Media Technologies in the Structure of Environment - Essay Example

Running Head: Media Technology Impact of Media Technologies on the Structure of Environment Full Introduction McLuhan (1969) has commented that "new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature". This statement very succinctly captures the impact of new media technologies on the environment and indicates just how profound it is. This paper begins with a brief introduction on media ecology and why it is worth evaluating. It then goes on to discuss how the rapidly growing media technologies are impacting the world around us, and in what ways society is restructuring in response to the influence of new media. Media ecology is defined as the study of media as environments. The subject explores how technology and the various forms and techniques of communication impact society at large and more particularly human feelings, thoughts, value and behaviour. The environment which is deemed to be a messaging system in itself, is supposed to have a bearing on what people see and say and therefore how they act, how roles are assigned to people and the boundaries in which these roles are discharged in a society (Postman, 1980). It is observed that with rapid growth in media technology, physical spaces have shrunk and there is an integration between the physical and the social sciences. As pointed by Monberg (2005) "changes in media technology change patterns of social interaction, and changing patterns of social interaction have political consequences". The author likens the advancement of media technology to the "steel era" because steel changed the way people lived, worked, travelled, and fought wars. It is believed that new media technology will do just that in the 21st century. The impact of new media is also worth evaluating because of the notice convergent media nexus has received by the international community. It is acknowledged that media technology has an impact in facilitating or impeding man's chances of survival (Postman, 1980). In what ways does new media technology impact the environment As pointed by Bhuiyan (2006): "with the rapid growth of new media technology including the internet, interactive television networks, and multimedia information services, many proponents emphasize their potential to increase interactive mass media, entertainment, commerce, and education". It is also predicted that media technology will help preserve free speech and privacy and strengthen communication opportunities, largely owing to the use of digital media technologies such as PCs, the internet, computer games, cell phones in the ever shrinking global community. Such advancement has resulted in the advent of telecommunications, print, broadcast and computing into new domains to create a product that coalesces the elements of all these technologies, to create a brand new channel of communication and information storage. So consumers use iPods to make their own music playlists, personal video recorders to customize television schedules, digital audio broadcasting or DAB Digital Radio pumps static-free music to their homes and cars. With the heavy reliance on new media technologies, wired and wireless, into our daily life, the impact is such that it not only influences those who are using it but also those who are not because they have no access to them, lack the necessary skills, or simply do not want to. The world around is changing quickly. How it is changing is discussed in the following pages. The digital culture New media technologies have a telling effect on the culture we live in. Culture, as pointed by Stalder (2005) is "systems of meaning articulated through material and immaterial symbols". The culture is now becoming digital. The impact is felt even in the world of tangibles like chairs, automobiles, and buildings, which are designed digitally and produced through a process of information flow. Given that digital information is easy to copy, distribute and transform, it has become easier to incorporate the work of others not by referencing but directly copying and pasting. This is quite contrary to the analog culture where such a thing was very difficult. The copy-paste tools are set to challenge both "cultural production and consumption" (Stalder, 2005) with loss of authorship, a movement from individuals to groups and blurring of boundaries between the artist and audience. Social networks are sprouting and what one sees is the emergence of a more participative society as discussed next. The creation of participative society Broadband and IP are turning out to be the pivotal point around which consumers create their work, leisure and social activities. Convergence is leading to the emergence of a more participative society. As noted by Bhuiyan (2006): convergence is a process whereby media companies break out of their traditional forms and formats to deliver richer news and information services more in concert with the way that consumers are choosing to access and use such resources. It is a response to changes in the media environment brought on by technology and the information economy Convergence is as a: Convergence of services: the same content is created to suit various platforms. For instance news is distributed both via ordinary newspapers or radio slots and streamed via the internet A convergence of networks: the same platform may contain several types of content for instance the telephone cables are used both for internet and telecommunication A convergence of terminals: Terminal like computers are all multifunctional, although some are more feasible for certain types of services than others. For instance, we prefer to send mail or sms via our mobile phone rather than via our TV, while films are watched on the big TV or cinema screen rather than via the small display on the mobile phone A convergence of markets: There is trans-border mergers and acquisitions between the media, telecommunications and ICT industries. A case in point is the large-scale merger in 2000 between Time Warner and the internet provider AOL (America Online). Given this level of convergence, it has been aptly noted by Stalder (2005) that "it becomes harder and harder to get away from the communication networks without abandoning some of the most fundamental tools of social participation. Today, turning off the computer is far more consequential than turning off the television". In the new media environment, which is highly well networked, consumer participation is very high. Consumers are increasingly seen creating content for