NEW MEDIA AS THE INTENSITY OF CHANGE

The term ‘new media’ emerged to capture a sense that quite rapidly from the late 1980s on, the world of media and communications began to look quite different and this difference was not restricted to any one sector or element of that world, although the actual timing of change may have been different from medium to medium. This was the case from printing, photography, through television, to telecommunications.

Of course, such media had continually been in a state of technological, institutional and cultural change or development; they never stood still. Yet, even within this state of constant flux, it seemed that the nature of change that was experienced warranted an absolute marking off from what went before.

This experience of change was not, of course, confined only to the media in this period. Other, wider kinds of social and cultural change were being identified and described and had been, to varying degrees, from the 1960s onwards.

The following are indicative of wider kinds of social, economic and cultural change with which new media are associated:

• A shift from modernity to postmodernity: a contested, but widely subscribed attempt to characterise deep and structural changes in societies and economies from the 1960s.
For more on these particular developments onwards, with correlative cultural changes. In terms of their aesthetics and economies new media are usually seen as a key marker of such change (Harvey, 1989).

• Intensifying processes of globalisation: a dissolving of national states and boundaries in terms of trade, corporate organisation, customs and cultures, identities and beliefs, in which new media have been seen as a contributory element (Featherstone, 1990).

• A replacement, in the West, of an industrial age of manufacturing by a ‘postindustrial’ information age: a shift in employment, skill, investment and profit, in the production of material goods to service and information ‘industries’ which many uses of new media are seen to epitomise (Castells, 2000).

• A decentring of established and centralised geopolitical orders: the weakening of mechanisms of power and control from Western colonial centres, facilitated by the dispersed, boundary-transgressing, networks of new communication media.

Conclusively; new media were caught up with and seen as part of these other kinds of change (as both cause and effect), and the sense of ‘new times’ and ‘new eras’ which followed in their wake. In this sense, the emergence of ‘new media’ as some kind of epoch-making phenomena, was, and still is, seen as part of a much larger landscape of social, technological and cultural change; in short, as part of a new techno-culture.

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686