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part 6 NEW MEDIA:
WHERE THE RUBBER HITS THE ROAD
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See below for:

• Changing Times
• From Old Media to New Media

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CHANGING TIMES

"Many of the institutions that used to bring us together -- a main street, a union hall, a town meeting -- no longer work as before. Most people spend most of their day alone at a screen of a television or a computer. Meanwhile, social beings that we are, we are trying (as Marshall McLuhan said) to retribalize. And the computer [and new media] is playing a central role." (Sherry Turkle.)

New Media means basically just that: new media. The latest form of mass communication developed by society always tends to be given this label. In years past it was radio, television, cable TV, satellite TV, etc. Nowadays it tends to be used primarily to talk about emerging digital/electronic communications forms, particularly the internet and the World Wide Web.

From Old Media to New Media
The past 10-15 years have seen enormous shifts in the way people interact with mass media, especially with the visual media (broadcast and cable TV and, latterly, the World Wide Web). We used to have a centralized system of TV networks broadcasting entertainment and news one way to a (relatively) passive audience. In the past decade-plus we have seen develop a spectrum of cable channels and more recently, of course, the almost limitless medium of the internet. These changes were felt first and most keenly in the United States, but now they are being repeated all over the world.

The changes rendered in our mass media also seem to be changing the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. Canadians Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan were among the first to posit that the main thrust for societal change in human society was development in communication forms. As new forms of communication became dominant (e.g., from oral to print culture, or from print to electronic/visual), society changed to accommodate these developments. Today, researchers such as Sherry Turkle are studying the psychological and sociological changes underway in people as a result of the new computer and communications age -- something that lies close to the heart of what this Web Site is all about.

Turkle, in many ways echoing Jean Baudrillard, talks about television as part of the postmodern "culture of simulation," where we learn to identify with the simulated world of television more readily than we do with the "real" world around us. For example:

The bar featured in the television series Cheers no doubt figures so prominently in the American imagination at least partly because most of us don't have a neighborhood place where "everybody knows your name." Instead, we identify with the place on the screen, and most recently have given it some life off the screen as well. Bars designed to look like the one on Cheers have sprung up all over the country, most poignantly in airports, our most anonymous of locales. Here, noone will know your name, but you can always buy a drink or a souvenir sweatshirt (Turkle, 235).

This acceptance of visual simulation in this increasingly visually oriented society is an important development in the human psyche, something which sets us apart from our literary (word-oriented) predecessors. Indeed, it may be that televsion's predisposition toward simulation has laid the groundwork for the next development in our relationship with reality and simulation, respectively. Computers and the virtual worlds they now provide are perhaps adding another level (or dimension) of mediated experience to our increasing susceptibilty to simulation. "Perhaps computers and virtuality in its various forms feels so natural to us because of their similarity to watching TV, our dominant media experience for the past forty years" (Turkle, 235).

So this is the link (or one of the links) between older media and new media. But of course the new virtual media is (and will be) much more than simply "TV-plus." Its greatest departure from the old is be its level of interactivity -- true interactivity, not the fake kind of the old media, with their edited/censored letters to the editor or their phone-in talk shows. New media allows true interactivity between writer and audience. Now you, the audience member, are in the driving seat. You can go where you want, when you want, as you travel around the new virtual world of cyberspace. Interactivity, together with open access to information, shifts the media model from heavily centralized, top down to widely decentralized, democratic. As mass media begin to converge, the new media model will hopefully be the one that applies to most media in the future. These concepts lie at the very heart of what new media are about. It is what makes the new media so radically different from the old.

NEXT:
REAL REALITY vs. VIRTUAL REALITY