8 This debate, between Marxist and postmodern forms of media studies, agreed about the
importance of discourse, but conceived entirely different ends to their analysis, with
Marxism interested in the role of ideology in the reproduction of a social totality, and
postmodernism ontologizing the contingency of discourse itself as a denial of totality.
Certainly the sociological merits of the Marxist approach would prove to be limited by
remaining within the linguistic paradigm. By the 1990s Christopher Williams was ask-
ing, is it not ‘the case that ideology has become a hopelessly unusable term?’ (cited in
Corner, 1997: 453). Indeed, in the face of New Media, it can only be wielded as a ‘clumsy
club’, whereas it once had a central role in the unification of media studies.
9 For example, John Hartley (1992a) adheres to a basic theoretical tenet ‘that communication
is textual, not behavioural’ (14). The other tenet he gives is that communication is ‘social,
not individual’. It is because Hartley conflates all communication with broadcast, or, at
least, with understandings that an analysis of broadcast most often yields (the book in
which he wrote this is about television), that he overemphasizes texts. My modification of
this tenet is that the textual or behavioural qualities of communication are conditioned by
the architecture of the medium in which it is realized. I agree with Hartley’s second tenet,
but the social nature of communication once again has to be related to the means and
media of communication. The social is not some abstraction which can be posed over and
against the individual, or the means of communication in which individuality is realized.
10 I would suggest that it is because of this imbalance, rather than the incommensurability
of different approaches, that media studies has developed what John Corner (1997) has
called a ‘knowledge problem’.
11 Positivism and behaviourism each subscribe to instrumental views of technology, which
are based on a stark separation between the human and the technical. For example, pos-
itivist methodologies tend to talk about the ‘use’ of technologies, ‘the user perspective’
or rational choice perspective, in which a technology is reduced to a most visible and
tangible element, e.g. that on the Internet we use a mouse and make choices. Alternatively,
behaviourist models come from the opposite direction in which the individual is ren-
dered entirely passive – their aim being to examine the ‘influence’ that technology has
on individual (only sometimes social) behaviour.
12 But this does not mean that ‘media studies was nearly dead’, as Gauntlett extravagantly
claims in hailing ‘long live new media studies’ (Gauntlett, 2000: 3); rather, traditional
media can be looked at in a new way.
13 For an assessment of Gore’s proclamations on the Internet and the ‘techno-
communitarianism’ of Demos, the New Labour think-tank in Britain, see Robins and
Webster (1999: 229–31).
14 On decentralization see pp. 157–9. For Negroponte, the post-information age refers to a
post-broadcast age of an ‘audience the size of one’ (164), where information is extremely
personalized and not distributed in homogeneous volumes.
15 Moreover, ‘Cyberspace... is based not on such a hub-and-spoke model of distribution
but on one of shared spaces where everyone can have his say’ (223–4).
16 Studies indicate that the same gigantism that afflicts the old media now dominates the new.
Despite the Internet’s myth of indestructible diversity, cyberspace is also vulnerable to
monopolistic tendencies. ‘[In 1999], 60 percent of all time spent on the internet was on sites
owned by 110 companies. By 2001, fourteen companies captured the largest share of the
user’s time and 50 percent of all time is spent with four companies’ (Buzzard, 2003: 207).
17 See Chapter 3. A list of useful guides to the technical details of the Internet is given in
Jones (1995: 8).
18 As Silverstone (1999) observes,The new ideology of interactivity ... [is] ... one which stresses our capacity to
extend reach and range and to control, through our own choices, what to con-
sume, both when and how. It is hailed to undo a centur y of one-to-many broad-
casting and the progressive infantilization of an increasingly passive audience. It
is an expression of a new millennialism. These are the utopian thoughts of the18 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-01.qxd 2/15/2005 10:30 AM Page 18