Media Studies 2.0

Studying Me-dia: the Problem of Method in a Post-Broadcast Age

2010-03-09T12:33:00.001-08:00

This is just a first draft of a few thoughts about the problems of methodology in a post-broadcast era in which the totality of broadcast production is supplemented by the entire world of me-dia - of personal communications, collaborative productions, shared information, user-generated content, and networked relationships. It's a pessimistic scenario but I'm convinced the issues are serious ones. Comments and emails welcome.

The question of method is central to many humanities and social sciences. Much thought is given to the question of how to produce and legitimate disciplinary knowledge and many different methodologies have been formalized, discussed and employed. Media studies has a range of favoured methodologies which it uses. Images are subjected to semiotic analysis and texts are analysed using content analysis and discourse analysis, whilst audiences are studied using both qualitative and quantitative methods, from ethnographic observation, open-questionnaires and interviews to more formal, structured questionnaires and interviews. The success of these methods depends, however, on an uncomplicated relationship between the researcher and their object. It is this relationship that gets increasingly muddied by developments in digital media. In particular I’d like to suggest the following challenges to traditional empirical analyses.

The first problem is one of volume. We know the broadcast-era was marked by the industrial factory-line identical, serial mass-production of information, messages and products and their distribution by road, rail or airwaves to encompass and culturally cement together entire populations. Add up all the products of these industries every day and we have a huge volume of media output – an output that broadcast-era media studies could only sample. In the post-broadcast era we have all that plus our own horizontal communications and user-generated content. Add up the almost continuous one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many production of communication, responses, comments and messages we all engage in and we can see that this constitutes a remarkable volume of additional media for the researcher to deal with. And this output is not created by the media factories but through individuals, networks and groups managing their relationships and sharing their lives, thoughts and experiences. It builds up incrementally, with every new message, every post, every update, every comment, every photo, every video and every page. The audience reach of each posting may be tiny but its personal meaning, attention and cumulative effect is huge.

Unlike television, as Raymond Williams famously analyses it in his 1974 book Television: Technology and Cultural Form, this isn’t a ‘flow’ – me-dia has a different experiential temporality: both synchronous and asynchronous. It involves the creation of multiple, synchronous, ongoing messages and productions, with many conversations and contributions happening simultaneously, but each of these is also asynchronous as messages are sent and replies are delayed in discovery and response. Many messages disappear and only some take; some take moments to return, others take minutes, hours, days or more; some die after a brief burst whilst others continue with endlessly changing or shifting titles or content over weeks or months.

This is a near-global ongoing process of the production and pushing of personal messages that can barely be charted other than through abstract company data chronicling the quantity involved, the information flows and the user numbers. The Mobile Data Association, for example, reported in January 2010 that British people sent 874m texts on New Year’s Eve 2009 (up from 400m on the same day in 2008); that they sent 96.8bn texts in the whole of 2009 (up from 78.9bn in 2008 and 56.9bn in 2007); that they sent 601m picture and video messages in 2009 (up from 553m in 2008 and 449m in 2007); with an average in 2009 of 265m texts and 1.6m picture messages a day. By 2010 Youtube’s factsheet was reporting that 20 hours of new video was being uploaded every minute, whilst the production of social networking content is obviously greater. In March 2010 the Facebook website was claiming over 400m active users with more than 60 million status updates being posted every day; 3bn photos uploaded every month; more than 5 billion pieces of content (web-links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums etc.) shared each week, and more than 3.5m events being created every month.

If we add to this all our other personal messaging services, forums, blogs and other activity this begins to give us some idea of the volume involved but it doesn’t help us deal with it. If broadcasting already overwhelmed the researcher, the post-broadcast output eclipses it. Whilst broadcast production was predictable enough to be sampled (in genres such as rom-com, sci-fi and action-movies etc. or categories such as broadsheet and tabloid), the complexity of much of our digital production arguably resists this. We simply can’t keep up with me-dia: media researchers are overwhelmed by the scale of production.

Even comprehending how much is being produced is something that is beyond any academic researcher. The figures of user-production I quoted above came either from private data collection and analysis companies (who release very little information for free, requiring payment for their detailed evidence and reports), or from the web-sites themselves. Whilst Facebook and Youtube are perhaps the only ones who can gain accurate figures regarding the use of their sites one could be suspicious of their neutrality or objectivity given that there is no way to verify any of their claims. An additional problem arising from the volume of production, therefore, is the position of the researcher compared to private companies in discovering and disseminating accurate information about such large phenomena.

The second problem is that of dispersal. Broadcasting was dominated by mainstream, well-known, widely-publicised publishers and distribution channels. The ‘publisher’ of the material, whether a book publishing company, television company, film studio etc., made themselves known and had an official point of contact, making their material available through the expected channels – bookshops, newsagents, cinema, radio frequencies, television channels etc. In contrast much of today’s digital production is atomistic and decentralized. It is happening wherever there are people and wherever there is a connection. Even if the technological channels are identifiable – the mobile network, the broadband connection – the dispersal of its availability and place of ‘publication’ makes it difficult to find or follow. Produced for another’s phone or for a specific website or page we have no conceivable way of mapping all the places me-dia are available. This is the age of thin media: of media spread over every digital outlet.

A third problem is ephemerality. Digital media have a particular relationship with time. As I’ll argue in a later chapter, they can be seen as ephemeral in their physical fragility (the failing hard-rive or USB stick) and loss (the dropped memory stick, the mobile phone left behind in a club or taxi) and in the continued upgrading of obsolete technology (the photos of my children left on my last mobile phone). They are ephemeral in their use and attention: they are the messages and photos that are read, viewed, consumed, passed on, replied to, ignored, deleted, moved on from and almost immediately forgotten (how much of our personal media even survives to the next day?). They are also ephemeral in their relevance and meaning: they relate to present and immediate concerns and personal issues; they relate to what is happening now and one’s personal relations in that moment. Finally they are also ephemeral in their personal and public availability: messages and posts are deleted by ourselves or by administrative individuals on websites and forums. Messages are buried and left behind and sites and pages are left for dead, with their contents and comments forgotten, even inaccessible. In all these ways the ephemerality of much of our digital media impacts upon our ability to study our productions.

Of course in other ways our media aren’t ephemeral. As we’ll see, the retention of electronic trails, of records and copies and archives by hosting companies, websites and ISPs; the long life of our postings and productions (with even long-forgotten pages and comments remaining discoverable); the availability of back-up services (such as Itextuploader which stores texts and personal information), together with the physical survivability of media (the problem of completely wiping or destroying hard-drives), can all ensure the continued survival of media. Broadly, however, we can say that the ephemerality of more personal productions and communication causes problems for their study that don’t exist as much for broadcast media.

The fourth problem is one of access. Whereas the major broadcast media were publicly accessible many of our digital media productions and communications are not. Broadcast products were designed to be open and accessible to the majority of the population: they were made to be seen, were made available through the expected channels and were widely advertised to maximise audiences and revenue. In contrast an individual’s texts, IMs, PMs, social-networking messages, comments, updates, activities and photos are inaccessible without permission and much of it is specifically made not to be seen. This causes a significant problem for media studies which depends upon the ability to recognise and see and analyse media production and consumption. Embedded in private relationships and networks, with highly personal meanings and content and with individuals reluctant to open these spheres up for greater public scrutiny, a significant part of our media productions are invisible to and unavailable for the researcher. Even if they gain access to part of this sphere of media there is no way of ascertaining whether the material is representative: only a miniscule amount could ever be sampled. The key question, therefore, is whether the world of post-broadcast media can ever be adequately studied?

The fifth problem is that of discovery. Alongside questions of access there are questions over how we even find the material we’d like to study. In the broadcast-era that wasn’t a problem. With a limited number of channels of information, listings magazines and advertising pushing the products of the media industries at the population discovery was simple. If anything was missed, reviews and word-of-mouth soon ensured those who missed something would find out about it. The post-broadcast era is very different. We see here a fractal splitting of media interest and attention into entire personalized and optional worlds of specific cultural forms in which we individually sample very little. Our limited interests ensure we miss what all others are interested in. Entire media worlds, interests, fads, jokes, knowledges, arguments and expertise pass silently by us without gaining our attention. Media lecturers are in no privileged position to know about and trace these worlds. Like anyone else they rely upon a limited number of methods – their own interests and hobbies; viral processes such as link-sharing among peers; filter sites such as Digg and mass media reporting of net ‘hits’. For all that these are imperfect tools: we are always missing things and struggle to reflect the diversity of media activities and phenomena today.

A sixth problem is that of content. Traditional media studies studied broadcast content. This was material produced for mass, public consumption, being created for particular reasons, being designed for mass comprehensibility and meaning and possessing prestige and potential cultural significance as an expression of a major productive outlet and its creative staff. In contrast much of our personal, user or peer-produced content is often intended for private or limited consumption, having different modes of meaning, comprehensibility and relevance. It is material with personal or peer significance with few claims to cultural significance or impact. This is a challenge for contemporary media studies: how do you study the ordinariness, incomprehensibility, banality or offensiveness of personal media production. How do you study, and what meaning or significance do we derive from, ‘LOL”, ‘You Suck’, Twat’ and ‘Where RU’?

A seventh problem is the question of ethics. There are, for example, ethical issues in studying individual and peer media production, given the personal nature of the communications and production, the fact that much involves young people (or the age cannot be determined) and much will involve illegal or sensitive activities. Studying media consumer and productive habits that can involve copying and downloading, pornography, libel and abuse and other criminal actions is very difficult yet today studying media consumption and production without including these activities will most likely result in a skewed representation of many people’s behaviour.

The eighth problem is that of production. Broadcast producers were public and locatable whereas me-dia producers may not even be found. Who precisely is the user-name on the sharing sites or forums? How do you establish with certainty the origins and reality of the me-dia content you study? How do you study anonymous, inaccessible producers? In the Post-broadcast era production is often private and identities are hidden.

The ninth, related, problem is that of the audience. As I’ll argue later the concept itself is in need of revision but even on its own terms we are still faced with the problem of how we find these people: how we know about them, identify them, follow their activities and sample and study them. Media studies has often treated the audience as the truth of media – as the teleological end-point and use of a form or message and hence as its ultimate reality and significance, a perspective that both elides the significance of other aspects of communication and mediation and that overlooks the existence of that audience within broader social and cultural and political and economic structures. In this perspective the ‘reality’ of media is discovered by studying individual real-world audience members and asking them about their use and relationship with the text, a method that is seriously compromised by developments in digital media and its anonymity, dispersal and volume. When the ‘audience’ can’t be accurately located, distinguished, claimed as representative or known and questioned with any certainty then this model of academic research is of limited use.

The tenth problem is that of generalisability. A central assumption of natural empirical science was that results obtained and confirmed by observation were spatially and temporally generalisable. Natural ‘laws’ did not vary according to where you were or when it was. Phenomena recorded in one space and time could also be recorded at any place and at any time. The social sciences that emerged in the 19^th century were influenced by positivist ideas, taking the practical success of science during that century as the model for their own methods of knowledge production and legitimation. In dealing with human activity and social and cultural phenomena these ‘sciences’ could not realistically produce similar spatially and temporarily generalisable laws but their truth claims did rest on observations that could claim to be objective and that could, they hoped, help to build into a broader picture of media use and meaning. If the evidence couldn’t be absolutely generalized, the broadcast model nevertheless offered enough predictable processes and operations for a broad faith in the truth, value and relevance of the research.

Once we consider media use in the post-broadcast era we realize that we lose even that broad faith. It is more likely that patterns of use, habits and behaviours will increasingly vary once we take into account developments in me-dia and peer or horizontal communication. Plus the fragmentation of users into interest groups with their personalized and optionalised media worlds will reinforce this problem of generalisability. But the real problem is temporal generalisability. The perpetual upgrading and hybridization of digital media technologies, capacities and uses and the variety and ongoing transformation of user behaviours and pleasures means that any knowledge we accrue very rapidly risks being out of date soon after publication. The more specific and detailed the case-study the more it risks its ability to stand for anything other than its own moment and place of capture and its own culture. Our empirical methods, therefore, do exactly what they promise: they tell us, through our observations, what has taken place, but they don’t necessarily tell us about what is happening now.

A final problem I want to suggest is that of accumulation. The Liberal model of science always had a solution to the problems I’ve discussed above: unforced and undirected, freely-chosen scientific enquiry would, it was believed, accumulate into a greater whole, leading (as in the market model, as if directed by an invisible hand) to the most efficient system of knowledge. This model, however, can’t serve media studies today. No amount of individual researchers can cope with the products of me-dia creation and sharing; no amount of researchers can sample, or study, or discover or access, or find enough out about these media worlds. With its more formulaic production, broadcast media could be sampled through studying genres and categories that broadly identified products, demographics and markets. Post-broadcast production doesn’t follow these market-led conventions and is harder to classify and categorise and hence it is harder to sample. Moreover, any sample that is found – types of Youtube video, particular tweeting habits around specific events – is less likely to help contribute to a single, valid, meaningful, coherent view of the media world, constituting a proportionately smaller representation of the media ecology than ever before. The media researcher’s year-long project looking in detail at one carefully-isolated aspect of the media world is increasingly like studying a cup of water to understand the sea.

These are serious problems that media studies, as an academic discipline, needs to address. They are not insurmountable and do not mean the end of any attempts at producing or legitimating knowledge but they do suggest that a greater degree of awareness is needed as regards the reliability and value of more empirically-minded approaches.

UNDERSTANDING ME-DIA: THE SECOND REFORMATION

2010-03-06T03:45:00.000-08:00

UNDERSTANDING ME-DIA: THE SECOND REFORMATION

A few years ago I considered adding a lecture on the telephone onto a module on media history. I'd already covered the electric telegraph a few weeks earlier and thought the telephone would represent a good extension of that topic. The problem was I couldn't find any books in media studies on the telephone. In fact media studies seemed to have almost no interest in the telephone. There was a growing literature on mobile phones but most of the history of the telephone had been ignored. Thinking about it the reasons seemed to be: (1) It was a technology and media studies doesn't like technologies. (2) There was no public content to analyse: telephone conversations were private and not available to study. (3) The telephone wasn't a mass medium. Admittedly nor was the telegraph and there were texts on that but media studies wasn't overly impressed with the telegraph either: It was mainly McLuhanists or science journalists who liked the telegraph. No, media studies as a broadcast era discipline liked mass media, with mass-produced, publicly disseminated content. Personal communications were irrelevant to it. Letters weren't part of media studies, the telegraph was barely covered and the telephone certainly wasn't. (4) Finally the telephone wasn't important because no matter how socially important it was for the individuals using it, it contained trivial information. People chatted. Probably about rubbish. None of which mattered. Newspapers and radio contained serious or important content and television and film contained culturally important programming; the telephone, however, contained personal gossip. In the end I didn't put on a lecture about the telephone.

What I've since come to realise is that media studies has intentionally ignored an entire mode of media communication. As a product of the broadcast-era media studies has always been a reflection of the forms and processes of the broadcast model, concentrating on print, cinema, radio and television: on mass-produced, mass-disseminated content mass-consumed by a large audience. What this leaves out is mediated interpersonal communication: the entire realm of peer-to-peer, horizontal, personal communications. This has always been outside the sphere of broadcast-era media studies. Admittedly it has always been a limited sphere - letters, telegrams and telephone calls account for the majority of mediated interpersonal communications prior to the development of modern digital media. But even then it was still significant; in part because of the amount of communication; in part because of the real commercial industries built upon it and in part because of the intense personal meaning and impact the communication held for those who took part.

One of the most important aspects of the rise of digital media has been the explosion of this realm of horizontal, peer-to-peer, mediated interpersonal communication. As that's a bit of a mouthful I suggest calling it 'me-dia'. I like this term because it emphasises the fact that I am at the centre of this communication. And that I really means me, myself, we, my friends, my contacts and our gossip and communication. It encompasses all media content produced and shared between ourselves outside of the structures of public broadcasting. It includes that form and content built into the structures of our everyday lives and at the centre of our personal relationships and sense of self. There are media and outside that there is me-dia.

If, before, media studies could practically ignore me-dia, today that's more difficult. The spread of networked computing technology, the availability of a range of personal devices carrying it and the growth of personal services aimed at and empowering the individual and their 'expression' (we'll accept that uncritically at the moment) have led to me-dia becoming not just personally important but a major social phenomenon. Of course it always was, but there's so much more of it and it occupies so much more personal time. Digital media didn't invent this but what it has done is amplify our ability to communicate, produce, share, access, send and publish. If we add up the time and attention spent on me-dia I'm willing to wager that for a significant proportion of the population it far outweighs the time and attention spent on mainstream broadcast media. How much time do we spend checking our personal contacts and sending and responding to messages? Even if I'm watching TV or a film I'm checking, sending, composing, and sharing. I still consume these mainstream media but alongside what I consider the more important me-dia. Broadcast content is less important than my contacts and less fascinating than the possibility of a reply.

That’s worth reflecting upon for a moment. If its true for others it means that the broadcast industry and content fore-grounded by media studies is less significant than the sphere of personal me-dia. It means that a different kind of media studies is urgently needed.

What counts as me-dia today? That's pretty obvious: it includes our mobile texts, videos and photos; emails, PMs, IMs; our contribution to chat rooms, forums and mailing lists; our social networking activity (posting, sharing, messaging, writing on walls, updating statuses, twittering, linking); our contribution to social sharing sites (Youtube, Flikr), fan sites and collaborative sites (wikis); our amateur porn videos and texts; our blogs; our media productions (music, images, software), plus all our comments, lists, recommendations, responses... That's a fairly standard list of new media outlets and phenomena but what's interesting is how little attention a lot of this has still received: who, yet, has studied comments, personal messages, IMs, texts etc.? As I'll argue soon I’m not even sure this is possible.

If its treatment of letters, telegrams and telephone calls is anything to go by, media studies won't see most of this as particularly important. In contrast I'd argue that they're as important as and, collectively today, probably more important than the whole of traditional broadcast media. As I've suggested above, this is due to the sheer social fact of the centrality of their use, the volume of attention they receive and the intensity of personal meaning behind them, but there's also a historical reason why they're important.

To date the history of digital media forms and its uses has only partially been written. We have a history of the hardware and software and many of the ideas that underlie developments ('the virtual', 'cyberspace' etc.) but every new possibility of digital media requires us to discover a new history to situate it within. We do, however, need to understand the implications of this history. I was talking to a professor of media history who explained to me he'd been reading an article which showed how elements of social networking could be found in old newspapers and his tone clearly implied the conclusion that this meant none of it was new and thus was perfectly explained and not worth bothering with. 'History' had won again ... In fact, I pointed out, that research didn't exist until the success of social networking which proved the value of the new forms in forcing us to rewrite our histories and create new histories for the world we're living in. History had certainly won but older media historians, desperate to dismiss the present, hadn't.

It's in this spirit that I started to think about the possible histories of what I'm calling me-dia. That history is obviously multi-stranded and complex but there was one element - one historical resonance - in particular that intrigued me and that's what I want to describe here. I want to argue that the contemporary rise of me-dia constitutes a second reformation.

The Second Reformation

If we look back to the medieval world we can see that the Catholic Church had a dominant position in the lives of the European population. Seen from one point of view the Catholic Church can be thought of as a medium. It was a medium in two particular senses. Firstly it was an institutional form that distributed a single, uniform doctrine to the mass of the population, operating in a top-down, hierarchical fashion employing what technologies it had available (monasteries, manuscripts etc.) to mass-distribute its message. Here the Church operated as a broadcasting form, employing the same hub-and-spoke structure that linked people to it, rather than to each other. Secondly the institution acted as a medium for the individual's relationship with the divine. They were the appointed mediators of God's message and will. There were numerous causes of the Protestant Reformation one can point to but at the core were two processes: opposition to an organisational form (the top-down production and mediation of an institutional message) and a new emphasis upon the individual - the internal and the personal.

Martin Luther's objection to the sale of 'indulgences', or remittances for sin, was essentially motivated by the belief that only God could offer forgiveness. What lay behind that was his belief in the centrality of faith – of one's individual relationship to God. It was that, not the intervention or decisions of the church and its priesthood, that determined one's fate after death. His ideas were widely disseminated thanks to the printing press. Of his three famous pamphlets from 1520, 'On the Freedom of a Christian' expresses his ideas well. He asserts here two contradictory claims: 'A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none, a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone'. Explaining the first part Luther argues that 'As regards kingship, every Christian is by faith so exalted above all things that, in spiritual power, he is completely lord of all things'. Faith brings a spiritual (though not a corporeal) power: 'this is the inestimable power and liberty of Christians'.

In principle, therefore, even if not in fact on earth, the Christian individual is free. 'The inward man' is under no earthly spiritual authority, even if 'the outward man' is . We are, he concludes, 'fellow priests' with Christ. Here, therefore, is Luther's famous assertion that 'we are all equally priests'. He objects in particular to the injustice that took the word 'priests' from the body of Christians and gave it to 'those few'.

