Technological Determinism and Digital Media

It's been a long time since my last post and I'm comming back on track... The last online session and essays of our class were on technological determinism. The theme resulted in several interesting essays. This one is mine...

"The development of the internet and its’ extremely rapid penetration in all aspects of human life implies the idea of technological determinism - the term, which is used to refer to the common assumption that new technologies are the primary cause of major social and historical changes. Working in an industry that offers internet services and being part of persuading customers that this is everything they need in this world for their life to be more efficient, fun, successful and simple… I often find myself believing in inevitability of the new media.

But is it really so? Is persuading people that living without digital media already part of the path to technological determinism? Is submitting technology really necessary? Will technology really result in a better life?

The frequent usage of the idea of technological determinism in advertising and other texts the primary purpose of which is persuasion was also noticed by Joseph Goguen who also sets the question “why this invalid form of argument is so common and so effective?”

Reading the texts on technological/media determinism and cyberspace it was obvious the theorists do quote Marshall McLuhan's media determinism, but do not use the theory of technological determinism as the theory that explains it all. In spite of that the feeling of inevitable process of the technologically oriented changes is at this very moment stronger than ever before. As Samuel Ebersole states “the speed at which the internet is growing prevents us from turning aside. One can not deny the millions of people who do believe in the Internet – people who have faith in the technology” (in Goguen)

One of the digital media that produced significant social change are blogs, wikis and other social media with user generated content. Blogs, wikis and the rise of user generated content represented the diminishing power of traditional media, which served merely the needs of the owners with service to the public only on the second place. The public questioned journalism and the truth presented by the journalists. At the same time they were powerless for not being able to be heard in traditional media.

The rise of new forms of media was a boost to the public. Blogs and wikis made the public possible to play an active role in collecting, publishing and disseminating the information and thereby overtaking the role that was once exclusively reserved for traditional media. Blogs and wikis gave public the possibility to regain the voice and also to represent the corrective mechanism for bad journalism. Social software and blogs represent digital media, which is based on technological innovation, but would wither away unless there was the right time, space and the social moment that enabled its’ flourishing.

That we can not apply Marshall McLuhan’s famous “The medium is the message” to blogs prove different uses and reactions on them in different countries – from liberal expression of thoughts in western countries to oppression and arresting of bloggers, like recently in China where a blogger was beaten to death in attempt to take a picture.

So neither theory on technological determinism, nor social determinism can fully explain the rise of blogs and other social media. Technology, social reality and many other factors (we may never know entirely) influence each other.

What is the cause and what is the effect of the technological development discusses Raymond Williams (Williams, 1974) He highly criticized the technological determinist school of thought and argued against it throughout the book. He argues that technology can not be isolated from the surrounding political, cultural and economic environment.“For if the medium is the cause, all other causes, all that men see as history, are at once reduced to the effects. What are elsewhere seen as effect, are excluded as irrelevant by comparison with the direct physiological effects of media as such.” He emphasizes the importance of the question whether it is “… reasonable to describe any technology as a cause, and in what relations with other kind of causes.” He continues: “If the technology is a cause, we can at best modify or seek to control its effects. Or if technology, as used, is an effect, to what other kinds of cause and other kinds of action, should we refer and relate our experience of its uses?”

Technology is never just technical but is a combination of what is possible in a time and what is desirable in a certain socio-historic context. Because we have become accustomed to live with and inside techno-social systems, we tend to forget that they are man-made and contingent. Because they have shaped our milieu for such a long time, we see them as a sort of second nature.So do we take part in blogs, wikis, social media for technological or social reasons? That brings us back to the question on advertising or to reformulate – can we artificially create social environment for our technological innovation? Can social environment also be a kind of technological innovation? According to Langdon Winner (in Ebersole) “those who had the power to introduce a new technology, also had the power to create a consumer class to use the technology, with new practices, relationships, and identities supplanting the old." Later he wrote, "those who had the wherewithal to implement new technologies often molded society to match the needs of emerging technologies and organizations."

Resources
Joseph Goguen,Media determinism in Cyberspace http://www.regent.edu/acad/schcom/rojc/mdic/md.html

Daniel Chandler, Technological or Media Determinism. Available at: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/tecdet/tecdet.html

Basic definitions, Regent University,
http://www.regent.edu/acad/schcom/rojc/mdic/define.html

Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Reviewed by Brian Martin, Technological Determinism Revisited; http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/96BRmetascience.html

Langdon Winner, Technology today: utopia or dystopia? - Technology and the Rest of Culture
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_n3_v64/ai_19952021/pg_1

Williams, Raymond (1975): Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routlege

Stumble! and find

I just installed StumbleUpon toolbar on my Mozilla browser, which finds you great and foremost intersting websites you probably wouldn't find so quickly.

Among them was special collections in web archive Wayback Machine with a collection of websites that began the Internet revolution that corresponds with the history of internet discussion we are about to have this week. Take a look how did it all look like about 10 yrs ago.

