|
The increased interactivity among the New Media audience has also prompted some critics to suggest that there has even been an increased ‘democratization' in the nature of New Media compared to old. ‘Citizen Journalism' (where people use blogs, photos or phone footage to create and comment on the news of the day) is only one current example among many that postmodernists might select to illustrate the increased ability of ‘ordinary' people to become actively involved in the very production of the media; moving power away from the ‘author' into the hands of the ‘audience'. Indeed the Internet provides a ‘Habermasian public sphere' - a cyberdemocratic network for communicating information and points of view that will eventually transform into public opinion. As voting on the Internet becomes more widespread so it may increase our democratic rights even further The postmodern context I have outlined here tends to place New Media in a primarily positive light, as if technology itself is simply opening up increased levels of audience participation, creative involvement and democracy. However this article will clearly outline some of the more negative features of this New Media world, not least the ‘digital divide' that currently enables only a small fraction of the planet to participate in this new digital culture. Even in the West, not all New Media participants are created equal. And some consumers have greater abilities to participate in this emerging culture than others'.
Similarly, some critics refer to the ‘myth of interactivity', arguing that the participatory nature of New Media has been over-inflated to such an extent that people now refuse to see its limitations. Critics have also argued that a landscape of postmodernism and New Media are turning citizens of democracies into apolitical consumers, no longer able to distinguish between the simulated illusions of the media and the harsh realities of capitalist society that they implicitly conceal. Many critics argue that now even the political landscape is a triumph of image over substance, a terrifying symbol of the aphorism that ‘the medium is the message', that is, a world where how something is presented is actually more important than what is being presented. In particular, these critics tend to argue that the postmodern obsession with ‘image' over ‘depth' produces a superficial and artificial environment where little is taken seriously; that its predominantly ‘camp' aesthetic has turned everything into entertainment.
The nightmarish vision of a world where all information is packaged as entertainment is perhaps further facilitated by a form of New Media that appears to give us so much choice, but ultimately ends up by limiting real choice; reducing everything to exactly the same commodified and consumerist product. Critics argue that the avant-garde's revolutionary power has now also been reduced to sheer commercialism, modernism's radical forms and aesthetics used to sell alcohol and cigarettes in advertising.. Rather than increasing people's ability to play with various identities, critics have even argued that the globalization of the world (partly facilitated by New Media) may actually decrease cultural and national identities as we all become increasingly alike and culturally homogenous. This process has been provocatively described by one critic as the ‘McDonaldization' of society.
The Internet has also been accused of narrowing people's choices down and encouraging obsessions with worthless and unimportant trivia such as bizarre hobbies and low-quality television shows. As more and more virtual communities come into being so some critics argue that real relationships and communities are being neglected; the one-to-one human contact on which civilization was based becoming increasingly redundant. Meanwhile, the breakdown of the ‘private' and ‘public' sphere (people treating the public arena of cyberspace as if it were private) has serious implications on civil liberties that are only now being fully recognized. Recently, for example, it has come to light that many employers are surreptitiously using websites like MySpace to ascertain the online personality of a future employee. Similarly, it is still hard to conceive the democratization of the media actually taking place in a country like China where Google and Rupert Murdoch seem happy to cooperate with the strict censorship of a non-democratic government in order to gain access to the vast financial potential of the country. Some critics of postmodernism also argue that if there has been a breakdown between the ‘image' and the ‘real', then we are entering an age of ‘moral relativism' where little critical or moral judgement can be exercised and where theorists even discuss the ‘reality' of the Gulf War. Such thinking, it is argued, inevitably produces a dangerous and unregulated media, where endless hardcore pornography sits alongside chat rooms that prey on the young and the innocent or websites that give voice to extremist political forces. New Media may seem to offer a world of glossy images and limitless communication, but it is also important to keep in mind who and what is left out of its postmodern embrace. Technological utopianism might suggest that New Media will automatically improve our world for the better, but our future well-being clearly lies in how and what we do with the choices we now have on offer.
Whatever theoretical point of view you may take about New Media, it is difficult to argue that the media itself has not come under considerable change over the last 20 or 30 years. We therefore need a new theoretical framework which allows us to understand and appreciate both the positive and negative features of our current media age. This means that critical understanding of the field is essential if we are to produce a sophisticated theoretical approach. As I mentioned at the start of this article, it would be naive to suggest that a methodological and theoretical approach to New Media could ever be drawn up and regarded as definitive, but this article was simply intended to offer a framework through which a number of approaches can be more carefully contextualized and approached.
The theory of New Media is still in its early stages of development and there is much work to do to flesh out and expand some of the basic arguments set out here and elsewhere in the article. However, I hope that what is clear by now is that since its conception, the media has been analysed and examined through a whole plethora of diverse schools, theories and methodologies. I hope that by simply organizing some of these within their ‘modernist' and ‘postmodern' contexts, it has helped to clarify many of the major debates that have taken place in and around the field as a whole. Although this article might not refer explicitly to modernism or postmodernism, they will clearly offer greater insight into some of the basic theoretical ideas introduced here. ‘Digital theory' may not yet be discipline in its own right, but its presence will be felt throughout this article and the way that we conceive New Media long into the future.