Here we see Luther’s two-pronged assault: an attack upon the Church as an organisational form (its priests and their selection and dissemination of God's message) and an emphasis instead upon faith. This faith represented the realm of the interior – the ‘inward’ – the individual’s personal relational existence. It was a realm of direct communication with another – the divine. It was the self itself as simultaneously a mode of being and a mode of expression and evidence. Luther’s attack was clearly unthinkable for an organization that insisted upon the shackling of the individual to it’s structures and doctrine. The claim that everyone was their own priest seemed fundamentally anarchic. And that’s because it was. Centuries later, in 1919 the German Dadaists would launch a journal Jedermann sein eigner fussball – ‘everyone his own football’, presenting us with a similar image of free, uncontrolled, unleashed participation. Imagine a football game in which everyone had their own football. Imagine a medieval world in which everyone really was their own priest.

Of course whatever the result of the Reformation, Luther’s opposition didn’t lead to the end of the Church and didn’t entirely free the individual in the way he’d hoped for. Instead the Reformation brought a fragmentation of the Church into many churches. One had more freedom to choose one’s priests but the organizational form per se survived, albeit it in different ways, within a changed theological and organizational ecology.

In foregrounding the interior self one of the lasting effects of the Reformation was to promote that nascent individualism already developing in Post-Rennaissance Europe and that would be carried forward in philosophical thought over the following centuries. Often this individualism was promoted as part of a theological conception of man. Descartes’ examination of the mind and its existence and concordance with an exterior reality in his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy , for example, was advanced with the aim of separating out two spheres, that of mind and matter, which would be the domain, respectively, of religion and science. The Cartesian individual, therefore, was not intended as a secularizing force, although that was perhaps its lasting impact. Science’s emphasis upon the individual’s senses as the basis of knowledge; the Liberal insistence of the centrality of the individual and their natural rights; the enlightenment’s emphasis upon the individual’s intellectual and moral reasoning, and nascent capitalism’s early consumer culture seducing the individual’s desires all propelled this increasingly secular individualism forward.

Slowly, gradually, in the centuries following Luther, all of these forces – the spread of print culture, the rise of modern science, the enlightenment and the industrial revolution – weakened the Church’s position as a culturally dominant organizational form broadcasting a single message to a captive population. It existed in this time in tension not only with a growing secularism but also with alternative sources of knowledge and information. The rise of mass media – through printing and the spread of pamphlets and newspapers – was a challenge to its own hub-and-spoke, mediatory dominance.

There were, of course, many differences between mass media broadcasting and the Catholic Church – the media weren’t unified as a single system to disseminate a single message and had a secular and commercial basis. Nevertheless it is possible to see the broadcast model that developed and intensified through the 18-19^th centuries and which became dominant through the 20^th century as echoing and playing an equivalent role as the Church. It followed the same broad, top-down model, employing far faster and more powerful technologies to distribute information to the new, modern masses, becoming the central source of all social knowledge beyond immediate experience for its populations. One might even suggest connectedness to its system became an equivalent moral duty. When in his 1988 book The Ecstasy of Communication Jean Baudrillard described the contemporary ‘categorical imperative’ of communication, it was more observation than metaphor.

The idea of mass media as replacing the Church is one that media studies has implicitly understood, even if the full implications were never drawn. There has been a long Durkheimian tradition of analysis of media events as social ‘rituals’, linking the communion of the religious experience to the communion offered by television. The most systematic presentation of this association is Dayan and Katz’’s 1992 Media Events, which presents collective television-watching as equivalent to a religious ceremony. Broadcast television, the message is, functions as our Church.

Interestingly there was an important early religious critique of broadcasting, simultaneously identifying the broadcast model as replacing the Church in its communicative and mediatory role and defending the Lutheran ‘inward man’ against the clamour of the press and ‘the public’. In 1846 Soren Kierkegaard published a book review, The Two Ages, part of which (published separately since as The Present Age) offers a reflection on his own time –a time that saw the beginning of industrial mass society make its mark in Copenhagen and the rise of mass and popular newspapers. Inspired as much by ‘the Corsair Affair’ – his ridicule in a satirical newspaper and the subsequent laughter and commentary upon his trousers by the public on the streets of Copenhagen – Kierkegaard launches a polemic against his age, the press and ‘the public’. The latter doesn’t even exist – it is ‘a phantom’, ‘a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage’, ‘a monstrous nothing’. Only in an age in which the power of association is too weak ‘to give life to concrete realities’ can the press ‘create that abstraction “the public”, consisting of unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization - and yet are held together as a whole’.

This abstract public ‘becomes everything’ and includes everything, exerting such a pressure that we desire to join it, to identify with it, to become part of its collective phantasmatic power ‘in comparison with which concrete realities seem poor’. More and more individuals, Kierkegaard says, aspire to join this nothing, to be nothing, forming an ‘indolent mass’, a ‘gallery’ that is ‘on the look out for distraction’ and that ‘abandons itself to the idea that everything that one does is done in order to give it (the public) something to gossip about’. If he had to imagine this public as a person, he says, ‘I should perhaps think of one of the Roman emperors , a large-well-fed figure, suffering from boredom, looking only for the sensual intoxication of laughter’. Hence the concrete reality of the individual and their inwardness is abolished in the desire to join this abstraction formed by a media organization that levels society, wasting the lives of each who succumbs. ‘The really terrible thing is the thought of all the lives that are or easily may be wasted … the many who are helpless, thoughtless and sensual, who live superior lazy lives and never receive any deeper impression of existence than this meaningless grin.’

Kierkegaard’s critique here is founded on a philosophy of communication that values, above all, the subjective individual and their inwardness – understood as a mode of being and a mode of communication: with oneself, with God and with others. This conception opposes the vulgar ‘sensual’ world of talkativeness, gossip, cheap pleasure, public ridicule and sensationalism emphasizing the value of each individual, the ethical and religious dimensions of their existence and the responsibility of the communicator to respect and raise these. At the heart of Kierkegaard’s critique of the press and of ‘the public’, therefore, is the Lutheran individual. Echoing Luther’s critique of the Catholic Church, at the dawn of modern broadcasting he identifies and critiques the abstract social forces it unleashes that abolish the ‘inward man’ and their personal, subjective interiority and individuality.

Stripped of its explicitly religious tone similar ideas made their way into Liberal political thought. By the mid 19^th century mass society was increasingly being recognized as a threat to the liberal individual, hence John Stuart Mill’s 1859 defence of ‘individuality’ in On Liberty against the ‘social tyranny’ of ‘public opinion’ and ‘the ape-like faculty of imitation’ that left little room for any other choice of path. Mill’s fears for the effect of this mass society and its mass communication system upon the individual were echoed again in the early 20^th century as the apparent success of propaganda in World War One, the success of newspapers and cinema and, very soon, radio, together with the development of the modern advertising and public relations industries all brought a renewed concern with the effect of mass media upon the individual.

By the 1930s the broadcast-era was in full-flower, assembling the combined forces of the ‘culture industry’ against them, under the guise, the Frankfurt School claimed, of expressing their individuality. A direct line can be followed here from Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique in ‘The Culture Industry’ of consumer culture’s ‘pseudo-individualisation’ and the underlying uniformity of broadcast media content; through Marcuse’s 1964 critique of industrially-manufactured and manipulated false needs in One Dimensional Man, to Debord’s 1967 Society of the Spectacle which presents an image of this realm of mass-mediated popular culture and its unilateral pleasures as the height of alienation and separation. The unilaterality of broadcast media becomes an overriding sign of this process; an idea Baudrillard would develop in his own radical Durkheimian symbolic critique of the semiotic.

These critical tradition, however, goes strongly against popular opinion which sees the realm of media-consumer culture precisely as a place and means of individualization. One’s choices, selections, tastes, purchases and identifications express and externalize one’s interior self and individuality. From this perspective, even if these products and programmes are mass produced and mass consumed there is enough variety for a personalized selection and enough common currency for others to recognize one’s choices within niche genres. Moreover the history of media studies is dominated by another tradition of reception and audience studies which, from the beginning, has tried to show how much more complex the consumption of media content is. The contemporary valorization of audience behaviour as a mode of self-production and its denial of media power seems to suggest the mass media didn’t entirely oppose the individual as this historical context claims.

Except what audience studies actually identified in its analysis of broadcast-era fan use and individual reception and what they ultimately valorized was the desire and even the demand for a mode of personal expression and individual meaning. Desperate to assert its reality in the broadcast-era they over-valorised what behaviour they could find. With the rise of contemporary digital media and its interactive and productive potential this audience studies erroneously saw its ideas of the active audience as realized, when actually the rise of the user was precisely at the expense of the audience, signaling a fundamental change in its existence and the value of the concept. Ultimately the greatest effect of the rise of the user wasn’t in the activity of the ‘audience’ member towards mass-produced and broadcast product but in the explosion of me-dia and the realm of personal meaning.

This explosion represents, I want to argue, a ‘Second Reformation’. Just as the first Reformation was marked by an assault upon a broadcast mode of organization in favour of the realm of the personal and interior and its expression, so the second Reformation – even if its secularity, cultural context and technological means are significantly different – directly echoes this. Like the Lutheran assault upon the Church, what we’re living through is a seismic shift in which one entire organizational mode of interconnection and mode of mass production, distribution and consumption of messages is overturned in favour of the emphasis on the personal and its expression. As in the first Reformation this isn’t leading to the final end of the organizational form it opposes, but instead to a fracturing and fragmentation, a proliferation of new ‘churches’ with their own hierarchies and priesthood (Facebook, Youtube, Flickr) and a funneling of individual expression and interiority into new forms.

At its heart though is a Lutheran ideal transformed for a different age. Just as the idea of every man as his own priest represented a fundamental assault upon the system, the institutions, the rules, the hierarchies, the interests and roles and economic, social and cultural privileges and epistemological framework of an entire age, so every man with his own blog, every man with his own video camera and every man with his own cam-phone represents an assault upon a system, a set of institutions, rules, hierarchies, interests, roles, privileges and the social epistemology of our age.

Digital media, of course, not only empower the individual, they are also used against that individual, allowing a greater monitoring, penetration and control of individual behaviour and activity than was possible in relation to broadcast-era technologies and media. From hardware design to the underlying structure of code, to the ability to trace, track, store and sort electronic records of use and the availability of content, the individual pays for their electronic freedom with its opposite. Government and industries use these technological capacities against us, often whilst promoting them as beneficial for us (cookies, for example, are explained as helping provide a better customer service).

Nevertheless there is a palpable confusion about and fear of digital media among all established hierarchies, boundaries, professions and authorities. The cam-phone waved in the face of authority; the conversations we have outside of the dominant communicational structures and messages; the material we share and swap, without a care about its legality or the whining complaints of the broadcast industries; the time we spend chatting to each other rather than buying daily newspapers or watching over-promoted films and TV shows; the ‘reality’ of our lives, footage and opinions that the broadcast media desperately want to co-opt, simulate or gather for themselves, and our lack of respect for the position, experience, opinions or claims of those who are used to having their status respected: in all of this professionals in government and industry are left behind, shocked, angered, and left trying to catch-up, to adjust to new realities or to shut the stable door. One can sense a seismic ripple through each established world, profession, industry, or branch of government as they grapple with this rise of the people.

I’m not sure we’ve even understood how to describe this popular movement. Andrew Keen and Lee Siegal picture this as the rule of the ‘electronic mob’ whilst authors like Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Charles Leadbetter, Jeff Howe, Chris Anderson and Dan Tapscott all implicitly valorize a Liberal individual – aggregated but (contrary to Mill’s fears) not lost in the mass; rational-critical, intelligent, creative and productive and moving in their aggregation to a greater state of enlightenment, whether in collaborative outputs, higher artistic or cultural products or the rise of wisdom to the top of the heap. Both positions are limited: the critical perspective ignores the value and quality of popular collaboration and participation and the Liberal ideal manages to avoid the mess, the filth, the nastiness, the negativity, the lack of rational-critical productivity of collective digital participation. Nor is this a simple democratization, nor a socialist power-to-the people nor anarchist vision: none of these political ideals or agendas fits the situation we find ourselves in. This isn’t a world of equality or agreed representation, nor one in which we are moving towards communal peace and satisfaction, nor self-ordered harmony.

We are closer, perhaps to the avant-garde experiments in participation: the provocations and invitations to interact and participate of the Futurist soirees and the Dadaist evenings and their methods. As I’ve suggested, ‘everyone his own football’ was the spiritual forerunner of the digital age: It is an image of a participatory moment; of a mode of liberatory inclusion whose outcome – whether good or bad – is secondary to the pleasure of the breaking of boundaries, rules and barriers.

If these claims have any validity then they provide a powerful indication of the historical significance of me-dia: the rise of me-dia is an event as momentous as the rise of the broadcast industries. It suggests that today these, the lowest forms of contemporary media – the mangled grammar of quickly-thumbed texts, the hasty video of friends on nights out, the lover’s pornographic ‘sexts’, the PMs and IMs and the wall comments and profile pictures – represent the most important contemporary forms. If pushed, most of us (on a personal level) would admit to this sentiment, even if we hold onto a residual belief that television, radio, cinema and newspapers must be more important really. History, however, might suggest that they’re not: the world of media has been shaken and threatened and, arguably, perhaps already eclipsed by the rise of me-dia.

Digital Media News: April 2009

2009-05-03T03:04:00.000-07:00

April 2009

DVDs/Copyright:

A court case starts about the legality of ‘RealDVD’, a technology allowing users to copy their DVDs onto their hard drive. RealNetworks claims it retains DRM and even adds extra protection but the MPAA and DCCA oppose it (30^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/30/realdvd-trial-dvd

Surveillance:

The government plans to monitor all internet use, asking communications forms to record all contacts between people (27^th April): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8020039.stm

Youtube:

Britain’s Got Talent contestant Susan Boyle becomes a Youtube internet sensation (26^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/26/susan-boyle-youtube-itv

Social Networking:

A Swiss women is fired after her employers spotted her using Facebook when she had claimed to be too ill to use a computer (25^th April): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8018329.stm

Broadband:

The government’s plans for universal broadband continue. They’re considering capping the amount of radio spectrum owned by Britain’s mobile phone companies (25^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/25/lord-carter-digital-britain-broadband

Print:
A revolutionary new ‘Espresso Book Machine’ launches in London. It will be able to print any book on its database in the shop as the customer waits (24^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/24/espresso-book-machine-launches

Apps:

Apple removes a baby-shaking game form its iPhone Apps store (24^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/24/apple-iphone-baby-shaker-application

Google:

Google Street-View gets the go ahead from the UK’s Information Commissioner who rejected privacy complaints (23^rd April): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8014178.stm See also (23rd April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/23/google-street-view-data-protection-cleared

Citizen Journalism:

A piece on the rise of sousveillance – ‘when all video all’ – and the use of cameras by ordinary people to hold the police to account during the G20 protests (21^st April): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8010098.stm

Crime/Security:

Almost 2 million PCs globally, including machines inside the US and UK governments have been taken over by hackers as part of a botnet operated from the Ukraine (21^st April): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8010729.stm

Politics/Blogs:

The BNP admits that some of its members are oddballs and liars in a memo to activists. Aware of the reputation of some of their members and their poor English they are dissuading them from officially linking themselves to the BNP in blogs and online postings, advising them that independent-looking postings are more persuasive (20^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/20/bnp-handbook-european-elections

Newspapers:

Peter Preston argues for an internet license fee to help save newspapers and traditional journalism (19^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/19/internet-licence-fee

Cyberwar:

Apple’s Ipod Touch is being given out to soldiers to help them make sense of data from drones, satellites and ground sensors (18^th April): http://www.newsweek.com/id/194623

Piracy:

A Swedish court hands down prison sentences and fines to four men behind the Pirate Bay website (18^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/18/pirate-bay-prison-sentences-sweden

Mobile Phones:

Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, saw profits fall 90% in the first three months of 2009 as cash-strapped consumers held onto their existing handsets or opted instead for Apple’s iPhone (17^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/17/nokia-profits-drop-iphone-apple

CyberCrime/CyberWar:

An article on cybercrime and nationalist attacks from China (16^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/16/china-cybercrime-hacking

Cyberwar:

A survey of cyberwarfare today (16^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/16/internet-hacking-cyber-war-nato

Online Advertising:

Amazon opts out of Phorm’s targeted advertising over the privacy fears of users (16^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/16/amazon-phorm-targeted-advertising

Surveillance:

The European Commission calls for the UK’s privacy laws to be strengthened to protect internet surfers, as it launches legal action against the government for breaching data protection and ePrivacy rules (15^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/15/internet-privacy-eu-legal-action

Future technology/Interfaces:

A demonstration of MIT’s new ‘SixthSense’ wearable, gesture-driven computing platform (14^th April): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7997961.stm

Amazon:

Amazon is discovered to have stripped many books of their sales rank, removing them from their charts and affecting customer search results. The books all have an adult content but gay and lesbian texts are hit especially hard. Complaints force an apology and an explanation (13^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/apr/13/amazon-gay-writers

Apps:

On the rise of the iPhone applications (12^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/12/iphone-applications-music-industry

Politics/Blogging:

A crisis engulfs Gordon Brown’s government as a key aide is forced to resign after leaked emails reveal his attempt to provide sexual smears against Conservative politicians for a pro-Labour blog (12^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/12/damien-mc-bride-labour-smear

Citizen Journalism:

On 1^st April 2009 Ian Tomlinson collapses and dies at the G20 protests in London. What follows is a remarkable example of old and new media working together. The Guardian follows up claims that he was struck by police before he died and their story attracts footage by people at the protests that cause the story offered by the police and much of the media’s account to collapse. Traditional journalism boosted by citizen journalism pursuing the facts of the case revealed considerable police mistreatment of protestors. Follow the story at:

(27^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/27/ipcc-police-g20-death-media

(26^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/26/g20-police-blog-assault

(21^st April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/21/g20-video-protest-policing

(20^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/20/police-assault-g20-protests

(19^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/19/police-g20-tomlinson-assault

(18^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/18/g20-ian-tomlinson-death

(18^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/18/ian-tomlinson-g20-police-officer

(17^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/17/ian-tomlinson-new-pictures-g20

(15^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/15/g20-police-assault-tomlinson-ipcc

(11^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/11/video-g20-ian-tomlinson

(9^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/09/g20-ian-tomlinson-police-video

(9^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/09/g20-police-assault-ian-tomlinson-g20

(9^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/09/g20-video-ian-tomlinson-death

(8^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/08/ian-tomlinson-g20-police-assault-footage

(8^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/08/ian-tomlinson-cameraman-inquiry

(7^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/07/video-g20-police-assault

Citizen Journalism:

An opinion piece on the ‘unstoppable rise’ of the citizen cameraman (11^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/11/public-camera-video-technology

Broadband:

The UK government’s plans for broadband for all are at risk (10^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/10/telecoms-broadband

Economics:

Microsoft and Yahoo revive talks about a search engine partnership to combat the growing power of Google (10^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/10/microsoft-yahoo-merger-talks

Television:

An article about how online content is going to enter the home through the TV (9^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/08/intenet-on-demand-tv-youtube

Virtual Worlds/Video Games:

An article about Sony’s new virtual world for kids ‘Free realms’ (9^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/09/sony-games-free-realms

Archives:

An article on the World Digital Library to be launched this month (9^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/09/world-digital-library

Gambling:

US prosecutors strike a deal to end a three-year clampdown on online gambling sites (8^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/08/online-gambling-partygaming-settlement

Twitter:

An uprising in Moldova is dubbed the ‘Twitter revolution’ after mass protests which began as a flash mob organised by Twitter, SMS and other social networking sites (8^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/08/moldova-protest-election-chisinau See also (16th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/15/moldova-activist-hiding-protests

Music:

Amazon’s challenge to iTunes continues. After launching its own DRM-free MP3 download store it now slashes prices on some downloads to 29p (8the April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/08/amazon-itunes-music-downlads-mp3

Broadband:

The Australian government launches a plan to extend broadband access across the country (7^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/07/broadband-internet-australia

Newspapers:

US news agency Associated Press threatens legal action against websites appropriating its content (7^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/07/associated-press-legal-action

Newspapers/Blogs:

The Huffington post, the New York based Liberal blog, sets up a fund to hire staff to preserve journalistic standards (6^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/06/huffington-post-us-newspaper-industry

Music:

The head of new service Spotify says fans will still buy music (6^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/06/spotify-digital-music-downloads

Wikipedia:

John Naughton defends Wikipedia (5^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/05/digital-media-referenceandlanguages

Twitter:

Demi Moore used twitter to intervene in the case of a woman who was feeling suicidal (4^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/04/demi-moore-twitter-avert-suicide-california

File-Sharing:

Swedish internet use plummets after the introduction of a law banning online piracy (4^th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/04/sweden-pirate-bay-filesharing-internet

Google/Privacy:

Villagers in a UK town force the Google streetview camera car to retreat (3^rd April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/03/google-street-view-broughton

Newspapers:

An article on the problems of local journalism and the possible impact on local democracy (3^rd April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/03/local-newspapers-journalism-democracy

Cinema:

A rough edit of the new X-Men movie Origins:Wolverine is leaked onto the internet a month before its release (2^nd April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/02/wolverine-xmen-leak-online-piracy

Online Advertising:

The digital technology company Phorm is facing a setback with many major dotcom companies considering boycotting its online advertising technology due to privacy concerns (2^nd April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/02/dotcom-boycott-advertising-phorm

Virtual Worlds:

An article about changes at Second Life to rejuvenate its business (2^nd April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/02/second-life-mark-kingdon

Privacy:

An article about the threat to privacy the mobile phone industry (2^nd April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/02/google-privacy-mobile-phone-industry

Newspapers:

The Guardian’s April fool joke is its claim that it’s switching to Twitter, digitising its archive and compressing every story into less than 140 characters. What’s good here is the obvious anxiety of the ‘old’ medium at the social use and significance of the newer one (1^st April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/01/guardian-twitter-media-technology

Digital Media News: February-March 2009

2009-05-03T02:30:00.000-07:00

March 2009

Online Advertising:

The EU signals new rules to protect privacy against online advertisers (31^st March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/31/online-adverts-eu-privacy-law

Surveillance:

The government is backing a project to install a ‘communication box’ in new cars to track their whereabouts anywhere in Europe (31^st March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/31/surveillance-transport-communication-box

Music:

Google launches a free music site in China as part of an attempt to compete with the dominant Chinese search engine Baidu (31^st March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/31/google-china-digital-music

Social Networking/Crime:

Police warn that a Facebook page showing CCTV images of a rape suspect could affect a prosecution. The woman’s partner put the images online in an attempt to identify the rapist (30^th March):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/30/rape-suspect-facebook-police-warning

Social Networking:

Myspace shrinks as rivals grab its users (29^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/29/myspace-facebook-bebo-twitter

Music:

An article praising the virtues of the 45rpm vinyl single (27^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/mar/27/45rpm-vinyl-singles

Newspapers:

The creator of the TV show The Wire warns about an explosion of corruption by politicians if the newspaper industry and journalism is allowed to collapse (27^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/27/david-simon-wire-newspapers

Future Technology:

An article on China’s investment in nanotechnology research (26^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/26/nanotechnology-china

Education:

In a shake-up of the primary school curriculum children will no longer have to study the Victorians and WWII but will be required ‘to master Twitter and Wikipedia’ (25^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/25/primary-schools-twitter-curriculum

Surveillance/Security:

On the use of virtual border patrol deputies on the US-Mexico border. With cameras that can be watched from any internet connection (23^rd March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/23/texas-mexico-patrol-webcam-australia

Surveillance:

The right to privacy is being broken by a quarter of the public databases, according to a new report (23^rd March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/23/dna-database-idcards-children-index

Newspapers:

A good article on the problems faced by the newspaper industry (23^rd March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/22/newspapers-layoffs-online-advertising

Television:

BSkyB is granted leave to appeal against the court ruling against its stake in ITV (21^st March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/21/bskyb-itv

Mobile Phones:

Sony Ericsson issues a profit warning due to a slump in mobile phone sales with the recession (21^st March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/20/sony-mobilephones

Bloggers:

An Iranian blogger dies in prison from an overdose a month after receiving a two and a half year sentence for insulting the country’s religious leaders (20^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/20/omidreza-mirsayafi-iran-blogger-rouznegar

Google Street-View:

Google launches street-view in the UK, soon coming under attack for its claimed invasion of privacy (19^th March+): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/19/google-street-view-uk See also: (20th March) http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/20/google-street-view1

(20^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/20/google-street-view And (21^st March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/21/google-street-view-privacy-images

Virtual Worlds:

The UK Home Office has defended its use of taxpayer’s money to set up an ‘innovations centre’ on Second Life (19^th March): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7952213.stm

Google:

Google’s legal fight with Louis Vuitton over the selling of trademark terms in its advertising continues (17^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/17/google-louis-vuitton-legal-battle

Mobile Phones:

Vodafone and O2 plan to pool their networks in the biggest shake-up of the UK’s mobile phone industry since the introduction of wireless broadband at the beginning of the decade (12^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/11/vodafonegroup-mobilephones See also (23rd March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/23/o2-vodafone-mobile-networks

Youtube:

A sandwich bar worker was filmed by a friend at work stuffing lettuce up his nose and the video was seen by a customer on Youtube. He avoided a jail sentence but was ordered to do 300 hours unpaid work (11^th March): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/7937945.stm

Social Networking:

Facebook launches an Arabic version (11^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/10/facebook-launches-arabic-version The BBC reports new versions in both Arabic and Hebrew (12^th March): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7939375.stm

File-Sharing:

The French government plans an anti-piracy bill that will punish downloaders by cutting off their internet access (11^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/11/france-internet-anti-piracy

Youtube/Music:

Youtube refuses to reverse its decision to block music videos for UK users after failing to reach a new licensing agreement with the performing rights society (10^th March): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7933565.stm

Security:

A police force loses a memory stick containing information on hundreds of police investigations (9^th March): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7932228.stm

Video Games:

An article about the thousands of Chinese ‘gold farmers’ working in virtual worlds for a living (5^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/05/virtual-world-china

Television:

ITV announces job cuts and changing plans as the recession and its economic position causes problems (5^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/05/itv-television-recession-michael-grade

Future Technology:

An article about the Pentagon’s investment in research into nanotechnology (5^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/05/micro-darpa-microchips

Future Technology:

A man who lost his sight 30 years ago can now see flashes of light after being fitted with a bionic eye (4^th March): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7919645.stm

Youtube/Crime:

A man has been fined £200 after posting a video on Youtube of the cannabis plants he was growing (4^th March): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/7922737.stm

Twitter:

A young British man dies snowboarding in the Alps despite a mountain rescue operation played out over Twitter (4^th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/04/twitter-death-entrepreneur-rob-william

Music:

Virgin Megastores announces it is pulling out of the US in another blow to real-world music retailing (3^rd March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/03/musicindustry-useconomy

Mobile Phones:

How mobile phones have transformed Africa (3^rd March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/03/mobile-phones2

Mobile Phones:

Mobile phone use passes a mile-stone as a UN report reveals that half the globe now pays to use one (3^rd March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/03/mobile-phones1

Crime/Social Networking:

Facebook is targeted by malicious hackers trying to steal data from its members (2^nd March): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7918839.stm

Surveillance:

An article about Westminster council’s CCTV control room: the ‘spy capital of the world’ (2^nd March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/02/westminster-cctv-system-privacy

February 2009

Newspapers:

An article on the problems newspapers face and the possibility of charging for online content (29^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/23/newspapers-online-content

Privacy:

The DNA details of 1.1m children are on the National DNA Database (27^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/27/dna-database-children-criminal-record

Social Networking:

A 16 year old from Essex is fired after describing her office job as ‘boring’ on Facebook (27^th Feb): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/7914415.stm

Mobile Phones:

O2 reports it has sold over a million iPhones in the UK (26^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/26/o2-rise-iphone

Surveillance:

An article about Sir David Omand’s new Institute of Public Policy Research paper and his warnings about a database state (25^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/25/database-state-ippr-paper

A related piece the same day traces the modes of surveillance we are moving towards: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/25/data-surveillance-identity

Video:

A young Indian woman is given police protection after a video clip of her undressing in a bedroom was circulated on the internet becoming India’s most searched item on Google (23^rd Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/23/privacy-law-internet-phone-video-india

Google:

Google scotches claims that users of its Google earth program have discovered Atlantis… (21^st Feb): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7903169.stm

Future Technology:

The iCub robot makes its UK debut (20^th Feb): http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5hP_LvoR-T3hcpH6Mq-l0ta7ZEVZw and http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/technology/s/1097231_cute_and_clever_meet_the_icub

Privacy:

A US judge dismisses a claim by a couple that Google Street View violates their privacy (19^th Feb): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7898407.stm

Mobile Phones:

Two of the world’s largest mobile phone companies – Telefonica (owners of 02) and the UK’s Vodafone warn that without a change in the European regulatory structure their business will suffer in the recession (18^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/18/mobile-telecoms-regulators

Privacy:

Facebook backs down on changes to its terms of service after outrage online (18^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/18/facebook-u-turn-on-privacy-changes and http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/19/facebook-personal-data

Mobile Phones:

Vodafone wins the race to sell the next generation of ‘Google phones’, planning to launch the ‘Magic’ phone in the spring (17^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/17/vodafone-google-phone

Music:

BSkyB announces its plans to launch a music download store to rival iTunes (16^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/16/bskyb-digital-music-service

Mobile Phones:

With sales of mobile phones down in the recession the only section of the industry showing growth is the ‘smart phone’ (16^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/15/mobile-world-congress-report-fewer-delegates

Television:

ITV puts Friends reunited up for sale as part of its cost-cutting drive in the face of the worst advertising downturn for a decade (15^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/15/itv-sells-friends-reunited A few days earlier an article discusses the problems ITV is facing (13th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/13/itv-staff-hundreds-job-cuts

Advertising:

How companies are using TV spots to launch their adverts online and how ads are becoming ‘cult’ videos (15^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/15/tv-ads-internet

File Sharing:

The trial is due to start in Sweden of four men behind the world’s largest filesharing site, ‘The Pirate Bay’ (14^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/14/pirate-bay-trial A few days later half the charges are dropped (17^th Feb): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7895026.stm

Social Networking:

Facebook pays $65m (£45m) to settle a rival’s claim that the site was its idea (13^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/13/facebook-inventor-claim-payout

Video Games:

An EU report suggests video games are good for children (12^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/12/computer-games-eu-study

Wikipedia:

Following a dispute at Prime Minister’s questions as to the date of Titian’s birth a Tory party worker at Conservative Central Office amended his Wikipedia entry to reflect David Cameron’s claims (12^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/12/gordon-brown-david-cameron-titian

Music:

An article on the UK launch of ‘Spotify’, the new ad-funded music streaming service and its problems with the music industry (11^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/11/digitalmusic-downloads

Crime:

Police are bing equipped with a new generation of data extraction devices to accelerate the downloading of information from seized mobile phones (10^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/10/police-checks-mobile-phones

Newspapers:

A discussion of the rise of online ‘comments’ sections at the end of articles and their ‘abuse’ by the public (9^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/09/newspaper-comment-pages

Privacy and Surveillance:

A series of articles on a new House of Lords report on surveillance in Britain (6^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/06/surveillance-freedom-peers see also http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/06/surveillance-privacy-dna-database and http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/06/surveillance-privacy-dna-database2

Social Networking:

A woman discovered her marriage was over when her husband announced it on Facebook (6^th Feb): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/7874273.stm

Cyberwar:

A report on cyberwar following the DDoS attack on Kyrgyzstan’s ISPs in January (5^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/05/kyrgyzstan-cyberattack-internet-access

Mobile Phones:

Mobile phone sales are falling as customers hold on their handsets and trade-down to cheaper deals -although the article doesn’t make the point that the ‘smart phone’ market is the one part of the industry holding up well (4^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/04/vodafone-nokia-mobile-phones

Economics:

Time Warner reports a $16bn loss in the fourth quarter of 2008, with cable subscription losses in the downturn being blamed for more than half of the loss (4^th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/04/time-warner-loss-16bn

Privacy:

Facebook intends to capitalise on its wealth of information it has about users by offering its 150 million-strong customer base to corporations as a research tool (1^st Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/01/facebook-seeks-to-exploit-user-information

Google:

Google announces an extension of its Google earth project that will map the world’s oceans and offer underwater imagery (1^st Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/01/google-earth-oceans-project

Digital Media News December 2008-January 2009

2009-02-21T04:11:00.000-08:00

January 2009

Internet:
A personal account of a marriage collapsing after one partner’s relationships on Facebook (31st Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jan/31/facebook-sex-divorce

Internet:
An article about the success of Lauren Luke on Youtube, a single mother from Tyneside whose video make-up tips have been watched more than 31m times (31st Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jan/30/lauren-luke-youtube-makeup

Digital Britain:
Lord Carter publishes his interim Digital Britain report (30th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/30/digital-britain-report-stephen-carter

Satellite Imagery:
An article on the positive uses of satellite imagery, such as disaster relief (29th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/28/satellite-photography-privacy

Computing:
Google plans to make PCs history – launching a service that would enable a user to access their personal computing from any internet connection. The ‘GDrive’ would store the user’s personal files and operating system on Google’s own servers. Privacy campaigners are obviously warning of the loss of control of user data and wider security issues (25th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/25/google-drive-gdrive-internet

Archives:
The head of the British Library warns of a ‘black hole’ of lost digital material unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records (25th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/25/preserving-digital-archive

Ecommerce:
The European Commission is investigating complaints about the tax advantages enjoyed by many leading online CD and DVD retailers in the UK who use a tax-dodge operating through the Channel islands (24th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/24/business-off-shore-tax

Economics:
Both Samsung and Sony report losses (23rd Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/23/samsung-first-quarterly-loss

Internet:
A woman is murdered by her estranged husband after she changes her marital status on her Facebook profile to ‘single’ (23rd Jan): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/staffordshire/7845946.stm

Internet:
The Pope launches his own Youtube channel (23rd Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/23/pope-youtube-channel A few days earlier newspapers report one convent in Spain has overcome its recruitment crisis by advertising on Youtube (17th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/16/nuns-turn-to-youtube-for-recruits

Television:
An article on the attempt to develop 3-D television (22nd Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/22/3d-television

Music:
A survey of the state of the digital music market, discussing the success of streamed, cloud-based listening sites (22nd Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/22/digitalmusic-drm

Cyborg Technology:
A student tells how he took minutes to adapt to his new i-Limb prosthetic hand (19th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jan/19/bionic-hand-amputation-accident

‘Internet Generation’:
Children are spending increasing amounts of their lives in front of televisions, computers and game consoles, according to new research (19th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jan/19/internet-generation-parents

Music:
According to a new IFPI report 95% of internet music downloads are illegal (17th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jan/17/music-piracy

Internet:
Police in Oakland, California arrest an ex-police officer over the killing of an unarmed man on New year’s Day. Videos taken by train passengers and uploaded onto Youtube showed the man sitting calmly on the platform shortly before a scuffle that saw him held down and shot in the back. The police officer refused to speak to investigators and resigned (15th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/15/usa-youtube

Internet:
An Oxford scientists has harnessed the power of the net in a ‘citizen science’ project in which the public helps to classify photographs of 1m galaxies (15th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/15/internet-astronomy

Internet:
Google extend their Google Earth imagery with access to high-definition scanned images from the Prado museum (14th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jan/14/museums-internet-google-earth-prado

Surveillance:
The Director of Public Prosecutions says Government plans for a ‘superdatabase’ tracking all phone and internet communications are ‘legitimate’ (10th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jan/09/dpp-keir-starmer-superdatabase

Music:
Apple drops DRM protection from its iTunes stores, so songs bought from the store will no longer be tied to ipods and users will be able to transfer their songs freely (7th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/06/apple-drops-itunes-copy-protection

Censorship:
China launches a crackdown on ‘vulgar’ websites (6th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/06/china-internet-censorship

Technology:
An article on the possible development of ‘wireless power’, broadcasting electricity through the air to power laptops etc. (4th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/04/wireless-power-technology-witricity

Mobile Phones:
An article about how Africa’s farmers are using mobile phones to help them find the best price for their crops (4th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/katine/2009/jan/04/katine-uganda-africa-mobile-phones

Internet:
The president of Guyana condemns a fake Facebook profile of himself (2nd Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/02/facebook-guyana-president-bharrat-jagdeo

December 2008

Video Games:
How a new generation of video games is being influenced by the success of social networking (29th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/29/social-networking-games-playfish-facebook

Advertising:
Online video technology form Blinkx has developed an integrated advertising system it hopes will generate revenues from he use of video online (29th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/29/blinkx-internet-video-advertising

Mobile Phones:
Thousands of British jobs in the mobile phone industry are expected to be lost as the networks look to cut costs in the face of fierce competition and the worsening economic condition (27th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/27/vodafonegroup-mobile-phones

Newspapers:
The internet overtakes newspapers for the first time as the major source of news in the US, according to a new survey (27th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/27/us-media-internet-newspapers-television

Internet/Music:
Warner Music Group falls out with Youtube over royalties and says it will pull hundreds of thousands of videos from the service after the renegotiation of a content-sharing deal fails (22nd Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/dec/22/warner-music-youtube

Internet:
A Chinese man bullied online for infidelity after his wife’s suicide has won the country’s first case against internet bullying (20th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/15/facebook-transplant-donor-campaign

Internet:
Online shopping surges in the run up to Christmas as department store sales slump to a record low (19th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/19/christmas-shopping-internet-retail

Television:
Sky unveils plans to launch a 3-D TV service within two years (19th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/19/sky-3d-television

Internet:
Internet and phone traffic between Europe, Asia and the Middle east are disrupted after a severed cable 130km off Sicily (19th Dec): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7792688.stm

Interfaces:
An article on attempts to integrate the 3D spaces of virtual worlds into the web for a seamless experience (18th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/18/3d-web

Privacy:
Yahoo announces it will cut the length of time it retains information about what its users are doing online from 13 months to 90 days before anonymising the data (18th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/18/yahoo-google-privacy-user-information

Internet:
A court in Australia has approved the use of Facebook as a means of notifying a couple they have lost their hoe after defaulting on a loan (17th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/17/facebook-australia-court-loan-default

Mobile Phones:
North Korea launches a restricted mobile phone service – an unusual move in a country where state controls of communication are so strong (16th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/18/yahoo-google-privacy-user-information

Internet:Facebook users are coming to the aid of children who need life-saving transplants (15th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/15/facebook-transplant-donor-campaign

Internet:Virgin unveils its new super-fast (50 Megabits per second) broadband service (15th Dec): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7776139.stm

BBC:
The BBC reveals its controversial plans to share online and digital content (12th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/12/bbc-internet-digital-technology

Virtual Worlds:
A Virtual world for Muslims launches (9th Dec): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7768601.stm See also (11th Dec) http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/11/muxlim-virtual-world-mmorpg

Censorship:
Britain blocks pages on Wikipedia showing an album sleeve by The Scorpions which shows a naked young girl (9th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/09/wikipedia-censorship-scorpions-sleeve

Newspapers:
The US Tribune Company, a ‘media powerhouse’ and owners of titles such as the LA Times and Chicago tribune moves to file for bankruptcy in the latest blow to the US newspaper industry (9th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/09/tribune-company-chicago-media-bankruptcy

Law:
A student who created a Facebook group critical of a teacher sues the school for violation of her free speech rights (9th Dec): http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/12/us-student-inte.html

Music:
Leona Lewis has the fastest-selling digital track ever with her cover of Snow Patrol’s ‘Run’ (8th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/dec/08/leona-lewis-run

Economics:
An article on how the UHF network that carries analogue national TV will be sold off with the digital switchover and how this will usher in a new generation of super-fast broadband and high-definition TV (7th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/07/uhf-network-television-switchover-digital

Social Networking:
An article on Facebook groups (5th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/05/facebook-groups-social-networking

Surveillance:
The fingerprints and DNA samples of over 857 000 innocent people now have to be wiped from police records after a legal ruling (5th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/dec/05/dna-database-civilliberties

Surveillance:
New requirements that Chinese internet cafes install Chinese-developed operating systems raise new concerns over cyber-snooping (4th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/04/china-privacy-cyber-snooping

Television:
Ambitious plans for ‘Project Kangaroo’, an online video-on-demand service bringing together 10 000 hours of shows from BBC, ITV and C4 suffer a negative report from the Competition Commission which rules that it would reduce competition in the UK (4th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/04/kangaroo-project-competition-commission-report

Future:
Transhumanism’s dreams of downloading into robot prostheses might be a step nearer… scientists create the illusion of out-of-body experiences, showing that it is easy to trick people into thinking they are inside another body (3rd Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/dec/03/phantom-limb-pain-brain-science

Economics:
The Royal Mail’s letter’s business is being hit by competition from electronic alternatives such as email and messaging (1st Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/01/royal-mail-email-internet

November Digital Media News Stories

2008-12-20T06:50:00.001-08:00

Computing:
The mouse turns 40 (30th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/30/computer-science-it-mouse

Searching:
The leading Chinese search engine has been accused of allowing unlicensed medical services to buy high search rankings (29th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/29/china-baidu-internet

Television:
An article on the 20th anniversary of satellite TV (29th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/29/digital-media-television-simon-garfield

Twitter:
A new mode of citizen journalism comes to the fore during the 26th-29th November Mumbai terror attacks – live updates by those caught up in the shootings via Twitter (28th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/28/mumbai-terror-attacks-india-internet-technology-twitter See also (1st Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/01/mumbai-terror-digital-media

Mobile Phones:
Apple has another iPhone ad banned after ‘really fast’ internet access claims (27th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/27/iphone-apple-advertising-ban

Music:
Digital sales overtake CD sales at Atlantic Records – the first label where this has happened (27th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/nov/27/digital-music-atlantic-records

Surveillance:
The Guardian newspaper hires its own satellite and manages to track down the hijacked Sirius Star Saudi supertanker off Somalia (27th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/27/piracy-somali-saudi-supertaker-aden

Privacy:
A feud between two TV anchors at Philadelphia’s local CBS station leads one to snoop on the other’s emails, leading to a court case and his sacking (26th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/26/cbs-news-presenters-lane-mendte

Porn/Privacy:
Salon.com offer an article on the rise in ‘upskirt’ photography and the posting of material on the internet (25th Nov): http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/11/25/upskirting/print.html

Internet:
Police in Florida are investigating after a teenager appeared to kill himself live on the internet after being goaded by other web surfers (22nd Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/22/internet-live-suicide

Print:
Newspapers are delighted as the BBC scraps its plans to deliver local news content on the web (22nd Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/22/bbc-internet-local-news

Internet:
The EU’s prototype digitisation of material from its most important libraries and museums etc. crashes with 10m hits an hour on its launch day (21st Nov):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/21/eu

Cyberwar:
China winning cyberwar, Congress is warned (21st Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/20/china-us-military-hacking

