Page 18 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

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ONE

INTRODUCTION – A SECOND MEDIA AGE?

In the last few years … widespread talk of ‘cyberspace’ has brought
new attention to the idea that media research should focus less on the
messages and more on communication technologies as types of social
environments. (Meyrowitz, 1999: 51)

In an essay, ‘Learning the Electronic Life’, written just before the ‘wide-
spread talk of cyberspace’ that accompanied the so-called ‘Internet
Revolution’ of the 1990s, James Schwoch and Mimi White (1992) set about
to describe a typical day’s activity for their American family – from waking
up, to putting in hours as teachers in the education sector, to trying to relax
in the evening.
At first light they relate how they are woken by the baby monitor
which links their room to their son’s. Next thing they are heating up the rice
cereal in a microwave. While their boy is in the playpen, James and Mimi
commence some exercise in front of the TV with remote control handy.

Out of the house and, if not a walk-to-work day, into the car, lowering the
garage door with the automatic opener as we drive away on errands. Stop
at the bank – or rather, the nearest automatic teller machine to get some
cash for groceries and shopping (done with cash, checks, and credit cards,
with access to the first electronically verified by a local computer network,
the latter two verified at point of purchase by a national computer network) –
and upon returning home, check the phone machine before going off to the
office or upstairs to the study to work on the computer. A typical work day
can include not only personally interacting with students and colleagues,
but also interfacing with long distance telephone calls, photocopies, print-
outs, hard drives, programs, modems, electronic mail, floppies, audio and
video tape, and once in a while a fax. If we do not work into the evening, a
typical night may well include (along with returning phone calls) radio
listening, recorded music (albums, tapes or compact discs), broadcast tele-
vision, cable television, or videocassettes. The most probable result, of
course, is some combination of the above choices, with too many TV nights
degenerating into an uninspired channel-hopping via remote from the com-
fort of the couch. In the background the baby monitor provides the sound
of sleeping baby, a sound that accompanies us into bed each evening. The
cycle, with a slight degree of variation, begins anew the next day. (Schwoch
and White, 1992: 101–2)