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Introduction – A Second Media Age? 5
by the influence of ‘semiotics’, ‘deconstruction’ and ‘New Criticism’ – was
conceived as a matter of studying the meaning of texts and discourse and
the way in which the ‘mass’ media influence cultural values and individual
consciousness. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, differences between these
approaches to studying texts were debated around the problem of social
reproduction and how dominant discourses of a ‘dominant ideology’ were
8
related to broader social form. Under the umbrella of the linguistic paradigm,
media studies has also concerned itself with ‘media’ over ‘medium’ – with
the textuality of writing, still and moving images, music and speech – more
than with the institutionalized adoption of these media in broadcast and
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network settings. Together with the related discipline of cultural studies,
media studies has been a discipline which has invariably confined ques-
tions of identity (individuality and ‘the subject’) as well as questions of
power, ideology and community to the great model of language and the
frameworks of understanding that have derived from the influence of
the ‘Copernican revolution’ in the humanities inaugurated by the work of the
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure at the turn of the twentieth century
(see Chapter 2).
With the exception of a few theorists writing throughout the period
of the dominance of media studies such as Marshall McLuhan, Guy
Debord and, to a certain extent, Jean Baudrillard, there was very little
10
attention given to questions of form and medium. It was as though the
fascination with the content of ‘the image’ and the discourses surround-
ing it had somehow concealed the very modes of connection which gave
them circulation. Some areas of communication studies, in particular
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positivist and behaviourist perspectives, have examined the interactive
processes which are deemed to exist between two speakers – and dyadic
models of communication analysing the relation of sender, receiver and
message abound (see Chapter 2). However, the social implications of
the actual structures of communication mediums (network and broad-
cast) have received relatively little attention (save exceptions such as
the above).
From the early 1990s onwards, a few years after the Internet began its
now infamous exponential growth, the theoretical necessity of analysing the
social implications of communication ‘mediums’ had become paramount,
if not unavoidable. It was as though, by the turn of a key, there had been
a transformation in the opportunity to understand the integrative dimen-
sions of media that aren’t subordinate simply to linguistic derivatives. It
was as if media studies had been waiting for an historical object – the
Internet – in order to acquire the appropriate lens for understanding
communication as medium. 12
The consequences of this theoretical period of change were that, firstly,
some of the early ‘medium’ theorists like McLuhan and Innis began to be,
and are still being, reclaimed (see Chapter 3). Secondly, new distinctions
are being made to reflect the renewed importance of distinguishing