WORLD ENCYCLOPEDIA: Mass Media, Mass Culture and Elite

1
An Overview

Media studies has a short history but a long past. Though the name is not more than three decades old, the central intellectual problems of media studies have been pursued in a variety of intellectual traditions over the course of the twentieth century (and before). Looking backwards, we are in a good position to discover ancestors in the American progressives (Chicago), the effects tradition (Columbia), critical theory (Frankfurt), and British cultural studies (Birmingham). This class attempts to give a guided tour through this thicket and to help you become familiar, comfortable, and even fluent with theoretical vocabulary and questions that have been historically important in the formation of media studies.

Of all the times in history to be studying the mass media, this is probably the best. Not only the dizzying technological and economic upheavals within the media industries themselves make it so, but also the outpouring of theory, argument, and research on the mass media from diverse academic fields. Theories about mass communication have never been more plural--or more contentious. The area of knowledge we provisionally call "Mass Communication Theories" is an unsettled terrain, something of a frontier, and frontiers are known for adventures and dangers, lawlessness and open vistas. This course does not pretend to offer more than a survey of important landmarks.

It will deal with central traditions of study, topics of debate, and conceptual problems in media studies, with a bias toward the United States. You will not learn everything you need about mass communication theories, let alone social theory. Recent work is slighted in this course (but not in other courses). Your development into a social theorist of media, culture, and society will likely take your entire program at least.

It is assumed that mass communication theory is best understood as a branch of social theory. Not only does mass communication theory historically mimic the main currents of social theory, but the concept of communication is central to efforts to understand modern societies: indeed, the attempt to theorize "society" and "communication" arise in the same moment, as reflected in Cooley's Social Organization, for instance. The class aims to help you begin to theorize about mass communication and society and to introduce you to a variety of positions. Part of the Iowa tradition is that every scholar, whatever his or her particular method, area, or topic, should be a theorist, and a theorist is (to give a minimalist definition), one who argues, gives reasons and makes connections to larger problems.

Theory is not only something that people do in their armchairs; it is an art that every scholar, if not citizen and human, should cultivate. "All anthropoi naturally desire to know," said Aristotle. This class is an invitation to theory.

Our approach will be historical. A chief way to study theory is via the history of theory. All theory is a rapprochement with the past of theory. Further, historical narration, as many recent theorists have claimed, is both a political and intellectual task. It is not a matter of stringing events or milestones together, but of claiming a lineage, and thus staking a claim to the present. Readings for this class have been chosen for cartographic rather than cutting-edge qualities--their ability to help anchor a cognitive map of ideas.

This class also aims to help serve as a preparation for the qualifying examination in media studies. It is something of a theory survival course. It aims to introduce you to the vocabulary and intellectual style and basic issues of social theory in general, to the world of theoretical talk in which you will be immersed here. We will also pursue, in passing, what could be called the philosophy of scholarship--why we should theorize, publish, teach, and what it is all for. The personal resources that give rise to theory are precious and need fostering.

Communication is the process of creating shared meaning. Communication between a mass medium and its audience is mass communication, a primary contributor to the construction and maintenance of culture. The precise relation of culture to mass communication and its function in our lives has long been debated. Because of the power mass communication has in shaping culture, it presents us with both opportunities and responsibilities. Media industries must operate ethically or risk negatively influencing the culture in which they exist. Consumers likewise have the responsibility to critically examine media messages. Both technology and money shape the mass communication process. Innovations in technology bring about new forms of media, or make older forms more accessible. As profit-making entities, the media must respond to the wishes of both advertisers and audience. Ultimately, though, the consumers choose which forms of media they support and how they react to the messages that face them. Technological and economic factors such as convergence and globalization will influence the evolution of mass communication.

In preliterate cultures knowledge was passed on orally. With the advent of writing, literacy became more highly valued than memory. After Gutenberg; and invention of the printing press, literacy spread to all levels of society and by the mid-19th century, a middle class with discretionary time and income had emerged, providing a mass audience of readers. Mass media helped to unify the diverse cultures of the United States. Television in particular was instrumental in transforming our country into a consumer economy. Understanding the ways in which media impact individuals and society is an important aspect of media literacy. Other elements include an understanding of the process of mass communication and an awareness of media content as a "text" that provides insight into contemporary culture.In order to develop our media literacy, we must be able to understand the process by which media sends messages and learn to analyze those messages. This requires an ability and willingness to analyze media messages, a knowledge of genre conventions, and an ability to distinguish emotional from reasoned reactions. By increasing our critical awareness, we can make better choices from among media content.

The Internet was inspired by Joseph C.R. Licklider's vision of a nationwide network of computers, and further developed by the U.S. military. Personal computers made the Internet available to non-institutional users. The most common uses of the Internet are accessing World Wide Web files, using e-mail, and participating in mailing lists and USENET groups. It is difficult to estimate the number of Internet users. Usage continues to increase with teenage girls now the fastest growing group of users. The development of on-line commerce has been controversial, since many of the original Internet users object to their medium being overtaken by commercialization. MP3, audio file compression software, is a form of convergence that is changing the distribution of music dramatically.

The Internet allows every user to become a publisher. This property has raised First Amendment issues related to misinformation, online pornography, and copyright protection. Privacy is another concern, regarding both online communication and easy access to personal information. The Internet is increasingly being used as a political forum in which citizens can communicate directly with elected officials, but runs the risk of closing out those who lack sufficient media literacy.

Most of the early literature printed in North America was political or religious in content. Technological advances in printing and increases in literacy led to the flowering of the novel in the 1800s. Due to the cultural importance of books, censorship has been a controversial issue. There are now several categories of books, including trade, professional, el-hi, higher ed, and mass market paperbacks.Although publishing houses were traditionally small businesses, most books today are published by huge conglomerates. At the same time, independent bookstores are increasingly giving way to chains. Electronic publishing is broadening the options for aspiring writers. Although illiteracy is rare in America, aliteracy, unwillingness to read, has caused some to wonder if books are a dying medium. The success of the Harry Potter books, however, has turned this trend around and helped bring about a rebirth of reading.

Newspapers as we know them date back to the seventeenth century. Even before the Revolutionary War, American newspapers largely maintained independence from government control. The first mass circulation newspaper was the New York Sun, emerging in 1833 and selling for one cent a copy. Groups such as Native Americans and African Americans also used the medium at this time to express views outside the mainstream. Competition in the 1880s led to the rise of yellow journalism.

Newspaper chains began forming in the 1920s, and have grown more numerous over time. The advent of television brought further changes to the medium. Today, metropolitan dailies are losing readership as suburban and small town papers grow in popularity. Nevertheless, chains control 82% of all circulation. Civic journalism and changing technology are two important issues for all newspapers. Editors are also facing the dilemma of giving younger readers the soft news they want or losing them as customers.

The magazine was introduced to America in the mid-18th century. Factors such as increased literacy and industrialization fueled growth in the industry after the Civil War. The medium was an important force for social change in the early 20th century, due to the muckrakers. After the coming of television, magazines continued to prosper through increased specialization. Of more than 22,000 magazines in operation today, the top 800 consumer magazines account for three-quarters of the industry's revenue. Since space is sold on the basis of circulation, research groups such as the Audit Bureau of Circulation and Simmons verify a magazine's circulation numbers. New types of magazines, such as Webzines and synergistic magazines, are currently emerging. In order to compete with the specialization of cable television, many magazines are now seeking global audiences. Advertisers are becoming increasingly influential over the stories that appear with their ads.

Movies began with the sequential action photographs of Eadweard Muybridge in 1877. Narrative films were introduced around the turn of the century. Film soon became a large, studio-controlled business on the West Coast. The industry weathered the Great Depression, only to be forced into change with the coming of television.

Today, major studios produce most movie revenue, though independent films are often more innovative. Rather than take chances, the blockbuster mentality of the big studios leads them to rely on such strategies as concept films, sequels and remakes, and movies based on television shows.

Convergence of film with other forms of media has allowed new methods of distribution and exhibition. Digital video is beginning to open up new methods of production. The practice of product placement often effects artistic decisions, which a media literate person can learn to detect.

The technology for radio was developed in the late 19th century, at about the same time that sound recording was being perfected. The medium was used in the early decades of the 20th century for point-to-point communication, and in 1920 KDKA made the first commercial radio broadcast.

Advertising became the economic base of radio in the 1920s. Because it offered free entertainment, radio became increasingly popular during the Great Depression. This time was known as the golden age of radio, until television began to overtake it in popularity after World War II.

Radio is successful today largely because it is local and specialized, which appeals to advertisers as well as listeners. The recording industry, on the other hand, is primarily controlled by four major companies. The two industries have changed and prospered due to technological advances such as digital recording and convergence of radio and the Internet. Controversial music file-sharing software such as Napster may transform the recording industry, in spite of legal attempts to shut it down.

Although methods of television transmission were developed as early as 1884, television first began to gain popularity after World War II. The 1948 television freeze allowed time for the FCC to develop a plan for growth, and by 1960, 90% of American homes had a television.

The business of television is still dominated by the networks, but new technologies are beginning to erode their power. Cable, VCR, DVD, the remote control, direct broadcast satellite, digital video recorders, digital television, and the Internet have diminished networks' authority and changed the relationship between medium and audience.

News staging is an ethical issue being debated by media literate viewers. Staging can range from giving the false appearance that a reporter is on the scene to re-creating or simulating an event, all for the purpose of holding the audience's attention.

Public relations is difficult to define, because it can involve publicity, research, public affairs, media relations, promotion, merchandising, and more. In its maturation as an industry, public relations has passed through four stages, culminating in advanced two-way communication. Some 200,000 people work in public relations in the United States, in 4,000 firms and in in-house PR operations. They typically carry out 14 activities, including publicity, communication, public affairs, and government relations. PR is not the same as advertising, in part because of its policy-making component.

Globalization, specialization, and converging technologies are trends in public relations. An important issue in the industry is ethical standards, one example being the proliferation of video news releases and their challenge to media literate consumers.

Advertising dates back thousands of years. Changes caused by industrialization and the Civil War fueled its growth, with magazines being an important vehicle for advertising. Radio, then television, changed the nature of advertising, as commercials in turn changed the nature of each medium. Although many see advertising as a critical aspect of our capitalistic society, others find it intrusive, deceptive, and demeaning to our culture.

The 6,000 advertising agencies in the United States are paid either through retainers or commissions. Types of ads include retail, direct market, institutional, and public service. The link between seeing an ad and buying the advertising product is tenuous at best.

New methods of cyberadvertising have developed over the past several years, such as transaction journalism and intermercials. Other important developments are increasingly fragmented audiences and globalization.

There are many theories of mass communication. The paradigms of these theories shift as new technologies and new media are introduced. Mass communication theory has passed through four eras. The era of mass society saw media as all-powerful and audiences as defenseless against their effects. In the era of the scientific perspective, research showed that media affected some people much more strongly than others, often according to social characteristics. The era of limited effects theory included several theories, including attitude change theory and the uses and gratifications approach. Recognizing the power of media effects, theorists discussed agenda setting, dependency theory, and social cognitive theory. Contemporary mass communication theory can be called the era of cultural theory. Media effects are seen as shaped by audience members involvement in the process and reality is seen as socially constructed. Gerbnerís cultivation analysis and critical cultural theory are two important examples of contemporary theories.

Media industry researchers debate whether media effects are diminished when audiences know that content is only make-believe and whether media reinforce preexisting values or are replacing them. Social scientists test the explanations of various theories advanced to answer these questions by doing research.

Quantitative research methods include experiments, surveys, and content analysis. Experiments sacrifice generalizability for control and the demonstration of causation. Surveys sacrifice casual explanations for generalizabilty and breadth. Qualitative methods include historical, critical, and ethnographic research. Researchers use methods such as the analysis of primary and secondary sources and the undertaking of participant-observer studies.

One of the most studied effects issue is the impact of mediated violence. Researchers have studied the link between violent media content and subsequent aggressive behavior, with social learning theory discrediting the notion of catharsis. There is, however, disagreement regarding the exact interplay of content and behavior. The impact of media portrayals of different groups of people and the impact of the media on political campaigns are two other effects issues that have been studied. Freedom of the press is established by the First Amendment of the Constitution. This protection extends to all forms of media but can be suspended in cases of clear and present danger and to balance competing interests, as in the conflict between a free press and a fair trial. Libel, slander, and obscenity are not protected. Other specific issues of media responsibility include definitions of indecency, the impact of deregulation, and copyright. Social responsibility theory is the idea that to remain free of government control, the media must serve the public by acting responsibly. This does not free audiences from their responsibility to be media literate.

Applied ethics is the practice of applying general ethical guidelines and values to a specific situation. Self-regulation by the media often results in ethical dilemmas involving such issues as truth and honesty, privacy, confidentiality, and conflict of interest. Media professionals have established formal standards of ethical behavior, though some people object that they are ambiguous and unenforceable.

Almost since radio's inception, signals have been broadcast internationally in order to circumvent government control. Today, so much entertainment is popular internationally that many countries have laws limiting the amount of airtime devoted to foreign content. The effects of a country's political system on its mass communications can be broken into five concepts: Western, Development, Revolutionary, Authoritarianism, and Communism. Regardless of the concept, most radio and television programming follows the model of the United States, though other countries might use the media to enforce different social messages. The advent of satellites and the Internet has thwarted the attempts of governments to control the media. UNESCO has called for the establishment of international rules that allow governments to monitor media content, but Western nations reject this limitation on the freedom of the press. The global village is bringing world communities closer together, but often at the expense of native cultures.

2

The Media Theories

Cultivation Theory of Mass Media

"Cultivation analysis concentrates on the enduring and common consequences of growing up and living with television. Theories of the cultivation process attempt to understand and explain the dynamics of television as the distinctive and dominant cultural force of our age. Cultivation analysis uses a survey instrument, administered to representative samples of respondents. The responses are analyzed by a number of demographic variables including gender, age, race, education, income, and political self-designation (liberal, moderate, conservative). Where applicable, other controls, such as urban-rural residence, newspaper reading, and party affiliation are also used.

Cultivation analysis is a part of the Cultural Indicators (CI) research project. CI is a data base and a series of reports relating recurrent features of the world of television to viewer conceptions of reality. Its cumulative content data archive contains observations on over 4,500 programmes and 40,000 characters coded according to many thematic, demographic and action categories."

"...specifies that repeated, intense exposure to deviant definitions of 'reality' in the mass media leads to perception of the 'reality' as normal. The result is a social legitimisation of the 'reality' depicted in the mass media, which can influence behavior. (Gerbner, 1973 & 1977; Gerbner et al., 1980.)"

Gerbner first introduced cultivation theory in 1969 with his work Toward "Cultural Indicators": The Analysis of Mass Mediated Public Message Systems. Gerbner begins developing cultivation as a structural piece for the long-term examination of public messages in media influence and understanding. He notes in the introduction that "the approach is based on conception of these message systems as the common culture through which communities cultivate shared and public notions about facts, values, and contingencies of human existence". Gerbner clarifies that his objectives are not with "information, education, persuasion, and the like, or with any kind of direct communication 'effects.'" More accurately, his concern remains with "the collective context within which, and in response to which, different individual and group selections and interpretations of messages take place". Nonetheless, Gerbner's works present a social psychology theory on communication effects, and consequently, on persuasion as related to mass media.

Gerbner speaks of the "cultivation of collective conscious" in relation to the rapid growth of media outlets (in particular, television) and the capacity of mass media to transcend traditional "barriers of time, space, and social grouping". Cultivation then describes the process in which entire publics are affected by content on television. Potter (1993) notes Gerbner's intentions for using "cultivation" as an academic term to define his interest in "the more diffuse effects on perceptions that are shaped over a long period of exposure to media messages". "Cultivation," rather than "long-term effects" indicates the emphasis on the constant nurturing, exposure, and consistent incorporation the viewing public experiences through mass media channels.

Contexts of Communication

Humans communicate with each other across time, space, and contexts. Those contexts are often thought of as the particular combinations of people comprising a communication situation. For example, theories of interpersonal communication address the communication between dyads (two people). Group communication deals with groups, organizational communication addresses organizations, mass communication encompasses messages broadcast, usually electronically, to mass audiences, intercultural communication looks at communication among people of different cultures, and gender communication focuses on communication issues of women and between the sexes. Newer contexts include health communication and computer-mediated communication.

Contexts of communication are best thought of as a way to focus on certain communication processes and effects. Communication context boundaries are fluid. Thus, we can see interpersonal and group communication in organizations. Gender communication occurs whenever people of different sexes communicate. We can have mass communications to individuals, group, and organizations.

Using communication contexts as a means to help us study communication helps us out of problems some people associate with the intrapersonal context (some say the "so-called" intrapersonal context). Some people facetiously say intrapersonal communication exists when someone talks to themselves. It's more accurate to define intrapersonal communication as thinking. While thinking normally falls within the purview of psychology we can recognize that we often think, plan, contemplate, and strategize about communication past, present, and future. It is legitimate to study the cognitive aspects of communication processes. So, even if some people call those cognitive aspects of communication thinking, it can be helpful to allow the context of intrapersonal communication to exist, thereby legitimating an avenue of communication research.

Coordinated Management of Meaning

The Coordinated Management of Meaning theorizes communication as a process that allows us to create and manage social reality. As such, this theory describes how we as communicators make sense of our world, or create meaning. Meaning can be understood to exist in a hierarchy, depending on the sources of that meaning. Those sources include:

Raw sensory data: The inputs to your eyes and ears, the visual and auditory stimuli you will interpret to see images and hear sounds;
Content: Interpreted stimuli, where the words spoken are understood by what they refer to;
Speech acts: Content takes on more meaning when it is further interpreted as belonging to a speaker who has specific communication styles, relationships with the listener, and intentions;
Episodes: In common terms, you may think of this as the context of the conversation or discourse where when you understand the context you understand what the speaker thinks he or she is doing;
Master contracts: These define the relationships the communicating participants, or what each can expect of the other in a specific episode;
Life scripts: The set of episodes a person expects they will participate in; and
Cultural patterns: Culturally created set of rules that govern what we understand to be normal communication in a given episode.

Persons use two types of rules to coordinate the management of meaning among those seven levels of meaning. First, we use constitutive rules to help understand how meaning at one level determine meaning at another level. Second, we use regulative rules to help us regulate what we say so that we stay within what we consider to be normal communication in a given episode.

The Meaning of Meanings

The first concept most students learn about the meaning of meanings is the Semantic Triangle. This label refers to the three part connection among a referent, a reference, and a symbol. The referent is the thing, such as my cat Baxter. The reference is the thought I have of Baxter, a 12 year old grey tabby who loves to lounge on my computer keyboard. The symbol is the word "Baxter." Notice that if I am talking about Baxter I have selected the referent and have control over the reference and symbol. However, if I talk to you about Baxter lounging on my keyboard you will not understand my meaning until you understand the thing (the referent) I am speaking of and the thoughts (references) I have of that thing.

The Semantic Triangle allows for some ambiguity. After all, it is not possible for you to know exactly what my thoughts are. Still, there needs to be ways for people to help make sure they are understand by others, especially when referents, references, or symbols are new to one or more of the communicators. There are four ways in which we help each other understand what we mean:

Definitions: These tell others what is in our heads, or what we mean when we use a certain word;
Metaphors: Metaphors allow us to talk about something unfamiliar in terms of something else that is familiar. Metaphors also allow us to merge two concepts whose result is a third concept. For example, I could speak of Baxter as a furry bundle of energy.
Feedforward: This is the process of providing feedback to ourselves before we even speak, so that we help ourselves choose the best way to communicate in a given situation to a given audience; and
Basic English: The set of 850 words out of which any person can effectively communicate ideas, simple or complex.

Signs, Signifiers, and Signified

Semiotics is concerned with signs and their relationship with objects and meaning. One way to view signs is to consider them composed of a signifier and a signified. Simply put, the signifier is the sound associated with or image of something (e.g., a tree), the signified is the idea or concept of the thing (e.g., the idea of a tree), and the sign is the object that combines the signifier and the signified into a meaningful unit. Stated differently, the sign is the relationship between the concept and the representation of that concept. For example, when I was a child I had a stuffed animal. OK, it was a stuffed green rat, but it was a smiling rat. That rat was the signifier. Think what a stuffed animal could signify to a child. In my case, it signified safety, warmth, and comfort. So, when I walked into my room and looked at my stuffed green rat it was a sign to me that everything was OK. Notice that the signifier and the signified cannot be separated and still provide a meaningful basis for the sign.

Today, that stuffed green rat is just a memory to me. I cannot even recall what I named it. In fact, as time passed that rat became a sign of something else. The rat is still a signifier but it signifies my early childhood when the world seemed calm, safe, and inviting. Now the rat could be considered a sign of my youthful innocence, long past and hard to remember, just like the name of that rat.

Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic Interactionism is based on three assumptions:

1. communication occurs through the creation of shared significant symbols,

2. the self is constructed through communication, and

3. social activity becomes possible through the role-taking process.

You can get a basic grasp of this theory by learning its keywords and how they fit together.

I -- the active portion of the self capable of performing behaviors.

Me -- the socially reflective portion of the self, providing social control for the actions of the I.

Self -- the combination of the I and the Me. Self is a process, not a structure. The I acts and the me defines the self as reflective of others.

Self-indication -- experience and feedback as the I acts and the Me observes the I from the role of the Other. The Me then gives direction regarding future action to the I.

Generalized Other -- the typical members of a society or culture.

Specific Other -- the idea of a specific person outside the Self.

Role Taking -- putting oneself in the place of another, or waling in someone else's shoes. We learn to Role Take by Play and Games.

Play -- activity where a child is both the self and an other, without recognizing the self. The child plays both roles without recognizing the self in either role.

Game -- interaction where the child has the attitude of all the others involved in the game. The child is the self but can recognize the other's perspectives. Thus, behavior is not a response but an interpretive process. The individual can comprehend the self only through interaction with other people.

Gesture (nonsymbolic) Interaction--an impulsive and spontaneous action in the sense of a reflex response (e.g., pulling your hand away quickly when after it touches something hot).

Symbolic Interaction -- an interpretation of a symbol.

Symbol -- the representation of one thing for another thing.

Significant Symbol -- a symbol that has shared meaning (e.g., the words in a language).

Mind -- a social, behavioral process in which the human being is capable of acting toward and even creating his or her environment, or objects in the environment.

Attribution Theory

Attribution Theory assumes that people try to determine why people do what they do. This search for a reason behind behavior allows people to attribute causes to behavior. A behavioral cause could be situational, where a person had to do something because of the situation they were in. A behavioral cause could also result from something unique to person. Examples of those unique attributes include, but are not limited to:

1. the person's desire to perform the behavior (e.g., they did it because they wanted to do it),

2. the person's whim (e.g., they did it because they felt like doing it),

3. the person's ability (e.g., the person is capable of doing the behavior),

4. the person's sense of obligation (e.g., the person did it because they felt they had to or should do the behavior), and

5. the person's sense of belonging (e.g., the person did it to fit in with a group of people important to the person).

A person seeking to understand why another person did something may attribute one or more causes to that behavior. However, a three-stage process leads up to the final attribution:

1. the person must perceive or observe the behavior,

2. then the person must believe that the behavior was intentionally performed, and

3. then the person must determine if they believe the other person was forced to perform the behavior (in which case the cause is attributed to the situation) or not (in which case the cause is attributed to the other person).

Constructivism

Constructivism makes three assumptions regarding communication:

1. all communication is intentional

2. communication is goal-driven

3. negotiation comes into play with shared interpretation (meaning)

Constructivism focuses on individuals rather than interactions. It tries to account for why people make the certain communicative choices. Constructs are the basis of constructivism. They are dimensions of judgment and can be thought of as filters, files, templates, or interpretive schemes. They are domain specific, almost exclusively focusing on interpersonal message variations. Constructs are assumed to change over time, following Werner's Orthogenetic Principle (impressions start globally, undifferentiated, and unorganized then get more complex, abstract, differentiated, and organized as people develop).

Constructivist research uses the Role Category Question to find constructs embedded in free response writing, often about a person the writer likes and a person the writer dislikes. The more constructs a person uses the more cognitively differentiated they are. Cognitive differentiation is a subset of cognitive complexity, which measures the organization, quantity, and level of abstractness of the constructs a person holds about another person. Cognitive differentiation measures only the quantity of constructs but still predicts the degree to which a communicator is person centered and other oriented. Constructivism claims that the more cognitively differentiated a person is the more likely they are to be a competent communicator (one who intentionally uses knowledge of shared interpretations to express meaning is such a way as to control another person's interpretations of some event, object, person, etc.).

Constructivist research shows moderately strong correlations between the organizational level of a person and cognitive differentiation, persuasive ability, and perspective taking. Smaller correlations have been found between organizational level and self monitoring.

Elaboration Likelihood Model

The Elaboration Likelihood Model claims that there are two paths to persuasion: the central path and the peripheral path. The central path is most appropriately used when the receiver is motivated to think about the message and has the ability to think about the message. If the person cares about the issue and has access to the message with a minimum of distraction, then that person will elaborate on the message. Lasting persuasion is likely if the receiver thinks, or rehearses, favorable thoughts about the message. A boomerang effect (moving away from the advocated position) is likely to occur if the subject rehearses unfavorable thoughts about the message. If the message is ambiguous but pro-attitudinal (in line with the receiver's attitudes) then persuasion is likely. If the message is ambiguous but counter-attitudinal then a boomerang effect is likely.

If the message is ambiguous but attitudinally neutral (with respect to the receiver) or if the receiver is unable or not motivated to listen to the message then the receiver will look for a peripheral cue. Peripheral cues include such communication strategies as trying to associate the advocated position with things the receiver already thinks postively towards (e.g., food, money, sex), using an expert appeal, and attempting a contrast effect where the advocated position is presented after several other positions, which the receiver despises, have been presented. If the peripheral cue association is accepted then there may be a temporary attitude change and possibly future elaboration. If the peripheral cue association is not accepted, or if it is not present, then the person retains the attitude initially held.

If the receiver is motivated and able to elaborate on the message and if there are compelling arguments to use, then the central route to persuasion should be used. If the receiver is unlikely to elaborate the message, or if the available arguments are weak, then the peripheral route to persuasion should be used.

Social Judgment Theory

The key point of the Social Judgment Theory is that attitude change (persuasion) is mediated by judgmental processes and effects. Put differently, persuasion occurs at the end of the process where a person understands a message then compares the position it advocates to the person's position on that issue. A person's position on an issue is dependent on:

1. the person's most preferred position (their anchor point),

2. the person's judgment of the various alternatives (spread across their latitudes of acceptance, rejection, and noncommitment), and

3. the person's level of ego-involvement with the issue.

Consider the course choices available to you next term. For the sake of argument, let's say you have four required courses to finish but have one three credit hour elective remaining. What courses open to you would you definitely not enroll in, no matter what? Those courses fall in your Latitude of Rejection. Do you think anyone could persuade you to take a class that falls in that latitude? Not likely. And, the more ego-involved you are in the decision to enroll in your course (the more you care about that decision) the larger your Latitude of Rejection will be. Persuasive messages that advocate positions in your Latitude of Rejection will be contrasted by you. That is, they will appear to be further away from your anchor point than they actually are. That's not good news for the would-be persuader.

Now consider the courses that you really don't have an opinion about, that you don't have positive or negative feelings toward. Those courses fall in your Latitude of Noncommitment. It's possible that someone could persuade you to enroll in one of those courses, but you'd have to learn more about the course first, at least enough until you an opinion, or judgment, about it. Now, consider all those courses you would consider enrolling in. Those courses fall in your Latitude of Acceptance. A person with good arguments might be able to persuade you to take one of those courses, especially if, in your judgment, the course is similar to your anchor point course. Persuasive messages that advocate positions in your Latitude of Acceptance will be assimilated by you. That is, they will appear to be closer to your anchor point than they actually are. That's good news for the would-be persuader.

If you are persuaded, then the further a message's position is away from your anchor point, the larger your attitude change will be. But remember that it is very unlikely that you will be persuaded out of your Latitude of Rejection. So, once a message enters that region and moves away from your anchor point, the amount of your attitude change decreases.

Social Penetration Theory

Social Penetration Theory asserts that as relationships develop persons communication from superficial to deeply personal topics, slowing penetrating the communicators' public persona to reach their core personality or sense of self. First viewed as a direct, continuous penetration from public person to private person, social penetration is know considered to be a cyclical and dialectical. Relationships have normal ebbs and flows. They do not automatically get better and better where the participants learn more and more about each other. Instead, the participants have to work through the tensions of the relationship (the dialectic) while they learn and group themselves and a parties in a relationships. At times the relationships is very open and sharing. Other time, one or both parties to the relationship need their space, or have other concerns, and the relationship is less open. The theory posits that these cycles occur throughout the life of the relationship as the persons try to balance their needs for privacy and open relationship.

Persons allow other people to penetrate their public self when they disclose personal information. The decision to disclose is based on the perceived rewards the person will gain if he or she discloses information. If a person perceives that the cost of disclosing information is greater than the rewards for disclosing information then no information will be disclosed. The larger the reward-cost ratio the more disclosure takes place. If you think to the relationships you have been in you will probably find that in almost all of them more disclosure took place at the outset of the relationship than at any other place. That happens because people initially disclose superficial information that costs very little if another person finds it out. It matters little if you know that I enjoy all types of music but especially enjoy listening to blues, saxophone jazz, and straightforward rock-n-roll.

It gets a bit more personal when I start explaining why I like those types of music, so I, like most people, will wait until you reciprocate and tell me your favorite types of music before I allow you more visibility into who I am. The deeper I allow you to penetrate my self, the more affective information I will disclose to you. The closer you get to my core self the higher my perceived costs will be for disclosing that information. Thus, it is not likely that I will disclose very personal information to very many people.

Uncertainty Reduction Theory

The Uncertainty Reduction Theory asserts that people have a need to reduce uncertainty about others by gaining information about them. Information gained can then be used to predict the others' behavior. Reducing uncertainty is particularly important in relationship development, so it is typical to find more uncertainty reduction behavior among people when they expect or want to develop a relationship than among people who expect or know they will not develop a relationship. Consider how you try to reduce uncertainty about someone you have just met and want to spend more time with. Now consider how you try to reduce uncertainty about people you meet on an elevator.

There are three basic ways people seek information about another person:

1. Passive strategies -- we observe the person, either in situations where the other person is likely to be self-monitoring* (a reactivity search) as in a classroom, or where the other person is likely to act more naturally (a disinhibition search) as in the stands at a football game.

2. Active strategies -- we ask others about the person we're interested in or try to set up a situation where we can observe that person (e.g., taking the same class, sitting a table away at dinner). Once the situation is set up we sometime observe (a passive strategy) or talk with the person (an interactive strategy).

3. Interactive strategies -- we communicate directly with the person.

* Self-monitoring is a behavior where we watch and strategically manipulate how we present ourselves to others.

Groupthink

Groupthink occurs when a homogenous highly cohesive group is so concerned with maintaining unanimity that they fail to evaluate all their alternatives and options. Groupthink members see themselves as part of an in-group working against an outgroup opposed to their goals. You can tell if a group suffers from groupthink if it:

1. overestimates its invulnerability or high moral stance,

2. collectively rationalizes the decisions it makes,

3. demonizes or stereotypes outgroups and their leaders,

4. has a culture of uniformity where individuals censor themselves and others so that the facade of group unanimty is maintained, and

5. contains members who take it upon themselves to protect the group leader by keeping information, theirs or other group members', from the leader.

Groups engaged in groupthink tend to make faulty decisions when compared to the decisions that could have been reached using a fair, open, and rational decision-making process. Groupthinking groups tend to:

1. fail to adequately determine their objectives and alternatives,

2. fail to adequately assess the risks associated with the group's decision,

3. fail to cycle through discarded alternatives to reexamine their worth after a majority of the group discarded the alternative,

4. not seek expert advice,

5. select and use only information that supports their position and conclusions, and

6. does not make contingency plans in case their decision and resulting actions fail.

Group leaders can prevent groupthink by:

1. encouraging members to raise objections and concerns;

2. refraining from stating their preferences at the onset of the group's activities;

3. allowing the group to be independently evaluated by a separate group with a different leader;

4. splitting the group into sub-groups, each with different chairpersons, to separately generate alternatives, then bringing the sub-groups together to hammer out differences;

5. allowing group members to get feedback on the group's decisions from their own constituents;

6. seeking input from experts outside the group;

7. assigning one or more members to play the role of the devil's advocate;

8. requiring the group to develop multiple scenarios of events upon which they are acting, and contingencies for each scenario; and

9. calling a meeting after a decision consensus is reached in which all group members are expected to critically review the decision before final approval is given.

Organizing

Karl Weick writes of the process oriented organizing, rather than the structural oriented organization. Communication is key to the organizing process because it is a large factor in the sense-making process people use when they organize. The sense-making process is an attempt to reduce equivocality, or multiple meanings, in the information used by the people in the organization. When information is handled by the organizers they go through the stages of:

Enactment -- where they define the situation and begin the process of dealing with the information,
Selection -- where they narrow the equivocality by deciding what to deal with and what to leave along, ignore, or disregard, and
Retention -- where they decide what information, and its meaning, they will retain for future use.

In both the selection and retention stages there are additional processes. These processes depend on double interacts. An act occurs when you say something ("Can I have a popsicle?"). An interact occurs when you say something and I respond ("No, it will spoil you dinner."). A double interact occurs when you say something, I respond, then you respond to that, adjusting your first statement ("Well, how about half a popsicle?"). Double interacts works in:

1. assembly rules -- the operating procedures (e.g., all requests for information from the media must be handled by the Corporate Communications Dept., requests for pay raises must be made through your immediate supervisor, etc.) used by the company to choose what to do maximize the likelihood of achieving the goal at hand, and in the

2. behavior cycles -- sets of double interacts the organization uses to facilitate the selection and retention process. Examples of behavior cycles include staff meetings, coffee-break rumoring, e-mail conversations, internal reports, etc.

Weick sees the the organization as a system taking in equivocal information from its environment, trying to make sense of that information, and using what was learned in the future. As such, organizations evolve as they make sense out of themselves and their environment.

Muted Group Theory

Summary

Muted Group Theory is a critical theory because it is concerned with power and how it is used against people. While critical theories can separate the powerful and the powerless any number of ways, this theory chooses to bifurcate the power spectrum into men and women.

Muted Group Theory begins with the premise that language is culture bound, and because men have more power than women, men have more influence over the language, resulting in language with a male-bias. Men create the words and meaning for the culture, allowing expression of their ideas. Women, on the other hand, are left out of this meaning creation and left without a means to express that which is unique to them. That leaves women as a muted group.

The Muted Group Theory rests on three assumptions:

1. Men and women perceive the world differently because they have different perception shaping experiences. Those different experiences are a result of men and women performing different tasks in society.

2. Men enact their power politically, perpetuating their power and suppressing women's ideas and meanings from gaining public acceptance.

3. Women must convert their unique ideas, experiences, and meanings into male language in order to be heard.

The premise and assumptions leads to a number of hypotheses about women's communication:

1. Women have a more difficult time expressing themselves than do men.

2. Women understand what men mean more easily than men understand what women mean.

3. Women communicate with each other using media not accepted by the dominant male communicators.

4. Women are less satisfied with communication than are men.

5. Women are not likely to create new words, but sometimes do so to create meanings special and unique to women.

Muted Group Theory does not claim that these differences are based in biology. Instead, the theory claims that men risk losing their dominant position if they listen to women, incorporate their experiences in the language, and allow women to be equal partners in language use and creation. Language is about power, and men have it.

Face

Erving Goffman wrote about face in conjunction with how people interact in daily life. He claims that everyone is concerned, to some extent, with how others perceive them. We act socially, striving to maintain the identity we create for others to see. This identity, or public self-image, is what we project when we interact socially. To lose face is to publicly suffer a diminished self-image. Maintaining face is accomplished by taking a line while interacting socially. A line is what the person says and does during that interaction showing how the person understands the situation at hand and the person's evaluation of the interactants. Social interaction is a process combining line and face, or face work. Brown and Levinson use the concept of face to explain politeness. To them, politeness is universal, resulting from people's face needs:

1. Positive face is the desire to be liked, appreciated, approved, etc.

2. Negative face is the desire not to be imposed upon, intruded, or otherwise put upon.

Positive politeness addresses positive face concerns, often by showing prosocial concern for the other's face. Negative politeness addresses negative face concerns, often by acknowledging the other's face is threatened. Anytime a person threatens another person's face, the first person commits a face-threatening act (FTA). Face-threatening acts come in four varieties, listed below in order from most to least face threatening:

1. Do an FTA baldly, with no politeness (e.g., "Close your mouth when you eat you swine.").

2. Do an FTA with positive politeness (e.g., "You have such beautiful teeth. I just wish I didn't see them when you eat.").

3. Do an FTA with negative politeness (e.g., "I know you're very hungry and that steak is a bit tough, but I would appreciate it if you would chew with your mouth closed.").

4. Do an FTA indirectly, or off-record (e.g., "I wonder how far a person's lips can stretch yet remain closed when eating?"). An indirect FTA is ambiguous so the receiver may "catch the drift" but the speaker can also deny a meaning if they wish.

Of course, a person can choose not to threaten another's face at all, but when a face must be threaten, a speaker can decide how threatening he or she will be.

Cultivation Theory

According to Cultivation Theory, television viewers are cultivated to view reality similarly to what they watch on television. No one TV show gets credit for this effect. Instead, the medium of television gets the credit. Television shows are mainstream entertainment, easy to access, and generally easy to understand. As such, they provide a means by which people are socialized into the society, albeit with an unrealistic notion of realty at times, particularly with respect to social dangers. Television seeks to show and reinforce commonalities among us, so those who regularly watch television tend to see the world in the way television portrays it. Compared to actual demographics, women, minorities, upper-class, and lower-class people are under-represented on television shows. At the same time, the percent of people who work in law enforcement and violent crime are over-represented. People who are heavy watchers of television assimilate this information and believe that the world is a dangerous, scary place where others can't be trusted. This is known as the "mean world syndrome." Further, heavy watchers of to blur distinctions between social groups such as the poor and the rich, urban and rural populations, and different racial groups. Those TV watchers also identify themselves as political moderates but answer surveys similarly to how political conservatives answer the surveys. Not everyone is successfully cultivated by television. Those who watch little television are not affected. Likewise, people who talk about what they see, especially adolescents who talk with their parents, are less likely to alter their view of reality to match what they see on television.

The Spiral of Silence

The Spiral of Silence is a model of why people are unwilling to publicly express their opinions when they believe they are in the minority. The model is based on three premises:

1. people have a "quasi-statistical organ," a sixth-sense if you will, which allows them to know the prevailing public opinion, even without access to polls,

2. people have a fear of isolation and know what behaviors will increase their likelihood of being socially isolated, and

3. people are reticent to express their minority views, primarily out of fear of being isolated.

The closer a person believes the opinion held is similar to the prevailing public opinion, the more they are willing to openly disclose that opinion in public. Then, if public sentiment changes, the person will recognize that the opinion is less in favor and will be less willing to express that opinion publicly. As the perceived distance between public opinion and a person's personal opinion grows, the more unlikely the person is to express their opinion.

Consider the case of Dennis Rodman, one of the stars of the Chicago Bulls basketball team. Mr. Rodman has consistently been an incredible competitor and rebounder for the Detroit Pistons, San Antonio Spurs, and Chicago Bulls. Over the years he attracted a large fan base, but watched it fall in recent years as he got "weirder" or more "individualistic" (depending on how you interpret his behavior). Fans in San Antonio welcomed Mr. Rodman when he first arrived, but vocal supporters were hard to find just before he was traded to Chicago. At the start of the 1996-1997 season Mr. Rodman's stock was high in Chicago, falling off somewhat after the "kick the cameraman" incident. I wish him well, but if the public becomes displeased with him the Spiral of Silence will strike his supporters once again.

Standard Format for a Social Scientific Journal Article

Social scientific research reports and journal articles are designed to describe what researchers did, why they did it, how they did it, what they found, and what that means. While all journals have their specific requirements, all research reports and journal articles follow the same standard format. The format is standardized to make it easy for readers to study research presented in a variety of journals. The speed with which you read journal articles and the understanding you gain from those articles will increase once you become familiar with the standard format.

1. Title: The title should be brief but clearly describe the focus of the research described in the article.

2. Author(s): The names of all authors is given. The institutional affiliation is also given, sometimes with the authors' names, sometimes at the bottom of the first page, sometimes at the end of the article, and sometimes at the end of the journal.

3. Abstract: The abstract is a brief summary of the article designed to give the reader an overview of what the researchers did, how they did it, what they found, and what it means.

4. Introduction: This section describes all prior research and theories that all relevant to the study described in the article. That prior literature is integrated to form the basis of an argument(s) supporting why the present study was conducted. The introduction also introduces and argumentatively supports whatever research hypotheses and/or research questions are addresses in the study.

5. Method: This section describes what the researchers did. The section is written in sufficient detail and precision to allow a reader to replicate the study. There are exceptions to this principle of replication (e.g., lengthy surveys are not normally included, complex and detailed instructions to experimental subjects are often summarized, etc.). The method section contains as many of these five subsections as are appropriate for the study:

Subjects: The demographics of the persons used in the study.

Apparatus: Detailed description of special equipment used, if any, in the study.

Procedures: Detailed description of what the researchers and subjects did.

Design: Description of the type of experimental design used in the study.

Materials or Measures: Description of which testing and measuring instruments were used, and how they were used if differently than their normal use.

6. Results: This section describes what the researchers found. You will often find this section to be a mixture of statistical reports, tables, and prose describing those numbers.

7. Discussion: This section provides the authors' the opportunity to tell what their research results mean, both to the study and to the world at large.

8. References: A list of all works (e.g., books, articles, personal communication, etc.) cited in the study. Most, and usually all, of the cited works will be cited and discussed in the introduction section of the article.

Readers familiar with statistical analyses and the theories, prior research, and methodologies used in field related to the article should have no problem understanding the article. Readers lacking familiarity with field related theories, research, and methodology usually have some difficulties grasping the big picture of the study, but if the article is well written the readers can understand enough to understand the gist of the study.

Readers unfamiliar with statistical analyses fare worse. These readers often entirely skip the Method and Results section, relying solely on the Introduction and Discussion sections. When read alone, the Introduction and Discussion sections can work well to provide the reader with an overview of the study. However, these sections generally stay at a higher level, leaving the details for the Method and Results sections. Often, the prize is in the details.

Certainly, the Results section contains the basis for determining the validity of information in the Discussion section. Readers lacking statistical analyses expertise will be best served by taking a course on experimental design and statistical analysis, preferably in the same discipline as the journal articles they read (e.g., readers of communication articles benefit from an experimental design and statistical analysis course offered by the communication department, readers of psychology articles benefit from an experimental design and statistical analysis course offered by the psychology department, etc.).

What's in an Abstract of a Social Scientific Journal Article?

An abstract is presented to the reader before the beginning of an article. The abstract briefly tells what the researchers did, how they did it, what they found, and what that means. More specifically, an abstract of an social scientific study will describe:

1. the problem being investigated or question being answer,

2. the subjects, along with key information about those subjects,

3. the experimental method(s) used,

4. the results of the study, including statistical significance levels; and

5. what the results mean, both in the study and with regard to prior research, theories, and the world outside the research lab.

A properly written abstract will convey all that information in about 100 to 120 words. There should be no reason to refer to the article to understand jargon, abbreviations, or other oddities in the abstract.

Use abstracts to gain a first glance into journal articles. When you are researching a particular topic you can usually tell if a journal article pertains to that topic just by reading the abstract. If you determine that the article is relevant then be sure to read the entire article. Be aware that when a journal article reports multiple significant findings only the most important four or five will be mentioned in the abstract. When writing about a journal article never rely solely on the abstract (unless you absolutely cannot find the journal article, then be sure to cite the abstract, not the article).

Media Control: Open Communication Technologies as Actors Enabling a Shift in the Status Quo

"The conditions associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transportable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively 'regulated' and 'regular' without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing actions of a conductor" (Bourdieu, p. 53)

The above quote by Bourdieu, when viewed from the perspective of the society as the 'habitus', is quiet informing (in theory as well as in practice) of media's interplay with the social structures within which they are embedded. As we have seen throughout our course readings, media technologies-as important instruments at various levels of communication processes in the society, have encountered resistance by various cultural and social norms, and somewhat mixed response from economical and political forces because of their profit making potentials or power generation ability. More then any other type of technology, media and communication technologies have been the subject of public and scholarly debates because of their intrinsic characteristics to be able to convey (asynchronously) content across time and space (at distance), inscribed in form of data, information, images, knowledge, and wisdom, in mediums such as books, data tape drives, CD-ROMS, video and audio tapes, etc. Additionally, synchronous communication has enabled instantaneous communication among people (e.g. telephone, audio and video conferencing, online chat) enabling efficient, but not necessarily effective exchange of information, ideas, thoughts, and concepts.

The pervasive and widespread use of media technologies, often used ubiquitously for symbolic purposes, is also used by the governing elites to maintain the status quo and ensure stability. The necessity to reproduce and maintain a stable state, the habitus (to borrow from Bourdieu whose habitus concept is similar to the stable state produced and maintained by the hegemonic ideology), requires ways for disseminating cultural and political material of the dominant ideology. Similarly to how Bourdieu describes the functioning of the habitus, Gitlin defines the status quo as hegemony, "a ruling class's (or alliance's) domination of subordinate classes and groups through the elaboration and penetration of ideology (ideas and assumptions) into their common sense and everyday practice," and contends that it "is systematic (but not necessary or even usually deliberate) engineering of mass consent to established order" (Gitlin, 1980, pp. 253). Further, elaborating on the aspect of hegemony and clarifying the composition of the elite, mostly government, corporate establishment and those institutions that produce cultural artifacts, Schiller (1996) explains their economic reason for cooperation: "The American economy is now hostage to a relatively small number of giant private companies, with interlocking connections, that set the national agenda. This power is particularly characteristic of the communication and information sector where the national cultural-media agenda is provided by a very small (and declining) number of integrated private combines. This development has deeply eroded free individual expression, a vital element of a democratic society" (Schiller, 1996, p. 44).

This paper will attempt to elaborate on the interplay between media and communication technologies, and social structures and forces (social, cultural, economical, political), whether institutionalized or not, emphasizing that both the content and the channels of communication through which the content is distributed are important factors in the production, maintenance and further reproduction of the artifacts of the dominant ideology. I will argue that the content that is being represented and recorded, when conveyed via open communication (such as the Internet), can show us the liberating potentials of various media technologies. As such, communication technologies are situated as important actors in the process to displacing or shifting the status quo.

Media Control

Evident from Gitlin's and Schiller's arguments is their emphasis on the necessity of free and open communication among the masses if there is to be any deliverance from the 'claws' of the media. On the contrary, it is the one-way communication (radio, TV, cable) utilized by the elites to achieve the subordination and dissemination of the hegemonic ideology. Fiske (1996) further elaborates this in his argument that surveillance technology is also used as means to discern the norms and regulations necessary to maintain the hegemony ideology: "Norms are crucial to any surveillance system, for without them it cannot identify the abnormal. Norms are what enable it to decide what information should be turned into knowledge and what individuals need to be monitored" (Fiske 1996, p. 220). Fiske's technologised surveillance of the physical goes hand-in-hand with surveillance of the discourse (what issues are raised on TV, radio, etc.) "because unequal access to those technologies ensures their use in promoting similar power-block interests" (Fiske 1996, p. 218). The important point brought forth here, directly or indirectly, is the identification of the closed, unidirectional (with masses on the receiving end) and restricted access of communication technology.

These aspects are identified as necessary characteristics for the maintenance and reproduction of the hegemonic ideology, enabling the elites to set the form, format and content of the public discourse (broadcasting, TV, radio, press, etc.), and as importantly decide who can participate. Therefore, it can be argued that this manifestation of communication technologies, entangled in the web of one-way communication and used by the elites for power control and dissemination of material in support of the hegemonic ideology, has shaped the traditional scholarly and public discourse, as well as their practical use, to view communication technology as intrinsically embedded with features, characteristics and functionalities, for reinforcing and aiding the hegemonic ideology.

This biased view, that communication technologies are inherently suited to help media control, is troublesome and factually wrong. For example, the scholarly and public discourse on early cable technology shows that cable access was intended for use unlike it is being used today (for dissemination popular consumer culture through its various formats with the aims of making profit). Streeter (1997) argues that cable "had the potential to rehumanize a dehumanized society, to eliminate the existing bureaucratic restrictions of government regulation common to the industrial world, and to empower the currently powerless public" (Streeter 1997, p.228). He further notes that the cable system had the potential to enable two-way communication and interactivity, but apparently failed to do so due to the social (un)response on the part of the audience: "Cable television was something that could have an important impact upon society, and it thus called for a response on the part of society; it was something to which society could respond and act upon, but that was itself outside society" (Streeter 1997, p. 225). And then adds that cable should not be viewed as an "autonomous entity that had simply appeared on the scene as the result of scientific and technical research" (Streeter 1997, p. 225). Here we see a distinction between the current social status of cable as profit making machinery and its potentials to have become socially responsible technology that would have empowered the audience with two-way open communication.

The above suggests that the communicative aspects of the production and reproduction of the dominant ideology, including the production of consent in the audience/consumer or citizen, are identified by media and communication technologies characterized by closed, one-way communication. This provides the elites with the ability to control the public discourse by selectively choosing the issues of discussion, and at the same time is able to control the access to the discourse: "But communication and information technology does not merely circulate discourse and make it available for analysts, it also produces knowledge and applies power" (Fiske 1996, p. 217). This process ensures conformity with the accepted cultural, social, economical, and political norms of the dominant ideology: "focus on communication technology both as ways of engaging in discourse struggles and, through their surveillance capability, as ways of producing a particular form of social knowledge and thus of exerting power" (Fiske 1996, p. 217)

That the various media and communication technology exhibit characteristics of closed systems with one-way communication can be hardly argued. However, the proper question to ask is: why is the communication technology so restrictive and a closed system that can be so easily controlled (deliberately or otherwise) by the elite? First, lets ask
the following question regarding how does media fit in the economic system. Do the existing media/communication technologies exhibit characteristics that make them a better fit for the capitalistic free market (economy whose ultimate goal is the bottom-line, i.e. profit), rather than empowering the publics/audiences with information to better participate in representative democracy? Second, are the exhibited characteristics intrinsic to a particular technology embedded in the technology itself, or they are a result of the features and functionalities which designers embellished a particular technology?

To answer the above questions, I first turn to Schiller (1996) who argues in favor of original purpose and design: "When military or commercial advantages are the motivating forces of research and development, it is to be expected that the laboratories will produce findings that are conducive to these objectives. If other motivations could be advanced, the common good, for instance, different technologies might be forthcoming" (Schiller, p.71). Schiller's idea of the original purpose is also supported by the adaptive structurations theory (AST) that differentiates between technology's spirit (the original intent as thought by the designers who might be operating 'outside' of the hegemonic control, relatively speaking) and its subsequent functionality due to the appropriation process as the technology becomes embedded in institutionalized social structures. As such, more then often the existing socially and politically brokered power structures reflect themselves in the structure of the technology: "Information technology is highly political, but politics are not directed by its technological features alone" (Fiske 1996, p. 219).

The AST might appear in contradiction to Schiller's argument that the social use of technology is determined by the original purpose: "What the evidence here demonstrates is the strong, if not determining, influence of the original purpose that fostered the development of each new technology. The social use to which the technology is put, more times that not, follows its originating purpose" (Schiller, p. 71). The seemingly contradictory arguments need to be scrutinized in light of the social constructionist theory and technological determinism applied together. Neither one can explain the interplay of communication technology and society alone. The argument is that if a particular technology was designed to serve the corporate interest, most of its features will be driven to maximize the profits. In contrast, if a group of people designs technology for open communication and democratic access to information, the technology in question will have such features as to enable ease of access to information and make it hard for that technology to be used for restrictive purposes.

But again, it is not the technology per se; it is the social structures that tilt the design, development, and subsequent use of the technology for particular purposes. Unfortunately, most of the communication technology in use today has been built and appropriated for profit making activities and perhaps is unfit to support activities related to participatory democracy.

For example, the development of cable as medium of communication was relatively uneventful until the media corporations saw potentials for profits via advertising. As the fight of discourses got under way between government officials, media corporations and the liberal progressive forces, the elite elements appeared on the scene controlling and moderating the discourse: "The talk about cable … was characterized by a systemic avoidance of central issues and assumptions, and by a pattern of unequal power in the discussion of its outcomes: the discourse of the new technology was shaped not so much by full fledged debate as by the lack of it" (Streeter 1997, p.222). Thus, the future of the cable technology was affected by the social structures and institutions, striping away from its technological potential the ability to become a technology that could link the masses and bring them together.

The communication's technological determinism and social constructionism are interrelated in circular and iterative nature. It is hard to conceptualize isolated technology that is not being affected by the social structures, but constantly affects the same:

"As Raymond Williams has shown, this assumption of autonomous technology is characteristic of much though about television and society, and constitutes a false abstraction of technologies out of their social and cultural context" (Streeter 1997, p.225)

"Such speculations naively assumed that telecommunication could magically resolve the power relations among people that caused racist, poverty, and international strife" (Streeter 1997, p.227)

Even when a particular communication technology changes the social structures, it does not necessarily mean that such changes will be progressive and liberating. Streeter argues that relations in social structures are created by people and can only be changed by the people themselves, suggesting that even if technology has changed some structures, the changes have been appropriated by the elite and incorporated in the production and reproduction of the dominant ideology: "The constrains were not caused by old technological limits, nor can they be eliminated by new technologies: they were caused by relationship between people and can be overcome only by changing relations between people" (Streeter 1997, p.240). Or, as Fiske has put it very succinctly: "Technology may determine what is shown, but society determines what is seen" (Fiske 1996, p. 221).

If technology's role in the society is determined both by its own characteristics and by the moderating characteristics of its social surroundings, what might be there that causes a particular technology to become a closed system, one-way communication, disseminating content which is controlled by the stakeholders whose primary concern is to advertise to the consumers or in the case of the government control its citizen through selective and strategic communications?

Arguing that one way communication by media companies (TV, cable, radio, movies) is a very important ingredient in the process of reproduction of the dominant ideology, because it is able to control the discourse by controlling the content and restricting the access to the discourse, Gitlin suggests that the centrally controlled one way communication (one-to-many) must disappear and be replaces by many-to-many communications if we wish to empower the masses (Gitlin, 1972, pp. 363). He further contends that a possible "revolutionary movement must aim to transform mass media by liberating communications technology for popular use (Gitlin, 1972, pp. 363). Apparently, Gitlin believes and posits the open communication (many-to-many) as a possible antidote to the hegemonic ideology.

Therefore, it can be argued that the communication technology, which is constantly modified and affected by the social structures in which it is embedded, while at the same time influencing and modifying those same social structures, has the potential to shift or displace the center of gravity (i.e. the status quo, the habitus) through its characteristics of open communication, which can induce mass communication amongst the masses themselves empowering them with many-to-many communication relatively outside of elites' controls.

Constrained by the historical discourse and practicality of most of the communication technology used for one way communication and for profit making purposes, Schiller is skeptical that such technology can be of any benefit to the society: "The customary argument that commerce and profit seeking go hand-in-hand with social benefit, is still to be demonstrated after hundreds of years of contrary experience" (Schiller, p.71).

At this point I would like to argue that the newest media technology, the communication facet of the Internet, exhibits characteristics of open communication that could position it as potential antidote to hegemonic ideology. As it has been argued above, whoever controls the content can control the scope of the public discourse, and whoever controls the access to the mass communication technology can practically control the voices that can debate the already restricted content/discourse. Unfortunately, TV, radio and cable technologies have been socially (various social and institutional structures) constructed such that both content and access control are in the same hands.

However, the Internet, especially the website portion of it (ability to publish) and the email discussion lists exhibit characteristics contrary to those of earlier technologies (as shaped by the social structures). For example, almost anyone can publish anything on the Internet, relatively speaking, without the fear that the server hosting firms might block the website (apart from criminally related material). In addition, the masses, can freely organize into groups of citizens, consumers, special interests groups, hobbyists, etc., and advocate their causes openly. This is partially enabled by the ability to establish many-to-many communication via email discussion lists. These two examples show that the content is not necessarily controllable by corporate power, and that the access to that content is not restricted by any corporate power. As matters of fact, both are subject to the ability to pay for Internet access, however, many libraries provide free Internet access for interested individuals. From the traditional technologies, public cable access channels resemble the above cases. However, most communities seldom use public cable access channels. When used, they are marginalized by not being included in programming listings (e.g. TV Guide) with the rest of cable and broadcast channels.