Internet studies - two approaches

Comparing two introduction articles on the same topic (at first sight) reveals quite different approach to the subject of internet studies. David Gauntlett in Web.Studies presents internet media as any other popular media stressing its’ usability potential with putting people in the centre of it: “New media would be nothing if it wasn’t meaningful to people,….” Gauntlett includes in the book several important issues from participatory media like blogs, wikis which returns media to its “authentic, community roots”, to the attention “the scarce resource, which everybody on the web is struggling for.” He points to the main issues in web studies which are gathered around individual – possibility of expressing oneself, building the community and expressions of identity. The author basically encompasses major areas of everyday life that influences the web and vice versa. They are presented from the very basic, user’s standpoint of view and remains on the surface of the individual field of discussion. The problem is that web studies are influenced by so many other disciplines, that it can not be studied as a whole in one package. With that approach we can only get crumbs of it.

On the other side is David Silver with more theoretical approach, trying to define the status of the Internet studies as a discipline, seeing it as an interdiscipline, where “traditional disciplinary approaches can help inform our understanding of new sites of study”. Silver stresses the importance of all forms of networked media and culture that surrounds us today with critical cyberculture studies locating its object of study within various overlapping context.

Cyberculture studies still lack theories but considering interdisciplinary approach there is sufficient theoretical base at the moment. Without doubt new theories will emerge as the discipline ripens and the boundaries are set. But with only two decades of research of the field it can be hardly expected to have them by now.

Interactivity in the spotlight

Rob Cover in the article Audience inter/active: Interactive media, narrative control and reconceiving audience history (2006) examines the author-text-audience relationship, suggesting there is audience's desire for control over the text, placing that desire in the centre of interactivity. What I see problematic to a certain point is the negative notion of interactivity with being nothing more than a tension to alter a copy and to violate copyright.

There are (true) many opportunities to violate the content on the web and many measures have been taken to prevent it with different copyright regulations. But it should not be seen as the key generator of interactive participation highly encouraged by web 2.0. Today’s users are becoming ‘prodUsers’ in the Web world or (according to McMillan (Cover, 2006)) empowered audience who is to replace the traditional concept of audiencehood. ProdUsers do both, they consume content and produce it as well, but not only by altering existing content, but also by producing unique, authentic content, helping to generate knowledge.

If the interactivity is not the technologically driven concept as Rafaeli and Sudweeks (Cover, 2006) put it, but rather culturally constituted desire for communication, according to Raymond Williams (Cover, 2006) (with whom I strongly agree), there must be more to the ever increasing number of participants in interactive web activities. To mention (concentrating on media industry) just the media-audience distinction, which becomes blurred with active user participation. Interactivity or two-way interaction conflicts with a traditional view of the traditional media industry as producers on one side and users as consumers on the other and threatens the social status of journalists (Matheson, 2004), as also Cover (2007) points out in the case of CNN’s advertisement over independent internet media. The public service mission has been abandoned by the commercial press in favour of expanding profit margins. Keeping that in mind the internet and interactivity holds the great potential to change the way information is produced and consumed.

The monopoly of public knowledge, held by elite media is destabilized, which adds to the empowerment of individuals. With unlimited supply of information every citizen can become a gatekeeper and low production costs (blogs) have inspired millions to self-publish and millions more to read alternative content outside the mainstream (Scott, 2005).

• Cover, Rob (2006): Audience inter/active: Interactive media, narrative control and reconceiving audience history, New Media & Society, 8(1), 139-158.
• Matheson, Donald (2004): Weblogs and the Epistemology of the News: Some Trends in online Journalism. New Media & Society, 6(4), 443–468.
• Scott, Ben (2005): A Contemporary History of Digital Journalism. Television and New Media, 6(1), 89–126.

Brainland map and much more on data visualization

A propos our first meeting on e-Science theme, where we talked about core features of it and data visualization among them, I must share with you one of the best web sites I encountered lately. Information Aesthetics is a must see for those interested in numerous possibilities of data visualization - as it says "form follows data".

Just for a taste an iconographic music video... much more on Infosthetics...

To begin...

There is no deeper reason for this blog. It is just a simple, plain homework for the Communication Studies postgraduate seminar New media and Society at the Faculty for Social Science. Yet I hope it will serve me as a good additional memory stick for my thoughts that will appear during this course.

The title New Media - We Media was being created on the basis of my firm belief that there is always 'we', 'society', 'community' or whatever we can call it, behind the new technology. Technology, no matter how progressive it is, is nothing without our constant quest for something new, better, unknown...

What interests me most is the deep and profound impact new media with help of anonimous individuals can have and had on established 'old' media. New technologies and the emergence of blogs (so called participatory journalism) gave fresh impulse to the public. Participatory journalism with individuals, who play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing an disseminating of information, takes over the mission once exclusively reserved for traditional media. Numerous authors see blogs as a method of confrontation with traditional journalism but at the same time they also see them as means of improvement of traditional journalism by adapting the latter to contemporary needs and expectations of the people.

So much for the first post - just to drop a hint of my interests...

And for some fun, before we begin some serious work - try if you can outsmart the computer or will it outsmart you? :)