NETWORKED COMPUTER

Networked computer and the ways that this machine is held to have transformed work in other media: from books to movies, from telephones to television. When did all this happen? What, in other words, is the period in which ‘everything changed’? The process by which computerisation or ‘digitisation’ impacted upon the media of the twentieth century has moved on many fronts and at different speeds, so it is difficult to pinpoint a single date or decisive period for the emergence of new media. Even the key developments in computing, the core technology of this digitisation, which, over the long term, made this technically and conceptually possible, are many.

We can get some idea of the period that mainly concerns us by considering the emergence of the personal computer. We can point to the mid-1980s as a watershed, when the PC began to be equipped with interactive graphic interfaces; to possess enough memory to run the early versions of image manipulation software; and when computer-mediated communications networks began to emerge.

This was a moment when the ideas and concepts of earlier visionaries appeared to become real possibilities. In turn, it is since that time, a period of less than thirty years, that speculation, prediction, theorisation and argument about the nature and potential of these new media began to proceed at a bewildering and breathless pace.

A wide range of ideas, many of which challenged settled assumptions about media, culture and technology (and, indeed, nature) were generated and pulled along in the vortex of constant and rapid technological innovation. So too was a comparable quantity of ‘hype’ that accompanied the emergence of new media in the mid-1980s. This, of course, is still with us, but it has been met by some hard-headed reflection born of experience and enough time to recover some critical poise. New media have become a major focus of research and theory, an emerging field of media and cultural study which now possesses a complex body of thought and writing.

Thinking about new media has become a critical and contested field of study. Media studies, like any other field of study, thrives on problems. At the early stages in the study of any new phenomenon the very question of ‘what the problems are’ is part of the field of enquiry; the problems themselves are contested. What exactly is the problem? Which questions are worth bothering about? Which ideas are really significant? In this book, by bringing together a range of voices and disciplines, we have aimed to provide an initial map of the territory and its debates.

Such a project has its challenges. When we began to write this book we were conscious, above all, of the rapid pace of media-technological change that has characterised the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. This became all the more apparent with the rise of what we might call ‘upgrade culture’: with the practice of upgrading, the computer itself becomes a technology in flux, rather than a finally achieved and stable piece of technology.

Thus we were faced with the question of how to take a snapshot of a breaking wave. Constant technological and media change makes it absurd to tie a discussion of ‘new media’ to those particular media which are new at the time of writing. Rather, we set ourselves the task of investigating the more fundamental issues of what constitutes newness in media and what part technological change may play in that.

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686