What social conditions and circumstanced led to the development of the Internet technologies which seem to exhibits open content and open communication properties, unlike the TV, radio and cable that have remained one-way communication channels? Why haven't then the same social structures and forces restricted various Internet technologies to be used for one-way communication only?

The apparent power to reach the masses, as well as the ability to interact with them, could not have escaped the elite. All of a sudden, as the number of Internet users increased manifolds each year, previously uninterested media corporations (there were repeated public claims that profit cannot be made with this new technology) invaded the Internet landscape, using it not much different than the TV: "Whether deceptively labeled as 'entertainment,' 'news,' 'culture,' 'education,' or 'public affairs,' TV programs aim to narrow and flatten consciousness-to tailor everyman's world view to the consumer mentality, to placate political discontent, to manage what cannot be placated, to render social pathologies personal, to level class-consciousness" (Gitlin, 1972, pp.345). The obviousness of the above is that almost all commercial sites support their Internet presence by online advertising. Yes, one can choose to visit a web site only to be bombarded by advertising, similar to TV advertising. However, studies have shown that web site visitors are increasingly becoming aware and do not necessarily get influenced by advertisements. This is a bit different from the TV. A visitor can still view the page without wasting time, whereas on TV you either watch the commercials or need to switch the channel.

In other words, the Internet, fueled by the open content and open communication, in its infancy and during its development until mid 90s, before it become obvious that it can be used by corporation for making profit, was truly the liberating technology alluded by Gitlin.

To think that the elites were so naive to overlook Internet's potential as mass medium is at best naivety itself. They could not have also overlooked the potential for the masses to utilize the Internet to organize themselves outside elite's control, however, perhaps the elite thought that any such conflict should be domesticated as Gitlin suggests: "What permits it to absorb and domesticate criticism is not something accidental to the liberal capitalist ideology, but rather its core" (Gitlin, 1980, pp. 256). Then, it seems that the inevitable happened, as many times before: "The hegemonic ideology changes in order to remain hegemonic; that is the peculiar nature of the dominant ideology of liberal capitalism" (Gitlin, 1982, pp. 450).

The elite moved to utilize the open communication technology, taking control over various aspect of it. Internet users still have to access the Internet via commercial entities that use online advertising as a profit stream. Various mergers and acquisition have occurred between traditional media and online industry, successfully trapping the masses to a particular content. Yet, it is still easier to escape the online advertisers than those on TV.

Corporations find this very problematic, as it is hard to centrally control a technology that was build to be managed in distributed fashion. Therefore, they have turned more than ever before to manage the access to the Internet technology and control the Internet visiting habits (through content portals) of the masses.

Despite these attempts by corporations, if a group of people wants an Internet presence, with potential readership/viewership of all who have access to the Internet, it can do so with minimal cost. The same cannot be said for the TV, the radio or cable. Whether the possibility for inexpensive presence on the Internet and its potential mass viewership will remain so, only the future will tell.

What could change? The unimaginable could happen. Governments can for example restrict who publishes what in their country by requiring licenses to operate a website. Obviously, for it to be effective the entire world has to enact the same laws since it is easy to move website servers around the world. Next, imagine that by some 'strange' imagination a judge rules that a US firm that provides Internet access can be held responsible for the content published by its customers. If such ruling is to be enforced, it could require that a corporation first approve each websites' content.

This could potentially lead various Internet access and Internet hosting providers to utilize their central role to their advantage. Why was the Internet build with open communication in mind? Adherents of the theory of hegemony could argue that this is contrary to the theory. If the Internet contains such power that can be used as an antidote to hegemony, why did the elite allow it to be developed in the form it is? Did they intent it or is it an unintentional byproduct of government's action to create communication network that can sustains nuclear attack by creating a very distributed communication network?

Conclusion: The Internet and its open communication and open content technologies and principles are still in the infancy. Whether the open concepts will remain part of the Internet in the future remains to be seen.

If previous communication technologies are any indication, we might expect the same with the Internet. However, as I have attempted to show in this paper, the Internet communication technologies have more or less embedded in their technology some characteristics that lend themselves to be used for open communication where the masses can communicate amongst themselves without the corporate media's oversight.

Claiming that there are embedded characteristics in a given technology sounds like technological determinism. That would be an oversight. One needs to look at the social, political, economical, and cultural factors that have helped construct those characteristics in the first place so they could be embedded in the underlying Internet technologies. Further, as time goes on, the social situatedness of the Internet technology could change and the social structures of the future might modify, change or even restricts the initially acquired and embedded open communication and open content characteristics of the Internet. Alternatively, if the open characteristics of the Internet take strong hold in society and overcomes the already entrenched hegemonic forces as they are embedded deeply in various social structures, it might empower the masses to shift and displace the status quo and thus bring forth more representative democracy.

Jargon Busting

Typical of an emerging technology, the Semantic Web literature is veiled in a bewildering array of technical jargon. So much so that a time-pressed researcher might be forgiven for concluding that the Semantic Web is something for geeks and that it has no bearing on real work and real people; that it (unrealistically) requires everyone to create all online content in the RDF (Resource Description Framework)

Semantic Web language. This, of course, could not be further from the truth. Take the Weblogs (Blogs) phenomenon as an example. Few users of Weblogs are aware that they are publishing, syndicating and aggregating data onto the Semantic Web as well as the human-readable Web. Weblog technology revolves around the RSS (Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary) family of languages that vary in their human- readability but are united in their machine readability.

This resultant machine processibility is exploited to connect even the most human-centric RSS vocabularies into the Semantic Web directly, or through automated transformation to RDF. Weblogs thus form a valuable (and vast) source of richly interconnected information that requires little or no knowledge of the Semantic Web in order to create and use it.

For the information researcher, the Semantic Web view of this data enables seamless fusion of Weblog data with data from completely different sources such as dictionaries, thesauri, catalogues, databases as well as the 'traditional' Web. Where all this will lead is uncertain but the jargon is no obstacle to its creation and use.

Bottom-up Revolution

What seems certain is that both evolution and revolution will occur, and that the latter is all too easily overlooked. For instance, given the proliferation of data about data (metadata) that underpins the Semantic Web, it is tempting to focus in on the obvious prospect of a better-than-Google search engine. Such a "semantic search" engine is able to determine whether the query "orange" refers to the colour, the fruit, the mobile phone company, or a chemical weapon used by the United States. As clever and useful as this may be, it is only an evolutionary enhancement of something that is already possible on the Web today. By looking in a little more detail at what is happening on the Semantic Web today, it is possible to gain a deeper insight into where revolution is starting to occur. In this article we will do just that; we will take a look at one of the most exciting new developments on the Semantic Web. Joined-up information about people, emanating not from some centralistic database but from individuals themselves.

I don't know but I know Someone who Does

In many ways, the explosive growth of social networking software, sites and data is representative of the way the Semantic Web is emerging. Weblogs were the first wave of this evolution/revolution; they allowed individuals to publish data in a sufficiently structured format for machine processing of that data to be relatively trivial.

Communities formed around weblogs in a bottom-up fashion, defined implicitly through syndication and through the lists of other weblogs ("blogrolls") that frequently accompanied weblogs. The next step, perhaps more revolutionary than evolutionary, is to explicitly define these (and other) communities in a way that is more easily machine processible. The Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) project is one such initiative that is making this possible and, like weblogs, it does this from the bottom up.

One of the aims of the FOAF project is to improve the chances of happy accidents by describing the connections between people (and the things that they care about such as documents and places).

FOAF is a vocabulary for describing people, used analogously to Dublin Core metadata for documents. The idea is to use FOAF to describe the sorts of things you would put on your homepage-your friends, your interests, your pictures-in a structured fashion that machines find easy to process. What you get from this is a network of people instead of a network of web pages: the Web now contains descriptions of real things in the world-people-and because the Semantic Web is designed to be open and extensible, information about what these people do (their calendar), what they own (cars, houses, pets), what they create (documents, pictures, weblogs), can all be described as well.

Several million FOAF documents are out there on the Web already, created both by individuals and by various social software and networking sites. FOAF documents can be created by hand, but increasingly, FOAF is being created from existing databases or by mining the existing Web.

When people need to know something and the area is outside their expertise, they need a way into the information landscape. They need to find out what the main topics of interest are; who is well thought of; what where the important issues and papers in the area. People often serve as conduits for this type of information, with personal contacts serving as a way into an area and the key individuals within a field serving as a way of finding the main issues.

FOAF applications cannot replace the subtle social interactions which characterise personal information exchange, but they can help to make connections that might not otherwise have occurred: for example, by enabling certain sorts of information to be accurately processed by computers and therefore much easier to search.

Privacy and trust are clearly issues in FOAF as with all digital information on the Web or elsewhere. Organisations of various sorts already intensely mine the Web for information about individuals, email spammers being the most frequent example. FOAF includes protection against email spammers but in wider terms the very network of connections described in FOAF is likely to be its greatest asset in assessing reliability and quality of digital information on the Web.

Conclusion

From the perspective of the information researcher, the Semantic Web promises to provide and exploit joined-up information that goes way beyond the Web's traditional page-to-page links. Analysing the impact this will have on the day-to-day work of information professionals is not trivial. As with most new technologies, the Semantic Web is likely to create entirely new ways of working while simultaneously rendering others obsolete.

Applications like FOAF are at the vanguard of the Semantic Web, enabling a glimpse of what might be achieved. Their implicit and explicit definition of social networks offers the information researcher a wealth of new channels into the information cloud around individuals and communities.

3 The Elite Group and Mass Media

Introduction

Governments generate large quantities of information. They produce statistics on population, figures on economic production and health, texts of laws and regulations, and vast numbers of reports. The generation of this information is paid for through taxation and, therefore, it might seem that it should be available to any member of the public. But in some countries, such as Britain and Australia, governments claim copyright in their own legislation and sometimes court decisions. Technically, citizens would need permission to copy their own laws. On the other hand, some government-generated information, especially in the US, is turned over to corporations that then sell it to whomever can pay. Publicly funded information is "privatised" and thus not freely available.

The idea behind patents is that the fundamentals of an invention are made public while the inventor for a limited time has the exclusive right to make, use or sell the invention. But there are quite a few cases in which patents have been used to suppress innovation. Companies may take out a patent, or buy someone else's patent, in order to inhibit others from applying the ideas. From its beginning in 1875, the US company AT&T collected patents in order to ensure its monopoly on telephones. It slowed down the introduction of radio for some 20 years. In a similar fashion, General Electric used control of patents to retard the introduction of fluorescent lights, which were a threat to its sales of incandescent lights. Trade secrets are another way to suppress technological development. Trade secrets are protected by law but, unlike patents, do not have to be published openly. They can be overcome legitimately by independent development or reverse engineering.

Biological information can now be claimed as intellectual property. US courts have ruled that genetic sequences can be patented, even when the sequences are found "in nature," so long as some artificial means are involved in isolating them. This has led companies to race to take out patents on numerous genetic codes. In some cases, patents have been granted covering all transgenic forms of an entire species, such as soybeans or cotton, causing enormous controversy and sometimes reversals on appeal. One consequence is a severe inhibition on research by non-patent holders. Another consequence is that transnational corporations are patenting genetic materials found in Third World plants and animals, so that some Third World peoples actually have to pay to use seeds and other genetic materials that have been freely available to them for centuries.

More generally, intellectual property is one more way for rich countries to extract wealth from poor countries. Given the enormous exploitation of poor peoples built into the world trade system, it would only seem fair for ideas produced in rich countries to be provided at no cost to poor countries. Yet in the GATT negotiations, representatives of rich countries, especially the US, have insisted on strengthening intellectual property rights. Surely there is no better indication that intellectual property is primarily of value to those who are already powerful and wealthy.

The potential financial returns from intellectual property are said to provide an incentive for individuals to create. In practice, though, most creators do not actually gain much benefit from intellectual property. Independent inventors are frequently ignored or exploited. When employees of corporations and governments have an idea worth protecting, it is usually copyrighted or patented by the organisation, not the employee. Since intellectual property can be sold, it is usually the rich and powerful who benefit. The rich and powerful, it should be noted, seldom contribute much intellectual labour to the creation of new ideas.

These problems -- privatisation of government information, suppression of patents, ownership of genetic information and information not owned by the true creator -- are symptoms of a deeper problem with the whole idea of intellectual property. Unlike goods, there are no physical obstacles to providing an abundance of ideas. (Indeed, the bigger problem may be an oversupply of ideas.) Intellectual property is an attempt to create an artificial scarcity in order to give rewards to a few at the expense of the many. Intellectual property aggravates inequality. It fosters competitiveness over information and ideas, whereas cooperation makes much more sense. In the words of Peter Drahos, researcher on intellectual property, "Intellectual property is a form of private sovereignty over a primary good -- information."

Here are some examples of the abuse of power that has resulted from the power to grant sovereignty over information.

• The neem tree is used in India in the areas of medicine, toiletries, contraception, timber, fuel and agriculture. Its uses have been developed over many centuries but never patented. Since the mid 1980s, US and Japanese corporations have taken out over a dozen patents on neem-based materials. In this way, collective local knowledge developed by Indian researchers and villagers has been expropriated by outsiders who have added very little to the process.

Charles M. Gentile is a US photographer who for a decade had made and sold artistic posters of scenes in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1995 he made a poster of the I. M. Pei building, which housed the new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. This time he got into trouble. The museum sued him for infringing the trademark that it had taken out on its own image. If buildings can be registered as trademarks, then every painter, photographer and film-maker might have to seek permission and pay fees before using the images in their art work. This is obviously contrary to the original justification for intellectual property, which is to encourage the production of artistic works.
Prominent designer Victor Papanek writes: "...there is something basically wrong with the whole concept of patents and copyrights. If I design a toy that provides therapeutic exercise for handicapped children, then I think it is unjust to delay the release of the design by a year and a half, going through a patent application. I feel that ideas are plentiful and cheap, and it is wrong to make money from the needs of others. I have been very lucky in persuading many of my students to accept this view. Much of what you will find as design examples throughout this book has never been patented. In fact, quite the opposite strategy prevails: in many cases students and I have made measured drawings of, say, a play environment for blind children, written a description of how to build it simply, and then mimeographed drawings and all. If any agency, anywhere, will write in, my students will send them all the instructions free of charge."
In 1980, a book entitled Documents on Australian Defence and Foreign Policy 1968-1975 was published by George Munster and Richard Walsh. It reproduced many secret government memos, briefings and other documents concerning Australian involvement in the Vietnam war, events leading up to the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, and other issues. Exposure of this material deeply embarrassed the Australian government. In an unprecedented move, the government issued an interim injunction, citing both the Crimes Act and the Copyright Act. The books, just put on sale, were impounded. Print runs of two major newspapers with extracts from the book were also seized.
The Australian High Court ruled that the Crimes Act did not apply, but that the material was protected by copyright held by the government. Thus copyright, set up to encourage artistic creation, was used to suppress dissemination of documents for whose production copyright was surely no incentive. Later, Munster and Walsh produced a book using summaries and short quotes in order to present the information.
Scientology is a religion in which only certain members at advanced stages of enlightenment have access to special information, which is secret to others. Scientology has long been controversial, with critics maintaining that it exploits members. Some critics, including former Scientologists, have put secret documents from advanced stages on the Internet. In response, church officials invoked copyright. Police have raided homes of critics, seizing computers, disks and other equipment. This is all rather curious, since the stated purpose of copyright is not to hide information but rather to stimulate production of new ideas.

The following examples show that the uncertainty of intellectual property law encourages ambit claims that seem to be somewhat plausible. Some targets of such claims give in for economic reasons.

Ashleigh Brilliant is a "professional epigrammatist." He creates and copyrights thousands of short sayings, such as "Fundamentally, there may be no basis for anything." When he finds someone who has "used" one of his epigrams, he contacts them demanding a payment for breach of copyright. Television journalist David Brinkley wrote a book, Everyone is Entitled to My Opinion, the title of which he attributed to a friend of his daughter. Brilliant contacted Brinkley about copyright violation. Random House, Brinkley's publisher, paid Brilliant $1000 without contesting the issue, perhaps because it would have cost more than this to contest it.
Lawyer Robert Kunstadt has proposed that athletes could patent their sporting innovations, such as the "Fosbury flop" invented by high jumper Dick Fosbury. This might make a lot of money for a few stars. It would also cause enormous disputes. Athletes already have a tremendous incentive to innovate if it helps their performance. Patenting of basketball moves or choreography steps would serve mainly to limit the uptake of innovations and would mainly penalise those with fewer resources to pay royalties.
The US National Basketball Association has sued in court for the exclusive right to transmit the scores of games as they are in progress. It had one success but lost on appeal.
A Scottish newspaper, The Shetland Times, went to court to stop an online news service from making a hypertext link to its web site. If hypertext links made without permission were made illegal, this would undermine the World Wide Web.

These examples show that intellectual property has become a means for exerting power in ways quite divorced from its original aim -- promoting the creation and use of new ideas.

Critique of Standard Justifications

Edwin C. Hettinger has provided an insightful critique of the main arguments used to justify intellectual property, so it is worthwhile summarising his analysis. He begins by noting the obvious argument against intellectual property, namely that sharing intellectual objects still allows the original possessor to use them. Therefore, the burden of proof should lie on those who argue for intellectual property.

The first argument for intellectual property is that people are entitled to the results of their labour. Hettinger's response is that not all the value of intellectual products is due to labour. Nor is the value of intellectual products due to the work of a single labourer, or any small group. Intellectual products are social products.

Suppose you have written an essay or made an invention. Your intellectual work does not exist in a social vacuum. It would not have been possible without lots of earlier work -- both intellectual and nonintellectual -- by many other people. This includes your teachers and parents. It includes the earlier authors and inventors who provided the foundation for your contribution. It also includes the many people who discussed and used ideas and techniques, at both theoretical and practical levels, and provided a cultural foundation for your contribution. It includes the people who built printing presses, laid telephone cables, built roads and buildings and in many other ways contributed to the "construction" of society. Many other people could be mentioned. The point is that any piece of intellectual work is always built on and is inconceivable without the prior work of numerous people.

Hettinger points out that the earlier contributors to the development of ideas are not present. Today's contributor therefore cannot validly claim full credit.

Is the market value of a piece of an intellectual product a reasonable indicator of a person's contribution? Certainly not. As noted by Hettinger and as will be discussed in the next section, markets only work once property rights have been established, so it is circular to argue that the market can be used to measure intellectual contributions. Hettinger summarises this point in this fashion: "The notion that a laborer is naturally entitled as a matter of right to receive the market value of her product is a myth. To what extent individual laborers should be allowed to receive the market value of their products is a question of social policy."

A related argument is that people have a right to possess and personally use what they develop. Hettinger's response is that this doesn't show that they deserve market values, nor that they should have a right to prevent others from using the invention.

A second major argument for intellectual property is that people deserve property rights because of their labour. This brings up the general issue of what people deserve, a topic that has been analysed by philosophers. Their usual conclusions go against what many people think is "common sense." Hettinger says that a fitting reward for labour should be proportionate to the person's effort, the risk taken and moral considerations. This sounds all right -- but it is not proportionate to the value of the results of the labour, whether assessed through markets or by other criteria. This is because the value of intellectual work is affected by things not controlled by the worker, including luck and natural talent. Hettinger says "A person who is born with extraordinary natural talents, or who is extremely lucky, deserves nothing on the basis of these characteristics."

A musical genius like Mozart may make enormous contributions to society. But being born with enormous musical talents does not provide a justification for owning rights to musical compositions or performances. Likewise, the labour of developing a toy like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that becomes incredibly popular does not provide a justification for owning rights to all possible uses of turtle symbols. What about a situation where one person works hard at a task and a second person with equal talent works less hard? Doesn't the first worker deserve more reward? Perhaps so, but property rights do not provide a suitable mechanism for allocating rewards. The market can give great rewards to the person who successfully claims property rights for a discovery, with little or nothing for the person who just missed out.

A third argument for intellectual property is that private property is a means for promoting privacy and a means for personal autonomy. Hettinger responds that privacy is protected by not revealing information, not by owning it. Trade secrets cannot be defended on the grounds of privacy, because corporations are not individuals. As for personal autonomy, copyrights and patents aren't required for this.

A fourth argument is that rights in intellectual property are needed to promote the creation of more ideas. The idea is that intellectual property gives financial incentives to produce ideas. Hettinger thinks that this is the only decent argument for intellectual property. He is still somewhat sceptical, though. He notes that the whole argument is built on a contradiction, namely that in order to promote the development of ideas, it is necessary to reduce people's freedom to use them. Copyrights and patents may encourage new ideas and innovations, but they also restrict others from using them freely.

This argument for intellectual property cannot be resolved without further investigation. Hettinger says that there needs to be an investigation of how long patents and copyrights should be granted, to determine an optimum period for promoting intellectual work. For the purposes of technological innovation, information becomes more valuable when augmented by new information: innovation is a collective process. If firms in an industry share information by tacit cooperation or open collaboration, this speeds innovation and reduces costs. Patents, which put information into the market and raise information costs, actually slow the innovative process.

It should be noted that although the scale and pace of intellectual work has increased over the past few centuries, the duration of protection of intellectual property has not been reduced, as might be expected, but greatly increased. The US government did not recognise foreign copyrights for much of the 1800s. Where once copyrights were only for a period of a few decades, they now may be for the life of the author plus 70 years. In many countries, chemicals and pharmaceuticals were not patentable until recently. This suggests that even if intellectual property can be justified on the basis of fostering new ideas, this is not the driving force behind the present system of copyrights and patents. After all, few writers feel a greater incentive to write and publish just because their works are copyrighted for 70 years after they die, rather than just until they die.

Of various types of intellectual property, copyright is especially open for exploitation. Unlike patents, copyright is granted without an application and lasts far longer. Originally designed to encourage literary and artistic work, it now applies to every memo and doodle and is more relevant to business than art. There is no need to encourage production of business correspondence, so why is copyright applied to it?

Intellectual property is built around a fundamental tension: ideas are public but creators want private returns. To overcome this tension, a distinction developed between ideas and their expression. Ideas could not be copyrighted but their expression could. This peculiar distinction was tied to the romantic notion of the autonomous creator who somehow contributes to the common pool of ideas without drawing from it. This package of concepts apparently justified authors in claiming residual rights -- namely copyright -- in their ideas after leaving their hands, while not giving manual workers any rationale for claiming residual rights in their creations. In practice, though, the idea-expression distinction is dubious and few of the major owners of intellectual property have the faintest resemblance to romantic creators.

The Marketplace of Ideas

The idea of intellectual property has a number of connections with the concept of the marketplace of ideas, a metaphor that is widely used in discussions of free speech. To delve a bit more deeply into the claim that intellectual property promotes development of new ideas, it is therefore helpful to scrutinise the concept of the marketplace of ideas.

The image conveyed by the marketplace of ideas is that ideas compete for acceptance in a market. As long as the competition is fair -- which means that all ideas and contributors are permitted access to the marketplace -- then good ideas will win out over bad ones. Why? Because people will recognise the truth and value of good ideas. On the other hand, if the market is constrained, for example by some groups being excluded, then certain ideas cannot be tested and examined and successful ideas may not be the best ideas.

Logically, there is no reason why a marketplace of ideas has to be a marketplace of owned ideas: intellectual property cannot be strictly justified by the marketplace of ideas. But because the marketplace metaphor is an economic one, there is a strong tendency to link intellectual property with the marketplace of ideas. There is a link between these two concepts, but not in the way their defenders usually imagine.

There are plenty of practical examples of the failure of the marketplace of ideas. Groups that are stigmatised or that lack power seldom have their viewpoints presented. This includes ethnic minorities, prisoners, the unemployed, manual workers and radical critics of the status quo, among many others. Even when such groups organise themselves to promote their ideas, their views are often ignored while the media focus on their protests, as in the case of peace movement rallies and marches.

Demonstrably, good ideas do not always win out in the marketplace of ideas. To take one example, the point of view of workers is frequently just as worthy as that of employers. Yet there is an enormous imbalance in the presentation of their respective viewpoints in the media. One result is that quite a few ideas that happen to serve the interests of employers at the expense of workers -- such as that the reason people don't have jobs is because they aren't trying hard enough to find them -- are widely accepted although they are rejected by virtually all informed analysts.

There is a simple and fundamental reason for the failure of the marketplace of ideas: inequality, especially economic inequality. Perhaps in a group of people sitting in a room discussing an issue, there is some prospect of a measured assessment of different ideas. But if these same people are isolated in front of their television sets, and one of them owns the television station, it is obvious that there is little basis for testing of ideas. The reality is that powerful and rich groups can promote their ideas with little chance of rebuttal from those with different perspectives. The mass media are powerful enterprises that promote their own interests as well as those of governments and corporations.

In circumstances where participants are approximate equals, such as intellectual discussion among peers in an academic discipline, then the metaphor of competition of ideas has some value. But ownership of media or ideas is hardly a prerequisite for such discussion. It is the equality of power that is essential. To take one of many possible examples, when employees in corporations lack the freedom to speak openly without penalty they cannot be equal participants in discussions.

Some ideas are good -- in the sense of being valuable to society -- but are unwelcome. Some are unwelcome to powerful groups, such as that governments and corporations commit horrific crimes or that there is a massive trade in technologies of torture and repression that needs to be stopped. Others are challenging to much of the population, such as that imprisonment does not reduce the crime rate or that financial rewards for good work on the job or grades for good schoolwork are counterproductive. (Needless to say, individuals might disagree with the examples used here. The case does not rest on the examples themselves, but on the existence of some socially valuable ideas that are unwelcome and marginalised.) The marketplace of ideas simply does not work to treat such unwelcome ideas with the seriousness they deserve. The mass media try to gain audiences by pleasing them, not by confronting them with challenging ideas.

The marketplace of ideas is often used to justify free speech. The argument is that free speech is necessary in order for the marketplace of ideas to operate: if some types of speech are curtailed, certain ideas will not be available on the marketplace and thus the best ideas will not succeed. This sounds plausible. But it is possible to reject the marketplace of ideas while still defending free speech on the grounds that it is essential to human liberty.

If the marketplace of ideas doesn't work, what is the solution? The usual view is that governments should intervene to ensure that all groups have fair access to the media. But this approach, based on promoting equality of opportunity, ignores the fundamental problem of economic inequality. Even if minority groups have some limited chance to present their views in the mass media, this can hardly compensate for the massive power of governments and corporations to promote their views. In addition, it retains the role of the mass media as the central mechanism for disseminating ideas. So-called reform proposals either retain the status quo or introduce government censorship.

Underlying the market model is the idea of self-regulation: the "free market" is supposed to operate without outside intervention and, indeed, to operate best when outside intervention is minimised. In practice, even markets in goods do not operate autonomously: the state is intimately involved in even the freest of markets. In the case of the marketplace of ideas, the state is involved both in shaping the market and in making it possible, for example by promoting and regulating the mass media. The world's most powerful state, the US, has been the driving force behind the establishment of a highly protectionist system of intellectual property, using power politics at GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Courts may use the rhetoric of the marketplace of ideas but actually interpret the law to support the status quo. For example, speech is treated as free until it might actually have some consequences. Then it is curtailed when it allegedly presents a "clear and present danger," such as when peace activists expose information supposedly threatening to "national security". But speech without action is pointless. True liberty requires freedom to promote one's views in practice. Powerful groups have the ability to do this. Courts only intervene when others try to do the same.

As in the case of trade generally, a property-based "free market" serves the interests of powerful producers. In the case of ideas, this includes governments and corporations plus intellectuals and professionals linked with universities, entertainment, journalism and the arts. Against such an array of intellectual opinion, it is very difficult for other groups, such as manual workers, to compete. The marketplace of ideas is a biased and artificial market that mostly serves to fine-tune relations between elites and provide them with legitimacy.

The implication of this analysis is that intellectual property cannot be justified on the basis of the marketplace of ideas. The utilitarian argument for intellectual property is that ownership is necessary to stimulate production of new ideas, because of the financial incentive. This financial incentive is supposed to come from the market, whose justification is the marketplace of ideas. If, as critics argue, the marketplace of ideas is flawed by the presence of economic inequality and, more fundamentally, is an artificial creation that serves powerful producers of ideas and legitimates the role of elites, then the case for intellectual property is unfounded. Intellectual property can only serve to aggravate the inequality on which it is built.

The Alternative

The alternative to intellectual property is straightforward: intellectual products should not be owned. That means not owned by individuals, corporations, governments, or the community as common property. It means that ideas are available to be used by anyone who wants to.

One example of how this might operate is language, including the words, sounds and meaning systems with which we communicate every day. Spoken language is free for everyone to use. (Actually, corporations do control bits of language through trademarks and slogans.)

Another example is scientific knowledge. Scientists do research and then publish their results. A large proportion of scientific knowledge is public knowledge. There are some areas of science that are not public, such as classified military research. It is usually argued that the most dynamic parts of science are those with the least secrecy. Open ideas can be examined, challenged, modified and improved. To turn scientific knowledge into a commodity on the market, as is happening with genetic engineering, arguably inhibits science.

Few scientists complain that they do not own the knowledge they produce. Indeed, they are much more likely to complain when corporations or governments try to control dissemination of ideas. Most scientists receive a salary from a government, corporation or university. Their livelihoods do not depend on royalties from published work.

University scientists have the greatest freedom. The main reasons they do research are for the intrinsic satisfaction of investigation and discovery -- a key motivation for many of the world's great scientists -- and for recognition by their peers. To turn scientific knowledge into intellectual property would dampen the enthusiasm of many scientists for their work. However, as governments reduce their funding of universities, scientists and university administrations increasingly turn to patents as a source of income.

Language and scientific knowledge are not ideal; indeed, they are often used for harmful purposes. It is difficult to imagine, though, how turning them into property could make them better.

The case of science shows that vigorous intellectual activity is quite possible without intellectual property, and in fact that it may be vigorous precisely because information is not owned. But there are lots of areas that, unlike science, have long operated with intellectual property as a fact of life. What would happen without ownership of information? Many objections spring to mind.

Plagiarism

Many intellectual workers fear being plagiarised and many of them think that intellectual property provides protection against this. After all, without copyright, why couldn't someone put their name on your essay and publish it? Actually, copyright provides very little protection against plagiarism. So-called "moral rights" of authors to be credited are backed by law in many countries but are an extremely cumbersome way of dealing with plagiarism.

Plagiarism means using the ideas of others without adequate acknowledgment. There are several types of plagiarism. One is plagiarism of ideas: someone takes your original idea and, using different expression, presents it as their own. Copyright provides no protection at all against this form of plagiarism. Another type of plagiarism is word-for-word plagiarism, where someone takes the words you've written -- a book, an essay, a few paragraphs or even just a sentence -- and, with or without minor modifications, presents them as their own. This sort of plagiarism is covered by copyright -- assuming that you hold the copyright. In many cases, copyright is held by the publisher, not the author. In practice, plagiarism goes on all the time, in various ways and degrees, and copyright law is hardly ever used against it. The most effective challenge to plagiarism is not legal action but publicity. At least among authors, plagiarism is widely condemned. For this reason, and because they seek to give credit where it's due, most writers do take care to avoid plagiarising.

There is an even more fundamental reason why copyright provides no protection against plagiarism: the most common sort of plagiarism is built into social hierarchies. Government and corporate reports are released under the names of top bureaucrats who did not write them; politicians and corporate executives give speeches written by underlings. These are examples of a pervasive misrepresentation of authorship in which powerful figures gain credit for the work of subordinates. Copyright, if it has any effect at all, reinforces rather than challenges this sort of institutionalised plagiarism.

Royalties

What about all the writers, inventors and others who depend for their livelihood on royalties? First, it should be mentioned that only a very few individuals make enough money from royalties to live on. For example, there are probably only a few hundred self-employed writers in the US. Most of the rewards from intellectual property go to a few big companies. But the question is still a serious one for those intellectual workers who depend on royalties and other payments related to intellectual property.

The alternative in this case is some reorganisation of the economic system. Those few currently dependent on royalties could instead receive a salary, grant or bursary, just as most scientists do.

Getting rid of intellectual property would reduce the incomes of a few highly successful creative individuals, such as author Agatha Christie, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and filmmaker Steven Spielberg. Publishers could reprint Christie's novels without permission, theatre companies could put on Webber's operas whenever they wished and Spielberg's films could be copied and screened anywhere. Jurassic Park and Lost World T-shirts, toys and trinkets could be produced at will. This would reduce the income of and, to some extent, the opportunities for artistic expression by these individuals. But there would be economic resources released: there would be more money available for other creators. Christie, Webber and Spielberg might be just as popular without intellectual property to channel money to them and their family enterprises.

The typical creative intellectual is actually worse off due to intellectual property. Consider an author who brings in a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars of royalty income per year. This is a tangible income, which creators value for its monetary and symbolic value. But this should be weighed against payments of royalties and monopoly profits when buying books, magazines, CDs and computer software.

Many of these costs are invisible. How many consumers, for example, realise how much they are paying for intellectual property when buying prescription medicines, paying for schools (through fees or taxes), buying groceries or listening to a piece of music on the radio? Yet in these and many other situations, costs are substantially increased due to intellectual property. Most of the extra costs go not to creators but to corporations and to bureaucratic overheads -- such as patent offices and law firms -- that are necessary to keep the system of intellectual property going.

Stimulating Creativity

What about the incentive to create? Without the possibility of wealth and fame, what would stimulate creative individuals to produce works of genius? Actually, most creators and innovators are motivated by their own intrinsic interest, not by rewards. There is a large body of evidence showing, contrary to popular opinion, that rewards actually reduce the quality of work. If the goal is better and more creative work, paying creators on a piecework basis, such as through royalties, is counterproductive.

In a society without intellectual property, creativity is likely to thrive. Most of the problems that are imagined to occur if there is no intellectual property -- such as the exploitation of a small publisher that renounces copyright -- are due to economic arrangements that maintain inequality. The soundest foundation for a society without intellectual property is greater economic and political equality. This means not just equality of opportunity, but equality of outcomes. This does not mean uniformity and does not mean levelling imposed from the top: it means freedom and diversity and a situation where people can get what they need but are not able to gain great power or wealth by exploiting the work of others. This is a big issue. Suffice it to say here that there are strong social and psychological arguments in favour of equality.

Strategies for Change

Intellectual property is supported by many powerful groups: the most powerful governments and the largest corporations. The mass media seem fully behind intellectual property, partly because media monopolies would be undercut if information were more freely copied and partly because the most influential journalists depend on syndication rights for their stories.

Perhaps just as important is the support for intellectual property from many small intellectual producers, including academics and free-lance writers. Although the monetary returns to these intellectuals are seldom significant, they have been persuaded that they both need and deserve their small royalties. This is similar to the way that small owners of goods and land, such as homeowners, strongly defend the system of private property, whose main beneficiaries are the very wealthy who own vast enterprises based on many other people's labour. Intellectuals are enormous consumers as well as producers of intellectual work. A majority would probably be better off financially without intellectual property, since they wouldn't have to pay as much for other people's work. Another problem in developing strategies is that it makes little sense to challenge intellectual property in isolation. If we simply imagine intellectual property being abolished but the rest of the economic system unchanged, then many objections can be made. Challenging intellectual property must involve the development of methods to support creative individuals.

Change Thinking

Talking about "intellectual property" implies an association with physical property. Instead, it is better to talk about monopolies granted by governments, for example "monopoly privilege." This gives a better idea of what's going on and so helps undermine the legitimacy of the process. Associated with this could be an appeal to free market principles, challenging the barriers to trade in ideas imposed by monopolies granted to copyright and patent holders.

As well, a connection should be forged with ideals of free speech. Rather than talk of intellectual property in terms of property and trade, it should be talked about in terms of speech and its impediments. Controls over genetic information should be talked about in terms of public health and social welfare rather than property.

The way that an issue is framed makes an enormous difference to the legitimacy of different positions. Once intellectual property is undermined in the minds of many citizens, it will become far easier to topple its institutional supports.

Expose the Costs

It can cost a lot to set up and operate a system of intellectual property. This includes patent offices, legislation, court cases, agencies to collect fees and much else. There is a need for research to calculate and expose these costs as well as the transfers of money between different groups and countries. A middle-ranking country from the First World, such as Australia, pays far more for intellectual property -- mostly to the US -- than it receives. Once the figures are available and understood, this will aid in reducing the legitimacy of the world intellectual property system.

Reproduce Protected Works

From the point of view of intellectual property, this is called "piracy." (This is a revealing term, considering that such language is seldom used when, for example, a boss takes credit for a subordinate's work or when a Third World intellectual is recruited to a First World position. In each case, investments in intellectual work made by an individual or society are exploited by a different individual or society with more power.) This happens every day when people photocopy copyrighted articles, tape copyrighted music, or duplicate copyrighted software. It is precisely because illegal copying is so easy and so common that big governments and corporations have mounted offensives to promote intellectual property rights.

Unfortunately, illegal copying is not a very good strategy against intellectual property, any more than stealing goods is a way to challenge ownership of physical property. Theft of any sort implicitly accepts the existing system of ownership. By trying to hide the copying and avoiding penalties, the copiers appear to accept the legitimacy of the system.

Openly Refuse to Cooperate with Intellectual Property

This is far more powerful than illicit copying. The methods of nonviolent action can be used here, including noncooperation, boycotts and setting up alternative institutions. By being open about the challenge, there is a much greater chance of focussing attention on the issues at stake and creating a dialogue. By being principled in opposition, and being willing to accept penalties for civil disobedience to laws on intellectual property, there is a much greater chance of winning over third parties. If harsh penalties are applied to those who challenge intellectual property, this could produce a backlash of sympathy. Once mass civil disobedience to intellectual property laws occurs, it will be impossible to stop.

Something like that is already occurring. Because photocopying of copyrighted works is so common, there is seldom any attempt to enforce the law against small violators -- to do so would alienate too many people. Copyright authorities therefore seek other means of collecting revenues from intellectual property, such as payments by institutions based on library copies. Already there is mass discontent in India over the impact of the world intellectual property regime and patenting of genetic materials, with rallies of hundreds of thousands of farmers. If this scale of protest could be combined with other actions that undermine the legitimacy of intellectual property, the entire system could be challenged.

Promote Non-owned Information

A good example is public domain software, which is computer software that is made available free to anyone who wants it. The developers of "freeware" gain satisfaction out of their intellectual work and out of providing a service to others. The Free Software Foundation has spearheaded the development and promotion of freeware. It "is dedicated to eliminating restrictions on people's right to use, copy, modify and redistribute computer programs" by encouraging people to develop and use free software.

A suitable alternative to copyright is shareright. A piece of freeware might be accompanied by the notice, "You may reproduce this material if your recipients may also reproduce it." This encourages copiers but refuses any of them copyright.

The Free Software Foundation has come up with another approach, called "copyleft." The Foundation states, "The simplest way to make a program free is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. But this permits proprietary modified versions, which deny others the freedom to redistribute and modify; such versions undermine the goal of giving freedom to all users. To prevent this, `copyleft' uses copyright in a novel manner. Typically copyrights take away freedoms; copyleft preserves them. It is a legal instrument that requires those who pass on a program to include the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the code; the code and the freedoms become legally inseparable." Until copyright is eliminated or obsolete, innovations such as copyleft are necessary to avoid exploitation of those who want to make their work available to others.

Develop Principles to Deal with Credit for Intellectual Work

This is important even if credit is not rewarded financially. This would include guidelines for not misrepresenting another person's work. Intellectual property gives the appearance of stopping unfair appropriation of ideas although the reality is quite different. If intellectual property is to be challenged, people need to be reassured that misappropriation of ideas will not become a big problem.

More fundamentally, it needs to be recognised that intellectual work is inevitably a collective process. No one has totally original ideas: ideas are always built on the earlier contributions of others. (That's especially true of this chapter!) Furthermore, culture -- which makes ideas possible -- is built not just on intellectual contributions but also on practical and material contributions, including the rearing of families and construction of buildings. Intellectual property is theft, sometimes in part from an individual creator but always from society as a whole.

In a more cooperative society, credit for ideas would not be such a contentious matter. Today, there are vicious disputes between scientists over who should gain credit for a discovery. This is because scientists' careers and, more importantly, their reputations, depend on credit for ideas. In a society with less hierarchy and greater equality, intrinsic motivation and satisfaction would be the main returns from contributing to intellectual developments. This is quite compatible with everything that is known about human nature. The system of ownership encourages groups to put special interests above general interests. Sharing information is undoubtedly the most efficient way to allocate productive resources. The less there is to gain from credit for ideas, the more likely people are to share ideas rather than worry about who deserves credit for them.

For most book publishers, publishing an argument against intellectual property raises a dilemma. If the work is copyrighted as usual, this clashes with the argument against copyright. On the other hand, if the work is not copyrighted, then unrestrained copying might undermine sales. It's worth reflecting on this dilemma as it applies to this book. It is important to keep in mind the wider goal of challenging the corruptions of information power. Governments and large corporations are particularly susceptible to these corruptions. They should be the first targets in developing a strategy against intellectual property.

Freedom Press is not a typical publisher. It has been publishing anarchist writings since 1886, including books, magazines, pamphlets and leaflets. Remarkably, neither authors nor editors have ever been paid for their work. Freedom Press is concerned with social issues and social change, not with material returns to anyone involved in the enterprise.

Because it is a small publisher, Freedom Press would be hard pressed to enforce its claims to copyright even if it wanted to. Those who sympathise with the aims of Freedom Press and who would like to reproduce some of its publications therefore should consider practical rather than legal issues. Would the copying be on such a scale as to undermine Freedom Press's limited sales? Does the copying give sufficient credit to Freedom Press so as to encourage further sales? Is the copying for commercial or noncommercial purposes?

In answering such questions, it makes sense to ask Freedom Press. This applies whether the work is copyright or not. If asking is not feasible, or the copying is of limited scale, then good judgement should be used. In my opinion, using one chapter -- especially this chapter! -- for nonprofit purposes should normally be okay.

So in the case of Freedom Press, the approach should be to negotiate in good faith and to use good judgement in minor or urgent cases. Negotiation and good judgement of this sort will be necessary in any society that moves beyond intellectual property.

4 Mass Media and Culture

The aim of this chapter is threefold: first, to examine the ways in which the market economy framework and the elites condition culture and mass media; second, to discuss the relationship of the neoliberal consensus with the present intensification of cultural homogenisation; finally, to outline the nature of culture and the role of mass media in a democratic society, as well as to explore the strategies which could bring about a shift from the present cultural institutions to those of an inclusive democracy.

Culture, Mass Media and Elites

The Dominant Social Paradigm and Culture

A fruitful way to start the discussion of the significance of culture and its relationship to the mass media would be to define carefully our terms. This would help to avoid the confusion, which is not rare in discussions on the matter. Culture is frequently defined as the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behaviour. This is a definition broad enough to include all major aspects of culture: language, ideas, beliefs, customs, taboos, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, ceremonies and so on. However, in what follows, I am not going to deal with all these aspects of culture unless they are related to what I call the dominant social paradigm. By this I mean the system of beliefs, ideas and the corresponding values which are dominant in a particular society at a particular moment of its history. It is clear that there is a significant degree of overlapping between these two terms although the meaning of culture is obviously broader than that of the social paradigm.

But, let us see first the elements shared by both terms. Both culture and the social paradigm are time- and space-dependent, i.e. they refer to a specific type of society at a specific time. Therefore, they both change from place to place and from one historical period to another. This implies that there can be no 'general theory' of History, which could determine the relationship between the cultural with the political or economic elements in society. In other words, our starting point is the rejection not only of the crude economistic versions of Marxism (the economic base determines the cultural superstructure) but also of the more sophisticated versions of it (the economic base determines 'in the last instance' which element is to be dominant in each social formation). In my view, which I expanded elsewhere, the dominant element in each social formation is not determined, for all time, by the economic base, or any other base. The dominant element is always determined by a creative act, i.e. it is the outcome of social praxis, of the activity of social individuals. Thus, the dominant element in theocratic societies was cultural, in the societies of 'actually existing socialism' political and so on.

Similarly, the dominant element in market economies is economic, as a result of the fact that the introduction of new systems of production during the Industrial Revolution in a commercial society, where the means of production were under private ownership and control, inevitably led to the transformation of the socially- controlled economies of the past (in which the market played a marginal role in the economic process) into the present market economies (defined as the self-regulating systems in which the fundamental economic problems--what, how, and for whom to produce-- are solved `automatically', through the price mechanism, rather than through conscious social decisions). Still, the existence of a dominant element in a social formation does not mean that the relationship between this element and the other elements in it is one of heteronomy and dependence. Each element is autonomous and the relationship between the various elements is better described as one of interdependence. So, although it is the economic element which is the dominant one in the system of the market economy, this does not mean that culture is determined, even 'in the last instance' by this element.

But, there are also some important differences between culture and the dominant social paradigm. Culture, exactly because of its greater scope, may express values and ideas, which are not necessarily consistent with the dominant institutions. In fact, this is usually the case characterising the arts and literature of a market economy, where, (unlike the case of 'actually existing socialism', or the case of feudal societies before), artists and writers have been given a significant degree of freedom to express their own views. But this is not the case with respect to the dominant social paradigm. In other words, the beliefs, ideas and the corresponding values which are dominant in a market economy and the corresponding market society have to be consistent with the economic element in it, i.e. with the economic institutions which, in turn, determine that the dominant elites in this society are the economic elites (those owning and controlling the means of production).

This has always been the case in History and will also be the case in the future. No particular type of society can reproduce itself unless the dominant beliefs, ideas and values are consistent with the existing institutional framework. For instance, in the societies of 'actually existing socialism' the dominant social paradigm had to be consistent with the dominant element in them, (which was the political), and the corresponding political institutions, which determined that the dominant elites in this society were the political elites (party bureaucracy). Similarly, in the democratic society of the future, the dominant social paradigm had to be consistent with the dominant element in them, which would be the political, and the corresponding democratic institutions, which would secure that there would be no formal elites in this kind of society (although, of course, if democracy does not function properly the emergence of informal elites could not be ruled out).

So, culture and, in particular, the social dominant paradigm play a crucial role in the determination of individual and collective values. As long as individuals live in a society, they are not just individuals but social individuals, subject to a process, which socialises them and induces them to internalise the existing institutional framework as well as the dominant social paradigm. In this sense, people are not completely free to create their world but are conditioned by History, tradition and culture. Still, this socialisation process is broken, at almost all times-as far as a minority of the population is concerned-and in exceptional historical circumstances even with respect to the majority itself. In the latter case, a process is set in motion that usually ends with a change of the institutional structure of society and of the corresponding social paradigm. Societies therefore are not just "collections of individuals" but consist of social individuals, who are both free to create their world, (in the sense that they can give birth to a new set of institutions and a corresponding social paradigm), and are created by the world, (in the sense that they have to break with the dominant social paradigm in order to recreate the world).

The Values of the Market Economy

As the dominant economic institutions in a market economy are those of markets and private ownership of the means of production, as well as the corresponding hierarchical structures, the dominant social paradigm promoted by the mainstream mass media and other cultural institutions, (e.g. universities) has to consist of ideas, beliefs and values which are consistent with them. Thus, the kind of social 'sciences' which are taught at universities and the kind of articles which fill academic journals, explicitly, or usually implicitly, take for granted the existing economic institutions. Therefore, their search for 'truth' in the analysis of major economic or social problems is crucially conditioned by this fundamental characteristic. The causes of world-wide unemployment, for instance, or of massive inequality and concentration of economic power, will not be related to the system of the market economy itself; instead, the malfunctioning of the system or bad policies will be blamed, which supposedly can be tackled by the appropriate improvement of the system's functioning, or the 'right' economic policies.

In economics, in particular, the dominant theory/ideology since the emergence of the market economy has been economic liberalism, in its various versions: from the old classical and neo-classical schools up to the modern versions of it in the form of supply-side economics, new classical macro-economics etc. But, from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman, the values adopted are the same: competition and individualism, which, supposedly, are the only values that could secure freedom.

Thus, for Adam Smith, the individual pursuit of self-interest in a market economy will guarantee social harmony and, therefore, the main task of government is the defence of the rich against the poor. So, in Smith's system, as Canterbery puts it, 'individual self-interest is the motivating force, and the built-in regulator that keeps the economy from flying apart is competition'. Similarly, for Milton Friedman, the Nobel-prize winner in economics (note: the Nobel Prize in economics was never awarded to an economist who challenged the very system of the market economy) the capitalist market economy is identified with freedom:

The kind of economic organisation that provides freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other…The two ideas of human freedom and economic freedom working together came to their greatest fruition in the United States

It is obvious that in this ideology, which passes as the 'science' of economics, the values of individualism and competition are preferred over the values of collectivism and solidarity/co-operation, since freedom itself is identified with the former values as against the latter. But, it 'happens' also that the same values are the only ones, which could secure the production and reproduction of the market economy. No market economy can function properly unless those in control of it, (i.e., the economic elites), at least, and as many of the rest as possible, are motivated by individualism and competition.

This is because the dynamic of a market economy crucially depends on competition and individual greed. Furthermore, the fact that often the economic elites resort to state protection against foreign competition, if the latter threatens their own position, does not in the least negate the fact that competition is the fundamental organising principle of the market economy. It is therefore no historical accident that, as Polanyi has persuasively shown, the establishment of the market economy implied sweeping aside traditional cultures and values and replacing the values of solidarity, altruism, sharing and co-operation (which usually marked community life) with the values of individualism and competition as the dominant values. As Ray Canterbery stresses:

The capitalistic ethic leans toward the extreme of selfishness (fierce individualism) rather than toward altruism. There is little room for collective decision making in an ethic that argues that every individual should go his or her own way. As we have seen, the idea that capitalism protects 'individual rights' would have been rejected during the early Middle Ages. 'Individual rights' were set in advance by the structure of feudalism, governed by the pull of tradition and the push of authority. Economics was based upon mutual needs and obligations.

A good example of the enthusiastic support for these values today is, again, the Nobel-prize winner in economics Milton Friedman. According to him:

Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. This (social responsibility) is a fundamentally subversive doctrine.

Indeed, it is not Friedman who supports values which are inconsistent with the market economy system but the various social democrats and Green economists, who, taking for granted the market economy system, proceed to argue in favour of utopian economic institutions incorporating values which are inconsistent with this system (e.g.'stakeholding' capitalism, 'social investment' etc).

As I attempted to show elsewhere, the basic cause of the failure of both the 'actually existing socialism' in the East and social democracy in the West was exactly that they attempted to merge two fundamentally incompatible elements: the 'growth' element, (which implies the concentration of economic power and expresses the logic of the market economy), with the social justice element (which is inherently linked to equality and expresses socialist ethics).

Chomsky and the Values of the Market Economy

However, quite apart from social democrats and reformist Greens, there is an alternative view about the values of the market economy proposed by Noam Chomsky, which, however, ends up with similar conclusions about the feasibility and desirability of state action with respect to controlling today's market economy.

Thus, for Chomsky, the values which motivate today's elites in advanced capitalist countries are not individualism and competition; instead, these elites simply use such values as propaganda in their attempt to 'persuade' their own public and the countries in the periphery and semi-periphery to implement them whereas they themselves demand and enjoy the protection of their own states:

For the general public, individualism and competition are the prescribed values. Not for elites, however. They demand and obtain the protection of a powerful state, and insist on arrangements that safeguard them from unfettered competition or the destructive consequences of individualism. The process of corporatization is a standard illustration, as is the reliance in every economy -- crucially, the US -- on socialisation of risk and cost. The need to undermine the threat of competition constantly takes new forms: today, one major form, beyond corporatization, is the development of a rich network of "strategic alliances" among alleged competitors: IBM-Toshiba-Siemens, for example, or throughout the automotive industry. This has reached such extremes that prominent analysts of the business world now speak of a new form of "alliance capitalism" that is replacing the managerial/corporate capitalism that had largely displaced proprietary capitalism a century ago in advanced sectors of the economy.

Chomsky has recently expanded on the same theme in a New Left Review article in which it is made clear that his views above about the values of the market economy are perfectly consistent with his views on the nature of today's capitalism. In this article he first states that the word 'capitalist' does not mean capitalist but rather it refers to state subsidised and protected private power centres, or 'collectivist legal entities,' which embody today's corporatization of the market economy. He then goes on to describe corporatization and the role of the state as follows:

The corporatization process was largely a reaction to great market failures of the late nineteenth century, and it was a shift from something you might call proprietary capitalism to the administration of markets by collectivist legal entities-mergers, cartels, corporate alliances-in association with powerful states…the primary task of the states-and bear in mind that, with all the talk about minimising the state, in the OECD countries the state continues to grow relative to GNP, notably in the 1980s and 1990s-is essentially to socialise risk and cost, and to privatise power and profit.

Furthermore, Chomsky's views about the market economy's values and the nature of present capitalism are, in turn, entirely consistent with his present views on the potential role of the state in controlling today's market economy. Thus, as Chomsky stresses in the aforementioned article:

The long-term goal of such initiatives (like the Multilateral Agreement on Investment-MAI) is clear enough to anyone with open eyes; an international political economy which is organised by powerful states and secret bureaucracies whose primary function is to serve the concentrations of private power which administer markers through their own internal operations, through networks of corporate alliances, including the intra-firm transactions that are mislabelled 'trade'. They rely on the public for subsidy, research and development, for innovation and for bailouts when things go wrong. They rely on the powerful states for protection from dangerous 'democracy openings'. In such ways, they seek to ensure that the 'prime beneficiaries' of the world's wealth are the right people: the smug and prosperous 'Americans'; the 'domestic constituencies and their counterparts elsewhere. The scale of all of this is nowhere near as great or, for that matter, as novel as claimed; in many ways it's a return to the early twentieth century. And there's no reason to doubt that it can be controlled even within existing formal institutions of parliamentary democracy.

One, however, could object on several grounds this stand, as portrayed by the above extracts. First, the argument about the values of the economic elites, as I attempted to show above, is contestable; second, the nature of today's market economy could be seen in a very different analytical framework than the one suggested by Chomsky and, finally, it could be shown that the way out of the present multi-dimensional crisis and the related huge concentration of power can not be found in fragmented and usually 'monothematic' defensive battles with the elites. Such battles, even if sometimes victorious, are never going to win the war, as long as they are not an integral part of a new popular movement's fight against the system of the market economy itself, which is the ultimate cause of the concentration of economic power.

As regards the nature of the market economy today, I have attempted elsewhere to show how it evolved since it emerged, about two centuries ago, and how it took the form of the present growth economy. I will only add here that the shift from proprietary (or entrepreneurial) capitalism to the present internationalised market economy, where a few giant corporations control the world economy, did not happen, as Chomsky presents it, as the outcome of 'a reaction to great market failures of the late nineteenth century.' What Chomsky omits is that it was competition, which led from simple entrepreneurial firms to the present giant corporations.

The market failures he mentions are not a God-given calamity. Excepting the case of monopolies, almost all market failures in history have been directly or indirectly related to competition. It is competition, which creates the need for expansion, so that the best (from the profit of view of profits) technologies and methods of organising production (economies of scale etc) are used. It is the same competition, which has led to the present explosion of mergers and take-overs in the advanced capitalist countries, as well as the various 'strategic alliances'. For instance, the recently announced merger of giant oil companies, in a sense, is the result of a 'market failure' because of the fall in their profits. But, in a deeper sense, this merger, as well as the take-overs, strategic alliances etc going on at the moment, are simply the result of self-protective action taken by giant corporations, in order to survive the cut-throat competition launched by the present internationalisation of the market economy. Therefore, it is competition, which has led to the present corporate (or 'alliance') capitalism, not 'market failures' and/or the associated state activity, which just represent the effects of competition.

Similarly, the present internationalisation of the market economy is not just the result of state action to liberalise financial and commodity markets. In fact, the states were following the de facto internationalisation of the market economy, which was intensified by the activities of multinationals, when, (in the late seventies), under pressure from the latter, started the process of liberalising the financial markets and further deregulating the commodity markets (through the GATT rounds). Therefore, the present internationalisation is in fact the outcome of the grow-or-die dynamics, which characterises the market economy, a dynamics that is initiated by competition, the crucial fact neglected by Chomsky.

