Lister et al. — Ch. 4

Outline

Chapter 4 New Media in Everyday Life

4.1.1
‘Everyday life’
• Implies the mundane and quotidian, the routine and ordinary (219)
‘Cyberspace’
• Disembodied and exhilarating
• “…A new kind of life and society online, a democratic public sphere unencumbered by the stultifying routines and alienating hierarchies of the real word”(269).

4.1.2
• For some observers new media offer new creativities and possibilities, for others they reinforce and extend social constraints and power relationships (220)

4.1.3
Cyberspace
o “The sense we have of a space behind the monitor screen, or the network ’in’ which we communicate with distant others or from which we receive images, information and services”(221).
• New media quickly cease to represent exciting new features and are incorporated into the fabric of everyday experience (222)

4.2.1
• Telecommuting
o Working exclusively or predominately from home while connected to the office or clients via PC or modem
• “The Net is not just a spectacle for passive consumption but also a participatory activity”(225).

4.2.2
• Popular new media are commodities
• “Technologies, far from being merely technical, are at once material and symbolic” —Bingham
• ‘Black boxes’: a particular configuration of entertainment and/or information technologies packaged as a single, commercially successful product
o It is not only particular technical features included in any new black bow device that determines its commercial success; its symbolic status is also crucial (227)

4.2.3
• Computer technology is instrumental in profound transformations in contemporary culture and beyond
• Cyberspace us seen as a realm in which social divisions based on bodily and material attributes and positions (age, gender, class, race, etc.) can be transcended (228)
• The meanings and uses of popular new media such as the web or video games are by no means fixed
• “Computers enter into the development of personality, of identity, and even of sexuality” —Turkle (234).

4.2.4
• The negotiation of access and construction of meaning of stand-alone PCs

4.2.5
• Edutainment: the use of entertainment, toys and games as a medium for learning
o Derogatory—a trivializing, ‘dumbing down’ or commercialization of knowledge and learning
o Edutainment has now been adopted by the educational software industry
• “Knowledge is not only central to economic development, it becomes raw material and commodity”(241).

4.2.6
• “Networks could be seen as more like public theatre than ‘old’ media”(245).
• “An online home, on the other hand, is a little hole you drill in the wall of your real home to let the world in” —John Seabrook (264).
• Bricolage: the appropriation and manipulation of the meanings of commodities by youth subcultures

4.3.2
• An optimistic, positive reading of cultural change: new media technologies are free from the repressive ‘master narratives’ and hierarchies of the modern era (249)
• Identity become a ‘moveable feast’ (252)

4.3.3
• Cyberfeminism: term covers a diverse, even contradictory range of feminist theories on technological change and gender
• Cyborg: ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism’ (255)

4.4
• Videogames are the first popular computer-based medium”(260).

4.4.1
• Videogames are generally presented as a problem to be solved (262)
• Losing oneself in the medium can be creative and liberating, this immersion can be hypnotic, seductive, ‘mindless’ as well (263)

4.4.2
• It is estimated that 49 percent of adult online gamers are female (Datamoniter 2000)
• Pokemon is an example of an ‘entertainment supersystem’

4.4.3
• What is the cultural significance of play?
• According to Huizinga, though essential to culture play is always separate from ordinary or real life (269)
• Ludus: denotes modes of play characterized by adherence to strict rules
• Paidia: ‘true’ creative play
• “Playing is both escape and engagement”(271).

4.4.4
• Videogames do represent a significant new medium: mass media as games (273)
• “We see videogames not as ephemeral digital toys but as offering distinct, perhaps unique, opportunities for engaging with and making sense of the complex and intimate relationships—networks even—between people and computer media technology”(277).

4.4.5
• “Established conceptual frameworks for studying media and culture in everyday life, whilst productive, do not fully address the questions raised by digital media technologies”(279).

Comments

Sonia Livingstone’s 1998 account of the confusion adults felt when they heard eight year olds refer to their off-line adaptation of a favorite multimedia adventure game as “playing the Internet” embodies the generational divide between those of us who grew up “playing the Internet” and the adults whose new media commentary is embedded in a Before Internet/After Internet perspective. For a post-Internet generation, the framing of “everyday life” and “cyberspace” as “distinct, even irreconcilable concepts” rings of historical fiction, not science fiction. The Jetsons approach to new media by old timers privileges those for whom cyberspace succeeded outerspace as the new frontier. Having grown up in cyberspace, the theorizing does not always resonate with experience. One feels like the subject of a photograph who, when presented with the snapshot fails to recognize the landscape. The excitement surrounding the introduction of what were new technologies is not necessarily shared by those young enough to have not been without. For us, new media is everyday life and the rapidity of technological change is as normal as the ten-week quarter. New media is not superimposed on our everyday lives, in large measure, it defines our lives.

A recurrent theme in new media theory, regardless of topic, is the dichotomy between the cyberculture ideology of democratic empowerment and the postmodernist ideology of commercialized mediasphere. “Appropriation of the fittest” might be an apt descriptor of the endless cyberspace chase scene in which authenticity of relationships and construction of identity are the commodities of choice in both the commercial and non-commercial sectors, with the burgeoning of chat, brands, franchises, MUDs, home pages, and on-line gaming. Convergence on connectivity directs the mad scramble for attention and allegiance.

Although entitled, New Media in Everyday Life, Chapter 4 did not succeed in maintaining a strong continuity of theme throughout the chapter. The ethnography of one family’s shared computer use seemed relevant and illustrative of practice, the chapter lacked a unified presentation. Diverse viewpoints were presented, examples of Microsoft’s X-Box marketing strategy was contrasted with the do-it-yourself post-punk media culture, but critique, as it related to the specific topic seemed more generic than domestic-specific.