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84 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
about New Media have been made. This distinction underpins the second
media age thesis itself and much of the cyberculture literature which now
defines itself in opposition to, or as having succeeded, ‘media studies’.
Part, if not most, of the difficulty in making this historical distinction
between these two forms of media association is that it is based on a
misconceived ‘parallelism’ between communication mediums and the
technical mediums they are said to relate to as if in a one-to-one corre-
spondence. Broadcast can be interactive as much as interactivity can be
facilitated within broadcast. In fact almost all technically constituted
forms of communication, from print to television, to cyberspace, contain
elements of broadcast and interactivity; it is just that these are realized
differently, and at different levels of embodiment in different techno-social
relations.
In the historical model, broadcast media are characterized by one-
way communication. Typically, this entails a sender of messages trans-
mitting information to an indeterminate mass or audience, without that
audience having recourse to also ‘transmit’ information, at least not to the
extent that the broadcaster does. Post-broadcast mediums of communica-
tion, on the other hand, are said to provide for two-way interaction and a
‘restoration’ of the specificity of both interlocutors. In this way, the second
media age is viewed as redemptive and emancipatory. The centrist tyranny
that is seen to be carried by the apparatus of broadcast media is said to be
annulled by a supposed democratization of broadcast, where everyone
can be a broadcaster or datacaster, thereby flattening out the otherwise
concentrated (performative) power of broadcast.
The overriding evidence for this argument is to point to the massive
take-up of new media in developed nations. Statistics on the rate of
growth of web traffic, the take-up of PCs in the home, as well as connec-
tions to the Internet, mobile telephony and short messaging services
(SMS) or texting are all a part of this evidence. Regardless of what indi-
viduals actually do with the technology, or what it might mean to use it,
the fact of its take-up is said to be proof of the need individuals have to
‘find connection in a computerized world’ (Rheingold, 1994).
It is empirically true that, from 1990 onwards, the take-up of inter-
active media technology in information societies increased far more dra-
matically than did the adoption of new broadcast technologies. However,
if such a trend is posited as the basis of the second media age thesis, there
are a number of problems.
One such problem involves the question of historical determination.
The early second media age advocates like Gilder, Negroponte, Kapor
and Poster suggested that the need for interactive technology has been
historically created by broadcast. The very development of New Media
which provide such interactivity is, in a sense, seen to be driven by this
need. Second media age advocates suggest that the new interactive media
are able to overcome the hard-wired asymmetry of broadcast and allow
everyone to be a broadcaster and audience member simultaneously.