It is also the same internationalisation of the market economy, which became incompatible with the degree of state control of the economy achieved by the mid seventies, that made necessary the present neoliberal consensus. The latter, therefore, is not just a policy change, as socialdemocrats and their fellow travellers suggest, but represents an important structural change. So, minimising the state is not just 'talk', as Chomsky assumes basing his argument on the assumption that 'the state continues to grow relative to GNP, notably in the 1980s and 1990s'. However, not only the fall in the growth rate of government spending in OECD countries was higher than that of the other parts of aggregate demand in the period 1980-93 but, in fact, the (weighted average) general government consumption of high income economies was lower in 1995, at 15% of GNP, than in 1980 (17%). All this, not taking into account the drastic reduction in the overall public sectors in the last twenty years, as a result of the massive privatisation of state industries. Therefore, minimising the state, far from being 'talk' is a basic element of the present neoliberal consensus.

Also, strategic alliances, mergers and take-overs do not represent a movement away from the market economy but a movement towards a new form of it. Away from a market economy, which was geared by the internal market and towards a market economy, which is geared by the world market. This means further and further concentration of economic power not only in terms of incomes and wealth but also in terms of concentration of the power to control world output, trade and investment in fewer and fewer hands. However, the oligopolisation of competition does not mean lack of competition.

Furthermore, it will be wrong to assume that the main characteristic of the present period is an 'assault against the markets', as the purist neoliberal argument goes, which Chomsky accepts. The present period of neoliberal consensus can be characterised instead, as an assault against social controls on markets, particularly those I called social controls in the narrow sense, i.e. those aiming at the protection of humans and nature against the effects of marketization, (the historical process that has transformed the socially controlled economies of the past into the market economy of the present). Such controls have been introduced as a result of social struggles undertaken by those who are adversely affected by the market economy's effects on them (social security legislation, welfare benefits, macro-economic controls to secure full employment etc).

What is still debated within the economic elites is the fate of what I call social controls in the broad sense, i.e. those primarily aiming at the protection of those controlling the market economy against foreign competition (tariffs, import controls, exchange controls--- in the past, and non-tariff barriers, massive public subsidy for R&D, risk-protection (bailouts), administration of markets etc--- at present). Thus, pure neoliberal economists, bankers, some politicians and others are against any kind of social controls over markets (in the narrow or broad sense above). On the other hand, the more pragmatic governments of the neoliberal consensus, from Reagan to Clinton and from Thatcher to Blair, under the pressure of the most vulnerable to competition sections of their own economic elites, have kept many social controls in the broad sense and sometimes even expanded them (not hesitating to go to war to secure their energy supplies) giving rise to the pure neoliberal argument (adopted by Chomsky) about an assault on markets.

In this context, one should not confuse liberalism/neoliberalism with laissez-faire. As I tried to show elsewhere, it was the state itself that created the system of self-regulating markets. Furthermore, some form of state intervention has always been necessary for the smooth functioning of the market economy system.

The state, since the collapse of the socialdemocratic consensus, has seen a drastic reduction in its economic role as it is no longer involved in a process of directly intervening in the determination of income and employment through fiscal and monetary policies.

However, even today, the state still plays an important role in securing, through its monopoly of violence, the stability of the market economy framework and in maintaining the infrastructure for the smooth functioning of it. It is within this role of maintaining the infrastructure that we may see the activities of the state in socialising risk and cost and in maintaining a safety net in place of the old welfare state. Furthermore, the state is called today to play a crucial role with respect to the supply-side of the economy and, in particular, to take measures to improve competitiveness and to train the working force to the requirements of the new technology, in supporting research and development and even in subsidising export industries wherever required. Therefore, the type of state intervention which is compatible with the marketization process not only is not discouraged but, instead, is actively promoted by most of the professional politicians of the neoliberal consensus.

It is true that the economic elites do not like the kind of competition which, as a result of the uneven development of the world market economy, threatens their own interests and this is why they have always attempted (and mostly succeeded) to protect themselves against it. But, it is equally true that it was the force of competition which has always fuelled the expansion of the market economy and that it was the values of competition and self-interest which have always characterised the value system of the elites which control the market economy. Chomsky, however, sometimes gives the impression that, barring some 'accidents' like the market failures he mentions, as well as the aggressive state support that economic elites have always enjoyed, the 'corporatization' of the market economy might have been avoided.

But, of course, neither proprietary capitalism (or any other type of it) is desirable ---since it cannot secure covering the basic needs of all people--- nor can we deny all radical analysis of the past hundred and fifty years or so, from Marx to Bookchin, and all historical experience since then, which leads to one conclusion: the market economy is geared by a grow-or-die dynamic fuelled by competition, which is bound to lead to further and further concentration of economic power. Therefore, the problem is not the corporatization of the market economy which, supposedly, represents 'an attack on markets and democracy', and which was unavoidable anyway within the dynamic of the market economy. In other words, the problem is not corporate market economy/capitalism, as if some other kind of market economy/capitalism was feasible or desirable, but the market economy/capitalism itself. Otherwise, one may easily end up blaming the elites for violating the rules of the game, rather than blaming the rotten game itself!

If the above analytical framework is valid then obviously it is not possible, within the existing institutional framework of parliamentary democracy and the market economy to check the process of increasing concentration of economic power. This is a process that is going since the emergence of the market economy system, some two centuries ago, and no socialdemocratic governments or grassroots movements were ever able to stop it, or even to retard it, apart from brief periods of time. In fact, even the grass root 'victory' hailed by Chomsky against the MAI proposals is doubtful whether it would have been achieved had there been no serious divisions among the economic elites about it.

Furthermore, the 'victory' itself has already started showing signs that it was hollow, as it is now clear that the MAI agreement was not, in fact, set aside, but it is simply implemented 'by installments', through the 'back door' of the IMF at present, and possibly the World Trade Organisation in the future. The basic reason why such battles are doomed is that they are not an integral part of a comprehensive political program to replace the institutional framework of the market economy itself and, as such, they can easily be marginalised or lead to simple (easily reversible) reforms.

The inevitable conclusion is that only the struggle for the building of a new massive movement aiming at fighting 'from without' for the creation of a new institutional framework, and the development of the corresponding culture and social paradigm, might have any chances to lead to a new society characterised by the equal distribution of power.

Cultural Homogenisation

As I mentioned above, the establishment of the market economy implied sweeping aside traditional cultures and values. This process was accelerated in the twentieth century with the spreading all over the world of the market economy and its offspring the growth economy. As a result, today, there is an intensive process of culture homogenisation at work, which not only rules out any directionality towards more complexity, but in effect is making culture simpler, with cities becoming more and more alike, people all over the world listening to the same music, watching the same soap operas on TV, buying the same brands of consumer goods, etc.

The establishment of the neoliberal consensus in the last twenty years or so, following the collapse of the socialdemocratic consensus, has further enhanced this process of cultural homogenisation. This is the inevitable outcome of the liberalisation and de-regulation of markets and the consequent intensification of commercialisation of culture.

As a result, traditional communities and their cultures are disappearing all over the world and people are converted to consumers of a mass culture produced in the advanced capitalist countries and particularly the USA. In the film industry, for instance, even European countries with a strong cultural background and developed economies have to effectively give up their own film industries, unable to compete with the much more competitive US industry. Thus, in the early 1990s, US films' share amounted to 73% of the European market.
Also, indicative of the degree of concentration of cultural
power in the hands of a few US corporations is the fact that, in 1991, a handful of US distributors controlled 66% of total cinema box office and 70% of the total number of video rentals in Britain.

Thus, the recent emergence of a sort of "cultural" nationalism in many parts of the world expresses a desperate attempt to keep a cultural identity in the face of market homogenisation. But, cultural nationalism is devoid of any real meaning in an electronic environment, where 75 percent of the international communications flow is controlled by a small number of multinationals. In other words, cultural imperialism today does not need, as in the past, a gunboat diplomacy to integrate and absorb diverse cultures.

The marketization of the communications flow has already established the preconditions for the downgrading of cultural diversity into a kind of superficial differentiation akin to a folklorist type. Furthermore, it is indicative that today's `identity movements', like those in Western Europe (from the Flemish to the Lombard and from the Scots to the Catalans) which demand autonomy as the best way to preserve their cultural identity, in fact, express their demand for individual and social autonomy in a distorted way.

The distortion arises from the fact that the marketization of society has undermined the community values of reciprocity, solidarity and co-operation in favour of the market values of competition and individualism. As a result, the demand for cultural autonomy is not founded today on community values which enhance co-operation with other cultural communities but, instead, on market values which encourage tensions and conflicts with them. In this connection, the current neoracist explosion in Europe is directly relevant to the effectual undermining of community values by neoliberalism, as well as to the growing inequality and poverty following the rise of the neoliberal consensus.

Finally, one should not underestimate the political implications of the commercialisation and homogenisation of culture. The escapist role traditionally played by Hollywood films has now acquired a universal dimension, through the massive expansion of TV culture and its almost full monopolisation by Hollywood subculture. Every single TV viewer in Nigeria, India, China or Russia now dreams of the American way of life, as seen on TV serials (which, being relatively inexpensive and glamorous, fill the TV programmes of most TV channels all over the world) and thinks in terms of the competitive values imbued by them. The collapse of existing socialism has perhaps more to do with this cultural phenomenon, as anecdotal evidence indicates, than one could imagine.

As various TV documentaries have shown, people in Eastern European countries, in particular, thought of themselves as some kind of 'abnormal' compared with what western TV has established as the 'normal'. In fact, many of the people participating in the demonstrations to bring down those regimes frequently referred to this 'abnormality', as their main incentive for their political action. In this problematique, one may criticise the kind of cultural relativism supported by some in the Left, according to which almost all cultural preferences could be declared as rational (on the basis of some sort of rationality criteria), and therefore all cultural choices deserve respect, if not admiration, given the constraints under which they are made. But, obviously, the issue is not whether our cultural choices are rational or not. Nor the issue is to assess 'objectively' our cultural preferences as right or wrong. The real issue is how to make a choice of values which we think is compatible with the kind of society we wish to live in and then make the cultural choices which are compatible with these values.

This is because the transition to a future society based on alternative values presupposes that the effort to create an alternative culture should start now, in parallel with the effort to establish the new institutions compatible with the new values. On the basis of the criterion of consistency between our cultural choices and the values of a truly democratic society, one could delineate a way beyond post-modern relativism and distinguish between 'preferable' and 'non-preferable' cultural choices. So, all those cultural choices involving films, videos, theatrical plays etc, which promote the values of the market economy and particularly competition for money, individualism, consumerist greed, as well as violence, racism, sexism etc should be shown to be non-preferable and people should be encouraged to avoid them. On the other hand, all those cultural choices, which involve the promotion of the community values of mutual aid, solidarity, sharing and equality for all (irrespective of race, sex, ethnicity) should be promoted as preferable.

The Role of Mass Media Today

A basic issue in the discussion of the role of the mass media in today's society is whether they do reflect social reality in a broad sense, or whether, instead, the elites which control them filter out the view of reality which they see fit to be made public. To my mind, the answer to this question is that the media do both, depending on the way we define reality.

To take, first, political reality, mass media, in one sense, do not provide a faked view of it. Taking into account what is considered as politics today, i.e. the activity of professional politicians 'representing' the people, one may argue that it is politics itself, which is faked, and mass media simply reproduce this reality. In this sense, the issue is not whether the mass media manipulate democracy, since it is democracy itself, which is faked, and not its mass media picture, which simply reflects the reality of present 'democracy'. But, at the same time, if we give a different definition to political reality, mass media do provide, in general, a distorted picture of it. In other words, if we define as real politics the political activity of people themselves (for instance, the collective struggles of various sectors of the population around political, economic or social issues) rather than that of professional politicians, then, the mass media do distort the picture they present about political reality. They do so, by minimising the significance of this type of activity, by distorting its meaning, by marginalising it, or by simply ignoring it completely.

Furthermore, mass media do provide a distorted picture of political reality when they come to report the causes of crises, or of the conflicts involving various sections of the elites. In such cases they faithfully reflect the picture that the sections of the elites controlling them wish to reproduce. The latest example of this was the way in which the Anglo-American media, in particular, distorted the real meaning of the criminal bombardment of the Iraqi people at the end of 1998. Thus, exactly, as in their reporting during the war in the Gulf, the real cause of the conflict, (i.e. who controls the world's oil, irrespective of where the oil stocks are located -- the elites of the North versus those in the South), was distorted as a conflict between the peace loving regimes in the North versus the rogue regimes in the South, or, in more sophisticated versions supported by socialdemocrat intellectuals, as a conflict between the 'democracies' in the North versus the 'despotic regimes' in the South over the control of oil.

Under these circumstances, it is obvious that the mass media usually offer a true glimpse of reality only when the elites are divided with respect to their conception of a particular aspect of political reality. From this point of view, concentration in the mass media industry is significant and whether the media are owned by 100 or 10 owners does indeed matter in the struggle for social change. It is for instance such divisions among the European elites over the issue of joining the European Monetary Union which have allowed a relatively wide media discussion on the true meaning of European integration, particularly in countries like Britain where the elites were split. It was also similar divisions between the Anglo-American and the European elites over the latest war crime in the Gulf which made a bit clearer the directly criminal role of the former (support for the bombardments), as well as the indirectly criminal role of the latter (support for the embargo). It is not accidental that in the USA and UK, where the media played a particularly despicable role in distorting the truth and misinforming the public, the polls showed consistently vast majorities in favour of the criminal activities of their elites. Of course, this does not mean that decentralisation of power in the mass media industry (or anywhere else) represents by itself, even potentially, a radical social change leading to an authentic democracy. Still, the significance of decentralisation in the media industry with respect to raising consciousness should not be ignored.

As regards economic reality, mass media, in one sense again, do provide a relatively accurate picture of what counts as economic reality today. This is when the media, taking for granted the system of the market economy, end up with a partial picture of economic reality where what matters is not whether the basic needs of the population are covered adequately but whether prices (in commodity and stock markets), interest rates, exchange rates and consequently profit rates are going up or down. Still, in another sense, the very fact that mass media take for granted the system of the market economy means that they cannot 'see' the 'systemic' nature of most of the real economic problems (unemployment, poverty and so on) and therefore inevitably end up with a faked image of economic reality. This way of seeing economic reality is not imposed on the media by their owners, important as their influence may otherwise be, or by their internal hierarchical structure etc. The media simply reflect the views of orthodox economists, bankers, businessmen and professional politicians, i.e. of all those who express the dominant social paradigm.

But if the picture of political and economic reality offered by the media is mixed this is not the case with respect to ecological reality. As no meaningful reporting of the ecological crisis is possible unless it refers to the systemic causes of it, which by definition are excluded by the discourse in the mainstream media, the result is a complete misinformation, or just straightforward description of the symptoms of the crisis. The mass media are flooded by the 'realist' Greens who fill the various ecological parties and who blame technology, consumerist values, legislation etc-- anything but the real cause of the crisis, i.e. the very system of the market economy. Similarly, the reporting of the present social crisis never links the explosion of crime and drug abuse, for instance, with their root cause, i.e. the increasing concentration of political, economic and social power in the hands of various elites. Instead, the symptoms of the social crisis are distortedly reported as its causes and the media blame, following the advice of the establishment 'experts', the breaking of the traditional family, or of the school, as the causes of crime. Similarly, various 'progressive' intellectuals (like the lamentable ex 'revolutionary' and now well promoted by the mainstream media Euro-parliamentarian Con Bendit) blame the prohibitive legislation on drugs for the massive explosion of drug abuse!

However, there is another approach being promoted recently by system theorists, according to which mass media do not just either reflect or distort reality but also manufacture it. This is not said in the usual sense of manufacturing consent described by Chomsky and Herman or, alternatively, by Bourdieu, which is basically a one-way process whereby the elites controlling the mass media filter out the information, through various control mechanisms, in order to create consent around their agenda. Instead, system theorists talk about a two-way process whereby social reality and mass media are seen as two interdependent levels, the one intruding into the other. This is based on the valid hypothesis that reality is not just something external to the way it is conceived. TV watching is a constituent moment of reality since our information about reality consists of conceptions that constitute reality itself. At the same time, the conception of reality is conditioned by the media functioning, which is differentiated in relation to the other social systems (political, economic etc).

In the systems analysis problematique, it is not the economic, or the political systems, which control the media functioning. What determines their functioning, as well as their communicative capability, is their ability to generate irritation- a fact that could go a long way to explain the high ratings of exciting or irritating TV programs. The diversified functioning of mass media creates, in turn, the conditions for a social dynamic which, in a self-reflective and communicative way, reproduces, as well as institutes, society. Thus, whereas the early modern society is instituted through a transcendental subjectivity and a material mode of production, the present post-modern society's reproduction depends on the processes of communicative rationality. The mass media are an integral and functional part of the communicative processes of post-modern society.

However, one may point out here that although it is true that social reality and mass media are interacting, i.e. that our conception of TV news is a constituent element of reality and at the same time our conception of reality is conditioned by TV functioning, this does not imply that the diversified functioning of mass media creates the conditions for a social dynamic which acts for the institution of society, although it does play this role as far as its reproduction is concerned. The meaning we assign to TV reporting is not determined exogenously but by our world view, our own paradigm, which in turn, as we have seen above, is the result of a process of socialisation that is conditioned by the dominant social paradigm. Furthermore, TV functioning plays a crucial role in the reproduction of the dominant social paradigm and the socialisation process generally. So, the diversified functioning of TV does indeed create the conditions for a social dynamic leading to the reproduction of the status quo, but in no way could be considered as doing the same for instituting society.

Goals and Control Mechanisms

The goals of the mass media are determined by those owning and controlling them, who, usually, are members of the economic elites that control the market economy itself. Given the crucial role that the media could play in the internalisation of the dominant social paradigm and therefore the reproduction of the institutional framework which secures the concentration of power in the hands of the elites, it is obvious that those owning and controlling the mass media have broader ideological goals than the usual goals pursued by those owning and controlling other economic institutions, i.e. profit maximising. Therefore, an analysis that would attempt to draw conclusions on the nature and significance of media institutions on the basis of the profit dimension alone, (i.e. that they share a common goal and consequently a similar internal hierarchical structure with all other economic institutions and that they just sell a product, the only difference with other economic institutions being that the product is the audience,) is bound to be one-dimensional. Profit maximising is only one parameter, often not even the crucial one, which conditions the role of mass media in a market economy. In fact, one could mention several instances where capitalist owners chose even to incur significant losses (which they usually cover from other profitable activities) in order to maintain the social influence (and prestige), which ownership of an influential daily offers to them (Murdoch and The Times of London is an obvious recent example).

Given the ultimate ideological goal of mass media, the main ways in which they try to achieve it are:

• first, by assisting in the internalisation of the dominant social paradigm and,

• second, by marginalising, if not excluding altogether, conceptions of reality which do not conform with the dominant social paradigm.

But, what are the mechanisms through which the media can achieve their goals? To give an answer to this question we have to examine a series of mechanisms, most of them 'automatic' built-in mechanisms, which ensure effective achievement of these goals. It will be useful here to distinguish between 'internal' and 'external' control mechanisms, which function respectively as internal and external constraints on the freedom of media workers to reproduce reality. Both internal and external mechanisms work mainly through competition which secures homogenisation with respect to the media's main goals. Competition is of course the fundamental organisational principle of a market economy; but, it plays a special role with respect to the media. As Bourdieu points out, competition 'rather than automatically generating originality and diversity tends to favour uniformity'. Still, competition is not the only force securing homogenisation. In a similar way as with the market economy itself, competition provides only the dynamic mechanism of homogenisation. It is the fact that owners of mass media, as well as managers and the highest paid journalists, share the same interest in the reproduction of the existing institutional framework which constitutes the 'base', on which this competition is developed.

But, let us consider briefly the significance of the various control mechanisms. The main 'internal control' mechanisms are ownership and the internal hierarchical structure, which are, both, crucial in the creation of the conditions for internal competition among journalists, whereas the 'ratings' mechanism plays a similar role in the creation of the conditions for external competition among media.

Starting with ownership, it matters little, as regards the media's overall goals defined above, whether they are owned and controlled by the state and/or the state-controlled institutions or whether, instead, they are owned and controlled by private capital. However, there are certain secondary differences arising from the different ownership structures which may be mentioned. These secondary differences have significant implications, particularly with respect to the structure of the elites controlling the media, their own organisational structure and their 'image' with respect to their supposedly 'objective' role in the presentation of information. As regards the elite structure, whereas under a system of state ownership and control the mass media are under the direct control of the political elite and the indirect control of the economic elites, under a system of private ownership and control, the media are just under the direct control of the economic elites.

This fact, in turn, has some implications on whether filtering out of information takes place directly through state control, or indirectly through various economic mechanisms (e.g. ratings).As regards the media organisational structure, whereas state-owned media are characterised by bureaucratic rigidity and inefficiency, privately owned media are usually characterised by more flexibility and economic efficiency. Finally, the 'objective' image of mass media suffers less in case of private ownership compared to the case of state ownership. This is because in the latter case control of information is more direct and therefore more obvious than in the former.

Another important internal control mechanism is the hierarchical structure which characterises all media institutions (as it does all economic institutions in a market economy) and which implies that all-important decisions are taken by a small managerial group within them, who are usually directly responsible to the owners. The hierarchical structure creates a constant internal competition among journalists as to who will be more agreeable to the managerial group (on which their career and salary prospects depend). Similarly, people in the managerial group are in constant competition as to who will be more agreeable to the owners (on which their highly paid position depends). So, everybody in this hierarchical structure knows well (or soon learns) what is agreeable and what is not and acts accordingly. Therefore, the filtering of information works through self-censorship rather than through any kind of 'orders from above'. The effect of the internal hierarchical structure is to impose, through the internal competition that it creates, a kind of homogenisation in the journalists' performance. But, does this exclude the possibility that some media workers may have incentives other those determined by career ambitions? Of course, not. But, such people, as Chomsky points out, will never find a place in the corridors of media power and, one way or another, will be marginalised:

They (journalists) say, quite correctly, "nobody ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like. All this business about pressures and constraints is nonsense because I'm never under any pressure." Which is completely true, but the point is that they wouldn't be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing… it is not purposeful censorship. It is just that you don't make it to those positions. That includes the left (what is called the left), as well as the right. Unless you have been adequately socialised and trained so that there are some thoughts you just don't have, because if you did have them, you wouldn't be there.

But, how is it determined what is agreeable? Here it is where the 'external' control mechanisms come into play. It is competition among the various media organisations, which homogenises journalists' behaviour. This competition takes the form of a struggle to improve ratings (as regards TV channels) or circulation (as regards newspapers, magazines etc). Ratings or circulation are important not per se but because the advertising income of privately owned mass media (which is the extra income determining their survival or death) depends on them. The result is, as Pierre Bourdieu points out that:

Ratings have become the journalist's Last Judgement… Wherever you look, people are thinking in terms of market success. Only thirty years ago, and since the middle of the nineteenth century---since Baudelaire and Flaubert and others in avant-garde milieux of writers' writers, writers acknowledged by other writers or even artists acknowledged by other artists---immediate market success was suspect. It was taken as a sign of compromise with the times, with money... Today, on the contrary, the market is accepted more and more as a legitimate means of Iegitimation.

The pressures created by the ratings mechanism, as Bourdieu points out, have nothing to do with the democratic expression of enlightened collective opinion or public rationality, despite what media ideologues assert. In fact, as the same author points out, the ratings mechanism is the sanction of the market and the economy, that is, of an external and purely market law. I would only add to this that given how 'public opinion' is formed within the process of socialisation and internalisation of the dominant social paradigm, it is indeed preposterous to characterise the ratings mechanism as somehow expressing the democratic will of the people. Ratings, as well as polls generally, is the 'democracy of the uninformed'. They simply reflect the ignorance, the half-truths, or the straightforward distortions of the truth which have been assimilated by an uninformed public and which, through the ratings mechanism, reinforce the role of the mass media in the reproduction of the dominant social paradigm.

One may therefore conclude that the role of the media today is not to make the system more democratic. In fact, one basic function of the media is, as Chomsky stresses, to help in keeping the general population out of the public arena because 'if they get involved they will just make trouble. Their job is to be "spectators," not "participants". Furthermore, the media can play a crucial role in offsetting the democratic rights and freedoms won after long struggles. This has almost always been the case when there was a clash between the elites and trade unions, or popular movements generally. Walter Lippmann, the revered American journalist was explicit about it, as Chomsky points out.

For Lippmann, there is a new art in the method of democracy, called "manufacture of consent." By manufacturing consent, you can overcome the fact that formally a lot of people have the right to vote. We can make it irrelevant because we can manufacture consent and make sure that their choices and attitudes will be structured in such a way that they will always do what we tell them, even if they have a formal way to participate. So we'll have a real democracy. It will work properly. That's applying the lessons of the propaganda agency.

Within this analytical framework we may explore fruitfully the particular ways through which the filtering of information is achieved, as, for instance, is described by Chomsky and Herman in their 'propaganda model'. Similarly Bourdieu shows in a graphic way how the filtering of information takes place in television, through the structuring of TV debates, the time limits, the methods of hiding by showing etc. Particularly important is the way in which the media, particularly television, control not just the information flow, but also the production of culture, by controlling the access of academics as well as of cultural producers, who in turn, as a result of being recognised a public figures, gain recognition in their own fields.

Thus, at the end, the journalistic field, which is structurally very strongly subordinated to market pressures and as such is a very heteronomous field, applies pressure, in turn, to all other fields.

An illustrative application of the above analytical framework is the crucial contribution of the mass media in the creation of the subjective conditions for the neoliberal consensus. Thus, the mass media have played a double ideological role with respect to the neoliberal consensus. On the one hand, they have promoted directly the neoliberal agenda:

by degrading the economic role of the state,
by attacking the 'dependence' on the state which the welfare state supposedly creates,
by identifying freedom with the freedom of choice, which is supposedly achieved through the liberation of markets etc. (talk radio and similar TV shows play a particularly significant role in this respect).

On the other hand, the media have also attempted to divert attention from the consequences of the neoliberal consensus (in terms of growing inequality and poverty, the explosion of crime and drug abuse and so on):

by promoting irrational beliefs of all sorts (religion, mystical beliefs, astrology etc). The film and video explosion on the themes of exorcism, supernatural powers etc (induced mainly by Hollywood) has played a significant role in diverting attention from the evils of neoliberalism.
by manufacturing irrelevant and/or insignificant 'news stories' (e.g. Monica Lewinsky affair), which are then taken over by opposition politicians who are eager to find fictitious ways (because of the lack of real political differences within the neoliberal consensus) to differentiate themselves from those in power.
by creating a pseudo 'general interest' (for instance around a nationalist or chauvinist cause) in order to unite the population around a 'cause' and make it forget the utterly dividing aspects of neoliberalism.

At the same time, the creation of the neoliberal conditions at the institutional level had generated the objective conditions for the mass media to play the aforementioned role. This was because the deregulation and liberalisation of markets and the privatisation of state TV in many European countries had created the conditions for homogenisation through the internal and external competition, which I mentioned above. It is not accidental anyway that major media tycoons like Murdoch in the Anglo-Saxon world, Kirsch in Germany, or Berlusconi in Italy have also been among the main exponents of the neoliberal consensus agenda.

5 Media and Culture in a Democratic Society

Culture and a Democratic Conception of Citizenship

I am not going to repeat here the discussion on the fundamental components of an inclusive democracy and the necessary conditions, which have to be met for the setting up of it. Instead, I will try to focus on the implications of the democratic institutional arrangements on culture and the role of media.

The starting point is that the conditions for democracy imply a new conception of citizenship: economic, political, social and cultural.

Thus, political citizenship involves new political structures and the return to the classical conception of politics (direct democracy). Economic citizenship involves new economic structures of community ownership and control of economic resources (economic democracy). Social citizenship involves self-management structures at the workplace, democracy in the household and new welfare structures where all basic needs (to be democratically determined) are covered by community resources, whether they are to be satisfied in the household or at the community level. Finally, cultural citizenship involves new democratic structures of dissemination and control of information and culture (mass media, art, etc.), which allow every member of the community to take part in the process and at the same time develop his/her intellectual and cultural potential.

It is obvious that the above new conception of citizenship has very little in common with the liberal and socialist definitions of citizenship, which are linked to the liberal and socialist conceptions of human rights respectively. Thus, for the liberals, the citizen is simply the individual bearer of certain freedoms and political rights recognised by law which, supposedly, secure equal distribution of political power. Similarly, for the socialists, the citizen is the bearer not only of political rights and freedoms but, also, of some social and economic rights, whereas for Marxists the citizenship is realised with the collective ownership of the means of production.

Furthermore, the conception of citizenship adopted here is not related to the current social-democratic discourse on the subject, which, in effect, focuses on the institutional conditions for the creation of an internationalised market economy 'with a human face'. The proposal for instance for a redefinition of citizenship within the framework of a "stakeholder capitalism" belongs to this category. This proposal involves an 'active' citizenship, where citizens have 'stakes' in companies, the market economy and society in general and managers have to take into account these stakes in the running of the businesses and social institutions they are in charge of.

The conception of citizenship adopted here, which could be called a democratic conception, is based on our definition of inclusive democracy and presupposes a 'participatory' conception of active citizenship, like the one implied by the work of Hannah Arendt. In this conception, "political activity is not a means to an end, but an end in itself; one does not engage in political action simply to promote one's welfare but to realise the principles intrinsic to political life, such as freedom, equality, justice, solidarity, courage and excellence". It is therefore obvious that this conception of citizenship is qualitatively different from the liberal and social-democratic conceptions, which adopt an 'instrumentalist' view of citizenship, i.e. a view which implies that citizenship entitles citizens with certain rights that they can exercise as means to the end of individual welfare.

Although the above conception of citizenship implies a geographical sense of community which is the fundamental unit of political, economic and social life, still, it is assumed that it interlocks with various other communities (cultural, professional, ideological, etc.). Therefore, the community and citizenship arrangements do not rule out cultural differences based on language, customs etc, or other differences based on gender, age, ethnicity and so on; they simply provide the public space where such differences can be expressed. Furthermore, these arrangements institutionalise various safety valves that aim to rule out the marginalisation of such differences by the majority. What therefore unites people in a political community, or a confederation of communities, is not a set of common cultural values, imposed by a nationalist ideology, a religious dogma, a mystical belief, or an 'objective' interpretation of natural or social 'evolution', but the democratic institutions and practices, which have been set up by citizens themselves.

However, as we attempted to show elsewhere this cultural pluralism does not mean a kind of cultural relativism where 'everything goes'. In other words, it is possible to derive an ethical system and correspondingly a set of cultural values which is neither 'objective', (in the sense that it is derived from a supposedly objective interpretation of social evolution-Marx, or natural evolution---Bookchin), nor just a matter of individual choice. There can be a set of common or general moral criteria by which individual actions could be judged, i.e. a code of democratic ethics, which would be based on the fundamental principle of organising a democratic society around a confederal inclusive Democracy, (i.e. a democracy based on a confederation of demoi, or democratic communities).

Democratic Ethic Code

This code of democratic ethics may be derived out of the two fundamental principles of organisation of a confederal inclusive Democracy, i.e. the principle of autonomy and the principle of community. Thus, out of the fundamental principle of autonomy one may derive a set of cultural values about equality and respect for the personality of every citizen, irrespective of gender, race, ethnic identity etc. Out of the same fundamental principle one could derive the principle of protecting the quality of life of each individual citizen -- something that would imply a relationship of harmony with nature. Similarly, out of the fundamental principle of community life one may derive a set of values involving solidarity and mutual aid, caring and sharing. These values should constitute an integral part of the dominant social paradigm so that democracy can reproduce itself. This of course does not exclude the possibility, or rather the probability, of the existence of alternative cultural values, or perhaps even of a conflict between personal and collective values ---particularly with respect to those citizens who cannot reconcile themselves with the tragic truth that it is we who determine our own truth and might still adhere to moral codes derived from irrational belief systems (religions, mystical beliefs etc). However, as long as these people are in a minority, (hopefully, a dwindling one, through the Paedeia of a democratic society), the conflict in their personal values with the collectively defined values should not be a problem for the community as a whole.

Democratic Media

The sufficient condition which has to be met so that democracy will not degenerate into some kind of "demago-cracy", where the demos is manipulated by a new breed of 'professional' politicians, is crucially conditioned by the citizens' level of democratic consciousness. This, in turn, is conditioned by Paedeia. It is therefore obvious that the cultural institutions, particularly the media, play a crucial role in a democracy, given their role in the formation of Paedeia.

So, let us now consider the nature and role of the mass media, as cultural institutions, in a democratic society. First, there is no reason why the mass media in a democratic society will distort rather than reflect reality. As political and economic power would be equally distributed among citizens and therefore the existence of institutionalised elites would be excluded, the media would face none of the present dilemmas whether to reflect the reality of the elite, or particular sections of it, versus the reality of the rest of the population. Still, even in an inclusive democracy there is still the problem of the possible emergence of informal elites, which may attempt to exercise some sort of control over the information flows. It is also clear that no democracy is possible unless its citizens are fully informed on anything affecting their life. Therefore, a way has to be found to organise the decision-taking process in the media so that, on the one hand, citizens are always fully informed and, on the other, the media are under the real control of the community.

It is obvious that it is citizens as citizens, through their assemblies, who should determine the overall operation of mass media and supervise them. This function could not just be assigned to the councils of media workers because in that case the democratic society will run the double risk of media not expressing the general interest, as well as of the possible emergence of new media elites within, at least, some of them. This does not, obviously, mean that the assemblies will determine every day what the content of TV news bulletins will be, or what the papers would say next day. What it does mean is that the community assemblies would set strict rules on how full diversity and accountability could be achieved and then supervise the application of these principles in media practice.

Diversity implies that all sorts of views should be given full access to the media, provided that that they have been approved by the community and media workers' assemblies. Assuming that these assemblies have internalised the dominant democratic social paradigm, one could expect that they would not give easy access to views which contradict the democratic values (e.g. views promoting racial, sexist, religious values etc). However, the decision will always rest with the assemblies and if they see no contradiction involved in giving full access to such views this will simply herald the degradation and eventual collapse of the democratic society itself.

Accountability implies that the media workers would be accountable for their decisions to the media workers' assemblies in the first instance and, next, to the community assemblies. Such a structure of accountability would be compatible with the lack of hierarchical structures in the media and the fact that it will be the communities themselves that would 'own' the media institutions.

So, this dual system of decision-taking, whereby overall decision-taking and supervision rests with the community assemblies, whereas the determination of detailed operational functioning of the media is left to the media workers' assemblies, to my mind, guarantees that not only the general interest is adequately taken into account but also that the day-to-day decisions are taken democratically by the media workers themselves.

Ways to Bring about Systemic Social Change

As I tried to show above the culture of a democratic society will be characterised by very different values than those of a market economy. The values of heteronomy, competition, individualism and consumerism which are dominant today have to be replaced in a democratic society by the values of individual and collective autonomy, co-operation, mutual aid, solidarity and sharing. Furthermore, as far as the mass media is concerned, the role, organisation and nature of media in a democratic society will also drastically differ from the corresponding role, nature and organisation today. The media will not have the role to reflect reality, basically, as seen from the elites' point of view, but, as seen from the people's viewpoint; their organisation will not be based on hierarchical structures, but, on democratic structures; finally, the media will cease to be profit-making enterprises owned and controlled by elites and will become, instead, democratically owned and controlled institutions of communicating information.

The obvious issue, which arises here, is how we move from 'here' to 'there'. This basic question involves a series of other issues concerning social change, which have been discussed extensively, particularly during the century which is now expiring. Can there be a drastic change of values, like the one discussed above, without a parallel change of institutions? Do we need a systemic change to bring about the required change in values and institutions? Should the social struggle have as explicit aim the systemic change as part of a comprehensive political program for it? To attempt to give an answer to all these questions we will have to discuss briefly the main approaches to social change.

But, first, we have to be clear about the meaning of social change. As it is obvious from the above analysis, social change here means systemic change, i.e. a change in the entire socio-economic system of the market economy, representative democracy and hierarchical structures. As I attempted to show elsewhere the fundamental cause of the multi-dimensional crisis we face today (economic, ecological, social, political) is the concentration of power at the hands of various elites (economic, political etc) and therefore the only way out of this crisis is the abolition of power structures and relations, i.e. the creation of conditions of equal distribution of power among citizens. One way that could bring about this sort of society is the Inclusive Democracy proposal which involves the creation of political, economic and social structures that secure direct democracy, economic democracy, ecological democracy and democracy in the social realm. It also involves the creation of a new social paradigm (based on the values I mentioned above) which, for the reproduction of inclusive democracy to be secured, it has to become dominant.

So, assuming that the aim is to bring about systemic social change involving the creation of conditions for the equal distribution of power among citizens, there are, schematically, four main approaches which claim that they may bring about this result: reforms (from 'above' or from 'below'), revolution (from 'above' or from 'below'), 'life-style strategies' and the Inclusive Democracy approach.

The Reformist Approach

The reformist approach claims that it can bring about systemic change through either the conquest of state power (reforms 'from above') or through the creation of autonomous from the state power bases which would press the state for reforms (reforms 'from below'). The main example of the former strategy is the social democratic approach, whereas the main example of the latter is the civil societarian approach.

The social democratic approach reached its peak during the period of statism and particularly in the first thirty years after WWII, when the social democratic consensus was dominant all over the Western world. However, the internationalisation of the market economy since the mid '70s brought about the end of this consensus and the rise of the neoliberal consensus-which, in my view, is irreversible as long as the market economy is internationalised, in other words, as long as the market economy reproduces itself. The recent deletion from the program of the British Labour Party (which was the last social democratic party still committed to full socialisation of the means of production) of 'clause four', which committed it to full socialisation, marked the formal end of social democratic claims towards real systemic change.

In fact, the neoliberal agenda for 'flexible' labour markets, minimisation of social controls on markets, replacement of the welfare state by a safety net etc has now become the agenda of every major social democratic party in power or in opposition. The parallel degradation of social democracy and the reversal of most of its conquests (comprehensive welfare state, state commitment to full employment, significant improvement in the distribution of income) has clearly shown that supporters of the revolutionary approach were always right on the impossibility of bringing about a systemic change through reforms.

As regards the civil societarian approach, the strategy here is to enhance 'civil society', that is, to strengthen the various networks which are autonomous from state control (unions, churches, civic movements, co-operatives, neighbourhoods, schools of thought etc.) in order to impose such limits (i.e. social controls) on markets and the state, so that a kind of systemic change is brought about. However, this approach is based on a number of unrealistic assumptions.

Thus, first, it implicitly assumes a high degree of statism where the state can still play the economic role it used to play during the social democratic consensus. Second, it assumes, in effect, an almost closed market economy where the state can ignore the instant movement of capital in case a government attempts to meet demands of civil societarians which threaten capital's interest. No wonder that civil societarians usually deny (or try to minimise) the importance of the present internationalisation of the market economy. It is also indicative that when civil societarians attempt to internationalise their approach the only limits on the internationalised market economy that they view as feasible are various 'regulatory controls'. But, such controls have very little in common with the sweeping social controls that they have in mind when they discuss, abstracting from the present internationalised market economy, the limits that civil society networks should impose on markets (drastic reduction of inequalities, massive creation of jobs etc).

So, the civil societarian approach is both a-historical and utopian. It is a-historical, since it ignores the structural changes, which have led to the present neoliberal consensus and the internationalised market economy. And it is utopian because it is in tension both with the present internationalised market economy and the state. So, given that civil societarians do not see the outcome of this inevitable tension in terms of the replacement of the market economy and the state by the civil society, it is not difficult to predict that any enhancement of the civil society will have to be compatible with the process of further internationalisation of the market economy and the implied role of the state. In other words, the 'enhancement' of civil society, under today's conditions, would simply mean that the ruling political and economic elites will be left undisturbed to continue dominating society, while, from time to time, they will have to try to address the demands of the civil societarians-- provided, of course that these demands are not in direct conflict to their own interests and the demands of oligopolistic production.

In conclusion, enhancing the civil society institutions has no chance whatsoever of either putting an end to the concentration of power, or of transcending the present multidimensional crisis. This conclusion may be derived from the fact that the implicit, although not always explicit, aim of civil societarians is to improve the functioning of existing institutions (state, parties, market), in order to make them more responsive to pressures from below when, in fact, the crisis is founded on the institutions themselves and not on their malfunctioning! But, in the present internationalised market, the need to minimise the socio-economic role of the state is no longer a matter of choice for those controlling production.

It is a necessary condition for survival. This is particularly so for European capital that has to compete with capital blocks, which operate from bases where the social-democratic tradition of statism was never strong (the United States, the Far East). But, even at the planetary level, one could seriously doubt whether it is still possible to enhance the institutions of civil society within the context of the market economy. Granted that the fundamental aims of production in a market economy are individual gain, economic efficiency and growth, any attempt to reconcile these aims with an effective `social control' by the civil society is bound to fail since, as historic experience with the statist phase has shown, social control and market efficiency are irreconcilable objectives. By the same token, one could reasonably argue that the central contradiction of the market economy today is the one arising from the fact that any effective control of the ecological implications of growth is incompatible with the requirements of competitiveness, which the present phase of the marketization process imposes.

The Life-style Approach

The second type of approach which claims capable to bring about systemic social change is the presently fashionable, particularly among Anglo-Saxon anarchists, life-style strategy. There are several versions of this strategy. Sometimes this approach involves no intervention at all in the political arena and usually not even in the general social arena --other than in struggles on specific 'Green' issues, like animal rights campaigns etcetera. Alternatively, this approach may involve a process which, starting from the individual, and working through affinity groups, aims at setting an example of sound and preferable life-styles at the individual and social level: alternative media, Community Economic Development projects, 'free zones' and alternative institutions (free schools, self-managed factories, housing associations, Local Employment and Trading Systems (LETS), communes, self-managed farms and so on).

However, this approach, in any of the above versions, is, by itself, utterly ineffective in bringing about a systemic social change. Although helpful in creating an alternative culture among small sections of the population and, at the same time, morale-boosting for activists who wish to see an immediate change in their lives, this approach does not have any chance of success--in the context of today's huge concentration of power--in building the democratic majority needed for systemic social change. The projects suggested by this strategy may too easily be marginalised, or absorbed into the existing power structure (as has happened many times in the past) whereas their effect on the socialisation process is minimal--if not nil.

Furthermore, life-style strategies, by usually concentrating on single issues which are not part of a comprehensive political program for social transformation, provide a golden opportunity to the ruling elites to use their traditional divide and rule tactics (the British elites, for instance, frequently use security guards recruited from the underclass to fight Green activists rather than 'exposing' the police on this role!)

Furthermore, systemic social change can never be achieved outside the main political and social arena. The elimination of the present power structures and relations can neither be achieved "by setting an example", nor through education and persuasion. A power base is needed to destroy power. But, the only way that an approach aiming at a power base would be consistent with the aims of the democratic project is, to my mind, through the development of a comprehensive program for the radical transformation of local political and economic structures.

A variation of the life-style strategy which however has, also, elements of the civil societarian approach is, to my mind, the strategy proposed by Noam Chomsky, Michael Albert and the group around Z magazine. Thus, Albert sees the setting up of alternative media institutions just 'as part of a project to establish new ways of organising media and social activity', without even mentioning the need to incorporate them into a comprehensive political program for systemic change. In fact, what differentiates the alternative from the mainstream media in his argument is, basically, their internal structure:

Being alternative can't just mean that the institution's editorial focus is on this or that topical area. And being alternative as an institution certainly isn't just being left or right or different in editorial content. Being alternative as an institution must have to do with how the institution is organised and works… An alternative media institution sees itself as part of a project to establish new ways of organising media and social activity and it is committed to furthering these as a whole, and not just its own preservation.

Similarly, Chomsky does not raise either the issue of incorporating alternative institutions into a comprehensive political program for systemic change. Thus, to the question whether we should just continue supporting efforts to set up alternative media institutions etc, or whether, instead, we should direct our striving towards integrating such attempts in a struggle to build a new political and social movement that will fight for alternative systems of social organisation, his reply is that these two possibilities 'should not be regarded as alternatives… these are not conflicting goals; rather, mutually supportive efforts, all of which should proceed'.

It is therefore obvious that for Chomsky and Albert the establishment of alternative media is seen as a kind of life-style strategy, rather than as part of a political strategy and a comprehensive program for systemic change. Similarly, Chomsky's argument above that, even within the existing institutional framework, we could reverse the present concentration of power involves elements of the civil societarian approach. It is illustrative how Chomsky justifies his argument on the matter:

These are not the operations of any mysterious economic laws; they are human decisions that are subject to challenge, revision and reversal. They are also decisions made within institutions, state and private. These have to face the test of legitimacy, as always; and if they do not meet that test they can be replaced by others that are more free and more just, exactly as has happened throughout history.

However, although it is true that there are no historical or natural laws determining social evolution this does not mean that 'anything goes' within the existing institutional framework, as Chomsky seems to assume. The institutional framework does set the parameters within which social action takes place. This means that both the nature and the scope of radical social action cannot transcend these parameters -unless social action explicitly aims at the institutional framework itself. The neoliberal consensus was not just a policy change, as social democrats assume, but a structural change imposed by the needs of internationalisation of the market economy.

This implies that the basic elements of the neoliberal consensus and particularly flexible markets and minimisation of social controls on markets will not go away, as long as the present internationalised market economy exists. But, today, the market economy can only be internationalised, since the growth (and therefore profitability) of the multinationals, which control the world market economy, depends on enlarging their markets worldwide. And as long as the market economy has to be internationalised, markets have to be as open and as flexible as possible. All this means that, as long as the system of the market economy and representative democracy reproduces itself, all that reforms ('from above', or 'from below') can bring about today is temporary victories and reversible social conquests like, for instance, those made during the period of the social democratic consensus which are now being systematically dismantled by the neoliberal consensus.

The Revolutionary Approach

Coming now to the revolutionary strategy, by 'revolution from above' I mean the strategy, which aims at systemic change through the conquest of state power. The Marxist- Leninist tradition is a classical example of this type of strategy. This approach, implied that the change in the social paradigm even among a minority of the population, the vanguard of the proletariat, (organised in the communist party and equipped with the 'science' of socialism, i.e. Marxism), could function as a catalyst to bring about a socialist revolution. The socialist revolution would then lead to the conquest of state power by the proletariat (effectively by its vanguard, i.e. the communist party) which would bring about a change in the institutional framework as well as a change in the dominant social paradigm. The socialist society would give way to a communist society only when the rapid development of productive forces, through the socialisation of production relations, would lead to the abolition of scarcity and division of labour and the withering away of the state. History however has shown that this strategy could only lead to new hierarchical structures, as the vanguard of the working class becomes at the end the new ruling elite. This was the main lesson of the collapse of 'actually existing socialism' which has clearly shown that, if the revolution is organised, and then its program carried out, through a minority, it is bound to end up with new hierarchical structures rather than with a society where concentration of power has been abolished.

By 'revolution from below', we mean the strategy which aims at systemic change through the abolition of state power and the creation of federations of communes, or of workers' associations. The various trends within the anarchist movement (community-oriented versus worker-oriented) aim at revolution, in order to abolish state power and transform society 'from below', rather than in order to conquest state power and transform society 'from above'. But, attempts for revolutions from below in History have usually ended up either as insurrections, which failed to lead to a systemic change (the major recent example being the May '68 insurrection in France) or to civil wars, where the superior means, organisation and efficiency of their enemies (either the state army and/or statist socialists) led to the suppression of revolutionaries (the major recent example being the Spanish civil war in 1936).

To my mind, the major problem of any revolutionary strategy, either from above or from below, is the uneven development of consciousness among the population, in other words, the fact that a revolution, which assumes a rupture with the past both at the subjective level of consciousness and at the institutional level, takes place in an environment where only a minority of the population has broken with the dominant social paradigm.

Then, if it is a revolution from above, it has a good chance to achieve its first aim, to abolish state power and establish its own power. But, exactly because it is a revolution from above with its own hierarchical structures etc, it has no chance to change the dominant social paradigm but only formally, i.e. at the level of the official ideology. On the other hand, although the revolution from below is the correct approach to convert people democratically to the new social paradigm, it suffers from the fact that the uneven development of consciousness among the population may not allow revolutionaries to achieve even their very first aim of abolishing state power. Therefore, the still unresolved problem with systemic change is how it could be brought about, from below, but by a majority of the population, so that a democratic abolition of power structures could become feasible.

The Inclusive Democracy Approach

The Inclusive Democracy (ID) project does offer a strategy, which aims at resolving this problem. It starts first with the assumption that radical systemic change would never come about through reforms, or life-style strategies. This is because systemic change requires a rupture with the past, which extends to both the institutional and the subjective level. Such a rupture is only possible through the development of a new political organisation and a new comprehensive political program for systemic change. This means that the various activities to set up communes, co-ops, alternative media institutions etc are just irrelevant to a process of systemic change --- unless they are an explicitly integral part of such a comprehensive political program. It is in this sense that one may argue that the two strategies are not complementary as Chomsky argues, but mutually exclusive.

The ID political strategy comprises the gradual involvement of increasing numbers of people in a new kind of politics and the parallel shifting of economic resources (labour, capital, land) away from the market economy. The aim of such a transitional strategy should be to create changes in the institutional framework, as well as to value systems, which, after a period of tension between the new institutions and the state, would, at some stage, replace the market economy, statist democracy, and the social paradigm "justifying" them, with an inclusive democracy and a new democratic paradigm respectively.

The immediate objective should be the creation, from below, of 'popular bases of political and economic power', that is, the establishment of local public realms of direct and economic democracy which will confederate in order to create the conditions for the establishment of a new society. Contesting local elections (the only form of elections which is not incompatible with the aims of the ID project) could provide the chance to put into effect such a program on a massive social scale, although other forms of establishing new types of social organisation should not be neglected, as long as they are part of a program which explicitly aims at systemic change.

Once the institutions of inclusive democracy begin to be installed, and people, for the first time in their lives, start obtaining real power to determine their own fate, then the gradual erosion of the dominant social paradigm and of the present institutional framework will be set in motion. A new popular power base will be created.

Town by town, city by city, region by region will be taken away from the effective control of the market economy and the nation-state, their political and economic structures being replaced by the confederations of democratically run communities. A dual power in tension with the state will be created, an alternative social paradigm will become hegemonic and the break in the socialisation process--the precondition for a change in the institution of society--will have occurred. The legitimacy of today's 'democracy' will have been lost.

The implementation of a strategy like the one outlined above requires a new type of political organisation, which will mirror the desired structure of society. This would not be the usual political party, but a form of 'democracy in action', which would undertake various collective forms of intervention at:

the political level (creation of 'shadow' political institutions based on direct democracy, neighbourhood assemblies, etc.),
the economic level (establishment of community units at the level of production and distribution which are collectively owned and controlled),
the social level (democracy in the workplace, the university etc.), and
the cultural level (creation of community-controlled art and media activities).

However, all these forms of intervention should be part of a comprehensive program for social transformation aiming at the eventual change of each municipality won in the local elections into an inclusive democracy. The alternative media established as part of this program would play a crucial role in developing an alternative consciousness to the present one, as regards the methods of solving the economic and ecological problems in a democratic way. They should connect today's economic and ecological crisis to the present socio-economic system and make proposals on how to start building the new society. For example: by setting up a democratic economic sector, (i.e. a sector owned by the demos); by creating a democratic mechanism to make economic decisions affecting the demotic sector of the community; by 'localising' decisions affecting the life of the community as a whole (local production, local spending, local taxes, etc.).

Without underestimating the difficulties involved in the context of today's all-powerful methods of brain control and economic violence, which, in fact, might prove more effective methods than pure state violence in suppressing a movement for the inclusive democracy, we think that the proposed strategy is a realistic strategy on the way to a new society.

6 Mass Media and Communication

At the beginning of the third millennium, it hardly needs any emphasis that journalism and mass media or simply the "press" plays a central role in modern society. Even in the early 18th century, the press was recognised as a powerful entity. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) wrote that the British statesman Edmund Burke (1729-97) called the reporters' gallery in the British Parliament "a Fourth Estate more important by far" than the other three estates of Parliament-the peers, bishops, and commons. A Similar statement, however, is attributed to the English historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) who in his Essay On Hallam's Constitutional History Published in Edinburgh Review (September 1828), observed with reference to the press gallery of the House of Commons, "The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm".

And over time, newspapers, news magazines, radio, television, cable video, video Cassettes and movies have been demanding more and more of our attention and leisure time. The mass media now markedly affect our politics, our recreation, our education in general and profoundly our culture, our perception and our understanding of the world around us. However, Prof. (Herbert) Marshall Mcluhan (1911-1980), whose theories on mass communication caused widespread debate, argued that each major period of history is characterised, not by the mass media per se, but by the nature of the medium of communication (print or electronic) used most widely at the time. In this Chapter will be discussed educational opportunities in four interrelated areas of studies, viz., Journalism and Mass Communication, Communication Studies, Public Relations, and Advertising. However, it would be in order to present first an overview of the media world, the role of the government, and to explain several terminologies.

Media Terminologies

First, a few words about the various terms used in this field because many such terms occur in admission advertisements. The term "journalism" often referred to as "news business" involves the gathering, processing, and delivery of important information relating to current affairs by the print media (news papers and new magazines), and electronic media (radio and TV). This integrated entity is also simply called "media". News and entertainment are communicated in a number of different ways using different media. The world "media" is often used to refer to the communication of news, and in this context means the same as news media. Media and mass media are often used when discussing the power of modern communication.

If there is a term that has appeared in more diverse publications than any other over the last few years, it is "multimedia". The number of definitions for it is as numerous as the number of companies that are involved in multimedia business. In essence, multimedia is the use or presentation of information in two or more forms. The combination of audio and video in film and television was probably the first multimedia application. It is the advent of the PC, with its ability to manipulate data from different sources and offer this directly to the consumers or subscribers that has sparked
the current interest. In the context of mass media and communication, multimedia is an effective tool for the profession. Still journalism, which has long history beginning almost with the invention of printing, continues to be the core concept of the entire process of communication. The newer communication technologies, in fact, have been strengthening the cause of journalism and newspapers, the latest to appear on the scene being the Internet. However, education in multimedia is mainly offered by private IT institutes (e.g., Arena Multimedia).

The Media World

The media world consists of a wide variety of agencies and organisations which are involved in media related activities. At its core are the mass media organisations per se and the users of mass media. The first category consists of:

(i) the print media (newspapers and magazines),

(ii) the electronic media (radio and television channels), and

(iii) the news agencies.

The electronic media now includes the World Wide Web (WWW) which hosts Internet versions of most of the well-known newspapers and news magazines and is also emerging as a potential advertisement medium. In the second category are:

(i) the advertisers and advertising agencies, and

(ii) the public relations agencies.

Advertising provide the financial sustenance to the mass media and their survival depends upon advertisements. Public relation agencies interact with the mass media to put across their messages.

They also have their own mechanisms to reach their target audience groups. Besides, there are other institutions and organisations associated with media related activities. They include:

(1) audit agencies which vouch for the circulation figures of the print media;

(2) agencies conducting readership surveys;

(3) schools of journalism and mass communication;

(4) statutory and non-statutory organisations dealing with regulatory and ethical issues; and

(5) organisations representing various interest groups in the media world.

Last but not the least, there are facilitators, such as the chain of distributors of the print media and the TV cable operators, who provide the vital link between the products of media organisations and their consumers.

However, apart from functional relationships among mass media, advertising, and public relations, from academic point of view what is necessary to appreciate is that at the heart of these three activities is the art and science of communication. The practitioners is these areas strive to communicate with their respective target audience groups, adopting the most effective communication strategies.

The term communication, however, has a much wider connotation encompassing many fields of studies, the major areas being sociology and psychology, linguistics, cybernetics and information theory, and the study of non-verbal communication. Sociology and psychology produced the first academic studies in mass communication during the 1930s. Thereafter, many scholars studied the effects of mass communication on individuals and society. The theory and process of communication indeed has profoundly influenced the study of journalism and mass communication.

