Technology

The media in media studies are the technologies that mediate between those who make messages and those who receive them. Models of the communication process have long included the media, but for many years, research almost exclusively focused on message production and reception, with little attention to how messages got from here to there. The convergence of technologies that has resulted in the internet, however, has provoked a great deal of interest in just what makes one technology different from another. Today's global information infrastructure is a “pan-medium” (Theall, 1999) that combines all previous media, but differences among them still matter: Media developed earlier remain in use, many forms of communication use digital and analog media in combination, and although technologies may have multiple meanings and uses, they are not infinitely malleable; materialities still matter. The ways we use media and the policies we make for them are, in the end, always local and therefore technology specific.

This chapter opens by distinguishing among different classes of technologies and between stand-alone technologies and technological systems, looks at characteristics of technologies that make certain choices more or less appropriate in particular circumstances, examines how new technologies appear and come into use, reviews the technological features of the contemporary global information infrastructure that provides the context and conduit for the media, and concludes by looking at media themselves as technologies.

From Tool to Meta-Technology

Across the long course of human history, the invention of new kinds of tools and technologies had such an impact on the nature of society that we distinguish between the premodern, modern, and postmodern periods by dominant type of technology. The ancient tools of premodernity, the industrial technologies of modernity, and the informational meta-technologies of postmodernity differ in the degree and kinds of social coordination they require, the materials they process, and the range of types of processes they enable. The specific features of meta-technologies go far toward explaining why the current period is also described as an information society (Braman, 1993).

The word technology has its roots in the Greek techne (making), referring to what both art and engineering have in common. This linguistic root has given rise to three different ways of making:

• 1.
  Tools can be made and used by individuals working alone and make it possible to process matter or energy in single steps. The use of tools characterized the premodern era. Although it is easy to think of examples of ancient tools for other things that people do, such as planting seeds or starting a fire, because communication is an inherently social act, it may only be when marks are made for the purposes of individual memory can it be said there are communication tools.
• 2.
  Technologies are social in their making and use; that is, they require a number of people to work together. They make it possible to link several processing steps together in the course of transforming matter or energy, but there is only one sequence in which those steps can be taken, only one or a few types of materials can be processed, and only one or a few types of outcomes can be produced. The shift from tools to technologies made industrialization possible, and the use of technologies thus characterizes the modern period. The printing press and the radio are examples of communication technologies.
• 3.
  Meta-technologies vastly expand the degrees of freedom with which humans can act in the social and material worlds. Meta-technologies involve many processing steps, and there is great flexibility in the number of steps and the sequence with which they are undertaken. Meta-technologies can process an ever-expanding range of types of inputs and can produce an essentially infinite range of outputs. They are social but permit solo activity once one is operating within the socially produced network. Their use characterizes the postmodern world. Meta-technologies are always informational, and the internet is a premiere example of a meta-technology used for communication purposes.

There are four dimensions along which tools, technologies, and meta-technologies can usefully be distinguished: the degree to which they are social, the complexity of the processes they enable, their autonomy, and their scale. The movement from tool to technology to meta-technology is marked by an increase on each of these dimensions.

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