Forum: New Media & Society

This article provides a ‘long history’ of the renvois, an 18th century antecedent of hyperlinked text featured prominently in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedie (1791). It describes the emergence of renvois in the encyclopedias of early modern Europe, traces its expansion over the course of the 20th century through the work of such pioneers as Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee, and looks forward to the potential of renvois as a key component of the semantic web and the growing use of folksonomies online. The article reveals how the use of renvois — both in the 18th century and today — leads to unsettling juxtapositions, contradictions and unexpected meanings, allowing readers to relinquish their position as passive receivers of pre-organized information, to subvert traditional knowledge structures and hierarchies, and to become active and integral participants in the production of knowledge.

Every August for more than a decade, thousands of information technologists and other knowledge workers have trekked out into a barren stretch of alkali desert and built a temporary city devoted to art, technology and communal living: Burning Man. Drawing on extensive archival research, participant observation and interviews, this article explores the ways in which Burning Man’s bohemian ethos supports new forms of production emerging in Silicon Valley and especially at Google. It shows how elements of the Burning Man world — including the building of a sociotechnical commons, participation in project-based artistic labor and the fusion of social and professional interaction — help to shape and legitimate the collaborative manufacturing processes driving the growth of Google and other firms. The article develops the notion that Burning Man serves as a key cultural infrastructure for the Bay Area’s new media industries.

With the rise of participatory culture, social networking sites such as MySpace (www.myspace.com) provide a new outlet for the works of independent artists. The operation of participatory media is not autonomous because the opportunity of intersection with the mainstream media exists, hence the term ‘convergence culture’ coined by Henry Jenkins. Nonetheless, the critical question for this article pertains to the role of participatory media in consecrating artworks: are independent artists using participatory media simply to have their work viewed, or are they seeking mainstream media exposure? Does the mere act of gaining access to mainstream media result in the consecration of an artwork? How do musician labor on this site to gain value and legitimacy? Overall, this article argues that the blind valorization of the medium itself may inspire an indifferent attitude toward the underlying problems connected with the differing sets of values being negotiated in the participatory media.

Must the concept of the study of new media seem so thoroughly ordinary? What does it mean to study new media other than to study media that exist now? Prompted by the 10th anniversary of New Media & Society, this article aims to help rethink and elongate the history of new media studies by merging new media studies and media history literatures.The recursive definition and use of the term `new media’ are reviewed. New media need to be understood not as emerging digital communication technologies, so much as media with uncertain terms and uses. Moreover, by recognizing that new media studies quickly become history and that most media history is already new media history, this article calls for a use of both literatures to focus on the renewable nature of media in history. It reflects on a complementary attitude toward history meant to help usher in a sounder future of the study of the past.

Focusing on the mail art movement and its legacy for other forms of networked art, this article looks at how historically, culture has accompanied technological change.The mail art movement provided separate but fertile ground to explore themes of disembodiment in a networked society prior to spread of digital technology. Surfacing in the 1950s and flourishing in the 1970s, at a time when computers and the internet were still largely the domain of military and government control, mail art challenged the threat of technocracy by making available metaphors and the experience of networking. Its goal of social connection inspired other networked arts, which eventually found a place among digital technology users. An unlikely but productive clash between artists and early users aided, validated and expanded the network ethos of early online social groups or ‘virtual communities’. This investigation shows how art clears the ground for social practices that technology instantiates.

This study provided a comparative analysis of three social network sites, the open-to-all Facebook, the professionally oriented LinkedIn and the exclusive, members-only ASmallWorld.The analysis focused on the underlying structure or architecture of these sites, on the premise that it may set the tone for particular types of interaction.Through this comparative examination, four themes emerged, highlighting the private/public balance present in each social networking site, styles of self-presentation in spaces privately public and publicly private, cultivation of taste performances as a mode of sociocultural identification and organization and the formation of tight or loose social settings. Facebook emerged as the architectural equivalent of a glasshouse, with a publicly open structure, looser behavioral norms and an abundance of tools that members use to leave cues for each other. LinkedIn and ASmallWorld produced tighter spaces, which were consistent with the taste ethos of each network and offered less room for spontaneous interaction and network generation.

Like its analogue counterpart, digital radio is one of the ‘older’ forms of new media. The technology of digital radio broadcasting has been under active development for at least 25 years and has produced a number of different technical solutions, the longest established of which is Eureka-147 or Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB). This article explores DAB’s distinctly European vision for the future of broadcasting. DAB is traced to its origins in 1980s European research and development policy and its affinity with traditions of European public service broadcasting. Ironically, it was DAB’s failure to capitalize on its ‘Europeanness’ that contributed to the fragmentary political support that it later received, compromising its subsequent implementation. From a contemporary perspective DAB’s original mission, while visionary, to provide enhanced, interactive information and entertainment services through audio, text and visual content, appears to have misread trends towards convergence and appears out of step with contemporary media consumption patterns.