Government and Mass Media

Governments and press are widely perceived as mutual adversaries. Freedom of the Press-the right of the press to report and to criticise the wrong doings of the powerful without retaliation or threat of retaliation-is the cornerstone of democracy. Freedom of the Press in the United States is more than a legal concept-almost a religious tenet. The First Amendment to the US Constitution states clearly and unequivocally that the "Congress Shall Make No Law. Abridging Freedom of Speech or of the Press". The Indian Constitution does not have similar provision, but Art 19 (1) (a) protects the right to freedom of speech and expression subject to reasonable restrictions as mentioned in Art 19 (2) Though many governments vouch for protecting the freedom of the press, there are instances galore of throttling the press. There are several agencies in various countries which fight for the cause of press freedom. Be that as it may, governments themselves are also major users of mass media for putting across their messages.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting which was set up during the Second World War to mobilise support for war efforts, is now a very large mass media organisation of the Government of India. It performs its tasks through a number of specialised media units and other organisation. One of its most important units, the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity (DAVP), is the primary multimedia advertising agency of the Central Government which uses about 6,240 newspapers for press advertisement.

The Ministry, besides its own mass media activities performs several statutory functions, the most important of which is the registration of newspapers and periodicals. The Office of the Registrar of Newspapers in India (RNI), commonly known as Press Registrar, was created in 1956 in accordance with the Section 19A of the Press and Registration of regulation of titles of newspapers and periodicals, followed by their registration and allocation of registration numbers.

It is also responsible for the verification of circulation claims, receiving Annual Statements of registered newspapers and periodicals, and compiling and publishing the annual report titled `Press in India' containing detailed information about the print media, a valuable media reference tool. Another important statutory quasi-judicial authority, under the umbrella of the Ministry, is the Press Council of India (PCI). The objectives of the PCI established under the Indian Press Council Act 1978, are to preserve the freedom of the press and to maintain and improvement of standards of newspapers and news agencies.

The Ministry of Labour, on the other hand, is responsible for the operation of the provisions of two Acts relating to the employees of newspaper establishments: (1) The Working Journalists and Other Newspaper Employees (Conditions of Service) and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1955, and (2) The Working Journalists (Fixation of Rates of Wages) Act, 1958. The first Act provides for the constitution of two separate Wage Boards for fixing or revising rates of wages of working journalists (including those working in news agencies) and non-journalist newspaper employees.

So far five Wage Boards had been set up (1956, 1963, 1975, 1985, and 1994). The fifth one (Manisana Wage Board) set up in 1994, has submitted its tentative proposals on December 12, 1999. Besides, there are a number of Acts which directly or indirectly affect the mass media. In December, 1999, the Government has introduced in the Parliament the Freedom of Information Bill. When enacted, it is likely to have a far reaching favourable effect on mass media. So far five States viz., Goa, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Tamil Nadu also have enacted similar laws.

Journalism and Mass Communication

Journalism education in the narrow sense prepares students for careers in newspapers, news magazines, broadcast news, and news services. Now it encompasses a much wider area under the broad label "mass communication ". By what ever name it may be called, journalism and mass communication study is not a discipline in the sense that sociology, economics, political science or history is, but a rather loose interdisciplinary field covering a wide range of issues somehow related to public concerns. As such, the field reflects in general, the growth of mass communication itself.

Journalism Education in the USA

A brief account of the development of journalism education in the USA will be helpful in understanding the current trend in journalism and mass communication education in India. Journalism education which has a beginning in English Departments in America universities focussed more on techniques, such as, reporting, news writing, editing, design, photography. Often they were taught by former journalists. Willard G Bleyer, a professor of English in the University of Wisconsin may be called the father of journalism education. He was instrumental in introducing the first journalism course in the University in 1905 and his scholarly interests later greatly influenced the field.

However, the country's first school of Journalism came into existence in 1908 at the University of Missouri. This was followed by the establishment of the Graduate School of Journalism in 1911 at the Columbia University backed with a $2 million gift from Joseph Pulitzer (1846-1911), publisher of the New York World, Pulitzer is also remembered for the Pulitzer Prizes, also funded by him, and annually awarded for excellence in journalism, letters and music. The School, still rated as one of the best journalism schools in the USA, is the publisher of the scholarly journal Columbia Journalism Review published since 1961. Now there are 427 colleges and universities which offer programmes in journalism and mass communication.

The focus on newspapers continued to dominate journalism education throughout the 1940s at leading Schools of Journalism in the USA. With the emergence of radio and television as major news and entertainment media, the journalism schools incorporated such topics as radio news, television news and broadcasting production techniques in their programmes.
Even the Speech Departments, offshoots of English Departments, became involved in the preparation of students for careers in broadcasting. In some universities, the speech of communication arts department were merged with the journalism programmes.

Around the same time, more and more journalism schools started offering courses in advertising and public relations, giving rise to the term "mass communication" to describe this amalgam of courses on newspapers, radio, television, news magazines, and an increasing involvement with the study of communication itself. Communication study as an academic discipline has long been a part of social sciences in the American higher education. It involves the study of mass media and other social institutions devoted, among other, to persuasion, communication processes and their effects, audience studies, contents analysis, and interpersonal communication.

Wilbur Schramm, a leading scholar of communication studies, who taught at University of Iowa, Illinois and Stanford, is credited with popularising communication studies in journalism departments. Increasingly, graduate programmes became more concerned with communication theory while undergraduate courses stressed pre-professional training for careers in news media, advertising, and public relations. However, such emphasis on communication has its share of criticism too. It has been argued that communication and media studies hardly have anything to do with the practice of journalism.

The increased emphasis on communication theory at the expense of basic reporting and writing skill has also led to the scrapping of exclusive journalism courses in some universities. The shifting of focus from conventional journalism to communication is reflected in the rechristening the Schools and Departments of Journalism as School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Department of Communication, or Schools of Communication. Some of the well-known schools, however, did not change their names. At Missouri and at Columbia they continue to be the School of Journalism and Graduate Department of Journalism, respectively.

Journalism Education in India

In India, the very notion of journalism education in universities was looked at with askance. A write-up published in the Times of India (November 27, 1934) shares the most commonly held view of the time that "journalists are born and not made". It observed, "A faculty for criticism, a flair for essentials and a sense of news values can be developed by experience only if these qualities are innate from the beginning… The actual basis of journalism is its various departments can be only be acquired by direct contact and often bitter experience". Almost all the famous journalists of yesteryears learnt journalism on the job starting as "cub" reporters. Even many of the celebrated editors and columnists did not undergo any formal training in journalism. The credit for making journalism as a subject of study goes to Dr. Annie Besant, the distinguished theosophist and freedom fighter. The course in the National University (Adyar) introduced by her, however, did not survive.

There were several other abortive attempts also. The oldest surviving Department of Journalism in the Indian sub-continent was established at Punjab University in Lahore (now in Pakisthan) in 1914. After partition, the Department continued to function at the New Delhi campus of the Indian part of the divided Punjab University till July 1962. At present, it offers a two-year integrated Master of Mass Communication (MMC) programme. From 1947 to 1954, there were only five university departments of journalism: (1) University of Madras (1947), (2) University of Calcutta (1950), (3) University of Mysore (1951), (4) Nagpur University (1952) and (5) Osmania University (1954), Both the First (1952-54) and the Second (1980-82) Press Commissions emphasised the need for expanding the scope of journalism education. The Second Press Commission recommended the establishment of a National Council for Journalism and Communication Research. It also highlighted the need for inter-disciplinary approach in journalism education and recommended that admission should be based on the performance in aptitude tests.

It was in 1963, that the Ford Foundation Mass Communication Study Team headed by Wilbur Schramm, who, as stated earlier greatly influenced journalism education in the USA, recommended the expansion of the scope of journalism education by broadening the curriculum to include mass communication, advertising, public relations and Radio and TV journalism, to fall in line with the American system. The Ford Foundation report set the trend of journalism and mass communication education in India. It also led to the establishment in 1965, of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication at New Delhi, by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting which over a period, has introduced separate courses in these areas. In 1981, the University Grants Commission published the Report on the Status of Journalism and Communication Education in India, which recommended various measures for the strengthening the University Departments of Journalism and improvement in the quality of education. In another document, English Plan Perspective on Journalism/Communication Education in India published in 1990-91, the UGC unveiled a proposal for strengthening of selected universities departments.

With the broadening of curriculum to include the various dimensions of mass communication, the Indian Universities followed the examples of their US counterparts and started incorporating the terms "communication" and "mass communication" in their names. Many new Departments do not even include the term "journalism" in their names. The nomenclature of both the degrees, Bachelor of Journalism (BJ), and Master of Journalism (MJ), accordingly were changed by some universities to incorporate the terms "communication", "mass communication", such as, Bachelor of Communication and Journalism (BCJ), Bachelor of Journalism and Mass Communication (BJMC), Master of Communication and Journalism (MCJ), and Master of Journalism and Mass Communication (MJMC).

In some other universities the nomenclature of the Master's degree courses in MA (Journalism), or MA (Communication and Journalism). Yet in some universities the term "Journalism" does not occur at all, for example, MA, MS or M.Sc (Communication, or Mass Communication), Master of Communication Studies (MCS), Master of Mass Communication (MMC), The choice of nomenclature often reflects the incorporation, in varying degrees, the components of the "journalism", "mass communication" and "communication" in the course curricula.

In the programmes with such labels as "Journalism" or "Journalism and Mass Communication", while topics such as communication theory and broadcast journalism (TV and Radio) are covered, the focus of graduate programmes is more on the basics of print journalism methods and techniques.

In the latter category, apart from the preponderance of communication theory and process along with such issued as development communication, rural communication, educational communication, media research, the trust of many programmes is shifting towards TV and video production, web reporting and publishing, and Internet journalism. However, course contents vary from university to university. Advertising and public relations are covered in almost all the courses. The application of Information Technology (IT) of late is demanding more attention in many programmes.

Educational Opportunities

There has been now a proliferation of university courses in journalism in packages of different combinations of topics. The number of universities offering journalism and related courses now exceeds 75. An exclusive journalism university, Makhanlal Chaturvedi Rashtriya Patrakarita Vishwavidyalaya, was established in Bhopal in 1990.

The objective of the university is to develop itself into a national centre for teaching, training and research of journalism and mass communication through the medium of Hindi. It however, received considerable flak for its greater involvement in franchising out its BCA course to all and sundry throughout the country, rather then striving to achieve excellence in Hindi journalism. At present it offers nine journalism related courses.

Several institutions outside the university system also offer these courses, which include, as stated, earlier, the Indian Institution of Mass Communication. Some of these institutions have been sponsored by newspaper establishments, such as, Eenadu School of Journalism, Times Journalism (Indian Express Group). Some members of the Indian Newspaper Society took the initiative to promote the Press Foundation of India to provide opportunities for training and retraining of journalists.

It may be mentioned that the Film and Television Institute of India (FTTI) (Pune) is the first institution to introduce courses in TV Production. Besides FTTI, its counterpart in Calcutta, Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute, and several other institutions offer programmes in Television. This has been discussed in Chapter 45 (Performing Arts). The National Institute of Design (Ahmedabad) has courses in the area of Communication Design which include Print Media, Audiovisuals and Video Film.

Levels of Education: Education in journalism and mass communication is offered at the first degree (three-year BA degree), postgraduate Bachelor's degree (BJ/BCJ/BJMC, etc.,) Master's degree (MJ/MCJ/MJMC, etc.,) and pre-doctoral and doctoral levels. Besides, some universities offer the subject as one of the combinations at the first degree levels. Three-year BA degree courses, open to candidates who have passed 10+2 examination, are available only in the affiliated colleges of University of Delhi and Bangalore University. There are also diploma and certificate courses in a number of universities. M.Phil and Doctoral programmes are also available in some universities.

The Bachelor's degree course is of one year duration and open to degree holders in any discipline. Master's degree, also of one year duration, is open to Bachelor's degree holders in journalism. The MA course in the subject, which is of two-year duration, is open to Bachelor's degree holders in any discipline. A number of universities have started introducing two year integrated programmes, instead of separate one year programmes leading successively to Bachelor and Master degrees. The diploma courses are of one-year duration and the entry requirement is mostly a degree in any discipline. The certificate courses are open to undergraduates.

Language Journalism

Although, both in terms of the number and circulation, Indian language newspapers far outnumber those in English, only a small number of universities offer courses in language journalism. As of now, there are courses only in Hindi, Urdu and Telugu journalism. Two universities offer courses in Hindi journalism:

(1) Avinashilingam Institute for Home Science of Higher Education for Women-MA in Hindi Journalism,

(2) Banaras Hindu University-MA (Functional Hindi) in Journalism, and PG Diploma in Hindi Journalism of two-year duration (after MA).

As stated earlier, the Makhanlal Chaturvedi Rashtriya Patrakarita Vishwavidyalaya was established to promote journalism and mass communication through the medium of Hindi. Indian Institute of Mass Communication has a postgraduate Diploma course in Hindi Journalism. Urdu journalism is taught only in Jawaharlal Nehru University. It offers an Advance Diploma in Mass Media course with Urdu as one of the subjects. Potti Sreeramulu Telugu University and Eenadu School of Journalism offer Journalism courses in Telugu. While the former offer BJ and MJ programmes, the latter has introduced a Diploma course. The Eenadu Journalism School established by Eenadu, the largest circulated Telugu daily, deserves special mention. Eenadu is the first newspaper in the country to establish a school of journalism. It offers a Diploma course in Journalism of six months duration.

Candidates who successfully complete the course with merit would undergo further TV channels. Candidates are paid a fellowship of Rs.2,000 per month during the course and Rs.3,400 per month while undergoing advanced training. After successful completion of the advances training, candidates will be put on probation. Eligibility requirements are: (a) graduate degree, (b) proficiency in English and Telugu, (c) flair for writing in Telugu, (d) age not more than 25 years. Admissions are made on the basis of reporting and editing, and an orientation in political, economic, geographical, and legal aspects relevant to print and visual media.

Public Relations

Public Relations (PR), one of the newest management disciplines, means different things to different people. It is widely perceived as the profession of corporate image making, a "lobbying" mechanism or "fixing things", and also as a face-saving device employed by organisations who find themselves in deep trouble. Yet others equated PR with publicity and propaganda. A PR professional once wryly described PR as "the art of making friends you don't need". Be that as it may, PR is a reality and is practised world over by organisations which have something to do with their publics. It has now attained the status of specialised profession of communication management.

However, the definitions of PR are legion. There are as many definitions as there are PR "gurus". Dr R F Harlow, a PR practitioner, culled out 472 definitions from various sources. Analysing them, he put forward a sort of working definition thus: "Public relations is a distinctive management function which helps establish and maintain mutual lines of communication. Understanding, acceptance and cooperation between an organisation and its publics; involves the management of problems or issues; help management to keep informed on and responsive to public opinion; defines and emphasizes the responsibility of management to serve the public interest; helps management keep abreast of effectively utilising change, serving as an early warning system to help anticipate trends; and uses research and sound and ethical communication as its principle tools".

The concept of PR as a distinct branch of communication is comparatively a recent one, though it is an ancient practice. Perhaps, it was the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (now AT & T) which coined the term "public relations" and used it in its annual report for 1908.

It is the Second World War that brought about new opportunities to the PR work. The International Public Relations Association was formed in 1955 and simultaneously many countries including India established national professional for a. In India it was the Tatas which first set up a PR Department in 1942.

In a sense, in India the first PR exercise on a very large scale was undertaken by the Government of India with the creation of a new Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in the 1940s. Its main function was to mobilise public opinion in favour of the war efforts in a situation where the Indian National Congress and national sentiment generally were against the war efforts. The professionalism in PR may be said to have emerged with the establishment in 1958 of the Public Relations Society of India (PRSI). It was not until 1968 when the first national level conference of PRSI which adopted Code of Ethics and defined the parameters of the PR profession that it earned a sort of professional respectability.

With 28 regional chapters, the PRSI is now a national organisation involved in promoting PR along ethical lines and develop human resources through seminars, conferences and training programmes. It also publishes a professional journal `Public Relations'. As stated earlier PR has a symbiotic relationship with mass media and advertising. Though public relations, and advertising are different professions yet they are interdependent. Often, the two have similar goals, a shared audience and the same media vehicles. As such, PR practitioners need the same level of communication skills and the knowledge of communications techniques as that of journalism and advertising professionals.

Public Relations Departments, often known as Corporate Communication Departments, exist in major business and industrial organisations. All the government agencies at different levels, both at the Centre and the States, have PR Departments. The international organisations of the Un family and even large non-governmental organisations (NGOs) fell the need for PR units. Besides, there are a large number of PR organisations, often set up by the advertising agencies, which provide PR service to a large number organisations although some of them have their own PR outfits. There are also a large number of individual PR consultants.

Among the PR tools are press releases, press conferences, seminars, annual reports of the organisations, house magazines and newsletters, films, charitable donations, sponsorship of events (such as, sports and games, music recitals), community relations and last but not the least PR advertising, as distinct aimed at building a positive corporate image of an organisation in the context of its community on subjects of welfare or seeking to educate or inform the community on subjects of public interest, such as, road safety, immunisation; AIDS, family welfare.

Educational Opportunities

It has been mentioned earlier that PR is one of the essential components of almost all the courses in journalism and mass communication. The number of stand-alone courses in PR, however, is limited. Often the courses cover both PR and advertising. Most of the courses are at the diploma level offered by both universities and non-universities institutions. The courses generally cover such subjects as communication tools media of PR, media planning, editing and proof reading, advertising writing press releases, media production techniques.

Advertising

Way back in 1759, Samuel Johnson (1709-84) the English poet, critic and lexicographer observed "Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement" (The Idler No.40, 20 January 1759). Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), a Canadian humourist described advertising "as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it" (Garden of Folly (1924)-"The Perfect Salesman"). Leacock's dig at advertising perhaps signifies its enormous power. Though many TV watchers curse advertisers and their advertising agencies for the number of commercial breaks to show advertisements in between TV programmes, consciously and often willingly or unwillingly, they listen to their message and more often than not succumb to the allurements. In fact, we now live in an "advertisement-laden" society. Advertisements stare at us from the pages of newspapers and glossy magazines, TV screen and the huge outdoor billboards, often illuminated ones in the night. We cannot escape online advertisements while surfing the Internet. And now advertising via wireless devices carrying messages to the cell phone is in the offing!

Advertisements, a Marketing Management function, has been defined by the American Marketing Association as "any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goals or services by an identified sponsor". In other words, advertisements involve purchasing time or space in such mass media as television, radio newspapers or magazines to explain, or to urge or to persuade the use or adoption of a product, service or an idea. The field of advertisement management is made up of a system of interacting organisations and institutions, all of which play a role in the advertising process.

At the core of the system are advertisers, the organisations that provide financial resources that support advertising. Advertisers are private and public sector organisations, that use mass media to achieve their respective organisational objectives. Increasingly, political parties are using advertising as a major tool for election campaign. The two other components of the system are: (i) advertising agencies, and (ii) the media that carry the advertisements. Another important adjunct of the advertising industry is the advertising models. Many celebrated women models went on to win laurels in beauty contests, both national and international, and made their marks in films. The expenditure incurred by advertisers provides the basis for estimates of the size of the burgeoning advertising industry.

According to the Eleventh A&M Agency Report prepared by the prestigious A&M magazines (15 September 2000),
the total advertisement expenditure of 200 top spenders in 1998-99 was Rs.3,914.7 crore representing 2.3% of their sales. The top 200 spenders account for 90% of the total expenditure. However, the report is based on the data provided by advertising agencies and thus excludes expenditures incurred by small and private organisations which buy media space or time directly, the Central Governments and State Governments which release advertisements through the Directorate of Audio-Visual Publicity (DAVP), and Departments of Information and Public Relations, respectively.

Though the advertisers provide the nutrients, it is advertising agencies which are the backbone of the advertising industry and make things happen. The importance of advertising agencies has increased because the era of brand loyalty is almost a thing of the past. It is the agencies which now create brand images for new products and resurrect those of the fading ones. The agencies vary in size, organisation structure and services they offer. Large agencies have networks of branch offices in major cities.

According to the A&M Agency Report referred to above, during 1999-2000, of the top 89 agencies, the first 15 garnered more than 65% of the gross income. Advertisement agencies do the planning for their clients, create advertisements, and select the appropriate media for placing them. Advertisement planning involves market research. Most of the big agencies, therefore, have in-house market research facilities, e.g., Indian Market Research Bureau, (IMRB), a Division of the Hindustan Thompson Associate. Besides, there are also independent agencies, such as, MARG Marketing and Research Group, and Operations Research Group (ORG). The Advertisers' Handbook (1999-2000), listed more than 690 accredited agencies.

Two of the oldest agencies are Hindustan Thompson Associates (1929) and Ogilvy & Mather (1928). Incidentally, David M Ogilvy (1911-1999), the most revered, albeit controversial, advertisement "guru" is the founder of Ogilvy & Mather. Besides, about 660 non-accredited agencies are also listed in it. As stated elsewhere, the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) operates the system of accreditation of advertising agencies. One of the conditions for accreditation is that the agency should be completely independent without control or ownership of the media or clients. The INS also has framed conditions for accepting advertisements from accredited advertising agencies by INS member publications. The income of advertising agencies comes mostly from commissions received not from the clients but from the advertising media.

As stated earlier, the Directorate of Advertisement and Visual Publicity (DAVP) is the advertising agency of the Government of India. The Advertisement policy of the Government of India says that in "pursuance of broad social objectives of the Government and in order to achieve parity of rate between various categories of newspapers, appropriate weightage/consideration may be given to: (1) small and medium newspapers and journals, (2) specialised scientific and technical journals, (3) language newspapers and journals, and (4) newspapers and journals published especially in backward, remote, and border areas." Many big advertisers and the print an electronic media have their own advertising departments which generally liaise with advertising agencies.

Advertising agencies have three different associations, to look after the business interest, viz., the Advertising Agencies Association of India (1948) (Mumbai), the National Council of Advertising Agencies (1967) (New Delhi), and the Indian Society of Advertisers (Mumbai). Besides, the Advertising Standards Council of India (1985) (Mumbai) comprising advertisers, advertising agencies, newspapers, magazines and others involved in advertising has prepared a Code for Self-Regulation in Advertising to create a sense of responsibility for its observance amongst advertisers, advertising agencies and others connected with the creation of advertising, and the media.

7 The Indian Scenario

Introduction

Among the institutions that contribute to the make-up of a public sphere in society, the media perhaps perform the most critical function. In the transactions in the public sphere, the media are not a neutral participant or an impassioned chronicler. Instead they either legitimize the status quo or innovator of the existing social equilibrium. The conflict or collaboration of the media with forces that attempt to colonize the public sphere materializes in this context. The mutual relationship between the state and the media, either as oppositional or as complementary, is influenced, among others, by the nature of intervention of the state in the public sphere. The former goes back to the 18th century when the Bengal Gazette trained its guns on the British administration and was mauled in the process. Since then, the endeavor of the press to imbue the public space with a critical culture has been consistently curtailed by the state, both by legislative interventions and by administrative interference.

For liberal democratic practice such measures of the state have serious implications, as restrictions on the media are bound to affect the ambience of the public sphere. The Indian intelligentsia realized this as early as the beginning of the 19th century when Rammohan Roy, acclaimed as the father of modern India, publicly denounced the attempts of the British government to curb the freedom of the press. Following the lead set by Rammohan, freedom of expression and civil liberties became two key issues of the anti-colonial struggle. In fact, the history of both the national movement and of the press can be read as the history of the struggle for these two rights. The legacy of this struggle has great contemporary value, as the freedom of the press and civil liberties continue to be under strain due to the restrictions imposed by the state.

Meaning and Definition

Herbert Schiller, a theoretician of repute, has ascribed to the media the role of mind managers. Implicit in this description is the ideological function of the media in society. As such, multiple social consequences could ensue as a result of the intervention of the media. For instance, it could generate a sense of fatalism. It could also create non-conformism. The first relegates the media to the status of an adjunct of the dominant interests whereas the second provides them the possibility of influencing the course of history. There are several occasions in the life of a nation when the media are called upon to make a choice.

In India such a situation arose in the 1990s when a massive, emotionally orchestrated secular political mobilization was taken. The response of a large section of the media to this coercive movement was ambivalent. Many chose to swim with the tide. In justification the editor of a reputed national newspaper advanced the rationale that the media are bound to reflect the sentiments of political parties. By doing so he was renouncing the leadership role of the media-of that of an intellectual, if you like-which the nationalist press had so admirably performed. It also relegated the media to the status of a helpless victim. The consequences were grievous. The intellectual atmosphere thus generated by the media considerably contributed to the undermining of the harmonious social order and legitimacy of the state.

During the last two decades, the Indian media have undergone a sea change, particularly in their intellectual content and cultural ambience. There are two sources from which the transformation draws sustenance and inspiration: one emanating from outside and the other internally generated. The first, which seeks to subordinate the media to global control, comes with a variety of promises-of development, technology and internationalism-extremely appealing to the modernising quest of the middle class. The baggage also includes access to the advanced frontiers of knowledge and the cultural avant garde. The political and intellectual discourse, which it might generate, is likely to influence the nature and direction of social transformation. Whether it would lead to an intellectual climate in favour of a mode of development that may not address the problems of the nation is a fear entertained in many quarters. Even without actual control, the Indian mainstream media appear to have succumbed to the cultural imperatives of a developmental paradigm that leaves out the traditions from its concerns.

Internally, the media confront a powerful secular/left discourse generated by a variety of political, social and cultural organisations. Sociologists from JNU and other left establishment, leftist political parties over the decades have established links with foreign universities in UK/USA on social changes and social studies. The discussion on social changes using left/Marxist ideology has dominated the intellectual space. Marxist principles on social changes and social studies have dominated these subjects for many decades. Foreign sociologists, indologists and political experts have dangerous influence on the discourse of these Indian political and social organizations.

The media, at least a major section of them, have over the years internalised the logic to such an extent that it has become the instrument of its reproduction. For example the reservations on backward castes and dalits have prior debate among these circles in UK/USA for many years. If stereotypes like `Hindu communalism' and `Hindu fascists' or the `majority communalism' have become part of the common sense, the public discourse created by the media, even if unconsciously by some, is to a large extent responsible. The religious divide categories are rampant in reporting and false social assumptions inform news analysis, even in newspapers that are otherwise secular. The colonial ideologue, James Mill, who characterised Indian society in terms of religious communities in conflict, still appears to exert influence on our minds.

Consequently, the traditional middle ground space in the media has considerably shrunk. Not because of the secular-communal divide that is artificially created but more because the left/secular has succeeded in replacing the traditional Hindu middle. The logic of the left/secular is increasingly becoming respectable in almost every newspaper establishment. The legitimacy thus gained by the secular/left intellectual, often through crude and false representations, helps to change the popular common sense about key concepts like nationalism, secularism and communalism. This tendency has considerably impaired the fundamental commitment of the media to truth. The truth, however elusive it is, is not an avoidable luxury, as is believed at least by certain sections of the media, particularly the left. Social engineers

Despite these developments, the media are privy to an intense ideological struggle that Indian society is currently witnessing, between secularism on the one hand and communalism on the other. Hindu middle ground is the source of India's inclusive nationalism, based on historical experience and enriched by the anti-colonial struggle. Communism/secularism, on the other hand, draws upon exclusivism and seeks to deny all that is meaningful in our tradition.

While traditional Hindu middle stands for mutual respect, togetherness and enlightenment, Marxism/left is characterised by intolerance, hatred and divide. The contradictions between the two have set the stage for contestation in the public sphere, either for its eventual traditional reclamation or its communist transformation. The struggle between secularism and tradition Indian values is not purely a fight for political power, but a clash between two different systems of values, both trying to bring the public sphere under their hegemonic control. The outcome to a large extent depends upon the manner in which the media intervene in the public space and mould its character. On it also depends whether the Republic will be able to preserve its foundational principles. Hence the importance of the media remaining neutral. Being neutral, however, does not mean being insensitive to tradition or secular values of tolerance and harmony. In the past Indian intellectuals have invoked philosophical traditions like Vedanta to erase social divisions and appealed to universalism to bring about religious unity. Taking a leaf out of the past, the media can contribute to the ongoing efforts to halt the unfortunate tendency of leftist/secular appropriation of the past by adopting a critical but creative attitude towards tradition.

Over the years, the character of the public sphere in India has undergone a qualitative change. There is a discernible decline in the intellectual content of its transactions. Moreover, the culture of public discussion it promotes has lost much of its sanity and social purpose; the self rather than society seems to dominate in it. As a consequence, informed interventions by institutions like the media have become exceptions rather than the rule, in contrast to the era of the national movement when such interventions contributed to the emergence, evolution and vitality of the public sphere. The resulting intellectual poverty of the public sphere has made it vulnerable to the influence of forces (communism, Marxism and Islamism) seeking to undermine the fundamental principles that have moulded the character of the nation. Although the media currently function under severe compulsions, both ideological and financial, a critical introspection is in order.

Aim of the Media

The media in India is one of the most powerful tools used by the major powers to control and change the Indian public perception about them selves and about the world. This pattern is also followed in the international scene with negation of Indic culture and bias against any revival of civilization ethos. The creeping news about any event in the world including jihad/terrorism information is presented in such a way that the process of evolution and force of history is inevitable and forgone conclusion in favor of the Islamic parties.

Indian populations are like an experimental subject to be fed with new perception and information away from reality and in favor of the Islamic and major powers. Over several decades the general population could be made less hostile and more favorable to the designs of the major power. In the movie Pleasantville a boy grows up in a make believe world thinking that his neighbors and friends are the actual reality and totally oblivious of the reality of the world. Indian population is considered by major powers to be similar with low knowledge about the reality and threats in the world. How long have the west been experimenting with Indian population with news and indoctrination? It could be even before the independence for more than 60 years. Deception and brainwashing have been used for a long time by the west and India is one of the largest targets of deception.

The current campaign to demonize Hindutva is to defame and remove the new indigenous political party, which is not under the control of the major powers and whose ideology is fully rooted in Indic civilization. The attack on Christians and minorities are overblown with the logic that the majority community must be checked with aggressive reporting even to the point of falsehood.

Romila Thapar eminent historian is quoted as saying that the notion of non-violent Hindu is misnomer. Distorted or even totally false reporting on communally sensitive issues is a well-entrenched feature of Indian journalism. There is no self-corrective mechanism in place to remedy this endemic culture of disinformation. No reporter or columnist or editor ever gets fired or formally reprimanded or even just criticized by his peers for smearing Hindu nationalists.

This way, a partisan economy with the truth has become a habit hard to relinquish. This logic of news reporting is considered some form of social engineering. The sense of chaos and insecurity is conveyed by media reports so that stable environment and harmony is never achieved in the minds of the larger society. This is one form of psychology operation done inside India for the last three decades. The news creates a notion of change, which reinforces the decay of the Hindu culture and brings out more of the light Islamic/Urdu culture. By being very anti-Hindu the media and social scientists hopes to reduce aggression of the so called 'majority' community over the minority community and bring balance even at the expense of the truth. This logic was pursued even when the Muslim terrorists in Kashmir were killing the minorities Hindus and the news is usually kept low key.

Control of media by the foreign governments is done in a subtle way. Some of the ways are by indoctrinating the editorial teams and the journalists over time. The Indian leftists have been used for a long time by the external powers and since they control the media they are better able to influence the bias in the media. Some question put by them are 'why don't you talk to your very reasonable nuclear rival Pakistan' or 'why do you have a Hindu nationalist party in power' game. Each of these questions is loaded, as they say in the courtroom, with facts or inferences not yet established by evidence to be true and designed to shift the conversation from a dubious premise to a foregone conclusion. The public buys this kind of argument more readily.

Cultural Cold War

The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Stonor Saunders

This book describes all the dirty tricks used by the CIA and other agencies all over the world to change countries and to bring chaos in those countries. It is well known that the CIA funded right-wing intellectuals after World War II; fewer know that it also courted individuals from the center and the left in an effort to turn the intelligentsia away from communism and toward an acceptance of "the American way." Frances Stonor Saunders sifts through the history of the covert Congress for Cultural Freedom in The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. The book centers on the career of Michael Josselson, the principal intellectual figure in the operation, and his eventual betrayal by people who scapegoat him. Sanders demonstrates that, in the early days, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the emergent CIA were less dominated by the far right than they later became (including the Christian right), and that the idea of helping out progressive moderates--rather than being Machiavellian--actually appealed to the men at the top.

David Frawley Writes: The Indian English media dictates against the government as if it should be the real political decision-making body in the country. (Because it is urged and influenced by other foreign agencies and academic institutions such as U Berkeley/U Columbia) It deems itself capable of taking the place of legal institutions as well, printing its allegations as truth even if these have never been entered into much less proved in any court of law. It has vested itself with an almost religious authority to determine what is right and wrong, good and evil, and who in the country should be honored or punished.( This is called manufacturing consent) Like an almost theocratic institution, it does not tolerate dissent or allow its dogmas to be questioned.( It creates groupthink, manufactures 'dissent' forcing everybody to fall in line and creates an old boys network).

In the name of editorial policy, it pontificates, promoting slogans, denigrations and articles of faith in the guise of critical policy review. (This is called brainwashing under freedom).

The media doesn't aim at reporting the news; it tries to create the news, imposing its view of the news upon everyone as the final truth. The media doesn't objectively cover elections, it tries to influence voters to vote in a specific manner, demonizing those it disagrees with and excusing those it supports, however bad or incompetent their behavior. We saw this particularly during the recent Gujarat elections in which the media went so far as to print the type of election results it wanted to see as the likely outcome, though voters proved it to be totally wrong.

The Mandate of Media

The question therefore arises as to what affords the media such a sweeping authority that can override legitimately elected and appointed bodies? What sort of mandate has the media been given to justify its actions? Clearly the media has never been elected to any political post and does not undergo any scrutiny like that of candidates in an election. It does not represent any appointed post in the government. It has no accountability to any outside agency. The media's authority is largely self-appointed and, not surprisingly, self-serving. Hence media has become a tool of foreign powers who would like a particular outcome of an election or policy making inside India or image creation.

The sources behind the media's operation and where they get their money is also not revealed. We are not informed as to how prominent reporters and editorial writers derive their income, including how much may come from outside sources. But clearly they are getting a lot of money from somewhere that they are not in any hurry to disclose. Though the media likes to expose the improprieties, financial, sexual and otherwise, of those its dislikes, which it often exaggerates, if not invents, if you examine how the media people live, you certainly wouldn't want them as., role models for your children!

Nor are we certain who the media really represents. Certain groups, not only inside but also outside India, are using this English media as a vested interest to promote their own agenda, which is generally anti-Hindu and often appears to be anti-India as well. Negative news is portrayed more than positive news. President APJ Abdul Kalam asks: "Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements? We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why? Is there an agenda to reduce the achievements of India?" The only reason for the negative news is to reduce the self confidence of Hindus and their place in the world. This is a campaign on a world scale probably never done anywhere. Is this really possible and is this really happening.

The Media Propaganda Machine

A section of the Indian media often appears more as a propaganda machine than an objective news agency. In this regard the large section of English media of India is much like the old state propaganda machines of communist countries. This is an important clue for understanding its operation. The English media of India largely represents a holdover from the Congress era in which it was a state run propaganda center for the Congress government that was far left in its orientation. We can perhaps at understand its actions today as a state run propaganda machine that has continued in power after the decline of the party that created it. Its prime motive has now become to reestablish that old state and former ruling party.

The media remains largely a Congress run propaganda machine. As the Congress has not been able to win elections, it has emphasized its media wing even more strongly to try to compensate for its failures in the electoral arena. Yet as the Congress Party itself has often failed, the media has taken to supporting other leftist groups inside and outside the country in hope of gaining power. There is a clear hand of western governments in manipulating the congress party to do its work. This shows how the Indian government is manipulated as a puppet of the western governments and has been for a long time for the last 40 years.

During independence before and just after, the British have used media to demonize Hindu groups in India. From history K Elst says quote: In November 1944: "It is the subtle scheme of political propaganda to describe the Hindu as pro-Fascist. It is a cruel calumny, which has been spread in America and other countries. The Hindu Mahasabha stood for Savarkar's policy of militarization and industrialization. We recognized that Fascism was a supreme menace to what is good and noble in our civilization. Due to Veer Savarkar's call thousands of young men joined the Army and Navy and Air Force and shed their blood for resisting Nazi tyranny and for real friendship with China and Russia. But as the Hindus had the temerity to ask for National Independence and took the lead in rejecting the Cripps (commission) offer, they were maligned and the subtle forces of organized British propaganda were let loose to blackmail the Hindus." (Hindu Politics, p.103) The current tendency to accuse the Hindu movement for cultural decolonization of India of "fascism" is nothing but a replay of an old colonial tactic."

8 Globalization and Media

An essential prerequisite to sustainable development, for all members of the human family, is the creation of a Global Information Infrastructure. This GII will circle the globe with information superhighways on which all people can travel. The GII will not only be a metaphor for a functioning democracy, it will in fact promote the functioning of democracy by greatly enhancing the participation of citizens in decision-making. I see a new Athenian Age of democracy forged in the fora the GII will create.

We are often said to be in the process of an information revolution-a revolution that is turning the world into a ‘global village’. The global village metaphor is attractive; it is simple; and it is profoundly misleading. It may well be tempting to imagine the world as a village, when a network like CNN can make television audiences in five continents eye witnesses to US marine landings in Somalia, Boris Yeltsin climbing on to a tank in Moscow, or indeed the events at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. From a certain perspective, this is indeed impressive.

But the global information and communication system is far from involving the majority of people around the world-even as consumers, and certainly not as participants or producers. It is a system that perpetuates many inequalities.

The sales revenue of the top twenty media companies-all concentrated in the USA, Japan and Western Europe-amounted to $102 billion in 1992. In the same year the combined GNP of the 45 least developed countries was just $80 billion. In August 1995 the Walt Disney Corporation agreed to pay $19 billion for the US media giant Capital Cities/ABC. Disney’s chairperson Michael Eisner explained that the deal would help his corporation to exploit the world’s growing appetite for ‘non-political entertainment and sports’ (quoted in Squires 1995, p. 139). But the world has other appetites too. That 19 billion dollar sales tag is equivalent to UNICEF’s estimate of the extra cost of meeting worldwide need for basic health and nutrition, and primary education (UNICEF 1995).

When Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are regarded as a better financial investment than fundamental human needs, we are surely a world at risk. In 1985 Neil Postman published a cogent indictment of entertainment culture. The trivialisation of public life and discourse was already so insidious, he warned, that we were in danger of Amusing Ourselves to Death. A decade later, with the Disney corporation poised to become ‘the greatest entertainment company in the next century’ (Michael Eisner again), Postman’s prediction seems chillingly close to fulfillment. Writer Benjamin Barber has correctly observed that ‘Disney’s amusements are much more than amusing. Amusement is itself an ideology. It offers a vision of life that... is curiously attractive and bland’ (Barber 1995). And as Alan Bryman’s study of Disney’s ‘business of fantasy’ points out, the vision of life offered by the entire panoply of Disney products is permeated by a highly traditional form of gender stereotyping (Bryman 1995, p. 130-132).

The Aspirational Culture and Images of Women

Whether or not the world actually has a growing appetite for ‘non-political entertainment and sports is largely irrelevant. In a global information and communication system whose corporate managers characterise their output as ‘product’ (rather than content) and view people as ‘demographics’ (rather than audiences), appetites and aspirations can if necessary be created. Women are often a central target in this process of opening up markets. ‘Polish women have been crying out for a magazine like this’ insisted advertising manager Jack Kobylenski at the 1994 Polish launch of the glossy fashion and beauty magazine Elle, owned by French publisher Hachette. Of course no woman in Poland ever took to the streets to ‘cry out’ for Elle, but the Polish version of the magazine is now the third biggest edition, second only to France and the USA (Meller 1994). In Russia, the American Hearst Corporation’s Cosmopolitan entered the market cautiously in April 1994 with a monthly press run of 60,000; by 1995 this had risen to well over 500,000 and the Russian Cosmo was commonly described as a ‘publishing miracle’. Says its Moscow-based publisher: ‘I knew Cosmopolitan could work here. You looked at Russian women, and you saw... how they wanted to improve themselves. I knew if there was one magazine that shows you how your life can be, a shop window you can look in... it was Cosmo’ (Hockstader 1995).

If women’s magazines are fantasy-like shop windows that ‘show you how your life can be’, the products they display are of course also meant to be purchased-in real shops. But since actual buying power is often extremely limited, this step in the global marketing process requires a more long-term strategy. ‘I take a decade’s view’, said company president Leonard Lauder at the opening of the first Este’e Lauder store in Prague in September 1994. ‘I am a lipstick imperialist. You can’t underestimate the long-term value companies like Este’e Lauder bring to Eastern Europe... One person, one family, can change the whole aspirational culture’ (Menkes 1994). Helping along the process of change is Lauder’s Central European Development Corporation which has a 75% stake in Nova TV, the Czech Republic’s first-and hugely successful-commercial television station. The most popular items in its foreign-dominated programme schedule include Dynasty, M*A*S*H and Disney animations (Gray 1995), all of whose representations of women have been the subject of much criticism.

Interestingly enough, in his lengthy study of Dynasty Jostein Gripstrud makes a direct comparison between its female ‘anti-heroine’ Alexis Carrington Colby (played by Joan Collins) and the Disney creation Cruella de Ville in One Hundred and One Dalmations, who wanted to skin little puppies to make herself a fur coat (Gripstrud, 1995, p. 193). These are the ‘bad’ women of male fantasy, the villainesses whose function is to confirm the proper characteristics of ‘good’ women-passivity and powerlessness, which are the essential attributes of any woman who is to achieve happiness in popular media fiction. The female audience is encouraged to emulate submissive, long- suffering heroines not simply by a media narrative which suggests that this is how they will ‘get their man’. Women are also encouraged to literally ‘buy in’ to the (fantasy) world of such heroines by purchasing products marketed by the shows’ producers. Disney was one of the first to recognise the power of ‘merchandising’. From Alice’s Wonderland in 1924 to Pocahontas in 1995, Disney products-films, television, publications, character dolls, theme parks-have become mutually reinforcing links in a powerful narrative of consumption. During the 1980s the multi-million Dynasty merchandising operation included not just clothes (fans of the programme used to ‘dress up’ to watch the show), but also luggage, linens, jewellery, home furnishings and even optical wear. One of the most successful items was the perfume ‘Forever Krystle’, named after the ‘good’, sympathetic female character Krystle Carrington (played by Linda Evans).

In the first series of Dynasty Krystle, then a subservient secretary, married her brutal boss Blake Carrington and the marriage went through numerous tribulations. In the ads for ‘Forever Krystle’ several years later, Blake is portrayed as an adoring husband who presents his wife with a fragrance specially created for her. Krystle will be happy ‘forever’ after-and by implication so will the women who buy the perfume.

Gender and the Political Economy of Communication

Any consideration of gender portrayal in the media must take account of these wider issues of political economy if existing patterns of representation are to be properly understood and challenged. For as Kamla Bhasin has rightly pointed out: ‘We are not just concerned with how women are portrayed in the media or how many women work in the media. We are also concerned about what kinds of lives they lead, what status they have, and what kind of society we have. The answers to these questions will determine our future strategies for communication and networking. Communication alternatives therefore need to emerge from our critique of the present world order and our vision of the future’ (Bhasin 1994, p. 4).

Certain trends in the information and communication system of the present world order are set to have a considerable impact on the future of people throughout the world. The media mergers of the past decade have not only consolidated huge power in a decreasing number of corporations with global reach. They have also begun to erode old distinctions between information and entertainment, software and hardware, production and distribution. It is this fusion of communication forms, which constitutes a radical break with the past, that presents such a challenge for the future. For although the influence of a single medium such as television is clearly limited in many ways, it is the ‘panoply of cultural means together’ (Schiller 1989, p. 151) that is central to the ability of large media conglomerates to present a world-view that bolsters and reinforces their position in the modern economic system and that system itself.

In this context the significance of ‘lipstick imperialism’ becomes clear. The term puts an intriguing new spin on a concept that dominated much of the debate on international communication during the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Cultural imperialism’-the rallying cry of communication scholars and activists who sought to defend indigenous cultural identity and economic independence-now has a rather anachronistic ring. Yet the free-market economic policies adopted by many countries around the world in recent years have opened the doors to new forms of consumerism, driven by increasingly commercial, increasingly transnational communication media. Reflecting on the current situation in Latin America, Gabriel Escobar and Anne Swardson take the example of MTV Latino, whose ‘message is powerful and still growing, an influential cultural tool in a market already saturated with images and products from the north. But what is most striking about this loud invasion is the silence that has greeted it. Three decades after the Latin American left led a call againt cultural imperialism... the continent has unabashedly embraced -cultura lite’-a universal, homogenised popular culture in which touches of Latin American rhythm or -Spanglish’ accent a dominant North American diet of songs, words and images’ (Escobar and Swardson, 1995). To explain the lack of opposition to this contemporary cultural invasion, Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano echoes Schiller’s ‘panoply’ thesis. By stimulating consumption, he argues, the neo-liberal policies which the countries of the North passionately promote simultaneously stifle resistance and creativity. They have helped to develop in Latin Americans a trend towards imitation and what he describes as a ‘mentality of resignation’.

Such an analysis is equally applicable outside Latin America. MTV Asia-with 28 million viewers in the region-is said to have triggered a change not just in musical tastes, but ‘in social style. In fashions, behaviour, language and morals, more and more youngsters are falling to the thrall of MTV and are drawn into aping the West’ (Menon 1993a, p. 29). Again, this cultural invasion is dictated by economics-as MTV’s director of international programme sales explains: ‘The youth audience is the most sought-after and most lucrative demographic internationally’ (Jenkinson 1994, p.104). Again, the representation of women plays a particular role in the channel’s iconography. Sut Jhally, in his educational documentary Dreamworlds, argues that MTV works systematically to deny women subjectivity.

Jhally demonstrates how the channel constructs an image of women through a patriarchal discourse of ‘nymphomia’-as ever-available objects in an endlessly repetitive male adolescent fantasy world. Other studies agree that, despite the presence of strong female images in some music videos, it is hard to fault the essential truth of this argument.

Media Commercialisation and the Women’s Market

If music television targets the ‘youth demographic’ by using highly sexualised male fantasy images of women, the ‘female demographic’ is itself an increasingly important market in today’s commercial media environment. According to Tor Hansson, managing director for Universal Media in Norway, ‘the most sought-after demographic group in Norway is women between the ages of 25 and 45-and especially professional and middle management women’ (Edmunds 1994, p.4). With advertisers in Norway and Sweden complaining that this lucrative market was not being delivered to them, the powerful Kinnevik media group launched TV6-Scandinavia’s first channel targeted solely to women-in April 1994. Three weeks before its launch, all advertising spots for TV6 had been sold out.

Most of the new channels aimed at women adopt the style and mode of address of women’s magazines-the vehicle through which advertisers have traditionally reached the female consumer. Not surprisingly, publishing giants such as Hearst (USA), Hachette (France), D.C. Thompson (United Kingdom) and Bertelsmann (Germany) were among the first to grasp the additional routes into the female market opened by a proliferation of new cable channels. In 1993 three channels aimed at women were launched in the UK alone. The most successful has been UK Living, providing ‘practical and entertainment’ programmes for women.

The output is ‘comforting, non-threatening and promises not to over-tax your senses, sensitivities or brain-cells. It smacks of tabloid television-the agony aunts, the special offers,... the game shows, the cult of the minor celebrity as social pundit. There are no documentaries or news’ (O’Brien 1993, p. 20). Apolitical and uncontroversial, these channels fit perfectly within the framework of consumerism. To paraphrase the (male) director of Germany’s first women’s television channel TM3, launched in August 1995, they pursue an ideal viewer who is ‘feminine rather than feminist’.

Gems, the first transnational television channel aimed at women, was launched in April 1993 for distribution in the USA and Latin America. The (male) president of International Television which produces the channel’s shows, all made in Spanish, describes it as ‘programming that’s relevant to women, showing musicals, movies and mini-series featuring women’s unique roles’ (Burnett 1993, p. 25). Particularly revealing of the Gems ideology is an advertisement for the channel, run in the trade magazine ‘TV World’ in April 1994: ‘She’s a romantic and a realist. A caretaker and an emerging power.

She’s the gatekeeper of more than $260 billion in the U.S. alone. And she has just one international Spanish-language cable television service talking directly to her. GEMS Television.... GEMS is her TV. Because we empower her in a way cable programming never has before. And because we know she is a treasure. GEMS is her TV. That’s its brilliance’. Telenovelas feature prominently in the schedule, ensuring-according to marketing director Grace Santana-success against any competition: ‘We’ve programming that’s proven-novelas have been around for 40 years’.

That such a channel will ‘empower’ women seems improbable. What does seem likely, however, is that Gems will indeed open up a new gateway to capital-potentially ‘$260 billion in the U.S. alone’. With an audience of 600,000 subscribers shortly after its launch, by early 1995 the Miami-based channel was reaching a potential audience of almost five million viewers throughout the Americas (Weinstock 1995, p. 39). While male-owned commercial women’s channels like these are flourishing, the Canadian Women’s Television Network (WTN)-launched in January 1995 as ‘a dynamic alternative to mainstream viewing: a channel run by women, for women’-is attempting to succeed in the same market, but on quite different terms.

In May 1995 Barbara Barde, WTN’s first Vice President of Programming outlined some of the channel’s distinctive features: ‘WTN has no victims, no violence.... We have women as chief protagonists, women who drive the stories, are in control of their lives.... For us, it is very important that women form part of the creative team of producers, directors and writers... We also have a foundation to which we pledge three-quarters of 1% of our revenues. Its job is two-fold. The first part is research projects, looking at issues relating to women in broadcasting. The second is concerned with mentoring, apprenticeships, etc.... not only mentoring women within our own organisation, but also encouraging conventional broadcasters to do the same.... I think we can be a role model’ (Barde 1995, pp. 18-19).

The philosophy has little in common with that of the male-controlled channels described earlier and-almost inevitably-WTN has met with hostility from male media establishment. When industry ratings, released in July 1995, showed that WTN was the least-watched of Canada’s new cable channels, male critics rushed to the attack. An article by John Haslett Cuff in the Toronto ‘Globe and Mail’ declared that ‘WTN was born with a large chip on its padded shoulders’; in his view, no-one would be surprised by the ratings. On the other hand, Cuff was surprised and disappointed that Bravo, an arts channel, had tied for second-last place in the ratings since it was ‘easily the most stimulating and original of all the new specialty services’. It is instructive to contrast this review with another in ‘TV World’, by Claire Atkinson. She noted that both WTN and Bravo were ‘still finding their audience, although both have won recognition for their programming philosophies.... For WTN.. the problem is that TV viewing is a family affair during primetime, and it isn’t until after 22.00 that women will watch channels on their own’.

The gendered nature of these two reviews is illuminating. Cuff’s comments display a deep and subjective antagonism to the channel; Atkinson reveals a knowledge of the context in which female viewing takes place, and uses this knowledge to interpret the ratings. For WTN itself the ratings would have come as little surprise. As Barbara Barde remarked two months before they appeared, ‘We always expected that our audience would grow slowly, and that we would have to change habits in a large number of households, because guess who controls the remote controls? Not women’ (ibid.). Whether the finances of WTN will allow the channel sufficient time to build up its audience remains to be seen. Rosalind Coward has argued that during the 1980s, series after series of women’s television programmes in the United Kingdom were simply ‘allowed to fail’, while other genres were protected and preserved until they had established themselves (Coward 1987, p. 100). In the 1990s it is clear that any venture of this kind faces an even more formidable array of obstacles, most of which will never be experienced by channels which treasure women as the gatekeepers of dollar bills.

Resisting the Mentality of Resignation: Women’s Media Alliances

The immensity, facelessness and apparent impregnability of today’s media conglomerates undoubtedly help to foster a ‘mentality of resignation’, as Galeano puts it. The mentality of resignation is a sign that people are being, or have been, disempowered. But if certain forms of communication and culture can disempower, others can empower. Over the past twenty years women have not been content merely to denounce biases and inequities in the established media. Women have created and used countless alternative and participatory communication channels to support their struggles, defend their rights, promote reflection, diffuse their own forms of representation. Pilar Rian~o argues that this process has made women the primary subjects of struggle and change in communication systems, by developing oppositional and proactive alternatives that influence language, representations and communication technologies (Rian~o, 1994, p. 11).

Standing outside the mainstream, ‘women’s movement media’ have certainly played a crucial role in women’s struggle around the world. Part of a global networking, consciousness-raising and knowledge creation project, they have enabled women to communicate through their own words and images. If print and publishing have been the most widely used formats, in the past two decades other media such as music, radio, video, film and-increasingly the new communication technologies-have also been important. Over the same period, in most regions there has been a steady growth of women’s media associations and networks, and an increase in the number of women working in mainstream media. Yet as Donna Allen points out ‘there is still a wide gap between the women who have formed networks outside of the ‘mainstream’ media and those women who are employed in mass media who hold the key to reaching the larger public’. The closing of this gap, she argues, ‘is a crucial step toward the advancement of all women’ (Allen 1994, pp. 161, 181). The building of such alliances, and the merging of women’s diverse experiences of working with and in the media, is surely one of the most urgent tasks for women struggling for a more diverse and democratic world information and communication system.

Gender Portrayal in the Media: The Basic Facts

Clearly the debates around gender representation in the media have moved on since the content analyses of ‘sex-roles and stereotypes’ which typified studies of the 1970s in North America and in countries such as Japan, Korea, the Philippines where quantitative social science methods were favoured.

These studies certainly documented women’s exclusion from or silencing in many media forms, and helped to show how media images reinforce notions of ‘difference’-in behaviour, aspirations, psychological traits and so on- between women and men. Studies of this kind are of course still carried out, and they remain important in recording some of the basic elements in a very complex situation. In an ambitious global monitoring exercise, women from 71 countries studied their news media for one day in January 1995. More than 15,500 stories were analysed, and the results were dramatic. Only 17% of people interviewed in the news were women. Just 11% of news stories dealt with issues of special concern to women, or foregrounded any gender perspective on the events reported (MediaWatch, 1995). National monitoring studies, over longer time periods, show similar patterns. The particular power of these studies lies in their potential to document change. In fact, regular media monitoring in Canada and the USA shows surprisingly slow progress towards equal representation of women and men in the media.

Studies since 1974 indicate that ‘peaks’ may be followed by ‘troughs’, with no sustained pattern of improvement. Indeed, according to one of the longest running studies of trends in gender portrayal on US television (carried out since 1969 by the Cultural Indicators research team at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania), ‘the demography of the world of television is impressive in its repetitiveness and stability:... women comprise one-third or less of the characters in all samples except day-time serials where they are 45.5%, and in game shows where they are 55.3%.

The smallest percentage of women is in news (27.8%) and in children’s programmes (23.4%). As major characters, women’s role’s shrink in children’s programmes to 18%... A child growing up with children’s major network television will see about 123 characters each Saturday morning but rarely, if ever, a role model of a mature female as leader’ (Gerbner 1994, pp. 39, 44). The world depicted by the media ‘seems to be frozen in a time-warp of obsolete and damaging representations’ (op. cit., p. 43).

Interpreting Patterns of Portrayal

Obvious numerical imbalances in media portrayals of women and men tell only a small part of the story-and not necessarily the most important part. Of course most studies go further, investigating gender differentiation in social and occupational roles, psychological and personality traits, physical attributes and so on. The results have been extensively documented for most world regions and will not be detailed here. Perhaps the more interesting questions concern the implicit messages which are woven into these media portrayals of women and men. Why is the pattern as it is, and why does it so stubbornly persist despite two decades of research and action aimed at changing it? There are many ways of approaching such questions. For example, I have already argued that discrimination or imbalance in gender portrayal is not an isolated phenomenon which can be studied-or changed-in a compartmentalised way. Media representations of women and men take shape within particular, and changing, socio-economic formations which must themselves be analysed and understood. But there are other issues to consider too.

One is the question of political ideology. In most parts of the world, at different times in history, representations and images of women been used as symbols of political aspirations and social change. An obvious example was the widespread use of particular asexual, ‘emancipated’ female images in Soviet culture: the confident, sturdy woman on her tractor, on the farm, or in the factory. As various recent commentators have pointed out, images of this kind never reflected existing reality. In the words of Olga Lipovskaya, ‘the social realist tradition was intended to create an ideal reality and utilised this model to portray the exemplary woman of the radiant Communist future’.

