Page 179 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES

dilemmas remain hypothetical due to current industry structures and
consumer preferences.
Since the mid-1990s, governments in developed countries have
been drawing up visionary blueprints, or strategies, that will improve
their ability to participate within the information economy (Gore,
1999). The original vision for newmedia policies was delivered in the
US under the title National Information Infrastructure (NII).
Intended as a broadband communications network, the NII was based
on principles of:
. private investment
. competition
. economic progress,
. the advancement of democracy
. providing better solutions to environmental issues

As Barr points out, ‘these five nowconsistently appear in so many
economic development national blueprints that they have virtually
become international communications policy benchmarks’ (Barr,
2000: 171).

NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES

The first newmedia technology we know about was writing, invented
about 3100 bc in Egypt and Sumaria, and separately in China around
the same time, and never subsequently extinguished, no matter what
changes in civilisation ensued. Thus writing is as much a commu-
nications technology as the telephone: both are used to distribute ideas
between people. Technologies are the systems and machinery that we
use for getting things done (Green, 1994). Advances in communica-
tion technologies have had immense consequences for cultural,
economic and political life, determining the ways in which
information is processed, transferred and creatively expressed.
Although technologies have always had a transformative impact
upon society, the current interest in communications technology – in
creating and advancing it, deploying and theorising it – seems
unprecedented (Barr, 2000: 21). The newmedia technologies are said
to have ‘reshaped the material basis for society’ (Castells, 1996: 1),
enabling the globalisation process through their capacity to distribute
information at a rapid pace and volume. Important discourses on
economic shifts (the new economy, or the knowledge economy)

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