ELEMENTS OF DIGITAL MEDIA

Mark Poster argued that the main difference between old broadcast media and new media
was that new media was 'active', while old media was 'passive'. He associated broadcast
media with modernism, as it was part of the development of modern industrial capitalism and
the nation-state. Poster argued that the new 'internet model' of media promoted a more active
and critical subject, suggesting a collapse of the distinction between consumers and
producers.

Poster argues that the shift to decentralised networks of communications has enabled
audiences to 'answer back' or produce their own media. Digital media is seen as innovative in
comparison to the media of the past, with three major themes: technical processes, cultural
form and immersive experience. Video games are contemporary media products, which defy
traditional cultural categorisation. Manovich's work suggests that digital media is numerical,
modular, automated, variable and transcoded.

TECHNICAL PROCESS

Digital media is unique due to its technological processes, production, distribution and
consumption. This shift towards a database logic has been seen in fields such as science,
social work, and criminal justice. Networked, digital, hypertextual, and databased
environments suppress narratives and get rid of authors, leading to the erosion of the
distinction between producers and consumers of media.

DIGITAL

Digital media is a numerical representation, alterable and subject to algorithmic

manipulation. It can be compressed and decompressed, manipulated or copied, and
transferred between different sources.

NETWORKED

Digital media is more decentralised than broadcast media, with many producers and sources
of information in a constant dialogue. This allows for a greater element of choice when
consuming digital media, such as the multitude of web pages, social networking sites, video-
sharing sites, blogs, forums, and the hundreds of channels available on digital television. This
diversity of choice is a fundamental characteristic of new media that follows on from
networking, convergence and the blurring of producers and consumers.
INTERACTIVE

It is the deterministic structure of the technology that creates the affordance of 'interactivity'
and interactive media, in a sense that there is a technological potential for a user to modify
their mediated environment, as they use it.

HYPERTEXTUAL/HYPERMEDIATED

Bush's ideas were influential on Ted Nelson, who coined the term 'hypertext' in the mid-
1960s. Hypertext is a form of text composed of nodes or blocks of text, links between them,
and buttons or tags that enact the link. It blurs the distinction between 'writer' and'reader',
creating a non-linear text that is difficult to conceive within the notion of a 'traditional'
printed page. Barthes suggests that classic literature has two elements that inform an
ideological position: authorship and linearity. Landow combines information theory with
critical theory of Barthes, Foucault and Derrida to describe hypertext and its potential for
subversion of hegemony and power.

Rivett cautions that the extent of 'hyper-reading' is likely to be influenced by the

interpretative framework set up for the reader by the text. Manovich also qualifies this
complete freedom of the writerly reader in hypertext by arguing that the relationship between
producer and consumer is more complex.

AUTOMATED

Manovich proposed that automation is one of the key components of digital media, as it
allows products and media to be easily manipulated through automated templates and
algorithms. This has led to the increasing personalisation of media, with services like Google,
My Amazon, and news feeds automatically customising a user's news page based on their
interests and preferences. This has enabled the internet and other forms of digital media to
collect information and target consumers with advertising more efficiently. Automation is
essential for our navigation through the internet, such as search engines and trend monitoring.

DATABASED

A database system is a structured collection of data that stores and organises information to
pass down through generations. It is composed of three components: the storage element, the
query element, and the query element. Manovich suggested that databases are becoming a
dominant cultural form of our times, and that almost every practical act involves choosing
from some menu, catalogue, or database. Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay and Microsoft have
made billions by providing services that build, use and sort through databases. Web pages are
assemblages of different elements, stored and assembled together when viewed by a user.
This illusion of coherence applies to the web as a whole, but it is a vast collection of files that
are continually being sorted and assembled together.

CULTURAL FORMS

The rise of a database culture has had a significant cultural impact, not only on how we
organise and categorise the world, but also in terms of who has the ability to do the
organising. Narratives attempt to create order, with beginnings, middles and endings, and
lend themselves to the notion of an author.

CONTEXT OR LACK OF IT

Walter Benjamin's 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction' (1936) is a highly
influential work which contextualises the changing visual culture within the early
development of modernity. It suggests that with the advent of photography, film and
phonographic recording, works of art, cultural objects and performances of music could for
the first time be copied on a large scale or mass-produced. Databases contribute to the lack of
context in digital culture, and has weakened contextual links between cultural objects, space
and time.

VARIABILITY

Digital media objects are unique due to their ability to personalise and customise, as well as
their ability to change over time. Old media objects were mass-produced copies of the master
or prototype, while digital media objects are produced under post-industrial informational
capitalism, which caters more towards individual choice and less focused on physical goods.
Digital media objects are characterised by variability, as they are constantly updated,
reassembled and recreated. This is due to the fact that digital media is digital numeric code,
which can be compressed and decompressed using algorithms.

RHIZOME

The rhizome is a complex concept that is discussed in the introduction to “A Thousand

Plateaus”. It connects any point to any other point, operates by variation, expansion, and is an
acentered, non-hierarchical, nonsignifying system without a organizing memory or central
automation. It is made up of only lines, which can be severed or broken to create new lines
for growth or transformation. The principle of connection is easy to establish, as the
architecture of the internet is one in which connectivity reigns supreme. Multiplicity and
decalcomania require more nuanced analysis.