In such a situation female imagery becomes a metaphor for a particular political ideology, rather than a representation of women’s lives. In her analysis of the powerful media definitions of womanhood in revolutionary China, Elizabeth Croll maintains that ‘imaging’ actually became a substitute for living or experience: ‘With the gradual exclusion of semantic or visual variations of image and text, the rhetoric of equality and celebration soon became the only language officially tolerated... There were no images of, or words for representing, the inequality of experience’ (Croll 1995, p. 80).

In one of the few extensive analyses of female imagery in the Arab States, Sarah Graham-Brown points out that images of women may be used in conflicting ways-as symbols of progress on the one hand, and as symbols of continuity with the cultural past on the other-frequently in reaction to representations of women imposed from outside the society, for instance by the Western media.

Major ideological changes obviously affect the use of female imagery to promote national goals. A clear example, cited by Graham-Brown, is the contrast between the way women were portrayed in the media in Iran during the Pahlavi rule and since the revolution. ‘In both instances, these images form an important element in the way the regimes promote and legitimize themselves. At the same time, neither kind of image necessarily reflects with accuracy the changes or continuities in the everyday life of women in different classes’.

The disjuncture between image and reality becomes profound in situations where governments are attempting to mobilize people for certain kinds of social change. Graham-Brown gives examples from post- independence Algeria and Nasser’s Egypt, where ‘modernist’ and westernised images of women were used as emblems of progress and enlightenment. Yet ‘on the whole, these images of emancipation, while they might promote the idea of the progressive nation, did not challenge basic gender relations in society, particularly male domination of the family structure’ (Graham-Brown 1988, p. 245). In contemporary Egypt, according to Lila Abu-Lughod (1993), there is a similar gap between the ideological message of certain ‘national interest’ television serials and experience of life in particular communities. The interpretation of such images is thus fraught with complications. This does not mean that no indication of changing status, or changing attitudes to women can be gleaned from them. But they cannot be ‘read’ according to any simple formula whereby changes in imagery are assumed to equate with changes of the same magnitude in women’s lives.

Diversity and Change in Gender Portrayal

These examples illustrate the limitations of a framework which sets out to critique ‘negative’ images and to demand ‘positive’ media representations of women. Such a juxtasposition assumes that there is a norm against which images can be judged. In reality, things are much more complicated. The same kind of image can embody a variety of different meanings, depending on the context. A more promising route seems to be offered by the search for greater ‘diversity’ in gender portrayal. But here again, the situation is not completely straightforward. Media representations of women and men in the 1990s may indeed be more diverse than they were twenty years ago. Lawyers, doctors and police officers are no longer inevitably male; and we may even see the occasional male character in the kitchen, weeping into the washing-up bowl. But how important is this change, and what is its significance?

It is true that drama-including popular fiction, soap operas and telenovelas-has to some extent begun to respond to new currents and complexities in gender relations, with occasional portrayals of the ‘new man’ (gentle, supportive, emotional) and the ‘modern woman’ (independent, assertive, resourceful). But detailed analyses suggest that such innovations are often simply a modish facade, behind which lurk old-fashioned formulaic assumptions. Longitudinal studies of Italian television drama show that, despite a scattering of ‘anti-heroes’, output remains overwhelmingly male- centered and success-oriented. In Germany and the United Kingdom, studies have called into question claims that ‘progressive’ soap operas have actually introduced radically different points of view (for example, Externbrink 1992; Geraghty 1995).

In Latin America most of the independent new heroines of recent telenovelas, on closer examination seem to have been introduced as a means of changing the ‘outer wrappings’ of the genre rather than its core messages. In the USA several studies of the successful prime-time series thirtysomething have concluded that despite claims that it articulates a ‘new view of manhood’, the show’s construction of reality is substantially conservative. Even the trail- blazing 1980s female detective series Cagney and Lacey does not escape criticism. Julie D’Acci’s detailed study reveals that although the writers struggled to maintain the show’s original feminist orientation, in the face of pressures imposed by commercial network television, the series gradually became more conventional, ‘feminine’ and exploitative-in the sense of promoting stories that literally ‘cashed in’ on issues of great complexity for women, such as rape, abortion, marital violence and so on (D’Acci 1994).

Sightings of the ‘new man’ in media portrayals have been recorded in countries as different as India, Italy and the USA (Shelat 1994; Buonanno 1994; Douglas 1995). Again, this phenomenon can not automatically be taken at face value. Milly Buonanno sounds a note of caution, pointing out that the ‘new man’ in Italian drama is winning the central position in the family and domestic domain at the expense of women, whose overall share of central roles has fallen over the past four years: ‘Even the domestic sphere, the traditional stronghold of the female character in drama, now seems to be increasingly inhabited by males who show themselves more in command of emotional life than the women do’ (p. 82). A similar concern is expressed by Susan Douglas. Both she and Manisha Shelat question the extent to which these images actually reflect reality in their societies, though for Shelat they are a ‘welcome change’ from the role stereotyping that predominates in the majority of Indian media. But Douglas is less sanguine, seeing the development as a ‘bizarre twist on the real world, where many women have changed, but too many men have not’ (p.81).

This review raises important questions about the extent to which the mainstream media are capable of reflecting diversity and complexity in a way which would properly respond to the current criticisms of women media activists. For this reason, some women remain sceptical of any engagement with the mainstream. But others-like film-maker Michelle Citron-regard it as an essential step forward, providing a possibility of ‘subverting’ and changing mainstream media content, despite the compromises involved: ‘These are risks we need now to take. We will lose a certain amount of control, despite our best intentions and preparedness... But we need new -data’ in order to refine our understanding of (the media) and our relationship to it’ (Citron 1988, p. 62).

The Media and Violence Against Women

In a detailed analysis of how the press covered four prominent sex crimes in the USA over the period 1978 to 1990, Helen Benedict concludes: ‘During the 1980s and 1990s, the quality of sex-crime coverage has been steadily declining... Rape as a societal problem has lost interest for the public and the press, and the press is reverting to its pre-1970s focus on sex crimes as individual, bizarre, or sensationalist case histories’ (Benedict 1992, p. 251). Benedict offers a useful set of suggestions to improve the reporting of sex crimes-covering language, balance, context, focus on attacker rather than victim, and so on. On the specific question of language Ann Jones, author of Next Time, She’ll Be Dead: Battering and How to Stop It, gives numerous examples of crime reporting in which women are victims but their attackers’ violence is masked in the language of love. Says Jones, ‘this slipshod reporting has real consequences in the real lives of real men and women. It affirms a batterer’s most common excuse for assault: “I did it because I love you so much” (quoted in Media Report to Women 1994). It does seem justifiable to suppose that what we see and hear in the media has real consequences in our lives. However the issue of ‘media effects’ raises many complicated questions which I will not attempt to take up in this short paper. Instead I will approach the question of violence primarily from the perspective of the female consumer.

How do women react to the portrayal of violence? It seems fair to conclude that if women are made uncomfortable, anxious or frightened by depictions of violence, then their views deserve to be heard.

In fact, the presentation of violence in the media is an issue which provokes quite divergent reactions between women and men. Women are less likely than men to watch violent programmes and films. And even if they do watch, women may not actually enjoy what they see. In the words of one woman interviewed in a recent British study, ‘women don’t enjoy watching violence in the way that men do, judging by the popularity of violent films. I don’t know any women who get a kick out of watching the after-effects of violence’ (Hargrave 1994, p. 20). Research in the USA shows that women (47%) are much more likely than men (24%) to object to the level of violence on television. A survey of women viewers in Canada found that violence was what concerned women most about television: 34% selected this from a list of seven items of concern, and 36% said they avoid violent programmes on television (MediaWatch 1994). In India women were found to have a ‘strong dislike for (television) films which show violence, and admit to just waiting for the violent scenes to be over so that they could enjoy the next violent-free scene’ (Media Advocacy Group, 1994). Women are also more concerned than men about the possible impact of violent messages. Research in the United Kingdom has shown that 59% of women-compared with 45% of men-would be prepared to give up their freedom to watch violent programmes if it was widely believed that these caused some people to be violent (Docherty, 1990). Of the Canadian women questioned in MediaWatch’s 1994 survey, 82% said they believed that violence in the media contributes to violence in society. More informal reports have found that women in many countries around the world express high levels of anxiety about media violence, and groups such as the Tanzania Media Women’s Association (TAMWA) and Women’s Media Watch in Jamaica have launched campaigns and activities to address the problem.

For women who have actually experienced violence, subsequent exposure to scenes of media violence against women-particularly when portrayed as ‘entertainment’ may be especially painful: ‘There are things that bring it back... I can’t watch extremely violent things, I just want to turn off because the thoughts start and I just don’t want to know’. But even if they have not been victims themselves, seeing violence on television is an extremely disturbing experience for many women. Recent audience research in Germany found that more than half of all female viewers are frightened and feel threatened by the kind of violence presented on television (Roser and Kroll, 1995). Similar findings emerged clearly from an in-depth study in the United Kingdom (Schlesinger et al., 1992) in which women were shown various kinds of violent material, including an episode from Crimewatch UK (a series which reconstructs crimes: the reconstruction used was of a young woman’s rape and murder), and the Hollywood film The Accused (which includes a graphic portrayal of gang rape). One of the most striking findings was ‘the fear of male violence, particularly of rape. This was generally found across all of the viewers, despite class or ethnicity, as was the concern about the possible impact upon children of viewing violence against women on television. In relation to the rape/murder in Crimewatch and the gang rape in The Accused, group discussions revealed a profound anxiety about personal safety’ (op. cit., 166). In the case of The Accused, ‘there was considerable concern about the appropriateness of a Hollywood film-essentially premised on entertainment values-as the most suitable vehicle for dealing with this troubling subject... and worries (which) centered upon what -men’ were likely to make of this film’ (op. cit., 163).

The Center for Media and Public Affairs in the United States analysed the incidence of violence on television over a twenty-four hour day in April 1994.

The number of violent scenes ranged from a low of 71 in the hour between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m., to a high of 295 scenes of violence in the hour from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. (Kolbert 1994). An eight-country study of television violence in Asia conducted by the Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Centre classified 59% of all the programmes studied as ‘violent’, with particularly high levels of violence in India, Thailand and the Philippines (Menon 1993b).

George Gerbner, who has studied television violence for the past twenty years, maintains that ‘Constant displays of violent power and victimization cultivate an exaggerated sense of danger and insecurity among heavy viewers of television’. Clearly, many of the women in the studies mentioned earlier experience this sense of danger and insecurity.

Strong sentiments were also expressed by these women about the extent to which it is acceptable to show representations of violence against women to the general public without adding special safeguards.

Such ideas deserve to be taken seriously, and to enter the public domain so that they become part of the debate on regulation and self-regulation. Satellite communication, by weakening the control of national governments over a growing proportion of media messages and images beamed into their territories from elsewhere, has given this debate a new urgency. But proposals for a global code of practice have been met with general scepticism by the media community. At the national level only a few countries-for example, Australia, Canada and New Zealand-have so far taken a new, tougher stand on television portrayal of violence against women.

The United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women-which defines the term ‘violence against women’ as ‘any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women’-certainly provides scope for actions aimed at reducing or eliminating media violence in general, and scenes of violence against women in particular. Here it is important to bear in mind that media depictions of dramatic aggression against women are at one end of a continuum of media images of women which build up from an apparently benign starting point. For instance the educational video Dreamworlds, mentioned earlier, demonstrates how an accumulation of images in which women are presented as submissive objects of male fantasy in music television may contribute to a perception of the ultimate act of sexual violence-rape-as justifiable and ‘natural’. At the very least, the development of further materials of this sort should be undertaken with a view to documenting how patterns of media violence against women are constructed, and what their implications may be for the lives of women everywhere.

Pornography and Freedom of Expression

Pornography has for many years been a multi-billion dollar international industry. In the United Kingdom alone, 52 million was earned from the sale of pornographic magazines in 1993 (Davies 1994). Recent developments in the information and communication system have made pornography more widely available than ever before. For instance television deregulation, combined with transborder satellite channels, has resulted in a tenfold increase in televised pornography over the past decade in Europe, and the demand is escalating (Papathanassopoulos 1994). New information technologies have introduced various forms of ‘on-line’ pornography. Interactive computer porn is a particularly menacing development. This is quite different from earlier forms, in that the user becomes a participant-a ‘doer’ of pornography rather than merely an observer. Male fantasy myths about women’s sexual availability feature strongly in these products.

In cyberspace and elsewhere, pornographers routinely use ‘freedom of speech’ arguments to defend their right to distribute material which is nothing other than a violation of women’s human right to safety and dignity. In 1986 British Member of Parliament Clare Short tried to introduce a Bill to make illegal the display of naked or partially naked women in sexually provocative poses in newspapers (known in the UK as ‘Page 3 girls’). ‘Killjoy Clare’, as she was dubbed by the Sun newspaper, was accused of ‘authoritarianism’, of wishing to deprive people of one of their few ‘pleasures’, of wanting British newspapers to resemble Pravda. Compared with the displays used in hard-core pornography, Page 3 may seem relatively innocuous. But Clare Short received 5000 letters of support for her proposal, the overwhelming majority from women. Twelve women who had been raped wrote that their attackers said they reminded them of a woman on Page 3, or said they ought to be on Page 3. Since 1986 one major British tabloid newspaper has abandoned its ‘Page 3 girls’, but others maintain the practice.

Pornography is a central issue for the women’s movement, especially in relation to violence against women. It is regarded by many as the key site of women’s oppression. Yet disputes over the regulation of pornography have split women’s groups, raising the spectre of censorship-a weapon which could be used against minority groups and against women themselves. In this respect, recent developments in Canada are of note. In February 1992, a milestone decision, the Canadian Supreme Court upheld a conviction against a pornography dealer and, in so doing, recognised a new definition of obscenity.

The Court ‘recognised the harms to women, children and society arising from pornography as justifying constraint on the free speech rights of pornographers. The expression found in obscene material, the Court concluded, lies far from the core of the guarantee of free expression’ (Easton 1994, p. 178). The Butler decision, as it became known, has had important and not entirely predictable consequences. Women saw it as a huge step forward, opening up the possibility of convictions in other areas of media content which could also be proven to degrade or dehumanise women. But the unforeseen consequence was a crackdown on works by prominent homosexual and lesbian authors and, for a time, Andrea Dworkin-one of America’s fiercest opponents of pornography, whose book Pornography: Men Possessing Women was temporarily seized by the Canadian customs.

The regulation of pornography is also a contentious issue for women partly because the term ‘pornography’ has been confused-even in legal instruments-with the concept of ‘obscenity’. The definition of obscenity-filthy, disgusting, indecent-implies a moral judgement with which women may feel uncomfortable. The definition of pornography in most feminist literature follows that of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin: ‘the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures or words’ (MacKinnon 1987, p. 176). This perspective shifts the arguments against pornography away from the terrain of morality, towards an interpretation of pornography as a violation of women’s rights. Yet even here there are problems. One criticism of the civil rights Ordinances of Minneapolis and Indianapolis, drafted by MacKinnon and Dworkin in the 1980s as a means of regulating pornography, was that terms such as ‘sexual objectification’, ‘degradation’, ‘subordination’-on which appeal to the Ordinances depended-left too much scope for judicial interpretation and could be used against women. As Carol Smart (1989) argues, traditional judicial attitudes reflect a legal framework which is essentially incompatible with the definitions of feminism, and which cannot accommodate the complexity of feminist arguments. However, Susan Easton (1994) takes the view that-rather like the mainstream media-this is an area of challenge for feminists, who must work to infuse new ideas into established legal frameworks. As one of a number of strategies to deal with pornography, she advocates the enactment of a law to prohibit ‘incitement to sexual hatred’.

Of course the polarisation of the pornography debate in terms of ‘free speech’ versus ‘censorship’ fails to take account of the fact that freedom of expression is limited in all sorts of ways for most people, most of the time. As A.J. Liebling remarked many years ago, ‘Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one’. In today’s media context, the aphorism rings particularly true. Eastman points out that the feminist argument against pornography ‘is not an isolated assault on free speech rights, but could be seen as a recognition of the difficulty and undesirability of an absolutist position on free speech in a pluralist society’ (1994, p. 174). Since they have relatively restricted access to the channels of communication, it is hardly surprising that women’s attitudes towards ‘free speech’ differ from those of men. For example, a study of attitudes among journalism students in the USA found that the women see the free speech issue from a dual perspective. While they value the operation of a ‘free press’, they also believe that absolute freedom of expression can be harmful to them and to others. The authors conclude optimistically that if the female students carry their attitudes towards free expression with them into the journalistic work force, ‘society may see a somewhat different set of professional values in the future’ (McAdams and Beasley 1994, p. 23).

Women as Users of Media and New Technologies

Gender differences in media access are linked with patterns of discrimination in society at large, and with patterns of power relations within the home. In many parts of the world, high female illiteracy rates mean that women have little access to the print media. As for television and radio, women may not always be able to watch or listen to their preferred programmes. Research in countries as different as Mozambique, Zambia, India, the USA and the United Kingdom shows that, in family viewing and listening situations, the decisions of the adult male in the household tend to prevail. Nevertheless, these and other studies show that women are enthusiastic media users. In Egypt certain groups of women are particularly avid television viewers: one study found that 21% of women-compared with 11% of men-spent on average more than four hours a day in front of the small screen (El-Fawal 1991). In a study of relatively low-income, poorly educated women in Nigeria, 96% had access to radio within the household or compound and television was available to 89%. More than two-thirds of the women listened to the radio every day, and just under one-third watched television daily (Imam 1992). In Ecuador, Rodriguez (1990) found that 94% of the working-class women she surveyed had radio in their homes, and over half listened at least three hours a day. In Brazil almost every woman in three low-income areas studied by Tufte (1992) had television in her house, and the women watched an average of three to four telenovelas a day, six days a week.

These Brazilian women’s heavy viewing of telenovelas reflects a universal, gendered pattern of media preferences. All over the world men prefer sports, action-oriented programmes and information (especially news); women prefer popular drama, music/dance and other entertainment programmes. These programme choices are most easily explained in terms of the extent to which women and men are able to identify with various types of media content. One of the most obvious reasons for women’s preference for serialised drama, soap opera and telenovelas is the exceptionally high proportion of female characters in such programmes. Nor is it surprising that men favour genres such as action drama which feature powerful, dynamic male characters, or sports and news which revolve almost exclusively around male figures. It is reasonable to wonder what impact these repetitive patterns of gender representation have on the female-and the male-audience. During the 1980s there was a vogue for research into ‘women’s genres’-soap opera, melodrama, magazines-leading to the conclusion that these could ‘empower’ women. Recent studies have criticised such claims as being wildly exaggerated, and have focused on the fundamentally conservative and patriarchal frameworks within which these genres operate.

The problem is that in most other types of media content women simply do not see or hear any reflection of themselves, or of their experience of life. Television sports coverage in Europe provides a good example of the ways in which women’s media choices are limited. Audience data for six countries in 1992 showed that, in all six, the sporting events most watched by men were football matches (Akyuz 1993). But women watched other sports. In France, the event which got the top female audience-over 8 million viewers, which was higher than the male audience for any sporting event-was women’s figure skating at the Winter Olympics.

According to the same data, the event which attracted the largest female audience in the United Kingdom was the women’s 10,000 meters final in the Summer Olympics, though this reached only 8th place among male audiences. So it is not that women don’t like watching sport, but that they like watching different sport. In particular, they like ‘women’s sport’. Unfortunately for women, the television sports schedules are built around male and not female preferences.

Similarly, news and current affairs programmes reflect a hierarchy of values in which the issues that concern women are given low priority, if covered at all. Recent research with British viewers shows that although women feel ambivalent about the concept of ‘women’s issues’-believing that once an issue becomes labelled as being of exclusive concern to women, it is in danger of being marginalised-there is also a shared understanding among women about issues that do concern them, and a feeling that these are not given priority in the news media. As one woman put it: ‘Women’s issues don’t always get enough airtime on the so-called serious programmes. They don’t have the same weight as world politics-which they should do, because they are about changing society in fundamental ways’ (Sreberny-Mohammadi 1994, p. 69).

When asked directly, many women are clear that their preferences are not catered for by the media. In common with women recently surveyed in Canada and Germany (MediaWatch 1994; Roser and Krull 1995), most of those interviewed in Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi’s research said that women should have more visibility on television, that there should be stronger female characters in drama and entertainment, and that there should be more women of authority in news and current affairs output.

The participants felt that more women journalists and more female experts voicing opinions across a variety of issues would act as significant role models for other women, stimulate female interest in public issues, and-perhaps-sometimes speak in the interests of and for women (op. cit., p. 75).

The potential of the new information and communication technologies for the advancement of women is considerable. Networking, research, training, sharing of ideas and information-all these could be made infinitely easier through relatively affordable computer-mediated communications such as E-mail, Internet, hypertext and hypermedia (Steffen 1995). However, the obstacles are formidable. Unequal access to computers at school and in the home; highly male-dominated computer languages and operating systems; a hostile environment in which sexual harassment, sexual abuse and pornography flourish; these are just some of the factors which deter women from entering cyberspace. Gender-differentiated data on access to the new technologies are scarce, but those available do indicate that women are more reluctant users than men. In the United Kingdom in 1992 27% of women (compared to 37% of men) owned a home computer (Mackay 1995). Almost identical figures were reported in 1994 for the USA, where just 9% of women (and 15% of men) also had a computer modem-essential for use of E-mail and Internet. However 46% of women in this survey were dissatisfied with their level of technical know- how, suggesting that women may be frustrated users rather than completely uninterested in the new technologies.

Women comprise only about 10% of the Internet population in the USA. On the other hand Women’s Wire-a commercial on-line service-has 90% to 95% female subscribers. Aliza Sherman recommends this kind of service-‘providing women-specific information on topics such as women’s health, politics, news, technology, business, finance, and family’-as a good starting point for women wary of cyberspace (Sherman 1995, p 26). Dale Spender claims that there are literally thousands of women’s groups now on-line, though it seems that most of them are located in-and relatively limited to-North America. An exception is Virtual Sisterhood, described as a ‘network for women around the world to share information, advice and experiences’ which claims to have links with women’s networks in a wide range of countries in Asia and Latin America (op. cit., p. 238). At the international level, the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) is among the most actively involved in supporting women through electronic communication. Women in Latin America as well as Canada and the USA have been using the APC networks for information exchange, and the APC Women’s Networking Support Program has provided training workshops for women in Africa and Asia. The presence of a 40-strong all-women APC team at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 introduced countless women to the possibilities of electronic communication, creating connections-technological and human-which will doubtless flourish in the years ahead.

But despite the hyperbole, it is important to remember that these new technologies are inherently no ‘better’ than the old ones-print, radio, television etc. For example, to claim-as British scholar Sadie Plant does-that the Internet is an inherently equalizing, non-hierarchical, even liberating communication system seems somewhat overstretched. Already, as Herman Steffen points out, ‘large corporations are trying to turn cyberspace into a televised shopping mall where communications is one-way (entertainment) unless the consumer wishes to buy something; if so, he is welcome to communicate by punching in his credit-card number’ (op. cit., p. 16). In that sense, cyberspace merely provides women with a new terrain on which to wage old struggles.

Changing the Picture: Five Strategies for the Future

As we reach the close of the twentieth century, there is little evidence that the world’s communication media have a great deal of commitment to advancing the cause of women in their communities. Although the presence of women working within the media has increased in all world regions over the past two decades, real power is still very much a male monopoly.

And while it is relatively easy to make proposals for the implementation of equality in the area of employment-and to measure progress-the issue of media content is much more problematic. Who is to decide what is acceptable in this domain? What criteria should be used to evaluate progress?

Research (and experience) has shown that purely quantitative measures are completely inadequate to describe gender portrayal in the media, much less to interpret its meaning or significance. There may be fairly widespread agreement that certain types of media content-for example, violent pornography or child pornography-are completely unacceptable and degrading to women, and should be strictly regulated. But what about the routine trivialisation and objectification of women in advertisements, the popular press, and the entertainment media? What about the prime-time television shows, watched by millions, in which women are regularly paraded as the mute and partly-clothed background scenery against which speaking and fully-clothed men take centre-stage? And how many women feel uneasy, or downright fearful, if they are alone at night in a taxi which stops at traffic lights beside an advertising poster adorned with a semi-naked, pouting female image? There are important rights and responsibilities involved here, and the conflicts are obvious. We have hardly begun to address them, much less find ways of reconciling them.

In terms of strategies for change, there are perhaps five broad areas in which simultaneous and coordinated activity could bring results. Within each of these, I will merely indicate the types of action which seem particularly important, rather than explore the many approaches and initiatives which have already been tried.

1. First, there needs to be pressure from within the media themselves. More women must be employed-at all levels and in all types of work-in the media, so that we do finally achieve the critical mass of female creative and decision-making executives who could change media output. Numbers are important, if long-established media practices and routines are to be challenged. To quote the veteran American journalist, Kay Mills: ‘A story conference changes when half the participants are female... There is indeed security in numbers. Women become more willing to speak up in page-one meetings about a story they know concerns many readers’ (Mills 1990, p. 349).

There is evidence that, when they do constitute a reasonable numerical force, women can and do make a difference. For instance, in the United States a 1992 survey of managing editors of the largest 100 daily newspapers found that 84% of responding editors agreed that women have made a difference, both in defining the news, and in expanding the range of topics considered newsworthy-women’s health, family and child care, sexual harassment and discrimination, rape and battering, homeless mothers, quality of life and other social issues were all cited as having moved up the hierarchy of news values because of pressure from women journalists (Marzolf 1993). In their study of press coverage in India during the 1980s, Ammu Joseph and Kalpana Sharma (1994) conclude that female journalists played an important role in focusing attention on issues of crucial importance to women: dowry-related deaths, rape, the right to maintenance after divorce, the misuse of sex determination tests, and the re-emergence of sati. But it is not just a question of introducing ‘new’ topics (though they are age-old concerns for women) on to the news agenda. As we know from the example of war reporting in the former Yugoslavia, women have also succeeded in changing the way in which ‘established’ issues are covered. Similarly, in the Asian context, Joseph and Sharma note a qualitative difference in reporting of the conflict in Sri Lanka by Indian women journalists who ‘focussed on the human tragedy unfolding in that country while also dealing with the obvious geopolitical aspects of the ethnic strife. By contrast, the latter was the sole preoccupation of most of the male journalists covering the conflict’ (op.cit., p. 296).

2. The second need is for pressure from outside the media, in the form of consumer action and lobbying. One of the many paradoxes of the move towards the market-led media systems that are developing all around the world is that in some respects it places more power in the hands of the consumer. Not surprisingly, this was recognised long ago in North America, where strong media lobby groups already exist. In Canada for instance, Media Watch-established in the early 1980s-has secured the removal of numerous sexist advertisements, has worked with national broadcasters and advertising associations to develop guidelines on gender portrayal, and has effectively lobbied to secure a strongly worded equality clause in Canada’s 1991 Broadcasting Act. Elsewhere the Tanzania Media Women’s Association (TAMWA), Women’s Media Watch in Jamaica, and the Media Advocacy Group in India have all made an impact with both the media and the public. In Europe initiatives of this sort have barely started. In Spain the Observatorio de la Publicidad (created in early 1994 by the Instituto de la Mujer), and in Italy the Sportello Immagine Donna (established in 1991 by the Commissione Nazionale per la Parita‘) have begun to provide mechanisms through which complaints can be organised and channelled. However, these are rare examples. Strong women’s media associations do exist in a many countries, but often their primary purpose is to defend women’s professional interests as media workers. There is a real need to develop monitoring and lobby groups which could organise effective campaigns and protests on a national and-when necessary-a regional and even a global level.

3. The third area is media education. It is astonishing how little the public in general, and even media professionals themselves, understand the subtle mechanisms which lead to patterns of gender stereotyping in media content. This emerged clearly from recent research by the Broadcasting Standards Council in the United Kingdom. For instance, they found that women viewers had even ‘no concept of the script-writer developing characters in a particular way and accepted with little question the presentation of women that they were offered’ (Hargrave 1994, p. 21) There is a great deal of talk-particularly in academic and political circles-about the portrayal of women in the media. But abstract discussions about ‘sexist stereotyping’ and ‘negative images of women’ are unlikely to promote true understanding of what is involved, much less lead to real change. What is needed are effective, practical workshops built around specific media examples. In this sense, the NOS Portrayal Department in the Netherlands is exemplary. It was launched as a five-year project in 1991, and has built up a unique collection of audio- visual examples-as well as specially produced material-which are used in training sessions and workshops with programme-makers. Media education is a key strategy. The development of national and regional banks of examples and materials, which illustrate the many ways in which gender stereotyping occurs, would be a tremendous contribution to its success.

4. The fourth need is for pressure from above so that, for example, media organisations are encouraged to adopt guidelines and codes of conduct on the fair portrayal of women. The media in most countries already have guidelines that govern particular aspects of their output such as the portrayal of violence, or the regulation of advertising. In some countries-for instance Canada, the United Kingdom-certain media organisations also have guidelines covering the ways in which women are portrayed. These guidelines have been made to work, and they could work in other organisations too. Given the development of transborder and global communication systems, there is also an urgent need for regional and international codes of practice. This is a delicate matter, which would undoubtedly provoke immediate and vociferous objections from the media communities. For example, in 1995 the European Union adopted a Resolution on the image of women and men portrayed in advertising and media.

As a result of fierce lobbying by the media industry, the final text is very much weaker than the initial draft. However, it is still a useful document. Despite the inevitable opposition, it is important to work towards the development of regulatory texts and codes of conduct in all countries and regions.

5. The final need is for international debate aimed at a reinterpretation of ‘freedom of expression’ within the framework of a women’s human rights perspective, and the subsequent development of a global code of ethics based on this new interpretation. Such an undertaking would certainly provoke controversy. Cees Hamelink points out that the pursuit of democracy in world communication has been all but abandoned because ‘the gospel of privatisation... declares that the world’s resources are basically private property, that public affairs should be regulated by private parties on free markets’ (Hamelink 1995, p. 33). Moreover the belief that a free market guarantees the optimal delivery of ideas and information means that-in a bizarre way-the terms ‘free market’ and ‘free speech’ have become almost interchangeable.

With more and more communication channels in the control of fewer and fewer hands, it is surely time for a fundamental reinterpretation of the doctrine of freedom of speech, and the search for a new definition of this ‘freedom’ which takes full account of the contemporary global economic, information and communication system and of women’s place within it. The 1995 report of the World Commission on Culture and Development provides a lead here.

The Commission points out that the airwaves and space are part of a ‘global commons’-a collective asset that belongs to all humankind, but which is at present used free of charge by those who possess resources and technology. It goes on to suggest that ’the time may have come for commercial regional or international satellite radio and television interests which now use the global commons free of charge to contribute to the financing of a more plural media system’ (World Commission on Culture and Development 1995, p. 278).

Conclusion

The World Commission on Culture and Development makes a number of very concrete proposals aimed at ‘enhancing access, diversity and competition’ in the international media system (op. cit., pp. 278-281, emphasis added). But its view of ‘competition’ is a radical one, whose starting point is human and cultural diversity, rather than financial markets. Radical as it is, this approach offers women more hope than the information superhighways of the Global Information Infrastructure extolled by Vice President Al Gore. The Vice President, it will be remembered, envisions ‘a new Athenian Age of democracy forged in the fora the GII will create’. But the Vice President seems to have forgotten that Athenian democracy did not extend its membership to women.

9 Media and its Role in American Society

Introduction

There has been no shortage of government propaganda on all sides of the recent Iranian-British detainment crisis. British and American leaders have denounced Iran for intimidation, coercion, and arrogance, while Iranian leaders have made similar charges against the Bush and Blair governments. The dispute between the three countries only recently came to an end with the unconditional release of the “hostages” (as they were labeled by Western leaders) two weeks after their initial detainment. It is worth seriously reflecting on American media coverage of the British-Iranian standoff, at least if one is interested in understanding the nature of foreign policy news coverage of events in the Middle East.

In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky lay the foundations for a “propaganda model,” which postulates that American mass media reporting and editorializing strongly and uncritically privilege official perspectives. Official sources are treated with deference, and U.S. humanitarian rhetoric elaborating high-minded goals of American foreign policy is left largely unquestioned.

The propaganda of U.S. allies and client regimes is accorded positive coverage (and certainly not referred to as propaganda), while dissidents and officially designated “enemies” of state are denigrated and denounced for coercive, terrorist, and/or aggressive behavior. Such claims against the American mass media are not meant to be taken lightly, as they should be made the subject of serious empirical testing and scrutiny. It so happens that the British-Iranian standoff represents an important opportunity to test the propaganda model in the realword.

History

On March 23, 2007, an Iranian gunship detained 7 marines and 8 sailors of the British Royal Navy near the Shatt al-Arab waterway off of the coast of Iran and Iraq. The British Navy personnel were inspecting vessels suspected of smuggling goods to and from Iraq, when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard picked them up, claiming they had illegally entered Iranian national waters. American media reports soon referred to the situation as a major confrontation between Britain and Iran, as both governments placed blame squarely on the other, refusing to admit to any sort of wrongdoing.

American leaders, retaining a long history of antagonistic relations with Iran, predictably reacted by denouncing the detainment as a violation of international law and as an act of unprovoked aggression. Dan Barlett, White House Counselor, described “a long history from the Iranian government of bad actions it’s taken, further isolating themselves from the international community.” President Bush called the detainment “inexcusable,” claiming about the Iranian personnel: “They’re innocent, they did nothing wrong, and they were summarily plucked out of waters.”

Those hoping the American media would react more calmly than the U.S. and British governments, carefully weighing evidence in favor of a fair portrayal of the conflict, were in for a disappointment. As the propaganda model predicts, the American mass media are quick to demonize the actions of official “enemies,” while exonerating the U.S. or allied governments for any blame.

In no uncertain terms, Max Hastings argued in the New York Times that “Iran represents a menace to the security of us all,” while the Washington Post editors railed against the “illegal attacks against a major Western power,” despite the fact that there was still uncertainty at the time over whether the British troops had been in Iranian waters or not. Of the four editorials run by the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times on the detainment incident, all condemned Iranian leaders for utilizing propaganda in pursuit of selfish motives. The Los Angeles Times editors labeled the sailors and marines “innocent” victims of Iranian “escalation.”

American Reports

As with major editorials, American reporting on the conflict also tended to heavily promote official Western frames. Of the 49 major stories run by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post (found through a comprehensive search of the Lexis Nexis database), 54% of all sources quoted were British, as opposed to 30% that were Iranian. Western sources (including British and American) dominated media narratives even more thoroughly, comprising on average 70% of all sources quoted by the three papers. Such sources tended more often to promote antagonistic views of Iranian leaders, while presenting heroic and resolute images of U.S. and British leaders, under siege as a result of Iranian aggression and coercion.

Of course, there is nothing inevitable about the fact that most sources were pro-Western in nature. There were, after all, reporters in Iran from Reuters and the Associated Press, amongst other reporting agencies and organizations operating in Tehran, who filed reports based upon the statements of Iranian leaders, military officials, media, dissidents, and specialists. If American media outlets wanted to pursue a more balanced approach to reporting the standoff, equally citing British and Iranian sources, they could have done so. Pursuing a more balanced approach, however, would require that American reporters and editors not pursue (as one of their major objectives) the uncritical transmission of official propaganda at the expense of alternative views.

Further evidence for claims of propagandistic news coverage is seen in the heavy reliance of the U.S. print media on American and British government officials, who were disproportionately quoted in reporting the British-Iranian standoff. Of all the British and American sources quoted in the major stories from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post on the incident, 80% of British and 73% of American sources were either from government or former government officials, or from military sources. Conversely, only 20% of British and 27% of American sources came from non-government sources such as other media, academics and specialists, activists and dissidents, or people on the street.

Aside from looking at source bias, there are other ways in which to test the propaganda model concerning American news coverage of the standoff. It so happens that the Iranian detainment of British personnel (in March 2007) was preceded by a detainment of Iranian government officials by the United States in Iraq (in January 2007). Both incidents are generally comparable in nature, although the U.S. detainment is arguably more extreme than the Iranian detainment, upon reflecting on the facts surrounding the cases.

On January 11, U.S. armed forces conducted a raid on an Iraqi foreign liaison office in the Kurdish city of Irbil, detaining 5 Iranian intelligence officials who were a part of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. While the 5 were not officially diplomats, they were members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s al-Quds Brigade, on an official mission to Iraq, representing the Iranian government. The officials were in the process of being awarded diplomatic status at the time of the U.S. detainment. The officials did not illegally enter the country on a covert mission; quite the contrary, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari explained that they were “not [on] a clandestine operation…They were known by us…They operated with the approval of the regional government and with the knowledge of the Iraqi government. We were in the process of formalizing that liaison office into a consulate.”

U.S. leaders claimed the raid was necessary in order to send a message to Iranian leaders to stop “meddling” in Iraqi affairs. Iran had been accused by U.S. leaders of providing improvised explosive devices to Iraqi “insurgents” to be used against American troops. Iran had also been accused of providing money, weapons, and training to Iranian militias and “insurgents,” and in threatening U.S. attempts to “stabilize” a war-torn Iraq. Of course, Iraqi leaders explicitly rejected U.S. charges of Iranian “meddling” in Iraqi affairs, filing numerous protests of the U.S. detainment operation. Kurdish officials labeled the attack as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty and
a violation of international law. Iraq’s Foreign Minister
explained that the detainment of one of the Iranian officials (who had been an accredited diplomat) was “embarrassing for my country.”

The U.S. and Iranian detainments represent a rare opportunity to conduct a natural experiment into the ways in which comparable military operations between the United States and “enemy” regimes are portrayed in the American media. The reasons for expecting comparable coverage between the two abduction stories are numerous.

As the Iranian detainment of British sailors was protested as illegal by British and American leaders, so too was the U.S. detainment of Iranian officials heavily protested by Iraqi and Iranian leaders as illegal. Both abductions represented major standoffs between powers attempting to exert their authority in the Middle East.

One could easily argue that the U.S. detainment of Iranian officials should have garnered even more attention than the Iranian detainment of British personnel. In the case of the U.S. detainment, the Iranian officials were in Iraq legally, with the express permission of the Iraqi government. Conversely, the legal status of the British and American occupation of Iraq has been widely considered illegal under international law at the highest levels of organizations like the United Nations (hence any operations of British or American troops could also be deemed illegal).

On another level, the U.S. detainment of the Iranian officials was explicitly authorized at the highest levels of the American government (a clear case of official U.S. provocation against Iran), whereas it was unknown at the time of the reporting of the British-Iranian standoff whether the detainment of British Navy personnel was ordered at the highest levels of the Iranian government or not. Furthermore, Iran’s detainment of British forces paled in comparison to the U.S. detainment of Iranians in terms of potential for inciting a hostile reaction. This is most clearly evident in that the Bush administration explicitly authorized the kidnapping or killing of Iranian government officials within Iraq, whereas the Iranian government made clear no such intentions in terms of its treatment of British detainees.

The killing of foreign political officials has been expressly rejected as illegal under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and the 1973 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons, both of which the United States and Iran have ratified. The assassination or killing of any Iranian official invited into Iraq, then, represents a violation of the aforementioned international legal protections. Violation of such laws is a sufficient reason in-and-of-itself for major coverage of the U.S. abduction of Iranian officials.

Despite expectations of comparable coverage, the propaganda model is once again vindicated after one reviews the extreme imbalance of coverage of the two detainment incidents. In the two week period following the U.S. detainment of Iranian officials, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post each reported only three major stories on the incident, for a total of nine stories. Conversely, U.S. media coverage from these three newspapers totaled 49 major stories in the two week period following the Iranian detainment of British personnel.

In sum, the actions of an “enemy” regime were deemed far more salient and worthy of attention than the potentially embarrassing actions of the United States, which had been ardently condemned as a violation of international law and Iraqi national sovereignty. While reporting on the British-Iranian “standoff” was largely dominated by official narratives and frames, the U.S. detainment operations were portrayed as essential in promoting American self-defense, protection of American troops, and in opposition to Iranian aggression and terrorism.

Such points were perhaps most blatantly evident in a Los Angeles Times editorial insisting that the “U.S. has every right [emphasis added] to insist on the arrest, prosecution, or expulsion from Iraq of Iranians, officials or not, who abet terrorism.” Deference to U.S. justifications was also evident in light of over-reliance on official statements, to the neglect of non-official ones.

In a final test of the propaganda model, one may examine the ways in the Iranian-British standoff was distinguished from the earlier U.S. detainment of Iranians in terms of discounting a possible cause and effect relationship. Did the U.S. abduction of Iranian officials incite Iranian leaders to respond against the U.S. or its allies in Iraq by abducting British military personnel? While a complete answer to this question seems elusive, the posing of the question should have been a priority if the American media were committed to understanding possible root causes of the British-Iranian standoff.

In the case of British media coverage, one can see that the question of a causal link between the two incidents was focused on more intensively. In a number of potentially explosive stories reported during the March standoff, the Independent of London reported that the original targets in the U.S.-Iranian detainment in January had been government officials with far higher credentials than the low-level officials who were actually detained in U.S. operations.

The United States, the Independent reported, had attempted to capture “two senior Iranian officers…Mohammed Jafari, the powerful deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the Chief of Intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.” The source of these charges came from Kurdish officials, who explained that Jafari and Frouzanda “were in Kurdistan on an official visit during which they met with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and later saw Massoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).”

The significance of the failed capture of these officials was presented lucidly by Patrick Cockburn of the Independent: “The attempt by the US to seize the two-high ranking Iranian security officers openly meeting with Iraqi leaders is somewhat as if Iran had tried to kidnap the heads of the CIA and MI6 while they were on an official visit to a country neighboring Iran, such as Pakistan or Afghanistan. There is no doubt that Iran believes that Mr Jafari and Mr Frouzanda were targeted by the Americans.

In a number of reports, Cockburn suggested a direct cause-and-effect link between the original U.S. detainment and the following British-Iranian standoff (“The Botched U.S. Raid that Led to the Hostage Crisis,” and “American Raid and Arrests Set Scene for Capture of Marines”). He argued that “Better understanding of the seriousness of the US action in Irbil – and the angry Iranian response to it – should have led Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence to realize that Iran was likely to retaliate against American or British forces such as highly vulnerable Navy search parties in the Gulf…The attempt by the U.S. to seize the two high-ranking Iranian security officers” was “a far more serious and aggressive act. It was not carried out by proxies but by US forces directly.”

While the Independent’s reports were subsequently picked up by other mainstream British media sources, neither the story, nor its charges, appear to have received any headline coverage in the major American print media. There was no coherent or systematic effort in the American press to report charges that the two abductions were directly related. This decontextualization is best seen in a breakdown of the 19 stories (out of the total 49 major stories on the British-Iranian “standoff’) in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post that did mention the U.S. January abduction in their reporting.

Out of those 19 stories, only 5 (all from the Washington Post) suggested that there might be a causal relationship between the U.S. and Iranian detainments; 14 stories either suggested no link or explicitly refuted suggestions of one. Only one story (from the Los Angeles Times) directly referenced the Independent story, although the reference was not in the headline, but buried deep within the article. Importantly, none of the 49 stories on the British-Iranian “standoff” discussed the charge that Iran’s detainment of British personnel might have been motivated by the failed U.S. attempt to seize senior Iranian officials a few months earlier.

Whether it is in the over-reliance on British and American official sources over non-official ones, the systematic marginalization of comparable news coverage implicating both U.S. “enemies” and the U.S. in aggression or violation of international law, or the suppression of explosive charges against the United States for provoking a hostage crisis, the American press has revealed itself as extraordinarily subservient to the agendas of the American foreign policy elite.

Official “enemies” are vilified (at times for good reason), while the questionable actions of American leaders are largely left unchallenged, as professional norms of “objectivity” do not allow for the challenge of official statements. As the propaganda model suggests, American reporters have faithfully taken to the role of an unofficial propaganda arm for the state, most blatantly during times when the United States rules in favor of allies and client regimes against powers deemed antagonistic to U.S. interests.

10 New Media and New Technologies

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’?

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: 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?

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 ‘inter-texts’ 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.

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.

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 and open up new creative and communicative horizons. Calling a range of developments ‘new’, which may or edutainment, edutainment may not be new or even similar, is part of a powerful ideological movement and a narrative about progress in Western societies.

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.

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).

What is new about interactivity?

So, while a person using the term ‘new media’ may have one thing in mind (the Internet), others may mean something else (digital T V, 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.

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 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.

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.

The characteristics of new media: some defining concepts

• New experiences of the relationship between embodiment, identity and com-munity: 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.

• New patterns of organisation and production: wider realignments and integrations in media culture, industry, economy, access, ownership, control and regulation.

• If we were to set out to investigate any one of the above, we would quickly find ourselves encountering a whole array of rapidly developing fields of technologically mediated production (user-generated content) and even a history of such as the site for our research. These would include:

• Computer-mediated communications: email, chat rooms, avatar-based communication forums, voice image transmissions, the World Wide Web, blogs etc., social networking sites, and mobile telephony.

• New ways of distributing and consuming media texts characterised by interactivity and hypertextual formats – the World Wide Web, CD, DVD, Podcasts and the various platforms for computer games.

• Virtual ‘realities’: simulated environments and immersive representational spaces.

• A whole range of transformations and dislocations of established media (in, for example, photography, animation, television, journalism, film and cinema).

The characteristics of new media: some defining concepts

In previous section we noted that the unifying term ‘new media’ actually refers to a wide range of changes in media production, distribution and use. These are changes that are technological, textual, conventional and cultural. Bearing this in mind, we nevertheless recognise that since the mid-1980s at least (and with some changes over the period) a number of concepts have come to the fore which offer to define the key characteristics of the field of new media as a whole. We consider these here as some of the main terms in discourses about new media. These are: digital, interactive, hypertexual, virtual, networked, and simulated.

Before we proceed with this, we should note some important methodological points that arise when we define the characteristics of a medium or a media technology. What we are calling ‘characteristics’ here (digital, interactive, hypertexual etc.) can easily be taken to mean the ‘essential qualities’ of the medium or technology in question. When this happens being ‘digital’, for example, ceases to mean a source of possibilities, to be used, directed, and exploited. It becomes, instead, a totalising or overarching concept which wholly subsumes the medium in question. There is then a danger that we end up saying, ‘Because a technology is like “this” (electronic, composed of circuits and pulses which transform colour, sound, mass or volume into binary digital code) it necessarily results in “that” (networked, fleeting and immaterial products)’. To make this move risks the accusation of ‘essentialism’ (an ‘essentialist’ being someone who argues that a thing is what it is because it possesses an unchanging and separable essence:).

One of the complete human-headed lions from the entrance to the throneroom of Ashurnasirpal II now in the British Museum. The head of a corresponding sculpture can be seen in the foreground. These two figures were recorded using a NUB 3D Triple White light scanning system. They were recorded and milled at a resolution of 400 microns.

With regard to ‘digitality’ an instructive example is offered by the work carried out by the artists and technicians of ‘Factum–Arte’, a group who use digital technology to reproduce ancient artefacts such as sculptures, monuments, bas-reliefs and paintings. These are not virtual, screen based replicas of the original works but material facsimiles (‘stunning second originals’) achieved by computers and digital technology driving and guiding powerful 3-D scanners, printers and drills. Here, the ‘digital’ produces hefty material objects rather than networked, fleeting and immaterial things. This may be a rare case of digital technology being directly connected to the production of physically massive artefacts rather than flickering images on screens (the ‘virtual’) but it nevertheless warns against the kind of ‘this therefore that’ (digital) essentialism we warned of above.

On the other hand, while traditional media studies is wary of doing so, we also argue that it is very important to pay attention to the physical and material constitution of a technology (a digital media-technology no less than a heavy industrial manufacturing technology), not just its cultural meanings and social applications. This is because there is a real sense in which the physical nature and constitution of a technology encourages and constrains its uses and operation. To put this very basically, some technologies are tiny things, some are large and hefty. In terms of media technologies, compare an iPod to a 1980s ‘ghetto-blaster’, or a 1940s ‘radiogram’ and consider the influence that their sheer size has on how they are used, where and by whom, quite apart from matters such as the lifestyles and cultural meanings that may be attached to these objects.

Such physical properties of technologies are real. They change the environments and ecologies, natural and social, in which they exist. They seriously constrain the range of purposes to which they can be put and powerfully encourage others. Hence, recognising what a technology is – really and physically – is a crucial, if a partial and qualified aspect of a media technology’s definition. This does not mean that we should reduce technology to its physical features because in doing that we would become essentialist about technological objects; we would arrive at a technological essentialism.

Let us take a final example from ‘old’ media: broadcast television (or radio). It is common (especially when contrasted to digital networked media) to think of television as a centralised medium – broadcasting out from a centre to a mass audience. This is not because the tech-nology of television inevitably leads to centralisation (just as Factum-Arte’s digitality doesn’t inevitably lead to virtuality) but it does lend itself to such a use; it readily facilitates centralisation. Of course, alternative uses of broadcast media existed as in ‘ham’ and CB radio, in local television initiatives in many parts of the world, or even the use of the television receiver as a sculptural light-emitting object in the video installations of the artist Nam June Paik. Nevertheless television came to be developed and put to use dominantly in a centralising direction. That is, television came to be organised in this way within a social structure which needed to communicate from centres of power to the periphery (the viewer/listener). Recognising that a single media technology can be put to a multiplicity of uses, some becoming dominant and others marginal for reasons that can be cultural, social, economic or political as well as technological, is one important way of understanding what a medium is.

So, our approach here, in identifying new media’s ‘characteristics’, is not meant to lead to or endorse essentialism but to take seriously the physical constitution and operation of technologies as well as the directions in which they have been developed. Being ‘digital’ is a real state and it has effects and potentialities. On the other hand, this does not mean that ‘being digital’ is a full description or wholly adequate concept of something. There is, then, a difference between assuming or asserting that we have detected the essence of something and recognising the opportunities or constraints that the nature of a media technology places before us. A useful term here, taken from design theory, is ‘affordance’ which refers to the perceived and actual properties of (a) thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used . . . A chair affords (‘is for’) support, and, therefore, affords sitting. A chair can also be carried. Glass is for seeing through, and for breaking.

‘Affordance’ draws our attention to the actions that the nature of a thing ‘invites’ us to per-form. It is in this spirit that we now discuss the defining characteristics of new media.

Digital

We need first of all to think about why new media are described as digital in the first place – what does ‘digital’ actually mean in this context? In addressing this question we will have cause to define digital media against a very long history of analogue media. This will bring us to a second question. What does the shift from analogue to digital signify for producers, audiences and theorists of new media?

In a digital media process all input data are converted into numbers. In terms of communication and representational media this ‘data’ usually takes the form of qualities such as light or sound or represented space which have already been coded into a ‘cultural form’ (actually ‘analogues’), such as written text, graphs and diagrams, photographs, recorded moving images, etc. These are then processed and stored as numbers and can be output in that form from online sources, digital disks, or memory drives to be decoded and received as screen displays, dispatched again through telecommunications networks, or output as ‘hard copy’. This is in marked contrast to analogue media where all input data is converted into another physical object. ‘Analogue’ refers to the way that the input data (reflected light from a textured surface, the live sound of someone singing, the inscribed marks of someone’s handwriting) and the coded media product (the grooves on a vinyl disc or the distribution of magnetic particles on a tape) stand in an analogous relation to one another.

Analogues

‘Analogue’ refers to processes in which one set of physical properties can be stored in another ‘analogous’ physical form. The latter is then subjected to technological and cultural coding that allows the original properties to be, as it were, reconstituted for the audience. They use their skills at e.g. watching movies to ‘see’ the ‘reality’ through the analogies. Analogos was the Greek term which described an equality of ratio or proportion in mathematics, a transferable similarity that by linguistic extension comes to mean a comparable arrangement of parts, a similar ratio or pattern, available to a reader through a series of transcriptions. Each of these transcriptions involves the creation of a new object that is determined by the laws of physics and chemistry.

Analogue and digital type

Consider how this book would have been produced by the analogue print process which used discrete, movable pieces of metal type; the way of producing books in the 500 years between Gutenberg’s mid fifteenth-century invention of the printing press and the effective introduction of digital printing methods in the 1980s. Handwritten or typed notes would have been transcribed by a typesetter who would have set the pages up using lead type to design the page. This type would then have been used with ink to make a physical imprint of the words onto a second artefact – the book proofs. After correction these would have been transcribed once more by the printer to make a second layout, which would again have been made into a photographic plate that the presses would have used to print the page. Between the notebook and the printed page there would have been several analogous stages before you could read the original notes. If, on the other hand, we write direct into word processing software every letter is immediately represented by a numerical value as an electronic response to touching a key on the keyboard rather than being a direct mechanical impression in paper caused by the weight and shape of a typewriter ‘hammer’ (see Hayles 1999: 26, 31). Layout, design and correction can all be carried out within a digital domain without recourse to the painstaking physical work of type manipulation.

Analogue media, mass production and broadcasting

The major media of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (prints, photographs, films and newspapers) were the products not only of analogue processes but also of technologies of mass production. For this reason, these traditional mass media took the form of industrially mass-produced physical artefacts which circulated the world as copies and commodities.

With the development of broadcast media, the distribution and circulation of such media as physical objects began to diminish. In broadcast media the physical analogue properties of image and sound media are converted into further analogues. These are wave forms of differing lengths and intensities which are encoded as the variable voltage of transmission signals. In live broadcast media such as pre-video television or radio there was a direct conversion of events and scenes into such electronic analogues.

This electronic conversion and transmission (broadcast) of media like film, which is a physical analogue, suggests that digital media technologies do not represent a complete break with traditional analogue media. Rather, they can be seen as a continuation and extension of a principle or technique that was already in place; that is to say, the principle of conversion from physical artefact to signal. However, the scale and nature of this extension are so significant that we might well experience it not as a continuation but as a complete break. We now look at why this is so.

Digital media

In a digital media process the physical properties of the input data, light and sound waves, are not converted into another object but into numbers; that is, into abstract symbols rather than analogous objects and physical surfaces. Hence, media processes are brought into the symbolic realm of mathematics rather than physics or chemistry. Once coded numerically, the input data in a digital media production can immediately be subjected to the mathematical processes of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division through algorithms contained within software.

It is often mistakenly assumed that ‘digital’ means the conversion of physical data into binary information. In fact, digital merely signifies the assignation of numerical values to phenomena. The numerical values could be in the decimal (0–9) system; each component in the system would then have to recognise ten values or states (0–9). If, however, these numerical values are converted to binary numbers (0 and 1) then each component only has to recognise two states, on or off, current or no current, zero or one. Hence all input values are converted to binary numbers because it makes the design and use of the pulse recognition components that are the computer so much easier and cheaper.

This principle of converting all data into enormous strings of on/off pulses itself has a history. It is traced by some commentators from the late seventeenth-century philosopher Leibniz, through the nineteenth-century mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage, to be formulated seminally by Alan Turing in the late 1930s (Mayer 1999: 4–21). The principle of binary digitality was long foreseen and sought out for a variety of different reasons. However, without the rapid developments in electronic engineering begun during the Second World War it would have remained a mathematical principle – an idea. Once the twin engineering goals of miniaturisation and data compression had combined with the principle of encoding data in a digital form massive amounts of data could be stored and manipulated.

In the last decades of the twentieth century the digital encoding of data moved out from the laboratories of scientific, military and corporate establishments (during the mainframe years) to be applied to communications and entertainment media. As specialist software, accessible machines and memory-intensive hardware became available, first text and then sound, graphics and images became encodable. The process swiftly spread throughout the analogue domain, allowing the conversion of analogue media texts to digital bit streams.

The principle and practice of digitisation is important since it allows us to understand how the multiple operations involved in the production of media texts are released from existing only in the material realm of physics, chemistry and engineering and shift into a symbolic computational realm. The fundamental consequences of this shift are that:

• Media texts are ‘dematerialised’ in the sense that they are separated from their physical form as photographic print, book, roll of film, etc. (However see the section ‘Digital processes and the material world’ for an account of why this does not mean that digital media are ‘immaterial’.)

