Topic 1: New Communication Technologies

The Changing Face of Communications

• The mid-twentieth century witnessed the emergence of institutionalised forms of major media, notably radio, film and television, often misleading referred to as ‘mass media’. The labels ‘mass media’ and ‘mass communication’ are both contradictory in terms, given the extraordinary disparities of access to the new communications technologies and services within different nations. Moreover, responses that individuals, audiences and consumers make to media content, across different cultures, can hardly be adequately categorised as ‘mass culture’. The products of the convergence of communications have also meant that contemporary information society is highly dependant on information networks that can distribute images, data and symbols.

• Rarely challenged is the presumed nexus between ‘an advanced information society’ and the technologies of convergence – a sophisticated telecommunications system, the widespread adoption of computing and the acceptance of enhanced media systems.

• The telecommunications carriers have tended to be quasi-bureaucratic, technology focused and driven by an engineering ethos. The publishing culture, on the other hand, has tended to be more financially free-wheeling, with higher risk-taking, but more customer-focused. Similarly, ninemsn (PBL/Microsoft) has faced creative tensions within its organisation because the television people tend to want to build web sites to promote the network’s television programs, while the Microsoft people want to use the web sites to shift the television audience to on-line purchasing.

• The formation of an alliance can mean loss of managerial autonomy, technology sharing with the possible further loss of core competence to a partner, a difficulties in reconciling global and national strategic objectives.

• Digitalisation is the process which converts any type of information into a compressed form to be sent as a stream of bits for use at the receiving end. Digitalisation enables the transmission of all kinds of communication signals – not only voice, but also data, video, graphics and music – over the network.

• Castells postulates that the present world economy ‘is global because the core activities of production, consumption, and circulation, as well as their components (capital, labour, raw materials, management, information, technology, markets) are organised on a global scale’. And it is informational, he adds, ‘because the productivity and competitiveness of units or agents in this economy (be it firms, regions or nations) fundamentally depend upon their capacity to generate, process and apply efficiently, knowledge based information’.

• This economic policy shift is generally referred to as economic rationalism, neatly interpreted by Brian Toohey:
  [E]conomic rationalism was based on the premise that markets know best. Rather than being seen as integral to its operation, governments are considered as somehow outside – and antagonistic to – the economy. Accordingly, governments should not ‘intervene’ in the market. As a corollary, individuals should be required to do more to fend for themselves, taxes should always be cut, privatisation should be accelerated, communal services funded according to the ‘user pays’ principle and deregulation of all markets, including the labour market, pursued with unremitting vigour.