Theoretical Considerations - Digital Stucco: Convergent Media and Social Consensus in the Postmodern Condition, A Thesis
THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS
The convergent media
The following pages review theoretical positions that are relevant to the present discussion and propose a framework for the analysis of the convergent media. Such framework is fundamental for the subsequent arguments presented throughout this work, as it contains the formulation of a particular model to analyze the new media in terms of simple and complex entities in cyberspaces, and a point of view about the social context in which the new media develop and which they also help shape.
The networked world
Interactivity in communications over computer networks is conditioned by two key elements of the new media: cyberspace and hypertext. Cyberspace provides the channels through which electronic communications take place, while hypertext is the vehicle for the interactions between people or between people and information. Perhaps the most popular manifestation of cyberspace in our contemporary world is the World Wide Web, which supports one-to-one, one-to many and many-to-many communications asynchronously (such as through e-mail, electronic bulletin boards, or web-browsing) or synchronously (in chat rooms, for example).
The metaphor of cyberspace comprises both the micro-universe that flows at a molecular level within microprocessor and wires, and the “real” world. Through cyberspace, entities of the physical world acquire a new mobility, as they acquire a fluid, digital nature. This condition affects not only communications but also businesses and governments. For Michael Benedikt (1991, 190) the system of ideas behind the notion of cyberspace has been the creative engine that drives the development of the virtual world. He writes that “[s]uccess lies in the consistency with which ‘cyberspace’ as a functional metaphor, as a set of mental images and concomitant, real operations, can be propagated across platforms, applications and networks.” This idea underlines the concept-also stressed by David Trend (1997, 114)-of the virtual and non-virtual worlds as two mutually informing spheres, each reflecting and shaping the other. To some extent, they represent the binary opposition between representation and reality, but cyberspace cannot be viewed as a simple reflection of the physical universe. Instead, cyberspace is a construction deeply rooted in the physical world but free of its constraints at some level. Trend (1997, 112) argues that the illusory condition of cyberspace becomes less of an issue as the virtual experience becomes trivial, an everyday occurrence, and the imaginary world on the computer takes some material form. In this sense, the metaphor of cyberspace escapes the realm of science fiction where it was conceived[1] to become a transcendent factor in the way people relate to other people, do bank transactions, buy products, or conduct bureaucratic tasks. Regardless of their mutually influencing relationship, the virtual world is generally dependent on the physical one. Even if events of cyberspace have consequences in the real world (for instance, the growth of one’s financial wealth through on-line trading), those particular events are also affected by non-virtual phenomena (e.g., the performance of the financial markets).
Cyberspace is inhabited by interacting units originated by entities of the real world-persons or organizations. These units of interactions can be regarded as simple or complex. A simple entity might just be a user’s virtual identity. Of course, there is no guaranteed correspondence between the virtual and the real “personae.” The interactive media have been described as an environment that favors simulation and disguise (Papacharissi and Rubin 2000, 178). Simple entities usually have a virtual representation in a form of an e-mail address, a basic web page or even an avatar (the figure that represents an on-line character in a tridimensional environment). Through these representations, they move about in the virtual space and execute electronic transactions (communicative or otherwise) in this decentralized universe. Other more complex units provide centralized nodes, serving as the virtual grounds where the simple entities exchange correspondence or do business. This group includes applications such as Web portals that provide search engines, e-mail accounts, chat rooms and on-line shops. These “Internet Services that people use to start their treks through cyberspace…bring order to the Web experience” (McChesney 2000, 22). Some of these virtual spaces are characterized by their “general interest,” creating “places” where users can find a wide variety of products or services. Others are “specialized”, or “vertical” and cater to particular interests-news, health, etc. In these categories we find the on-line manifestations of many traditional media outlets. As complex virtual entities, they carry their real-life social weight into cyberspace, a place “almost fully transparent with respect to communication” (Mosco 2000, 38)-since the “ubiquitous exchange of information” is a crucial part of the constitutive nature of the virtual sphere.
The electronic exchange of information as we know it today is possible partially because of another technological achievement with large cultural implications: hypertext. The term hypertext refers to pieces of information (in form of video, audio, pictures or text) and the links between them. The existence of such links provides the possibility for each user to follow a unique pathway in his/her interactions with people or artifacts in the virtual space. In the context of the World Wide Web, for example, this condition allows for a vast horizon of opportunities presented to the participants in the on-line experience. It gives them the chance to “go” to particular places, or to look for the specific information that they need or want at any given moment.
The concept employed to describe this quality of the interactive media is “non-linearity.” It implies that texts (or artifacts) don’t have to be read along a pre-defined line; instead, the role of the creator is viewed in a different light, since the emphasis moves from the text as written towards the ability of the reader to find references to supplementary text (Trend 1997, 120). This notion also includes the possibility of infinite additions to a particular product, with which a “final” version may never be completed. Gunnar Liestol (1993, 275) considers this situation as a turning point, as the stability of the message (it remains unchanged in the process) has been a “presupposition of communication” through the history of media. The implication of this idea is that if the “receiver” can alter the message before re-distributing it, the role of “receiver” ceases to exist as such.
From the point of view of mass communication, a radical change is taking place in the way people consume media products. The creation of meaning becomes in some senses a more individualistic act, while the creative process has the potential of becoming more collective. In quasi-interactive or asynchronous situations, where users read texts, browse the web or exchange ideas on a bulletin board, non-linearity is easily appreciated. People select what to read or the order in which they want to read and in fully interactive situations, such as a chat room, the user can go back to previous points in the debate or digress towards other paths by choosing links that may provide references to more information about the topic.