• Data can be compressed into very small spaces;

• It can be accessed at very high speeds and in non-linear ways;

• It can be manipulated far more easily than analogue forms.

The scale of this quantitative shift in data storage, access and manipulation is such that it has been experienced as a qualitative change in the production, form, reception and use of media.

Fixity and flux

Analogue media tend towards being fixed, where digital media tend towards a permanent state of flux. Analogue media exist as fixed physical objects in the world, their production being dependent upon transcriptions from one physical state to another. Digital media may exist as analogue hard copy, but when the content of an image or text is in digital form it is available as a mutable string of binary numbers stored in a computer’s memory.

The essential creative process of editing is primarily associated with film and video production, but in some form it is a part of most media processes. Photographers edit contact strips, music producers edit ‘tapes’; and of course written texts of all kinds are edited. We can use the process of editing to think further about the implications of ‘digitality’ for media.

To change or edit a piece of analogue media involved having to deal with the entire physical object. For instance, imagine we wanted to change the levels of red on a piece of film as an analogue process. This would involve having to ‘strike’ new prints from the negative in which the chemical relationship between the film stock and the developing fluid was changed. This would entail remaking the entire print. If the original and inadequate print is stored digitally every pixel in every frame has its own data address. This enables us to isolate only the precise shots and even the parts of the frame that need to be changed, and issue instructions to these addresses to intensify or tone down the level of red. The film as a digital document exists near to a state of permanent flux until the final distribution print is struck and it returns to the analogue world of cinematic exhibition. (This too is changing as films get played out from servers rather than projectors in both on-demand digital TV and movie theatres.)

Any part of a text can be given its own data address that renders it susceptible to interactive input and change via software. This state of permanent flux is further maintained if the text in question never has to exist as hard copy, if it is located only in computer memories and accessible via the Internet or the web. Texts of this kind exist in a permanent state of flux in that, freed from authorial and physical limitation, any net user can interact with them, turning them into new texts, altering their circulation and distribution, editing them and sending them, and so on. This fundamental condition of digitality is well summarised by Pierre Lévy:

The established differences between author and reader, performer and spectator, creator and interpreter become blurred and give way to a reading writing continuum that extends from the designers of the technology and networks to the final recipient, each one contributing to the activity of the other – the disappearance of the signature.

Digital processes and the material world

So digitisation creates the conditions for inputting very high quantities of data, very fast access to that data and very high rates of change of that data. However, we would not want to argue that this represents a complete transcendence of the physical world, as much digital rhetoric does. The limits of the physical sciences’ ability to miniaturise the silicon chip may have already have been reached although current research on nano-circuits promises to reduce their current size by many times.

Although wireless connections between computers and servers and to networks are becoming increasingly common, many connections continue to rely upon cables and telephone lines, which have to be physically dug into the earth. On a more day-to-day level the constant negotiations that any computer-based media producer has to make between memory and compression are also testament to the continuing interface with the physical emotional response. I Way [Internet] thought is modular, non-linear, malleable and co-operative. Many participants prefer internet writing to book writing as it is conversational, frank and communicative rather than precise and over written.

However, the responses prompted by the instantaneous availability of the reply button are not always so positive – hence the Internet-based practice of ‘flaming’ – argumentative, hostile and insulting exchanges which can accelerate rapidly in a spiral of mutual recrimination. It is precisely the absence of the face-to-face exchange that leads to communication that can become dangerous. The carefully crafted diplomatically composed memo gives way to the collectively composed, often acrimonious, email debate.

With this kind of history in mind we can see how a consideration of even the banal case of email might give rise to a number of central critical questions:

1 Where does control over authorship lie when the email text can be multiply amended and forwarded?

2 What kind of authority should we accord the electronic letter? Why do we still insist on hard copy for contractual or legal purposes?

3 What are the possible consequences of an interpersonal communication system based increasingly not on face-to-face interaction but on anonymous, instant, interaction?

In attempting to answer such questions we might have recourse to different kinds of analytic contexts. First of all an understanding of the cultural history and form of the letter itself. Second, an understanding of the convergence of discrete media forms through the process of digitisation. Third, an attempt to assess those shifts through already existing analyses of culture – in this case theories of authorship and reading. Finally, the questions above would have to be answered with reference to the study of CMC (Computer Mediated Communications) in which the problem of the disappearance of face-to-face communication has been central.

Interactivity

Since the early 1990s, the term ‘interactivity’ has been much debated and has undergone frequent redefinition. Most commentators have agreed that it is a concept that requires further definition if it is to have any analytical purchase. At the ideological level, interactivity has been one of the key ‘value added’ characteristics of new media. Where ‘old’ media offered passive consumption new media offer interactivity. Generally, the term stands for a more powerful sense of user engagement with media texts, a more independent relation to sources of knowledge, individualised media use, and greater user choice. Such ideas about the value of ‘interactivity’ have clearly drawn upon the popular discourse of neo-liberalism which treats the user as, above all, a consumer. Neo-liberal societies aim to commodify all kinds of experience and offer more and more finely tuned degrees of choice to the consumer. People are seen as being able to make individualised lifestyle choices from a never-ending array of possibilities offered by the market.

Political economy

For full discussions of the problems of defining interactivity see Jens F. Jensen’s ‘Interactivity -tracking a new concept in media and communication studies’, in Paul Mayer (ed.) Computer Media and Communication, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (1999), which offers a comprehensive review of theoretical approaches, and E. Downes and S. McMillan, ‘Defining Interactivity’, New Media and Society 2.2 (2000): 157-179 for a qualitative ethnographic account of the difficulties of applying theoretical definitions in practice; and Lisbet Klastrup (2003) Paradigms of interaction conceptions and misconceptions of the field today

Hypertextual

Virtual

What happened to Virtual Reality; The virtual and visual culture; The digital virtual; Immersion: a history; Perspective, camera, software; Virtual images/Images of the virtual ideological context then feeds into the way we think about the idea of interactivity in digital media. It is seen as a method for maximising consumer choice in relation to media texts.

However, in this section we are mainly concerned with the instrumental level of meanings carried by the term ‘interactive’. In this context, being interactive signifies the users’ (the individual members of the new media ‘audience’) ability to directly intervene in and change the images and texts that they access. So the audience for new media becomes a ‘user’ rather than the ‘viewer’ of visual culture, film and TV or a ‘reader’ of literature. In interactive multi-media texts there is a sense in which it is necessary for the user to actively intervene; to act as well as viewing or reading in order to produce meaning. This intervention actually subsumes other modes of engagement such as ‘playing’, ‘experimenting’, and ‘exploring’ under the idea of interaction. Hinting at the connection between instrumental definitions and ideological meanings, Rosanne Allucquere Stone suggests that the wide field of possibility suggested by the idea of interactivity has been ‘electronically instantiated . . . in a form most suitable for commercial development – the user moves the cursor to the appropriate place and clicks the mouse, which causes something to happen’ (Stone 1995: 8). We can break down this pragmatic account of interactivity further.

Hypertextual navigation

Here the user must use the computer apparatus and software to make reading choices in a database. (We are using the term ‘database’ in a general rather than specifically technical sense – a database is any collection of memory stored information, text, image, sound, etc.) In principle, this database could be anything from the entire World Wide Web to a particular learning package, an adventure game, or the hard drive on your own PC. The end results of such interactions will be that the user constructs for him or herself an individualised text made up from all the segments of text which they call up through their navigation process. The larger the database the greater the chance that each user will experience a unique text.

Immersive navigation

In the early 1990s Peter Lunenfeld (1993) usefully distinguished between two paradigms of interaction, which he called the ‘extractive’ and the ‘immersive’. Hypertextual navigation (above) is ‘extractive’. However, when we move from seeking to gain access to data and information to navigating representations of space or simulated 3D worlds we move into ‘immersive’ interaction. In some sense both kinds of interaction rely upon the same techno-logical fact – the existence of a very large database which the user is called upon to experience. At one level, a more or less realistically rendered 3D space like the game world of ‘Halo 3’ or ‘Grand Theft Auto IV’ is just as much a big database as Microsoft’s ‘Encarta’ encyclopaedia. We might say that the navigation of immersive media environments is similar to hypertextual navigation, but with additional qualities.

When interacting in immersive environments the user’s goals and the representational qualities of the media text are different. Immersive interaction occurs on a spectrum from 3D worlds represented on single screens through to the 3D spaces and simulations of virtual reality technologies. Although the point-and-click interactivity of hypertextual navigation may well be encountered in such texts, immersive interaction will also include the potential to explore and navigate in visually represented screen spaces. Here the purpose of interaction is likely to be different from the extractive paradigm. Instead of a text-based experience aimed at finding and connecting bits of information, the goals of the immersed user will include the visual and sensory pleasures of spatial exploration.

Registrational interactivity

Registrational interactivity refers to the opportunities that new media texts afford their users to ‘write back into’ the text; that is to say, to add to the text by registering their own messages. The base line of this kind of interactivity is the simple activity of registration (i.e. sending off details of contact information to a website, answering questions prompted in online transactions, or typing in a credit card number). However, it extends to any opportunity that the user has to input to a text. The original Internet bulletin boards and newsgroups were a good example – not interactive in the sense of face-to-face communication, yet clearly built up by successive inputs of users’ comments. This ‘input’ or ‘writing back’ then becomes part of the text and may be made available to other users of the database.

Interactive communications

As we have seen in our case study of email, computer-mediated communications (CMC) have offered unprecedented opportunities for making connections between individuals, within organisations, and between individuals and organisations.

Much of this connectivity will be of the registrational interactivity mode (defined above) where individuals add to, change, or synthesise the texts received from others. However, when email and chat sites are considered from the point of view of human communication, ideas about the degree of reciprocity between participants in an exchange are brought into play. So, from a Communication Studies point of view, degrees of interactivity are further broken down on the basis of the kinds of communication that occur within CMC. Communicative behaviours are classified according to their similarity to, or difference from, face-to-face dialogue, which is frequently taken as the exemplary communicative situation which all forms of ‘mediated’ communication have to emulate. On this basis, the question and response pattern of a bulletin board or online forum, for instance, would be seen as less interactive than the free-flowing conversation of a chat site. This inflects the whole idea of interactivity by lending it a context of person-to-person connection.

Interactivity and problems of textual interpretation

Interactivity multiplies the traditional problems about how texts are interpreted by their readers. By the problem of interpretation we refer to the idea that the meaning of any given text is not securely encoded for all audiences to decode in the same way. This is based upon the recognition that the meanings of a text will vary according to the nature of its audiences and circumstances of reception. We all already have highly active interpretative relationships with the analogue (or linear) texts we encounter, such as books and movies. Under conditions of interactivity this problem does not disappear but is multiplied exponentially. This is because the producer of an interactive text or navigable database never knows for certain which of the many versions of the text their reader will encounter. For critics this has raised the essential question of how to evaluate or even conceptualise a ‘text’ that never reads the same way twice. For producers it raises essential problems of control and authorship. How do they make a text for a reader knowing that they have very many possible pathways through it?

What is the interactive text?

Established ways of thinking about how meaning is produced between readers and texts assumed a stability of the text but a fluidity of interpretation. Under conditions of interactivity this traditional stability of the text has also become fluid. Hence as critics we find ourselves having to reconceptualise the status of our own interpretations of the interactive text. From a theoretical point of view the traditional semiotic tools used for analysis of texts become

Problems for producers

If new media products pose new questions about textuality they also demand different relationships between producers and users. How do you design an interface that offers navigational choice but at the same time delivers a coherent experience? These problems will of course vary from one text to another. For instance, a website with many embedded links to other sites will offer users many opportunities to take different pathways. The reader/user is quite likely to click onto another site whilst only halfway through your own. On the other hand, within a downloaded interactive learning package, or one that runs off a discrete memory drive (i.e. CD-ROM/DVD) where there is a finite database, the user can be far more easily ‘guided’ in their navigation of pathways that the producers are able to pre-structure. This has meant that producers of interactive texts have gradually come to understand that they need to have collaborative and co-creative relationship with their audiences. The digital media text (e.g. website, game, social network), is an environment supporting a range of user activities that emerge within the perimeters of the software. Producers therefore need, in Woolgar’s terms, to ‘configure’ the user, to have some idea of the kinds of behaviours that they want their environment to afford, whilst simultaneously understanding that they can neither wholly predict nor control what users will do within it. These rich forms of interaction therefore have a number of consequences for producers:

• They create the possibility for traditional media producers to collaborate with audiences by finding ways to incorporate ‘user-generated content’ in their corporate projects e.g. newspapers ‘crowd sourcing’ stories.

• They also redefine the producer not as author but as ‘experience designer’. Authors produced texts that readers interpreted. Interactive media designers are increasingly experience designers, creating open media spaces within which users find their own pathways (e.g. The Sims or Second Life)

• Audiences’ expectations of an interactive experience with a mediated world create the conditions for transmedial production in which for instance a TV programme can be repurposed across a range of platforms, a website with chat/forum capability, a box set DVD with additional material, a computer game etc.

Hypertextual

There are clear links between the navigational, explorative, and configurative aspects of interactivity and hypertextuality. Also, like interactivity, hypertextuality has ideological overtones and is another key term that has been used to mark off the novelty of new media from analogue media. Apart from its reference to non-sequential connections between all kinds of data facilitated by the computer, in the early 1990s the pursuit of literary hypertexts as novels and forms of non-linear fiction was much in evidence, becoming something of an artistic movement. Such literary hypertexts also attracted much attention from critics and theorists. This work now looks something like a transitional moment produced by the meeting between literary studies and new media potential. However, hypertext and hypertexuality remain an important part of the history of computing, particularly in the way they address ideas about the relationship of computer operating systems, software and databases, to the operation of the human mind, cognitive processes and learning.

Histories

The prefix ‘hyper’ is derived from the Greek ‘above, beyond, or outside’. Hence, hypertext has come to describe a text which provides a network of links to other texts that are ‘outside, above and beyond’ itself. Hypertext, both as a practice and an object of study, has a dual history.

One history ties the term into academic literary and representational theory. Here there has long been an interest in the way any particular literary work (or image) draws upon or refers out to the content of others, the process referred to as intertextuality. This places any text as comprehensible only within a web of association that is at once ‘above, beyond or outside’ the text itself. At another level, the conventional means of footnoting, indexing, and providing glossaries and bibliographies – in other words the navigational apparatus of the book – can be seen as antecedents of hypertexts, again guiding the reader beyond the immediate text to necessary contextualising information.

The other history is derived from the language of the computer development industry. Here, any verbal, visual or audio data that has, within itself, links to other data might be referred to as a hypertext. In this sense the strict term ‘hypertext’ frequently becomes confused with the idea and rhetoric of hypermedia (with its connotations of a kind of super medium which is ‘above, beyond, or outside’ all other media connecting them all together in a web of convergence).

Defining hypertexts

We may define a hypertext as a work which is made up from discrete units of material, each of which carries a number of pathways to other units. The work is a web of connection which the user explores using the navigational aids of the interface design. Each discrete ‘node’ in the web has a number of entrances and exits or links.

As we have seen, 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. In an analogue system like traditional video, arriving at a particular frame ten minutes into a tape involved having to spool past every intervening frame. When this information came to be stored digitally this access became more or less instantaneous. Such technology offers the idea that any data location might have a number of instantly accessible links to other locations built into it. Equally the many interventions and manipulations enabled by this facility create the qualities of interactivity.

Hypertext and a model of the mind

Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay ‘As We May Think’ is often seen as a seminal contribution to the idea of hypertext. Bush was motivated by the problem of information overload; the problem of the sheer volume of knowledge that specialists, even in the late 1940s, had to access and manipulate. Bush proposed that science and technology might be applied to the management of knowledge in such a way as to produce novel methods for its storage and retrieval. He conceptualised a machine, the ‘Memex’, in which data could be stored and retrieved by association rather than by the alphabetical and numerical systems of library indices. Bush argued that,

The human mind operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in association with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.

It [the Memex] affords an immediate step . . . to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another . . . The process of tying two items together is the important thing. (Bush in Mayer 1999: 34)

Bush’s argument from 1945 carries within it many of the important ideas that have subsequently informed the technology and practice of hypertext. In particular his position rests upon the assertion that associative linkage of data is a more ‘natural’ model of information management than the conventional linear alphabetical methods of bibliography such as the Dewey library system. Associative linkage, argues Bush, replicates more accurately the way the mind works. The continuing appeal of hypertext as both information storage and creative methodology has been that it appears to offer a better model of consciousness than linear storage systems. We can observe this appeal continuing in speculation about the development of a global ‘neural net’ that follows on from Nelson’s arguments below. These ideas also resurface in a different form in the arguments of Pierre Lévy calling for a global ‘collective intelligence’ and in the daily practice of using a site like Wikipedia. Such an enterprise appears in many ways to conform to the idea that knowledge can be produced through associative rather than linear linkage and that, moreover, this knowledge can be collectively authored.

Hypertext as non-sequential writing

The microfiche technologies of the postwar period were unable to create Bush’s vision. However, twenty years later, as digital computing began to be more widespread, his ideas were revived, most notably by Ted Nelson. His 1982 paper ‘A New Home for the Mind’ argues for the wholesale reorganisation of knowledge along hypertextual lines:

This simple facility – call it the jump-link capability – leads immediately to all sorts of new text forms: for scholarship, for teaching, for fiction, for poetry . . . The link facility gives us much more than the attachment of mere odds and ends. It permits fully non sequential writing. Writings have been sequential because pages have been sequential. What is the alternative? Why hypertext – non sequential writing.

However, Nelson does not stop at the idea of non-sequential writing, he also foresees, ten years before browser software made Internet navigation a non-specialist activity, a medium very close to contemporary website forms of the Internet. In this medium ‘documents window and link freely to one another’, ‘every quotation may be traced instantly’, and ‘minority inter-pretations and commentary may be found everywhere’. He envisages a hyperworld – a new realm of published text and graphics, all available instantly; a grand library that anybody can store anything in – and get a royalty for – with links, alternate visions, and backtrack available as options to anyone who wishes to publish them.

So, the postwar challenge of managing information overload, a model of the mind as a web of trails and associations, and a concept of non-linear writing then extended to a freely accessible ‘grand library’ of all kinds of media, finally lead us to the concept of hypermedia. Nelson’s vision of the potential of hypertext opens out to encompass an emancipatory configuration of human knowledge based in accessibility and manipulation through associative links.

Hypermediacy

More recently the very specific application of hypertext as an information management principle expanded to suggest all kinds of non-linear, networked paradigms. Here the term began to overlap with the idea of hypermediacy. The ideological investment in the idea of hypertext spills over into use of the term ‘hypermedia’ to describe the effects of hypertextual methods of organisation on all mediated forms. By the end of the 1990s, hypermediacy emerged as an important term in a theory of new media:

the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible. Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of not as a window on the world, but rather as ‘windowed’ itself – with windows that open on to other representations or other media. The logic of hypermediacy multiplies the signs of mediation and in this way tries to reproduce the rich sensorium of human experience.

Reproducing the ‘rich sensorium of human experience’ is the kind of claim that recalls Marshall McLuhan’s view that media should be understood as extensions of the human body (1.6.2). As we have seen, it is a claim that that was present in the original formulations of ideas of hypertextuality – the assumptions about cognition in Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson here become a principle in which hypermedia are valorised as somehow representing the ultimate augmentation of human consciousness.

From the library to Google – critical questions in hypertext

Much of the debate arising from the application of hypertext overlapped with discussions about the consequences of interactivity. However, debates about the issues and questions arising from hypertext practices have been conducted with reference to literary theory while questions of interactivity tended to reference human computer interface studies and communication studies.

Clearly, considerations of interactivity and hypertext share a concern with the status and nature of the text itself. What happens when conventional ways of thinking about the text derived from literature or media studies are applied to texts that, allegedly, work in entirely new ways? If the existing structures of knowledge are built upon the book, what happens when the book is replaced by the computer memory and hypertextual linking?

Since the Middle Ages human knowledge and culture has been written, recorded and in some sense produced by the form of the book (see, for example, Ong 2002; Chartier 1994). The printed word has established an entire taxonomy and classification system for the management and production of knowledge (e.g. contents, indices, reference systems, library systems, citation methods, etc.). It is argued that this literary apparatus of knowledge is defined around sequential reading and writing. When we write, we order our material into a linear sequence in which one item leads into another within recognised rhetorical terms of, for example, argument, narrative or observation. Similarly the reader follows, by and large, the sequencing established by the author. Now, it was argued, hypertext offered the possibility of non-sequential reading and writing. There is no single order in which a text must be encountered.

Each ‘node’ of text carries within it variable numbers of links that take the reader to different successive nodes, and so on. Thus the reader is offered a ‘non-linear’ or, perhaps more accurately, a ‘multilinear’ experience. (Following a link is a linear process; however the variable number of links on offer in any given text produce high numbers of possible pathways.)

Mapping Marshall McLuhan

The primary literature and debates arising are by now extensive, and have become one of the most important points of contact between European critical theory and American cyberculture studies. This section offers a brief introductory overview of the key questions. For further study see, for example, Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing, New York: Erlbaum (1991); George Landow and Paul Delaney (eds), Hypermedia and Literary Studies, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (1991); George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press (1992) (especially pp. 1-34); George Landow (ed.) Hyper/Text/Theory, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press (1994); Mark Poster, The Mode of Information,

Knowledge constructed as multilinear rather than monolinear, it is argued, threatens to overturn the organisation and management of knowledge as we have known it to date, since all existing knowledge systems are founded upon the principle of monolinearity.

Thus the very status of the text itself is challenged. The book which you hold in your hand is dissolved into a network of association – within the book itself numerous crosslinkages are made available which facilitate many different reading pathways; and the book itself becomes permeable to other texts. Its references and citations can be made instantly available, and other related arguments or converse viewpoints made available for immediate comparison. In short, the integrity of the book and of book-based knowledge systems is superseded by network knowledge systems. The superstructure of knowledge storage that formed library systems (Dewey classification, indices, paper based catalogues) is replaced by the design of the search engine with its associated systems of metadata, tagging and user-generated taxonomies of knowledge.

Hypertext scholarship

We can identify two trajectories in the first wave of hypertext scholarship that began to try and understand the significance of these developments.

The first was the return to previously marginal works in the history of literature which had themselves sought to challenge the linearity of text – these often experimental works are then constructed as ‘proto-hypertexts’. So, for instance, works as diverse as the I Ching, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Joyce’s Ulysses, stories by Borges, Calvino, and Robert Coover and literary experiments with the material form of the book by Raymond Queneau and Marc Saporta are all cited as evidence that hypertextual modes of apprehension and composition have always existed as a limit point and challenge to ‘conventional’ literature. For students of other media we might begin to add the montage cinema of Vertov and Eisenstein, experiments with point of view in films like Kurosawa’s Rashomon and time in a film like Groundhog Day (see, for example, Aarseth 1997: 41–54 and Murray 1997: 27–64). Equally, the montage of Dada, Surrealism and their echoes in the contemporary collage of screen-based visual culture might also be seen as ‘hypermediated’ in Bolter and Grusin’s sense. Here then is another important point at which the history of culture is reformulated by the development of new media forms.

Networked

During the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, capitalist economies experienced recurring crises, caused by the rigidity of their centralised production systems. These were crises in the profitability of the mass production of homogeneous commodities for mass consumer markets. In his detailed analysis of a shift from the ‘modern’ to the ‘postmodern’ mode of production, the Marxist cultural geographer David Harvey traced the manner in which these rigidities of centralised ‘fordist’ economies were addressed. Writing in 1989, he noted,

what is most interesting about about the current situation is the way that capitalism is becoming ever more tightly organized through dispersal, geographical mobility, and flex-ible responses in labour markets, labour processes and consumer markets, all accompanied by hefty doses of institutional, product, and technological innovation [our emphases]

These changes were felt in the organisation of media production. In 1985, Françoise Sabbah observed the tendency of the then emerging ‘new media’ toward decentralisation of production, differentiation of products, and segmentation of consumption or reception: the new media determine a segmented, differentiated audience that, although massive in terms of numbers, is no longer a mass audience in terms of simultaneity and uniformity of the message it receives. The new media are no longer mass media . . . sending a limited number of messages to a homogeneous mass audience. Because of the multiplicity of messages and sources, the audience itself becomes more selective. The targeted audience tends to choose its messages, so deepening its segmentation . . . (Sabbah 1985: 219; quoted in Castells 1996: 339)

Now, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, these have become key aspects of our networked and dispersed mediasphere. Over the last twenty-five years or so, the development of decentralised networks has transformed media and communication processes. Indeed, some commentators now argue, we have recently entered a new phase in which these characteristics become even more pronounced. Here, not only are the markets and audiences for media of all kinds demassified, increasingly specialist and segmented, and involving a blurring of producer and consumer, but whole sectors of the new media industries are learning to see their role as providing the means and opportunities for ‘users’ to generate their own content. Simultaneously, a new media economics is being recognised, one that does not aim to address large single audiences but instead seeks out the myriad of minority interests and niche markets that the net is able to support.

The World Wide Web, corporate intranets, Virtual Learning Environments, MPORPGs, ‘persistent worlds’, Social Network Sites, blog networks, online forums of all kinds, and humble email distribution lists, are all networks of various scales and complexities that nestle within or weave their way selectively through others. All are ultimately connected in a vast, dense and (almost) global network (the Internet itself) within which an individual may roam, if policed and limited by firewalls, passwords, access rights, available bandwidths and the efficiency of their equipment. This is a network that is no longer necessarily accessed at fixed desktop workstations plugged into terrestrial phone lines or cables, but also wirelessly and on the move, via laptops, PDAs, GPS devices, and mobile phones.

There are intricacies, unforeseen contradictions and social, political, economic and cultural questions that arise with these developments. These issues are more fully discussed in Part 3 of this book. For the moment our task is to see how, in recent history, there has been a shift from media centralisation to dispersal and networking.

Consumption

From our present position we can see that from the 1980s on, our consumption of media texts has been marked by a shift from a limited number of standardised texts, accessed from a few dedicated and fixed positions, to a very large number of highly differentiated texts accessed in multifarious ways. The media audience has fragmented and differentiated as the number of media texts available to us has proliferated. For instance, from an era with a limited number of broadcast TV stations, containing no time-shifting VCRs or DVD players, with very limited use of computers as communication devices and no mobile media at all, we now find ourselves confronted by an unprecedented penetration of media texts into everyday life. ‘National’ newspapers are produced as geographically specific editions; they can be interactively accessed, archived online, we can receive ‘alerts’ to specific contents. Network and terrestrial TV stations are now joined by independent satellite and cable channels. Alongside real-time broadcasts we have TV ‘on demand’, time shifted, downloaded and interactive. The networked PC in the home offers a vast array of communication and media consumption opportunities; mobile telephony and mobile computing have begun to offer a future in which there are no media free zones, at least in the lives of the populations of the ‘developed’ world. Technologists are currently conceptualising what a ‘pervasive’ media environment will be, when all media is available on a variety of wireless platforms and devices.

The ‘mass media’, which were transformed in this way, were the products of the communication needs of the first half of the twentieth century in the industrialised world and as such they had certain characteristics. They were centralised, content was produced in highly capitalised industrial locations such as newspaper printworks or Hollywood film studios. In broadcast media, press and cinema, distribution was tied to production, film studios owned cinema chains, newspapers owned fleets of distribution vans, the BBC and other national ‘broadcasters’ owned their own transmission stations and masts. Consumption was characterised by uniformity: cinema audiences all over the world saw the same movie, all readers read the same text in a national newspaper, we all heard the same radio programme. And we did these things at the same scheduled times. Twentieth-century mass media were characterised by standardisation of content, distribution and production process. These tendencies toward centralisation and standardisation in turn reflected and created the possibility for control and regulation of media systems, for professionalisation of communicative and creative processes, for very clear distinctions between consumers and producers, and relatively easy protection of intellectual property.

The centre of a circle

A useful way to conceptualise the difference between centralised and dispersed media distribution systems is to think about the differences between radio and television broadcast transmissions and computer media networks. The technology at the heart of the original radio and TV broadcast systems is radio wave transmission; here transmission suites required high investment in capital, plant, buildings, masts, etc. Airwave transmission was supplemented by systems of coaxial cable transmission, where massive investments throughout the twentieth century led to the establishment of a global network of cable systems crossing whole continents and oceans. At the core of this technology of transmission there was a central idea, that of transmission from ‘one to many’: one input signal was relayed to many points of consumption. The radio transmitter, then, works (for social and technological reasons) on a centralised model.

Nodes in a web

In contrast, the computer server is the technology at the heart of the dispersed systems of new media. A server, by contrast to a transmission mast, 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 networked device. It has many input connections and many output connections, and exists as a node in a web rather than as the centre of a circle. A radio transmitter capable of handling broadcast radio and TV signals is an expensive capital investment way beyond the reach of most enterprises or individuals. The server, on the other hand, is relatively cheap, being commonplace in medium or large enterprises of all kinds. Access to server space is commonly domestically available as part of online subscription packages.

However, this simple opposition between the centralised and the networked prompts questions. Most interestingly, it points up how there is no radical and complete break between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media. This is because networked media distribution could not exist without the technological spine provided by existing media routes of transmission, from telephone networks to radio transmission and satellite communications. ‘Old’ media systems of distribution are not about to disappear, although they become less visible, because they are the essential archaeological infrastructure of new media.

New media networks have been able to reconfigure themselves around this ‘old’ core to facilitate new kinds of distribution that are not necessarily centrally controlled and directed but are subject to a radically higher degree of audience differentiation and discrimination. 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 customise their own media use to design individualised menus that serve their particular and specific needs.

This market segmentation and fragmentation should not be confused with a general democratisation of the media. As Steemers, Robins and Castells have argued, the multiplication of possible media choices has been accompanied by an intensification of merger activities among media corporations: ‘we are not living in a global village, but in customised cottages globally produced and locally distributed’.

Production

This increased flexibility and informality of our interaction with media texts of all kinds is equally present in the field of media production. Here, too, we have seen the development of production technologies and processes that have challenged the older centralised methods of industrial organisation and mass media production sectors. These changes can be perceived within the professional audiovisual industries as well as within our everyday domestic spheres.

Today, media industries are facing the fact that the conjunction of computer-based communications and existing broadcast technologies has created a wholly new and fluid area of media production. The traditional boundaries and definitions between different media processes are broken down and reconfigured. The specialist craft skills of twentieth-century media production have become more generally dispersed throughout the population as a whole, in the form of a widening baseline of ‘computer literacy’, information technology skills, and especially the availability of software that increasingly affords the production of ‘user-generated content’.

Across the period, the range of sites for the production of media content has expanded – production has been dispersing itself more thoroughly into the general economy, now frequently dubbed ‘the knowledge economy’ or the ‘information society’. This dispersal of production can also be observed from the perspective of the everyday worlds of work and domesticity. Consider the proximity of media production processes to a twentieth-century citizen. In the UK during the 1970s, for instance, the nineteenth-century media processes of print and photography would probably have been the only kind of media production processes that might be used or discussed in everyday life as part of civic, commercial, cultural or political activity. Broadcasting and publishing systems (the ‘press’) were mostly very distant from the lives of ordinary people. However, by the end of the century, print production was easier than ever through digitised desktop publishing, and editorial and design technologies were all available in domestic software packages.

An extraordinary but little noticed and eccentric example of this is the use of a subterranean system of conduits designed to provide hydraulically (waterpowered) generated electricity to London households in the 1890s. The conduits were designed to hold water under pressure which powered generators placed at the threshold of each subscribing home. This system, owned until the 1970s by the long defunct ‘London Hydraulic Power Company’, was purchased by Mercury Telecommunications in 1992. Under Mercury’s ownership these conduits originally designed to carry water I were used as a means to I deliver Internet cable I services to those same I homes (Gershuny 1992) digital cameras, post-production processes, and distribution through file compression and networks, have transformed domestic photography (see Rubinstein and Sluis 2008). Television production has moved much closer to the viewer in the sense that very many of us ‘shoot’ digital video which can now be distributed online by, for example, YouTube (see 3.23). There may be limitations to this self production of media images, although new conventions and forms are also emerging to which the once mainstream media respond reflexively, but, as Castells recognised, it has also modified the older ‘one way flow’ of images and has ‘reintegrated life experience and the screen’ (1996: 338).

The integration of media process into everyday life is not confined to the domestic sphere. As work has increasingly moved towards service rather than production economies all kinds of non-media workers find themselves called upon to be familiar with various kinds of media production processes from web design to Powerpoint presentation and computer-mediated communication software. Both at home and at work media production processes are far closer to the rhythms of everyday life. While we certainly would not wish to over-emphasise the degree of this proximity by echoing claims of cyber pioneers for the total collapse of the distinction between consumption and production, it is certainly the case that the distance between the elite process of media production and everyday life is smaller now than at any time in the age of mass media.

Consumption meets production

Across a range of media we have seen the development of a market for ‘prosumer’ technologies; that is, technologies that are aimed at neither the professional nor the (amateur) consumer market but both – technologies that enable the user to be both consumer and producer. This is true in two senses; the purchaser of a £2,000 digital video camera is clearly a consumer (of the camera), and may use it to record home movies, the traditional domain of the hobbyist consumer. However, they may equally use it to record material of a broadcast quality for a Reality TV show, or to produce an activist anti-capitalist video that could have global distribution or pornographic material that could equally go into its own circuit of distribution. Until the 1990s the technological separation between what was acceptable for public distribution and what was ‘only’ suitable for domestic exhibition was rigid. The breakdown of the professional/amateur category is a matter ultimately of cost. The rigid distinction between professional and amateur technologies defined by engineering quality and cost has now broken down into an almost infinite continuum from the video captured on a mobile phone to the high-definition camera commanding six-figure prices.

The impact of these developments has been most clearly seen in the music industry. Digital technologies have made possible a dispersal and diffusion of music production that has fundamentally changed the nature of the popular music market. The apparatus of analogue music production, orchestral studios, 20-foot sound desks and 2-inch rolls of tape can all now be collapsed into a sampling keyboard, a couple of effects units, and a computer. The bedroom studio was clearly one of the myths of ‘making it’ in the 1990s; however, it is not without material foundation. The popular success of dance music in all its myriad global forms is in part the consequence of digital technologies making music production more accessible to a wider range of producers than at any time previously.

The PC itself is in many ways the ultimate figure of media ‘prosumer’ technology. It is a technology of distribution, of consumption, as well as a technology of production. We use it to look at and listen to other people’s media products, as well as to produce our own, from ripping CD compilations to editing videotape, mixing music or publishing websites. This overlap between consumption and production is producing a new networked zone of media exhibition that is neither ‘professionalised’ mainstream nor amateur hobbyist. Jenkins argues that it is clear that new media technologies have profoundly altered the relations between media producers and consumers. Both culture jammers and fans have gained greater visibility as they have deployed the web for community building, intellectual exchange, cultural distribution, and media activism. Some sectors of the media industries have embraced active audiences as an extension of their marketing power, have sought greater feedback from their fans, and have incorporated viewer generated content into their design processes. Other sectors have sought to contain or silence the emerging knowledge culture. The new technologies broke down old barriers between media consumption and media production. The old rhetoric of opposition and cooptation assumed a world where consumers had little direct power to shape media content and where there were enormous barriers to entry into the marketplace, whereas the new digital environment expands their power to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media products.

In the media industries the craft bases and apprenticeship systems that maintained quality and protected jobs have broken down more or less completely, so that the question of how anyone becomes ‘qualified’ to be a media producer is more a matter of creating a track record and portfolio for yourself than following any pre-established routes. This crisis is also reflected in media education. Here, some argue for a pressing need for a new vocationalism aimed at producing graduates skilled in networking and the production of intellectual and creative properties. Others argue that, in the light of the new developments outlined above, media studies should be seen as a central component of a new humanities, in which media interpretation and production are a core skill set for all kinds of professional employment. Yet others argue for a ‘Media Studies 2.0’ which would break with the traditional media studies emphasis on ‘old’ broadcasting models and would embrace the new skills and creativity of a ‘YouTube’ generation.

In summary, new media are networked in comparison to mass media – networked at the level of consumption where we have seen a multiplication, segmentation and resultant individuation of media use; dispersed at the level of production where we have witnessed the multiplication of the sites for production of media texts and a greater diffusion within the economy as a whole than was previously the case. Finally, new media can be seen as networked rather than mass for the way in which consumers can now more easily extend their participation in media from active interpretation to actual production.

Virtual

Virtual worlds, spaces, objects, environments, realities, selves and identities, abound in discourses about new media. Indeed, in many of their applications, new media technologies produce virtualities. While the term ‘virtual’ (especially ‘virtual reality’) is readily and frequently used with respect to our experience of new digital media it is a difficult and complex term. In this section we make some initial sense of the term as a characteristic feature of new media.

First, throughout the 1990s, the popular icon of ‘virtual reality’ was not an image of such a reality itself but of a person experiencing it and the apparatus that produced it. This is the image of a head-set wearing, crouching and contorted figure perceiving a computer-generated ‘world’ while their body, augmented by helmets carrying stereoscopic LCD screens, a device that monitors the direction of their gaze, and wired gloves or body suits providing tactile and positioning feedback, moves in physical space.

Equally powerful have been a series of movies, cinematic representations of virtual reality, from the early 1980s onwards, in which the action and narrative takes place in a simulated, computer generated world.

The ‘virtual reality’ experienced by the wearer of the apparatus is produced by immersion in an environment constructed with computer graphics and digital video with which the ‘user’ has some degree of interaction. The movies imagine a condition where human subjects inhabit a virtual world which is mistaken for, or has replaced, a ‘real’ and physical one.

Second, alongside these immersive and spectacular forms of virtual reality, another influential use of the term refers to the space where participants in forms of online communication feel themselves to be. This is a space famously described as ‘where you are when you’re talking on the telephone’ (Rucker et al. 1993: 78). Or, more carefully, as a space which ‘comes into being when you are on the phone: not exactly where you happen to be sitting, nor where the other person is, but somewhere in between’ (Mirzoeff 1999: 91).

As well as these uses, the ‘virtual’ is frequently cited as a feature of postmodern cultures and technologically advanced societies in which so many aspects of everyday experience are technologically simulated. This is an argument about the state of media culture, postmodern identity, art, entertainment, consumer and visual culture; a world in which we visit virtual shops and banks, hold virtual meetings, have virtual sex, and where screen-based 3D worlds are explored or navigated by videogame players, technicians, pilots, surgeons etc.

Increasingly we also find the term being used retrospectively. We have already noted the case of the telephone, but also the experience of watching film and television, reading books and texts, or contemplating photographs and paintings are being retrospectively described as virtual realities. These retrospective uses of the term can be understood in two ways: either as a case of the emergence of new phenomena casting older ones in a new light (Chesher 1997: 91) or that, once it is looked for, experience of the ‘virtual’ is found to have a long history (Mirzoeff 1999: 91 and Shields 2003).

As Shields has pointed out (2003: 46) in the digital era the meaning of ‘virtual’ has changed. Where, in everyday usage, it once meant a state that was ‘almost’ or ‘as good as’ reality, it has now come to mean or be synonymous with ‘simulated’. In this sense, rather than meaning an ‘incomplete form of reality’ it now suggests an alternative to the real and, maybe, ‘better than the real’. However, some older meanings of ‘virtual’ still find echoes in modern usage. One of these is the connection between the virtual and the ‘liminal’ in an anthropological sense, where the liminal is a borderline or threshold between different states such as the carnivals or coming of age rituals held in traditional societies. Such rituals are usually marked by a period in which the normal social order is suspended for the subject who is passing from one status or position to another. The more recent interest in virtual spaces as spaces of identity performance or places where different roles can be played out appears continuous with older liminal zones (Shields 2003: 12).

The rise of the digital virtual (the virtual as simulation and as an alternative reality) has also led to interest in philosophical accounts of the virtual. Here, particularly in the thought of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, we are urged to see that the virtual is not the opposite of the real but is itself a kind of reality and is properly opposed to what is ‘actually’ real. This is an important argument as, in a world in which so much is virtual, we are saved from concluding that this is tantamount to living in some kind of un-real and immaterial fantasy world. In networked, technologically intensive societies we increasingly pass between actual and virtual realities; in such societies we deal seamlessly with these differing modes of reality.

There is a common quality to the two kinds of virtual reality with which we started above (that produced by technological immersion and computer generated imagery and that imagined space generated by online communications). This is the way that they give rise to puzzling relationships between new media technologies and our experiences and conceptions of space, of embodiment (literally: of having and being conscious of having bodies) and identity. The generic concept which has subsumed both kinds of virtual reality has been ‘cyberspace’. It is now arguable that the widespread and deep integration of new technologies into everyday life and work means that the concept of ‘cyberspace’ (as another space to ‘real’ physical space) is losing its force and usefulness. Nevertheless, the promise of a fusion of these two kinds of virtual reality – the sensory plenitude of immersive VR and the connectivity of online communication – has been an important theme in the new media imaginary because, in such a scenario, full sensory immersion would be combined with extreme bodily remoteness.

The middle term, the ground for anticipating such a fusion of the two VRs, is the digital simulation of ‘high resolution images of the human body in cyberspace’. The empirical grounds for venturing such a claim are seen in the form of virtual actors or synthespians (computer simulations of actors) that appear in cinema, T V, and videogames. However, the computing power and the telecommunications bandwidth necessary to produce, transmit and refresh simulations of human beings and their environments, let alone the programming that would enable them to interact with one another in real time, remains a technological challenge. Instead we find the body digitally represented in a host of different ways. In popular culture for instance we see increasing hybridisation of the human body in performance as real actors create the data for a performance which is finally realised in CGI form through various techniques of motion capture. In the realm of MMORPGs we see the body of the user represented through avatars that are the subject of intense and intricate work by their users.

If we were to understand these digitisations of the body as partial realisations of the fully immersive 3-D Avatar, interesting questions arise. Where does the desire for such developments lie? And, what goals or purposes might attract the financial investment necessary for such technological developments? In thinking about these developments, their desirability and purpose, we have to take into account the technological imaginary which so powerfully shapes thinking about new media of all kinds. We are also reminded of the part played by science fiction in providing us with ideas and images with which to think about cyberspace and the virtual. Writing in the mid-1990s, Stone (1994: 84), suggested that when the first ‘virtual reality’ environments came online they would be realisations of William Gibson’s famous definition of cyberspace, in his novel Neuromancer, as a ‘consensual hallucination’. The current examples of persistent online worlds such as ‘Second Life’ or games like World of Warcraft mark the current stage of this vision and project.

The technological imaginary

William Gibson, in Neurotnancer (1986: 52), describes cyberspace as ‘a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation ... a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in every human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding.’ This has become the standard science fictional basis for imagining cyberspace as an architectural (Cartesian) space, in which ‘a man may be seen, and perhaps touched as a woman and vice versa - or as anything else. There is talk of renting prepackaged body forms complete with voice and touch . . . multiple personality as commodity fetish!’ (Stone 1994: 85)

Simulated

We saw in the previous section that uses of the concept ‘virtual’ have, in a digital culture, close relationships with ‘simulation’. Simulation is a widely and loosely used concept in the new media literature, but is seldom defined. It often simply takes the place of more established concepts such as ‘imitation’ or ‘representation’. However where the concept is paid more attention, it has a dramatic effect on how we theorise cultural technologies such as VR (2.1–2.6) and cinema (2.7). For the moment, it is important to set out how the term has been used in order to make the concept of simulation, and how we will subsequently use it, clear.

Looser current uses of the term are immediately evident, even in new media studies, where it tends to carry more general connotations of the illusory, the false, the artificial, so that a simulation is cast as an insubstantial or hollow copy of something original or authentic. It is important to invert these assumptions. A simulation is certainly artificial, synthetic and fabricated, but it is not ‘false’ or ‘illusory’. Processes of fabrication, synthesis and artifice are real and all produce new real objects. A videogame world does not necessarily imitate an original space or existing creatures, but it exists. Since not all simulations are imitations, it becomes much easier to see simulations as things, rather than as representations of things. The content of simulations may of course (and frequently does) derive from ‘representations’. This is what lies at the core of Umberto Eco’s analysis of Disneyland for instance: the houses in Disneyland’s version of an ideal American Main Street are fakes, deceits, they look something like real houses yet are something quite different (in this case supermarkets or gift shops) (Eco 1986: 43). But noticing a gap between the representational content of a simulation (shops, space invaders) and its architectural or mechanical workings should not lead us to discount and ignore the latter. The simulation exists regardless of whether we are fooled by its content or not. Thus the problem to which simulation draws our attention is not that of the difference between ‘simulated’ and ‘real’ content, but rather that of the material and real existence of simulations as part of the furniture of the same real world that has been so thoroughly ‘represented’ throughout the history of the arts and media. In other words a simulation is real before it imitates or represents anything.

For the present, however, as things stand in new media studies, not only is there no agreement that simulation does in fact differ from representation or imitation, but the simple profusion of answers to the question of what simulation really is and how, or if it differs at all from representation or imitation, has led many commentators to give up seeking any specificity to the concept and to concede that [t]he distinction between simulation and imitation is a difficult and not altogether clear one. Nevertheless, it is vitally important. It lies at the heart of virtual reality.

Yet if the concept is, as Woolley here notes, ‘vitally important’, it surely becomes all the more important to seek some clarity. We should then examine the ways in which the term is in use with regard to the analysis of new media. There are three very broad such ways, which we will call Postmodernist, Computer, and Game simulation.

Postmodernist simulation

Here the term is drawn principally from Jean Baudrillard’s identification of simulation with hyperreality (Baudrillard 1997). According to Baudrillard, simulacra are signs that cannot be exchanged with ‘real’ elements outside a given system of other signs, but only with other signs within it. Crucially, these sign-for-sign exchanges assume the functionality and effectiveness of ‘real’ objects, which is why Baudrillard calls this regime of signs hyperreal. When, under these conditions, reality is supplanted by hyperreality, any reality innocent of signs disappears into a network of simulation.

In postmodernist debates over the past few decades claims that simulation is superseding representation have raised fundamental questions of the future of human political and cultural agency. Baudrillard himself, however, is no fan of postmodernist theory: ‘The postmodern is the first truly universal conceptual conduit, like jeans or coca-cola . . . It is a world-wide verbal fornication’ (Baudrillard 1996a: 70). This is in stark contrast to those who use Baudrillard’s theorising as the exemplification of postmodern thought. Douglas Kellner, for instance, considers Baudrillard as resignedly telling the story of the death of the real without taking political responsibility for this story. Others consider him the media pessimist par excellence, who argues that the total coverage of the real with signs is equivalent to its absolute disappearance. Still others celebrate Baudrillard as an elegant ‘so what?’ in the face of the collapse of all values. All, however, omit the central point regarding his theory of simulation: that it functions and has effects – it is operational – and is therefore hyper-real rather than hyper-fictional. The grounds of this operativity are always, for Baudrillard, technological: ‘Only technology perhaps gathers together the scattered fragments of the real’ (Baudrillard 1996b: 4). ‘Perhaps’, he adds, ‘through technology, the world is toying with us, the object is seducing us by giving us the illusion of power over it’ (1996b: 5).

Baudrillard, who published an early (1967) and positive review of McLuhan’s Understanding Media, makes it clear that the ground of hyperrealism is technology as a complex social actor over which we maintain an illusion of control. To cite a typically contentious Baudrillardian example, electoral systems in developed democratic states do not empower an electorate, but rather determine the exercise of democracy in cybernetic terms: voting for party X rather than party Y consolidates the governance of binary coding over political systems. This constitutes a ‘simulation’ of democracy not in the sense that there are really and in fact more complex political issues underlying this sham democracy; but rather in the sense that real and effective politics is now conducted in precisely this new scenario. Choice has become the only reality that matters, and it is precisely quantifiable. Thus the simulation, or transposition of democracy onto another scene, concerned exclusively with a hypertrophied ‘choice’, is the only political reality there is. It is for this reason that simulations constitute, for Baudrillard, the hyperreality of cybernetic governance. The ‘perfect crime’ to which the title of one of Baudrillard’s works alludes is not the destruction of reality itself, but the destruction of an illusory reality beyond the technologies that make it work (Baudrillard 1996b). The effect is not a loss of reality, but the consolidation of a reality without an alternative.

Where commentators on contemporary cultural change have seized upon the concept of simulation is in noting a shift from ‘representation’ to simulation as dominant modes of the organisation of cultural objects and their signifying relationships to the world. According to such scholars ‘representation’ was conceived to be a cultural act, an artefact of negotiated meanings, pointing, however unsuccessfully or incompletely, to a real world beyond it. ‘Simulation’, they assert, supplants these negotiated relationships between social and cultural agents and reality, replacing them with relationships that operate only within culture and its mediations:

The theory of simulation is a theory of how our images, our communications and our media have usurped the role of reality, and a history of how reality fades. Such critical approaches draw on theories that identify profound cultural, economic and political shifts taking place in the developed world in recent decades. A defining moment in the development of this approach is Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967), which argues that the saturation of social space with mass media has generated a society defined by spectacular rather than real relations. Although there are various approaches and positions within this broad trend, they generally share the assumption that the emergence in the postwar period of a consumption-led economy has driven a culture which is dominated and colonised by the mass media and commodification. The rise of this commercialised, mediated culture brings with it profound anxieties about how people might know, and act in, the world. The sheer proliferation of television screens, computer networks, theme parks and shopping centres, and the saturation of everyday life by spectacular images so thoroughly mediated and processed that any connection with a ‘real world’ seems lost, adds up to a simulated world: a hyperreality where the artificial is experienced as real. Representation, the relationship (however mediated) between the real world and its referents in the images and narratives of popular media and art, withers away. The simulations that take its place also replace reality with spectacular fictions whose lures we must resist. In broad outlines, this remains the standard view of Baudrillard’s theses.

Accordingly, Baudrillard’s controversial and often poorly-understood versions of simulation and simulacra have proved very influential on theories and analysis of postwar popular and visual culture. The nature of the ascendency of this order of simulation over that of representation has been posited as being of fundamental importance to questions of the future of human political and cultural agency. Cultural and critical theory, when faced with the manufactured, the commodified and the artificial in modern culture, has identified the simulational and simulacral character of postwar culture in the developed world – a culture, it is claimed, that is increasingly derealised by the screens of the mass media, the seductions and veilings of commodification, and (more recently) the virtualisations of digital culture. For instance, Fredric Jameson describes the contemporary world as one in which all zones of culture and everyday life are subsumed by the commodifying reach of consumer capitalism and its spectacular media: a whole historically original consumers’ appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for pseudo-events and ‘spectacles’ . . . It is for such objects that we reserve Plato’s concept of the ‘simulacrum’, the identical copy for which no original has ever existed. Appropriately enough, the culture of the simulacrum comes to life in a society where exchange value has been generalized to the point at which the very memory of use value is effaced, a society of which Guy Debord has observed, in an extraordinary phrase, that in it ‘the image has become the final form of commodity reification . . .’. (Jameson 1991: 18)

Similarly, for Cubitt, as reality fades, the materiality of the world around us becomes unsteady, ‘the objects of consumption are unreal: they are meanings and appearances, style and fashion, the unnecessary and the highly processed’ (Cubitt 2001: 5).

What is at stake for these theorists is that any sense of political agency or progressive knowledge is lost in this seductive, consumerist apocalypse. The relationship between the real and the mediated, the artificial and the natural, implodes. It is also clear how the technological sophistication, seductive/immersive and commercial nature of videogames might be seen as a particularly vivid symptom of this postmodernist condition (Darley 2000). It is equally clear, however, that these critics’ conceptions of Baudrillard in general and simulation in particular are at best partial, and at worst wholly misleading. For these reasons, it is wholly appropriate to refer to such a constellation of theories as ‘postmodernist’, as it is to argue that Baudrillard’s simulation is not postmodernist. Far from providing any specificity to the concept of simulation, the postmodernist approach generalises it to the point where it becomes an entire theory of culture.

Computer simulation

The second use of the concept reflects a more specific concern with simulation as a particular form of computer media. Just as a confusion of imitation, representation or mimesis with simulation arises in postmodernist uses, critical approaches to computer simulation tend to take a more nuanced attitude to the mimetic elements sometimes (but not always) present in simulation. The principal difference is, in this case, that simulation is not a dissembling, illusory distraction from the real world (like Eco’s Disneyland) but rather a model of the world (or of some aspect of it). This context presents a more specific and differentiated use of simulation than that of the postmodernists. For some (writers, engineers, social scientists, military planners, etc.) the computer simulation models complex and dynamic systems over time in ways impossible in other media.

Marc Prensky, in a book that espouses the use of computer games in education and training, offers three definitions of simulation:

• any synthetic or counterfeit creation

• creation of an artificial world that approximates the real one

• a mathematical or algorithmic model, combined with a set of initial conditions, that allows prediction and visualisation as time unfolds (Prensky 2001: 211)

The first and second of these definitions recall the confusion of some aspects of simulation with imitation. That a simulation is a ‘counterfeit’ (definition 1) suggests it may be smuggled in, unnoticed, to stand in for ‘the real thing’. That it is ‘synthetic’, by contrast, suggests only that it has been manufactured. Just as it would be false to say that any manufactured product, by virtue of being manufactured, counterfeits a reality on which it is based (what does a car counterfeit?), so it would be equally false to argue that all simulations ‘counterfeit’ a reality. In short, if manufacturing goods adds additional elements to reality, so too, surely, should manufacturing simulations.

Definition 2 repeats this error: an artificial world does not necessarily approximate the real one. Consider, for example, the work of exobiologists – biologists who research the possible forms life on other worlds might take. An exobiologist, for instance, might simulate a world with denser gravity than ours; this would entail that, if life evolved on such a world, it would take a different form, with creatures perhaps more horizontally than vertically based, replacing legs with other means of locomotion, and so forth. Undoubtedly such a world is simulated, but it precisely does not approximate ours. In a more familiar sense, this is what we encounter in videogame-worlds, and the rules governing the motion of characters, the impact and consequence of collisions, and so on. In particular, the issue of ‘virtual gravity’ (generally weaker than the terrestrial variety with which we are familiar) demonstrates the extent to which such simulations owe their contribution to reality to their differences from, rather than approximations of, our own.

In computer game culture the term ‘simulation games’ refers to a specific genre in which the modelling of a dynamic system (such as a city in SimCity or a household in The Sims) provides the main motive of the game as structure and gameplay experience of automata quite specifically differentiate between automata proper and simulacra – in brief, not all automata are simulacra, insofar as they do not necessarily approximate the human form. These examples alone ought to make us wary of suggesting any equivalence between imitation and simulation.

For the task in hand – the identification of analytical concepts and approaches in the study of computer simulation in the context of a general account of new media studies – Prensky’s third definition of simulations as material (and mathematical) technologies and media is very useful. It recalls, for instance, both the temporal aspects of simulation (see below) and the Baudrillardian sense, reflecting on the notion of simulation as productive of reality, neither a ‘counterfeit’ nor necessarily an approximation of a real world beyond them. This is helpful in that such an account makes more obvious sense of those simulations used in many different contexts, for example by economists to predict market fluctuations, and by geographers to analyse demographic change. Unlike the postmodernist use of the term, this gain in applicability does not cost a loss of specificity. The processes of simulation are also foregrounded in gaming, since all digital games are simulations to some extent. Prensky cites Will Wright (the creator of SimCity, The Sims, and numerous other simulation games) discussing simulations as models quite different from, for example, balsa wood models. The simulation is temporal, modelling processes such as decay, growth, population shifts, not physical structures. The model, we might say in more familiar terms, really does precede the reality it produces.

Simulation games

In recent years, game studies has adopted analytical, formal and descriptive approaches to the specificity of computer simulation software. ‘Simulation’ here refers to the particular char-acter and operations of games, particularly computer and videogames, as processual, algorithmic media. Distinctions are made between simulation as a media form that models dynamic, spatio-temporal and complex relationships and systems (for example, of urban development and economics in SimCity) and the narrative or representational basis of other, longer-established, media (literature, film, television, etc.).

Gonzalo Frasca’s simulations are media objects that model complex systems. They are not limited to computer media (pre-digital machines and toys can simulate) but come into their own with the processing affordances of computing. This emphasis on the simulational character of computer and videogames has proven to be productive in the task of establishing the distinctiveness of the videogame as a hybrid cultural form, emphasising features, structures and operations inherited from both its computer science and board game forebears over other sides of its family – notably its media ancestors (literature, cinema, television).

