NEW MEDIA

Again in the D&D revolution thread:

I’m not sure if you explicitly know this, but you are basically giving a rough definition of ‘media’ in the technical sense of the term.

It is important that ‘new media’ is understood as a genuinely new medium of communication, and how rare and wonderful the creation of a new medium is. You are being too generous with your ‘phases’; the printed word is basically identical to the broadcasted word in the technical sense of ‘media’, the only difference is in scope and scale. So it is important to recognize that new media is not just a change in scope and scale, it is a change in medium itself.

The classic media studies analysis of this uses the analogy of transportation. The analogy isn’t perfect, but it does have the virtue of distinguishing between “mode of transportation” and “vehicle of transportation”. All the talk of ‘speed’ and ‘audience’ is about the vehicle, not the medium.

Here’s how the analogy works:

For the vast, vast majority of our existence as a species, the only areas we could travel to were over land. We can improve the speed and scale of land-based travel through various technological innovations- the wheel, the paved road- but they are still taking us to and from the same places.

Then a breakthrough emerges: we build boats. Suddenly, we have a new avenue of travel previously off limits. In some cases it allows faster travel between distant lands, but sometimes this travel might be slower. The difference, though, is not simply a difference of speed, it is a difference of medium: we are traveling through avenues that were previously inaccessible. As a result, we opened up new destinations that we could have never reached by land-based travel alone, such as islands scattered throughout the waters, and eventually the New World.

Note that land-based travel doesn’t stop when we start building boats; there is still the need to travel over land, and this engenders improvements in technology that keep pace with our demands. We build the train and the car and the steam engine and so forth. Still, because this new medium is opened up, we have parallel innovation in water-based travel.

Much, much later, we figure out how to open up yet another mode of travel that again is not just an improvement of old methods but offers a legitimately new mode of transportation: air travel. This requires, again, new vehicles for traveling through that medium, and again these innovations are produced in parallel with the old methods. We aren’t traveling the old roads faster, we are travelling by different ‘roads’ altogether. Even if the destinations are the same, the routes are via this new medium. It is, quite literally, a new dimension of travel; the shortest distance between two points is no longer a straight line.

Keeping this analogy in mind, there are roughly three equivalent stages of communication media.

The first is, as you say, face-to-face or one-to-one communication. This allows certain forms of communication, mostly between small groups of individuals. This isn’t on the scale of decades, we literally used this medium for hundreds of thousands of years, for the vast, vast, VAST majority of our existence as a species. The problems with this medium aren’t just that it doesn’t extend far is scope; the biggest problem is that you can’t have a very large group engaged in this form of communication, because the voices start to drown each other out. So one-to-one communication primarily limits the size of social organization.

You get the next stage right too: we start writing things down. What this allows more than anything else is for one speaker to reach a much larger audience than their mere voice could reach on its own, and it entirely circumvents the problem of a cacophony of voices. Writing things down, encoding it in the symbols and imprinting them on objects, more than anything else allows a single voice to reach a wide audience; it transcends the strict limitation on one-to-one communication, the way a boat transcends the limits of land-based travel. The audience is ‘wide’ both in the sense of number (you can talk to a lot of people at once), and in the sense of geographic distance (you can transport writing anywhere), and in the sense of temporal distance (so we can still read the words of Aristotle today). This is a new medium of communication. Whereas the old medium allowed only one-to-one communication in small groups, this new medium allowed one-to-many communication. It allows one voice to hit many ears. This doesn’t just make one-to-one communication faster (although it does that too), it opens up new possibilities of communication that simply were not possible before.

What is important to recognize is that every form of communication we’ve had since the invention of written language has been an improvement on this medium. The printing press, the radio, television and film, these are all ways of facilitating one-to-many communication, making it faster and more robust in order to reach a larger audience more quickly. Sometimes the ‘one’ communicating is a group of people (like film makers), but this broadcast model is still the same: one voice directed at a large audience. It is also worth pointing out that this medium blows wide open the limitation of the scale of social organization. With the written word, we can organize ourselves on the scale of populations, not just groups. We can have nations and cultures in a scope that far outstrip even our ability to travel.

What makes new media ‘new’ is not simply that it improves the speed or scale at which a voice can reach its audience. This isn’t like building a faster car or better roads. This is a genuinely new medium; we’ve built the communicative equivalent of an airplane. What it allows is many-to-many communication, something that was simply not possible before. It isn’t the same as broadcasting a voice to a large audience; the participatory nature of the internet allows a genuinely new form, a new dimensionof communication. Some things are faster or better in this medium, but it isn’t about speed, and it isn’t about the size of the audiences being reached. It is a fundamental difference in the way we communicate, period. It is like many people talking at once; but whereas in the old channels this was just collapsed into noise, the new media opens up the possibility of finding the signal within that noise; or rather, it opens up the possibility of tracking each of these conversations simultaneously. Not that the information is any more reliable, or even any faster than old broadcasts. Instead, what has changed is how many people are engaged in the conversations, and how many conversations we can sustain at once. Just as you can just fit a lot more people in the air than on the roads, you can fit a lot more people into a conversation on the internet.

Again, we haven’t had a genuinely new medium open up like this for literally tens of thousands of years, so it is no surprise that we have no idea what will happen. One thing we should expect, though, from even this rough analysis, is that this breakthrough in medium will again dramatically change the ways we can self-organize, something that can possibly transcend even the scale of populations and cultures. This helps, I think, to dramatize and make real the nature of the revolution taking place.

Just to be clear, though, these changes are by no means inevitable. When people attempt to harness this new medium, the established powers in the old media system attempt to shut it down, and there is no guarantee that they will always be unsuccessful. One of the most important lessons gained from understanding the new medium is understanding just how new and fragile it is, and how desperately we need to fight on its behalf. More than anything else, this is ample reason to try and pursue a shared narrative and shared identity centered on the internet as a common source of value, because it is precisely this resource that allows the new medium to flourish.