These features of the interactive media bring fragmentation and superficiality to the production and consumption of communication, in the context of the postmodern condition. Some authors warn about consequences of these inclinations, such as its potential to result-culturally-in a “fragmented set of superficial borrowings, a heritage patchwork stitched together as a game without empathetic commitment to the culture documented, while the receiver only interprets the product by poaching a wide variety of discourses” (Taylor 1997, 264). Another consequence mentioned is the possibility that non-linearity extends to cyberspace the “modern” fear of getting lost, in a metaphor of spatial disorientation (Sorenseen 1993, 483).
However, Sorenseen and Taylor also provide a notion that opposes the concerns about the digressions associated with hypertextual practices. It builds upon the idea that those anarchic detours may lead to greater insight instead of leading to a meaningless discourse. The hypertextual nature of the interactive media may have substituted the purpose of creating a record of life by the anticipation of occurrences, connected pieces of information from news reports, gossip and even imagination (Jones 2000, 178). This suggests that in the networked environment the individual experience is being informed by a vast array of sources of information, through exchanges that follow diverse paths depending on the user’s interest and with contents that in some cases would not pass through the filters of the traditional media. One example of these communications is the wave of weblogs (or blogs) that chronicled diverse angles of the US military campaign in Iraq in 2003. There were daily accounts written by people from various positions in the conflict: Iraqis in Baghdad, American soldiers, military analysts, or journalists “embedded” with the troops. The popularity of these sites resided in the perspectives that they offered, mainly overlooked in the US media-because of the graphic nature of some photos or viewpoints “too far outside the political mainstream” (Hamilton 2003).
Even though in the mainstream media the trend is to the concentration of ownership, they are increasingly competing with a greater number of people willing to tell stories. As the number of online, ethnic and alternative media outlets grows, traditional outlets such as CBS News and The New York Times admit that they often follow stories and images that emerge online (Bauder 2004). This is not to say that the level of trustworthiness of the online information is always the optimum, and users are taking this fact into consideration: the UCLA Internet Report for 2002 indicates that the Internet is viewed as an important source of information, although less users than in previous surveys now believe that most or all the information on the net is reliable (UCLA Internet Project 2003, 9). Conversely, some public officials and media outlets have found themselves in an embarrassing position after taking seriously reports of The Onion, which does satirical pieces in “a really straight, AP style” as editor Carol Kolb puts it (Terdiman 2004).
According to Liestol (1993, 267) individual readings in hypermedia[2] “are governed by the codes of the receiving context, but always within the constraints provided by the software and the hardware in use, and, of course, by conventions of genre.” Non-linearity depends upon the purpose of the particular communication. Even if the possibility exists for the multiple alternations of the roles of author and reader (sender/receiver), not all exchanges in the interactive media are absolutely decentered. Furthermore, although the non-linear condition of the communicative experience in cyberspace exists as potential in an abstract sense, the concrete realization of the experience at an individual level occurs in a linear fashion. Liestol (1993, 276) writes about the “double process of editing” implicit in the interactive media:
The sender selects and combines the elements that constitute the hypermedia message as a whole, where each of these operations represents constraints in the process of communications: the selection-act of exclusion and inclusion, and the combination-act concerning the structures of connections (linking). The second process of editing is the reader’s selection and combination of elements in the message, constituting the order in which to consume the non-linearly stored information. Here, the stored information in the message is articulated and realized as linear montage, constituting one out of many possible readings.
The particular nature of the interactive medium poses new challenges and perspectives in mass communications. The decentralized flow of information through the channels of the computerized networks may favor a model of communication that disenfranchises the figure of the media outlet. However, the multiple paths of interactions, representing individual points of view, have to converge at some point as long as the person behind the “screen name” remains a social being. In this case, the socializing potential of the interactive media becomes more relevant as complex entities in cyberspace provide grounds for the convergence of the otherwise disperse, and sterile, individual points of view. This is the role of mass communication in the virtual world, one that the Internet-exclusive media outlets, as well as the traditional media concerns, are beginning to understand.
The interactive media could take a central but symbiotic position in the contemporary media system. Its multimedia platform can carry the output of other media and at the same time allows the traditional media outlets to become entities in cyberspace, to which they carry content, advertisers and the loyalty of some audiences. This convergence is at the center of Poster’s (1995) periodization of “media ages.” He argues that “the insertion of a period may suggest not a passage from one state of being to another but a complexification, a folding in of one structure upon another, a multiplying or multiplexing of different principles in the same social space. Periods or epochs do not succeed but implicate one another, do not replace but supplement one another, are not consecutive but simultaneous” (Poster 1995, 21).
Convergent Modes of Communication
In contemporary societies of the industrialized world, people are being interpellated by two different systems of mass communications that not only coexist in space and time but also converge at prominent points. Many radio and television stations, newspapers, magazines and websites of all types share and struggle to cater to the same group of people, but the mode in which those communications take place differ radically from one system to the other. Those differences are summed up in what can be conceptualized as the Broadcast Mode of Communication (BMC) and the Interactive Mode of Communication (IMC)[3]. The persons that are exposed to both types of media relate to them in a distinct manner. For the broadcast outlets they are an audience, for the interactive media they constitute the user-base. The same person that consumes the linear output of a TV station can also be a player in cyberspace, where he or she coexists and interacts in the same plane with other entities that are made of the same material-binary code.
Both modes of communication can be compared in terms of the elements of the traditional paradigms through which mass communication is explained. In the interaction over the digital networks, the participants can always be directly aware of the (virtual) presence of other people, as opposed to the one-way flow characteristic of the hierarchic nature of the broadcast media. Such dialogue takes place between audiences and media characters, whose voices are amplified by the particular medium. As noted by Poster (1995), in terms of the production of content, a dichotomy exists between the model of few producers and multiple consumers (in the broadcast environment) and the model of multiple producers (a potential of the interactive medium). Production of content for the digital environment is presented as “open” according to the decentralized nature of the computerized networks. From an economic point of view, the technologies required for the production of content in the digital world are less expensive and more widely available than those needed to create a quality broadcast product. Space is also less of a premium in the virtual sphere, than it is in terms of the airwaves. On the Internet voices and ideas have virtually unlimited space while a television station only has a limited amount of broadcast time. Internet or Web outlets compete for the attention of their users.
