New Media as Event

Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, 2015

A major part of our lives is now entangled with new media devices-mobile phones, laptops, iPods, blogs, twitters, SMS, e-mails, TV screens, etc. Our daily life happens in a cultural context where television, video, advertisement and computer images are more real to us than the non-media physical reality that surrounds us. In this article, within an ontological setting marked by Heidegger's notions of being-inthe-world and Ge-stell, we argue that information and communication technologies (ICT) would only essentially show up as what they are as long as they are experienced in-the-world where they are what they already have been for us. In this light, we submit that new media are essentially and paradoxically linked to instrumentality. On the one hand, within Ge-stell, the essence of ICT is shown to be far removed from its obvious toolness; yet, on the other, we submit that it is this very instrumentality that bounds new media that cannot be stripped out of what they most essentially are. At this point our article brings together earlier and later Heidegger, in a manner not done up to now, and that we claim is epistemologically consistent. The in-the-worldness of ICT, of its many devices but fundamentally of its revealing, that is, of the conditions of possibility for contemporary life

Since all media were new before they were old, the history of new media is older than the history of old media. New media-roughly defined as communication or information technologies still in the process of social institionalization-repurpose, reform, remediate, regulate, distort, enhance, measure, and re-coordinate the media that came before them. Media history thus helps us make sense of how we understand what around us is new and old, kinetic and potential, exhausted and untapped. Since all media were at once new and all new media will at some point be old, traditional mass media like the telegraph, telephone, radio, and cinema make as worth subjects of study as do cutting-edge new technologies like mobile technology, online networks, virtual reality, and other tools of digital orchestration. This sense of the new media history begs diachronic study: histories of memex (a portmanteau for a microfilm "memory extender" system), Talmudic page layout, or even cuneiform may help inform the new media history of XML (eXtensible Markup Language, possible heir to HTML). Peters 3 Readings The following books are required readings and are available at the reserves desk at Butler. If you want to build your personal library, however, look for them on your favorite Amazon.com equivalent or at Labyrinth (536 W 112 th St.). Any edition will do. Other materials supplied in class or on Courseworks.

When scholars of media attend to the material and historical particularities of media, many recognise that ‘newness’ is not a self-evident social category (see Marvin 1988; Gitelman 2006; Gitelman and Pingree 2003; Peters 1999; Larkin 2008; Ginsburg et al. 2002). Instead, they explore how people on the ground interpret and make use of the newness of their media. In the process these scholars have shed light on how people discuss and experience their changing social contexts through their engagement with these different forms. Studying the newness of new media involves understanding people as social analysts in their own right, and exploring how they think about communication and change. Today the media technologies that are understood as new – the Internet, mobile phones and social networking sites – provide another venue for innovation and continuity, as well as a means to reflect on how newness is constituted. In this special issue, the authors explore how the ‘newness’ of new media is experienced by people outside of the Global North, ranging from how communities have and are responding to the introduction of writing to the introduction of mobile phones and social networking sites. To understand how newness is constructed, the authors in this issue were guided by three types of intellectual investments: a focus on history, on media ecologies and on media ideologies.

Ethics in Progress, 2019

Can we say we live in a post-digital condition? It depends. This paper sets out to distinguish between the current mass digital culture and an authentic post-digital culture. If we mean “post-digital” as the full internalization and awareness of the result of the so-called digital revolution, then it is necessary a philosophical work to discuss related problems, identify the causes and propose solutions. An authentic philosophy of digital will, however, have to start from a clarification of the terms and basic objects of its investigation. Here media theory is inserted as an analytical tool: the purpose of this essay is to outline a road map for a good media theory that interfaces with questions of definition of digital, also in light of the notions of space, time, and matter. As will be seen, the description given here for a “good media theory” does, in fact, coincide with an already existing – and inserted in the contemporary debate – school. In conclusion we will try to delineate the field of philosophical inquiry opened by the clarification brought by the previous analysis, and to suggest a general framework within which philosophy will have to move in order to finally reach the authentic postdigital condition.

On the road toward a cultural history of digital interconnectivity, there are many potholes. It is not easy to define the digital culture itself and what a cultural history of the digital means. It is unclear what we have in mind with the digital (often used in an oversimplified sense to simply mean the Internet): The geographical horizon of this culture is unclear, and lastly the main trends are unclear. What is more, too many aspects of the contemporary digital landscape are taken for granted, as if “natural”, while they are historically determined. This is the reason why history is so helpful in reconstructing the origins, the changes, the main trends of digital media, simply because it shows how they came into being and they were metabolized by the cultures. This discussion aims to clarify these elements or at least discuss them critically, whereby“critically” is meant first of all in the etymological sense of differentiating, second in the sense of not accepting prima facie what is generally considered to be obvious. This will be only a preliminary contribution that, far from being exhaustive, will aim to start a reflection on the role and benefits of cultural history in analyzing the digital.

Digital Roots

2009