internet in text, picture, music and video formats through use of blog, podcast, wikis, wikipedia, vlogs, and folksonomies. The copy, paste techniques make all this possible in a digital environment. Thus the consumers no longer stay passive receivers of information as in the traditional media environment. With the proliferation of participative, well networked society which has plenty of choices advertising giants find it daunting to lock the audiences during commercial breaks. Traditional business models thus perceive a need to change in response to this new structure where audience groups are rarely large. For advertising giants, it means that small firms and individuals will be competing better than large media houses. This is leading to the creation of "attention economy" (Stalder, 2005) where products are plenty but attention is scarce. To get attention from a saturated world wide audience is posing new challenges now. The fact that there are celebrities waiting to be known, unrequested .mp3 files and several unfrequented web sites, only goes to highlight this fact. Hence with media transforming itself to a more participatory nature, the distinction between audiences and content creators are likely to fade. So, the flow of information from the media giants to public is now tending to conversations between people (or audiences). This is leading to a change in the quality of discussion which are now open ended and can point out faults easily, not possible with the media giants' monopoly who had to bow to hierarchy. Power is now transferred to the audience to decide what is credible and what is not. Very aptly pointed by Bhuiyan (2006) "the obvious benefit of this media revolution will be an explosion of creativity ... We are entering an age of cultural richness and abundant choice that we've never seen before in history. Peer production is the most powerful industrial force of our time". With intelligence distributed over networks and sprouting of communities to churn new found knowledge, new media technologies provide an immediate and very real boost to both speed and economy. People living in separate cities no more need to travel, to meet, since the world wide web provides them just the space necessary for meeting. Stalder (2005) comments that "new technology has more than ever before engendered the emergence of new forms of collaborative work, quite often based on volunteering, free cooperation and gift economy. Having first been established through co-operation in Free Software development, these principles are being transferred onto the plane of human communication and production at large". In the participative society the culture is thus changing from object oriented to exchange oriented. It is also worth pointing out, in this context, that more and more of what is accessed by people today is organized as networks rather than as a traditional hierarchy. So large social networks are emerging for the first time which are capable of undertaking new endeavours that hold potential for success. The traditional hierarchy is being replaced by informational networks which allow processes to be organized in real time, over distances. Such a change also entails a change in the nature of relationships. In the new set up of networks and people need to work effectively without having a central authority to report to. Impact on orality and literacy Before writing was invented, it was difficult to make ideas tangible. The culture that was oral, worked by exchanging and retelling stories. The technology of writing allowed transferring parts of fluid performances into fixed objects and access to more people. The earliest work of Western literature, Homer's Odyssey, is just that: an oral epic written up (Stalder, 2005). The logic applies to media technology as well. Since media literacy has become so widespread, more and more people are able to consume the content, spread over the digital network. The fact that more people are media literate has resulted in a proliferation of production, no more limited to artists alone. For instance the music remixes and the new tunes being produced. Not only has it increased cultural production but digital technology has reduced the cost of cultural production and distribution. Email is blurring the distinction between verbal and written communication, after centuries of hard work establishing the difference between the two. Stalder (2005) makes very insightful comments on the new changes in digital technology and its impact on culture: the difference between what a literary critic does (writing about literature to produce criticism) and the work of a DJ (using music to make new music) - one is additive, the other transformative. One refers to the source material, the other embodies it immaterial processes treated as objects, used to be much harder to imagine, until quite recently. How can something as fluid as an idea be fixed, counted and owned Much less, how can a tune that has already been sung in public be stolen However, today, we are witnessing major attempts to establish exactly this conception of culture at the core of global, informational capitalism. The basic argument is simple: the immaterial and the material need to be treated in the same way. There is no difference. An idea is like a cow. In the same way that the owner of a cow can freely decided whether to sell the milk, the live animal or chunks of dead meat, the creator of an idea is free to do whatever she wants with it: license it for one time use, license it perpetually for certain uses, sell it altogether, keep it to herself, or give it away. As with cows, any use what is not specifically authorized is prohibited: clear and simple. In Orality and Literacy Ong (1982) describes the psychodynamic affect of the transition from a primarily oral culture to a literate culture. His work helps to understand how internet transforms the computation job of the computer to that of communication. That computational power, in turn, has the potential to transform human communication and therefore, according to Ong, human consciousness (Wall- Smith, 2002). It is for the first time that in cyber space human interaction comes closest to the immediacy usually associated with orality. According to Langham (1994): Like print, interactive networks bring individuals separated by geography into closer proximity a multiple user dimension, or MUD, is a form of "virtual reality" designed to produce a structured world--structured both in the sense that it contains structures (like buildings), and that it provides