Table 1. Comparing the IMC and the BMC |
In the traditional media, the message is linear in space and time and digressions are radical, and lead the subject to abandon the linear discourse of a particular outlet, while non-linearity is a defining characteristic of the interactive media, as explained above. And finally, traditional feedback in the broadcast media provides a chance for some type of interaction, but it is subject to its technical constraints. This condition implies the existence of a selection process, a “gatekeeping” function that determines what is reflected in the linear discourse of a specific outlet. In contrast, communication through the digital networks is characterized by two-way exchanges, making instant feedback a crucial condition of the development of the general discourse of the medium.
The Interactive Mode of Communication and the Broadcast Mode of Communication not only coexist, but they also complement each other in the context of the contemporary media system. At their point of contact, each model takes on features of the other and the consequences of such trade impact the inner workings of the media outlet in question. Members of the audience of the broadcast media can also interact among themselves in cyberspace. In many cases, the same broadcast outlet provides a virtual place (Website or portal) where such interactions take place, as a complex entity of the virtual world. In this situation, the exchange is best described by the paradigm of the new media (for instance, in bulletin boards or in non-moderated chats conducted over the online platform provided by a media outlet). However, the manifestations of the broadcast outlets in cyberspace, apart from providing a pure new-media environment, also reproduce the features of the Broadcast Mode of Communication in their function as media outlets in the virtual world-as their goal is to disseminate content and advertisement to mass audiences. In such cases, Web operations follow pre-determined marketing strategies, and they may impose a hierarchical structure to the dialogue in cyberspace (for example, when a “personality” guest is invited to a “moderated” chat room). At the same time, the output of the broadcast media receives a strong influence of the Interactive Mode of Communication. This leads them to introduce new practices in order to accommodate the requirements of the contemporary media context (in terms of competition, for instance) and the needs of an increasingly demanding audience that is well acquainted with a new type of media participation.
A national survey tracking changes in media use from 1995 to 1999 (Stempel et al 2000, 71) found that the number of Americans connected to the Internet increased ten times in that period, while newspaper circulation and Nielsen ratings for early evening network newscasts dropped. However, the authors conclude that such a decline “cannot be pinned on the Internet” (Stempel et al 2000, 77). Their comparison between users and non-users of the Internet was not significant with regard to network and local TV news viewership. The study also showed that Internet users were more likely to be newspaper readers and radio news listeners. Since users and non-users of the Internet watched TV news to the same extent, while Internet users also tended to read newspapers and listen to radio news, the article finds a “complementary, rather than competitive relationship among Internet news, newspapers and radio news” (Stempel et al 2000, 78). An explanation of this finding is offered through the information-seeking model (people looking for more in-depth content). A questionable point in the conclusions of this study is the explanation proposed as to the decline of ratings for TV News. The article suggests that TV stations may be driving viewers away by sending them to their websites (which is also true for radio stations and newspapers). In a 1999 analysis of 62 broadcast-related websites (produced by local television stations), Vincent Kiernan and Mark Levy (1995, 278) suggested that the stations-regardless of their network affiliation-were not seizing upon the potential of the Internet as newspapers had done.
From another point of view, this could be related to a deliberate cross-promotion pattern that would seem consistent with a complementary role of the on-line experience. This seems to be the natural business environment favored by the corporations particularly at the network level, as in the cases of broadcast organizations with an intense on-line presence such as NBC and CNN. NBC has an aggressive web structure as well as an on-line/cable TV venture with Microsoft (MSNBC)(McChesney 2000, 19). CNN is now part of Time Warner (which includes AOL), and has one of the top global networks of news sites-including international sites in various languages other than English.
However, in recent years the process of accommodation of the new media has continued to take a toll on the traditional audiences for the broadcast media. According to the UCLA Internet report (UCLA Internet Project 2003, 9) as Internet use increases in the United States, television viewing declines, showing that users “may be ‘buying’ their time to go online from hours previously spent watching television.” These findings are consistent with the notion that traditional standards for credibility and relevance have been stretched by the convergence of the new and old media, with the gradual multiplication of sources and exchanges (of information). Official confirmations and black-and-white stories can be bypassed in the public sphere in the eyes of the media users that are taking what Mary Jackson Pitts (2003) terms the “cafeteria approach.” With this metaphor the author speaks of the shortcomings of local television stations in updating their Web presence for people who seek “to pick and choose” the elements of the story, but it also illustrates a particular mindset that characterizes the current media environment. In the networked world people jump easily in and out of cyberspace, interacting with virtual entities of diverse nature and bringing that fluidity back to the real world, where it has its roots. It is a cycle.
Convergence and the postmodern condition
Digital stucco
At the core of the analysis stands the network’s vital fluid -the digital matter. It is also an ambivalent concept that contains physical implications in the form of electronic code as well as symbolic ones. Through the notion of simulation, Jean Baudrillard (1983) illuminates a point of view that can be used to summarize the nature of the code-dependent age of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Contemporary society is obsessed with code. Among its most visible manifestations one can mention computer languages and genetic code.
The endeavor of looking at history through the evolution of simulacra presents the evolution of society in a succession of different phases of the image, from reflection of reality, to mask of reality and, eventually, to pure simulacrum without links to reality (Baudrillard 1983, 11; Foucault 1973, 44). It portrays a transition from mere representation to a construction with an explicit disregard for the referent. Examples can be found on all fronts nowadays, from the digitally perfect-but non-existent-model on the cover of a magazine to some rather disturbing television images of mice growing human ears on their backs.
