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). When we have studied the media we usually, and fairly safely, have had in mind ‘communication media’ and the specialized and separate institutions and organizations 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: Thompson 197). 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.
People 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’. 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.
(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’. 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 ‘intertexts’ 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, people 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 un-problematically. Why? There are 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.
BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA
BAPRM III - 42686
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