On this module we have been attempting to explore and analyse the role of digital technology in the contemporary media industries. We have been using blogging as a form of critical technical practice to think about how digital technologies are being used. So what have we learned so far?

    As critical technical practitioners we should think about and investigate the social significance of new technologies and explore and evaluate them by using them to make things. We began by considering the idea of ‘being digital’, how we live with and use digital technologies, taken from the title of Nicholas Negroponte's book about the future of digital society. Blogs are an example of a cultural practice that has been facilitated by new technologies. Blogging is a form of social communication relying on reading and writing. It requires a dedication of time and purpose as an extension of literate society and forms of writing such as journalism and story telling. Electronic reading and writing may extend what people already do as readers and writers, but blogging may also turn non-writers into writers. The emergence of the computer has enabled entirely new ways to produce media, as well as ways of helping and expanding established methods and techniques.fficeffice" />

    The basis of the ‘new’ in new media, then, is the onset of human-machine interaction of digital computation and network connectivity. The internet is a continuation and transformation of electronic communication that extends the ‘message’ of media (Marshall McLuhan). Television has turned us into audiences making us part of its content as part of the process of collapsing space and time. The internet exposes and extends us further as we make ourselves its content. The message of the internet is that we spend time making media as part of a personalised global communication network. This is a new alignment of what we can do with technology and what technology does to us. We become electronically and virtually connected to others through making ourselves the content of the internet in the lines we write and the photographs we post, and so on.

    To study digital technology as new media we must refer to the concept of mediation; the way that media structure our experience and how media technologies are part of a wider social and cultural process of communicating and making meaning. In other words, how digital technologies re-structure the way that we experience the world and how we make digital media significant through its use. This is not simply a question of a complete break with the past, but instead it is a technological transformation of established and continuous media forms. Blogs are new media forms but they are remediations (Bolter and Grusin) of writing since as McLuhan has suggested, the content of any medium is always another medium. The important question becomes then to consider how digital technologies contribute to the transformation of existing media. Blogging makes the personal website genre more dynamic and invites a dialogue with readers at a degree that print cannot sustain. Blogging is electronic publishing, but with no guaranteed or necessarily targeted audience. It is writing ‘out loud’.

    Mediation also helps to think through the operations of virtuality and cyberspace as conceptions of human-computer interaction.  Virtual reality (VR) refers to a sense of experiencing the world (a structure of experience) typically through computer media as if it were unmediated reality. This has proven difficult to achieve, but the sense of being immersed in a virtual environment is probably achieved in its most advanced form with videogames, though the cinema has the power to draw us into its simulations of reality. The virtuality of the internet is bound up with the concept of cyberspace, that theoretical place where we ‘go’ when we sit at our computers and log on to the internet. It is a concept that is a powerful metaphor for our sense of being online, for instance, as a participant on a communal website or internet experience, but on the other hand we are just using media as real people in real places to explore new ways of interacting at a distance and with the ability to control our identities. To communicate with someone through blogs, emails or chat rooms is a real not a virtual experience, but one conducted at a distance through the mediation of the computer screen. Is cyberspace any more virtual (unreal) than television (‘telespace’) or radio (‘radiospace’) as mediation, as structures of experience and circulation of meaning? It is the physicality of human-computer interaction that is distinctive, how we bring machines into the pattern of our lives rather than the virtual ‘loss of body’ of using machines that seems distinctive about cyberculture at the present moment.

    If old media is characterised by consumption on a mass scale, new media such as the internet offers a different kind of consumption by the masses and production on a wider scale. On the one hand, mass media is becoming more fragmented as broadcasting gives way to ‘narrowcasting’. The ‘on demand’ aspect of digital media services is a distinctive transformation of existing media. On the other hand, digital technologies provide tools of media production that allow the audience to become users. The web seems to be a new technology of production that allows individuals to create their own public image for themselves. Instead of imitating others that are presented to us, we create images of ourselves to follow. In the outward presentation of self that constitutes our identity, the web is a set of techniques that allows us to create public images that may come to dominate our identities. With web technologies such as blogs we objectify ourselves as the content of new media. We can literally play with and explore ‘who we are’ in the process of creating content and communicating with others.

