Page 27 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-01.qxd 2/15/2005 10:30 AM Page 10

10 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
Table 1.1 The historical distinction between the first and
second media age
First media age (broadcast) Second media age (interactivity)
Centred (few speak to many) Decentred (many speak to many)
One-way communication Two-way communication
Predisposed to state control Evades state control
An instrument of regimes of Democratizing: facilitates universal
stratification and inequality citizenship
Participants are fragmented and Participants are seen to retain their
constituted as a mass individuality
Influences consciousness Influences individual
experience of space and time

rooted in its decentralized technical structure. Based on ‘packet-switching’,
a technical network system developed by Rand Corporation in the 1960s,
messages, images and sounds on the Internet are always sent in a frag-
mented fashion by way of multiple routes. This principle was Rand’s
solution to information held in a database being destroyed in military
conflict. Information is always on the move, fluctuating between deci-
pherability and indecipherability and indeterminate in its mobility. Because
of this the Internet cannot be controlled either technically (by hackers or
17
programmers) or politically (by states or corporations). In the twentieth
century, which was characterized by the control of broadcast apparatuses
by governments and corporations, the Internet was also popularly seen to
represent an unlimited technical medium for the reconstitution of a ‘public
sphere’. As Table 1.1 suggests, the public sphere enabled by the second
media age restores a two-way reciprocity that is otherwise seen to be denied
by one-way communications of broadcast. In addition, the constituency
addressed by broadcast is constructed as, and so regarded as, an undif-
ferentiated and largely indeterminate mass, whilst on the Internet the
individuality of communicants is redeemed.
In this historical typology, the periodization of an ‘age’ or era of
interactivity – the digital age, the age of the Internet or the second media
18
age – is almost always contrasted with a dark age of mass media. It is a
particular expression of an historicist discourse on technology which
fetishizes the new and accentuates any differences there might be from
the old. 19
The critique of broadcast is remarkably coherent, whether it be from
liberals concerned with public choice and free speech (like Gilder, 1994;
Negroponte, 1994; and Rheingold, 1994) or from those employing Marxist
frameworks (post-Frankfurt School), or postmodern concerns for the
rhizome (as in Deleuze) or the shadow of the silent majority overcoming
the simulation machine (Baudrillard, 1982). 20
Celebrants of the Internet herald its claimed democratic and redemp-
tive virtues either as being able to re-establish lost communities through
interactivity or as making possible new kinds of community that transcend