the face-to-face but recognizes its instrumental, tool-using extension) becomes more
and more displaced as social ties are more intensely recast in terms of dependency on
technologically mediated simulations.
9 See also Robin Nelson’s (1999) comparison of a TV drama from the 1980s and one from
the 1990s, ‘Boys from the Blackstuff ‘and’ Twin Peaks’, respectively, as a case study in
the way ‘TV space has begun to depart from a (humanist) depiction of characters and
events grounded in a historical world in which actions have consequences to a (post-
modern) collage of attractive but dislocated images and sounds’ (17).
10 It could be argued that the sums paid to celebrity sports and film stars are an accurate
reflection of the commodification of the value of interactivity that is extracted from the
media-constituted ‘masses’.
11 A useful guide to decorum on the Internet can be found at http://www.dtcc.edu/cs/rfc1855.
html; see also Shea (1994).
12 For a site which explores emoticons, see http://www.randomhouse.com/features/davebarry/
emoticon.html
13 Shannon and Weaver’s theory was actually motivated by the perceived need to enable
cost-effective communication which minimized random noise and so allowed transpar-
ent and successful communication.
14 The codification of communication theory into process schools and semiotic schools is
implicit in the work of John Fiske. This clustering of schools is potentially useful for the
first and second media age distinction. However, semiotics is barely of interest for
analysing the Internet, which is arguably all process and not much in the way of content.
To the extent that it iscontent, there is no particular reason why it is any more instructive
for the purposes of study than the ‘wider’ bandwidth semiotic mediums of broadcast.
15 For an argument for the case that cyberspace cannot be said to constitute a space in any
socially meaningful sense, see Chesher (1997).
16 Indeed the German coffee house of the eighteenth century is heralded as no less than
the place in which the communicative culture of modernity began in Europe.
17 For an argument which is strongly opposed to Jordan’s and Smith’s position, see Spears
and Lea (1994).
18 Van Dijk (1999) restates the archetypal second media age thesis: ‘The interrelationship
of processes and the growing role of media networks gives rise to a new type of society.
The best name for this new type is “network society”. In the course of the twentieth
century it has replaced another type of society that has been called “mass society”’ (23).
19 A salient example is the marriage of digital photography and mobile telephony, leading
to mergers between corporations who specialize in these technologies (e.g. Sony Ericsson),
which in turn lead to innovations in the micronization of photographic technologies
and the way images can be sent wirelessly.
20 Mark Poster (1990) claims that McLuhan’s ‘mediumization’ of media studies is restricted
to a sense-centred empiricist conception of media effects.
21 Electronic media become arms of the interests of capital rather than information
providers which abide by a public service ethos. This ethos only remains in other insti-
tutions like public libraries, museums and government statistical services which are
involved in impartial and neutral presentation of information.
22 Similarly, Hawisher and Selfe argue (see discussion below) that in the USA the popular
imagination about computers is that they are the ‘latest technological invention in a
long line of discoveries that will contribute to making the world a better place by
extending the reach and the control of humankind, most specifically the reach of
America and its related system of free market capitalism and democracy’ (Hawisher
and Selfe, 2000: 6).
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