  McQuail identifies four categories of new media;

interpersonal communication media (email, mobile phones)

interactive play media (videogames, VR)

information search media (WWW)

collective participatory media (the Internet, WWW).

These categories help us to focus on the purposes that have been assigned to digital technologies. McQuail also adds four characteristics to these categories:

social presence = the sense of personal contact with others when using a medium, including ‘media richness’, involving more senses, being more personal

autonomy =  feeling in  control of content and use, independent from source

private = solitary behaviour, individualistic choices and responses and frequently anonymity

playfulness = shallow, transient entertainment.

Here we see some of the significance that we attach to our uses of new technologies – to play, to do something alone, to have a sense of control and to gain personal contact at a distance.

    We have focused on the web as a digital medium. The web is a technological apparatus that is becoming ‘second nature’ for many people, but not for all. The web is also a loosely defined technology of cultural production. You can make content, but equally you can buy things or obtain information. The web is loosely dedicated as a media technology (Burnett and Marshall). Technologically, the web is just a database of documents and files stored on servers accessed at specific addresses on the internet. It is a different medium compared to television. The web is a communication network whereas television is a broadcast network, and the web is an ‘on demand’ system rather than a technology that ‘pushes’ content to audiences. The web offers the potential for a more personalised form of mass media – many-to-many communication, and to be creators, publishers, as much as readers, viewers, listeners. Websites are the technological equivalent of television programmes or films so that websites are content that provide objects of study. Websites are the technological products of individuals, institutions and organisations, and websites are collections of web pages linked together. It is this hypertextuality that makes websites much more expansive, non-linear and indeterminate than, for instance, television programmes. Visionaries of hypertext such as Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee imagine a utopian global system for creating, sharing and managing information. Electronic hypertext provides a basis for re-invigorating debates about printed texts. The web is the most familiar example of hypertext, a technology that has great creative potential at the same time as being a mundane element of web document construction.

     To summarise, then, from a cultural studies perspective, media technology such  

as the web is an instrument for creating things that society attempts to make

meaningful. Thus, websites are representations of culture that tell us about the kind

of society we live in, how technology is used, and they can be used in the processes

of making sense of who, what and where we are. Technology is a technological

apparatus that becomes integrated into the patterns of everyday life. For example,

take new media advertising which is part of a growing entertainment economy, a

business-entertainment convergence. The existing advertising industry attempts to exploit less regulated media such as the web and mobile phones to create new  forms of media and communication (such as viral videos) as a continuation of commercial media funded by advertising. The interactivity of new media also allows new forms of user activities and relationships between producers and consumers, new forms of intermediation (Coke sells music), and viral marketing and hypercontextual blurring of reality and fiction (such as in ‘alternate reality games’ (ARGs). These are all extensions of existing media practices that are brought into the pattern of everyday life.

    A blog is an online journal about personal observations about life or specific topics with links to other locations on the web. They are personal, collaborative, work, play, and so on. Blogs seem to add to the scope of media culture as a participatory form of reading and writing on a new scale of access and influence. Blogging is a media experience, a process involving things, using things, participation, creating and exchanging meanings in the process of mediation, where production rather than consumption comes to the fore in making ourselves between work and leisure. Making media demands our time as production rather than consumption, a more active time that can feel more like work than leisure.

    We know that technologies are cultural because similar technologies are used in very different cultural practices and not everyone chooses to use blogs – they appeal differently to people. New technologies such as computer and network media create new potentials and possibilities for expression and activity in similar and very different social and cultural contexts. How the Web develops is not just dependent on its technological basis, but what society decides to do with technology, the way that technologies get taken up as part of everyday life in the process of making and using media, the way that we become digital.