Introduction - Digital Stucco: Convergent Media and Social Consensus in the Postmodern Condition, A Thesis
INTRODUCTION
The landscape of mass communication changed radically in the 1990s with the integration of digital technologies and the contemporary telecommunications infrastructure, through which computers, satellite technologies and fiber optic lines constitute a powerful net linking all corners of the planet. Computer-mediated communication has become a daily activity for an increasing number of people in different regions of the world. This has been made possible by the explosive expansion of the global computerized networks and the relatively fast decrease in the costs of equipment and software. Electronic exchanges are now central not only to the movement of information between people but also to an important portion of the world’s economy. By these means, even governments and large corporations are conducting their information-centered businesses through cyberspace. At the same time, the virtual world has become an arena where the notion of mass media acquires a new dimension.
Mark Poster (1995) calls it the “Second Media Age,” in reference to the radical change introduced in the way people communicate. In Poster’s view, the new systems provide an alternative to the traditional broadcast model of communication as they carry with them the potential for erasing the boundaries between the established roles of producers, distributors and consumers. The digital media integrate text, video and audio in a single platform, and these tools are technologically available to potentially every user, which creates more opportunities for alternative points of view to emerge. People can put out messages bypassing the constraints previously imposed by the technical requirements of broadcasting. For the first time, mediated communications may imply the existence of immediate feedback from members of the audience through the same channel—in a non-hierarchical and non-linear fashion— as all participants in the on-line experience inhabit the same “digital sphere.” For example, in a chat-room situation, all participants are able to “speak” to the chatting crowd (in what is often called a many-to-many type of communication). In an equivalent setting in a broadcast environment, people who call in inevitably stumble upon the switchboard in a control room where the producers decide what “goes next” on the linear output of the program. Poster (1995, 25) explains that until the 1980s the infrastructure of the media enabled only a few senders and distributors of images and information, while the latest technical innovations in the field are making possible a drastic reduction of these limitations.
Under these conditions, the new media are basically defined by their interactivity. Ronald Rice (1984, 35) characterizes this factor as a consequence of “…communications technologies, typically involving computer capability (microprocessor o mainframe) that allow or facilitate interactivity among users or between users and information.” Interaction in this sense is separated from another type of activity (dubbed “quasi-interaction”) already generated by the increasing amount of communicative options available to any broadcast audience, particularly after the multiplication of channels related to the vast expansion of broadband cable TV, satellite TV or FM radio. The difference lies in the decentralized nature of the networks that form the digital interactive media. The system is technologically non-hierarchical, since information flows from server to server (computers to which individual users connect) through a web of connections that don’t have to follow a preset path from one point to the other. These technologies employ “packet switching” as a means of data distribution. It allows for the different parts of a message to be sent through the system separately and then be reunited at the destination. As a result of this situation, electronic transactions can defy traditional notions of time and space, allowing people to interact through electronic mail, bulletin boards, and even explore multimedia artifacts built by other people—as in the case of the World Wide Web.
However, the new media do not exist in a separate context from the traditional ones. Instead, old media and new media coexist and converge in the context of modern society, regardless of the novelty and apparent advantages of the latter over the shortcomings of their predecessors. Contemporary broadcast media are constantly inviting us to browse their websites, and many radio and TV shows have e-mail addresses inviting audience comments or questions. At the same time, the multimedia capabilities of the digital systems allow them to carry the output of traditional outlets—newspapers, television or radio stations. It is a relationship that works both ways between old media and new media.
The interactive media have originated a new “mode of communication” (Poster 1995), defined by the radically different pattern in which information moves through the system. It can be characterized in opposition to the mode of communication associated with the traditional broadcast media. Nevertheless, the convergence of both modes of communications and their symbiotic interactions create a situation in which the features of the broadcast mode are reproduced in some instances in the virtual world, while in others, the traditional media tend to mirror certain features of their interactive counterparts.
This contemporary idea of a networked world holds the great advantage of conveying an ambivalent concept that refers to both the whole and its parts. It can be analyzed as a totality but a closer focus makes apparent the connected points that constitute it and the relationships that bond them together. The metaphor of the networked world—and its referent—mirror in many ways the condition of the advanced western society to which they were born: an era that tends to illuminate differentiation, ephemerality and individuality over collective narratives or historic transcendence. It can be looked at as the result of a process that is bringing the individual to the center stage, an underlying quest in some traditional metanarratives of emancipation (of the social being or the spirit) that may now be fading as a consequence of their own realization. Apparently, the common subject of the current stage in the capitalism of the industrialized world has more means to fully develop its potential, even under the constraints of the system. As the middle class grows, the individual becomes more visible amid the mass, as an increasingly important part of it, interacting with others in new ways and altering the conformation of the society as a whole. Even if this is just a result of a change in the focus of the lens of capital, there is more to it than an optical illusion. It becomes not just a matter of perspective but also a central notion on which the system operates. From the slave to the peasant, to the factory worker, and to the computer technician, there have been crucial changes in the position of the individual with respect to capital. It is an evolution that can be seen as ultimately marked by—and leaving its mark on—the advance of science and technology, in the materialization of the dialectical relationship between thought and the social sphere and the material conditions in which they exist.
In the digital age many products and services are not simply “massive” in the traditional sense of the word, but they are also individualized to certain extent (for example, the news bulletin that goes to a cell phone with only items related to the topics selected by the user; or the welcome page for clients of amazon.com, containing suggestions of books that they might be interested in). In a similar sense, the digital networks carry the technological potential to project the individual (messages, points of view, artistic expressions, etc.) towards the collective. This is of central importance in the configuration of the new mode of communication. The flexibility of communicative roles in the networked world leads to what Castells (2003, 131) calls “networked individualism,” describing a social pattern of interaction that takes place in the online environment but also has an impact on the organization of society as a whole.
In the context of the system of mass communication as a whole, the convergence of the new and old media is marked by the corporate forces that have marched into the digital world. Critics see in the anarchic ways of the worldwide computer networks a vulnerability to market manipulation and the opportunities for the power structures of the real world to replicate themselves in cyberspace (McChesney 2000; Taylor 1997; Trend 1997). However, a simply celebratory stance towards the new media or a focus on the dangers that they pose will not illuminate the concrete conditions of the current configuration of the media system. This study is particularly concerned with how the new technologies are put to work as mass communication tools. It introduces the metaphor of digital stucco to describe the impact of digital communication technologies in symbolic production, as they are employed by networked individuals in an environment of focalized issues and ephemeral social alliances.
The present work seeks to study the relationship between the universe of the digital networks (with their particular impact on mass communication) and the social conditions in which those systems have been developed. For that purpose, it looks at a particular communicative situation to illustrate the convergence of the traditional media and the interactive, networked world. Focusing on the antiglobalization movement, its roots on the Internet, and its emergence in the public sphere, this work analyzes the diversification of points of view in this debate as reflected in the traditional and the new media. It views the critique of social concordance through the lens of the convergent modes of communications, arguing that it needs to take into account not only the definitive accommodations of the traditional media but also the forces that emerge from the decentralized interactive environment, which provides a new and fluctuating dimension to social debates.
