Digital retouching
Hamelink says that ‘the digital age arrives with
a monumental invasion of people’s privacy’
through the massive collection and sale of
personal data, which he considers – referring
to the proliferation of electronic monitoring by
employers of their employees – to be ‘a funda-
mental violation of human rights’. He believes
that digital technology is creating ‘transparent
societies, “glass-house” countries that are very
vulnerable to external forces and to the loss of
their sovereign capacities’.
Digitization is seen to be both empowering (to
the already powerful) and potentially disempow-
ering (to those with less of it in the fi rst place).
In relation to the trend towards deregulation,
Hamelink argues that ‘tension between public
good and private commodity is increasingly
resolved to the latter’s advantage’. Consequently
the ‘erosion of the public sphere by implication
undermines diversity of information provision
... everything that does not pass the market
threshold because there is not a sufficiently
large percentage of consumers, disappears. Th at
may be good for markets, it may be suicidal for
democratic politics and creative culture’. See
communications act (uk), 2003; disem-
powerment; downloading; journalism:
phone-hacking; mobilization. See also
topic guides under media: technologies;
network society.
▶Jan van Dijk, Th e Deepening Divide: Inequality in
the Information Age (Sage, 2005); Vincent Miller,
Understanding Digital Culture (Sage, 2011).
Digital retouching Or electronic retouching;
process whereby laser and computer technology
are combined to retouch or re-create photo-
graphs. A laser beam scans and measures images
and pigmentations, then reduces them into a
series of ‘pixels’, or minute segments. Th ese are
then recorded in digital form and stored in the
computer’s memory for eventual reproduction,
which permits the rearrangement of the picture,
a re-creation – or just plain faking.
Digital video disc (DVD) Or digital versatile
disc. One of a number of video compression
systems, the size of a compact disc (CD) but
holding up to twenty-six times more informa-
tion. Th e DVD allows for four full feature-length
fi lms to be stored on a single disc, and permits
wide-screen format. Th e cost of duplication is
considerably less than that for VHS tape. DVDs
can be encrypted, allowing the distributor to
control viewing access, and in the case of parents
to empower them, through the use of a program
password, to restrict what their children view.
Originating in 1998, DVDs swiftly displacedpast, part of a recognizable audience. Special-
ized, more targeted provision comes at an extra
price. Where once the annual licence fee was the
only payment for radio and TV services, now
reception depends more and more on subscrip-
tions, smart-cards and digital conversion boxes.
Viewing is becoming almost as expensive as a
night at the opera.
Take up the new digital technology, and you
pick up the cost of development and the rush for
profi ts. Availability of what has been traditional
screen fare for public service broadcasting
(psb) – that is, programmes available for the
entire nation to watch – rapidly diminished in
the last decade of the twentieth century. British
digital broadcasting began in 1998, with two
rivals in the fi eld, Ondigital and Sky Digital (in
which News International has a 40 per cent
stake), with government insistence that they
must produce compatible technology to mini-
mize consumer confusion.
Digitization is the ultimate form of conver-
gence, technically but also in terms of control.
All texts converge in the bit, but the investment
costs of turning the electronic world digital are
enormous, meaning not only that the competi-
tion is to be between media giants, but that even
the major operators will be continually at risk
from their competitors.
At the same time there are serious worries that
in terms of quality of programmes and schedules,
more may turn out to be more of the same. A key
question is whether segments of the population
will be left behind in the new age of subscription
and pay-per-view. Many commentators fear that
digitization favours the already information-rich
and widens the information gap between
them and the information-poor.
Cees Hamelink in World Communication:
Disempowerment & Self-Empowerment (Zed
Books, 1995) identifies four major trends in
world communications, citing digitization as
the fi rst, and interacting and interlocking with
the others – consolidation, deregulation and
globalization. Th e cost of developing digitiza-
tion leads to consolidation of ownership and
control, which in turn demands the minimum of
regulation in order to expand and traverse the
boundaries of nation states, and in particular
regulations governing and protecting public-
interest communication.
Finally digitization provides the techno-
logical basis for globalization ‘as it facilitates the
global trading of services, worldwide fi nancial
networks, and the spreading of high-technology
research and development across the globe’.