Under our present conditions, everything in the realm of the image or thought can be turned into a digital entity, a collection of units of equivalence that-in the right combination-produce, or reproduce the thing, or move it, or alter it. The “thing” may be pictures, text, words of love, thoughts, even genetic code (which in large part has been researched, calculated and manipulated by computers). By virtue of science and technology the homogenizing digital matter marks and determines many aspects of the social life at the current stage of development of western capitalism (which irradiates globally). It appears to be a logical step in the evolution of the sign, tied to other evolutions such as that of scientific thinking and the process of social emancipation.
Baudrillard (1983, 85) sets in the Renaissance, at the point of rupture of the feudal order under the weight of the emergent bourgeois values, the “end of the obliged sign, reign of the emancipated sign, that all classes will partake of.” He presents it as an era giving way to an alternative cultural order and free production of signs, drifting slowly from the cult of the “originals,” first towards the counterfeit of “theater and stucco.” Baudrillard (1983, 88) writes that “stucco exorcises the unlikely confusion of matter into a single new substance, a sort of general equivalent of all the others.” Later, through mass production after the industrial revolution, the sign finally reaches what he defines as the age of simulation “controlled by the code.” This view of the historical evolution of the sign connects the stages of simulacra to social relations and power. Stucco, as general equivalent of other substances, can adopt all forms and represent all materials and shapes, ending the dominance of the restrictive sign and opening symbolic production in concurrence with the values of the Renaissance. In the era of mechanical reproduction the free sign carries neutral values and depends on the market exchange, as do the members of the working class. The current stage dominated by simulation is the age of symbolic power, dependent on media images and opinion polls. The present work studies a phenomenon that can be seen through this perspective. It borrows the image of stucco as a homogenizing substance only as a means to illustrate its particular view about the nature of the digital “matter,” the essence of the networked world.
According to Baudrillard (1983, 136), the duplication of the sign by means of it being just a model destroys its meaning. However, the nature of the digital world as we experience it today may give the sign an affection for originality that opposes its condition as just a model or pattern for infinite reproduction. Digital matter homogenizes but it also differentiates. It invites reproduction and alteration with equal emphasis. As the technological advances allow for cheaper and more user-friendly means of producing signs, mass production (such as those of the traditional media outlets now on the Web) acquires the capability of delivering “personalized” versions, while massive products like media texts or popular music are broken and reconstructed by the individual user-formerly audience member, in the context of the traditional mass communication. In turn, almost anyone can make his/her own products (symbolic or otherwise) available to potentially massive audiences. With this sort of digital stucco, a cycle could have been closed in the process of the “emancipation of the sign.” It has departed from its ties to the referent of reality and it now has the ability to change the very notion of such referent. Symbolic consumers/producers of a new kind push their individualities against the totality of the system, emerging in a multi-layered force that alters the ideas of what was considered relevant or elevated in modernist standards-as the following pages try to explain focusing on the fields of mass communication and social change.
At this point, it becomes necessary to abandon Baudrillard’s trail, to pursue the idea of coexistence between the real and the symbolic spheres in a mutually informing relationship. Although many activities of our daily lives now happen exclusively in instances of what we have come to designate as “cyberspace,” those activities are not exempt from having implications in the “real” world. The fact, for instance, that a person may complete a substantial business transaction through a virtual financial institution, or fall in love with some online “being,” does not preclude the person from losing money if the real markets go down, nor does it avert the possibility of a disastrous relationship. After all, the evolution of the sign may not only be regarded as a leading force, but also as a consequence of larger social changes.
The postmodern condition
Is it possible to see in the networked world the sign and a building block of the postmodern condition? The present configuration of the global society includes civilizations that have learned to liquefy themselves into a single digital substance, somehow expanding inwardly onto new, constructed spaces. They have also transferred to those artificial spheres the struggles and on-going contradictions of the real world, but also the hopes for new compromises and new challenges. Bred in the confluence between technological advances and the increasingly global nature of capitalism, the digital condition becomes another distinguishing feature of the postmodern age.
Trying to bring together the major historic events that marked the beginnings of such an age, Perry Anderson (1998, 5) turns to Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History. Anderson notes that in the first volume of his work, Toynbee argues that the history of the West has been shaped by a destructive contradiction between Industrialism and Nationalism, with industry reaching beyond the boundaries of nations and undermining the self-sufficiency of national power. He adds that, in later publications, Toynbee views the postmodern age as “…marked by two developments: the rise of an industrial working class in the West, and the bid of successive intelligentsias outside the West to master the secrets of modernity and turn them against the West.” In this perspective, the promise of a universal civilization comes along with the load of internal contradictions that could cause its own ruin. But what is seen here as the demise of the modern West, can also be interpreted as a sign of the dialectical transformation of Western society. This transformation occurs under the influence of forces from outside the industrialized world, but also as a reflection of the changes in the social structure of its centers. Modern society becomes susceptible to the changes brought about by its own globalization and segmentation in ways other than nationality or class.
This context describes the breeding ground of the digital networks as we know them today. They are the result of the accumulation of great technological successes, and have constituted themselves into an indispensable virtual space for business, information, politics and all sorts of social interactions. Although in some senses the networked world mirrors the ways of the physical realm (such as the power of a brand, or a large amount of capital), it also provides new opportunities for the potential incorporation of marginal-and otherwise ignored-forces to the core of the social exchange. This is the case, for instance, of the surprisingly international network of supporters of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico, built over the Internet (Castells 2004, 75). The insurgence started with a peasant movement in one of the poorest regions of the country but it grew to cause an upheaval in the Mexican civil society, and brought the issues of the indigenous Mayan populations to the center of the political discussions. The strength of the rebel group went well beyond its power as an armed force. It also gathered the sympathy of many sectors of the Mexican society, as well as the supports of many players in the international arena. They organized demonstrations and campaigns around the world in favor of the Zapatista cause, along with petitions calling the Mexican government to negotiate, and shipments of supplies for the people displaced by the conflict. Some foreign volunteers have even helped monitor the peace talks. The debate over the Chiapas uprising crossed national and ideological boundaries, triggering a debate about the rights of native peoples around the world, in what Castells (2004, 75) considers the “first informational guerrilla movement.” The movement attracted the attention of many previously unconnected groups, who shared points of view and organized actions over the Internet, even when the revolt itself as “news” had been overlooked by the Mexican media and had received mostly “superficial coverage” in the international press (Carrigan 1998).
