any other so that we can say that every part of the text can be equidistant from the reader (as opposed to the traditional text, which has a beginning and an end). The jump-link capability leads immediately to all sorts of new text forms. It permits fully NON-SEQUENTIAL writing.

The consequence is that there is no single order in which a text must be encountered. Thus, the reader is offered a ‘non-linear’ (or ‘multi-linear’) reading experience. The traditional book is dissolved into a network of association. The integrity of the book is superseded by network knowledge systems.

4 – Networked Media

This term refers to the tendency of new media toward decentralization of production, differentiation of products, and segmentation of consumption or reception. The new media are no longer mass media, sending a limited number of messages to a homogeneous mass audience. With the multiplicity of messages and sources, the audience becomes more selective.

Traditional media:

• Centralized. Content was produced in highly capitalized industrial locations, such as newspaper printworks or Hollywood film studios.
• Consumption was characterized by uniformity: Cinema audiences all over the worlds saw the same movie, all readers read the same text in a national newspaper, we all heard the same radio program.
• These characteristics created the possibility for control and regulation of media systems, for professionalization of creative and communicative processes, for a very clear distinction between consumers and producers, and relatively easy protection of intellectual property.

Revolutionary features of new technologies:

• The computer server is at the heart of the disperse system of new media (as opposed to the airwave transmission or the coaxial cable, where massive investments are required).
• The computer server is a multiple input/output device, capable of receiving large amounts of data as input as well as making equally large quantities available for downloading to a PC.
• The server is a node in a web rather than the center in a circle.
• Many different users can access many different kinds of media at many different times around the globe using network-based distribution.
• Consumers and users are increasingly able to customize their own media use.

Production and consumption:

• New communication technologies enable the user to be, at the same time, consumer and producer.
• As a consumer, you can buy a $ 2,000 digital camera that allows you to create high definition movies that can be distributed in movie theaters and DVDs.
• The PC itself is in many ways the ultimate figure in this blending process.
• With a PC you can consume information, but can also produce and distribute it. You can use it to edit movies, mix music, or publish Web-sites

5 – Virtuality

Virtual worlds, spaces, objects, environments, realities, and identities abound in discourses about new media. “Virtual” is a difficult and complex term, though.

Etymology: from Latein “virtus”, “virtualis”, (Something that has an effect).

Virtual Reality:

• This term origins in a series of movies, in which the action and narrative takes place ina simulated, computer generated world.
• Tron (1982), Videodrome (1983), Lawnmower Man (1992), The Matrix (1999), eXistenZ (1999).
• The virtual reality experienced by the heroes of those movies is produced by immersion in an environment constructed with computer graphics and digital video with which the user has some degree of interaction.

“Virtual” is not the opposite of “real”, as it is commonly understood, but is itself a kind of reality and is different from what has been traditionally considered “actually real”. In postmodern societies, we visit virtual shops and banks, hold virtual meetings, have virtual sex, and where screenbased 3D worlds are explored or navigated by videogame players, technicians, pilots, surgeons, etc. Virtual has then become an alternative to the real, which, in some cases, may be better than the real.