Privacy:
A BNP membership list is leaked online, leading to police and other services scanning the members for serving officers. Exposed members are contacted by the press for comments (20th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/nov/19/police-bnp-far-right-list

Digital Media Use:
A report o our ‘digital addiction’ – our digital media use (20th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/20/digital-communications-phones

Internet:
Fears over Australia’s plans to impose compulsory filters over net content (20th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/20/australia-internet-filter-censorship

Virtual Worlds:
Victor Keegan on the rise of virtual worlds and his own experience of Second Life (16th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/16/virtual-worlds-second-life-internet

Politics:
A story about how Obama will take presidential radio broadcasts into the digital age. This week he reached out to the American public using a Youtube video (16th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/16/obama-white-house-barackobama

Internet:
The UK government back the idea of naming and shaming ISPs over the speed with which they take down offensive material (15th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/15/internet-children

Virtual Worlds:
A Second Life affair leads to a real-life divorce. A couple who met in an internet chatroom and moved in together in RL argued after he was caught having sex with a prostitute in Second Life. They split up in SL though stayed together in RL. Then she set a ‘honey trap’ in SL to test her husband again which he passed and they got back together in SL, marrying in a SL ceremony. They soon married in RL too in a 2005 ceremony. She then found her husband chatting with a woman in SL and filed for divorce in RL … The story then goes global … (14th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/14/second-life-virtual-worlds-divorce The story then develops as a pair of reporters logging onto SL get the interview scoop RL reporters camped outside the couple’s home couldn’t get (14th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/14/digitalmedia-secondlife The BBC coverage also offers an explanation of avatar sex (14th Nov): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7729207.stm

Searching/Tracking:
Google uses its data collection power to predict the spread of flu up to two weeks in advance of existing public services (13th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/13/google-internet

Virtual Worlds:
Users of Google earth can now navigate a virtual reconstruction of ancient Rome on 1st April AD320 (13th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/13/italy-google-earth-ancient-rome

Social Networking:
After blocking US military access to Youtube the Pentagon unveils its own ‘Trooptube’ video-sharing service to aid family communication for serving forces (13th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/13/us-military-censorship-networking-communication

Software:
An article on the problems of licensing software (13th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/13/software-research

Nanotechnology:
A report by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution questions the safety of nanomaterials in our products (12th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/nov/12/nanotechnology-pollution

War:
News of more than a dozen foreign raids by US forces against Al-Qaida, often using electronic surveillance and reconnaissance such as Predator drones: rais included ‘a 2006 navy Seal raid on a suspected militant compound in Pakistan's Bajaur region. The CIA watched the entire operation live in Virginia through a camera mounted on a Predator drone.The unmanned Predators have become an increasingly popular tool of the CIA and US military forces. More and more Predators are being switched from Iraq to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, partly to step up the hunt for Bin Laden in the last days of the Bush administration and partly because of the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan’ (11th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/11/cia-rendition-raids-al-qaida

Politics:
John Naughton on the failure of the US Republican party to use digital media as successfully as Obama in their presidential campaign (9th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/09/youtube-technology-internet-election-campaign

Television:
An article on the Virgin media chief discussing the recent settlement with Sky over their channels and the state of Virgin TV and the digital TV market (7th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/nov/07/virgin-media-neil-berkett-interview

Television:
ITV sees its revenues slide again as advertising downturn and online shift takes hold (6th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/06/itv-television-advertising-sales

Theory:
An article on Ray Kurzweil and the idea of the ‘singularity’ (6th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/06/artificialintelligenceai-engineering

Surveillance:
A Chinese official is sacked over claims he assaulted a girl at a restaurant. Video footage led to his identification by Chinese internet users – the human search engine (5th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/05/china-lin-xiaxiang-communist-party

Television:
Sky and Virgin end their actions and channels row (5th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/05/bskyb-virgin-media-richard-branson

Nanotechnology:
A Which report questions the safe use of nanoparticles in cosmetics (5th Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/nov/05/cosmetics-beauty-nanoparticles-royal-society

Privacy:
Virgin sacks 13 after staff post comments on Facebook referring to passengers as ‘chavs’ (1st Nov): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/nov/01/virgin-atlantic-facebook

September-October Digital Media News Stories

2008-12-20T06:48:00.000-08:00

October 2008

Privacy/Social Networking:
Cory Doctorow on privacy in the digital age (31st Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/31/civil-liberty-information-database-jacqui

Print:
A breakthrough deal between Google and the US book industry to sell book content online (29th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/29/google-books-publishing-online-royalties

Security:
The government’s official privacy watchdog warns of the security dangers of bigger databases (29th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/29/data-security-breach-civil-liberty

Computing:
Microsoft unveils Windows 7 (29th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/29/microsoft-windows-7

Music:
UK Music, A new umbrella organisation, is formed to represent the British music industry and fight piracy, headed by Feargal Sharkey (27th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/27/feargal-sharkey-music-piracy

Virtual Worlds/Crime:
Associated Press in Tokyo report: ‘A 43-year-old Japanese piano teacher's sudden divorce from her online husband in a virtual game world made her so angry that she logged on and killed his avatar digital persona. The woman, who used his identification and password to log on to the interactive game Maple Story in May, was arrested on suspicion of illegal access to a computer and manipulating electronic data, police in Sapporo City said. If charged and convicted she could face a prison term of up to five years or a fine of up to £3,100. The man complained to police when he discovered that his online avatar was dead’ (24th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/24/4

Music:
An article on the continuing popularity of sampling (24th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/oct/24/electronicmusic-urban

Piracy:
Chinese internet users are angry after Microsoft launch an anti-piracy tool to combat fake software (23rd Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/23/microsoft-china-software-piracy

Video games:
An article on the problems of the UK games industry (23rd Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/23/games-industry

War/Terrorism:
Analysts suspect a systematic cyber-attack on Al-Qaida websites by western security services (22nd Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/22/alqaida-terrorism-internet

Television:
A complaint that rural viewers will be hit by the digital television switchover as the government has refused to make sure all the broadcasters using Freeview will offer a full service for every home (20th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/20/freeview-rural-country-digital-discrimination

Crime:
A motorcyclist is jailed for 12 weeks after posting videos of himself doing stunts and speeding at 130mph on Youtube (21st Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/20/youtube-ukcrime

Crime:
A secret website for fraudsters to buy and sell stolen credit card details has been shut down (18th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/18/internet-identityfraud-darkmarket

Video:
A new viral video success – footage of a UK basketball player running rings around a visiting US NBA professional (17th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/oct/17/gbbasketball-ussport

Censorship:
The website of turkey’s third largest-selling newspaper has been blocked after a complain by an Islamic creationist (17th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/17/turkey-religion

Crime:
A man murders his wife because of posts she made on Facebook after they split up (17th Oct): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7676285.stm

Internet/Future:
On the movement towards an ‘internet of things’ (16th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/16/internet-of-things-ipv6

Privacy:
The government is drawing up plans for new powers for the security and intelligence agencies allowing them to access personal data online (16th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/16/internet-uksecurity

Virtual Worlds/Video Games:
A new football game will offer off-pitch action as well as matches, mixing the appeal of console games with virtual worlds (14th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/14/games-digitalmedia

Cyberwar:
Hackers force a leading pan-Arab TV station to change its internet domain name (13th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/13/middleeast-internet

Radio:
Hard-up Channel 4 axes its plans for a string of new digital radio stations to challenge the BBC (11th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/11/digitaltvradio-channel4 See also the article at (13th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/13/channel4-radio-digital A few days later figures show that despite C4’s fear digital radio listening continues to increase (17th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/17/digitaltvradio-channel4

Information:
A computer hard-drive with the private details of 100 000 armed forces personnel has gone missing (11th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/oct/11/military-defence

Future;
An article on developments in artificial life (9th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/09/artificial.intelligence.ai.robots

Censorship/Law:
South Korea plans to use the law to control internet postings and content (9th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/09/news.internet

Video:
The rise of ‘the Youtube generation’ (6th Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/06/youtube.youngpeople

Mobile Phones/Music:
Nokia seeks to challenge the iPhone with the launch of a new touchscreen phone with unlimited music (the ‘Comes With Music’ service) (3rd Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/03/nokia.nokia

Video:
A University investigates a drunken student initiation videoed by a journalism student (3rd Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/oct/03/students.highereducation

Print:
Cambridge scientists launch a three year project to create the next generation of epaper, allowing full-colour, interactive electronic magazines and newspapers (2nd Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/09/news.internet

Mobile Phones:
A Spanish mortuary has begun offering condolences by text message for time-pressed or distant mourners (1st Oct): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/01/spain

September 2008

Television:
BSkyB loses its legal battle over its 17.9% stake in ITV (30th Sept): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/30/bskyb.itv

Video:
An article on the new viral web video craze – subtitled Hitler videos (28th Sept): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/28/youtube.internet

Music:
The charts try to keep pace with the changing consumption of music by including a ‘subscription plays chart’ (24th Sept): http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/sep/24/internet

Mobile Phones:
Google makes its handset debut with its first mobile phone, the G1 (22nd Sept): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/22/google.mobilephones
See also (24th Sept): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/23/google.apple

China/Internet:
A story about China’s online ’50 cent army’ – how it is paying people to post online messages promoting or supporting government policies (22nd Sept): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/22/chinathemedia.marketingandpr

Security:
A strike threat by prison officers after data is lost containing the personal details of 5000 justice staff (8th Sept): http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/sep/08/prisonsandprobation.justice

Internet:
An article on Google on the occasion of its launch of a new browser, ‘Chrome’ (7th Sept): http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article4692267.ece

Television:
TV’s viewing decline slows but the young are still turning the TV off. Mainstream TV is trying to find new ways to attract desirable audiences (6th Sept): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/06/television.bbc

Print:
The launch of the new Sony Reader, a £199 electronic reader that holds up to 160 books (5th Sept): http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/05/ebooks.sony

Music/Mobile Phones:
Nokia’s assault on the iPhone arrives: a range of phons that will allow the downloading of up to 2.1m songs onto their computer and then their phone for no extra charge for 12 months (2nd Sept): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/02/nokia.nokia

The Challenge of New Media - One day forum, UWE, Bristol

2008-09-28T02:57:00.000-07:00

Jon Dovey and Martin Lister of the Department of Culture, Media and Drama and the Faculty of Creative Arts at UWE, Bristol, are organising a one-day forum on issues around media studies and Media Studies 2.0 entitled 'The Challenge of New Media'.

It's on the 12th December 2008 at the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol.

Martin Lister will provide an introduction, locating the issues, I'm going to be arguing the case for the renewal of a failing discipline and Jon Dovey will offer a response to the case. The day will also include chaired discussion groups around the arguments, a consideration of student and employer experiences and case studies on issues around teaching and learning.

For more information contact the organisers.

New Book: Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories

2008-09-21T04:05:00.001-07:00

Coming out any day now in hardback, a new book co-edited by myself, David Clarke, Marcus Doel and Richard Smith (Swansea University) - Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories. Email the publisher Routledge and ask for a paperback edition as soon as possible.

It's based on the 2006 conference, 'Engaging Baudrillard', held at Swansea. Baudrillard couldn't attend due to illness but he sent a new essay, 'On Disappearance' which is included here (along with another essay by him - a 1992 lecture published for the first time).

Contents:

Introduction The evil genius of Jean Baudrillard David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, William Merrin and Richard G. Smith

1. The vanishing point of communication- Jean Baudrillard

2. On disappearance - Jean Baudrillard

3. Commentaries on Jean Baudrillard’s ‘On disappearance’ - Rex Butler, David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, Gary Genosko, Douglas Kellner, Mark Poster, Richard G. Smith, Andrew Wernick

4. Baudrillard’s taste - Rex Butler

5. Floral tributes, binge-drinking and the Ikea riot considered as an up-hill bicycle race - William Merrin

6. Better than butter: margarine and simulation - Gary Genosko

7. Baudrillard and the art conspiracy - Douglas Kellner

8. ‘Mirror, mirror:’ The Student of Prague in Baudrillard, Kracauer and Kittler - Graeme Gilloch

9. The Gulf War revisited - Philip Hammond

10. Fate of the animal - Paul Hegarty

11. Reality: now and then: Baudrillard and W-Bush’s America - Diane Rubenstein

12. Baudrillard’s sense of humour - Mike Gane

13. The (un)sealing of the penultimate - Andrew Wernick

The Amazon link:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jean-Baudrillard-International-Library-Sociology/dp/0415464420/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221995519&sr=8-2

Tara Brabazon on Textbooks

2008-09-21T04:01:00.000-07:00

Prof. Tara Brabazon of the media studies department at the University of Brighton recently published this discussion of textbooks as a response to my own critique: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=403362

New Book: Copy, Rip, Burn

2008-09-21T03:56:00.000-07:00

My colleague at Swansea, David Berry has just published Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source, with Pluto Press.

From the Amazon blurb:

Open source technology, like OpenOffice, has revolutionised the world of copyright. From downloading music and movies to accessing free software, digital media is forcing us to rethink the very idea of intellectual property. While big companies complain about lost profits, the individual has never enjoyed such freedom and autonomy in the market. Berry explores this debate in a clear and concise way, offering an ideal introduction for anyone not versed in the legalistic terminology that - up until now - has dominated coverage of this issue. Looking at the impact that the open source movement has had on journalism, printing, music and design, they show how the ideas that inspired the movement have begun to influence wider cultural and political transformations. This is a key text for students of media studies, journalism and anyone interested in new opportunities for creating a truly independent and democratic media.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Copy-Rip-Burn-Politics-Source/dp/0745324142/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221994678&sr=8-1

Available now!

MS2.0 Paper - Lincoln University 22nd Oct

2008-09-21T03:17:00.000-07:00

I'm giving the following paper at Lincoln University on 22nd October:

'Ask the Audience' and 'Say What You See'? ... Time to Upgrade Media Studies

Abstract:

Media studies was a product of the broadcast era, originating with the rise of broadcast media and limiting itself to the study of their mass communication. Unable to study media production, hostile to technology and with a limited interest in theoretical and historical issues, media studies gradually became dominated by an emphasis upon audience research and analyses of broadcast content. In an ironic reflection of the media it claimed to study, ‘ask the audience’ and ‘say what you see’ became the central disciplinary research methods and knowledge. The passage to a post-broadcast era, however, requires a corresponding disciplinary change: one that upgrades the discipline to reflect contemporary digital changes, rethinks its organising categories and returns to broader and more diverse intellectual and media histories to understand a changed media ecology. This is a call for a new media studies: a Media Studies 2.0

It's part of the Research & Professional Practice Seminar Series in the Faculty of Media, Humanities & Technology. From 5pm.

July-August Digital Media News

2008-09-21T01:27:00.000-07:00

August 2008

Music:
An article on some of the forgotten pioneers of electronic music (29th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/aug/29/electronicmusic See also (20th Sept): http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/sep/20/bbc.doctorwho

Internet:
In an interesting example of cross-media fertilisation and old-new media relationships, the creator of West Wing is planning a film about Facebook (29th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/aug/29/facebook

Internet:
Photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls will now go online in a five year project (28th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/aug/28/archaeology.israelandthepalestinians

Advertising:
Online advertising is predicted to grow again this year to overtake radio as the 3rd largest market (behind TV and newspapers/magazines) (28th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/28/advertising.mediabusiness

Security:
An article about Captcha – Completely Automated Public Turing Tests – those squiggly numbers and letters you have to type to prove you are human rather than an automated machine. Experts now say that they have been broken by spammers (28th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/28/internet.captcha

Music:
A new website will offer music fans the chance to invest in artists in £10 increments up to a pre-ordained level when it will fund the recording of an album. Investors will then get a copy of the album and a percentage of profits plus other perks (27th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/aug/27/musicindustry.investing

Censorship:
A Turkish court lifts the ban on Youtube imposed since May after videos were posted deemed insulting to the modern state’s founder (26th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/26/turkey.youtube

Censorship/Control:
iTunes users in China are blocked from downloading music after an album calling for greater rights for Tibetans was placed on the site (22nd Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/22/olympicsandthemedia.apple

Future Technology:
An article about the idea of intelligent swarms of autonomous robots for military information gathering and reconnaissance (21st Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/21/robots.researchanddevelopment

Internet:
An article about changes to Ebay’s business model (20th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/aug/20/ebay.efinance See also (10th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/aug/10/ebay.efinance

Video-Games/Crime:
A British woman is ordered to pay a US games company £16000 after illegally sharing its files over the internet (19th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/19/piracy.games

Mobile Phones:
Vodafone raises its charges in an attempt to claw back revenues lost through increased regulation (19th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/aug/19/vodafonegroup.telecoms

Internet:
An article on a new cable linking east Africa to the net (18th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/18/east.africa.internet

Internet:
An article on Google (17th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/17/googlethemedia.google

Economics:
Google ‘pipped’ by Apple, as their market-share overtakes their hi-tech rival’s, a success attributed in part to the new iPhone (15th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/15/apple.apple

Television:
A story about fundamental changes in television viewing in the digital, post-broadcasting ecology (14th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/14/ofcom.digitaltvradio

Crime:
Blogs are increasingly a target for site hackers (14th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/14/blogging.hacking

Privacy:
Local councils, health authorities and hundreds of other public bodies are to be given the power to access details of everyone’s personal texts, emails and internet use under Home Office proposals (13th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/aug/13/privacy.civilliberties

Mobile Phones:
A poolside row between two of Britain’s Olympic swimmers affected their final performance and prevented them winning a medal. The row was because one of the two divers took exception to the other receiving a mobile phone call from their mother as they were preparing for their sixth dive (12th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/aug/12/olympics2008.tomdaley

Mobile Phones:
Watchdog urges mobile companies to improve their age filtering for phone content (12th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/aug/12/telecoms.internetphonesbroadband

Mobile Phones:
3’s sale of over 100 000 Skype phones highlights the growing attraction of free internet-based telephony, but there are problems here for the economics of the industry (11th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/aug/11/telecoms.telecoms

Mobile Phones:
Ikea launches a ready-made mobile phone service through T-Mobile (9th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/aug/09/internetphonesbroadband.consumeraffairs See also (4th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/04/telecoms.ikea

Old Media:
ITV down £1.5bn as falling advertising revenue begins to bite. The problems of old media with changes in advertising placement (7th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/07/itv.advertising

Internet:
On life after death – user profiles of dead people on social networking sites (7th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/07/socialnetworking.myspace

Crime:
A Spanish hacker is jailed for two years for sending out the private emails of their ex-manager (6th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/06/hacking.email

Video Games:
Sales of Grand Theft Auto are halted in Thailand after a teenager allegedly killed a taxi driver to re-enact scenes from the video game, to find out if robbery was as easy as it was depicted (5th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/05/games.thailand

Internet:
Coverage of the Facebook-organised water fight ‘splash-mob’ at Kensington Gardens that ended with violence and arrests (4th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/aug/04/facebook.socialnetworking The Daily Mail has a picture of the violence: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1040056/Pictured-The-moment-man-punched-girl-feet-Facebook-water-fight.html

Networks:
Proof that there are 6.6 degrees of separation between people (3rd Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/03/internet.email

Internet
British broadband suppliers are hit by the housing crisis and falling demand (1st Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/aug/01/internetphonesbroadband.internet

July 2008

Future Technology:
An article on mechanical creatures and our relationships with them (31st July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/31/robots.artificialintelligence

Privacy:
Google’s ‘street view’ service cameras can be used in the UK after a privacy watchdog said it had no complaints about the service (31st July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/31/google.civilliberties

Internet:
UK MPs tell internet firms to police the ‘dark side’ of the web (31st July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/31/internet.youtube

Crime:
British hacker who broke into the Pentagon loses their battle against extradition to the US (31st July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/31/hacking.hitechcrime plus their appeal a month later (28th Aug): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/28/hacking.security

Internet:
The government has set a target to cut film and music filesharing by 80% by 2011 (25th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/jul/25/downloads.digitalmedia

Internet:
A man is ordered to pay £22000 in damages after setting up a fake Facebook profile to spread lies about an ex-friend (25th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jul/25/law.facebook

Mobile Phones:
A leading cancer expert tells his staff to limit their mobile phone use (25th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/25/mobilephones.health

Interfaces:
An article on the rise of the touch-screen and its limits (24th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/24/news.computing

Music:
Sky sets up rival to iTunes with a deal with Universal music for a new subscription music service (23rd July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/23/bskyb.musicindustry

Internet:
A wife’s rant on Youtube about her husband that attracted 4m viewers was used by him in his divorce claim. The judge agreed with his claims of ‘spousal abuse’ (23rd July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/23/usa.youtube

Video:
A human rights-group praises video as a new weapon against the Israeli army after footage of a soldier firing baton rounds at a blindfolded and cuffed Palestinian detainee emerged (22nd July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/22/israelandthepalestinians.humanrights

Music:
A story about how the music industry is adapting to the new digital times (21st July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/21/marketingandpr.mediabusiness

Privacy/Surveillance:
A secret study in Bath tracks tens of thousands of people without their consent using scanners to capture Bluetooth radio signals from phones, laptops and cameras (21st July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jul/21/civilliberties.privacy

Internet:
A story about the hit website 4chan and its comedy viral ‘memes’ (20th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/20/internet.google

Pathologies:
Hi-tech is turning us all into distracted time-wasters psychologists warn (20th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jul/20/psychology.mobilephones