Another example, right in the center of the industrialized World is the case of the “flaming Ford,” in which customers of the auto maker coordinated efforts through a website, forcing the corporation to pay attention to their grievances about a faulty model. The site was created to denounce the problem and to urge the company to recall those vehicles. The Web offered a low cost, and direct communication channel that made those affected by the problem a force within Ford’s stakeholder network. This situation impacted the company’s public relations strategy, diminishing its ability to control the dissemination of such information, as anyone searching for “Ford” on the internet could come across with it (Coombs 1998).
Those are tangible steps in the democratization of the symbolic production empowered by the digital age, more progress in the democratization of the sign. The expansion of the “secrets of modernity” flows not only from the center of the industrialized world to its outskirts, but also within the central areas as well, along class, ethnic or other social lines.
Frederick Jameson (1991, xviii) employs the term “late capitalism” to describe a stage of development where the bureaucratization of the state is assumed as natural, while the emphasis is placed on a new vision of the world capitalist system, with transnational capital and business organizations taking over the role that colonial powers used to play. Along with these business structures, late capitalism also features, in Jameson’s view (1991, xix), “…a new international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third World debt), new forms of media interrelationship (very much including transportation systems such as containerization), computers and automation, and the flight of production to advanced Third World areas…”
In similar terms in political economy, David Harvey (1990, 147) sees the emergence of a new type of accumulation that he calls “flexible”, opposing Fordist practices. It is characterized by flexibility in production and consumption, leading to the emergence of new environments in the commercial, financial and organizational fronts. The new type of economy also generates a new service sector, with different conditions of employment that require new skills and more mobility (geographic and psychological). Harvey (1990, 147) also emphasizes the role of a “new round of time-space compression” based on the advances of transportation and telecommunications (As does Jameson (1990, 6)).
The transformation of the economic environment in the industrialized world also originates a surge in the ranks of white-collar office workers and technicians who now are required to quickly become familiar with automated processes and all sorts of computer programs. This also implies a need for higher levels of education, which in turn lead to new outlooks on life in general. Buying power increases as well as the demand for new products and services. However, Harvey (1990, 181) warns that the tendency towards accumulation does not go away, as it lays within the nature of capitalism’s constant need for expansion. Idle capital and idle labor supply pile up, and new strategies are developed to let the system absorb such overaccumulation. According to Harvey (1990, 183), this is done by means such as lending money to the Third World, geographically shifting capital and labor force, or by switching resources from current to future uses and accelerating the turnover time of products. Under these conditions, cultural production undergoes a transformation, as capital favors the productions of ephemeral items, events and fashions-an aesthetic that reinforces the commodification of cultural forms.
Information acquires a central role in this context, even more than other elements in the structure of business such as hardware or financial planning. This trend became painfully evident during the short-lived initial boom of the Internet as a business platform, when in a few years, billions of dollars poured into start-up companies, creating a typical speculative bubble magnified by the novelty of the sector. Although the Internet is still considered a fundamental technology, paired by some analysts with the railroads (Holstein, 2001), soon after the public relations hype wore off, the overaccummulation factor (particularly of labor power) became terribly apparent for many companies. The public’s appetite for new computer products seemed to fade as well. After a golden period where “almost everybody” could buy a personal computer, the market reached a point of saturation and now, even the promise of faster microprocessors, more memory and a stable operating system, may not do much to better the expectations in the PC market.
On the flip side, the lower prices on computers and digital hardware have been crucial in the expansion of the global networks. There is only so much the mass market can absorb until the next “killer application” comes along, but a wider access to the Internet and the World Wide Web contributes to the democratization of the pivotal realm of information. The combination of both the user-friendly personal computer and the great capabilities of the contemporary telecommunications systems has been central in the transit of the postmodern condition into the digital era. Information technologies-as we have come to know the many pieces of hardware and software that handle our electronic interactions-are now a crucial element of the knowledge-based economy. Poster (2001, 43) considers that such economic context has given birth to what he calls “the digital commodity,” alluding to all the products that are becoming digital. Although it will never replace the material commodities, as Poster explains, the digital commodity holds the potential to alter basic principles of capitalism. Recently some of the traditional notions in business have clashed with the results of the developments in production, distribution and consumption that the information technologies have brought about. Such is the case of the threats to traditional business models in the form of the ubiquitous software piracy, or the copyright issues emerging from the inception of online file swapping applications.
The constant alternation of the roles of producers and consumers is one of the defining features of the new digital media. In a system where many people have the potential to create digital goods, digital stucco becomes a rather important raw material but it is one that is widely available. Poster (2001) also points out the resulting contradictions emerging between these new ways of production and traditional business structures and concepts such as scarcity, or supply and demand. A fundamental tension also emerges between content and form, as the symbol achieves a new independence from its physical embodiment (and, therefore, from the traditional mechanisms of social reproduction).
The dispute over the distribution of music and videos over the Internet shows the capacity of the virtual world for impacting the physical one. It also evidences the potential that the digital networks hold for alternatives, as any obscure band can also put out its music bypassing the regular corporate channels of the industry. That is, of course, an up-hill battle, but it projects the ambivalence of the networked world operating in various directions, as it supports the flow of the commodified symbol as well as the seeds of a new authenticity. However, these are early debates in the context of the development of the system, but a very important point is clear-that a new type of consumer/user/being is weighing in from behind the keyboard.
