THE SOCIAL FORM OF NEW MEDIA

The process of ‘social shaping’ leaves a medium with a social form, an identity, which influences the way it is used and its impact on the world; it is never quite shaken off. In this way we can see that new media are as much the product of social, political and economic forces as they are of technological endeavor. Media not only influence the way in which we see and experience our world but are products of the world in which we live. As the contemporary experience of intense change is not only associated with new media but also with other wider kinds of social, economic and political experience.

It is also true that the very intensity of change is something we associate with the capitalist economic system. So it is that in a modern economy the development and use of media are deeply imprinted by the circumstances of their creation. Williams pointed out in theoretical terms how the ‘social significance’ of a technical invention only came about once it had been selected for investment and production, ‘processes which are of a general social and economic kind, within existing social and economic relations, and in a specific social order’ (Williams 1989).

The spread of the Internet and its colonization by commercial forces, particularly in retail sales is an excellent demonstration of this process in action. To understand this process better we will look at three examples, starting with the personal computer, the machine that plays such an extremely important role in the growth of new media.

The IBM PC originated in the company’s research labs in the 1980s because of the pressure on its traditional business from the new desktop computers. To get the new IBM machines onto the market as rapidly as possible they were assembled from readily available components. They were, therefore, always going to be easy to replicate. The operating system, Microsoft’s Disk Operating System (MS-DOS), used on the new PCs was also sold as PC-DOS. It was widely available and easily distributed on cheap floppy disks. Overall the very origins of the IBM PC made it very difficult to protect it from copying, since almost everything that made it work was already widely available. The fact that it was assembled from all.

 Brian Winston, Media Technology and Society: a history from the telegraph to the Internet, London: Routledge (1998), for more on the operation of these forces on technological development sorts of bits and pieces also meant that it was impossible to use patent law to protect the design of the hardware. The IBM PC may have been clunky and inelegant but anyone could make one, and they did. To make matters worse (for IBM), because of a commercial miscalculation Microsoft were left with the rights to the operating system, which was where the new monopoly in software was eventually to flower.

In the origins of the World Wide Web, we can see how the idea of social form applies not only to hardware and commercial objects but also to forms of knowledge. The origin of the web lay in a widely readable computer code, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), first published in 1990. It was developed in the scientific academic world to transfer images and text within the international user community associated with CERN (Organization Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire). Since that community was using a variety of types of computers and associated software, many with their own ways of handling text and images, the challenge was to develop a code that would work equally well on all of them. Rather than try to develop yet another set of international standards for files, the new code simply told a wide range of computer systems what to do with the files they were receiving. To make the new code even easier to use web browsers were developed at the university-based National Centre for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA). The code was made publicly available and is still the basis of both Netscape and Internet Explorer.

Once web browsers became items of commercial interest, extra gimmicks and capabilities gave a business advantage and meant that there was good reason for private companies to keep some code developments to themselves. In consequence, business organizations were now creating new standards that only their own products could interpret. Commercial investment building on academic research has thus given the web browser a new social form. In other words, the form and distribution and capabilities of a web browser are as much a product of the ownership of the code as of technical potential. Moreover the fact that this code was first developed in the public sector, as part of an attempt to promote co-operation and exchange, has a legacy within the social form of the web browser despite its subsequent development within a market framework.

The roots of the Internet in the publicly funded uses and the PC in the private sector are both integral to the way in which the Web and its communicative capabilities have remained in play. It is notable that the power of this public root of Internet use is such that the control of specifications for HTML and it offshoots such as XML remain important methods for determining the actions and locations of other software within browsers. For example Microsoft’s latest application for delivering media, Limelight, still depends on some very traditional HTML as well as a variety of proprietary software. We have seen in these examples that the form of a medium is a product not only of what is technically possible, but also of the material and economic circumstances of its creation. These circumstances may be commercial or intellectual, or a mixture of these and other factors, but they leave the medium with a social form that cannot be ignored.

The outcome of these three vital developments is hardly determined any more by the technology that they contain than by the social circumstance of their development. But the ‘social form’ which they take, along with other developments, and investment in communications combine to give us the Internet. We can see that new media, how they are represented, how they are sold and the commercial interests underlying them, are the complex outcomes of the interaction between our existing culture, business interests, and major investments in telecommunications. All are underpinned by the availability of computing power in an average home that far exceeds that which put a man on the moon in 1969. But on its own this is not enough to explain the for a discussion of the social form of the PC as a domestic commodity.
Robert X. Cringely, Accidental Empires: how the boys of Silicon Valley make their millions, battle foreign competition and still can’t get a date, London: Penguin (1996), for a well-informed and entertaining description of the ups and downs of the invention of the Personal Computer particular form that information and communications technologies have taken.

At this point it is important to note that the interaction under discussion is actually implemented by real people who also require an ideological structure in order to negotiate the range of meanings and practices that will construct the media regime. This show how terms such as information, economy both express and construct ways of thinking and consequent action.

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686