structure for human behavior. A variation of MUD known as MOO ("mud, object-oriented"), is "internally extensible," meaning that the people who occupy these virtual spaces can expand them, not just as though someone were to add a room to a house (although this is often done), but as though one were to enlarge the universe Thus it is possible to build structures within this space that can contextualize and give meaning to human interaction just as physical structures do. Relationships The new media technology with its network and high level of connectedness is distinct from the erstwhile system of isolated machines; imparting tremendous connectivity to people across interests and ethnic groups. This makes the environment connected through nodes - a shared place for people from diverse backgrounds. It also calls for interdependence of several elements for the networked environment to function smoothly. As pointed by Stalder (2005) "what makes this interdependency so vital is the "material" of the flow: information. Information is not objective data, however, information is the relation which arises within the environment Information results from relationships between two otherwise meaningless pieces of data, it relates both sides of the flow to each other". The economy thus is viewed as an integrated environment, which does not produce isolated products, but groups of products that support each other. The decline of Apple Computers has been caused by locking in its operating system instead of licensing it to other manufacturers and profiting from the increased variety (Stalder, 2005). The human element The new media technologies' influence on the environment entails a shift from " within" to "in between" as suggested by Stalder (2005). The question now is, not what something is made of, but what it interfaces with. With regard to this, a new terminology has come to exist "technological forms of life" (Lash, 2002). This does not imply "cyborgian" man-machine connections or even artificial life. On the contrary it refers to a deeper aspect of human relations. When ideas arise as a result of conversations between two people the origin of the idea is not attributed to one person or the other but to the association or relationship that the two people share. In this sense what exists in between people or the interface, is a new form of life. Lash (2002) emphasizes the fact that these associations are made increasingly possible by technology. There are three elements required to create a system of flows: - the medium - digital communication technology - the flows - information, and - the nodes - hybrids of people and machinery. The technological form of life which thus originate are not characterized by simply a sum of their individual characteristics but how they take shape in the association and ensuing interaction. Interestingly, it appears that as life becomes technological, technology becomes more life like. It does not however mean that technology is a replacement of man and reproduce itself autonomously. The digital era makes humans and technology "stand increasingly in a dynamic ecological relationship to one another" (Stalder, 2005). This relationship instead of being the cause and effect one, is a continuously evolving one through constant feedback and the flow through the network Exclusion and inclusion in society The new media technologies have not only made softwares freely available on the internet, but also allowed for opening the code, inspecting it and changing it. This transforms the nature of software from a commodity to an "environmental resource" on the internet, much like air in the physical environment (Stalder, 2005). Since everyone on the internet has access to such a software, it helps make for a more balanced society and reduces the power imbalance that otherwise exists between the user and the developer, between those who are rich and not so rich. Overall the free and open source software (FOSS) benefits the society in general which has started relying on software based processes for daily life. FOSS entails voluntary contribution and its license allows the code to be open to everyone. Thus a project leader cannot rob the developers of essential knowledge. The benefit is not for the audiences alone but also the makers. For example, RealPlayer allows millions of users to listen to whatever they personally find worth listening to; the software amplifies their power to gain access to recorded sounds that are stored on-line. On the other hand, all these millions of players also promote the agenda of their developer, real.com, which now has millions "agents" in the field reporting back in the users listening habits. Effectively, RealPlayer amplifies millions of user's agenda once, and one company agenda millions of times. Hence it empowers each user a little bit and the owning company tremendously (Stalder, 2005) One can conclude that new media technology has changed the structure of the environment by creating digital social circles and redeeming power imbalances. It has blurred the boundaries between the written and oral, and the author and the audience. It has given a boost to peer production and made collective efforts of large number of people on the digital networks successful. References Bhuiyan, S.I. (2006) Impact of new media technology on society: Asia Media [online]. Available from < http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.aspparentid=52164> [Accessed 8 Jan 2007]. Langham, D. (1994) The Common Place MOO: Orality and Literacy in Virtual Reality: Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine [online] , 1 (3), 1 July 1994 Available from < http://www.ibiblio.org/cmc/mag/1994/jul/moo.html> [Accessed 8 Jan 2007]. Lash, S. (2002). Critique of Information. London: Sage McLuhan, M. (1969). Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan - A candid conversation with the high priest of popcult and metaphysician of media. Playboy (March); reprinted in McLuhan, E. and Zingrone, F., eds (1995). Essential McLuhan. New York: BasicBooks, pp. 233-69. Monberg, J. (2005) Social Worlds of the Information Society [online]. Available from [Accessed 8 Jan 2007] Ong, W. J. 1982. Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen, p. 81. Postman, M. (1980) The Reformed English Curriculum in A.C. Eurich, ed., High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education. Wall-Smith, M. (2002) The Network Society. A shift in Cognitive Ecologies: First Monday [online], 7 (9), September 2002. Available from [Accessed 8 Jan 2007]. Read More