Internet/Ecommerce:
A story about how HMV is able to offer cheaper products online due to its use of Jersey to avoid the 17.5% British VAT and how it is installing kiosks in its physical stores for customers to order online in-store (19th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jul/19/hmvgroupbusiness.retail

Mobile Phones:
The European Commission threatens enforcement action against hundreds of European websites conning young people into taking out expensive mobile phone contracts (18th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jul/18/telecoms.eu

Security:
A computer technician is charged with launching a cyber-coup against the city of San Francisco (18th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/18/hitechcrime.internet

Internet/Ecommerce:
Online sales are booming as consumers switch from traditional shops (18th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jul/18/retail.internet

Video Games:
A changing economic climate means that more video games are being cancelled due to development costs (17th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/17/it.games

Crime:
A teenage hacker in New Zealand who pleaded guilty to hacking into computers around the world and accused of stealing millions of pounds has been discharged without a conviction (16th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/16/hacking.security

Privacy/Surveillance:
The UK information commissioner warns about a Home Office project to create a ‘super-database’ tracking all phone, email, text and internet usage (16th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/16/telecoms.privacy

Internet:
BT aims for faster broadband and higher margins with a new £1.5bn fibre-optic network (16th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/16/bt.digitalmedia

Mobile Phones:
The EC puts forward proposals to cut the cost of ‘roaming’ texts by 66% (16th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/16/mobilephones.telecoms

Internet:
A story about the hit Youtube amateur instruction videos (14th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/14/digitalmedia.youtube

Internet:
Bloggers spot that Iranian photos of a missile launch have been photoshopped to add a missile that failed to launch (11th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/11/iran.israelandthepalestinians

Security:
An internet flaw leads to the biggest security fix in web history (10th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/10/hacking.internet

Control:
An agreement about intellectual property rights to be ratified by the G8 heads highlights conflicts between ownership and privacy (10th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/10/intellectualproperty.law

Social Networking:
A soldier who bragged on Facebook that he’d served with the SAS and killed over 100 people has resigned from the army after being exposed as a fantasist by genuine soldiers (9th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jul/09/military.facebook

Economics:
The Microsoft-Yahoo takeover continues as Microsoft says it will talk to yahoo if it replaces its board (8th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jul/08/microsoft.yahoo

Mobile Phones:
O2 and T-Mobile double the minimum connection charge for many prepay customers following Vodaphone’s similar rise last month. Coinciding with plans by the EC to cut the cost of connection charges, networks are trying to claw back lost revenue (5th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jul/05/telecoms.mobilephones

Internet:
Google is asked to hand over the personal details of every person who has ever watched a video on Youtube to Viacom. Civil liberties groups are unhappy at the court ruling (4th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/04/youtube.google

Economics/Mobile Phones:
Vodaphone buys a 70% stake in Ghana Telecommunications for £452m (3rd July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jul/03/vodafonegroup
(see also 4th July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jul/04/vodafonegroup.telecoms

Future Technology:
A critique of claims that the internet’s processing power might rival that of the human brain (3rd July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/03/internet.processor.brain

Television:
Ambitious plans by the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 for project ‘Kangaroo’, an online video service offering more than 10 000 hours of classic TV shows, are hit by a decision to refer them to the Competition Commission (1st July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/01/televisionindustry

Internet/Crime:
Ebay ordered by a French court to pay a 38.6m Euro fine in damages to the luxury goods group LVMH for allowing the sale of fake goods (1st July): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jul/01/ebay.hitechcrime

Future Technology:
A story about how robots – intelligent armed vehicles using GPS, laser and heat-recognition technology – are close to being deployed (25th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/26/robots.weaponstechnology

April-June Digital Media News

2008-07-23T02:18:00.000-07:00

June 2008

Music:
Record companies find ways to offset CD slump: ‘Record companies made 11.4% of their income outside traditional music sales last year, according to figures released today by the BPI, the industry trade body. The data offers hope that the industry can weather the threat from illegal downloading and falling CD sales. Revenues from outside retail sales - from licensing music to third parties, or from non-copyright income such as merchandising, the use of artists' logos and sponsorship - were £121.6m last year, up 13.8% on 2006. Record companies made £943m from music sales last year, with digital formats accounting for 8.6% of all sales income’ (30th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jun/30/2

Mobile Phones/Economics:
EC plans to cut the price European mobile phone companies charge to connect calls could impact upon the consumers and services such as free handsets, the industry warns (27th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jun/27/telecoms.regulators

Radio:
Capital Radio’s owners are fined a record £1.1m over a phone-in scandal (27th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/27/gcapmedia.radio

Future Technology:
Intelligent armed robot vehicles are ready to be deployed on the battlefield to support soldiers (26th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/26/robots.weaponstechnology

Mobile Phones/Crime:
A 12 year old boy had terrorist murder videos on his mobile phone (26th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jun/26/ukcrime.uksecurity

Television:
The BBC plans to revamp its online iPlayer catch-up service (which has received 100m programme requests in just 6 months), to include radio, to cross-promote and group shows and to allow personalised channels (26th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/26/bbc.digitalmedia

Television:
A report says television consumers don’t understand the digital message and switchover (26th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/26/digitaltvradio.television1

Mobile Phones/economics:
Nokia buys British software company Symbian and announces plans to make its mobile phone software available free of charge as open-source to counter the threat of Apple and Google (25th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jun/25/nokia.google

Privacy/Surveillance:
British scientists are developing technology that will enable CCTV cameras to ‘hear’ a crime taking place and spin round to capture it on film (24th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jun/24/ukcrime1

Television:
ITV seeks to cut its public service output before the digital switchover to raise its ratings in a cutthroat market (23rd June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/23/itv.itvbusiness

Computing History:
An article on the anniversary of ‘Baby’, the Manchester computer and its place in computing history (21st June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/21/computing.digitalmedia

Citizen Journalism:
A story on a 61 year-old amateur journalist who broke two of the biggest stories of the 2008 US elections for the website The Huffington Post (20th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/20/barackobama.uselections2008

Mobile Phones:
Before the launch of the new iPhone, an article on the state of smartphone technology (19th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/19/iphone.blackberry

Crime/Photography:
An article about how digital photos posted online are being stolen and used for profit (19th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/18/news.internet

Economics/Social Networking:
LinkedIn, the business social networking site, has secured a billion dollar valuation after a new round of venture capital funding (19th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/19/digitalmedia.mediabusiness

Global Media:
An article on the global media and entertainment market (18th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/18/digitalmedia.mediabusiness

Mobile Phones:
On the success of the mobile phone in Africa (17th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jun/17/telecoms.telecoms

Internet/Cyberbullying:
A story about the attempt to discover a law to deal with a recent cyberbullying case where a woman posed as a 16 year old boy to bully a 13 year old neighbour who later committed suicide (17th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/17/usa.news

Internet:
CBS owned Last.fm strikes a deal with Universal music that puts 12 000 full-length videos on its site (17th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/17/digitalmedia.news

Mobile Phones/Control:
John Naughton on Apple’s strategy of control through its iPhone operating system (15th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/15/stevejobs.apple

Mobile Phones/Pathologies:
Two Spanish children aged 12 and 13 are treated for addiction to mobile phones (13th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/13/spain.mobilephones

Television:
On the BBC’s plans to create a web page for every episode of every programme ever broadcast on BBC TV (11th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/11/bbc.bbc

Mobile Phones:
New Apple iPhone launched aimed at boosting sales (10th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/10/iphone.stevejobs

Computing:
A story about Roadrunner – the fastest supercomputer in the world (10th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/10/computing.sciencenews

Internet:
Online advertising spending in the UK leapt over the £3bn level for the first time according to new research, taking market share from other traditional media (10th June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/10/advertising.digitalmedia

DVDs:
An article on the threat to the DVD industry from downloads (2nd June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/02/digitalmedia.digitalmusic

Internet:
Chinese bloggers launch an online attack on an official in the recent earthquake zone who is accused of grinning too much in the midst of the disaster (1st June): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/01/china.humanrights

May 2008

Music:
Prince covers Radiohead but demands the clip is removed from Youtube for copyright reasons (31st May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/apr/15/television.digitalmedia

Television/Internet:
BBC chiefs are accused of breaching their licence as the website overspend hits £36m (30th May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/30/bbc.mediabusiness

Virtual Worlds:
An article on the populations and population crisis of massively multiplayer online virtual worlds (29th May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/29/games.mmos

Internet:
A story about the effect of blogging on one’s personal privacy and relationships (25th May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/25/digitalmedia.blogging

Internet:
‘Fears of a digital divide are groundless as online access soars in UK rural areas’ (22nd May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/22/internet.digitalmedia

Economics:
An article on Google’s interest in a tie-up with Yahoo (20th May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/20/yahoo.yahoo

Economics/Radio:
Orange is launching itself into the internet radio market in Britain as it tries to get a larger slice of the home entertainment market (19th May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/19/digitalmusic.mobilephones

Television:
The hit Youtube video of a baby buffalo escaping lions and a crocodile is turned into a documentary by a US wildlife channel (18th May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/18/conservation

Crime:
Myspace wins a record $230m legal judgement against internet spammers (15th May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/15/myspace.socialnetworking

Music:
‘Piracy growing fast as fewer fans buy downloads’ (15th May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/15/piracy.digitalmusic

Television:
The BBC apologises for holding on to £106 000 of money from phone-ins that should have gone to charity (10th May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/10/bbc.tvfakery

Television:
ITV must pay a record fine of £5.7m for prime-time phone-ins that robbed viewers of £7.8m (9th May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/09/itv.tvfakery1

Security:
More than half a million computers were infected in seven days with a single piece of malicious software (9th May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/09/internet.hacking

Music:Universal to offer free music downloads after signing a deal with Qtrax. Qtrax originally advertised its service in January but deals weren’t in place. Now it has signed up with the world’s largest record label, plus other companies (8th May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/08/digitalmedia.digitalmusic

Internet/Television:
BBC and ITV launch belated digital satellite service – they combine to launch FreeSat to complement Freeview, offering up to 200 channels for a one-off fee with no contract (7th May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/07/bbc.itv

Economics:
An article investigating Chris Anderson’s claims in his new book on the new economics of ‘free’ (6th May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/may/06/consumeraffairs.economics Anderson’s ‘Wired’ article can be found here: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free

Internet:
Jonathan Zittrain argues that ‘tethered appliances’ are stifling innovation (1st May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/01/internet.gadgets

Economics:
The mobile phone company O2 launches a new advertising campaign to attract residential broadband customers as it takes its service nationwide with a new deal with BT (1st May): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/may/01/mobilephones

April 2008

Mobile Phones:
How multi-media mobile phones are leading to a decline in mobile wallpapers and ringtones (28th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/apr/28/telecommunications

Video games:
How the release of Grand Theft Auto IV may threaten Hollywood’s summer blockbuster profits (28th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/28/games.filmnews

Security/Surveillance:
Face scans for air passengers to begin in the UK summer 2008 (25th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/apr/25/theairlineindustry.transport

Control:
An article on how computing licenses are becoming more important – and controlling of users (24th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/24/law.software

Web 2.0/UGC:
The text of a great speech by Clay Shirky on user-generated content and Web 2.0 entitled ‘Gin, Television and Social Surplus’ given on 23rd April: http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

Future Technology:
A ‘bionic’ eye gives blind people some sight (22nd April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/apr/22/medicalresearch.news

Music:
A groundbreaking deal with Youtube and a booming live music scene has seen composers and songwriters receive record royalty payments (21st April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/apr/21/mediabusiness.digitalmedia

Music:
On how the music industry’s battle with downloaders has damaged trust (21st April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/apr/21/netmusic

Internet/Politics:
‘DowningStreet’ joins Twitter (18th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/18/internet.digitalmedia

Internet/Crime:
Fewer than 3000 websites produce the bulk of child porn (17th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/17/internet.childprotection

Economics:
Poor broadband sales cause problems for Carphone Warehouse which sees £325m wiped off the value of its business as shares slump (16th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/16/aol.internetphonesbroadband

Mobile Phones:
Apple slashes £100 from the price of the iPhone amid talk of slow sales (16th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/16/iphone.telecoms

Television:
A new survey on people’s relationship with and use of television in a digital age (15th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/apr/15/television.digitalmedia

Internet:
Police warn that pupils are posing as paedophiles on social networking sites to bully other children (10th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/apr/10/schools.uk2

Future Technology:
On companies looking to recreate the human brain’s processing power virtually (10th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/10/robot.brain

Internet:
‘How I fell in love with Wikipedia’ (10th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/10/wikipedia.internet

Privacy:
An article on Google Street View and its privacy implications (10th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/10/news.google

Television/Internet:
Internet firms clash with BBC over new iPlayer. Viewing has increased from 11m programmes watched in February to 17m in march and internet firms are now complaining about the strain on their service (10th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/10/bbc.internet

Internet:
Spending on online advertising rose by 38% in 2007 from £797m to £2.8bn (7th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/apr/08/advertising.digitalmedia1

Music:
Survey finds 95% of youngsters are illegally copying music. Copying is now ‘burnt into the teenage psyche’ (7th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/apr/07/news.katieallen

Economics:
Microsoft gives Yahoo three weeks to accept its $31 per share takeover bid or it will approach its shareholders directly (7th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/apr/07/microsoft.microsoft

Infrastructure:
On ‘the broadband crunch’: how the popularity of web video is causing problems for the web’s infrastructure (6th April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/06/internet.digitalmedia

Crime:
Youtube is criticised after an error in its review procedure meant that it had failed to remove footage apparently showing a gang rape (2nd April): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/02/youtube.internet

March 2008

The UK gets set for the television ‘digital switchover’ with 90% of the population now multichannel (31st March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/31/digitaltvradio

Jan-March digital media news

2008-04-07T02:55:00.000-07:00

March 2008

Video Games:
The government backs TV psychologist Dr Tanya Bryon’s suggestions for film-style ratings overseen by the British Board of Film Classification to be introduced for video games… (28th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/mar/28/childprotection.internet

Crime:
An article on new ‘fast flux’ techniques making internet crime more difficult to detect (27th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/27/security.hacking

Surveillance:
The online ad company Phorm defends its system which tracks what users do online to provide better targeted advertising (27th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/mar/27/advertising.digitalmedia

Internet:
Parents are to be shown how to protect children online. TV psychologist Dr Tanya Bryon’s report for the Government will set out a national strategy for child internet safety (27th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/27/privacy.childprotection

Internet:
Cuba blocks access to the country’s most popular blog signalling a crackdown on a new generation of cyber critics (26th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/26/cuba.news

Internet:
A new report warns parents of the dangers of children effectively being ‘raised online’, spending all their time on social networking sites (25th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/mar/25/children.socialnetworking

Internet:
A US internet service suspends the site hosting Dutch politician Geert Wilder’s controversial anti-Qu’ran film (24th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/24/netherlands.usa

Future/Theory:
A Wired article on Ray Kurzweil (24th March): http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/02/cyber_command?currentPage=all

Internet:
Youtube presents its second annual video awards (22nd March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/22/youtube.news

Television:
ITV is to re-launch its own online TV service as a rival to the BBC’s iplayer (18th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/18/itv.digitalmedia

Video Games
The banned game Manhunt 2 has been granted a certificate after a 9 month court battle (15th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/15/games

Internet:
Bebo sold to AOL for $850m (£417m) (14th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/14/bebo.web20

Internet:
China overtakes the US as the country with the most internet users (14th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/14/internet.china

Cinema:
On a new generation of 3D films (13th March): http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2264536,00.html

Television:
The BBC’s iPlayer is hacked (13th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/13/digitalvideo.television

Music/Economics:
An article on the rise of ‘free’ in music (13th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/13/internet.google

Robots:
Swarms of tiny robots could join together to tackle jobs (13th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/13/robots.artificialintelligenceai

Television:
On the success of Freeview – more than 3.8m devices that can receive Freeview were sold in the last quarter of 2007, according to figures to be released today. For the year as a whole 9.7m TVs, set top boxes and personal video recorders were sold that can receive Freeview's more than 40 free to air channels, up 64% on the previous year and also a new record. The success of Freeview compares with 167,000 new subscribers for Sky in the last three months of 2007, which took its total customer base above 8.8 million, and 61,100 new subscribers for Virgin Media's cable TV service. It now has 4.8 million customers (11th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/11/digitaltvradio.television

Television:
The Japanese are working on a high-definition TV system with 33 times more detail than the best available systems today (11th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/11/television.bbc

Robots/War:
The RAF buys American robot planes for use in Afghanistan (10th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/mar/10/military.afghanistan

Music:
Sony joins We7, a free, advertising-supported music service, agreeing to license more than 250 000 tracks to Peter Gabriel’s company (10th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/10/sony.netmusic

Internet:John Naughton on how Flickr became a classic Web 2.0 success story (9th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/09/web20.internet

Journalism:
Peter Preston poses the question, when news is free who’ll pay the journalists (9th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/09/pressandpublishing4

Privacy:
An article on Phorm, a new company that will track surfing patterns to serve targeted ads (6th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/06/internet.privacy

Security:
Nato says cyber attacks and cyber war are as great a threat today as a missile attack (6th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/06/hitechcrime.uksecurity

Future Technology:
News of a computerised mind-reading machine … (6th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/mar/06/medicalresearch

Print:
Penguin audio-books are to be released without DRM copy-protection (4th March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/04/digitalmusic.booksnews

Searching:
An article about how online communities sharing recommendations help people to find material they’ll like and the implications of this for the advertising and PR industries (3rd March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/03/marketingandpr.digitalmedia

Television:
The Guardian publish a section devoted to TV and commercial broadcasting in the digital age (3rd March): http://media.guardian.co.uk/tvtoday

Internet:
Youtube is set to take on established TV broadcasters by offering its own live channels (2nd March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/02/youtube.realitytv

Internet:
An article on the success of parenting websites (2nd March): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/02/internet.parentingwebsites

February 2008

Law:
The EU fines Microsoft a record £680m for imposing unreasonable prices on rivals for access to its dominant Windows software, bringing the total fine by the EU to date to 1.7bn euros (28th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/28/microsoft.news

Economics:
Chris Anderson’s Wired article on why ‘free’ is the future of business (25th Feb): http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free

Censorship:
Pakistan bans Youtube over anti-Islamic clips (25th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/25/pakistan.youtube

Internet:
A Swiss bank wins a court case this week against the whistle-blower website Wikileaks (23rd Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/feb/23/internet.usa

Television:
BSkyB launches an appeal against the ruling that it must reduce its stake in ITV from 17.9% to under 7.5% (23rd Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/feb/22/bskyb.itv

Internet:
Facebook sheds 400 000 users between December 2007 and January 2008. Commentators claim that people are ‘falling out of love’ with the site but the more likely explanation is that the wave of publicity attracted users who got bored within a month or so. It doesn’t yet seem to represent a turn away from networking or that particular site (22nd Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/22/facebook.facebook

Mobile Phones:
The UK Sentencing Guidelines Council urges stiffer sentences for ‘happy slapping’ attacks (21st Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/feb/21/law.ukcrime

Music:
An article on the Government’s threat to force ISPs to police illegal P2P sharing of copyright material over their networks (21st Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/21/piracy.digitalmusic

Videogames /Interfaces:
An article on how neurofeedback devices could be used for gaming and other applications (21st Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/21/research.games

Television:
BBC shows will now be available to download from itTunes to be watched on ipods, under a new agreement between the BBC and Apple (20th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/20/ipod.apple

Security:
A British company has patented laptop software to protect stolen laptops. It photographs the thief, pinpoints their location and destroys sensitive data (20th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/feb/20/ukcrime.news

DVDs:Toshiba are expected to pull the plug on HD-DVD after the recent success of Blu-ray. An analysis of the market and the format war (19th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/19/television.games

Video Games:
An article on music in video games (15th Feb): http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2256333,00.html

Mobile Phones:
A 15 year old girl is convicted of aiding manslaughter by agreeing to film a fatal attack on her phone (15th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/feb/15/ukcrime See also (14th Feb): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/7244782.stm Sentencing takes place in March: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bradford/7294680.stm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bradford/7302959.stm

Mobile Phones:
T-Mobile drops Google in favour of Yahoo as its partner in the UK for search technology (13th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/13/google.yahoo

Privacy:
A story about a Chinese celebrity sex scandal, with thousands of photos copied from a star’s macbook, showing him engaged in sexual activity with a number of actresses and singers, being made available online (13th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/13/china.news

Mobile Phones/Television:
T-Mobile and Orange plan to test a new mobile phone TV technology that may allow users to view up to 100 channels (12th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/12/mobilephones.telecoms

Mobile Phones:
Nokia begins to look into touch screen technology (12th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/12/mobilephones.telecoms1

Radio:
A story about the problems and future of digital radio in the UK (12th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/feb/12/radio.commercialradio

War:
A Wired article on cyberwar in the US (11th Feb): http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/02/cyber_command?currentPage=all

Mobile Phones:
An article on the battle for a share of the mobile phone market, especially with the rise of the phone as media player and of the mobile internet (11th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/11/mobilephones.telecoms

Radio:
An article on the state of digital radio in the UK (11th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/feb/11/digitaltvradio.radio

Mobile Phones:
Vodafone tries to avoid a clash with regulators by cutting its charges for mobile internet use abroad (9th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/09/mobilephones.mobileworldcongressbusiness

Censorship:
An article on China’s ‘great firewall’ (9th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/09/internet.china

