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There is no set method or theoretical framework for studying New Media. As this article hopefully reveals, the field is a complex and diverse one and it would be naive to suggest that a methodological and theoretical approach could ever be drawn up and regarded as definitive. Indeed the theoretical complexity that typifies New Media may even reflect the state of play in current Net and Web research, suggesting the openness of New Media to ‘cut and paste' different methods and theoretical approaches together. However, although there may not actually be something as clearly discernible as ‘digital theory', that should not prevent us from locating and exploring a new set of theoretical issues and methodologies which might better suit and reflect our current media age.
If we are to appreciate what these new theoretical approaches to New Media might be, it is crucial that we first outline the way the media has tended to be analysed and explained historically. This is because, rather than being a systematic overthrow of previous trends, these new theoretical approaches are inevitably a development and reaction to the way the media has been understood and theorized in the past. In order to clarify this historical debate, I will first discuss (old) media analysis within a largely ‘modernist' context, and then move on to discuss the connections between postmodernism, post-structuralism and New Media.
Beginning approximately at the end of the nineteenth century, modernism is the umbrella term we give to the way that human society responded to the changes that took place during the industrial revolution. With its roots in the Enlightenment period of the eighteenth century, modernism tended to challenge the theocratic and God-centred notion of the world that had helped define human society in the past. Ideas such as evolution in biology, communism in politics, the theory of relativity in physics and the emerging field of psychoanalysis attempted to explain the universe in scientific or quasi-scientific terms. In this way, modernism tended to challenge and revolutionize the religious mysticism of the pre-industrial world. With its belief in the scientific inevitability of progress, many aspects of modernism tended to have an optimistic belief in the power of modernity to transform human life for the better. However, as the twentieth century progressed, so the brutal effects of science and industrialization on human life (particularly in both the First and Second World Wars) became increasingly evident. In particular, many modernists came to perceive industrialization as the enemy of free thought and individuality; producing an essentially cold and soulless universe.
It was for this reason that modernism's reaction to modernity is often perceived as intensely paradoxical, offering both a celebration of the technological age and a savage condemnation of it. Struggling with these contradictions, modernist artists attempted to reflect the chaos and dislocation at the heart of the modernization process. As the growth of technology and science transformed our conception of society and ourselves, so artists and intellectuals sought new ways to represent and articulate the fragmentation of this ‘brave new world'. Surrealism vividly dramatized Freud's insights into the power of dreams and the unconscious, while the Futurists espoused a love for the machine, technology and speed. Yet, there was also a deep anxiety embedded in many of these artistic expressions; the schizophrenia of the modern experience seemed to be at the heart of the ‘stream of consciousness' novel, while the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists seemed to articulate the chaotic, anarchic, idiosyncratic and nihilistic landscape of the modern world. Implicit in these artistic movements was the modernist belief in the role of the artist, a romantic figure often regarded as a self-exiled hero whose genius was able to revolutionize and transcend both art and the world around us. The ‘struggle to produce a work of art, a once and for all creation that could find a unique place in the market, had to be an individual effort forged under competitive circumstances'. And it was partly modernism's belief in the power of art and the artist to transform the world that lay behind its overwhelming distrust and distaste for the sort of everyday culture to be found in pulp novels, the cinema, television, comics, newspapers, magazines and so on.
Modernism was almost consistently ‘relentless in its hostility to mass culture', arguing that only ‘high art' (particularly a strain of it known as the ‘avant-garde') could sustain the role of social and aesthetic criticism. It was this tension between these two extremes (a ‘mindless' mass culture versus an ‘enlightened' avant-garde) that perhaps most explicitly defined modernism's reaction to the media's early development during the twentieth century. There are many examples that reflect modernism's disdain for the media, but perhaps one of the most famous groups of intellectuals to take this ideological stance was ‘The Frankfurt School'. Exiled from Germany to America during the Second World War, this group of European Marxists were struck how American mass culture shared many similarities with the products of mass production. In particular, The Frankfurt School liked to perceive the media as a standardized product of industrialization, frequently connecting mass culture with aspects of Fordism.
Fordism was a term coined to describe Henry Ford's successes in the automobile industry, particularly his improvement of mass-production methods and the development of the assembly line by 1910. His use of mass-production techniques meant that cars could be made more cheaply and therefore became more accessible to ordinary American citizens. However, because they were mass-produced all his model T. Fords were exactly the same. When asked what colours his cars came in, Ford famously replied, ‘any color - as long as it's black'. For the Marxist theorists of The Frankfurt School, this ‘Fordist' philosophy was also evident in all aspects of mass culture, where every television show, film, pulp novel, magazine, and so on were all identical. Their description of the ‘Culture Industry' clearly reveals their distaste for these ‘industrialized' products and their formulaic packaging. Instead of stimulating audiences, these media ‘products' were designed to keep the masses deluded in their oppression by offering a form of homogenized and standardized culture.