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Introduction – A Second Media Age? 13
than others. Then they serve as “mass media” on the platform Internet that
allows for all kinds of media and types of communication’ (2000: 208).
Also, those Internet sites which are mirrors of professional established
media, such as newspapers, simply add to the original reach which the
publication or broadcast already has (see Schultz, 2000: 209).
It is not, therefore, the technologies themselves which bring about
these properties in a direct correspondence to a medium. A capacity for
broadcast is inherent in a range of technological forms, from the telephone
to writing. At the same time the simulation of presence is just as possible
in computer-mediated environments as it is with cinema and television.
The fact that so many of these examples have considerable histories
to them makes the New Media discourse on ‘convergence’ theoretically
flawed. Convergence is already immanent in old as well as new technolo-
gies, but mainly through their interrelation with technologically extended
social relations in general.
However, the principal basis upon which convergence is presented as
a New Media phenomenon is related to digitization. A review of the
history of media and telecommunications technology shows that digi-
tization is not a necessary condition of the convergence of broadcast and
network architectures. Convergence may increase the inter-operability
needed to access both architectures from one individual portal, but this
has much more to do with the historically produced demand for person-
alization. Nor does digitization particularly privilege interactivity and
network over broadcast, as the second media age theorists maintain.
Rather, as we will see in Chapter 3, both these theses place technology
before any understanding of the anthropology that is at work in contem-
porary communication environments.
To clear up these confusions caused by what might be called New
Media historicism, I argue, in this book, for the need to characterize ‘the
second media age’ not as an epochal shift but as a level of communicative
integration which is in fact not new at all but is internal to a range of com-
municational mediums which have co-existed with broadcast long before
the Internet. Brian Winston’s instructive history of means of communica-
tion from telegraph to Internet illustrates this fact well (Winston, 1998).
That new technical mediums somehow have their own aesthetic and
social qualities which are separated from ‘outdated’ mediums is, he
reveals, a common misconception resulting from the fetishization of
the ‘new’.
Winston shows, for example, how economic factors, rather than tech-
nology, imposed the primary limitations on the bandwidth of cable com-
munication in the last century. But political and ideological factors which
saw broadcasting as a ‘centralizing social force’ (Winston, 1998: 307) were
also instrumental in eschewing cable. Throughout all of the time in which
wireless broadcast prevailed, however, ‘the wires never really went
away’, ‘the early radio and television networks were wired and the
transoceanic telephone cables have kept pace with the development of the