Video Games:
The Government plan to introduce a cinema-style classification system for video games (9th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/09/games.digitalmedia

Television:
ITV’s falling share prices impact upon the value of BskyB’s stake (7th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/feb/07/bskyb.itv

Mobile Phones:
A short article on how digital technology is vital to the developing world (7th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/07/globaleconomy.mobilephones

Mobile Phones:
A new study claims that mobile phones don’t increase the risk of cancer (6th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/06/mobilephones.health

Mobile Phones:
The number of texts sent in the UK rose 40% in the last year, with 57bn messages being sent in 2007 (and 5000 every second in December!) (6th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/06/mobilephones

Internet:
Hackers declare war on the Church of Scientology, following their claimed pressure on Youtube to withdraw an embarrassing clip of Tom Cruise describing the religion as ‘a blast’ (4th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/04/news

Music:
An article on the music industry in the digital age (3rd Feb): http://music.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2251409,00.html

Economics:
Microsoft launches a $44.6bn bid for Yahoo in an attempt to create an online search and advertising group that would rival Google (2nd Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/02/microsoft.yahoo Yahoo rejected the offer a few days later (12th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/12/yahoo.microsoft The Yahoo board are said to be split over the rejection (16th Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/16/yahootakeover.yahoo An article from 3rd Feb analyses Microsoft’s reasons (3rd Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/03/billgates.google

Internet:
The notorious pirate website ‘The Pirate Bay’, based in Malmo, faces a copyright lawsuit from Swedish prosecutors (1st Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/01/piracy.digitalmusic

Internet:
How one clumsy ship cut the cables connecting 75m people to the World Wide Web (1st Feb): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/01/internationalpersonalfinancebusiness.internet See also (Jan 31st): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/31/internet.blackout.asia

January 2008

Internet:
Youtube announce plans to share ad revenue with their video posters (31st Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/31/youtube.digitalmedia

Television:
BSkyB plan to appeal after business secretary John Hutton supported the Competition Commission’s ruling that it must sell more than half its stake in ITV (30th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jan/30/itvbusiness.bskyb

Mobile Phones:
The EC begins to look at lower charges for texting in Europe (30th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/30/mobilephones.news

Internet:
Video of the German navy ramming its own boats finds its way onto Youtube, embarrassing the German Government and military (30th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jan/30/germany.internet

Music:
U2’s manager calls on artists to join him infighting online music piracy (29th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jan/29/musicnews.music

Music:
Music publishing, which generates revenue when songs are sold or played is thriving according to new figures, though the recording industry figures are down (29th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jan/29/netmusic.piracy

Music:
An article about the claimed launch of QTrax, set to offer 25m tracks to download for free, paid for by advertising. It quickly emerges that the major labels are not on board for this project (28th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/28/piracy.digitalmedia

Internet/Music:
The record labels call for legislation to force ISPs to police P2P filesharing over their networks (25th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/25/media.internet

Cyberwar:
Estonia fines a 20 year old ethnic Russian man for taking part in a ‘cyberwar’ against Estonia in April-May 2007 (25th Jan): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7208511.stm

Television:
BBC3 focuses on social networking and UGC in its makeover (23rd Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/23/bbc.television

Internet:
A local Bridgend MP suggests social networking sites could be influencing the spate of suicides in young people in the area. The ‘memory walls’ created for the dead are romanticising suicide, she says (23rd Jan): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7204172.stm

Music:
Last.fm announces a deal with the 4 major record companies and independent to allow users to listen to music for free on ‘the world’s biggest free jukebox’ (23rd Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/23/commercialradio.radio

Internet/Mobile Phones:
An article about schoolgirl bullying, often taking advantage of mobile phones and online sites (20th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jan/20/pupilbehaviour.gender

Internet:
An article on griefers in Second Life (18th Jan): http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/16-02/mf_goons

Cinema/Internet:
How silent cinema is thriving online on video websites for whom its brief slapstick scenes are perfect. Happy slapsticking anyone? (18th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/18/internet.digitalvideo

Security:
An article about how security companies are no longer sharing information on vulnerabilities with other companies, turning security into a ‘protection racket’ (17th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/17/computersecurity

Internet:
An article on how a scrabble application on Facebook is being sued for breach of copyright (17th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/17/internet.facebook.scrabulous

Television:
New findings about children’s use of TV in a digital age (16th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/16/television.socialnetworking

Crime:
Police are to use text message tactics to snare rape suspects, trying to make them incriminate themselves through their answers to text questions from the victim (14th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jan/14/ukcrime.topstories31

Digital Media:
A Guardian special report on trends in digital media covering virtual worlds and video gems, mobile phones and the mobile web, digital Tv and online video etc. (14th Jan): http://media.guardian.co.uk/trends08

Cyborgs:
A paralympic star has been banned from competing at the Olympic games as the IAAF ruled his prosthetic limbs give him an unfair advantage over his able-bodied competitors … (14th Jan): http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympics/athletics/7141302.stm

Television:
More than 1 million people use the BBC’s new iPlayer (14th Jan): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7187967.stm

Internet:
An important article on the politics of the people behind Facebook (14th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

Internet/Privacy:
A Cambridge admissions tutor has admitted checking up on students who apply by browsing their Facebook profiles (11th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jan/11/accesstouniversity.highereducation

Interfaces:
A new system allowing users to control their computer by waving their hands in the air is showcased (11th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/11/games.computing

Economics:
BT announces plans for improved broadband speeds in the UK (10th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/10/btgroupbusiness.internet

Internet:
Use of web video sites increases in the US during the TV writer’s strike (10th Jan): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7180889.stm

Music:
Brussels forces iTunes to cut the price of downloads in the UK (10th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/10/itunes.pricecutsintheuk

Music/Law:
The Government plans to relax copyright laws to make it legal to transfer your own music CDs onto your MP3 player. Currently it is against UK law! (9th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/09/copyrightlaws

Radio:
The internet radio station, Pandora, is shutting down its UK service because it can’t pay the fees demanded by the music industry trade bodies (9th Jan):
http://music.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2237674,00.html

DVDs:
Paramount announce they will withdraw support from Toshiba’s HD-DVD format (9th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/09/sony.digitalmedia

Security:
Introducing the iTaser – a taser gun that plays MP3s… (9th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/09/gadgets

DVDs:
Warner Bros. announce they will drop Toshiba’s HD-DVD format in favour of Sony’s Blue-ray (8th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jan/08/news.television

Music:
Napster announce they are joining the move away from copy protection (DRM) on music downloads (8th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/08/digitalmedia.news

Internet:
TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson loses his money after publishing details of his bank account in his newspaper column. He wanted to prove the furore over the Government’s loss of personal details on two discs was a fuss over nothing. Someone set up a direct debit with the information and transferred £500 out, with their identity being protected by Data protection Act. ‘I was wrong and I’ve been punished for my mistake’, he said (7th Jan): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7174760.stm

Print:
How newsrooms are responding to the challenge of the digital world (7th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/07/pressandpublishing.digitalmedia

Divides:
An article on the digital divide in modern shopping and banking caused by those unable to log on or who want to speak face to face (6th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jan/06/retail.internet

Censorship:
China targets video sites such as Youtube, blocking access die to the spread of ‘degenerate thinking’ on the internet (4th Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/04/youtube.video

Music:
3m music tracks are downloaded in the UK in the week between Christmas and New Year, double that of the same time the year before. Total UK download sales for 2007 were up 50% on 2006 to 77.6m tracks (3rd Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/03/digitalmusic.netmusic

Computing:
An article about the emergence of computing as a resource like electricity and the economics of this industry (an excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Big Switch) (3rd Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/03/computing.internet

Computing:
A story about the UK’s fastest computer, the HECToR supercomputer (2nd Jan): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/02/computing.climatechange

Internet:
A link to Kate Hafner’s useful article on the history of ‘the Well’ and online communities (originally May 1997): http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/ff_well_pr.html

Media Studies 2.0 - my thoughts ...

2008-01-04T03:05:00.000-08:00

(For a number of years I've been thinking about the problems of teaching media studies and of the nature of media studies itself in a changing media world. I started this blog in part as a place to think through some of these issues, titling it MS2.0 to prompt thoughts about the need to upgrade the discipline. It's taken me this long to put together a statement of my thoughts on this. This is only a rough draft, standing somewhere between a blog-entry opinion piece and an academic article. In the spirit of my own argument I've decided to publish this for anyone to read and open it up for comments and debate. )

MEDIA STUDIES 2.0

Responding to his critics in his 1968 Playboy interview, McLuhan acerbically commented, ‘for all their lamentations, the revolution has already taken place’. Whether his critics ever later grasped that is a moot point but everyone in media studies today faces an equivalent challenge: something is happening and the only important question is do you know what it is?

I began to notice it when I thought about my son’s media world compared to my own at his age. The only difference between the world I grew up in and my parents was that I had two more TV channels and my better-off friends had colour TV. Within the decade the same friends would have a VCR too, though we had to wait till the late 1980s until prices fell for it to be anything other than a luxury. This was a world of separate and more limited forms: the telephone (that you didn’t own) was screwed to the wall and couldn’t take photographs; you couldn’t get the radio on your television; films didn’t have special features, games or Easter eggs and no-one tried to hack into your television to steal your money or identity. Between my childhood media world and my son’s there is a chasm.

My son’s world is also my student’s world. I realised this a few years ago when a student came to see me about their essay and handed me a USB memory stick – the first I’d ever seen. I didn’t know what to do with it so I held it up to the light and joked about the weak introduction and poor referencing. It brought home the absurdity of being a media studies lecturer when your students know more about media than you do. We know the discipline and the texts, ideas and arguments but our students surpass us in their knowledge, use and navigation of the contemporary media world: they are at home in it; we’re always playing catch-up. We can always rest on our knowledge and publications but their value is questionable if they no longer relate to our student’s world.

It used to be easier; it used to be a shared world. Very little happened in film, TV, radio or print that we didn’t know about or couldn’t comprehend. Now most lecturers rely on their students or their newspaper to keep them informed of the latest developments. Ironically we’ve spent so long bemoaning the cultural and historical ignorance of our students – they haven’t seen Godard or Cathy Come Home, they don’t know about the structure of the BBC and they’re not that interested in reading books or daily newspapers – but our ignorance of their world is just as important. Now there’s a whole world of P2P music, film and TV; video-clips; home-made mobile porn; customised avatars; graffiti, funwalls and superwalls; tagging, texting, messaging, sheep-throwing, bitch-slapping and virtual penguins that we’re struggling to keep up with.

At the heart of the changes lie new media and their contemporary impact. Cheaper and more powerful computer processing, its insertion into and control of a range of technologies; the popular dissemination of these electronic forms; the subsequent movement of media content into digital form; the conversion of older media into digital technologies; the emergence of entirely new media forms and possibilities and the interconnectivity and intercommunication of devices mark a process that, over the last two decades, has left few media unaffected. Today almost every ‘old’ broadcast-era media has been transformed by new technology in its production, dissemination, reception or use. Digital technologies have led to a wide-ranging transformation of all existing technological, institutional, political and economic media structures.

Add to this the contemporary pace of change. Broadcast-era media evolved separately and slowly, with technological improvements having either a limited or a gradual impact upon the consumer. Today developments in computer processing power and its falling costs push a different environment and experience. Rapid commercial, technological invention and innovation, combined with the interconnected nature of contemporary technologies, means that new developments impact upon a range of media forms, constantly remaking their relationships. Inter-linked new media forms competing for space, attention and market share and regularly releasing new upgrades with new applications and capacities impact upon everyday life and media use, constituting, in the critical mass of their popular success, an ongoing revolution that continually remakes the entire media ecology. Today changes are visible on a daily basis. We can now follow entire forms and industries shift and transform as they struggle to remain relevant or compete to succeed in this new world.

But this isn’t simply a technology-driven transformation. It’s also driven by ourselves, as new generations embrace these technologies and discover and create new uses for them. What is fundamental is the way in which these users are reconfiguring their own social relations and expectations and producing entirely new modes of experience and knowledge. This is where the gap lies. This is the world we no longer share with our students.

I first tried to think about these issues in November 2006. I’d decided to start a blog, posting links to new media stories and news as a resource for students and for my own lectures and I used my first post to reflect upon the changes I was following and the changes in our student’s media. Following the terminology of software upgrades, I called the blog ‘Media Studies 2.0’ and argued that media studies needed similarly upgrading (1). Ongoing changes in new media technology and the remarkable irruption of entire new worlds of media experiences needed to be placed at the core of the discipline, I felt, and backward looking research, perspectives and debates needed to be left behind.

For these claims to have any academic credibility I needed to do more than articulate my own vague feelings. What was required was: a defensible analysis of what media studies ‘1.0’ was; a description of the changes that are forcing a rethink of traditional media studies; a clear statement of what media studies 2.0 isn’t; and a statement of what a media studies 2.0 should do and of the new tasks it faces.

MEDIA STUDIES 1.0

Defining media studies 1.0 is exceptionally difficult. There is no written history of media studies and the interpretations and experiences of its members vary considerably. Although we can trace the broad movements, perspectives and authors who have been popular at any time this doesn’t necessarily tell us about media studies. What media studies is and its history has as much to do with its origins, its development in specific academic institutions and about the people who taught there and their idea about what they were doing. It involves considering what they thought was media, how they analysed it, what texts were considered canonical, where they drew the limits of the subject and how they positioned themselves in relation to other disciplines and departments: in short, how they created the discipline. It involves the struggle to establish the study of media, the different origins of each part of media studies (film studies, television studies, print studies), the route media studies took through the country, through its different institutions and different constituencies and the inter-personal politics of those individuals who created and guided the field. It involves questions of the economic and political history of Higher Education and questions of the relationship between theory and practice as well as – within theory – of the relationship between empirical and culturalist modes of doing media studies.

Understanding media studies also involves the history and experience of each of us who has entered the field within the last decade, during the contemporary expansion of the discipline. We are here because of the proliferation of courses, the take-up of the subject in many old universities and the growing numbers of students passing through the field. Each of us has a very different background. Many of us haven’t studied media studies; many of us come from other subjects such as sociology, cultural studies, English and the languages; many are unaware of the prior history of the subject and its ideas and personalities, and each of us has a very different personal and institutional experience of media studies. Given that we are all pursuing our own highly-specialised research interests and reading in an essentially interdisciplinary subject whose scope is accordingly huge it is difficult for any one individual to know with any clarity what media studies is and what it means to its members today.

So how can we justifiably identify a MS1.0? Some attempt to sketch the field is necessary here but using too broad a brush for this risks oversimplifying the variety of research being conducted and merely creates a straw-man whose demolition impresses no-one. The simplest way to negotiate these problems is to approach the subject historically.

Media studies is an academic discipline that first emerged in the early-mid 20th century, at the same time as the rise of what Dan Gillmor calls ‘big media’. One can obviously find a considerable and important historical literature discussing media prior to this time – especially speech, images and written and printed forms – but this played little or no role in the formation of the discipline and has rarely been included in its mainstream student texts and textbooks since. These are clear: media studies traces its lineage back through the early 20th C sociology of Cooley, Dewey’s philosophy of communication, Lasswell’s post-World War One propaganda analysis, Lippmann’s discussion of public opinion, the work of Park and the Chicago School, Lazarsfeld and the empirical, behaviourist school of communication research of the 1930s-40s and the emerging information and communication theory of the war years emerging from the work of Weiner, Shannon and others. Media studies was an academic product of the broadcasting era. It developed out of a concern with mass society and issues of mass communication, mass persuasion and the formation and control of public opinion. It emerged in an era in which newspapers became major commercial enterprises, central to political and public culture; in which cinema was consolidating its position as a major commercial entertainment mass-producing its products for public distribution; in which radio broadcasting swept America and Europe and in which early experiments with television were beginning to yield results that would produce the dominant broadcasting medium of the second-half of the century.

Media studies 1.0 was a historical product: a historical response to one historical model of media. Its ‘broadcast model’ was later extended back to include earlier print media, with the era of mass media and mass communication coming to be defined as the Post-Gutenbergian era. This definition helped set the limits and concerns of the discipline: it would explore Post-Gutenbergian mass communication, focusing upon a small number of key forms, in particular the printed book, newspapers, cinema, radio and television – employing 20th century ideas, approaches and methods.

Whilst media studies has undoubtedly developed over the last century this broadcast focus has remained dominant. The diversity of individual research projects might suggest that there is no commonly-agreed conception of what media studies is and no identifiable mainstream discipline, but in practice these do exist, being found in the key texts we produce to introduce the subject to new students: our undergraduate textbooks. Looking through these one is struck by their similarity. They employ a remarkably-similar classificatory scheme, with a fairly-standardised list of topics (audiences, institutions, representation, effects, semiology, advertising etc.), an emphasis upon the main broadcast forms (TV, cinema, print, radio) and a near identical selection of ideas, perspectives, debates and content. Although their actual use may be limited to introductory modules their significance lies in the fact that they represent the public face and point of self-definition of the discipline, identifying the agreed, core knowledge new students must learn. Alternative ideas, debates, perspectives and content are found in the discipline, but their exclusion from this core implicitly marginalises their concerns, creating an identifiable mainstream of the discipline focused upon mass communication research.

Whereas in the broadcast-era this disciplinary classification appeared natural and inevitable, representing a logical break-down of the media’s organisation and operation, the passage to a new era highlights how it was imbued with the ideas and values of its age: an age of highly-capitalised big media corporations employing technology to transmit information to a mass of receivers. Communication theory and models of communication developed to explain and enshrine this process and although media studies developed a critique of and more sophisticated clarification of these models it never overcome them. The different emphases it has chosen at different times – production, political economy, institutions, ideology, technology, reception, content – are all fragmented responses to the broadcast-era model of communication.

More recently there has been some attempt to update these textbooks with the inclusion of new media. Discussions of new media, however, typically feel tacked-on; they are often analysed and understood through broadcast-era concepts and categories and their use as illustrative examples for students usually lacks any consideration of their challenge to the broadcast-era system of media and mass communication research. The placing of new media as a final chapter in textbooks is also common, ignoring their transformation of the entire preceding content of the book. Where media studies has taken up new media, therefore, it has been through the lens of the broadcast-era and as a specialist subject within the discipline: as optional knowledge for lecturers and students, taught in specialised modules, usually in the final year after students have been taught the core of the discipline. There remains the feeling that new media are too complex for our students and something they should only approach after years of training in the discipline.

The problem is our core knowledge is no longer the core of the student’s media world. They live new media and apply for our courses because of that use and that interest. They may think they are applying to study media but they are actually applying to study media studies. In the broadcast-era that distinction didn’t matter but today, when the latter no longer reflects the former, it is fundamental. Our students arrive to discover a discipline that is ill-equipped or unwilling to deal with the world they live in. Our introductory modules and textbooks bear so little relationship to our student’s media experiences that the discipline itself appears lifeless and anachronistic at its point of entry and self-definition: at precisely that point when it should be engaging with these new minds. Broadcast-era media studies doesn’t work in a post-broadcast era.

THE POST-BROADCAST ERA

Putting it simply, the broadcast-era media studies was born in has changed. New media are transforming our social, political, economic and cultural worlds and media studies has to transform itself to understand this environment. New media aren’t going to be un-invented or diverted and their continuing impact upon contemporary processes is certain.

As Gillmor, Anderson, Benkler et al point out, new media challenge big media’s broadcast model. In place of a top-down, one-to-many vertical cascade from centralised industry sources we discover today bottom-up, many-to-many, horizontal, peer-to-peer communication. ‘Pull’ media challenge ‘push’ media; open structures challenge hierarchical structures; micro-production challenges macro-production; open-access amateur production challenges closed access, elite-professions; economic and technological barriers to media production are transformed by cheap, democratised, easy-to-use technologies; the single expert voice is threatened by the ‘long tail’ of expertise; the ‘lecture’ is replaced by the ‘conversation’; the individual as consumer is complemented by the individual as producer and user and broadcasting to a mass-market is challenged by niche and nano-publishing. The contrast may be too heavily drawn and big media remain present and powerful but the rise of me-casting, my-casting and me-dia represents a significant and very real transformation of the broadcasting era.

No-one is arguing that broadcasting has disappeared or has ended. The television, print, radio and cinema industries remain powerful and important but they have each been transformed by digital technology in aspects of their production, distribution and consumption and they have each had to adapt their business model to the new media era, finding new ways to monetise their product and reach audiences. These changes are so significant and cannot be understood apart from the broader changes in new media production, distribution and consumption such that we can say that the broadcast model no longer adequately explains how contemporary ‘broadcast’ media work. We have entered a post-broadcasting era, defined by new alignments of productive power, technological mastery and media consumption. What makes today’s changes especially important is their interconnected nature: the real communications revolution today is the communication between devices and technologies. In the context of the broader changes in new media this adds up to a fundamental change in the key forms of broadcast media themselves.

Today, even the idea of fixed, separate media forms becomes problematic. Whereas, after a brief period of technical experimentation the broadcast era refined a set of broadly-standardised, fixed, commercial forms – cinema, radio, television – the contemporary era shows no such sign of stabilisation. It is marked instead by a permanent process of invention and innovation in which media forms are constantly reconfigured, obsolesced and revolutionised. This is the era of the permanent ‘beta’ in which, not just software, but all digital forms are tested in the real and continually improved and upgraded. In a visible evolutionary fast-forward we can watch forms, devices and processes develop. In contrast to the broadcast era’s dominance by a small number of separate commercial forms whose slow evolution did not challenge their essential form and rarely changed the user-experience (exceptions such as colour TV, FM radio and commercial video-recording are memorable because they were rare), the post-broadcast era is marked by a new, almost-unchartable, fluid, hybrid ecology. In this fragmented era our very identification of forms collapses as they are remade and cross-breed as vehicles of digital content.

