Page 21 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

12 Geoffrey Sykes

The challenge for integration of different types and levels of data, while
preserving respective security and confidentiality, remains, and has not been
made easier by the opportunities for and availability of fully digital video.
Previously there were differences, not only in form but artefactually and
technically, between forms of writing, between handwriting, printing and
publishing. Now transcription of a court proceeding or client interview can sit
side by side with a video version, both forms interlinked electronically, as a
result of digital and mathematical processes, to allow the facility of so called
―interactive video‖ for a user. A video can be watched as it is read, and
searched in written and visual forms. To speak of the interweaving of writing,
speech and video, in dynamic forms close to the reasoning process of case
inquiry, is to circumvent many of the old boundaries between the language
forms of different media. It is to raise possibilities about new ways of
integrating legal research, court proceedings, client interviews, evidence; new
ways of providing dynamic client information and services, especially for pre-
hearing mediation; new ways of delivering and archiving judgments; new
modes for processing client interviews; new mnemonic forms of detailed case
information. However, to speak of multi media legal systems is also to speak
prospectively about systems that are not in the main currently in place. It is to
speak of the transformative effects likely as the result of the diffusion of media
innovations now present in the wider community, and to test once again the
ability of legal institutions to control and determine the kind and rate of media
innovations they adopt.
The same digital processes that enable portable high quality cameras for
official use in courtrooms also allows ownership and production for individual
use in the wider community. The prosumer world of video production has
emerged especially in the last decade, and its products and messages begin to
infiltrate the membranes of legal institutions. So-called new media provides a
plethora of new means and methods of cheap amateur production, and the
orderly, professional and controlled public world of media has been
supplemented by an inchoate, comparatively disorganised range of
interpersonal messaging.
Compared to the formal rhetorical structures of traditional argument, or
the scripted structure of television drama or news, so called social media can
seem disorganised and ephemeral. There is no doubt that theories of individual
expression – whether American pragmatism or European phenomenology –
need to be updated to come to terms with the new electronic tools of
interaction and communication. The old opposition of natural or private