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Introduction – A Second Media Age? 7
The first and second media age – the historical distinction

The commitment to the idea of a ‘second media age’ is one that had been
gaining ground by the middle of the 1990s with an array of texts – some
utopian, others pessimistic concerning the rise of Internet culture and the
concomitant demise of broadcast or ‘media’ culture. Such literature, exem-
plified by the publication of Mark Poster’s book The Second Media Age in
1995, has exhibited either a kind of enthralled fascination with the liberat-
ing social possibilities of new technology, or, conversely, has encouraged
us to rethink what older technologies mean for social processes. But the
idea of a second media age had been gaining ground during the 1980s in
embryonic form within rubric notions of the information society which
was somehow different from simply ‘media society’. Indeed the discipline
of ‘media studies’ has become far more ambiguous as its object of study
has been made much more indeterminate by the transformations that are
currently underway. The term ‘media’ itself, traditionally centred on the
idea of ‘mass media’, is addressed in the United States by the discipline of
‘mass communications’. But media studies (and mass communication
studies) in its traditional form can no longer confine itself to broadcast
dynamics, and in contemporary university courses it is being subsumed
by the more generic scholarship of communication studies – where the
accommodation of the distinction between first and second media age is
able to be best made.
However, the formalization of the distinction between these two
kinds of era has, I would argue, received its greatest momentum in the
wake of the domestic take-up of the Internet from the early 1990s. Since
that time we have seen a plethora of literature taking over bookshop
shelves dealing with everything from technical guides to interactive
computing to numerous interpretive texts about the influence the Internet
will have on our lives. It is also implicit in a range of journalistic writings
in the mid-1990s including Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community
(1994), George Gilder’s Life After Television (1994), Nicholas Negroponte’s
Being Digital (1995) and the corporate musing of Bill Gates in The Road
Ahead (1996), but also in other, more critical texts like Poster’s, Sherry
Turkle’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995), Pierre
Lévy’s Cyberculture (2001) and various collections like Steven Jones’
Cybersociety (1995) or David Porter’s Internet Culture (1997), culminating
in the compilation of readers by the late 1990s (Bell and Kennedy, 2000;
Gauntlett, 2000; Lievrouw and Livingstone, 2002; Wardrip-Fruin and
Montfort, 2003). Not surprisingly, a ‘new media age’ had also come to fea-
ture in numerous texts regarding media policy, in claims that broadcast
was rapidly dying and that regulation of digital media forms presented
the only remaining policy challenge (see, e.g., Steemers, [1996] 2000). At
the same time the heralding of a ‘new Athenian age of democracy’ by Al
Gore, and Third Way political advisers in Britain, became very audible. 13