We've
spent most of this semester talking about communication --
particularly as it takes place, in various forms and with myriad consequences,
online. It seems appropriate to finish by
focusing on
the "change"
part of the course title.
|
Golding,
a sociologist, summarizes many of the themes we've covered here.
He suggests
that attempts
to understand new communication technologies have emphasized post-materialism,
globalization and the idea of an information society. But a focus
on the new often blinds us to the “law of the suppression
of radical potential”: social, political and economic
structures survive and typically stifle any revolutionary potential
that might
exist.
Common fallacies
involve issues of modernity, including identity, (in)equality, power
and change itself. “Impatient for a wholly
different social order, we prematurely discover its embryo in contemporary
innovations,” underestimating
the “enduring centrality” of our existing social structures.
New communication
technologies, he suggests, are evolutionary, not revolutionary. They
may change the way we do things ... but they do not, and will not,
change life as we know it.
What do
you think: Evolution or revolution? |
Walther (who
is chair of the Communication and Technology division of ICA) and his
colleagues use one of the readings we started the semester
with as a springboard to talk about what communications researchers
have studied over the past decade -- and what they might study.
Mostly,
he focuses on interpersonal communication ... which is what he studies.
But he does so by revisiting the key components of "new" media that
Newhagen and Rafaeli laid out in 1996:
| Their
multimedia, multifaceted sensory appeal. |
Their hyptertextuality
or non-linearity -- the fact that
everything and everyone online is linked, interconnected.
Jones,
in the last (and arguably best) chapter of Society Online,
also emphasizes the centrality of the network in understanding
new
communication technologies. This ability to connect anything
to anything else, he says, leads us to de-emphasize everything
else about online media -- including the consequences of connection
and the role of temporal or spatial distance in human society. |
| Their interactivity,
or the two-way nature of a medium in which content producers and
consumers are interchangeable. |
| Their anti-censorship
structure ("packet switching"), which makes
it hard to control content or communication online. |
| Their synchronicity (or
lack of it), or the degree to which we can and do communicate in real
time. |
What do you think?
As
mass communication (more or less) researchers, which do you see
as most important in studying the Internet or other emerging communications
forms?
Which
seem most likely to offer interesting insights or new avenues to
explore? |
Which
aspects are you already exploring in your own papers and studies?
Where would you like to go with those?
|
|
Chaffee
and Metzger
suggest today’s
media are “demassified,” which
raises interesting intellectual questions about them. Among the differences
between old and new media forms (and yes, you saw this chart before ...
on the very first day of class):
| |
Old |
New |
| CHANNELS |
Few |
Many |
| AUDIENCE |
Unified |
Diverse |
CONTROL
|
Sender |
User |
| TRANSMISSION |
One-way |
Interactive |
| |
Time-specific |
On demand |
| MOTIVATION |
Arousal |
Fulfill needs |
| LEARNING |
Social modeling |
Experiential |
They urge us to think
outside our little intellectual boxes:
"Researchers
need to resist the temptation to simply apply old models of mass
communication to the new media.
"Because of fundamental differences between the old and new technologies … new
theories of media uses and impacts must be developed and tested.
"The
new media bring challenges to our old models, as well as the occasion to
re-evaluate, extend, and perhaps even supercede them” (Chaffee
and Metzger, 2001, p. 378) |
What do
you think?
Is
the age of mass communication over?
|
They
suggest that our theories of mass communication need to be "re-evaluated"
in the context of changing
media forms. As examples, they highlight agenda-setting, cultivation
theory, and the broadly defined areas of critical theory and cultural
studies.
Do you agree such approaches are fundamentally challenged? Why
or why not? Others? |
Chaffee
and Metzger, as media scholars, come to a different conclusion
than the sociologist Golding, who is more of a "plus ca change,
plus c'est la meme chose" kind of guy. Where do your sympathies
lie?
|
|
You may
be familiar with the notion of paradigm shift, described
most thoroughly by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
Kuhn
discusses what happens when something new comes along that no longer
fits our accepted model for understanding how the world works. He suggests
three possible responses to the resulting crisis:
| Existing
paradigms are shown to address the new problem adequately after
all. |
| The
new problem resists even apparently radical new solutions. It appears
to have no solution at all, and so is set aside for future generations
to explore. |
| Scientists
realize they must reject all or part of a previously accepted theory
-- and accept a different one in its place. Paradigm shift happens. |
For instance,
the old paradigm of studying communication involved two rather neatly
divided sphere: mass and interpersonal.
And when
a new media form came along -- the Internet, say -- we studied it,
so far, in ways provided by the existing paradigms.
But some
people suggest (no, not just me) that this new hybrid form is in fact
a “crisis” that
should force a paradigm shift
in communication studies
| Neither
receivers nor senders are quite like the receivers or senders in
mass communication … or like those in interpersonal communication,
either. |
| Nor
are message processes directly comparable. |
So
we need a change in our perceptual gestalt in viewing
and understanding what is going on.
Agree or
disagree? Do
we need new concepts here ... or just better ways to apply old ones? |
|
There
are oh, so many ways in which we could consider new media forms to
be hybrids. Or perhaps it makes more sense to think about continuums
stretching between two poles -- and of the Internet as forcing us to
think about what hybrids are emerging, how they might be conceptualized,
and how we might study them.
For instance,
possible polarities include ...
| Producer |
Consumer |
| Professional |
Amateur |
| Public |
Private |
| Social
/ communal |
Individual
/ personal |
| Commercial |
Free |
| Owned |
Shared |
| Mass |
Interpersonal |
And,
of course, there are the dichotomies or tensions you wrote
(or will write) essays
about, such as ...
|
| Agency |
Primacy of tools over users |
| Primacy of users of tools |
| Citizenship |
Enhanced democratic potential |
| Extended consumerism |
| Community |
Connectivity |
| Fragmentation |
| Empowerment |
Greater individual power |
| Greater control over individual |
| Hegemony |
Internationalization,
cultural diversity |
Westernization,
cultural homogeneity |
Physicality
(see Dreyfus, for instance) |
Embodiment |
| Disembodiment |
| Utopianism |
Bright future |
| Dark future |
|
Speaking
of the
Future: You’re
a full professor in an endowed chair at a prestigious university, and
you’ve been tracking
communication technologies since grad school days. You are The Expert,
and new scholars come just to study with you.
| Where
have you concentrated most of your efforts? |
| Which
questions have been most compelling, most interesting, most important,
most rewarding? |
How
have you sought to address them?
|
| And
what the heck are those grad students of tomorrow studying, anyway
...? |
|
Thanks
so much to you all.
It
has been a pleasure and privilege
to learn from you this semester! |