Discussing the social implications of emerging “new” media.

This essay will explore some theory concerning the creation of, so-called, “new media”;  Cave painting, manuscripts, painting perspective, print, networked hypertext and hypermedia, were all new once. Media is the plural for medium.

The essay will look at the theory surrounding the creation new technologies that mediate and try to develop an appreciation of the way in which technology affects the world and the way we can affect the technology’s uses

First of all, Its worth bringing attention toward a bias towards enthusiasm for the “new” based on narratives about progress in Western societies.  The idea that ‘new’ automatically equates to ‘better’ is an ideology. It says the future is better than now. However, the newness can be attributed to societal change. Rather than referring to it as “new” Bolter and Grusin refer to it as remediation. It is continuing the act of meditating but with new technologies and techniques. Marchal McLuhan argues that a characteristic of every medium is that its content is always another (previous) medium.[3] For example, language becomes the content of words on a page. They too are the content used in the technology of the printing press, which allows it to reach mass audiences.

It can be seen from looking at the emergence of new technologies of mediation that they are instrumental in social change.  The way those changes came about however have varied. In His book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) McLuhan argued that the French revolution and American revolution happened under the push of print whereas the pre-existence of a strong oral culture in Britain prevented such an effect.

McLuhan attested that the medium its self, rather than the content being conveyed, that should be the focus in the study of media. It is the “medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” (Understanding Media, NY, 1964, p. 9). He argued that the medium, when added to a society, amplifies pre-existing social processes.  For example, the emergence of the Television brought with it its own rituals amplifying a pre-existing living room culture in western societies that had first been amplified by the radio.  In his words any medium "amplifies or accelerates existing processes", introduces a "change of scale or pace or shape or pattern into human association, affairs, and action", resulting in "psychic, and social consequences"; (ibid 1964).  This suggests that it is the way the media is formed that is of interest when considering the effects of new media.

Bolter and Grusin, in their book Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000), identify two logics that emerging mediums try to follow. Firstly, the attempt to be immediate. So as to try and deny the existence of the medium and put the individual in touch with an object.  For example, perspective painting aims to make the viewer seem to be looking at a view. Photography seems to be even more immediate and virtual reality even more so. And secondly, hypermediacy, which is characterised by combining of mediums and juxtaposing of content. Four example, CNN news with its different windows, some video, some text, and a rolling text bar at the bottom. Reproducing a “rich sensorium of human experience”(ibid)

An emphasis on the power of new technologies to change societies and condition humans can lead to the idea that technologies themselves are the things that cause social change. In other words Technological Determinism. Raymond Williams developed a critique of McLuhan's work as an attempt recover and develop what he saw as the lost early promise of it.  He argued against Technological Determinism and re-emphasised the social involvement in the creation and use of technologies. 'Determination is a real social process, but never (as in some theological and some Marxist versions)... a wholly controlling, wholly predicting set of causes…On the contrary, the reality of determination is the setting of limits and the exertion of pressures, within which variable social practices are profoundly affected but never necessarily controlled.' Williams (1974).  In other words, the technology of media will affect society but it is humans who are able to set the limits and exertion of pressures that the technology used. McLuhan argued that media could be seen as an extension of the self; of the senses and human faculty. With this in mind, more technology enables the self to extend. What is being extended, however, is a social choice.

Carolyn Marvin (1990) says “The history of media is never more or less than the history of their uses, which always leads away from them [, the media,] to the social practices and conflicts they illuminate". it can be seen that it is important to look at how the medium gets used and to look at the social processes of which it is a part. As such this section will explore what use society will be demanding from our medium and explore what uses it needs to facilitate; which social processes, as McLuhan argued, it will “amplify or accelerate”(1964). 

Discussing the media and society going on at the moment

In the medium of the Internet, it can be observed there is "a shift from a limited number of standardised texts, accessed from a few dedicated in fixed positions, to a very large number of highly differentiated texts accessed in multifarious ways."(Lister)  This internet “media determine a segmented, differentiated audience that, although massive in terms of numbers, is no longer a mass audience in terms of simultaneously and uniformity of the message it receives. The new media are no longer mass media… Sending a limited number of messages to a homogenous mass audience.”(Lister).

The large centres of knowledge used to assume authority mostly due to the technology available at the time. These centres, for example, the BBC, were capable of expressing a point of view that people would respect due to their reputation. The Internet has begun to undermine the authority of this old media, based on the old architecture of transmitters, as the multiplicity of other sources are able to express contradictory points of view. The internet has made it very possible for small voices to have a small voice, however, has not so far made it easy for small voices to have a clear voice that provides a uniform message received simultaneously by an audience.

It could be argued that it is a virtue of the Internet for not allowing one body of knowledge, with all the power-knowledge structures that go along with It, to claim overbearing rights over mediating knowledge: That is a good thing that the decentralising nature of the Internet has enabled the exposing of hegemonic patterns of thought.  The small alternative points of view from a multiplicity of sources, however, lack the respect gained by being part of a larger organisation. Anyone with any opinion can air their voice to an audience without any overt incentive to justify their claims. A message coming from somewhere, for example, a blogger, with our contemporary media, will not have had to pass the testing nature of getting a message broadcast on old medias structures, like television or radio.

