Week 1 | Orientation to New Media

Week 1

Mosco (2004) noted that myths “sustain themselves when embraced by power” (39).  My skeptical mind went to politics and realized that power will only embrace a myth if it will sustain or replicate itself.  Mosco and a little Marxist critical theory position myths as metanarratives intended to forward specific agendas.     

Myths presented as self-evident narratives rings well with me.  Authors such as Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno and Arendt could have clearly identified political, social and commercial Internet myths as they emerged.  Arendt wrote specifically to the myth of progress solving societal problems, and how those ideals generate emotive thrall over thoughtful discourse (Arendt, 2007).  Her notions run parallel with Mosco’s myth of the Internet and the suspension of rationality through the sublime.

History suggests we are somewhere between the innovative and diffusion stages.  New media has been accepted and new economic models have been developed. There have been attempts at Internet regulation, but I think society is still grasping with its potential.  More importantly, I was reminded that the technology may be new, but its application is still to the human experience, and it follows the same behavioral path as its technological predecessors.  

I looked at Alexa’s top ten Internet sites by traffic and found Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Wikipedia and Google to be the norm.  I see little resemblance of community between the commercialized sites and the sophistication of the Well.  I’m thinking sites like the Well haven’t gone away, but they are overshadowed by the popularity and size of the commercial sites.  Commercialization has drawn the masses, and notions of community are being reframed by advertising based on those idealized mythic narratives.

The reading has enabled me to situate the Internet as a medium, and as a medium its content is subject to critical theory and review.  It was also important for me to understand that new technology does not stand apart. It can be positioned and evaluated with historical context.

This was a great start to the class.

  

References

Arendt, R. (2007). Hannah Arendt: Dialectical Communicative Labor. In P. Arenson. Perspectives on Philosophy of Communication. West Layfette: Purdue University Press.

Levinson, P. (2012). New New Media. Boston: Pearson.

Mosco, V.  (2004).  Myth and Cyberspace.  In The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. 17-53.

Rheingold, H. (1993).  Chapter one: The heart of The Well.  In The Virtual Community.  Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press.

Stöber, R.  (2004). What media evolution is: A theoretical approach to the history of new media.  European Journal of Communication. 19(4).