John Perry Barlow’s ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ narrates a world in which revolutionary politics are assumed to be immanent in the machines that structure and enable networked communication. Attention to the rhetorical strategies of the piece reveals a wealth of contradictions and misdirection: newness is rooted in history; revolution is effected by commercial transaction; and liberal democracy becomes libertarianism. The ways in which the Declaration establishes and resolves narrative conflict promote an ‘impossible future’ that is blind both to the history of the underlying technologies and to the American revolutionary politics on which it claims to base itself. Barlow’s project would have been served better by a more pragmatic intervention into real-world processes.Ten years after its original publication, the Declaration is both widely reprinted and increasingly mocked: its language has become commonplace and its idealism has come to seem absurd.

This study investigates the role of media discourse in the hegemonic process by which the microcomputer became a common and trusted appliance in the USA during the early years of the technology’s adoption: the 1980s to 1990s. A critical discourse analysis combined with framing analysis of four cases from consumer magazines — two advertisements and two editorial feature stories — reveals that a device heralded as ‘revolutionary’ was presented in fact using rhetoric that incorporated and legitimized traditional values, roles and practices such as capitalism. Any frames that potentially challenged existing social structures and power relationships were secondary and ‘super-framed’ by the reinforcing frames.

This article explores what is new about Web 2.0, the contemporary cutting-edge platform for web development, differentiating between what is celebrated in the discourse of Web 2.0 and what is genuinely novel about this phenomenon, which is users’ propensity to construct content in the form of information and media products for the web environment. It argues that, from the perspective of theoretical treatments of the ‘active audience’, audiences or media users have created media content on a long-term and consistent historical basis for purposes related to radical and community movements.The article further considers expressive and aesthetic dimensions of Web 2.0 content construction through a discussion of three historical case studies of ‘participatory public art’ which, it is suggested, constitute a useful analogy for understanding similarly oriented Web 2.0 content construction. Finally, it proposes topics and questions that should figure prominently in research agendas addressing Web 2.0 phenomena in the future.

This article contextualizes discourses surrounding new media technologies by examining activism around community media, using as a case study an activist group which has advocated for greater citizen access to low-power FM (LPFM) radio since the mid-1990s. It argues that the significance of new and emerging communication technologies can be grasped most effectively when emerging technologies are considered in a dynamic field that includes older technologies; emerging technologies are viewed often through the lens of patterns of use and interpretation of older technologies, at least initially. The article follows the activists’ assessments of not only FM radio but emerging internet-based technologies, including webstreaming and wi-fi networks. In practice, the activists circumspectly negotiate expanding their efforts to encompass community wi-fi networks, while trying to retain the vision, flavor and organizing strategies from their LPFM campaigns.

Accounts about the origins of the web generally start with a US Department of Defense project that began in the late 1960s, which subsequently expanded to include universities and research laboratories, then later evolved into a service for the public in the mid-1990s: ARPANET, NSFNET, the internet–world wide web. However, the content that eventually populated the web as well as how the public learned to interact with online content had a long history of development via videotex and other online services.These are largely forgotten, except by a few scholars who have kept the history alive. What was learned in the extensive research about these services is very relevant to the current new media environment. Also, it can inform us at a theoretical level about the diffusion of innovations and at a policy level about the role of government in developing new media services.

This article puts on the agenda one of the fundamental theoretical questions within the emerging field of website history: how can the object of historical study — the website — be delimited? Its focus is on the ‘website’ artefact as a medium and a text. After elaborating a definition of the website, as well as discussing how the website is distinct from other possible analytical web objects (the web as a whole, web sphere, webpage and textual web element), the article addresses the challenges of delimiting the archived website. Finally, it outlines some of the key issues in a general discussion of website history.

The question of what is new about new media has become a central topic of discussion in new media studies. This article frames within that question a historical and comparative analysis of the process of audience manufacture, and attempts to overcome the limitations of previous literature on the internet by situating the discussion within the political economy of communication. The main topics addressed in the ‘blindspot debate’ — the debate regarding the audience as the commodity produced by advertising-supported media — are used to guide an examination of audience manufacture in broadcasting media, and to contrast it with the manufacture of the online audience. The evolution of online advertising, in particular its relationship with search engines, serves as an entry point for questioning some well-established assumptions about the role of audiences in commercial media systems.