Whereas the terms ‘print’, ‘cinema’, ‘video’, ‘photography’, ‘radio’, ‘telephone’ and ‘television’ once referred to separate physical, technological forms carrying specific content, in the digital era these terms are historical hangovers used for convenience-sake to refer to types of content accessed across a range of digital devices. What was a form in the broadcast-era is now the content of a digital device – being transformed into digital code interpreted by computer processors. As a result the form-barrier that characterised the broadcast era (that made it difficult for one form to be translated into and carried by another) has collapsed. For me, as a child, television was a physical box in the corner of the room. Today it is a type of content, existing in digital form and carried by a range of digital devices. The best example of this change is the development of the generic ‘media player’: we have no better name for a device that simply plays all digital content, potentially combining all media and erasing what were once fundamental differences.

When we consider how media studies lecturers have built their knowledge, research and careers around the specialisation upon specific forms (film studies, television studies, newspaper studies etc.) these changes have implications for the discipline. Today’s fluid forms and cross-platform content require the radical rethinking of specialist expertise.

Changes in content are also important. A Professor recently complained to me that the TV clips he’d shown in his lecture had been met with blank silence: his students hadn’t even seen recent and current shows. ‘What are they watching? What do they spend their time doing?’ he asked. Our students do still watch television (downloading shows, buying or renting DVD-box-sets, personalising their viewing with on-demand services and just occasionally turning it on) but the common culture that dominated the broadcast-era has changed. It’s more difficult today to find films, TV programmes or other content to teach that all the students have heard of. In an era in which our students have no necessary knowledge of contemporary media we’re going to look back nostalgically upon the days when we only complained about their knowledge of the past.

This isn’t simply about audience fragmentation: it’s about a fundamental shift in production and consumption. In the broadcast era the overwhelming majority of content was produced by media companies. Today, they still produce massive quantities of output but if we consider the origins of the media our students actually consume then me-casting or peer-casting probably exceeds broadcast consumption: our students spend more time in a day with their own personal or peer-created messages than they do watching broadcast products. These messages involve a completely different kind of content: one that is personal, self or peer-generated and self or peer-centred, including the use of messaging services, texts, videos, media-sharing, social networking and virtual relationships and worlds. Much of this content isn’t held in common or open to view, a fact having significant implications for our teaching, analysis and research. Thus the content that characterised the broadcast-era is being supplemented – arguably even supplanted – by a different type of content, with different processes of production and distribution.

To a large extent these changes are caused by a shift in the concept of the social in the post-broadcast era. In the broadcast-era ‘the social’ represented the abstract social body – the public, the population, the citizenry, the masses – with the media’s role being to incarnate the social bond and bring social and political developments to the individual. In contrast the ‘social’ in social networking derives from ‘social life’. The top-down provision of information is replaced by peer-produced relationships with news of the world being replaced by news of the self. Negroponte suggested in 1995 a future electronic newspaper – ‘call it The Daily Me’ – delivering personalised content to each if us. His broadcast vision was too limited: today our students are self-journalists, investigating their own lives, collecting information about their own behaviour, opinions and activities, constructing their own news-feed and delivering their personal content to their subscribed public.

This highlights a fundamental change in reception. In the broadcast-era the individual’s role was as receiver and consumer of the products of large-scale companies. Although media studies later fleshed out their ‘activity’ – their reuse of material and oppositional practices – replacing the earlier conception of the passive masses with a more sophisticated view of audience behaviours, this behaviour never challenged the broadcast model or the audience’s position within it. For many, new media seemed to offer a realisation of the ‘active audience’, extending those practices they had identified with new possibilities of interactivity, but this interpretation is backward-looking, still trying to understand the post-broadcast world through broadcast-era categories.

Whilst we still spend time as audiences (whether of mass or peer-produced media) the term itself is too limited to describe the contemporary media experience, constituting only a small part of our media use. Adding the term ‘active’ to this ‘audience’ doesn’t help, merely qualifying a role that no longer exists in many contexts. When we hear the complaint that our students no longer watch anything we should take the hint. In their self-generated experiences – their use of mobile phones, instant messaging, social networking, video-games, Hotel Habbo, Club Penguin, Second Life, World of Warcraft, chat rooms and forums and their Wiki-edits, reviews, comments, tagging, posting, sharing and production – they aren’t watching, they’re doing. Whatever else this is, it isn’t simply ‘reception’.

Our students have moved away from ‘the social’ we grew up with – the social as a top-down phenomenon and nationally shared bond. Instead they’re making their social. Networking sites are one of the most culturally visible examples but virtual worlds have the potential to be a defining force in the future. As Castronova says in Exodus to the Virtual World (2007):

“I see a hurricane coming. It’s called practical virtual reality. Practical virtual reality emerged unannounced from the dark imagineering labs of the video games industry, got powered by high-speed internet connections, and exploded across the globe, catching us all by surprise. Already practical virtual reality immerses 20 or 30 million people in worlds of perpetual fantasy. Over the next generation of two , hundreds of millions more will join them. The exodus of these people from the real world, from our normal daily life of living rooms, cubicles and shopping malls, will create a change in social climate that makes global warming look like a tempest in a tea-cup.”

Whatever media world we’ll see emerge in the following decades it will only have less, not more, in common with the broadcast model and mass communication assumptions we have lived within for the last century (2).

So what does the near-future hold? More powerful and cheaper processing power; the increased availability and near-ubiquitous dissemination of technologies; real-time communication and interaction; increased intercommunication between devices, platforms, applications and content; the everyday, immediate and personal accessibility of technologies and their increasingly personalised and individualised use are highly likely. Add on improved experiential simulations, 3-D modelling and virtual environments, improved and more various sensory interfaces and real developments in brain-computer interfaces and then add on too the new, unpredictable social uses of these forms. This use is important. Once, it was thought, students matured into media - they’d begin to take a newspaper at University and grow into more serious content as they joined the world of work. Today we can’t expect that generation to move into our media. Instead we’re having to move into theirs. Either way their current media use isn’t a phase: it’s too integrated into the structure of their lives, experiences and relationships and succeeding generations will only bring with them new patterns of media use. Our use is already the past. Sooner or later media studies has to recognise this.

WHAT MEDIA STUDIES 2.0 ISN’T…

This only begins to sketch the changes and challenges of the post-broadcasting era. Each of these changes in form, content and use take their place within a very different system of media ownership and production, including both real and virtual economics. At the moment, however, it offers enough to suggest that broadcast-era media studies needs rethinking. I’ve called this a media studies 2.0 but before we consider exactly what that is we need to be clear about what it isn’t, as there is an obvious temptation to assume its emphasis on new media ties it into certain positions.

Firstly, whilst MS2.0 emphasises post-broadcasting, it isn’t a rejection of print, cinema, radio and television. These forms remain with us and an MS2.0 is interested in the ways in which each of them has been fundamentally transformed in their production, dissemination, reception and consumption by digital technologies and culture. From this perspective print, radio, TV and cinema have each had to re-align themselves to meet the demands of a different era and market, changing their economic models, their content creation, their distribution, their relationship to other media forms and even their idea of what they are doing and how their products will be used. An MS2.0 foregrounds these changes and their implications.

Secondly MS2.0 isn’t simply a celebration of new media or an expression of faith in its inherently positive and democratising power. McLuhan recognised long ago that ‘many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favour of it’ and discussions of new media are similarly assumed to be in awe of new forms and their possibilities. An MS2.0 presupposes no particular critical position: its starting point is merely the necessity of recognising the reality and impact of new media. Digital technologies are as important for the new systems of governmental and corporate surveillance, integration and control they produce as for the new modes of empowerment they allow.

Thirdly MS2.0 isn’t a call to separate off a ‘new media studies’ as that erroneously implies that a media studies can survive apart from any consideration of new media and that new media can exist as a separable topic.

Fourthly, MS2.0 isn’t a-historical. This is important as discussions of new media are often criticised for celebrating ‘new’ developments that have a longer history. From this perspective MS2.0 depends upon a simplistic periodisation that breaks down if we trace back the individual history of digital computer processing, networked computing and each new media form. If many ‘new’ media forms appeared before many ‘old’ media forms then the division of MS1.0 and 2.0 becomes untenable.

A lot depends on how we use media history. Used negatively, media history is a conservative force, historicising contemporary developments to conjure away anything new and any need to engage with them. A more positive media history recognises that its processes are ongoing and extend into the present and thus that new media is part of its remit. It recognises that new media forms not only display continuities with the past, having their own complex history, but also display discontinuities, offering genuinely new developments. Thus, following Schivelbusch and Standage, the railway and telegraph can historically inform our understanding of the internet and its cultural impact, but we also have to recognise that the internet is different – no prior media offered its real-time, personalised, interactive, multi-media experiences.

More importantly, the recognition of each media’s own history doesn’t invalidate the periodisation I’m offering here. Technologies become revolutionary not at their point of invention or development, but at the point of their popular take-off, dissemination and success – their integration into the everyday life of the population. The essential point is their use. This is what we saw in the last decades of the 20th century as a range of cheaper, more powerful digital technologies were taken up across the population, changing their patterns of media use and consumption. Together these technologies challenged the dominance of the broadcast technologies and their systems of production, distribution and consumption that had defined the 20th century. Their interconnection – their ability to communicate and to transfer content between devices – meant that technical developments in one area or form soon fed into and impacted upon all others, creating a critical mass whose superfusive waves continue to transform the entire media ecology.

Even more relevant is the counter-claim that it is media studies 1.0 that is a-historical. As a product of the broadcast-era it has privileged the history of broadcast forms and, even then, primarily focused upon a limited number of forms – print, cinema, radio, television – ignoring the diversity of broadcast media. Entire media worlds, such as the 18-19th century commercial industries of screen and imagic entertainment and media produced for contemporary mass, urban audiences, have been erased from media studies textbooks. Peepshows, the eidophusikon, panoramas, dioramas, the entire magic lantern industry, commercial photography, stereoscopy and optical toys such as the zoetrope or praxinoscope make little or no appearance in the discipline. To find out about them you have to turn to those who do know about them – the specialist collectors, museum and archive staff and interdisciplinary experts who write about them, the collectors who have them and the collectors clubs and presses that disseminate the information.

The situation is worse for pre-broadcast media. Media studies has ceded any interest in these to other disciplines. Early image making and use is found in archaeology and anthropology; linguistics covers early language; early religious image making is the province of theology; historical western ideas about images and mediation are covered in theology and philosophy; manuscript-era culture is covered in history; aesthetic image-making is art history and photography is photographic studies. The divisions may be logical but what isn’t is our discipline’s decision to cut itself off from most of its own history, as this has significant implications for our ideas about media and the way we teach it (3).

The reason for this separation of pre-broadcast forms is obvious. Media studies has had to fight to establish itself in the academy and to constitute an essentially inter-disciplinary field as a distinct discipline with its own approaches, methods and knowledge. It’s focus upon mass media and mass communication and reception gave it a specific identity and credibility but this came at the price of a limitation of its subject matter. Whilst this was beneficial in the broadcast-era, today these limitations are a fetter to the discipline’s development.

Fortunately, in allowing us to look beyond broadcast forms and to recognise the broadcast-era as one phase in the history of media, new media open up the opportunity to rediscover pre-broadcast forms, to disrupt the linear histories written to explain their development and to find new insight into older forms. An MS2.0, therefore, can be more historical than MS1.0. Indeed, new media may have more in common with neglected and pre-broadcast forms, allowing different histories to be written. Facebook has more in common with cartes-de-visites than with television and Second Life has more in common with the stereoscope, the zograscope, the panorama and peepshow than with radio, cinema or newspapers.

Finally, an MS2.0 isn’t necessarily a study of the west or the privileged. The criticism could be raised that its focus on digital technologies is inadequate when an economic ‘digital divide’ means that both within western societies and globally many have limited or no access to these forms, but this logic is flawed. As examples such as Africa show the development and success of technologies isn’t linear: there the mobile phone is more successful than the land-line and even within western countries different forms have different rates of take-up among different economic classes. In addition, the fact that some nations don’t have certain technologies doesn’t invalidate an interest in them, just as the continuing existence of pre-literate societies doesn’t demand that we renounce any interest in literacy. Given that no society on earth today escapes the impact of digital technologies, being subject to the electronic information, surveillance and weapons systems of the wealthier and more powerful nations, then an MS2.0 isn’t invalidated by global inequalities. On the contrary, it may help to explain them better.

MEDIA STUDIES 2.0

So what is Media Studies 2.0?

Media studies 2.0 is an upgraded media studies. If MS1.0 was a product of the broadcast era and a reflection of its time and its dominant forms and processes then MS2.0 is a reflection of a changed media environment, exploring the post-broadcast, digital era and its implications. If MS1.0 was a media studies for the early 20th C then MS2.0 is a media studies for the early 21st C: a media studies radically receptive to the contemporary age, following and deciphering the media worlds our students live in. MS2.0 is a call for every part of media studies to recognise and open itself up to the changes caused by new media. It is a call to media studies to broaden and update its knowledge and references and to test its ideas, assumptions and arguments against the contemporary world. Above all it is a call for media studies to remain relevant.

The starting point is the return to, systematic revision and updating of the discipline and its constituent subject areas, approaches, methods, ideas and arguments in the light of changing media technologies, worlds, social uses and experiences. No-one individual can decide or direct this process: each of us must confront the changes in our discipline and specialisms and their implications for our knowledge, teaching and research. Clearly this process has already started with much work on digital media already being produced in the discipline. William Gibson’s famous comment – ‘the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed’ – describes the situation well. Digital technologies are being explored in media studies but there hasn’t yet been the discipline-wide recognition that today all of media studies has to confront this world and upgrade itself. There also hasn’t been the recognition yet of how much our student’s media use and world has changed. We’re the ones who still think newspapers, TV, films and radio are significant. Until we understand that for a major part of the population throwing sheep is infinitely more important than Newsnight, The Times or Radio 4 we won’t even see what’s happening in front of us.

Instead of massaging our media world to fit into our established frameworks we need to reconsider the basic classification, content, categories and concepts of broadcast-era media studies, dispensing with aspects that fetter our understanding and radicalising our ideas and arguments to capture the processes that actually form our present. The post-broadcast era gives us the chance to rewrite these models and find entirely new frameworks of analysis; to explore older, deeper, non-linear histories and to realise the inter-disciplinary potential of media studies. The latter is media studies’ great strength. Instead of the limited, conservative, controlled and patrolled zone found in mainstream textbooks and approaches we need to synthesise a more radical, exciting, innovative and forward-looking discipline.

To achieve this we not only need to update existing categories and topics, we also need to foreground different, and even new, aspects of media use and experience. Questions of reality and virtuality are central, as are questions of identity and personalisation; individual production, mashing and making; the new processes of digital labour and its ownership; the hybridity and fluidity of form; media ecologies; the underlying process of code; the materiality of our technologies and our sensory and mental relationships with them; new modes of interface and interactivity; the processes of information organisation, collection and retrieval; the archiving of digital content; copyright, IP rights, pirate cultures and activities; virtual politics and economics; the centrality of pleasures, fun, games and gadgetry; simulations, immersion, ubiquitous media and modes of hyperrealism; new bodily and sensory experiences and the new wirings of the social body all deserve study today.

Add to this entirely new problems in the discipline. In the broadcast-era, apart from the fear of theft, issues of crime and security were irrelevant, as were questions of surveillance and privacy. They simply did not appear in the discipline and no text would have considered their inclusion. Today these are all central issues whose significance is only going to increase in the future – although, typically, most of our textbooks don’t yet consider them worthy of inclusion.

Whilst the idea of an MS2.0 might appear limited, in its emphasis upon issues surrounding new media, on closer inspection it is actually broader and more inclusive than MS1.0 in avoiding the biases that have afflicted the discipline over the last two decades. In particular issues of production, political economy, politics, industries and institutions that have all been marginalised with the dominance of audiences, effects and ethnographic study need to be foregrounded and rethought for the contemporary era. As do theory and technology.

We need a greater theoretical understanding of our new media forms. To date media studies’ willingness to deal with theory (and its very definition of ‘media theory’) has been limited (4), but there is an important historical and contemporary theoretical literature that media studies needs to be aware of and employ. Today, in particular, in a period of rapid technological change, we need an improved theorisation of the materiality of media, our sensory relationship to form, the modes of experience and sociality produced, the impact of new technologies, their use and the significance of their content.

The question of technology might pose the biggest problem for the discipline. The new media ecology cannot be understood without a renewed emphasis upon technology and a consideration of the historical relationship between human life, society and technology but media studies is not well-placed to deal with this. Raymond Williams’ 1974 critique of McLuhan established ‘technological determinism’ as the cardinal sin of the discipline whilst Stuart Hall’s ‘Encoding/Decoding’ model dating from the same year emphasised the moment of audience reception above production, transmission or technology. Together these led to the marginalisation of technology within the subject and aided the rise of contemporary audience studies and effects research. Whilst these have mined a rich research seam the exclusion of any critical debate upon technology and resistance to newer continental theoretical paradigms sweeping the social sciences and humanities in the 1980s-90s meant that media studies was poorly placed to deal with accelerating developments in new media from the mid 1990s. Instead, the most innovative and theoretically-informed explorations of new media came in sociology and cultural studies, in debates around the information society, Post-Fordism, postmodernism, globalisation, cyberculture and cybertheory. Media studies came late to new media, ignoring the existing literature in these fields and their theoretical paradigms to focus instead upon the new media audience.

Contemporary media studies is still hampered by a remarkable hostility to technology, with any mention still being met with the reflex charge of ‘technological determinism’. Repeated too often, this has become an easy and convenient label so integrated into the dominant disciplinary paradigms that we accept it without question. It functions for us as a miraculous word-of-power conjuring away any need to deal with the deeper issues raised or with historical debates and complex philosophical texts that we don’t want to read. As the ‘philosophy of technology’ - one of the most important emerging fields, developed within philosophy, information studies, cultural studies, cultural history and computer science – is ignored within media studies we see once again an entire subject ceded to other disciplines.

So we are left with a discipline that attempts to think the historical processes of communication, mediation, connectivity and shared experiences with little or no reference to technology; a discipline that displays no knowledge of or interest in the historical debates on the relationship between culture and nature and the organic and mechanical that have been central to western thought and civilisation (5); that knows little or nothing about the historical writing on technology or even the work of 19-20th century theorists of technology (expunging all these from its limited definition of ‘media theory’) (6), and a discipline that – even in the middle of a remarkable digital transformation of everyday life – still refuses to consider the question of technology, refusing it any role in human experience, self or society.

Very simply, this is no longer intellectually credible. We need a much more historically informed and sophisticated debate about technology, recognising in particular its metaphysical and epistemological implications. Contemporary developments in electronic communication, in personal technologies, in the simulation of the senses, in interfaces and in implants and prostheses require us to historically contextualise and rethink the relationship between the natural and cultural; the body and technology and the real and its virtual image. The same developments make it even more important to think about the materiality of our media and our sensory and psychic relationship to technology, to recognise that the way in which we communicate, interact, share experiences and bring the world and others to ourselves has a role to play in what we experience, think and feel. Whilst ever we only see a ‘determinism’ in these discussions we’ll never progress to a greater understanding of contemporary processes.

Our fear of technology often extends to our own personal use of it. Whereas in the broadcast-era we broadly understood the basic technical principles of the dominant media and we understood their use – sharing that use with our students – today lecturers are being left behind in their knowledge of what technologies are out there, of their technical possibilities, of how they even work, of how to use them and of what they are being used for. Again, we no longer share a common culture with our students. Unless we can keep up with these changing technologies and uses and unless they become as integral a part of our lives as they are to our students then we will lose both the ability and even the right to teach them. In an era in which we watched and studied TV we had a right to teach it: in the future, unless we’re downloading, sharing, ripping, burning, messaging, networking, playing, building and producing then we’ll lose that right.

All of this points towards the necessity of a new holistic appreciation of media. The specialisms that defined the broadcast-era aren’t going to work when media forms are so fluid, when content moves across them and when modes of experience change so rapidly and move across and transform the whole media ecology. A greater ability to understand, follow and use our technologies allows us to grasp the totality of contemporary media and their interrelated developments and impact. As they move across the form-barrier, so too must we.

This is ultimately a call for us to follow the changes in media rather than ignore them or force them into broadcast-era categories. This isn’t easy – the pace of change, the nature of the changes and the time it takes for their impact to become clear make this a difficult task, but we don’t have any choice but to try. The cutting-edge is no longer an unrepresentative space of uncertain developments, but the place where things happen – where the media ecology is made and forges ahead and where new social uses are discovered. In the broadcast-era new developments rarely transformed the basic structure of the medium, its industries, business models and operation or did so only slowly and under the control of the major broadcast companies. Today changes impact upon all of these. In the age of the permanent media beta we can’t wait for things to settle before we consider them: today nothing settles.

McLuhan famously said he didn’t try to predict the future as anyone could do that. He decided instead to tackle ‘the really tough one’ – to predict the present. Applied to media studies that becomes a demand for a discipline that is radically receptive to the present: that confronts, traces, follows and critically explores its own on-going transformation; that embraces the threat to its own modules, accumulated lecture notes, established and comfortable knowledge and research to ensure its relevancy for coming generations.

These debates about the discipline have to happen as the study of media is already escaping media studies. As we have seen, in establishing its own boundaries media studies concentrated upon the dominant broadcast technologies, ceding off the study of pre-broadcast forms to other disciplines: a strategy and broadcast bias that is now holding the discipline back. With their impact upon every aspect of life the study of digital technologies is being taken up across the academic world such that, today, there are very few areas of the arts and humanities (plus other subjects such as computing and information studies) that aren’t interested in and publishing on media. In remaining tied to broadcast forms and concepts media studies itself is lagging behind. It is significant that the major contemporary texts on new media aren’t being produced by authors with a background in or working in media studies and don’t include any reference to the subject or its knowledge (7).

Moreover, entirely new paradigms about the masses and their behaviour are becoming popular – ideas of ‘collective intelligence’ and ‘the wisdom of crowds’ – that challenge traditional ideas about the audience in media studies. Not only are these ideas omitted from our textbooks but they are being developed outside of our discipline (in particular from the confluence of science, computing, psychology and business studies) with no reference to it. It is essential that media studies is part of these debates, taking its ideas into these new arenas to challenge and modify these new paradigms. If ideas of the wisdom of crowds are gaining in credibility then media studies needs not only to incorporate these new ideas into itself it also needs to critique them and develop them within its own knowledge and perspectives. It can’t do this whilst ever it remains a study of broadcast forms and concepts. Unless it takes its knowledge into fields that are already exploring new media without it then it is in danger of being left behind on the very subject that defines it.

But new media don’t just impact upon our discipline and knowledge they also have the potential to transform how we teach and transmit it. Perhaps one of the most important ways they can do this is by transforming academic publishing and the dissemination of our ideas. Universities are products of literate modernity, stamped with literate values and academics internalise these, subscribing to a hierarchy of academic publishing that privileges books and journals above other forms of expression. This academic publishing follows a scarcity-led broadcast model in which a publisher broadcasts academic output to a national or international audience, with limitations on the number of titles each publisher can produce and the page count of each text together with the need to make each book economically successful necessitating careful editorial decisions and the employment of readers and referees to assess submissions and monitor content. Academics may complain in private at this model and its processes, but they depend upon it for publication.

Except this system does not produce the best results. Economic considerations lead many contemporary publishers to focus on textbooks and rework and package academic texts as textbooks, leading to fewer academic monographs and a difficulty in placing anything new that doesn’t repeat the existing field in a way that guarantees its use for pre-specified modules and courses. The result is a predictability and conservativism in many academic publisher catalogues, the loss of publisher reputations built upon the variety and originality of their titles and a promotional inflation of ordinary texts as revolutionary and new to simulate the innovation lacking in the commissioning process. Ultimately this predictability and conservativism feeds back into the courses and the research of staff.

Academic print journals have their own problems. Though their proliferation suggests they are successful, their real impact is negligible as most humanities and social science journal articles go unread. Their value lies entirely in the academic privilege they receive rather than the impact of their scholarship upon the field. Ultimately this mode of academic vanity-publishing compares unfavourably to the potential offered by web publishing which not only allows more papers to be published (as it is less restricted by the scarcity-economics of physical publishing) but also provides an unparalleled opportunity to take academic ideas out of the academy (and out of the libraries that can afford them) to the whole population, making articles available for free in one’s own home.

The broadcast model’s reliance on the ‘expert culture’ of referees could also be questioned. Contemporary arguments about the ‘long tail’ of knowledge (Anderson), ‘collective intelligence’ (Levy) and ‘the wisdom of crowds’ (Surowiecki) suggest these gate-keepers are no longer needed: the audience can decide for itself the value of ideas placed in the public sphere. Most academics would be outraged by that idea, arguing that even if academics could judge the value of academic papers the mass of students and the public could not. But every academic knows the refereeing process is flawed: every academic has horror stories concerning dubious referee comments and decisions and the disproportionate weight given them by editorial boards and publishers. The expertise of chosen referees varies considerably; the suitability of their selection may be questionable and many use their position to further their own agendas, their own work and their own interpretation of the field and to control what will be allowed to be read. As Anderson points out, pre-production filters lead to a limitation of what is available and its manipulation into pre-existing, successful forms and patterns; an analysis that applies well to traditional academic publishing.

In a post-scarcity market these pre-production filters are no longer necessary. We should trust the academic community and our own public – the students and others who might read our work – far more. Over time the wisdom of crowds will make a better choice as to what is important for the field and what ideas will be taken up and survive. We need to exploit the potential of web publishing to open-source our ideas – to open them up for comments, discussion and revision – and let the field determine their value. This would have the added benefit of promoting more original work and newer ideas and research that pushes the boundaries of fields rather than merely satisfying the conservative experts that patrol them.

The biggest problem with academic publishing, however, is that it is always obsolete. It takes long enough to research and write an article or book but add to that the time it takes to pass though a series of referees, readers, proof-readers and editors and the time it takes to fit into their schedules, prepare the marketing and to print and ship it to the shops. Add the time it takes to be noticed, reviewed, bought and read and quoted in the field and it’s obvious that traditional publishing can’t keep up with contemporary media. By the time a book’s published, it’s out of date. That may always have been the case but accelerating developments and the inter-linked impact of changes across industries, economies, forms, processes and modes of use make this one of the most significant problems for the field today. We can justify what we do by suggesting that we offer a considered overview explaining the broader changes but the fact remains that the subject area is massively behind the student’s experiences. Try recommending books for students to read for lectures on Facebook: Turkle and Rheingold are still the best options we have but their world of the Well and MUDs is meaningless to today’s students. Again, web publishing seems to be the answer – cheap, instant, global, it allows for faster, updateable commentary, for freer expression, more debate and the opportunity of a rapid response and on-going critical dialogue. Even if it doesn’t replace books we should be using it to throw out faster, draft responses to the world, to engage with each other, to take our subject out of our libraries into the world to a broader public and to challenge our field.

‘SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE …’

In 1965 Jeffrey Owen Jones, a summer intern at Time magazine, hit upon the idea of an article on the renaissance of the harmonica in contemporary music. Visiting the Newport folk festival he managed to secure a five minute interview with Bob Dylan, where he asked his questions about the instrument whilst Dylan answered politely. The next day, in one of the most talked-about events in modern popular music, Dylan ‘went electric’. When Jones heard the song ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ on Dylan’s next album with its stinging line, ‘Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?’, he knew it was about him. Even the Dylan groupies screaming and shaking the truck had failed to alert him to the fact that something else was happening. On the eve of Dylan’s revolutionary embrace of amplification and transformation of early-60s rock and roll all he’d seen was the harmonica (8). Media studies today is at exactly the same point: an intellectual and generational shift is happening in front of us.

Perhaps a more acceptable academic way of explaining this is through Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shifts. Although his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, dealt with the transformation of the physical not the social sciences the argument remains relevant. Both progress not through the accumulation of facts and knowledge but through periods of upheaval in which older paradigms are challenged by new paradigms. ‘Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense … often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way’. This recognition leads to a split into camps or parties, ‘one seeking to defend the old institutional constellation, the others seeking to institute some new one’. Once that polarisation has occurred, Kuhn notes, ‘political discourse fails’ – ‘each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s defence’. The differences between paradigms, however, are about more than substance; they are also about how the subject itself is conducted: they include differences in methods, the problem-field and standards of solution accepted by the community. As such differences between paradigms are ‘both necessary and irreconcilable’.

What are decisive in the end are not the arguments each camp mounts but the existence of ‘anomalies’ – of phenomena the older paradigm struggles to explain. The older paradigms tries to force these anomalies into its structures and integrate them but its problems in doing so give rise to new theories that are better at explaining their processes. Eventually the inadequacy of the older paradigm convinces others of the merits of the newer paradigm which becomes acceptable when it receives ‘the assent of the relevant community’ (9).

This disciplinary paradigm shift is what we are dealing with today. Developments in digital technology aren’t a cumulative ‘add on’ to media studies that can be adequately explained through the existing concepts, categories and research. Look at the violence done to the richness of the new media user-experience in reducing their functioning to an ‘audience’. They represent instead a fundamental challenge to and transformation of the broadcast-era model of the discipline. They demand a richer, more sophisticated reading of the complexities of the digital era: they demand a post-broadcasting, digital paradigm.

As an established disciplinary paradigm media studies 1.0 has a long-standing personal, institutional and ideological investment in its own status quo. As such, as Kuhn suggests, the idea of a paradigmatic shift – of an upgrade – will inevitably provoke hostility. Arguments will be marshalled to explain the value of the older paradigm and how it can explain the digital world around it but the new paradigm has already placed enough questions in the minds of many teaching media today. As my colleague David Berry has argued, quoting Kuhn:

“At the start a new candidate for paradigm may have few supporters, and on occasions the supporters' motives may be suspect. Nevertheless, if they are competent, they will improve it, explore its possibilities, and show what it would be like to belong to a community guided by it. And as that goes on, if the paradigm is one destined to win its fight, the number and strength of the persuasive arguments in its favor will increase. More scientists will then be converted, and the exploration of the new paradigm will go on. Gradually, the number of experiments, instruments, articles, and books based upon the paradigm will multiply. Still more men [sic], convinced of the new view's fruitfulness, will adopt the new mode of practicing normal science, until at last only a few elderly holdouts remain. Though the historian can always find men [sic] - Priestly for instance - who were unreasonable to resist for as long as they did, he will not find a point at which resistence becomes illogical or unscientific. At most he may wish to say that the man [sic] who continues to resist after his whole profession has been converted has ipso facto ceased to be a scientist” (10).

If media studies wants to remain relevant in the digital era for succeeding generations of students then a more radical re-examination and reconceptualization of the discipline is required. This idea may not carry, it may be easily dismissed and forgotten now, but the basic problems in the discipline it describes aren’t going away and the direction it advocates is inevitably the direction the discipline will go. It’s time to remember McLuhan’s mischievous description of a sociologist as someone who ‘permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues’; a description that applies equally to our own discipline. We have the opportunity today to permit ourselves to think and see something else. We have the opportunity to fashion a new paradigm that reflects and explains the new media world that is emerging all around us. We have the chance of a media studies 2.0.

Notes

1. See ‘Media Studies 2.0’ at: http://mediastudies2point0.blogspot.com/ ; Soon after David Gauntlett developed the same phrase in his article at: http://www.theory.org.uk/mediastudies2.htm and we set up a discussion forum for the issues at: http://twopointzeroforum.blogspot.com/ Although Prof. Gauntlett and I come from very different perspectives in media studies what we share is a recognition of the importance of new media and its implications for the field: a recognition that new media developments necessitate not only an updating of the discipline’s content but a transformation of the discipline itself.

2. And this is only to consider what we can already see happening around us now. Samuel Butler in 1872, discussing the great strides machines had made in the last thousand years, asked one of the most chilling questions when he said, ‘may not the world last twenty million years longer … what will they not in the end become?’. Applying such time-scales to contemporary developments in media is dizzying. Ironically, however, what saves us is that we may not even be in a position to guess the future anymore. Once we could project stable current trends and phenomenon and construct science-fiction fantasies about where they might lead. Today we don’t even know if DRM is here to stay or will be swept away next month. Developments now happen so fast and take us into completely different directions: forget the far future, we can’t even guess next year. For those worried by Castronova’s comments, however, that can hardly be a more comforting thought.

3. Our treatment of media ‘representation’ is typical here. This is one of the most important theological, philosophical and political problematics in western civilisation but you wouldn’t know it from our textbooks. These focus upon 20th century media forms (films adverts, magazine images), approached through a limited theoretical framework (semiology, ideology, feminism) and methodological analysis (discourse analysis, content analysis). In the process the entire history of images and their role is elided. To understand the history use, power and function of images in western culture we need to turn to the historical theological, philosophical and anthropological literature on images. Yet we don’t: the history of images is instead considered part of other disciplines and media studies constitutes itself with little or no reference to these histories, leading to an artificially circumscribed definition both of media and its history. In contrast an MS2.0 understands that Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius, Dionysus Areopagitica, John of Damascus and Theodore of Studion are as important as Stuart Hall, Saussure, Pierce, Barthes, Jakobsen, and Dyer. In MS2.0 Plato is at least as important as Mulvey.

4. Whereas in sociology or cultural studies students receive a training in the historical development of theory in their discipline, this is rare in media studies. Media studies lacks any agreed canon of thinkers or even a clear sense of what theory is and what should be taught under it, with different institutions and individuals constructing wildly different versions of the field. It often ignores the history of thinkers/movements and simply teaches concepts (narrative/ideology etc.); it fails to teach its own history, with thinkers who dominated the field two decades ago (such as Althusser and Gramsci) now ignored, and it is highly selective about what theorists are considered acceptable. Hence whilst some theory is popular – semiology, feminism, audience theory, public sphere theory – there are huge gaps in the coverage. Much contemporary media theory is better taught in sociology, cultural studies and cyberculture (such as Baudrillard, Virilio, Kittler, Castells, Deleuze, Zizek, Hayles, Levy, Benkler, Lessig, Moravec, Drexler, Mazlish, Kurzweil), leading to a remarkably circumscribed conception of theory in the discipline. Unlike in sociology or cultural studies, few media lecturers study theory in detail plus there seem to be fewer working in theory and many texts are published with very little theoretical content or analysis.

5. For the best discussion of historical western debates about technology see David F. Channell’s The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life (Oxford: Oxford University press, 1991), which explores both mechanical philosophy in the west (and its conclusion that organic life is mechanical) and the opposing organic philosophy (and its conclusion, that technology itself is like life).

6. Media studies doesn’t teach technology; limits the teaching of the history of technology and ignores the history of theoretical work upon our relationship with technology and the relationship between technology and nature. Writers like Carlyle, Ure, Butler, Kapp, Engelmeier, Dessauer, Sombart, Junger, Spengler, Marinetti, Mumford, Heidegger, Giedion, Wiener, Innis, Ellul, De Chardin and Illich etc. are almost entirely absent from media studies, as are the contemporary discussions of technology taking place in other fields. In addition, the available books on the history of technology aren’t being written within our discipline. Most are written by journalists, IT specialists, science-writers, historians and specialist collectors and are more likely to be found in the ‘popular science’ section of bookshops than on the media studies shelves. Even if media studies lecturers find and use these texts in their teaching they don’t write them and the mainstream delineation of the discipline and its interests and knowledge rarely makes any reference to them.

7. Consider some of the key, best-selling academic texts on new media and their authors. Lawrence Lessig (The Future of Ideas, Free Culture, Code), Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks), Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu (Who Controls the Internet?) and David Weinberger (The Cluetrain Manifesto, Everything is Miscellaneous) are all located in law departments; Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (Wikinomics) have a business background; Dan Gillmor (We, the Media) and Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) are journalists and Edward Castronova (Synthetic Worlds, Exodus to the Virtual World) is an economist. References to ideas developed in media studies are notably absent in these works.

8. See http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007711130327

9. Thomas, Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962). See Chapter IX, ‘The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions’ available at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/kuhn.htm

10. Thomas Kuhn, quoted by David Berry, at: http://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2007/05/media-studies-20.html

December

2008-01-04T02:29:00.002-08:00

Music:
Warner agrees to make its music available for download on Amazon in the mp3 format without copy-protection (27th Dec): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7162280.stm

Cinema:
Apple and 20th century Fox are to announce a deal that will allow iTunes users to rent the studio’s films, purchasing a specified period to watch the downloaded film in (27th Dec): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7161609.stm

Internet:
The Queen becomes the first monarch to begin broadcasting films on her own Youtube site. She posts 18 films, including the first TV broadcast in 1957 (24th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/24/internet.youtube See also (23rd Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/23/youtube.monarchy

Internet:
Apple comes in for criticism after forcing a website dedicated to reporting on the company’s activities to close down. Thinksecret published news and rumours about their forthcoming products and had been locked in a two year legal battle over Apple’s claims it had published protected confidential information (22nd Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/22/internet.apple

Television:
Channel 4 is fined £1.5m by Ofcom for causing ‘serious consumer harm’ after viewers entered phone-in competitions they had no chance of winning (21st Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/dec/21/tvfakery.channel4

Television:
BSkyB is hoping to persuade the government is should be able to keep its 17.9% stake in ITV after the Competition Commission recommended it should reduce its holding to less than 7.5% (21st Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/dec/21/bskyb.television1

Video games:
UK gamers spent £1.52bn on games in 2007, up 25% on 2006 (with two weeks of sales still to be counted) (20th Dec): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7153474.stm

Internet:
Torrentspy, a website which facilitated the online exchange of music, TV and films without permission has lost a US copyright case brought by the Motion Picture Association of America (20th Dec): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7153323.stm

The Future:
A Swiss lab comes closer to building an artificial human brain on a supercomputer. Despite early derision at the project they have succeeded in building a computer simulation of the neocortical column of a two-week old rat that behaves exactly like its real-life counterpart (20th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/20/research.it

Television:
The BBC fears for its future funding in the digital age (19th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/dec/19/bbc.ofcom

Internet:
Dating website Match.com hopes to attract new customers by becoming the first big matchmaker to partner with the social networking site Facebook. It is offering a "Little Black Book" application to Facebook users from next week, which helps them find potential partners. The move comes as analysts argue that free social networking sites pose a serious threat to subscription services such as Match. Some dating sites have already left the market as networking operations such as Facebook and MySpace have rapidly expanded their non-paying audiences. Other matchmakers have become more like networking sites by introducing chat functions and video clips. But dating sites also argue that the social networking phenomenon has helped them increase their overall audience by breaking down people's inhibitions about meeting online (19th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/19/facebook.socialnetworking

Security:
The Government admits a disc of data with details of every applicant for a driving theory test between September 2004 and April 2007 has been lost from a secure store in Iowa. The story also says that the letter the government sent out to apologise for the loss of child benefit data itself contained too much confidential information and some of them were liable to have gone astray! (18th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,2229061,00.html

Internet:
A story about how the porn industry is suffering from the free porn available online, pirated pornography posted online and the postings of thousands of amateurs on sites such as Youporn (16th Dec): http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2228298,00.html

Internet:
A story about Hugh MacLeod, ‘Britain’s most successful Facebooker’, who gets 28 friend requests a day and the success of social networking in the UK (15th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/15/facebook.socialnetworking

Television:
ITV reports rising advertising revenues in the second half of 2007 (although that was up against a weak close to 2006) (14th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/dec/14/itv.tvnews

Internet:
Google receives complaints from businesses over changes to how it ranks results (13th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/13/internet.google

Internet:
Microsoft buys UK online form Multimap in an attempt to compete with Google, whose Google Maps and Earth dominate the online mapping and location markets (13th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/dec/13/microsoft.digitalmedia

Video Games:
The Playstation battles back against its rival, the Wii, outselling it in Japan for the first time (12th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/dec/12/playstation.sony

Security:
After recent admissions about the loss of child benefit data now discs of Northern Ireland drivers data are lost in the post (12th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/Northern_Ireland/Story/0,,2225981,00.html

Internet:
Britain leads Europe in social networking, spending an average of 5.3 hours a month on networking sites (12th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/12/socialnetworking.facebook

Television:
An article on how high-definition close-ups are affecting television production and causing problems for a medium that used to be able to hide presenter blemishes or cardboard sets (12th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/dec/12/television.digitaltvradio

Internet:
Concerns are raised over a flirty computer program that is being used to steal people’s identities from online chatrooms. The robot called Cyberlover is being used to gather information from people interacting with it (11th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/11/crime.internationalnews

Video Games:
Manhunt 2, criticised for its ‘casual sadism’, escapes a ban in the UK after the game’s creators, Rockstar Games, win an appeal against the British Board of Film Classification which banned it in June (11th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/11/games

Internet:
Online shopping in the UK hits a new record at 1.09pm on 10th December as shoppers spent £767, 500 over the internet in a single minute (11th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/11/internet.retail

Internet:
An article on the use of the internet by campaigning politicians in the US (10th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/dec/10/politicsandthemedia

Internet:
An article on the legal issues raised by Second Life (10th Dec): http://media.guardian.co.uk/digitallaw/story/0,,2225125,00.html

Music:
An article on the music industry’s current approach to DRM (10th Dec): http://media.guardian.co.uk/digitallaw/story/0,,2225127,00.html

Internet:
An article on copyright law and the liability if ISPs (10th Dec): http://media.guardian.co.uk/digitallaw/story/0,,2225128,00.html

Internet:
An article on libel laws and websites such as blogs and forums (10th Dec): http://media.guardian.co.uk/digitallaw/story/0,,2225129,00.html

Print:
An article on the implications of digital books for the publishing industry (10th Dec): http://media.guardian.co.uk/digitallaw/story/0,,2225131,00.html

Internet:
A professor is banned from editing Wikipedia after using it for self-promotion, tampering with his own biography and manipulating computer science articles to inflate the importance of his own work (9th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/09/wikipedia.internet

Internet:
An article on how young people see email as ‘for old people’, preferring texting, messaging and social networking for their personal communication (6th Dec): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/06/digitalcommunication

Video Games:
The merger of the French media conglomerate Vivendi’s computer games business with its US-based rival Activision in a £9.2bn deal creates the world’s largest computer games company (3rd December): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/03/games