The different sources of knowledge, as it is, are found through searches which use algorithms to throw up links that it deems important. The media of your standard blogs, news websites, Internet magazines, express their point of view without there being an easy way to juxtapose their point with that of others.  It is not easy, for example, to peruse which major bodies of knowledge and philosophy there are on how to treat soil. A search for “soil organic matter” on Google does not, at present, bring up the Soil Association.

(comment 1)

Also, the way of making media where an author, or editor, decides the order the content will be received in is being replaced by hypermedia. We are able to jump through media to get to the bit of information we are after. “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,”(Lister).

 It could be argued that the potential of this technology, of hyperlinking, to change society is vast. Lister points out that with the idea of hypertext "The very status of the text itself is challenged. The book you would hold in your hand is dissolved into a network of Association-within the book itself numerous cross-linkages are made available which facilitate many different reading pathways, and the book itself becomes permeable to other texts. It's 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." (Lister 2009:30).  It seems the potential of hypertext on in terms of technological possibility is quite limitless.  However, Just because of the technological possibility it does not mean that the human element of deciding how to use it should be ignored.  in arguing against technological determinism Raymond Williams re-emphasises the social involvement in the creation and use of technologies. Perhaps we can limit ourselves to mediating real social desires to communicate and affect. 
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Lister defines 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 aid of the interface design. Each discrete ‘node” in the web has a number of entrances and exits or links.” The vision of the idea of hypertext in its inception raised the speculative idea of a machine called the Memex (Vannevar Bush 1945). The Memex would provide an "enlarged intimate supplement to one's memory".[2]. The discrete units within the Memorex ‘would be individually coded according to the associative links that the user found meaningful to his or her own work’(Lister, M 2009:27).  This project aimed to break points up, add metadata to them, and retrieve them in a meaningful way so as to have quick access aid to one’s memory. The full realisation of this ideal has not yet occurred however human-computer interaction projects have continued to be developed. Each user or user group in his vision would have its own individual coding. To put it another way, each perspective will have its own vocabulary to talk about their points of interest.  The words that someone uses to describe the topics of interest to them would be individual to what they found meaningful.
(Comment 5)

Old media tends to be in the form of monographs, a way of writing, formed originally for the technology of paper, where points are formed in an order that goes from beginning to end with the established norms expected by the reader. The logic of breaking text up into points which can be directed at topics does not have a well-formed logic, as far as I know yet, nor is there yet an obvious feedback as to how it appears to the user. 
(comment 3)

Conclusion

We can see that technologies of media are part of society. Making new media produces changes in society.  However, it is up to humans to decide how to develop the functionality of the new technologies which will cause new habits and social conditioning.  It's not so much of interest which content gets mediated but rather what "change of scale or pace or shape or pattern into human association, affairs, and action" (McLuhan 1964) will happen and what the psychological, and social consequences of this will be. It is important to question how the medium will be used and which “social practices and conflicts they illuminate” Marvin (1990)

We are no longer bound to the old semantic order built around the technology of paper. Hypermedia is an interesting way of engaging with media with the potential to enable people to get to the piece of information they want in a similar way to how you access the memory. We have the potential to break information up into something vastly different from the monograph, however leaving behind the syntactical norms may not be so straightforward. Instead, focusing on the social needs of society may be a good step-by-step way to develop techniques and expected norms that work. It will be good to work out how to better mediate what, already existing, processes in human affairs there are.  Media can cause processes and processes can cause the way media is used.

While the Internet has helped make more knowledge available it has also reduced the simplicity of having only a few sources of media. I attest that there is a social process wishing to collaborate and form into new, flexible, centres of knowledge that are not rigid structures but remain in a state of flux.

(Comment 4)

Comment 1:

Another more basic way of doing it might be to start off with the different centres of knowledge that already exist; the various initiatives, or magazines, the bloggers, the organisations, and then break up their media into articles on various topics they talk about. This could be done by having a tag for the “who” and a tag for the topic. So you would have a range of articles from the various pre-existing groups all existing on one platform.

We put things into context saying “who is saying what about what”.

One suggestion might be that we encourage the creation of larger centres of knowledge where people group together to say what they mean.

Perhaps then in some way groups with similar opinions could unify under a form of superego and create a collaborative article articulating their position on a topic: A wiki with an overall point of view. Something like this could help the small voices work on the similarities and gain more respect for their ideas. Perhaps this could work like a hackpad.

The idea is that we create flexible fluid larger centres of knowledge where people group together to say what they mean.

Comment 2:

Seems to me that a good social desire would be to have the experts of something to be able to be in charge of it and of mediating it. To have those with well-considered points of view to become authorities. This seems similar to some think articulated in Greek philosophy "There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings [or queens] in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands." (Plato)

Comment 3:

Perhaps it is possible to artificially group similar points to other similar points. Maybe this could be done automatically with some sort of automatic thesaurus or perhaps humans could suggest which topics are similar.  Or perhaps we can start conversations using topics we define.  

Comment 4:
I propose a Parawiki can become a thing; that is should provide the opportunity to give form to authorities on a subject. 
Comment 5 (more recent June 2008):

Perhaps it will be possible to, as a planet, come up with a collectively agreeable system for accessing knowledge. So everyone can find all of the same subject matter without some getting lost, or hidden, in the masses of information out there. 
I propose that we can do this by agreeing on definitions of categories, that can be translated into all languages, that we then use to tag content with.  We should then be able to find the entirety of content on a specific matter and begin to collate it into a more manageable form.