What distinguishes the computer simulation is precisely what video games remind us of: it is a dynamic real-time experience of intervening with sets of algorithms that model any environment or process (not just imitating existing ones) – playing with parameters and variables.

So simulation in a videogame could be analysed thus:

• Productive of reality – so in Doom, Tomb Raider, or Grand Theft Auto the game is representational on one level – tunnels, city streets, human figures, monsters and vehicles – part of the universe of popular media culture, but the experience of playing the game is one of interacting with a profoundly different kind of environment. These maps are not maps of any territory, but interfaces to a database and the algorithms of the computer simulation;

• This ‘reality’ then is mathematically structured and determined. As Prensky points out, The Sims adds a fun interface to a cultural form rooted in science and the mathematical and traditionally presented only as numbers on the screen. Games such as SimCity incorporated a variety of ways of modelling dynamic systems – including linear equations (like a spreadsheet), differential equations (dynamic system-based simulations like Stella) and cellular automata – where the behaviors of certain objects come from their own properties and rules for how those properties interacted with neighbors rather than from overall controlling equations.

• As we have seen, exobiology and some videogames clearly indicate that simulations can function without simulating or representing already existing phenomena and systems. The mimetic elements of Tetris, Minesweeper and Donkey Kong are residual at best, yet each of these games is a dynamic simulated world with its own spatial and temporal dimensions and dynamic relationships of virtual forces and effects. They simulate only themselves.

• Thinking of videogames as simulations also returns us to the assertion that the player’s experience of cyberspace is one not only of exploration but of realising or bringing the gameworld into being in a semiotic and cybernetic circuit:

• The distinguishing quality of the virtual world is that the system lets the participant observer play an active role, where he or she can test the system and discover the rules and structural qualities in the process.

Summary

Ostensibly, these three positions have quite different objects of concern: the computer simulation of interest to game studies is not postmodernist simulation. Game studies is more modest – keen to establish the difference of games and simulations from narrative or representational media forms, rather than claiming simulation as an overarching model of contemporary culture. To analyse a videogame as a computer simulation is to understand it as an instance in everyday life, rather than as an all-encompassing hyperreality. Moreover, the screen metaphors of the postmodernist simulation carry little sense of the dynamic and procedural characteristics of computer simulation. Studied as such, computer simulations can be seen not only as the visual presentation of artificial realities (as, again, the screens of hyper-reality suggest) but as the generation of dynamic systems and economies, often with (and always in videogames) an assumption of interactive engagement written into the models and processes.

The three broad concepts of simulation outlined above overlap however. Postmodernist simulation, though formulated before the rise of computer media to their current predominance and predicated on – crudely speaking – the electronic media and consumer culture, is now widely applied to the Internet, Virtual Reality and other new media forms. Discussions of the nature of computer simulations often also entail a consideration of the relationships (or lack of) between the computer simulation and the real world. Both make a distinction between ‘simulation’ (where a ‘reality’ is experienced that does not correspond to any actually existing thing), and ‘representation’ (or ‘mimesis’, the attempt at an accurate imitation or representation of some real thing that lies outside of the image or picture) – though often with very different implications and intentions.

To sum up: within all of these approaches to simulation there is a tendency to miss a key point: simulations are real, they exist, and are experienced within the real world which they augment. Since, as Donkey Kong and the alien creatures of exobiology teach us, not all simulations are imitations, it becomes much easier to see simulations as things in their own right, rather than as mere representations of other (‘realer’) things.

Conclusion

The characteristics which we have discussed above should be seen as part of a matrix of qualities that we argue is what makes new media different. Not all of these qualities will be present in all examples of new media – they will be present in differing degrees and in different mixes. These qualities are not wholly functions of technology – they are all imbricated into the organisation of culture, work and leisure with all the economic and social determinations that involves. To speak of new media as networked, for instance, is not just to speak of the difference between server technology and broadcast transmitters but also to talk about the deregulation of media markets. To talk about the concept of the virtual is not just to speak of head-mounted display systems but also to have to take into account the ways in which experiences of self and of identity are mediated in a ‘virtual’ space. Digitality, Interactivity, Hypertextuality, Virtuality, Networked Media and Simulation are offered as the beginnings of a critical map. This discussion of the ‘characteristics’ of new media has merely established the grounds upon which we might now begin substantially to address the questions that they raise.

11 Change and Continuity

From this section to the end we now change our tack. So far we have considered, as promised at the outset, what it is that we take to be ‘new media’ and we have gone as far as to suggest some defining characteristics. We now take up the question of what is involved in considering their ‘newness’. Enthusiastic students of media technologies might wonder why this is a necessary question. Why do we not simply attempt to describe and analyse the exciting world of media innovation that surrounds us? Writing in this manner would be at the mercy of what we referred to in the introduction as permanent ‘upgrade culture’ – no sooner published than out of date because it failed to offer any critical purchase on the field. There are plenty of existing sites for readers to catch up on latest developments most of which are designed to facilitate the reader’s consumption. Our purpose is to facilitate critical thinking. In order to do that we need to get beyond the banal pleasures of novelty to reveal how the ‘new’ is constructed. Our aim here is to enable a clarity of thought often disabled by the shiny dazzle of novelty. We hope to show that this centrally involves knowing something about the history of media, the history of newness, and the history of our responses to media and technological change. But there is more to it than that.

Introduction

Media theorists, and other commentators, tend to be polarised over the degree of new media’s newness. While the various camps seldom engage in debate with each other, the argument is between those who see a media revolution and those who claim that, on the contrary, behind the hype we largely have ‘business as usual’. To some extent this argument hinges upon the disciplinary frameworks and discourses within which proponents of either side of the argument work. What premises do they proceed from? What questions do they ask? What methods do they apply? What ideas do they bring to their investigations and thinking?

In this section we simply recognise that while the view is widely held that new media are ‘revolutionary’ – that they are profoundly or radically new in kind – throughout the now extensive literature on new media there are also frequent recognitions that any attempt to understand new media requires a historical perspective. Many reasons for taking this view will be met throughout the book as part of its detailed case studies and arguments. In this section we look at the general case for the importance of history in the study of new media.

Measuring ‘newness’

The most obvious question that needs to be asked is: ‘How do we know that something is new or in what way it is new if we have not carefully compared it with what already exists or has gone before?’ We cannot know with any certainty and detail how new or how large changes are without giving our thinking a historical dimension. We need to establish from what previous states things have changed. Even if, as Brian Winston observes, the concept of a ‘revolution’ is implicitly historical, how can one know ‘that a situation has changed – has revolved – without knowing its previous state or position?’ (Winston 1998: 2). In another context, Kevin Robins (1996: 152) remarks that, ‘Whatever might be “new” about digital technologies, there is something old in the imaginary signification of “image revolution”.’ Revolutions then, when they take place, are historically relative and the idea itself has a history. It is quite possible to take the view that these questions are superfluous and only divert us from the main business. This certainly seems to be the case for many new media enthusiasts who are (somewhat arrogantly, we may suggest) secure in their conviction that the new is new and how it got to be that way will be of a lot less interest than what comes next!

However, if asked, this basic question can help us guard against missing at least three possibilities:

1 Something may appear to be new, in the sense that it looks or feels unfamiliar or because it is aggressively presented as new, but on closer inspection such newness may be revealed as only superficial. It may be that something is new only in the sense that it turns out to be a new version or configuration of something that, substantially, already exists, rather than being a completely new category or kind of thing. Alternatively, how can we know that a medium is new, rather than a hybrid of two or more older media or an old one in a new context which in some ways transforms it?

2 Conversely, as the newness of new media becomes familiar in everyday use or consumption we may lose our curiosity and vigilance, ceasing to ask questions about exactly what they do and how they are being used to change our worlds in subtle as well as dramatic ways.

3 A final possibility that this simple question can uncover is that on close inspection and reflection, initial estimates of novelty can turn out not to be as they seem. We find that some kinds and degrees of novelty exist but not in the ways that they were initially thought to. The history of what is meant by the new media buzzword ‘interactivity’ is a prime example of the way a much-lauded quality of new media has been repeatedly qualified and revised through critical examination.

The overall point is that the ‘critical’ in the critical study of new media means not taking things for granted. Little is assumed about the object of study that is then illuminated by asking and attempting to answer questions about it. An important way of doing this – of approaching something critically – is to ask what its history is or, in other words, how it came to be as it is. Lastly, in this review of reasons to be historical in our approach to new media, we need to recall how extensive and heterogeneous are the range of changes, developments, and innovations that get subsumed under the term ‘new media’. This is so much the case that without some attempt to break the term or category down into more manageable parts we risk such a level of abstraction and generalisation in our discussions that they will never take us very far in the effort to understand one or another of these changes. A better approach is to look for the different ratios of the old and the new across the field of new media. One way of doing this is, precisely, historical. It is to survey the field of new media in terms of the degree to which any particular development is genuinely and radically new or is better understood as simply an element of change in the nature of an already established medium.

Old media in new times?

For instance, it can be argued that ‘digital television’ is not a new medium but is best understood as a change in the form of delivering the contents of the TV medium, which has a history of some fifty years or more. This would be a case of what Mackay and O’Sullivan describe as an ‘old’ medium ‘in new times’ as distinct from a ‘new medium’ (1999: 4–5). On the other hand, immersive virtual reality or massively multi-player online gaming look to be, at least at first sight, mediums of a radically and profoundly new kind. This, however, still leaves us with the problem of defining what is truly new about them.

Before we accept this ‘new/old’ axis as a principle for distinguishing between kinds of new media, we have to recognise immediately that the terms can, to some extent, be reversed. For instance, it can be argued that some of the outcomes of producing and transmitting TV digitally have had quite profound effects upon its programming and modes of use and consumption such that the medium of TV has significantly changed. It could also be claimed that the increased image size, high definition, programmes on demand, interactive choice etc., of contemporary television effectively transforms the medium. Whether we would want to go as far as saying that it will be an entirely new medium still seems unlikely, if not impossible. On the other hand, the apparently unprecedented experiences offered by the technologies of immersive VR or online, interactive, multimedia can be shown to have histories and antecedents, both of a technological and a cultural kind, upon which they draw and depend. Whether, in these cases, however, we would want to go as far as saying that therefore VR is adequately defined by tracing and describing its many practical and ideological antecedents is another matter.

The idea of ‘remediation’

A third possibility is that put forward by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) who, following an insight of Marshall McLuhan, effectively tie new media to old media as a structural condition of all media. They propose and argue at some length that the ‘new’, in turn, in new media is the manner in which the digital technologies that they employ ‘refashion older media’, and then these older media ‘refashion themselves to answer to the challenges of new media’. It seems to us that there is an unassailable truth in this formulation. This is that new media are not born in a vacuum and, as media, would have no resources to draw upon if they were not in touch and negotiating with the long traditions of process, purpose, and signification that older media possess. Yet, having said this, many questions about the nature and extent of the transformations taking place remain.

What is new about interactivity?

From the 1990s onward, ‘interactivity’ became a key buzzword in the world of new media. The promise and quality of interactivity has been conceived in a number of ways.

The creative management of information

This concept of interactivity has roots in the ideas of early computer visionaries dating back as far as the 1940s, such as Vannevar Bush (1945) and Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg (1977) (both in Mayer 1999). These are visions of interactive computer databases liberating and extending our intellects. Such concepts, conceived in the years after the Second World War, were in part responses to the perceived threat of information overload in the modern world. Searchable databases that facilitated a convergence of existing print and visual media and the information they contained were seen as a new way for the individual to access, organise, and think with information.

Interactivity as consumer choice technologically embodied

We saw in our discussion of the concept in 1.2 how it has been central to the marketing of personal computers by linking it to contemporary ideas about consumer choice. On this view, being interactive means that we are no longer the passive consumers of identical ranges of mass-produced goods, whether intellectual or material. Interactivity is promoted as a quality of computers that offers us active choices and personalised commodities, whether of knowledge, news, entertainment, banking, shopping and other services.

The death of the author

During the 1990s, cybertheorists were keen to understand interactivity as a means of placing traditional authorship in the hands of the ‘reader’ or consumer (Landow 1992). Here, the idea is that interactive media are a technological realisation of a theory, first worked out mainly in relation to literature, known as ‘post-structuralism’. We had, it was suggested, witnessed the ‘death of the author’, the central, fixed and god-like voice of the author behind the text (see, for example, Landow 1992). Interactivity meant that users of new media would be able to navigate their way across uncharted seas of potential knowledge, making their own sense of a body of material, each user following new pathways through the matrix of data each time they set out on their journeys of discovery.

A related idea is that the key property of interactivity is a major shift in the traditional relationship between the production and reception of media. This resides in the power that computers give the reader/user to ‘write back’ into a text. Information, whether in the form of text, image, or sound, is received within software applications that allow the receiver to change – delete, add, reconfigure – what they receive. It has not been lost on many thinkers that this practice, while enabled by electronic digital technology, resembles the medieval practice of annotating and adding extensive marginalia to manuscripts and books so that they became palimpsests. These are surfaces upon which generations of additions and commentaries are overwritten on texts, one on the other. While this is true it has only a limited sense. There is after all a tremendous difference between the operation of the Internet and the highly selective access of the privileged class of medieval monks to sacred texts.

More recently, in the face of exaggerated claims for the almost magical powers of interactivity and on the basis of practice-based critical reflection, more critical estimations have been made. As the artist Sarah Roberts has put it:

the illusion that goes along with [interactivity] is of a kind of democracy . . . that the artist is sharing the power of choice with the viewer, when actually the artist has planned every option that can happen . . . it’s a great deal more complex than if you [the user] hadn’t had a sort of choice, but it’s all planned. (Penny 1995: 64)

These concepts of interactivity are less descriptions of particular technical, textual, or experiential properties and more claims or propositions rooted in the inspired founding visions, imaginative marketing strategies, and the sophisticated analogies of academic theorists about new, real or imagined, possibilities of human empowerment. However, whatever merits these ideas have, whether visionary or opportunistic, they have been subjected to methodical enquiry from within a number of disciplines which we need to attend to if we are to get beyond these broad characterisations of interactivity.

Human–computer interaction: intervention and control

A technical idea of interactivity has taken shape most strongly within the discipline of human–computer interaction (HCI). This is a scientific and industrial field which studies and attempts to improve the interface between computers and users.

An ‘interactive mode’ of computer use was first posited during the years of mainframe computers when large amounts of data were fed into the machine to be processed. At first, once the data was entered, the machine was left to get on with the processing (batch processing). Gradually however, as the machines became more sophisticated, it became possible to intervene into the process whilst it was still running through the use of dialogue boxes or menus. This was known as operating the computer in an ‘interactive’ mode (Jensen 1999: 168). This ability to intervene in the computing process and see the results of your intervention in real time was essentially a control function. It was a one-way command communication from the operator to the machine. This is a very different idea of interaction from the popularised senses of hypertextual freedom described above (Huhtamo 2000).

This idea of interaction as control continued to develop through the discipline of HCI and was led by the ideas of technologists like Licklider and Engelbart (Licklider and Taylor 1999 [orig: 1968]; Engelbart 1999 [orig: 1963]). If the kind of symbiosis between operator and machine that they envisaged was to take place then this interactive mode had to be extended and made available outside of the small groups who understood the specialised programming languages. To this end, during the early 1970s, researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center developed the GUI, the graphical user interface, which would work within the simultaneously developed standard format for the PC: keyboard, processor, screen and mouse. In what has become one of the famous moments in the history of Xerox, they failed to exploit their remarkable breakthroughs. Later, Apple were able to use the GUI to launch their range of PCs in the early 1980s: first the Apple Lisa, then in 1984 the celebrated Apple Mac. These GUI systems were then widely imitated by Microsoft.

Communication studies and the ‘face-to-face’ paradigm

However, this idea of interaction as control, as interface manipulation, is somewhat at odds with the idea of interactivity as a mutually reciprocal communication process, whether between user and machine/database or between user and user. Here we encounter an understanding of the term derived from sociology and communications studies. This tradition has attempted to describe and analyse interactivity and computers in relation to interactivity in face-to-face human communication. In this research interaction is identified as a core human behaviour, the foundation of culture and community. For communications theorists interaction is a quality present in varying degrees as a quality of communication. So a question and answer pattern of communication is somewhat ‘less’ interactive than an open-ended dialogue (see, for example, Shutz 2000; Jensen 1999). Similarly the modes of interactivity described earlier would here be classified on a scale of least to most interactive, with the various kinds of CMC ‘most’ interactive and the navigational choices ‘least’ interactive.

Various commentators (for example, Stone 1995: 10; Aarseth 1997: 49) quote Andy Lippman’s definition of interactivity generated at MIT in the 1980s as an ‘ideal’. For Lippman interactivity was ‘mutual and simultaneous activity on the part of both participants, usually working toward some goal, but not necessarily’. This state needed to be achieved through a number of conditions:

· Mutual interruptibility

· limited look ahead (so that none of the partners in the interaction can foresee the future shape of the interaction)

· no default (there is no pre-programmed route to follow)

· the impression of an infinite database (from the participants’ point of view).

This sounds like a pretty good description of conversation, but a very poor description of using a point-and-click interface to ‘interact’ with a computer.

The study of artificial intelligence

There seem to us to be some real problems with the application of communications theories based in speech to technologically mediated communications. Unresolved, these problems lead to impossible expectations of computers, expectations that open up a gap between what we experience in computer-based interaction and what we might desire. Often this gap gets filled by predictions drawn from yet another methodological field – that of artificial intelligence (AI). The argument usually goes something like this. Ideal human–computer interaction would approach as close as possible to face-to-face communication; however, computers obviously can’t do that yet since they are (still) unable to pass as human for any length of time. Futuristic scenarios (scientific and science fictional) propose that this difficulty will be resolved as chips get cheaper and computing enters into its ubiquitous phase (see ubiquitous computing and pervasive media). In the meantime we have to make do with various degrees along the way to ‘true’ (i.e. conversational) interaction. In this construction interactivity is always a failure awaiting rescue by the next development on an evershifting technological event horizon.

Media studies

Understandings of interactivity not only draw on HCI, communications studies, and AI research but often call up debates around the nature of media audiences and their interpretations of meanings that have been generated within media studies. Influential strands within media studies teach that audiences are ‘active’ and make multiple and variable interpretative acts in response to media texts: the meaning of the text must be thought of in terms of which set of discourses it encounters in any particular set of circumstances, and how this encounter may restructure both the meaning of the text and the discourses which it meets.

This reading of audience behaviour is sometimes referred to as an ‘interactive’ activity. Prior to the emergence of computer media, it is argued that as readers we already had ‘interactive’ relationships with (traditional analogue) texts. This position is then extended to argue that not only do we have complex interpretative relationships with texts but active material relationships with texts; we have long written marginalia, stopped and rewound the videotape, dubbed music from CD to tape, physically cut and pasted images and text from print media into new arrangements and juxtapositions. In this reading, interactivity comes to be understood as, again, a kind of technological correlative for theories of textuality already established and an extension of material practices that we already have. So, for instance, even though we might not all share the same experience of a website we may construct a version of ‘the text’ through our talk and discussion about the site; similarly it is argued we will not all share the same experience of watching a soap opera. Indeed, over a period of weeks we will almost certainly not see the same ‘text’ as other family members or friends, but we can construct a common ‘text’ through our responses and talk about the programme. The text and the meanings which it produces already only exist in the spaces of our varied interpretations and responses.

In other words there is a perspective on interactivity, based in literary studies and media studies, that argues that nothing much has changed in principle. We are just offered more opportunities for more complex relationships with texts but these relationships are essentially the same (Aarseth 1997: 2). However, we would argue that the distinction between interaction and interpretation is even more important now than previously. This is because the problems which face us in understanding the processes of mediation are multiplied by new media: the acts of multiple interpretation of traditional media are not made irrelevant by digital and technological forms of interactivity but are actually made more numerous and complex by them. The more text choices available to the reader the greater the possible interpretative responses. The very necessity of intervention in the text, of manipulation of the text’s forms of interaction, requires a more acute understanding of the act of interpretation.

What kind of history?

Grassroots democratic exchange

Beyond the particular ways of understanding interactivity that flow from the four methodologies we have discussed, there lies another, more diffuse yet extremely powerful, discourse about interactivity that is so pervasive as to have become taken for granted. Within this usage ‘interactive’ equals automatically better – better than passive, and better than just ‘active’ by virtue of some implied reciprocity. This diffuse sense of the virtue of interactivity also has a social and cultural history, dating from the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this history, democratising challenges to established power systems were led by constant calls for dialogue and increased lateral, rather than vertical and hierarchical, communications as a way of supporting social progress. This ideological attack on one-way information flows in favour of lateral or interactive social communications lay behind much of the radical alternative rhetorics of the period. A community arts and media group active in London through the 1970s and 1980s, under the name of ‘Interaction’, is characteristic of the period in its analysis:

The problems of a pluralist urban society (and an over populated one dependent on machines as well) are very complex. Answers, if there are any, lie in the ability to relate, to inform, to listen – in short the abilities of creative people.

The abilities to ‘relate’ and to ‘listen’ are the skills of face-to-face dialogue and social interaction recast as a progressive force. This valorisation of social dialogue was ‘in the air’ in the early 1970s. It informed a radical critique of mainstream media which took root not only in the burgeoning of alternative and community media practices of the period but also in early ideas about computer networking. As was pointed out by Resource One, a community computing facility based in the Bay area of San Francisco:

Both the quantity and content of available information is set by centralised institutions – the press, T V, radio, news services, think tanks, government agencies, schools and universities – which are controlled by the same interests which control the rest of the economy. By keeping information flowing from the top down, they keep us isolated from each other. Computer technology has thus far been used . . . mainly by the government and those it represents to store and quickly retrieve vast amounts of information about huge numbers of people. . . . It is this pattern that convinces us that control over the flow of information is so crucial.

This support for ‘democratic media’ is a kind of popular and latter-day mobilisation of ideas derived from the Frankfurt School, with its criticisms of the role of mass media in the production of a docile population seduced by the pleasures of consumption and celebrity. In this reading ‘interactive’ media are constructed as a potential improvement on passive media in that they appear to hold out the opportunity for social and political communications to function in a more open and democratic fashion which more closely approaches the ideal conditions of the public sphere.

The return of the Frankfurt School critique in the popularisation of new media

We are now in a position to see that the idea of interactivity, as one of the primary ‘new’ qualities of new media, comes to us as an automatic asset with a rich history. Yet, as we have also seen, it is a term that carries the weight of a number of different, and contradictory, histories. It may be possible to argue that it is precisely this lack of definition which makes it such a suitable site for our investment in the idea of ‘the new’.

What kind of history?

‘“I Love Lucy” and “Dallas”, FORTRAN and fax, computer networks, comsats, and mobile telephones. The transformations in our psyches triggered by the electronic media thus far may have been preparation for bigger things to come’ (Rheingold 1991: 387).

In previous chapter we posed a number of basic questions that need to be asked if critical studies of new media are to proceed without being based upon too many assumptions about what we are dealing with. We strongly suggested that asking these questions requires us to take an interest in the available histories of older media. There is, however, another important reason why the student of new media may need to pay attention to history. This is because, from their very inception, new media have been provided with histories, some of which can be misleading.

From the outset, the importance of new media, and the kind of futures they would deliver, has frequently been conceived as part of a historical unfolding of long-glimpsed possibilities. As the quote above suggests, such accounts imply that history may only have been a preparation for the media technologies and products of our time. In other words, a historical imagination came into play at the moment we began to strive to get the measure of new media technologies. These historical perspectives are often strongly marked by paradoxically old-fashioned ideas about history as a progressive process. Such ideas rapidly became popular and influential. There is little exaggeration in saying that, subsequently, a good deal of research and argument in the early years of ‘new media studies’ has been concerned with criticising these ‘histories’ and outlining alternative ways of understanding media change.

This section

While this book is not the place to study theories of history in any depth, a body of historical issues now attaches itself to the study of new media. Some examples, and an idea of the critical issues they raise, are therefore necessary. In this section we first consider what are known as teleological accounts of new media. The meaning of this term will become clearer through the following discussion of some examples but, broadly, it refers to the idea that new media are a direct culmination of historical processes. In this section, by taking an example of work on the history of new media we seek to show that there can be no single, linear historical narrative that would add to our understanding of all that ‘new media’ embraces. Instead, we are clearly faced with a large number of intersecting histories. These are unlikely to fall into a pattern of tributaries all feeding regularly and incrementally into a main stream. We would be hard put to think, let alone prove, that all of the developments, contexts, agents and forces that are involved in these histories had anything like a shared goal or purpose. We then outline the approaches of some theorists of new media who, rejecting the idea that new media can simply be understood as the utopian end point of progressive historical development, seek alternative ways of thinking about the differences and the complex connections between old and new media. In doing this we will consider how Michel Foucault’s influential ‘genealogical’ theory of history has found a place in studies of new media.

Lastly, we consider a view derived from modernist aesthetics, which argues that for a medium to be genuinely new its unique essence has to be discovered in order for it to break itself free from the past and older media. In questioning this idea we introduce a number of examples in which new media are seen to recall the past, rather than break with it.

Teleological accounts of new media

From cave paintings to mobile phones

In a once popular and influential history of ‘virtual reality’, Howard Rheingold takes us to the Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings of Lascaux, where 30,000 years ago, ‘primitive but effective cyberspaces may have been instrumental in setting us on the road to computerized world building in the first place’ (Rheingold 1991: 379). He breathlessly takes his reader on a journey which has its destination in immersive virtual environments. En route we visit the origins of Dionysian drama in ancient Greece, the initiation rites of the Hopi, Navajo, and Pueblo tribes ‘in the oldest continuously inhabited human settlements in North America’, the virtual worlds of TV soap operas like I Love Lucy and Dallas, arriving at last to meet the interactive computing pioneers of Silicon Valley, major US universities and Japanese corporations. In Rheingold’s sweeping historical scheme, the cave painting appears to hold the seeds of the fax machine, the computer network, the communications satellite and the mobile phone (Rheingold 1991: 387)!

Few examples of this way of understanding how we came to have a new medium are as mind-boggling in their Olympian sweep as Rheingold’s. But, as we shall see, other theorists and commentators, often with more limited ambitions, share with him the project to understand new media as the culmination or present stage of development of all human media over time. When this is done, new media are placed at the end of a chronological list that begins with oral communication, writing, printing, drawing and painting, and then stretches and weaves its way through the image and communication media of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, photography, film, T V, video and semaphore, telegraphy, telephony and radio. In such historical schemas there is often an underlying assumption or implication – which may or may not be openly stated – that new media represent a stage of development that was already present as a potential in other, earlier, media forms. A further example will help us see how such views are constructed and the problems associated with them.

From photography to telematics: extracting some sense from teleologies

Peter Weibel, a theorist of art and technology, former director of Ars Electronica and now director of a leading centre for new media art (ZKM, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, in Karlsruhe, Germany), offers an 8-stage historical model of the progressive development of technologies of image production and transmission which, having photography as its first stage, spans 160 years (1996: 338–339).

Weibel notes that in 1839 the invention of photography meant that image making was freed for the first time from a dependence upon the hand (this is Stage 1). Images were then further unfixed from their locations in space by electronic scanning and telegraphy (Stage 2). In these developments Weibel sees ‘the birth of new visual worlds and telematic culture’ (1996: 338).

Then, in Stages 3–5, these developments were ‘followed by’ film which further transformed the image from something that occupied space to one that existed in time. Next, the discovery of the electron, the invention of the cathode ray tube, and magnetic recording brought about the possibility of a combination of film, radio, and television – and video was born. At this stage, Weibel observes, ‘the basic conditions for electronic image production and transfer were established’ (1996: 338).

In Stage 6, transistors, integrated circuits and silicon chips enter the scene. All previous developments are now revolutionised as the sum of the historical possibilities of machine-aided image generation are at last united in the multimedia, interactive computer. This newly interactive machine, and the convergence of all other technological media within it, then join with telecommunications networks and there is a further liberation as ‘matterless signs’ spread like waves in global space (Stage 7). A new era (first glimpsed at Stage 2) now dawns: that of post-industrial, telematic civilisation.

So, Stage 7, Weibel’s penultimate stage, is that of interactive telematic culture, more or less where we may be now at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. His final Stage 8 tips us into the future, a stage ‘until now banished to the domain of science fiction’ but ‘already beginning to become a reality’ (1996: 339). This is the sphere of advanced sensory technologies in which he sees the brain as directly linked to ‘the digital realm’ (ibid.).

Weibel clearly sees this history as progressive, one in which ‘Over the last 150 years the mediatisation and mechanisation of the image, from the camera to the computer have advanced greatly’ (1996: 338). There is a direction, then, advancing toward the present and continuing into the future, which is revealed by the changing character of our media over time.

As we look back over Wiebel’s eight stages we see that the ‘advances’ all concern the increasing dematerialisation of images and visual signs, their separation from the material vehicle which carries them. The final, culminating stage in this dynamic is then glimpsed: neurological engineering which is about to usher in a direct interfacing of the brain with the world – a world where no media, material or immaterial, exist. We have the end of media or, as his title states, The World as Interface.

What kind of history is being told here?

• Each of Weibel’s stages points to real technological developments in image media production and transmission. These technologies and inventions did happen, did and do exist.

• Moving out from the facts, he then offers brief assessments of what these developments have meant for human communication and visual culture. In these assessments, the insights of other media theorists show through.

• Overall, Weibel organises his observations chronologically; the stages follow each other in time, each one appearing to be born out of the previous one.

• There is an ultimate point of origin – photography. The birth of this image technology is placed as a founding moment out of which the whole process unfolds.

• He finds a logic or a plot for his unfolding story – his sequential narrative of progress. This is the story of the increasing automation of production and increasing separation of signs (and images) from any physical vehicle that carries them.

This story is not without sense. But it is important to see that it is, in actuality, an argument. It is an organisation and integration of facts and ways of thinking about those facts. Facts? Photography and then telecommunications were invented. Hard to contest. Ways of thinking about the significance of those facts? Photography and telecommunications converged to mean that reality (real, material, physically tangible space) disappeared. A dramatic pronouncement that, at the very least, we may want to debate.

By selectively giving each fact a particular kind of significance (there are many others that he could have found), Weibel is making a case. Although it is more focused than the example we took from Rheingold’s ‘history’ of VR, it is basically similar in that an argument is made in the form of a historical narrative. Within Weibel’s ‘history’ he foregrounds and makes us think about some very important factors. Good, perceptive and well-researched stories have always done this.

However, at the same time, there are some big problems with Weibel’s account if we take it as a credible historical account without asking further questions about its implications. This is because he does not tell us why and how the apparent unfolding of events takes place. What drives this march of media from machine-aided production of material images (photography) to the simulation of ‘artificial and natural worlds’, and even the coming simulation of the ‘brain itself’? What, in this pattern of seamless evolution, has he detected? How was the bloom of interactive ‘telematic civilisation’ always contained in the seed of photography?

Historical narratives of the kind that Rheingold and Weibel tell are forms of teleological argument. These are arguments in which the nature of the past is explained as a preparation for the present. The present is understood as being prefigured in the past and is the culmination of it. Such arguments seek to explain how things are in terms of their ‘ends’ (their outcomes or the purposes, aims and intentions that we feel they embody) rather than in prior causes. There have been many versions of such teleological historical explanation, beginning with those that saw the world as the outcome of God’s design, through various kinds of secular versions of grand design, of cosmic forces, the unfolding of a world soul, through to dialectical explanation in which the present state of things is traceable to a long historical interplay of opposites and contradictions which inevitably move on toward a resolution. Related, if slightly less deterministically teleological, versions of historical explanation think in terms of history as a process of problem solving. Often a kind of relay race of great geniuses, in which each one takes up the questions left by their predecessors and, in each case, it is implied that the project is somehow communicated across and carried on over centuries of time as the final answer is sought.

Such attempts to find a (teleo)logic in history were strong in the nineteenth century, particularly in Western Europe and North America. Here, a dominant sense of optimism and faith in the progress of industry and science encouraged the view that history (as the growth, evolution and maturing of human societies) was drawing to a close.

Operating over very different timescales, both Rheingold and Weibel continue to tell stories about the rise of new media by adopting a kind of historical perspective which is as old as the hills. There is something of a paradox in the way in which new media have rapidly been provided with histories of a rather naive and uncritical (we are tempted to say old-fashioned) kind.

While we have stressed the importance of historical knowledge and research to understanding the contemporary field of new media, it does not, in our view, readily include these kinds of teleology which can be highly misleading in their grand sweep and the way in which they place new media, far too simply, as the end point of a long process of historical development.

Seeing the limits of new media teleologies

We now look at a third and recent contribution to the history of new media. This is a historical overview, in which Paul Mayer identifies the ‘seminal ideas and technical developments’ that lead to the development of computer media and communication. He traces the key concepts which lead from an abstract system of logic, through the development of calculating machines, to the computer as a ‘medium’ which can ‘extend new possibilities for expressions, communication, and interaction in everyday life’ (Mayer 1999: 321).

The important point for our present discussion is that as Mayer’s thorough historical outline of ‘pivotal conceptual insights’ proceeds, we can also see how other histories that are quite distinct from that of the conceptual and technical development of computing itself are entwined with the one he traces. At various points in his history, doors are opened through which we glimpse other factors. These factors do not contribute directly to the development of computer media, but they indicate how quite other spheres of activity, taking place for other reasons, have played an essential but contingent part in the history of new media. We will take two examples.

In the first section of his history Mayer traces the conceptual and practical leaps which led to the building of the first mainframe computers in the 1940s. He begins his history with the project of the late-seventeenth-century philosopher, Leibniz, to formulate a way of reasoning logically by matching concepts with numbers, and his efforts to devise a ‘universal logic machine’ (Mayer 1999: 4). He then points to a whole range of other philosophical, mathematical, mechanical, and electronic achievements occurring in the 300-year period between the 1660s and the 1940s. The history leads us to the ideas and practical experiments in hypermedia carried out by Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson in the mid-twentieth century. It is a history which focuses on that part of technological development that involves envisioning: the capacity to think and imagine possibilities from given resources.

Clearly, many of these achievements, especially the earlier ones, were not directed at developing the computer as a medium as we would understand it. Such a use of the computer was not part of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century frame of reference: it was not a conceivable or imaginable project. As Mayer points out, Leibniz had the intellectual and philosophical ambitions of his period (the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries) as one of the ‘thinkers who advanced comprehensive philosophical systems during the Age of Reason’ with its interest in devising logical scientific systems of thought which had universal validity (Mayer 1999: 4). Neither were our modern ideas about the interpersonal communications and visual-representational possibilities of the computer in view during the nineteenth-century phase of the Industrial Revolution. At this time the interest in computing was rooted in the need for calculation, ‘in navigation, engineering, astronomy, physics’ as the demands of these activities threatened to overwhelm the human capacity to calculate. (This last factor is an interesting reversal of the need that Vannevar Bush saw some 100 years later, in the 1950s, for a machine and a system that would augment the human capacity to cope with an overload of data and information).

Hence, as we follow Mayer’s historical account of key figures and ideas in the history of computing, we also see how the conceptual development of the modern computer as medium took place for quite other reasons. At the very least these include the projects of eighteenth-century philosophers, nineteenth-century industrialisation, trade and colonisation, and an early twentieth-century need to manage statistics for the governance and control of complex societies. As Mayer identifies, it is only in the 1930s when, alongside Turing’s concept of ‘the universal machine’ which would automatically process any kind of symbol and not just numbers, the moment arrives in which, ‘the right combination of concepts, technology and political will colluded to launch the construction of machines recognisable today as computers in the modern sense’ (1999: 9). In short, while Mayer traces a set of chronological connections between ‘pivotal concepts’ in the history of computing, we are also led to see:

1 That the preconditions were being established for something that was not yet conceived or foreseen: the computer as a medium.

2 That even the conceptual history of computing, formally presented as a sequence of ideas and experiments, implies that other histories impact upon that development.

To sum up, we are led to see that a major factor in the development of computer media is the eventual impact of one set of technologies and practices – those of computing numbers – on other sets: these being social and personal practices of communication and aural, textual and visual forms of representation. In short, a set of technological and conceptual developments which were undertaken for one set of reasons (and even these, as we have seen, were not stable and sustained, as the philosophical gave way to the industrial and the commercial, and then the informational) have eventually come to transform a range of image and communication media. It is also apparent that this happened in ways that were completely unlooked for. New image and communications media were not anticipated by the thinkers, researchers, technologists and the wider societies to which they belonged, during the period between the eighteenth and the mid-twentieth century in which digital computing develops (Mayer 1999).

If this first example begins to show how teleological accounts obscure and distort the real historical contingency of computer media, our second example returns us to the greater historical complexity of what are now called new media. Mayer’s focus is on the computer as a medium itself: the symbol-manipulating, networked machine through which we communicate with others, play games, explore databases and produce texts. Returning to our initial breakdown of the range of phenomena that new media refers to, we must remind ourselves that this is not all that new media has come to stand for. Computer-mediated communication, Mayer’s specific interest, is only one key element within a broader media landscape that includes convergences, hybridisations, transformations, and displacements within and between all forms of older media. These media, such as print, telecommunications, photography, film, television and radio, have, of course, their own, and in some cases long, histories. In the last decades of the twentieth century these histories of older media become precisely the kinds of factors that began to play a crucial role in the development of computer media, just as the demands of navigators or astronomers for more efficient means of calculating did in the nineteenth.

This is a vital point as Mayer’s historical sketch of the conceptual development of the computer ends, with Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg’s 1977 prototype for an early personal computer named the ‘Dynabook’. He observes that the ‘Dynabook’ was conceived by its designers as ‘a metamedium, or a technology with the broadest capabilities to simulate and expand the functionality and power of other forms of mediated expression’ (Mayer 1999: 20). Kay and Goldberg themselves make the point somewhat more directly when they write that ‘the computer, viewed as a medium itself, can be all other media’. In the late 1970s, Kay and Goldberg’s vision of the media that the Dynabook would ‘metamediate’ was restricted to text, painting and drawing, animation and music. (Subsequently, of course, with increased memory capacity and software developments, the ‘other media’ forms which the computer ‘can be’ would include photography, film, video and TV.)

On the face of it, this seems simple enough. What Kay and Goldberg are saying is that the computer as a ‘medium’ is able to simulate other media. However, both they and Mayer, in his history, seem to assume that this is unproblematic. As Mayer puts it, one of the great things about the Dynabook as a prototype computer medium, is that it is an ‘inspiring realisation of Leibniz’s generality of symbolic representation’ (1999: 21) due to its ability to reduce all signs and languages – textual, visual, aural – to a binary code. It does a great deal more besides, of course: it ‘expand[s] upon the functionality and power of other forms of mediated expression’ (1999: 20). However, this convergence and interaction of many previously separate media actually makes the picture far more complicated. We have to remind ourselves that this range of ‘old’ media, that the computer carries and simulates, have in turn their own histories. Ones which parallel, and in some cases are far older than that of the computer.

The media which the computer ‘simulates and expands’ are also the result of conceptual and technical, as well as cultural and economic, histories which have shaped them in certain ways. In an expanded version of Mayer’s history, space would need to be made for the ways in which these traditional media forms contributed to thinking about the Dynabook concept itself. For, if we are to understand the complex forms of new media it is not enough to think only in terms of what the computer might have offered to do for ‘other forms of mediated expression’ but also to ask how these other media forms shaped the kind of ‘metamediating’ that Goldberg and Kay envisaged. The universal symbol-manipulating capacity of the computer could not, by itself, determine the forms and aesthetics of the computer medium. This is because the very media that the computer (as medium) incorporates (or metamediates) are not neutral elements: they are social and signifying practices. We would want to know, for instance, what the outcomes of other histories – the conventions of drawing, the genres of animation, the trust in photographic realism, the narrative forms of text and video, and the lan-guages of typography and graphic design, etc. – brought to this new metamedium. These are, in fact, the very issues which have come to exercise practitioners and theorists of new media, and which the various parts of this book discuss.

Foucault and genealogies of new media

A widely read theorist of new media, Mark Poster, has suggested:

The question of the new requires a historical problematic, a temporal and spatial framework in which there are risks of setting up the new as a culmination, telos or fulfillment of the old, as the onset of utopia or dystopia. The conceptual problem is to enable a historical dif-ferentiation of old and new without initialising a totalising narrative. Foucault’s proposal of a genealogy, taken over from Nietzsche, offers the most satisfactory resolution. (Poster 1999: 12)

In this way, Poster sums up the problems we have been discussing. How do we envisage the relationship of new and old media over time, sequentially, and in space (what kind of coexistence or relationship with each other and where?) without assuming that new media bring old media to some kind of concluding state for good or bad? How do we differentiate between them without such sweeping, universalising schemas as we met above? Foucault’s concept of genealogy is his answer.

Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin introduce their book on new media, entitled Remediation, with an explicit acknowledgement of their debt to Foucault’s method:

The two logics of remediation have a long history, for their interplay defines a genealogy that dates back at least to the Renaissance and the invention of linear perspective. Note 1: Our notion of genealogy is indebted to Foucault’s, for we too are looking for historical affiliations or resonances, and not of origins. Foucault . . . characterised genealogy as ‘an examination of descent’, which ‘permits the discovery, under the unique aspect of a trait or a concept of the myriad events through which – thanks to which, against which – they were formed’. (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 21)

How does an idea or a practice, which for Bolter and Grusin is the concept and practice of remediation (the way that one medium absorbs and transforms another), reach us (descend)? What multiple factors have played a part in shaping that process?

We should note that Poster is particularly keen to avoid thinking of history as a process with a ‘culmination’ and end point. Bolter and Grusin, like Foucault, are not interested in the origins of things. They are not interesting in where things began or where they finished. They are interested in ‘affiliations’ (the attachments and connections between things) and ‘resonances’ (the sympathetic vibrations between things). They want to know about the ‘through’ and ‘against’ of things. Instead of images of linear sequences and chains of events we need to think in terms of webs, clusters, boundaries, territories, and overlapping spheres as our images of historical process.

Artificial Life

A simple model of the complex of histories ‘through’ and ‘against’ which new media emerge.

Theorists of new media seeking alternative ways of thinking about the differences and the complex connections between old and new media have drawn upon the influential ‘genealogical’ theory of history, as argued and put into practice in a number of major works of cultural history by the philosopher-historian Michel Foucault. It is a historical method which offers the possibility of thinking through new media’s relationship to the past while avoiding some of the problems we have met above. In doing this, theorists of new media are following in the footsteps of other historians of photography, film, cinema and visual culture such as John Tagg (1998), Jonathan Crary (1993) and Geoffrey Batchen (1997) who have used what has become known as a ‘Foucauldian’ perspective.

New media and the modernist concept of progress

the full aesthetic potential of this medium will be realised only when computer artists come to the instrument from art rather than computer science . . . Today the kind of simulation envisioned . . . requires a $10 million Cray-1 supercomputer, the most powerful computer in the world . . . [T]he manufacturers of the Cray-1 believe that by the early 1990s computers with three-fourths of its power will sell for approximately $20,000 less than the cost of a portapak and editing system today . . . [F]inally accessible to autonomous individuals, the full aesthetic potential of computer simulation will be revealed, and the future of cinematic languages . . . will be rescued from the tyranny of perceptual imperialists and placed in the hands of artists and amateurs. (Youngblood 1999: 48)

In the name of ‘progress’ our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old. (McLuhan and Fiore 1967a: 81)

In order to conceive a properly genealogical account of new media histories we need not only to take account of the particular teleologies of technohistory above but also the deeply embedded experience of modernism within aesthetics.

Commentators on new media, like Gene Youngblood, frequently refer to a future point in time when their promise will be realised. Thought about new media is replete with a sense of a deferred future. We are repeatedly encouraged to await the further development of the technologies which they utilise. At times this takes the simple form of the ‘when we have the computing power’ type of argument. Here, the present state of technological (under)development is said to constrain what is possible and explains the gap between the potential and actual performance (see for example, our discussion of virtual reality.

Related to views of this kind, there are some which embody a particular kind of theory about historical change. It is not technological underdevelopment per se that is blamed for the failure of a new medium to deliver its promise; rather, the culprit is seen to be ingrained cultural resistance. Here, the proposal is that in their early phases new media are bound to be used and understood according to older, existing practices and ideas, and that it is largely such ideological and cultural factors that limit the potential of new media. The central premises here is that each medium has its own kind of essence; that is, some unique and defining characteristic or characteristics which will, given time and exploration, be clearly revealed. As they are revealed the medium comes into its own. This kind of argument adds ideas about the nature of media and culture to the simpler argument about technological underdevelopment.

Such a view has quite a long history itself, as will be seen in the example from the pioneering writer on ‘expanded’ cinema, Gene Youngblood, quoted at the beginning of this section. Writing in 1984, in an essay on the then emerging possibilities of digital video and cinema (in Druckery 1999), he looks forward to the 1990s when he foresees affordable computers coming to possess the kind of power that, at his time of writing, was only to be found in the $10 million Cray-1 mainframe supercomputer. Then, in a clear example of the modernist argument that we have outlined, he adds that we must also look forward to the time when the ‘full aesthetic potential of the computer simulation will be revealed’, as it is rescued from ‘the tyranny of perceptual imperialists’ (in Druckery 1999: 48). Such imperialists being, we can assume, those scientists, artists and producers who impose their old habits of vision and perception upon the new media.

In a more recent example, Steve Holzmann (1997: 15) also takes the view that most existing uses of new media fail to ‘exploit those special qualities that are unique to digital worlds’. Again, this is because he sees them as having as yet failed to break free of the limits of ‘existing paradigms’ or historical forms and habits. He, too, looks forward to a time when new media transcend the stage when they are used to fulfill old purposes and when digital media’s ‘unique qualities’ come to ‘define entirely new languages of expression’.

As Bolter and Grusin have argued (1999: 49–50), Holzmann (and Youngblood before him in our other example) represent the modernist viewpoint. They believe that for a medium to be significantly new it has to make a radical break with the past.

A major source of such ideas is to be found in one of the seminal texts of artistic modernism: the 1961 essay ‘Modernist Painting’ by art critic and theorist Clement Greenberg. Although the new, digital media are commonly understood as belonging to a postmodern period, in which the cultural projects of modernism are thought to have been superseded, Greenbergian ideas have continued to have a considerable pull on thinking about new media. Clearly, the point of connection is between the sense that new media are at the cutting edge of culture, that there is an opening up of new horizons and a need for experimentation, and the ideology of the earlier twentieth-century artistic avant-garde movements in painting, photography, sculpture, film and video.

We meet these modernist ideas whenever we hear talk of the need for new media to break clear of old habits and attitudes, the gravity field of history and its old thought patterns and practices. It is also present when we hear talk about the essential characteristics of new media; when the talk is of the distinctive essence of ‘digitality’ as against the ‘photographic’, the ‘filmic’ or the ‘televisual’.

Greenberg himself did not think that modern art media should or could break with the past in any simple sense. But he did think they should engage in a process of clarifying and refining their nature by not attempting to do what was not proper to them. This process of refinement included ditching old historical functions that a medium might have served in the past. Painting was the medium that interested him in particular, and his efforts were part of his search to identify the importance of the painting in an age of mechanical reproduction – the age of the then relatively ‘new’ media of photography and film. He argued that painting should rid itself of its old illustrative or narrative functions to concentrate on its formal patterning of colour and surface. Photography was better suited to illustrative work and showed how it was not, after all, appropriate to painting. Painting could now realise its true nature.

Greenberg also made his arguments in the mid-twentieth-century context of a critique of the alienating effects of capitalism on cultural experience. He shared with other critics the view that the heightened experiences that art had traditionally provided were being eroded and displaced by a levelling down to mere ‘entertainment’ and popular kitsch. He argued that the arts could save their higher purpose from this fate ‘by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not obtained from any other kind of activity’ (Greenberg 1961, in Harrison and Wood 1992: 755). He urged that this could be done by each art determining, ‘through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself’ (ibid.). By these means each art would exhibit and make explicit ‘that which was unique and irreducible’ to it (ibid.). The task of artists, then, was to search for the fundamental essence of their medium, stripping away all extraneous factors and borrowings from other media. It is often thought that this task now falls to new media artists and forward-looking experimental producers.

However, the manner in which a new medium necessarily adopts, in its early years, the conventions and ‘languages’ of established media is well known. There is the case of the early photographers known as the Pictorialists, who strove to emulate the aesthetic qualities of painting, seeing these as the standards against which photography as a medium had to be judged. In Youngblood’s terms they would be examples of ‘perceptual imperialists’ who acted as a brake on the exploration of the radical representational possibilities afforded by photography as a new medium. Similarly, it is well known that early cinema adopted the conventions of the theatre and vaudeville, and that television looked for its forms to theatre, vaudeville, the format of the newspaper, and cinema itself.

As we have seen, Bolter and Grusin’s theory of ‘remediation’ (1999) deploys a Foucauldian historical perspective to argue against the ‘comfortable modernist rhetoric’ of authentic media ‘essences’ and ‘breaks with the past’ that we have discussed here. They follow McLuhan’s insight that ‘the content of a medium is always another medium’ (1999: 45). They propose that the history of media is a complex process in which all media, including new media, depend upon older media and are in a constant dialectic with them (1999: 50). Digital media are in the process of representing older media in a whole range of ways, some more direct and ‘transparent’ than others. At the same time, older media are refashioning themselves by absorbing, repurposing, and incorporating digital technologies. Such a process is also implied in the view held by Raymond Williams, whose theory of media change we discuss fully later. Williams argues that there is nothing inherent in the nature of a media technology that is responsible for the way a society uses it. It does not, and cannot, have an ‘essence’ that would inevitably create ‘effects peculiar and exclusive to itself’. In a closely argued theory of the manner in which television developed, he observes that some 20 years passed before, ‘new kinds of programme were being made for television and there were important advances in the productive use of the medium, including . . . some kinds of original work’ (Williams 1974: 30). Productive uses of a new medium and original work in them are not precluded, therefore, by recognising their long-term interplay with older media.

We need, then, to ask a number of questions of the modernist and avant-garde calls for new media to define itself as radically novel. Do media proceed by a process of ruptures or decisive breaks with the past? Can a medium transcend its historical contexts to deliver an ‘entirely new language’? Do, indeed, media have irreducible and unique essences (which is not quite the same as having distinguishing characteristics which encourage or constrain the kind of thing we do with them)? These seem to be especially important questions to ask of new digital media which, in large part, rely upon hybrids, convergences and transformations of older media.

The return of the Middle Ages and other media archaeologies

This section looks at yet another historicising approach to new media studies; here, however, insights from our encounters with new media are drawn upon to rethink existing media histories. Such revisions imply a view of history that is far from teleological, or a basis in the belief in inevitable ‘progress’. Unlike the previous examples we turn here to a kind of historical thinking that neither looks at new media as the fulfilment of the recent past nor does it assume a future time in which new media will inevitably transcend the old. Rather, it is suggested that certain uses and aesthetic forms of new media significantly recall residual or suppressed intellectual and representational practices of relatively, and in some cases extremely, remote historical periods. In the context of his own argument against ‘sequential narratives’ of change in image culture, Kevin Robins observes that: It is notable that much of the most interesting discussion of images now concerns not digital futures but, actually, what seemed until recently to be antique and forgotten media (the panorama, the camera obscura, the stereoscope): from our postphotographic vantage point these have suddenly acquired new meanings, and their reevaluation now seems crucial to understanding the significance of digital culture. (Robins 1996: 165)

The ludic: cinema and games

A major example of this renewed interest in ‘antique’ media is in the early cinema of circa 1900–1920 and its prehistory in mechanical spectacles such as the panorama. Its source is in the way the structures, aesthetics and pleasures of computer games are being seen to represent a revival of qualities found in that earlier medium. It is argued that this ‘cinema of attractions’ was overtaken and suppressed by what became the dominant form of narrative cinema, exemplified by classical Hollywood in the 1930s–1950s. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, changes in media production and in the pleasures sought in media consumption, exemplified in the form of the computer game and its crossovers with special effects ‘blockbuster’ cinema, indicate a return of the possibilities present in early cinema. These ideas and the research that supports them are discussed in more detail later. What is significant in the context of this section is the way that noticing things about new media has led some of its theorists to find remarkable historical parallels which cannot be contained within a methodology of technological progress, but rather of loss, suppression or marginalisation, and then return.

Rhetoric and spatialised memory

Benjamin Woolley, writing about Nicholas Negroponte’s concept of ‘spatial data management’, exemplified in computer media’s metaphorical desktops, and simulated 3D working environments, draws a parallel with the memorising strategies of ancient preliterate, oral cultures. He sees the icons and spaces of the computer screen recalling the ‘mnemonic’ traditions of classical and medieval Europe. Mnemonics is the art of using imaginary spaces or ‘memory palaces’ (spatial arrangements, buildings, objects, or painted representations of them) as aids to remembering long stories and complex arguments (Woolley 1992: 138–149). Similarly, with a focus on computer games, Nickianne Moody (1995) traces a related set of connections between the forms and aesthetics of role play games, interactive computer games and the allegorical narratives of the Middle Ages.

Edutainment and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment

Barbara Maria Stafford observes that with the increasingly widespread use of interactive computer graphics and educational software packages we are returning to a kind of ‘oral-visual culture’ which was at the centre of European education and scientific experiment in the early eighteenth century (1994: xxv). Stafford argues that during the later eighteenth century, and across the nineteenth, written texts and mass literacy came to be the only respectable and trustworthy media of knowledge and education. Practical and the visual modes of enquiry, experiment, demonstration and learning fell into disrepute as seductive and unreliable. Now, with computer animation and modelling, virtual reality, and even email (as a form of discussion), Stafford sees the emergence of a ‘new vision and visionary art-science’, a form of visual education similar to that which arose in the early eighteenth century, ‘on the boundaries between art and technology, game and experiment, image and speech’ (ibid.). However, she argues, in order for our culture to guide itself through this ‘electronic upheaval’ (ibid.) we will need ‘to go backward in order to go forward’, in order to ‘unearth a past material world that had once occupied the centre of a communications network but was then steadily pushed to the periphery’ (ibid.: 3).

Stafford’s case is more than a formal comparison between two periods when the oral, visual and practical dominate over the literary and textual. She also argues that the use of images and practical experiments, objects and apparatuses, that characterised early Enlightenment education coincided with the birth of middle-class leisure and early forms of consumer culture (1994: xxi). Stafford also suggests that our late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century anxieties about ‘dumbing down’ and ‘edutainment’ are echoed in eighteenth-century concerns to distinguish authentic forms of learning and scientific demonstration from quackery and charlatanism. Her argument, overall, is that the graphic materials of eighteenth-century education and scientific experiment were the ‘ancestors of today’s home- and place-based software and interactive technology’ (ibid.: xxiii).

In each of these cases, history is not seen simply as a matter of linear chronology or unilinear progress in which the present is understood mainly as the superior development of the immediate past; rather, short-circuits and loops in historical time are conceived. Indeed, it chimes with the postmodern view that history (certainly social and cultural history) as a continuous process of progressive development has ceased. Instead, the past has become a vast reservoir of styles and possibilities that are permanently available for reconstruction and revival. The most cursory glance at contemporary architecture, interior design and fashion will show this process of retroactive culture recycling in action.

We can also make sense of this relation between chronologically remote times and the present through the idea that a culture contains dominant, residual, and emergent elements (Williams 1977: 121–127). Using these concepts, Williams argues that elements in a culture that were once dominant may become residual but do not necessarily disappear. They become unimportant and peripheral to a culture’s major concerns but are still available as resources which can be used to challenge and resist dominant cultural practices and values at another time. We might note, in this connection, how cyber-fiction and fantasy repeatedly dresses up its visions of the future in medieval imagery. The future is imagined in terms of the past. As Moody puts it: Much fantasy fiction shares a clearly defined quasi-medieval diegesis. One that fits snugly into Umberto Eco’s categorisation of the ‘new middle ages’ . . . For Eco it would be entirely logical that the ‘high tech’ personal computer is used to play dark and labyrinthine games with a medieval diegesis. (Moody 1995: 61)

For Robins, the significance of these renewed interests in the past, driven by current reflections on new media, is that they allow us to think in non-teleological ways about the past and to recognise what ‘modern culture has repressed and disavowed’ (1996: 161) in its overriding and often exclusive or blind concern for technological rationalism. The discovery of the kind of historical precedents for new media which our examples stand for, may, in his terms, be opportunities for grasping that new media are not best thought of as the narrow pinnacle of technological progress. Rather, they are evidence of a more complex and richer coexistence of cultural practices that the diverse possibilities of new media throw into fresh relief.

A sense of déjà vu

The utopian, as well as dystopian, terms in which new media have been received have caused several media historians to record a sense of déjà vu, the feeling that we have been here before. In particular, the quite remarkable utopian claims made for earlier new media technologies such as photography and cinema have been used to contextualise the widespread technophilia of the last fifteen or so years (e.g. Dovey 1995: 111). So, the history in question this time is not that of the material forerunners of new image and communication media themselves but of the terms in which societies responded to and discussed earlier ‘media revolutions’. This is discussed more fully later.

Two kinds of historical enquiry are relevant here. The first is to be found in the existing body of media history, such as: literacy (Ong 2002), the printing press (Eisenstein 1979), the book (Chartier 1994), photography (Tagg 1998), film and television (Williams 1974). These long-standing topics of historical research provide us with detailed empirical knowledge of what we broadly refer to as earlier ‘media revolutions’. They also represent sustained efforts to grasp the various patterns of determination, and the surprising outcomes of the introductions, over the long term, of new media into particular societies, cultures and economies. While it is not possible to transfer our understanding of the ‘coming of the book’ or of ‘the birth of photography’ directly and wholesale to a study of the cultural impact of the computer, because the wider social context in which each occurs is different, such studies provide us with indispensable methods and frameworks to guide us in working out how new technologies become media, and with what outcomes.

Second, a more recent development has been historical and ethnographic research into our imaginative investment in new technologies, the manner in which we respond to their appearance in our lives, and the ways in which the members of a culture repurpose and subvert media in everyday use (regardless of the purposes which their inventors and developers saw for them). This is also discussed more fully in, where we deal with the concept of the ‘technological imaginary’.

Conclusion

Paradoxically, then, it is precisely our sense of the ‘new’ in new media which makes history so important – in the way that something so current, rapidly changing and running toward the future also calls us back to the past. This analytic position somewhat challenges the idea that new media are ‘postmodern’ media; that is, media that arise from, and then contribute to, a set of socio-cultural developments which are thought to mark a significant break with history, with the ‘modern’ industrial period and its forerunner in the eighteenth-century age of Enlightenment. We have seen that thinking in terms of a simple separation of the present and the recent past (the postmodern) from the ‘modern’ period may obscure as much as it reveals about new media. We have argued instead for a history that allows for the continuation of certain media traditions through ‘remediation’, as well as the revisiting and revival of suppressed or disregarded historical moments in order to understand contemporary developments. Our review of (new) media histories is based in the need to distinguish between what may be new about our contemporary media and what they share with other media, and between what they can do and what is ideological in our reception of new media. In order to be able to disregard what Langdon Winner (1989) has called ‘mythinformation’ we have argued that history has never been so important for the student of media.

Who was dissatisfied with old media?

The question

The question that forms the title of this section is asked in order to raise a critical issue – what were the problems to which new communications media are the solutions? We might, of course, say that there were none. ‘New’ media were simply that – ‘new’ – in themselves and have no relation to any limits, shortcomings, or problems that might have been associated with ‘old’ media. But, the two quotes above, one referring to television and the other to photography, can stand for many other views and comments that strongly suggest that they do.

In thinking about such a question we will find ourselves considering the discursive frameworks that establish the conditions of possibility for new media. This in turn will allow us to look at some of the ways in which previously ‘new’ media have been considered in order to understand the discursive formations present in our contemporary moment of novelty.

In the rumours and early literature about the coming of multimedia and virtual reality, and as soon as new media forms themselves began to appear, they were celebrated as overcoming, or at least as having the promise to overcome, the negative limits and even the oppressive features of established and culturally dominant analogue media. As the above statements about television and photography imply, in the reception of new media there was, and still is, an implication that we needed them in order to overcome the limits of the old.

On this basis it could seem reasonable to ask whether media were in such bad odour in pre-digital days, that a mass of criticism and dissatisfaction formed a body of pressure such that something better was sought. Or, alternatively, we might ask whether ideas about the superiority of new media are merely retrospective projections or post-hoc rationalisations of change; simply a case of wanting to believe that what we have is better than what went before.

However, these questions are too reductive to arrive at an understanding of how our perceptions and experiences of new media are framed. In order to arrive at a better explanation, this section considers how the development and reception of new media have been shaped by two sets of ideas. First, the socio-psychological workings of the ‘technological imaginary’; second, earlier twentieth-century traditions of media critique aimed at the ‘mass’ broadcast media and their perceived social effects. We will be interested in these traditions to the extent that they are picked up and used in the evaluation of new media.

The technological imaginary

The phrase the ‘technological imaginary’, as it is used in critical thought about cinema in the first place (De Lauretis et al. 1980) and now new media technologies, has roots in psychoanalytic theory. It has migrated from that location to be more generally used in the study of culture and technology. In some versions it has been recast in more sociological language and is met as a ‘popular’ or ‘collective’ imagination about technologies (Flichy 1999). Here, tendencies that may have been originally posited (in psychoanalytical theory) as belonging to individuals are also observed to be present at the level of social groups and collectivities. However, some of the specific charge that the word has in psychoanalytic theory needs to be retained to see its usefulness. The French adjective imaginaire became a noun, a name for a substantive order of experience, the imaginaire, alongside two others – the ‘real’ and the ‘symbolic’ – in the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. After Lacan, imaginaire or the English ‘imaginary’ does not refer, as it does in everyday use, to a kind of poetic mental fac-ulty or the activity of fantasising (Ragland-Sullivan 1992: 173–176). Rather, in psychoanalytic theory, it refers to a realm of images, representations, ideas and intuitions of fulfilment, of wholeness and completeness that human beings, in their fragmented and incomplete selves, desire to become. These are images of an ‘other’ – an other self, another race, gender, or significant other person, another state of being. Technologies are then cast in the role of such an ‘other’. When applied to technology, or media technologies in particular, the concept of a technological imaginary draws attention to the way that (frequently gendered) dissatisfactions with social reality and desires for a better society are projected onto technologies as capa-ble of delivering a potential realm of completeness.

This can seem a very abstract notion. The Case studies in this section show how, in different ways, new media are catalysts or vehicles for the expression of ideas about human existence and social life. We can begin to do this by reminding ourselves of some typical responses to the advent of new media and by considering the recurring sense of optimism and anxiety that each wave of new media calls up.

As a new medium becomes socially available it is necessarily placed in relation to a culture’s older media forms and the way that these are already valued and understood. This is seen in expressions of a sense of anxiety at the loss of the forms that are displaced. Well-known examples of this include the purist fears about the impact of photography on painting in the 1840s, and of television and then video on cinema in the 1970s. More recently, regret has been expressed about the impact of digital imaging on photography (Ritchen 1990) and graphics software on drawing and design as they moved from the traditional craft spaces of the darkroom and the drawing board to the computer screen. In terms of communication media this sense of loss is usually expressed in social, rather than aesthetic or craft terms. For instance, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century it was feared that the telephone would invade the domestic privacy of the family or that it would break through important settled social hierarchies, allowing the lower classes to speak (inappropriately) to their ‘betters’ in ways that were not permitted in traditional face-to-face encounters (Marvin 1988). Since the early 1990s, we have seen a more recent example in the widespread shift that has taken place between terrestrial mail and email. Here anxieties are expressed, by some, about the way that email has eradicated the time for reflection that was involved in traditional letter writing and sending leading to notorious email ‘flaming’ and intemperate exchanges.

Conversely, during the period in which the cultural reception of a new medium is being worked out, it is also favourably positioned in relation to existing media. The euphoric celebration of a new medium and the often feverish speculation about its potential is achieved, at least in part, by its favourable contrast with older forms. In their attempts to persuade us to invest in the technology advertisers often use older media as an ‘other’ against which the ‘new’ is given an identity as good, as socially and aesthetically progressive. This kind of comparison draws upon more than the hopes that a culture has for its new media, it also involves its existing feelings about the old (Robins 1996).

Traditional chemical photography has played such a role in recent celebrations of digital imaging (see Lister 1995; Robins 1995), as has television in the talking-up of interactive media. Before the emergence and application of digital technologies, T V, for instance, was widely perceived as a ‘bad object’ and this ascription has been important as a foil to celebrations of interactive media’s superiority over broadcast television (Boddy 1994; see also Case study 1.5). Television is associated with passivity, encapsulated in the image of the TV viewer as an inert ‘couch potato’ subject to its ‘effects’, while the interactive media ‘user’ (already a name which connotes a more active relation to media than does ‘viewer’) conjures up an image of someone occupying an ergonomically designed, hi-tech swivel chair, alert and skilled as they ‘navigate’ and make active choices via their screen-based interface. Artists, novelists, and technologists entice us with the prospect of creating and living in virtual worlds of our own making rather than being anonymous and passive members of the ‘mass’ audience of popular television. As a broadcast medium, TV is seen as an agent for the transmission of centralised (read authoritarian or incontestable) messages to mass audiences. This is then readily compared to the new possibilities of the one-to-one, two-way, decentralised transmissions of the Internet or the new possibilities for narrowcasting and interactive T V. Similar kinds of contrast have been made between non-linear, hot-linked, hypertext and the traditional form of the book which, in this new comparison, becomes ‘the big book’ (like this one), a fixed, dogmatic text which is the prescriptive voice of authority.

So, a part of understanding the conditions in which new media are received and evaluated involves (1) seeing what values a culture has already invested in old media, and this may involve considering whose values these were, and (2) understanding how the concrete objects (books, TV sets, computers) and the products (novels, soap operas, games) of particular media come to have good or bad cultural connotations in the first place. In order to do this we first consider how apparent the technological imaginary is in the ways we talk and write about media.

The discursive construction of new media

It is essential to realise that a theory does not find its object sitting waiting for it in the world: theories constitute their own objects in the process of their evolution. ‘Water’ is not the same theoretical object in chemistry as it is in hydraulics – an observation which in no way denies that chemists and engineers alike drink, and shower in, the same substance. (Burgin 1982: 9)

Victor Burgin offers this example of the way that the nature of a common object of concern – water – will be differently understood according to the specific set of concepts which are used to study it. A key argument of post-structuralist theory is that language does not merely describe a pre-given reality (words are matched to things) but that reality is only known through language (the words or concepts we possess lead us to perceive and conceive the world in their terms). Language, in this sense, can be thought of as operating as microscopes, telescopes and cameras do – they produce certain kinds of images of the world; they construct ways of seeing and understanding. Elaborated systems of language (conversations, theories, arguments, descriptions) which are built up or evolved as part of particular social projects (expressing emotion, writing legal contracts, analysing social behaviour, etc.) are called discourses. Discourses, like the words and concepts they employ, can then be said to construct their objects. It is in this sense that we now turn to the discursive construction of new media as it feeds (frames, provides the resources for) the technological imagination.

On meeting the many claims and predictions made for new media, media historians have expressed a sense of déjà vu – of having ‘seen this’ or ‘been here’ before (Gunning 1991). This is more than a matter of history repeating itself. This would amount to saying that the emergence and development of each new medium occurs and proceeds technologically and socio-economically in the same way, and that the same patterns of response are evident in the members of the culture who receive, use and consume it. There are, indeed, some marked similarities of this kind, but it would be too simple to leave the matter there. To do this would simply hasten us to the ‘business as usual’ conclusion which we have rejected as conservative and inadequate. More importantly, it would be wrong. For, even if there are patterns that recur in the technological emergence and development of new media technologies, we have to recognise that they occur in widely different historical and social contexts. Furthermore, the technologies in question have different capacities and characteristics.

For example, similarities are frequently pointed out between the emergence of film technology and the search for cinematic form at the end of the nineteenth century and that of multimedia and VR at the end of the twentieth century. However, film and cinema entered a world of handmade images and early kinds of still photographic image (at that time, a difficult craft), of venue-based, mechanically produced theatrical spectacles in which the ‘movement’ and special effects on offer were experienced as absolutely novel and would seem primitive by today’s standards. There was no broadcasting, and even the telephone was a novel apparatus. And, of course, much wider factors could be pointed to: the state of development of mass industrial production and consumer culture, of general education, etc. The world into which our new media have emerged is very different; it has seen a hundred years of increasingly pervasive and sophisticated technological visual culture (Darley 1991).

It is a world in which images, still and moving, in print and on screens, are layered so thick, are so intertextual, that a sense of what is real has become problematic, buried under the thick sediment of its visual representations. New media technologies which emerge into this context enter an enormously complex moving image culture of developed genres, signifying conventions, audiences with highly developed and ‘knowing’ pleasures and ways of ‘reading’ images, and a major industry and entertainment economy which is very different from, even if it has antecedents in, that of the late nineteenth century.

What then gives rise to the sense of déjà vu mentioned above? It is likely that it does not concern the actual historical repetition of technologies or mediums themselves – rather, it is a matter of the repetition of deeply ingrained ways in which we think, talk, and write about new image and communication technologies. In short, their discursive construction. Whatever the actual and detailed paths taken by a new media technology in its particular historical context of complex determinations (the telephone, the radio, T V, etc.) it is a striking matter of record that the responses of contemporaries (professionals in their journals, journalists, academic and other commentators) are cast in uncannily similar terms (Marvin 1988; Spiegel 1992; Boddy 1994).

In noticing these things, the experience of loss with the displacement of the old, the simultaneous judgement of the old as limited, and a sense of repetition in how media and technological change is talked and written about, we are ready to consider some more detailed examples of the ‘technological imaginary’ at work.

The examples above argue that the processes that determine the kind of media we actually get are neither solely economic nor solely technological, but that all orders of decision in the development process occur within a discursive framework powerfully shaped by the technological imaginary. The evidence for the existence of such a framework can be tracked back through the introduction of numerous technologies and goods throughout the modern period.

The return of the Frankfurt School critique in the popularisation of new media

We now return to a broader consideration of the points raised concerning the allegedly ‘democratic’ potential of interactivity. Here, however, we point out how a tradition of criticism of mass media finds itself reappropriated as another discursive framework that shapes our ideas about what new media are or could be.

This tradition of media critique expressed profound dissatisfaction with the uses and the cultural and political implications of broadcast media throughout the early and mid-twentieth century. Such critics of the effects of twentieth-century mass media did not normally think that there was a technological solution to the problems they identified. They did not suggest that new and different media technologies would overcome the social and cultural problems they associated with the media they were familiar with. To the extent that they could conceive of change in their situation they saw hope lying in social action, whether through political revolution or a conservative defence of threatened values. In another tradition it was more imaginative and democratic uses of existing media that were seen as the answer. Nevertheless, the critique of mass media has become, in the hands of new media enthusiasts, a set of terms against which new media are celebrated. The positions and theories represented by these media critics have been frequently rehearsed and continue to be influential in some areas of media studies and theory. Because of this they need not be dealt with at great length here as many accessible and adequate accounts already exist (Strinati 1995; Stevenson 1995; Lury 1992).

The ‘culture industry’, the end of democratic participation and critical distance

From the 1920s until the present day the mass media (especially the popular press and the broadcast media of radio and television) have been the object of sustained criticism from intellectuals, artists, educationalists, feminists and left-wing activists. It is a (contentious) aspect of this critique, which sees mass culture as disempowering, homogenising, and impo-sitional in nature, that is of relevance in this context. Strinati sums up such a view: [there] is a specific conception of the audience of mass culture, the mass or the public which consumes mass produced cultural products. The audience is conceived of as a mass of passive consumers . . . supine before the false pleasures of mass consumption . . . The picture is of a mass which almost without thinking, without reflecting, abandoning all critical hope, buys into mass culture and mass consumption. Due to the emergence of mass society and mass culture it lacks the intellectual and moral resources to do otherwise. It cannot think of, or in terms of, alternatives. (Strinati 1995: 12)

Such a conception and evaluation of the ‘mass’ and its culture was argued by intellectuals who were steeped in the values of a literary culture. Alan Meek has described well a dominant kind of relationship which such intellectuals and artists had to the mass media in the early and mid-twentieth century:

The modern Western intellectual appeared as a figure within the public sphere whose technological media was print and whose institutions were defined by the nation state. The ideals of democratic participation and critical literacy which the intellectual espoused have often been seen to be undermined by the emerging apparatus of electronic media, ‘mass culture’, or the entertainment industry.

(Meek 2000: 88) Mass society critics feared four things:

• The debasement and displacement of an authentic organic folk culture;

• The erosion of high cultural traditions, those of art and literature;

• Loss of the ability of these cultural traditions (as the classical ‘public sphere’) to comment critically on society’s values;

• The indoctrination and manipulation of the ‘masses’ by either totalitarian politics or market forces.

The context within which these fears were articulated was the rise of mass, urban society. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialisation and urbanisation in Western Europe and America had weakened or destroyed organic, closely knit, agrarian communities. The sense of identity, community membership and oral, face-to-face communication fostered and mediated by institutions like the extended family, the village, and the Church were seen to be replaced by a collection of atomised individuals in the new industrial cities and workplaces. At the same time the production of culture itself became subject to the processes of industrialisation and the marketplace. The evolving Hollywood mode of film production, popular ‘pulp’ fiction, and popular music were particular objects of criticism. Seen as generic and formulaic, catering to the lowest common denominators of taste, they were assembly line models of cultural production. Radio, and later television, were viewed as centralised impositions from above. Either as a means of trivialising the content of communication, or as a means of political indoctrination, they were seen as threats to democracy and the informed critical participation of the masses in cultural and social life. How, feared the intellectuals, given the burgeoning of mass electronic media, could people take a part in a democratic system of government in which all citizens are active, through their elected representatives, in the decisions a society makes?

With the erosion of folk wisdom and morality, and the trivialisation, commercialisation and centralisation of culture and communications, how could citizens be informed about issues and able, through their educated ability, to think independently and form views on social and political issues? Critical participation demanded an ability and energy to take issue with how things are, to ask questions about the nature or order of things, and a capacity to envision and conceive of better states as a guide to action. In the eyes of theorists such as those of the Frankfurt School, such ideals were terminally threatened by the mass media and mass culture.

Further, such developments took place in the context of twin evils. First, the twin realities of Fascism and Stalinism which demonstrated the power of mass media harnessed to totalitarianism. Second, the tyranny of market forces to generate false needs and desires within the populations of capitalist societies where active citizens were being transformed into ‘mere’ consumers.

This ‘mass society theory’, and its related critiques of the mass media, has been much debated, challenged and qualified within media sociology, ethnography, and in the light of postmodern media theory in recent years. Despite the existence of more nuanced accounts of the mass media which offer a more complex view of their social significance, it has now become clear that some of the main proponents of the twenty-first century’s new communications media are actually celebrating their potential to restore society to a state where the damage perceived to be wrought by mass media will be undone. In some versions there is an active looking back to a pre-mass culture golden age of authentic exchange and community. We can especially note the following:

• The recovery of community and a sphere of public debate. In this formulation the Internet is seen as providing a vibrant counter public sphere. In addition, shared online spaces allegedly provide a sense of ‘cyber community’ against the alienations of contemporary life.

• The removal of information and communication from central authority, control and censorship.

• The ‘fourth estate’ function of mass media, seen here to be revived with the rise of the ‘citizen journalist’ as alternative sources of news and information circulate freely through ‘blogs’, online publishing, camera-phone photography etc.

• The creative exploration of new forms of identity and relationship within virtual communities and social networking sites.

Online communication is here seen as productive not of ‘passive’ supine subjects but of an active process of identity construction and exchange. These arguments all in some way echo and answer ways in which conventional mass media have been problematised by intellectuals and critics.

The Brechtian avant-garde and lost opportunities

These ‘answers’ to a widespread pessimism about mass media can be seen in the light of another tradition in which the emancipatory power of radio, cinema, and television (also the mass press) lay in the way that they promised to involve the workers of industrial society in creative production, self-education and political expression. A major representative of this view is the socialist playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht castigated the form that radio was taking in the 1930s as he saw its potentials being limited to ‘prettifying public life’ and to ‘bringing back cosiness to the home and making family life bearable’. His alternative, however, was not the male hobby, as described by Boddy above, but a radical practice of exchange and networking. It is interesting to listen to his vision of radio conceived as a ‘vast network’ in 1932: radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as submit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. (Brecht 1936, in Hanhardt 1986: 53)

Brecht’s cultural politics have lain behind radical movements in theatre, photography, television and video production from the 1930s to the 1980s. In a final or latest resurgence they now inform politicised ideas about the uses of new media. Here it is argued that new media can be used as essentially two-way channels of communication that lie outside of official control. Combined with mobile telephony and digital video anti-capitalist demonstrators are now able to webcast near live information from their actions, beating news crews to the action and the transmission.

Finally, it is necessary to mention the influential ideas of a peripheral member of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin. He took issue, in some of his writing, with the cultural pessimism of his colleagues. In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, and ‘The Author As Producer’, he argues that photography, film, and the modern newspaper, as media of mass reproduction, have revolutionary potential. Benjamin roots his argument in noticing some of the distinctive characteristics of these media, and the implications that he draws from them can be heard to echo today in the more sanguine estimations of the potential of new (digital) media. However, Benjamin sees that whether or not this potential will be realised is finally a matter of politics and not technology.

Conclusion

This section has served to illustrate how the debates about new media, what it is, what it might be, what we would like it to be, rehearse many positions that have already been established within media studies and critical theory. Though the debates above are largely framed in terms of the amazing novelty of the possibilities that are opening up, they in fact revisit ground already well trodden. The disavowal of the history of new media thus appears as an ideological sleight of hand that recruits us to their essential value but fails to help us understand what is happening around us.

12 New Media: Determining or Determined?

In previous sections this book we have been looking at what kinds of histories, definitions and discourses shape the way we think about new media. We begin this final section by turning to examine two apparently competing paradigms, or two distinct approaches to the study of media, both of which underlie different parts of what will follow in this volume.

At the centre of each of these paradigms is a very different understanding of the power media and technology have to determine culture and society. The long-standing question of whether or not a media technology has the power to transform a culture has been given a very high profile with the development of new media. It will repay the good deal of attention that we give it here in this chapter. In this section we will investigate this issue and the debates that surround it by turning back to the writings of two key but very different theorists of media: Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams. It is their views and arguments about the issue, filtered through very different routes, that now echo in the debate between those who see new media as revolutionary or as ‘business as usual’ that we pointed to in.

Although both authors more or less ceased writing at the point where the PC was about to ‘take off’ their analysis of the relationships between technology, culture and media continues to resonate in contemporary thought. As media theorists, both were interested in new media. It is precisely McLuhan’s interest to identify and ‘probe’ what he saw as big cultural shifts brought about by change in media technologies. Williams, too, speaks of ‘new media’ and is interested in the conditions of their emergence and their subsequent use and control. While McLuhan was wholly concerned with identifying the major cultural effects that he saw new technological forms (in history and in his present) bringing about, Williams sought to show that there is nothing in a particular technology which guarantees the cultural or social outcomes it will have (Williams 1983: 130). McLuhan’s arguments are at the core of claims that ‘new media change everything’. If, as McLuhan argued, media determine consciousness then clearly we are living through times of profound change. On the other hand, albeit in a somewhat reduced way, the ‘business as usual’ camp is deeply indebted to Williams for the way in which they argue that media can only take effect through already present social processes and structures and will therefore reproduce existing patterns of use and basically sustain existing power relations.

The status of McLuhan and Williams

In the mainstream of media studies and much cultural studies the part played by the technological element that any medium has is always strongly qualified. Any idea that a medium can be reduced to a technology, or that the technological element which is admitted to be a part of any media process should be central to its study, is strongly resisted. The grounds for this view are to be found in a number of seminal essays by Raymond Williams (1974: 9–31; 1977: 158–164; 1983: 128–153), which, at least in part, responded critically to the ‘potent observations’ (Hall 1975: 81) of the Canadian literary and media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Williams’s arguments against McLuhan subsequently became touchstones for media studies’ rejection of any kind of technological determinism.

Yet, and here we meet one of the main sources of the present clash of discourses around the significance of new media, McLuhan’s ideas have undergone a renaissance – literally a rebirth or rediscovery – in the hands of contemporary commentators, both popular and academic, on new media. The McLuhanite insistence on the need for new non-linear (‘mosaic’ is his term) ways of thinking about new media, which escape the intellectual protocols, procedures and habits of a linear print culture, has been taken up as something of a war cry against the academic media analyst. The charge that the neo-McLuhan cybertheorists make about media studies is made at this fundamental, epistemological level; that they simply fail to realise that its viewpoints (something, in fact, that McLuhan would claim we can no longer have) and methodologies have been hopelessly outstripped by events. As an early critic of McLuhan realised, to disagree with McLuhanite thinking is likely to be seen as the product of ‘an outmoded insistence on the logical, ABCD minded, causality mad, one-thing-at-a-time method that the electronic age and its prophet have rendered obsolete’ (Duffy 1969: 31).

Both Williams and McLuhan carried out their influential work in the 1960s and 1970s. Williams was one of the founding figures of British media and cultural studies. His rich, if at times abstract, historical and sociological formulations about cultural production and society provided some of the master templates for what has become mainstream media studies. Countless detailed studies of all kinds of media are guided and informed by his careful and penetrating outlines for a theory of media as a form of cultural production. His work is so deeply assimilated within the media studies discipline that he is seldom explicitly cited; he has become an invisible presence. Wherever we consider, in this book, new media as subject to control and direction by human institutions, skill, creativity and intention, we are building upon such a Williamsite emphasis.

On the other hand, McLuhan, the provoking, contentious figure who gained almost pop status in the 1960s, was discredited for his untenable pronouncements and was swatted away like an irritating fly by the critiques of Williams and others (see Miller 1971). However, as Williams foresaw (1974: 128), McLuhan has found highly influential followers. Many of his ideas have been taken up and developed by a whole range of theorists with an interest in new media: Baudrillard, Virilio, Poster, Kroker, De Kerckhove. The work of McLuhan and his followers has great appeal for those who see new media as bringing about radical cultural change or have some special interest in celebrating its potential. For the electronic counterculture he is an oppositional figure and for corporate business a source of propaganda – his aphorisms, ‘the global village’ and ‘the medium is the message’, ‘function as globally recognised jingles’ for multinational trade in digital commodities (Genosko 1998). The magazine Wired has adopted him as its ‘patron saint’ (Wired, January 1996).

Williams’s insights, embedded in a grounded and systematic theory, have been a major, shaping contribution to the constitution of an academic discipline. McLuhan’s elliptical, unsystematic, contradictory and playful insights have fired the thought, the distinctive stance, and the methodological strategies of diverse but influential theorists of new media. We might say that Williams’s thought is structured into media studies while, with respect to this discipline, McLuhan and those who have developed his ideas stalk its margins, sniping and provoking in ways that ensure they are frequently, if sometimes begrudgingly, referenced. Even cautious media academics allow McLuhan a little nowadays. He is seen as a theoretically unsubtle and inconsistent thinker who provokes others to think (Silverstone 1999: 21). It matters if he is wrong. One or another of his insights is often the jumping-off point for a contemporary study.

McLuhan’s major publications appeared in the 1960s, some two decades before the effective emergence of the PC as a technology for communications and media production. It is a shift from a 500-year-old print culture to one of ‘electric’ media, by which he mainly means radio and television, that McLuhan considers. He only knew computers in the form of the mainframe computers of his day, yet they formed part of his bigger concept of the ‘electric environment’, and he was sharp enough to see the practice of timesharing on these machines as the early signs of their social availability. By the 1990s, for some, McLuhan’s ideas, when applied to developments in new media, had come to seem not only potent but extraordinarily prescient as well. It is quite easy to imagine a student at work in some future time, who, failing to take note of McLuhan’s dates, is convinced that he is a 1990s writer on cyber culture, a contemporary of Jean Baudrillard or William Gibson. While this may owe something to the way that his ideas have been taken up in the postmodern context of the last two decades of the twentieth century by writers such as Baudrillard, Virilio, De Kerckhove, Kroker, Kelly, and Toffler, this hardly undermines the challenging and deliberately perverse originality of his thought.

The debate between the Williams and McLuhan positions, and Williams’s apparent victory in this debate, left media studies with a legacy. It has had the effect of putting paid to any ‘good-sense’ cultural or media theorist raising the spectre of the technological determinism associated with the thought of McLuhan. It has also had the effect of foreclosing aspects of the way in which cultural and media studies deals with technology by implicitly arguing that technology on its own is incapable of producing change, the view being that whatever is going on around us in terms of rapid technological change there are rational and manipulative interests at work driving the technology in particular directions and it is to these that we should primarily direct our attention. Such is the dismissal of the role of technology in cultural change that, should we wish to confront this situation, we are inevitably faced with our views being reduced to apparent absurdity: ‘What!? Are you suggesting that machines can and do act, cause things to happen on their own? – that a machine caused space flight, rather than the superpowers’ ideological struggle for achievement?’

However, there are good reasons to believe that technology cannot be adequately analysed only within the humanist frame Williams bequeathed cultural and media theorists. Arguments about what causes technological change may not be so straightforward as culturalist accusations of political or theoretical naivety seem to suggest. In this section, therefore, we review Williams’s and McLuhan’s arguments about media and technology. We then examine the limits of the humanist account of technology that Williams so influentially offered and ask whether he was correct in his dismissal of McLuhan as a crude technological determinist. Finally, we explore other important nonhumanist accounts of technology that are frequently excluded from the contemporary study of media technologies.

Humanism

‘Humanism’ is a term applied to a long and recurring tendency in Western thought. It appears to have its origins in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance where a number of scholars (Bruno, Erasmus, Valla, and Pico della Mirandola) worked to recover elements of classical learning and natural science lost in the ‘dark ages’ of the medieval Christian world. Their emphasis on explaining the world through the human capacity for rational thought rather than a reliance on Christian theology fostered the ‘[b]elief that individual human beings are the fundamental source of all value and have the ability to understand - and perhaps even to control - the natural world by careful application of their own rational faculties’ (Oxford Companion to Philosophy). This impetus was added to and modified many times in following centuries. Of note is the seventeenth-century Cartesian idea of the human subject, ‘I think, therefore I am. I have intentions, purposes, goals, therefore I am the sole source and free agent of my actions’ (Sarup 1988: 84). There is a specifically ‘Marxist humanism’ in the sense that it is believed that self-aware, thinking and acting individuals will build a rational socialist society. For our purposes here it is important to stress that a humanist theory tends only to recognise human individuals as having agency (and power and responsibility) over the social forms and the technologies they create and, even, through rational science, the power to control and shape nature.

Mapping Marshall McLuhan

Many of McLuhan’s more important ideas arise within a kind of narrative of redemption. There is little doubt that much of McLuhan’s appeal to new media and cyber enthusiasts lies in the way that he sees the arrival of an ‘electronic culture’ as a rescue or recovery from the fragmenting effects of 400 years of print culture. McLuhan has, indeed, provided a range of ideological resources for the technological imaginary of the new millennium.

Here, we outline McLuhan’s grand schema of four cultures, determined by their media forms, as it is the context in which some important ideas arise; ideas which are, arguably, far more important and useful than his quasi-historical and extremely sweeping narrative. We then concentrate on three key ideas. First, ‘remediation’, a concept that is currently much in vogue and finds its roots in McLuhan’s view that ‘the content of any medium is always another medium’ (1968: 15-16). Second, his idea that media and technologies are extensions of the human body and its senses. Third, his famous (or notorious) view that ‘the medium is the message’. This section is the basis for a further discussion, in 1.6.4, of three ‘theses’ to be found in McLuhan’s work: his extension thesis, his environmental thesis, and his anti-content thesis.

A narrative of redemption

McLuhan’s view of media as technological extensions of the body is his basis for conceiving of four media cultures which are brought about by shifts from oral to written communication, from script to print, and from print to electronic media. These four cultures are: (1) a primitive culture of oral communication, (2) a literate culture using the phonetic alphabet and handwritten script which co-existed with the oral, (3) the age of mass-produced, mechanical printing (The Gutenberg Galaxy), and (4) the culture of ‘electric media’: radio, television, and computers.

‘PRIMITIVE’ ORAL/AURAL CULTURE

In pre-literate ‘primitive’ cultures there was a greater dominance of the sense of hearing than in literate cultures when, following the invention of the phonetic alphabet (a visual encoding of speech), the ratio of the eye and the ear was in a better state of equilibrium. Pre-literate people lived in an environment totally dominated by the sense of hearing. Oral and aural communication were central. Speaking and hearing speech was the ‘ear-man’s’ main form of communication (while also, no doubt, staying alert to the sound of a breaking twig!). McLuhan is not enthusiastic about this kind of culture. For him it was not a state of ‘noble savagery’ (Duffy 1969: 26).

Primitive man lived in a much more tyrannical cosmic machine than Western literate man has ever invented. The world of the ear is more embracing and inclusive than that of the eye can ever be. The ear is hypersensitive. The eye is cool and detached. The ear turns man over to universal panic while the eye, extended by literacy and mechanical time, leaves some gaps and some islands free from the unremitting acoustic pressure and reverberation.

THE CULTURE OF LITERACY

McLuhan says that he is not interested in making judgements but only in identifying the configurations of different societies (1968: 94). However, as is implied in the above passage, for McLuhan the second culture, the culture of literacy, was an improvement on pre-literate, oral culture. For here, via the alphabet and writing, as extensions of the eye, and, in its later stages, the clock, ‘the visual and uniform fragmentation of time became possible’ (1968: 159). This released ‘man’ from the panic of ‘primitive’ conditions while maintaining a balance between the aural and the visual. In the literate, scribal culture of the Middle Ages McLuhan sees a situation where oral traditions coexisted alongside writing: manuscripts were individually produced and annotated by hand as if in a continual dialogue, writers and readers were hardly separable, words were read aloud to ‘audiences’, and the mass reproduction of uniform texts by printing presses had not led to a narrowing dominance and authority of sight over hearing and speaking. Writing augmented this culture in specialised ways without wholly alienating its members from humankind’s original, participatory, audio-tactile universe (Theal 1995: 81).

PRINT CULTURE

For McLuhan, the real villain of the piece is print culture – the Gutenberg Galaxy with its ‘typographic man’, where the sensory alienation which was avoided in literate culture occurs. Here we meet the now familiar story of how the mass reproduction of writing by the printing press, the development of perspectival images, the emerging scientific methods of observation and measurement, and the seeking of linear chains of cause and effect came to dominate modern, rationalist print culture. In this process its members lost their tactile and auditory relation with the world, their rich sensory lives were fragmented and impoverished as the visual sense dominated. In McLuhan’s terms this is a culture in which the ‘stepping up of the visual component in experience . . . filled the field of attention’ (1962: 17). The culture was hypnotised by vision (mainly through its extensions as typography and print) and the ‘interplay of all the senses in haptic harmony’ dies. Fixed points of view and measured, separating distances come to structure the human subject’s relation to the world. With this ‘instressed concern with one sense only, the mechanical principle of abstraction and repetition emerges’, which means ‘the spelling out of one thing at a time, one sense at a time, one mental or physical operation at a time’ (1962: 18). If the primitive pre-literate culture was tyrannised by the ear, Gutenberg culture is hypnotised by its eye. McLuhan’s ideas about television received very short shrift from British cultural and media studies, even in its formative period (see Hall 1975).

The fourth culture, electronic culture, is ‘paradise regained’ (Duffy 1969). Developing from the invention of telegraphy to television and the computer, this culture promises to short-circuit that of mechanical print and we regain the conditions of an oral culture in acoustic space. We return to a state of sensory grace; to a culture marked by qualities of simultaneity, indivisibility and sensory plenitude. The haptic or tactile senses again come into play, and McLuhan strives hard to show how television is a tactile medium.

The terms in which McLuhan described this electric age as a new kind of primitivism, with tribal-like participation in the ‘global village’, resonates with certain strands of New Age media culture. McLuhan’s all-at-onceness or simultaneity, the involvement of everyone with everyone, electronic media’s supposedly connecting and unifying characteristics, are easy to recognise in (indeed, in some cases have led to) many of the terms now used to characterise new media – connectivity, convergence, the network society, wired culture, and interaction.

First, and most uncontentiously because it was an idea that McLuhan and Williams shared, is the idea that all new media ‘remediate’ the content of previous media. This notion, as developed by McLuhan in the 1960s, has become a key idea, extensively worked out in a recent book on new media. In Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999), Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin briefly revisit the clash between Williams and McLuhan as they set out their own approach to the study of new media. They define a medium as ‘that which remediates’. That is, a new medium ‘appropriates the techniques, forms, and social signif-icance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real’ (ibid.: 65). The inventors, users, and economic backers of a new medium present it as able to represent the world in more realistic and authentic ways than previous media forms, and in the process what is real and authentic is redefined (ibid.). This idea owes something to McLuhan, for whom ‘the “content” of any medium is always another medium’ (1968: 15–16).

Bolter and Grusin have something interesting to say about Williams and McLuhan which bears directly upon our attempt to get beyond the polarised debates about new media. They agree with Williams’s criticism that McLuhan is a technological determinist who single-mindedly took the view that media technologies act directly to change a society and a culture, but they argue that it is possible to put McLuhan’s ‘determinism’ aside in order to appreciate ‘his analysis of the remediating power of various media’. Bolter and Grusin encourage us to see value in the way that McLuhan ‘notices intricate correspondences involving media and cultural artefacts’ (1999: 76), and they urge us to recognise that his view of media as ‘exten-sions of the human sensorium’ has been highly influential, prefiguring the concept of the cyborg in late twentieth-century thought on media and cyberculture or technoculture. It is precisely this ground, and the question of the relationship between human agency and technology in the age of cybernetic culture, which the neo-McLuhanites attempt to map.

Extending the sensorium

McLuhan reminds us of the technological dimension of media. He does so by refusing any distinction between a medium and a technology. For him, there is no issue. It is not accidental that he makes his basic case for a medium being ‘any extension of ourselves’ (1968: 15) by using as key examples the electric light (ibid.) and the wheel (ibid.: 52) – respectively a system and an artefact which we would ordinarily think of as technologies rather than media. Basically, this is no more than the commonplace idea that a ‘tool’ (a name for a simple technology) is a bodily extension: a hammer is an extension of the arm or a screwdriver is an extension of the hand and wrist.

In The Medium is the Massage (McLuhan and Fiore 1967a) McLuhan drives this point home. We again meet the wheel as ‘an extension of the foot’, while the book is ‘an extension of the eye’, clothing is an extension of the skin, and electric circuitry is an ‘extension of the central nervous system’. In other places he speaks of money (1968: 142) or gunpowder (ibid.: 21) as a medium. In each case, then, an artefact is seen as extending a part of the body, a limb or the nervous system. And, as far as McLuhan is concerned, these are ‘media’.

McLuhan conflates technologies and mediums in this way because he views both as part of a larger class of things; as extensions of the human senses: sight, hearing, touch, and smell. Wheels for instance, especially when driven by automotive power, radically changed the experience of travel and speed, the body’s relationship to its physical environment, and to time and space. The difference between the view we have of the world when slowly walking, open on all sides to a multisensory environment, or when glimpsed as rapid and continuous change through the hermetically sealed and framing window of a high-speed train, is a change in sensory experience which did and continues to have cultural significance. (See, for instance, Schivelbusch 1977.) It is this broadening of the concept of a medium to all kinds of technologies that enabled McLuhan to make one of his central claims: that the ‘medium is the message’. In understanding media, it matters not, he would claim, why we are taking a train journey, or where we are going on the train. These are irrelevant side issues which only divert us from noticing the train’s real cultural significance. Its real significance (the message of the medium itself) is the way it changes our perception of the world.

McLuhan also asserts (he doesn’t ‘argue’) that such extensions of our bodies, placed in the context of the body’s whole range of senses (the sensorium), change the ‘natural’ relationships between the sensing parts of the body, and affect ‘the whole psychic and social complex’ (1968: 11). In short, he is claiming that such technological extensions of our bodies affect both our minds and our societies. In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962: 24) he expresses the idea of technological extension more carefully when he says, ‘Sense ratios change when any one sense or bodily or mental function is externalised in technological form.’ So, for McLuhan, the importance of a medium (seen as a bodily extension) is not just a matter of a limb or anatomical system being physically extended (as in the hammer as ‘tool’ sense). It is also a matter of altering the ‘ratio’ between the range of human senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell) and this has implications for our ‘mental functions’ (having ideas, perceptions, emotions, experiences, etc.).

Media, then, change the relationship of the human body and its sensorium to its environment. Media generally alter the human being’s sensory relationship to the world, and the specific characteristics of any one medium change that relationship in different ways. This is McLuhan’s broad and uncontestable premiss upon which he spins all manner of theses – some far more acceptable than others. It is not hard to see how such a premiss or idea has become important at a time of new media technologies and emergent new media forms.

The medium is the message

As we saw above, in what has been widely condemned as an insupportable overstatement, McLuhan concludes from his idea of media as extensions of man that ‘understanding media’ has nothing to do with attending to their content. In fact he maintains that understanding is blocked by any preoccupation with media content and the specific intentions of media producers. He views the ‘conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts’, as ‘the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’ (1968: 26).

McLuhan will have no truck with questions of intention whether on the part of producers or consumers of media. In a seldom referred to but telling passage in Understanding Media (1968: 62) he makes it clear that ‘It is the peculiar bias of those who operate the media for the owners that they be concerned about program content.’ The owners themselves ‘are more concerned about the media as such’. They know that the power of media ‘has little to do with “content”’. He implies that the owner’s preoccupation with the formula ‘what the public wants’ is a thin disguise for their knowing lack of interest in specific contents and their strong sense of where the media’s power lies.

Hence his deliberately provocative slogan ‘The medium is the message’. This is where his use of the electric light as a ‘medium’ pays off. It becomes the exemplary case of a ‘medium without a message’ (1968: 15). McLuhan asserts that neither the (apparent and irrelevant) messages that it carries (the words and meanings of an illuminated sign) nor its uses (illuminating baseball matches or operating theatres) are what is important about electric light as a medium. Rather, like electricity itself, its real message is the way that it extends and speeds up forms of ‘human association and action’, whatever they are (1968: 16). What is important about electric light for McLuhan is the way that it ended any strict distinction between night and day, indoors and outdoors and how it then changed the meanings (remediated) of already existing technologies and the kinds of human organisation built around them: cars can travel and sports events can take place at night, factories can operate efficiently around the clock, and buildings no longer require windows (1968: 62). For McLuhan, the real ‘“message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs’ (1968: 16). Driving his point home, and again moving from technology to communication media, he writes:

The message of the electric light is like the message of electric power in industry. Totally radical, pervasive, and decentralised. For the electric light and power are separate from their uses, yet they eliminate time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone and T V, creating involvement in depth. (McLuhan 1968: 17)

Also, like the effects of the electric light on the automobile, McLuhan claims that the content of any medium is another medium which it picks up and works over (the medium is the message).

McLuhan’s absolute insistence on the irrelevance of content to understanding media needs to be seen as a strategy. He adopts it in order to focus his readers upon:

1 the power of media technologies to structure social arrangements and relationships, and

2 the mediating aesthetic properties of a media technology. They mediate our relations to one another and to the world (electronic broadcasting as against one-to-one oral communication or point-to-point telegraphic communication for instance). Aesthetically, because they claim our senses in different ways, the multidirectional simultaneity of sound as against the exclusively focused attention of a ‘line’ of sight, the fixed, segmenting linearity of printed language, the high resolution of film or the low resolution of T V, etc.

We should now be in a better position to see what McLuhan offers us in our efforts to ‘understand new media’, and why his work has been seen to be newly important in the context of new media technologies:

• McLuhan stresses the physicality of technology, its power to structure or restructure how human beings pursue their activities, and the manner in which extensive technological systems form an environment in which human beings live and act. Conventional wisdom says that technology is nothing until it is given cultural meaning, and that it is what we do with technologies rather than what they do to us that is important and has a bearing on social and cultural change. However, McLuhan’s project is to force us to reconsider this conventional wisdom by recognising that technology also has an agency and effects that cannot be reduced to its social uses.

• In his conception of media as technological extensions of the body and its senses, as ‘outerings’ of what the body itself once enclosed, he anticipates the networked, converging, cybernetic media technologies of the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries. He also distinguishes them from earlier technologies as being more environmental. In his words, ‘With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself’ (1968: 53). This is qualitatively different from previous kinds of sensory extension where ‘our extended senses, tools, and technologies’ had been ‘closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness’. However, ‘Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history’ (1962: 5). McLuhan’s sweeping hyperbolic style is much in evidence in that last statement. However, the evolution of networked communication systems and present anticipations of a fully functioning, global neural net is here prefigured in McLuhan’s observations of broadcast culture in the 1960s.

• McLuhan’s ideas have been seen as the starting point for explanation and understanding of the widely predicted conditions in which cybernetic systems have increasingly determining effects upon our lives. At a point in human history where for significant numbers of people ‘couplings’ with machines are increasingly frequent and intimate, where our subjectivity is challenged by this new interweaving of technology into our everyday lives, he forces us to reconsider the centrality of human agency in our dealings with machines and to entertain a less one-sided view.

It is McLuhan’s view that these mediating factors are qualities of the media technologies themselves, rather than outcomes of the way they are used, which is criticised by Williams and many in media studies

Williams and the social shaping of technology

We noted at the outset of this section that media studies has by and large come to ignore or reject the views of Marshall McLuhan in favour of Raymond Williams’s analysis of similar terrain. In this section we draw out the major differences in their approaches to the question of technology’s relation to culture and society.

Human agency versus technological determination

Williams clearly has McLuhan’s concept of the ‘extensions of man’ in mind when he writes that ‘A technology, when it has been achieved, can be seen as a general human property, an extension of a general human capacity’ (1974: 129; our italics). McLuhan is seldom interested in why a technology is ‘achieved’, but this is a question that is important for Williams. For him ‘all technologies have been developed and improved to help with known human practices or with foreseen and desired practices’ (ibid.). So, for Williams, technologies involve precisely what McLuhan dismisses. First, they cannot be separated from questions of ‘practice’ (which are questions about how they are used and about their content). Second, they arise from human intention and agency. Such intentions arise within social groups to meet some desire or interest that they have, and these interests are historically and culturally specific.

McLuhan holds that new technologies radically change the physical and mental functions of a generalised ‘mankind’. Williams argues that new technologies take forward existing practices that particular social groups already see as important or necessary. McLuhan’s ideas about why new technologies emerge are psychological and biological. Humans react to stress in their environment by ‘numbing’ the part of the body under stress. They then produce a medium or a technology (what is now frequently called a prosthesis) which extends and externalises the ‘stressed out’ sense or bodily function. Williams’s argument for the development of new technologies is sociological. It arises from the development and reconfiguration of a culture’s existing technological resources in order to pursue socially conceived ends.

McLuhan insists that the importance of a medium is not a particular use but the structural way that it changes the ‘pace and scale’ of human affairs. For Williams, it is the power that specific social groups have that is important in determining the ‘pace and scale’ of the intended technological development – indeed, whether or not any particular technology is developed (see Winston 1998). Williams’s emphasis called for an examination of (1) the reasons for which technologies are developed, (2) the complex of social, cultural, and economic factors which shape them, and (3) the ways that technologies are mobilised for certain ends (rather than the properties of the achieved technologies themselves). This is the direction which the mainstream of media studies came to take.

The plural possibilities and uses of a technology

Where, for the most part, McLuhan sees only one broad and structuring set of effects as flowing from a technology, Williams recognises plural outcomes or possibilities. Because he focuses on the issue of intention, he recognises that whatever the original intention to develop a technology might be, subsequently other social groups, with different interests or needs, adapt, modify or subvert the uses to which any particular technology is put. Where, for McLuhan, the social adoption of a media technology has determinate outcomes, for Williams this is not guaranteed. It is a matter of competition and struggle between social groups. For Williams, the route between need, invention, development, and final use or ‘effect’ is not straightforward. He also points out that technologies have uses and effects which were unforeseen by their conceivers and developers. (A point with which McLuhan would agree.) Overall, Williams’s critique of McLuhan adds up to the premiss that there is nothing in a particular technology which guarantees or causes its mode of use, and hence its social effects. By viewing media the way he does, he arrives at the opposite conclusion to McLuhan: what a culture is like does not directly follow from the nature of its media.

Concepts of technology

We have noted how broadly, following a basic (nineteenth-century) anthropological concept of ‘man’ as a tool user, McLuhan defines a technology and how he subsumes media within this definition without further discussion. Williams does not. First, he distinguishes between various stages or elements in a fully achieved technology. The outcome of this process is subject to already existing social forces, needs and power relations.

In line with the ‘social shaping of technology’ school of thought (Mackenzie and Wajcman 1999), Williams is not content to understand technologies only as artefacts. In fact the term ‘technology’ makes no reference to artefacts at all, being a compound of the two Greek roots techne, meaning art, craft or skill, and logos, meaning word or knowledge (Mackenzie and Wajcman 1999: 26). In short, technology in its original form means something like ‘knowledge about skilful practices’ and makes no reference at all to the products of such knowledge as tools and machines. So, for Williams, the knowledges and acquired skills necessary to use a tool or machine are an integral part of any full concept of what a technology is. McLuhan is largely silent on this, his attention being fully centred upon the ways in which technologies ‘cause’ different kinds of sensory experience and knowledge ordering procedures.

The social nature of a media technology

Williams takes the technology of writing, which was so important in McLuhan’s scheme of things, as an example (Williams 1981: 108). He differentiates between:

• Technical inventions and techniques upon which a technology depends, the alphabet, appropriate tools or machines for making marks, and suitable surfaces for accurately retaining marks;

• The substantive technology which, in terms of writing, is a distribution technology (it distributes language) and this requires a means or form – scrolls of papyrus, portable manuscripts, mass-produced printed books, letters, or emails and other kinds of electronic text;

• The technology in social use. This includes (a) the specialised practice of writing which was initially restricted to ‘official’ minorities and then opened up, through education, to larger sections of society. But always, each time this happened, it was on the basis of some kind of argued need (the needs of merchants, of industrial workers, etc.), and (b) the social part of the distribution of the technologically reproduced language (reading) which again was only extended in response to perceived social needs (efficient distribution of information, participation in democratic processes, constituting a market of individuals with the ability to consume ‘literature’, etc.).

As Williams points out, at the time of his writing in 1981, after some thousands of years of writing and 500 years of mass reproduction in print, only 40 per cent of the world’s population were able to read and hence had access to written texts. In this way, Williams argues that having noted the strictly technical and formal aspects of a technology we are still crucially short of a full grasp of what is involved. For these basic techniques and forms to be effective as a technology within a society, we also have to add the ability to read and to be constituted as part of a readership or market by publishers. Simply put, writing cannot be understood as a communications technology unless there are readers. The ability to read, and the control of, access to, and arrangements for learning to read, are part of the distributive function of the technology of writing. In this sense, Williams argues, a full description of a technology, both its development and its uses, is always social as well as technical and it is not simply a matter of the ‘social’ following the technological as a matter of ‘effects’. Clearly this is an argument that can be extended to new media as policy debates about the growing existence of a ‘digital divide’ illustrate. The extent to which the technology can have transformative ‘effects’ is more or less in relation to other preexisting patterns of wealth and power.

The concept of a medium

While McLuhan uses the term ‘medium’ unproblematically and is quite happy to see it as a kind of technology, Williams finds the term problematic and he shares with some other theorists (Maynard 1997) an uneasiness about conflating ‘media’ and ‘technology’. It is often implicit for Williams that a medium is a particular use of a technology; a harnessing of a technology to an intention or purpose to communicate or express.

When is a technology a medium?

Here we might take the much-considered case of photography. Clearly there is a photographic technology; one in which optical and mechanical systems direct light onto chemically treated surfaces which then become marked in relation to the way that configurations of light fall on that surface. This, however, is not a medium. The manufacture of silicon chips, a technical process upon which the manufacture of computers now depends, uses this photographic technology. It is used to etch the circuits on the microscopic chips. This is a technological process – a technology at work. However, another use of the photographic technology is to make pictures – to depict persons or events in the world. This may also be a technology at work. However, when it is said that these pictures or images provide us with information, represent an idea, express a view, or in some way invite us to exercise our imaginations in respect to the contents and forms of the image, then we may say that photography is being used as a medium. Or, more accurately, the technology of photography is being used as a medium of communication, expression, representation or imaginative projection. On this line of argument, a medium is something that we do with a technology. Clearly, what we do needs to be of an order that the technology can facilitate or support but it does not necessarily arise from the technology itself. Having an intention for a technology is not synonymous with the technology per se. A technology becomes a medium through many complex social transformations and transitions; it is, in Williams’s reading, profoundly the product of culture and not a given consequence of technology.

A problem with binary definitions

Williams is also wary about the theoretical implications that the term ‘medium’ has come to carry. First, he criticises and virtually dismisses it as always being a misleading reification of a social process. Second, he sees that it is also a term that is used to recognise the part that materials play in a practice or process of production, as in artistic processes where the very nature of paint, ink, or a certain kind of camera will play a part in shaping the nature of an artistic product (1977: 159).

Medium as a reification of a social process

When he thinks about the sense in which a medium is a reification, McLuhan can be seen as very much in the centre of Williams’s line of fire. Williams uses the following seventeenth-century statement about the nature of vision to demonstrate what he sees to be the major difficulty, still present in contemporary thought, with the concept of a ‘medium’: ‘to the sight three things are required, the Object, the Organ and the Medium’ (1977: 158).

The problem, he argues, is that such a formulation contains an inherent duality. A ‘medium’ is given the status of an autonomous object (or the process of mediation is given the status of a process that is separate from what it deals with) which stands between and connects two other separate entities: that which is mediated (an object) and that which receives the results of the mediating process (the eye). With language as his example, Williams points out that when this concept of a medium is being used, ‘Words are seen as objects, things, which men [sic] take up and arrange into particular forms to express or communicate information which, before this work in the “medium” they already possess’ (1977: 159).

Williams argued against this position – for him the process of mediation is itself constitutive of reality; it contributes to the making of our realities. Communication and interaction are what we do as a species. The ‘medium’ is not a pre-given set of formal characteristics whose effects can be read off – it is a process that itself constitutes that experience or that reality. So for Williams to argue that ‘the medium is the message’ is to mistake and to reify an essentially social process taking place between human agents and their interests as if it were a technological object outside of human agency. As a theoretical conception which structures thought it necessarily leaves us with sets of binary terms: the self and the world, subject and object, language and reality, ideology and truth, the conscious and unconscious, the economic base and the cultural superstructure, etc.

Medium as material

One way of avoiding this problem is to narrow the definition of a medium. This is the other direction which Williams’s thought on the subject takes. He recognises that a ‘medium’ can also be understood as ‘the specific material with which a particular kind of artist worked’, and ‘to understand this “medium” was obviously a condition of professional skill and practice’ (Williams 1977: 159). The problem here, writes Williams, is that even this down to earth sense of a medium is often extended until it stands in for the whole of a practice, which he famously defines as ‘work on a material for a specific purpose within certain necessary social conditions’ (1977: 160). Once again we see that Williams wants to stress that a medium is only part of a wider practice, a material that is worked upon to achieve human purposes pursued in determining social contexts; a means to an end.

31 March 2012

Mass Media, Mass Culture and Elite

1 An Overview

2 The Media Theories

Cultivation Theory of Mass Media

Coordinated Management of Meaning

The Meaning of Meanings

Signs, Signifiers, and Signified

Symbolic Interactionism

Attribution Theory

Constructivism

Elaboration Likelihood Model

Social Judgment Theory

Social Penetration Theory

Uncertainty Reduction Theory

Groupthink

Organizing

Face

Cultivation Theory

The Spiral of Silence

Media Control

3

The Elite Group and Mass Media

Introduction

The Marketplace of Ideas

The Alternative

Plagiarism

Royalties

Stimulating Creativity

Strategies for Change

Change Thinking

4

Mass Media and Culture

5

Media and Culture in a Democratic Society

Culture and a Democratic Conception of Citizenship

6

Mass Media and Communication

7

The Indian Scenario

Introduction

8

Globalization and Media

9

Media and its Role in American Society

Introduction

10

New Media and New Technologies

11

Change and Continuity

12

New Media: Determining or Determined?

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