Being digital
The postmodern subject has generally being described as a decentered, mutable personality with a tendency towards a fragmented view of the world. It is supposed to be an entity that defies the compartmentalized social structure of the modernity in terms of class, religion, politics. According to Best and Kellner’s (1991, 12) interpretation of Baudrillard’s idea, “…the postmodern world is devoid of meaning, is a universe of nihilism in where theories float in a void, unanchored on any secure harbor. Meaning requires depth, a hidden dimension, an unseen substratum, and a stable foundation; in postmodern society, however, everything is ‘obscene’, visible, transparent, and always in motion.” For a person who lives in a simulacral world, where power is symbolic and the lines of opposition and differentiation implode, the sense of reality (hyperreality) is only as good as the interpretation of the signs with which such person comes across at a given moment. Those signs come though the “white lymph of the media” which substitutes the blood of the social substance, according to Baudrillard (1983, 129). Baudrillard’s rather absolute view is counterbalanced by Foulcault’s ideas about the multiple forms of power in contemporary society, and the way in which knowledge, discipline and subjects are created by institutions, practices and discourses (Best and Keller 1991, 123).
Although disregarding totalizing discourses, Lyotard also points out the roles of difference and plurality. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard (1999, 15) offers the perspective of a “self” connected in a fabric of relationships, always located at nodal points of specific “circuits” in different communicative situations. This subject may take different positions-according to the particular situation-in the “language games” of social interaction. Lyotard also addresses the topic of mutability, as such “self” moves and changes roles along those language games, a condition that he sees as tolerated and solicited by the system in its endless quest to improve performance. Following the thread of reason that emerges from modernity, Lyotard finds that performance is the only criterion standing as a mechanism of validation for knowledge and justice in the absence of “metaprescriptives” or overall rules that could stand above all types of social interactions. In his view, since all metanarratives have failed to keep some unifying power in the name of an ultimate purpose (human emancipation, the realization of the spirit), language games (in terms of justice, moral, religion, truth) are now played by rules that are local and cancelable upon agreement among the players.
The being that emerges from these views has been deemed as pathologically alienated. As Jameson (1991, 15) presents it, is a subject that has broken free of the stress and anxiety generated by modernity (and its structures of goals, classes, morals) but is now the bearer of other kinds of feelings-free floating and impersonal. This may be taken as a hyperbolic view, a caricature that magnifies the spirit of the postmodern in order to illuminate its inner workings. However, it is safe to say that there is some of such being in every person that nowadays lives close to the digital world, or lurks in cyberspace under one or many identities, or, some way or another plays with digital stucco.
Poster (2001, 15) notes that “faced with the simulacral object, the subject does not sustain its modern characteristics,” highlighting the links between the nature of the postmodern symbolic production (enhanced by the electronic communication technologies) and the emergence of a different form of identity. This is an identity that evolves from the one that he had described in previous works (Poster 1995, 24) in opposition to the centered individual of the modernity who is rational and stable, reasonable for the law, a good citizen for democracy, a calculating man for capitalism. The individual interpellated by the digital networks constitutes an identity complex and unstable. It transpires from the virtual space to the daily reality, framed by the remaining influences of the modernist structure of society.
In the age of the Internet and the World Wide Web, people have made the digital sphere part of their daily lives, as a new dimension parallel to the physical world and one that has a definite impact on it. Suddenly we have been faced with the possibility of liquefying part of the world into digital substance and send it through the networks where cyberspace is located. The concept of cyberspace itself describes a universe that is both real and symbolic, as it exists in the form of code within electronic microprocessors, airwaves and wires. Such condition has a decisive implication on the nature of the people who use the system, and on their interactions. We have somehow become digital beings, more than ever depending on electronic information to conduct our lives, expecting non-linearity and interactivity in our transactions with other virtual entities or with text of all forms. The digital being can use the networked world to defy traditional groupings and alliances that used to be defined according to exclusive considerations such as race, economic situation or religion. It also exhibits a great capacity to explore and move around new worlds (virtual or real). This connects with Castells’ (2003, 131) notion of the networked individualism and the importance of the “weak ties” that typify social relations in the network world, which are seen as an advantage, as they link “strangers, in an egalitarian pattern of interaction where social characteristics are les influential in framing, or even blocking, communication.” According to this view such “weak ties” are effective not only in the virtual world but in the physical one, where people seek to expand their “sociability” -and also to diversify their “portfolios of sociability” (Castells 2003, 132). Such terms describe situations in which, for instances, the pro-gay marriage movement combines the actions of people regardless of their social status. Individuals that have no other connection outside a particular issue form temporary alliances that have a certain impact in society as a whole. This view should not erase the fundamental material conditions in which these persons exist (for instance TV personality Rosie O’Donnell may not be worried about medical insurance coverage for her partner, while that is a concern for other same-sex couples). However, the “weak ties” of the networked world are important sources of information and action, and this consideration can illuminate the analysis of social movement in contemporary society.
This condition has made the exchange of information ubiquitous and it has also widened the scope of the criteria of relevance to include and amplify a range of content broader than the one usually reflected in the traditional mass media, as discussed above. The interactive condition of this new medium relies on the fact that all the participants in the interactions share the same plane of communication, all things being digital. It implies that individuals-as consumers or as voters-may have access to many alternative sources of information and they also have the ability to directly address some public centers of power (chat with the CEO of the company, email the President). This is however a general assumption, as the possibility exists within the constraints of the social reality in which these interactions take place, and since the real power behind a hypothetical truly two-way communication depends on other factors as well, such as public exposure of an issue or point of view, or the financial forces behind an idea or project. The fact that you can send an email to the President or chat with the CEO of the company you work for through the internal website does not warrant an answer from those centers of power, or the solution to a conflict. However, the interactions between like-minded people allow for the formation of new alliances of people otherwise geographically, ideologically or socially disconnected who come together around a common interest-as specific, limited or volatile as it may be. This helps constitute a society where a new mosaic of narratives is being constructed through a continuous superposition of multiple references fueled by the interactivity and the hypertextual practices of the networked world.