Multiplicity suggests that a rhizome is not a collection of units, but a multiplicity of

dimensions. Buchanan argues that what matters with regard to multiplicity is whether or not
these new connections and web pages are dimensions, or units of the web, and whether or not
subtracting them has any effect on the whole. Deleuze and Guattari argue that individual web
sites can be seen as 'units' of the web, but this is a tenuous argument. Decalcomania refers to
the idea of variation or transformation in expansion or encounter, which relates to Deleuze
and Guattari's notion of 'becoming' and suggests that rhizomes do not achieve growth through
reproduction, but through continual transformation.

PROCESS

Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of 'transformation' and 'becoming' suggests that the internet
and much on it is in a continual state of transformation. Manovich's claim that variability is
one of the key principles of new media points to the same key characteristic of digital media:
constant change. Bruns (2008) lists 'unfinished artefacts, continuing process' as one of the key
principles of 'produsage' in digital media. Bruns suggests that digital media is more like
'continuing processes' than 'objects', but Manovich (2001) contradicts himself by using the
term 'new media object'. Digital media products are more akin to conversations than material
objects due to their variability and transformation.

VIRAL

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge (IBC) was a viral phenomenon in 2014 that involved people
dousing water over themselves or having it doused over them by others. It was done to raise
awareness and funds for ALS, but the act took on a life of its own and became a social act to
be replicated. The most important details in this text are that virality is a cultural form that
emerges in particular from the technical processes of networking, interactivity and
automation, and that viral behaviours, memes and other forms of social imitation or
emulation, which spread like a contagion, but they demonstrate a prevalence in digital culture
that far surpasses previous generations of media. For example, the #MeToo campaign to
promote awareness of sexual harassment achieved over half a million tweets and 12 million
Facebook posts across 85 countries in the 24 hours after its initiation on 15 October 2017.
IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE

Digital media has a lot in common with the tradition of telecommunications and other
telecommunications than with the aesthetic tradition of novels or paintings. This shift to
media as process entails new conceptions of the audience and user, creating a more
immersive relationship between media and user.

TELEPRESENCE

Telepresence is the experience of presence in an environment by means of a communication

medium, and its experience varies between technologies and is influenced by social factors.
Steuer suggests that technologically there are two things that determine the extent to which
telepresence is experienced: vividness and sensory depth. The most important details in this
text are the importance of sensory depth, interactivity, and contextual or emotional factors in
the experience of telepresence. Sensory depth refers to the quality of the medium providing to
a given sense, while interactivity refers to the degree to which the user can influence the form
and content of their mediated environment. Additionally, first-person shooter games use the
combination of telepresence, sensory depth, and first person-ness to create a high degree of
vividness and engagement for the player.

VIRTUALITY

Virtuality is an important aspect of digital media and can be placed within a wider cultural
context. Virtuality is the nature of objects and activities which exist, but are not tangible or
concrete. Rob Shield distinguished 'the real', 'the actual' and 'the virtual', and suggested that
virtualities are often compared to 'the real'. He argued that the virtual is in opposition to the
concrete, not in opposition to the real, and that reality is always part virtual in everyday
concrete and electronic instances.

SIMULATION

Shields' insights suggest that digital objects have an ephemeral quality that makes them real
but not actual, but can be represented in concrete form. Simulations are used to project into
the future and estimate the potential effects of a change in certain variables on a complex
system or process, such as climatologists studying the potential effects of a change in
atmospheric carbon dioxide levels on the global climate. Computer simulations are two
different traditions within Western visual culture. The representation tradition relies on the
immobility of the spectator, while the simulational tradition relies on a mobile spectator.
Digital culture tends to follow in the immersive simulational tradition by emphasising the
mobility of the viewer.

POST-INDUSTRIALISM AND THE INFORMATION SOCIETY

Post-industrialism is a concept that suggests an economic transition from a manufacturing-

based economy to an economy based on services, with service provision becoming the
primary economic activity and the growth of technical and professional employment. Daniel
Bell proposed three historical periods based on three 'revolutions' within the last 500 years,
which are congruent with Alvin Toffler's succession of first, second and third waves of social
change. Bell argues that the moves to a post-industrial society will entail a decline in workers
employed in industry, increases in industrial output due to rationalisation and innovation in
manufacturing processes, increases in wealth and affluence, the expansion of service
industries, the pre-eminence of a professional and technical class, the heightened presence
and significance of information, a shift from an emphasis on practical knowledge and
empirical observation to theoretical knowledge and its emphasis on technical innovation, and
a rise of the individual, knowledge-adept, social actor.

The concept of the information society was reborn in the late 1970s with the help of Daniel
Bell. Fritz Malchup's book The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United
States charted the growth of the 'information industries', which had expanded to 29% of the
US GDP by 1958. Marc Porat sought a more complete definition and measurement of the
economic impact of the information economy, which included both industries and activities
that were specifically engaged in selling information as a primary product in established
markets and activities where the primary product was not informational. By 1978, 46% of US
GDP was accounted for in the information sector.

The information society argument has been challenged by a number of academics, including
Webster, Kumar and Rubin and Huber. These authors argue that capitalist industrial society is
not being revolutionised or transcended, but simply extended, deepened and perfected. Vogt
argued that this rhetoric detracts support and investment away from existing industry in post-
industrial nations, and labels the people in them as 'yesterday's workers'.