New Media

“New Media” in history

The broad definition of new media is kind of interesting according to the author, “At once singular and plural, ‘new media’ would seem to designate both a qualitatively new kind of media and a quality of all media (of every medium) at the point at which they are (it is) introduced into and disseminated across society.”

The plural meaning of “new media” indicates that every medium invented in history was once a “new media”, they had their impact as a “new” thing in the history. Then, these new media are adopted/dissolved by the society, they will evolve through time, while some of them, eventually, would be rendered obsolete and massively replaced by better medium. But, in history, do these “new media” getting adopted without too much trouble?

Nope, that is impossible.

Duality of New Media

“The fundamental duality that will drive media innovation…: to the extent that each new medium operates by extoriorizing some function of human cognition and memory, it involves both gain and loss.”

The introduction of each media in human history would bring a possible dialectic about its duality: in which it can both have an positive effect on human society, as well as a negative effect. The author’s example is writing: it provides “external supplement to internal memory“, but “result in a waning of onboard memory skills“. Another good example would be the silent film and the sound film. The introduction of sound film in late 1920s brought a revolution to the film industry, as well as argues. It changes the production, technology, as well as how the directors and actors/actress work so much that, film companies was hesitate at first, and the people working in the industry also didn’t know how to adapt well to this new form of media.

Charlie Chaplin once said that “Dialogue may or may not have a place in comedy . . . dialogue does not have a place in the sort of comedies I make . .. For myself I know that I cannot use dialogue.” Showing his puzzles about the new “talkies”: what will happen if the character start to talk? Will it destroy the original image in audiences’ mind, would it be not understandable across the world, if the character start to speak in English? Will the dialog destruct the performance of body language? But eventually, he got past these questions, and made “The Great Dictator”

Just as writing allows far more complex expression and recording of human mind, the sound film does not just bring dialogs, the design of sound effect also made an inseparable role in film industry, some expressions would be unable to achieve without sound effects.

Video: Hunting scene from “La regle du jeu” (Rules of the game, 1939)

Fear to the Unknown

“Any Promethean step forward is, so it seems, necessarily accompanied by fears that we have overstepped, that we have introduced something detrimental to our ‘natural’ life.”

It is very common in history for people to be terrored by new advancements which would “introduce modes of experience that challenge the familiar“, including new scientific advancements, social ideas, as well as new media, and duality of new media mentioned above is just one reason, or rather, an excuse for that. Fear to the unknown is a “constitutive dimension of the human experience of cultural challenge“. Every new media appeared in human history suffered a period like that, including the dialectics around film, radio, television, comic books, and most recently, video games.

Video game controversy is a familiar topic to my age, which I don’t want to expand on that.

The Effect of Media on Human History

Just as Marshall McLuhan said, “All media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment.”
“It is the medium itself that is the message, not the content.” Although the message carried by the media is important, it is also worth noticing that, the media itself, plays a more important role in human history, since itself can brought very significant changes to human history, and evolves the human society. The message displayed by the media itself hence cannot be ignored.

“The widespread adoption of a particular medium impacts experience at a different (and higher) level of magnitude than its use to convey this or that content.”

As the chapter suggests, the printing press is closely connected to numerous important era in history, it is also worth noticing that media itself has extremely high infuence on spread of political ideas, which can move human society forward.

“Print language is what invents nationalism, not a particular language per se” – Benedict Anderson

The Shift of Media

It is worth noticing that the invention of printing press is a standardization of linguistic marks, and this standardization anticipated other media revolutions in the 19th century, which would expand the standardization to other human sensory fluxes.

According to Kittler, gramophone, cinema and typewriter are the three representative media advancements in 19th century, they are all represent different sensory expansion of human, which is an answer to the standardization brought by printing press, but at the same time, the content to be presented by the media is directly linked to its method of storage, in other words, the media is limited by the material.

According to Stiegler’s thought “..human beings, from the very origin of the species, have always been technically mediated“; “Human beings have always depended on and co-evolved with technologies”. Indeed, the evolution in human culture is powered by the contribution of exterization of human knowledge and collective memories from the past in the form of some kind of cultural artifacts: ranging from records, books and monuments. Through this way, human can accumulate and spread their own knowledge and culture from generation to generation, in order to invent new technology, as well as new media to store and spread information. In other words, “mediation forms the very basis of human existence“.

But it is worth noticing that, with the invention of digital computer, the information stored no longer bounded to the material and the perceptual threshold of human experience. Since everything are stored in a same manner, which is the digital code. It can be stored on a variety of materials, and interpreted as the same content.

The dissociation of media from technics and “technical unconscious”

Lev Manovich divided digital media into two distinct layers: the “Culture layer” and the “Computer Layer”, in which, the “Computer Layer” will affect the “Culture Layer”. With the powerful representation of digital code, the surface appearance of a media can be completely unrelated to its technical infrastructure. Which means that, for the first time, we are free to create anything, including things not possible to record/create with the bound of material or human perception limitations. A good example for this would be the evolution of video editing and postproduction.

The separation of “computer layer” and “culture layer” have created a gap. The technology behind digital media “not only exceed our attention but remain fundamentally unfathomable by us“, since most of us are not responsible for creating the certain artifact, we are just the end user so we can only observe the interface, which lies hugely different to the actual technology behind it.

The author thus identifies two distinct functions of media, especially for the “new media” by modern term:
“Exteriorize human experience in durable, repeatable, and hence transmissible form”.
“Mediate for human experience the non- (or proto-) phenomenological, fine-scale temporal computational processes that increasingly make up the infrastructure conditioning all experience in our world today”.

The author values the later function of media, and it is important to aware of the technology themeselves, again, see through the message, and down to the medium itself.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is an interesting media to observe not only it represents an era of internet which allows an exploding amount of user generated contents through social networks and collectively produced archives (wikipedia and other wiki websites), but also the connectivity behind it.

“What is mediated by Web 2.0 is less the content that users upload than the sheer connectivity, the simple capacity to reach myriad like-minded users, that is afforded by that act of uploading content.”

Again, “medium is the message” can be applied here, the Web 2.0 itself have already largely changed our life, but this time, many of us does not notice the media itself, which lies in the massive connectivity between users all around the world. The connectivity achieved by complex cooperation of hardware and software frameworks provided an ideal media for exetremely fast content exchange, but at the same time, it poses a lot of problems, just as any other old “new media” in human history, which reflects the duality of new media.

The social influence, privacy, government monitoring, advertising, misinformation and information manipulation poses just a tiny amount of problems for Web 2.0. Aware or unaware of these changes, Web 2.0 has already in effect for many years, and deeply rooted in our life, this shift of media have already completed, and cannot be reversed, just as any other previous media advancements.

References:

Hansen, M.B.N., “New Media”, Critical Terms for Media Studies, US: University of Chicago Press, 2010 pp. 172 – 185
http://www.charliechaplin.com/en/biography/articles/6-Modern-Times
http://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept12/2012/10/28/the-end-of-an-era-from-silent-film-to-talkies/
McLuhan,E, et al. “The playboy interview”, Essential McLuhan, US: Basic Books, 1998 pp. 233 – 269
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/nationalism
Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983 pp. 122