An environment where digital technologies and telecommunication systems link computers and other devices in a decentralized network provides the grounds for the occurrence of a new kind of electronic exchanges (both private and public), free from the discriminating influence of the switchboard and the subjectivity of the producer that mark the broadcast mode of communication. Some of the consequences of such a development may be a byproduct of its inception, which was naturally oriented towards the reproduction machinery that, according to Jameson’s (1991, 38) notion, is part of the functionality of the “decentered global network” of the present stage of capital itself. The frenzy to join the ranks of the symbolic producers occurs organically in a society that holds the symbol in its highest regard. The blurring of the frontiers (or the constant alternation) between the roles of producers and consumers can be interpreted as a consequence of the inclination of the postmodern subject towards the spectacular, the representational. It can be seen as a technologically enabled reaction to the “neutral and reified media speech” of which Jameson (1991, 17) speaks, or to Baudrillard’s “white lymph of the media.” Many may want to take advantage of the ability to produce something of such a significant social value as the digital commodity.
This trend offers a great contribution to the growth of the “cultural mass” described by David Harvey (1990, 347), adding new layers to the already amorphous middle class. As Harvey points out, the attitudes of that group of producers and consumers (or both) are different from those of wage laborers, and, at the same time, more influential towards the symbolic order of society because they produce images for everybody. Along with its implications in the destruction of modernist formal values in art, such mass needs to be accounted for in politics. It constitutes an eclectic network of influences that are complex, multilayered and somewhat unlikely according to modernist patterns.
These new conditions can be regarded as another step in the evolution of the relationship between information and the ideals of democracy. Since early capitalism, suffrage was regarded as a key issue in the preservation of individual rights and liberties, and it was always tied to the need for fluid and rational information. As the dynamics of the media system changed, so did the opportunities for the use of those channels as elements of the democratic process. However, along the way, politics assumed some practices of the corporate universe and put image high on its list of priorities. According to Baudrillard (1983, 119-120) the role of the media in the “age of simulacra” is not information but testing, polling and control, as the reading of the message becomes a perpetual examination of the code. It is increasingly apparent how political discourse has deepened into the realm of the performative, granting greater preponderance to the political act by itself than to the information contained in the political speech. Words are carefully selected and political events are meticulously produced in ways that try to anticipate their effects on particular audiences. But if that game was once played as a means of subtle persuasion, now the code is not longer hidden. The intentions behind every political text are discussed publicly without hesitation, as it is assumed that both the sender and the receiver of the messages operate with the same code. For example, following the terrorists attacks in Washington and New York, an article in The New York Times Magazine[4] describes in detail the writing of the speech that President George W. Bush read before a joint session of the U.S. congress. By allowing the general public to know who proposed a phrase, and whether it made it to the final version or not, the system accepts the transparency of some layers of its inner workings. It makes available a map of the fabric of relations of its language games-in its quests to improve performance described by Lyotard (1999). It becomes conventional because both sides of the communicational continuum live consciously in a simulacral world. The text’s meaning is complete only through the apparent process of its creation.
It may seem that the audience’s view of the magician’s hidden pockets kills the magic. But the game is not longer one of crude manipulation. It is rather a play of accepted rules that govern the symbolic exchange. The public discourse functions along the lines of the “show politics” (Castells 2004, 275) or the “image events” (DeLuca and Peeples 2002, 144). For the citizens in the contemporary society the mechanisms of the political system become apparent, and they can also learn how to use the same codes and tools that are central to the power structures-as it is the case with the manifestations of the antiglobalization movement that are discussed below, or the Zapatista movement mentioned above. Digital networks provide a point of access to the public sphere for many groups that were previously excluded, even as some of their discourses are not of the type that it is regularly portrayed in the mainstream media. For instance, the speeches of Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden are distributed around the world through the Internet and the Arabic-language networks (and they are also somehow reflected by the US media where they naturally acquire a different perspective). Extremist groups find in the Internet a convenient vehicle of expression, for its capacity for the dissemination of information and connecting marginalized people, while protecting the identities of the organizers-and taking advantages of the net’s international appeal, and the capacity that it brings for these movements to take some control over their public image (Gerstenfeld et al. 2003, 37). For the same reasons that the digital networks may help criminal endeavors, in a world of bloodless wars and constant polling of public opinion, a tool like the Internet of the World Wide Web also holds the potential to play a decisive role in the balance of power. In the context of the globalized world, it carries the potential of harboring alternative points of view.
In his criticism of the postmodern thinking, Terry Eagleton (1996, 24) suggests that the politics of those who hold this point of view have been plagued by evasion, minimizing the role of the structure of capital by focusing on other forms of oppression. However, Eagleton salutes what he sees as a positive contribution of postmodernism, an enrichment of the political spectrum. Eagleton points out as an achievement of postmodernism that is has helped marginal groups to attain self-recognition (Eagleton 1996, 121)-while otherwise deeming the same achievement worthless in terms of the goal of transforming the system as a whole. This observation, however, highlights a feature of the postmodern age that is crucial in the location of some agency for social action. Where some see only fragmentation and diffuseness, one can also see greater complexity, a new depth, as more social layers become apparent. It is a phenomenon that can provide for more comprehensive accommodations in the dialectical development of society.
