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Introduction – A Second Media Age? 11
modern forms of state control. To quote from Poster (1997), who is working
from a broadly postmodernist point of view, the Internet connotes ‘a
democratization’ of subject constitution because ‘the acts of discourse are
not limited to one-way address and not constrained by the gender and
ethnic traces inscribed in face-to-face communications’ (222). This is to be
contrasted with the broadcast media as a medium of centralized, unilinear
communication: ‘The magic of the Internet is that it is a technology that
puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all partici-
pants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, film-
making, radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of
cultural production’ (222). 21
Further, insofar as the electronically produced space of the Internet
displaces institutional habitats, it breaks down hierarchies of race, gender
and ethnicity (see Poster, 2000: 148–70). By allowing the construction of
oppositional subjectivities hitherto excluded from the public sphere, the
Internet’s inherently decentralized form is heralded as its most significant
feature – allowing the collision and superimposition of signifiers and
semiotic worlds in which the some sense of an authoritative meaning –
a logos or a grand narrative – can no longer be sustained. This, Poster
argues, allows the Internet to subvert rationalized and logocentric forms
of political authority, which has imbued the European model of institu-
tional life since the Middle Ages. As cyberspace identities are experienced
in much more mobile and fluid forms, the public sphere enlarges in the
midst of state apparatuses but, at the same time, acts to undermine statist
forms of control. This tension is partly played out in those state-originating
anxieties concerned as much with the encryption of information against
cyber-terrorism as with the use of communications technologies in
surveillance.

Broadcast mediums and network mediums – problems
with the historical typology

The conviction that we are coming to live in a post-broadcast society,
envisaged in the claim that the Internet is going to eclipse broadcast media,
is one that has been made by journalists and cyber-theorists alike. The idea
that an entire communicational epoch can be tied to key technologies – print
technologies, broadcast technologies or computerized interaction – is
central to making the distinction between the first and second media age.
The distinction is relative rather than absolute, as we shall see, owing to
the fact that the significance of the interaction promised by the second
media age is defined almost exclusively against the said rigidity and
unilinearity of broadcast.
At an empirical level, the distinction between the two epochs is
supported by statistics regarding the rapid take-up of interactive CITs, to