New Media Theory

From Medium Theory to the Second Media Age

One of the first such claims about substantial change due to media was made by Marshall McLuhan, inventor of the term media, in Electronic Revolution: Electronic Effects of New Media, an address to members of the American Association for Higher Education in Chicago (and later reprinted in his book, Electronic Revolution). McLuhan argued that the effects of the electronic revolution in 1950s America were so great as to make educators displaced persons living in a world that has little to do with the one in which they grew up. For McLuhan, this revolution produced classrooms without walls as telecommunications and television brought a simultaneous information structure to electronic society.

McLuhan's formulations in the 1950s were to become prophetic for Internet Utopians in the 1990s, who proclaimed that McLuhan's time had finally arrived with the inception of instantaneous information provided by the Internet. The editors of Wired magazine went so far as to say that McLuhan was wired long before the editors of Wired magazine were born.

However, despite attempts to reclaim McLuhan for Internet studies (Paul Levinson's work is an example), there is little in McLuhan's work that deals with the kind of revolution in electronic media that is claimed by new media theorists today, a revolution which is the shift from broadcast to networked forms of electronic media. This transformation is one that is internal to electronic forms of media.

Although many of McLuhan's observations about media globalization (the global village) and convergence (the relationship between mediums) have established some of the grounds for new media research, the media revolution that inspires the contemporary concerns of new media theory can be found in the investigation of a second electronic media age based on interactivity. The euphoria for an Internet-led new media age culminated in a range of texts in the mid 1990s that ranged from the journalistic utopianism of George Gilder, Nicholas Negroponte, and Howard Rheingold to the more theoretical analysis of Mark Poster and Sherry Turkle, each of which declared the end of broadcast and the rise of interactive networks. In Life After Television, Gilder announced the overthrow of the master-slave architecture of television by networked media in which everyone is able to be a broadcaster.

With television, on the other hand, the ability to shape, store, and manipulate television pictures had to be contained at the broadcaster since the technology of the time, due to economic and technical [Page 685]constraints, simply could not be contained within the individual television set. However, the advent of new technologies—the transistor (1948), the microchip (1958), and the fiber-optic cable (late 1970s)—made analogue television technology redundant.

...