Power is not different than what it used to be, it is just exercised by different-and maybe more sophisticated-means. At some point, all the fragments of the social mosaic most converge. Castells (2004,425) concludes that “[t]he new power lies in the codes of information and in the images of representation around which societies organize their institutions and people build their lives…The site of this power are people’s minds…Whoever, or whatever, wins the battle around the people’s minds will rule.” This view contemplates “ephemeral victories” around particular areas of the social structure[5]. However, local or narrow-focused conflicts do not erase wider contradictions such as those inherent to the nature of capital itself. In Jameson’s (1991, 46) words, “…the logic of the simulacrum, with its transformation of older realities into television images, does more than merely replicate the logic of late capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it.” Within those logics, it is possible to see that the multiplication of a person’s groups of reference according to his/her different interests or motives at a certain point-and the temporary alliances that a specific issue may generate-serves a purpose in the resolution of particular conflicts, contributing to new dialectical accommodations. Jameson (1991, 345-49) emphasizes, too, the differences between groups and classes as part of the idea of the convergence between those groups into social consensus and larger alliances. The social movement of the postmodern age is characterized in his view by what he calls “micropolitics,” carried out by smaller communities determined by factors as profession, race or gender. However, any dialectical analysis of society reveals the need for a totalizing representation of the whole system. A useful concept in this regard would be based on what Jameson calls a “cognitive mapping,” one that counterbalances the disorientation generated by the notion of the postmodern hyperspace, not only in the physical world but also in the corresponding global communication networks.
The metaphor of spatial disorientation is often used in connection with the virtual world. The digital networks through which electronic interactions take place provide grounds for such sentiment, based on their decentered nature and non-linearity. They create an environment in which physical notions of space and time are employed, but only to be twisted by virtue of the malleability of the digital substance. The electronic exchange, then, by its own nature becomes a central feature of the postmodern condition at this stage. This notion speaks of the fragmentation, non-linearity and multiplicity of angles that characterize the interactions between people (and/or digital entities) or between people and information over the global computerized networks. The virtual arena provides the support for the realization of the postmodern digital being in a universe of dispersed and ever-shifting centers, where social discourse flows in the form of mutable, less-than-sacred text. According to personal interests or the topic of the moment people move centers of attention to different points of the net, in the form not only of the quasi-interactive information-seeking mode, but also as participants in synchronous or asynchronous debates where they enjoy equal digital status and opportunities for digression.
In a universe with so many private truths, concert among people with similar interests may be the only way to social action and movement. However free and diffuse these dialogues may be, they hold in the last instance some connection with the material condition in which the participants live. As David Trend (1997, 115) suggests, the virtual world should not be regarded as an end in itself but rather as one of the many spaces where dialogue occurs. If the digital arena is in the process of taking central stage in the constitution of the postmodern self, as it generates new mechanisms for the subject to constitute an identity (however multilayered and mutable it may be), all the exchanges and transaction that take place in the virtual world not only reflect, but also affect the physical reality. The results of those electronic interactions are significant on virtual grounds but they also induce changes in the non-digital realm.
The global network as a new medium of communication (personal and massive) holds the potential to foster those changes through such mutually influencing relationship between the virtual and the real worlds. Cyberspace, where the virtual flows, contains not only disperse entities but also central points and channels towards the mainstream of society. Where the electronic exchanges generate the potential to empower activism related to certain topic, people can use the digital means to gain concert and coordination, but it also leads to the appearance of the critical mass. Through their growing presence in the virtual public sphere, they may become part of the debate or bring the issue to the agenda of the mainstream media.
The conditions under which such mutually influencing relationships take form can be explained through the analysis of the points of convergence between the ways and communicative practices elicited by the new digital medium and those associated with the more traditional structure of mass communication. The impact of the inception of this new and radically different channel of communication in the context of the whole media system is not limited to the function of mass communication that describes many interactions in cyberspace. It also has visible effects on the life of the traditional media. Rather than exclusive channels, the new, interactive, medium builds a new mode of communication that favors inclusiveness, fusion, and the integration of multiple technological platforms. It turns the audience into a user-base, makes it increasingly demanding, seeking to trade places in the communicative order, and gives it access to a vast array of alternative sources of information. The new media age forces a new dimension into the field of mass communication. It does so by means of mergers and acquisitions in the corporate side of the business, but also-and fundamentally-at the level of symbolic production.
However, the seemingly amorphous text of the contemporary media environment eventually needs to go back to the Cartesian plane at the moment of its individual and social realization. Faced with the linearity of time in human life and the contingency of social decisions, the subject of the networked world can also use the sense of context and relevance provided by the traditions of mass communication. In the spirit of the postmodern condition that would be the mark of the confluence between new and old media, it is a communicative environment wary of its own fragmentation but tired of totalizing discourses.
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In general terms, the literature reviewed in the present work with regard to the new media seems to focus exclusively on the context of computer mediated communication. Therefore this project seeks to contribute in this field by exploring the convergence of the mode of communication brought about by the new media with that of the traditional ones. It does so from the perspective of the individuals that are subjects of the convergent media environment, in a postmodern context characterized by micropolitics and a multiplicity of social networks. For this purpose the following research questions have been formulated: (1) How does the convergence of modes of communication impact public debate?; (2) How does the convergence of modes of communications reflects attributes of contemporary capitalist society as described in postmodern theory?. The following case study looks at a particular communicative situation employing a methodological framework inspired in the analysis of dominant ideologies through the critique of concordance[6] (which will be discussed in the next section). Such methodological considerations raise another research question: (3) How does the inception of the new mode of communication complicate the critique of concordance?
[1]It is generally attributed to William Gibson in Neuromancer.
[2] The term “hypermedia” is used to account for the multimedia nature of the experience.
[3] See Table 1.
[4]D.T. Max, “The Making of the Speech”, The New York Times Magazine, 7 October 2001.
[5] In The Power of Identity, Castells (2004, 7) discusses the construction of identity at an individual level, arguing that identity is the source of meaning for the social actors, and meaning is “organized around a primary identity (that is an identity that frames the others), which is self-sustaining across time and space.” According to this view, in the network society new forms of social change appear, based on the disarticulation of the civil societies and as a prolongation of “communal resistance” (Castells 2004, 11), therefore focusing on particular conflicts, such as those related to religious fundamentalisms or the struggles of indigenous populations.
[6] As proposed by Celeste Condit (1994).
