Nct09-Gc

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

Chorus from TS Eliot's The Rock

Some Suggested Readings

Considering New Media

This subject is designed to give students both hands-on experience of new communication technologies and a critical awareness of the theoretical debates around the area. Let's look for some wisdom amongst all this information!

What are New Communication Technologies? Some things to consider are:

CD-ROM	multimedia	Internet
telepresencing	interactive TV	virtual reality
videoconferencing	wireless	SMS - text messaging
broadband	wikis	weblogs
social networks	YouTube	Twitter

What are old communication technologies? see Antikythera Mechanism

How do we distinguish between old and new communication technologies? Under what circumstances will new communication technologies become old communication technologies? Let us begin by analysing these notions of communication and technology.

Defining Communication and Technology

What is Communication?

Communication is any process that transfers, transmits or makes information known to other people.

The basic model of communication was explained by Aristotle in his book Rhetoric about two and half thousand years ago:

The speaker produces a message that is heard by the listener.

This account of communication is simple but effective where communication is face to face and the communicators have a common background. Unfortunately the world is no longer like that and a more complex model has been suggested by Shannon & Weaver in their book The Mathematical Theory of Communication which suggests that a better model is:

The speaker produces an effect on the transmitter which sends a message (which is degraded by the noise of the transmission process) that is intercepted by the receiver which converts it into an effect that is heard by the listener.

Because it does not allow for the difference in codes dictated by the use of metaphor (a figure of speech that implies but does not state a connection between two things), the Shannon and Weaver model discounts a couple of other factors that further complicates the communication process:

intersubjectivity	- the listener interprets the message and changes it as they send it along
	- communication is between people and they always want to argue about things, interpreting them in the light of their own experience
	- the active audience produces feedback
intertextuality	- no message is ever complete
	- any message gains its meaning (for a particular person) from all the other messages that person has previously received and sent

While the preponderance of communication since the invention of the radio has been in the broadcast mode, new communication technologies are becoming more and more interactive and so accentuate this problem of interpretation.

What is Technology?

Technology is the scientific study of mechanical arts and their application to the world.

Marshall McLuhan argues that technologies are extensions of human body ... a tool is an extension of the hand; a wheel is an extension of the leg; and a book is an extension of the eye.

An Australian-based performance artist whose work addresses this idea of technology as extensions of the human body is Stelarc.

McLuhan also argues that "the medium is the message"; this means that in so far as the communication is an extension of the mind, the medium in which that communication occurs is, itself, the message. This insight suggests some interesting possibilities in the move from analog to digital technology:

Analog technology functions by representing various forces (through dials) and the relatively imprecise modulation of those forces.

Digital technology relies on storing bits of binary information (whether the current of electricity or light in on or off) and allows for the precise modification of forces.

The shift from analog to digital can be good (as in linear to non-linear video editing) or not so good (try tuning a digital car radio while driving along). While digital technology is dominant, there are those that find the texture of analog offers something more appealing than the certainty and flat surfaces of the digital domain. Some "old skool" musicians prefer the modulated electronic sounds of the Theremin or the Moog (which are analogue synths).

Applying the concepts from McLuhan, in the shift from analog to digital perhaps we are moving from representational old communication technology that allows many shades of grey (analogue) to a much more black and white, on or off digital system that nevertheless encourages us to communicate exactly what we mean.

A way to think about the difference between these is to look closely at photograph taken on a regular non-digital camera. Compare that to a black and white photo from a newspaper, presuming its the same photo, and you see that the newspaper photo is made up of lots of dots.

The dots in the newspaper photos represent the way digital media capture our experience of the world, as many many approximate samples. In the old photograph it captures a much more continuous photo. Of course the higher the resolution in digital media the closer we come to the idea of the continuous old photo; in some way this is a tricky bit of technology that makes us think its continuous.

You can probably think of many examples of the digitisation of media from your own experience, perhaps from your digital camera or mobile phone camera, or perhaps when you use mp3s or other audio on your iPod (or portable media player of your choice).

Convergence

The last ten years have seen a growing tendency to Convergence as the possibilities of communication technology develop. This concept works on a number of levels:

Information technologies are converging as computer technology provides the means to draw together telephone, radio, television and print so that they can be accessed from the one point.

Communication is converging as the different media are joined together into multimedia, providing complex, interactive means of communication integrating vision, sound, text.

Businesses are converging, using new technologies to create horizontal and vertical integration (that is across an industry by subsuming competitors or up and down the supply chain). What future technologies will also be subsumed into single access points? Medical treatment? Social engineering?

Contours of the Communication Discipline

The twentieth century saw the development of mass society and an explosion of broadcast media forms (newspapers, cinema, radio, and television) where messages were distributed from centralised sources to audiences around the world. Theorists struggled to keep up. A number of sometimes competing, sometimes compatible academic disciplines have sprung up to investigate issues around communications

Communication Studies International Communication Association
Media Studies Media Studies 2.0 Mediaedu.co.uk
Cultural Studies Cultural Studies Association of Australia

At the same time these "studies" disciplines were establishing themselves, a number of more practically-oriented, job-focussed discplines have emerged: