The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  The creation and protection of reserved domains also shaped the development of American cable television. The cable pioneers of the 1940s established primitive but effective systems for retransmitting free-to-air television across physical wires to those areas where the signals were weak. As the technologies of retransmission improved and cable operators began to bring in content from other areas, the free-to-air networks began to see them as a threat to the dependable audiences that provided their advertising revenues. Legal challenges to the cable industry followed, based upon arguments that cable was infringing intellectual property rights through retransmitting content without permission. These resulted in a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1968, which found that the cable operators were not liable, but they also led to an FCC ruling banning cable companies from the hundred largest urban areas in the United States, as part of an attempt to boost the development of ultra-high frequency (UHF) television—a move that severely hindered the development of cable until a series of rulings undid the restrictions and brought the industry within the pale of existing copyright law in the late 1970s (Wu, 2010: 180–181). By that stage, cable was being transformed by entrepreneurs like Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, into either a commercial subscription model or one based upon entertainment and niche advertising. And yet traces of the medium’s origins in the interactive and data services model continued in the form of local public access networks and C-SPAN and can be seen today in the role that cable companies have played in promoting broadband internet infrastructure. Nobody would pretend that cable television has been an unqualified boost to American democracy, but by eventually loosening the grip of CBS, NBC, and ABC, it changed the face of American broadcast media and it served to embed many of the values that went on to inform the popularization of the internet: individual control, niche content, information services, customization, and diversity, albeit within limits.

  Digital Newer Media

  How do digital newer media and the internet fit into this brief history of media hybridity?

  In common with previous newer media, digital media have borrowed heavily from print traditions. The basic and familiar “page” organizes a vast array of online material and it is still difficult to imagine the internet without this metaphor. Since the early human–computer interfaces of the 1950s, the physical spaces and objects for organizing printed materials in the modern organization—desktops, files, folders, and so on—have also become synonymous with digital interfaces of various kinds. Bibliographic metaphors, and the practices associated with libraries and books as social institutions, were important in shaping the prototype internet of the 1950s and they remain so: in 2012, Google’s search still refers to all of its web objects as “documents.” The classic visionary texts of early computing, Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think (1945) and Joseph Licklider’s Libraries of the Future (1965) sought to create systems that would free societies from the rigid and bureaucratic capture of information, but these texts were full of references to the print culture into which the internet was born. Records, files, cabinets, desktops, shelves, cards, microfilm, and paper all played important roles in the sketches of what would later become the ARPANET (Gitelman, 2006: 98–121).

  Licklider’s approach was shaped by the international scientific community’s concerns about the growth of published information during the post-1945 research boom. The document, broken down into its bibliographically-defined constituent parts, was seen as the canonical unit, and its efficient storage and retrieval the answer to the growing mountains of paper generated by government and corporations. Information increasingly came to be seen as a disembodied commodity consisting of sources of data that were capable of being processed and measured in identifiable quantities. Information was perceived as self-evidently growing, a resource to be exploited. The idea of the “information society” also originates in the early 1960s, as Fritz Machlup’s economic analysis of the “production and distribution of knowledge” in the United States came to displace an older view of information as a shifting but finite resource innate in social relationships and passed down and exchanged between individuals in discrete social contexts (Crawford, 1983).

  Yet if digital newer media have been influenced by print, they have also been influenced by—and have coevolved with—a surprising array of other media. In Lev Manovich’s convincing account (2001) today’s digital media are best seen as products of the co-development of visual media and computerization. The point of origin here goes all the way back to the 1830s, when modern photography arrived in the shape of the daguerreotype. Photography then went on to influence broadcast media’s affordances for recording, manipulating, and displaying sound and images. But the 1830s also saw the birth (of sorts) of modern computing, with Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a prototype mechanical “computer” theoretically capable of mathematical calculations. Computerization, a twentieth-century development whose pace quickened after the Second World War, introduced the principle of digitizing analog media artifacts so that they could be manipulated as data. In this interpretation, the development of digital new media is actually the outcome of the coevolution of “media machines” and “computing machines.” After all, during the 1890s, when photography was being turned into moving images by Edison and the Lumiѐre brothers, the U.S. census was also being transformed by Hollerith’s electric punch-card tabulating machines. In 1936, when Konrad Zuse built the first operational digital computer, the medium on which he recorded binary instructions was, of all things, second-hand 35mm cinema film (Manovich, 2001: 25).

  It might seem surprising, but digital media and the internet owe a lot to film and cinema (Manovich, 2001: 78). Digitization rests upon the sampling of points in time so that those moments may later be manipulated. Film recording, editing, and projection all rely on the same principles, and have done since the emergence of prototype projection devices such as Eadweard Muybridge’s now-famous Zoopraxiscope (1879), which conveyed movement by rotating still photographs that had first been captured from different perspectives. Digital media interfaces routinely combine moving images with audio and text, but text-based intertitles and musical sequences have also been staples of cinema since its very beginnings in the late nineteenth century. Cinema relies upon frame, screen, and window metaphors; so do almost all computing devices. Cinematic visual techniques such as zooming, tracking, and point-of-view are to be found in many online interfaces. Computer games are obvious examples that rely upon cinematic (and novelistic) genres to achieve their realism and fantasy effects, but at the same time games rely on “augmented reality” applications for displaying ambient information about a player’s environment. Video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo can be seen as descendants of the early twentieth-century “cinema of the attractions” (simple films depicting events such as fast-moving trains) that preceded the emergence of narrative cinema (Rizzo, 2008). Digital media are often considered to be “new” due to their affordance for interactivity and engagement, but as Erik Bucy convincingly argues, the concept of interactivity is far from straightforward: it may be a product of a technology, a communication context, or individually-held perceptions (2004: 376). For example, post-1920s “modern” cinematic style has been dominated by techniques consciously designed to heighten cognitive engagement among the audience and to visually represent human thought, such as montage and fast cutaway editing. Interactivity is not exclusively the product of a physical encounter with a media object, such as clicking a hyperlink.

  The hybrid development of digital newer media was also influenced by a radically different medium, one that also influenced television: radar. During the 1930s and 1940s, radar embedded the idea of a screen that could be updated in real time according to the data being monitored. This was a significant departure from photography and film, which were based on the capture and storage of events that would then be played back in a predictable sequence and without further intervention from the audience. Digital media environments have steadily integrat
ed the affordances of photography and film, but they have also made extensive use of radar’s “real-time screen” as an interface whose elements are manipulated in order to allow us to act upon information. This concept of a display-of-the-present that enables user intervention was an important break with older media (Manovich, 2001: 99–103). It quickened the processes of mediation and it enabled acting in real time over great distances (Manovich, 2001: 169). In James Beniger’s (1986) account of technological evolution, such monitorial technologies reveal a growing “systemness,” as communication and information flows of all kinds become more central to the controlled and functional integration of modern societies.

  Building upon these aspects of digital media, the internet has been based upon the continuous assembly, disassembly, and reassembly of modular data. Its read-write environment is based on an assortment of text, still images, audio, and video, some originally analog, some digitally native, pulled in from scattered databases and acted upon in real time by human and software agents. As David Weinberger has argued, the internet contributes to a new “order of order” where the systems for categorizing and organizing information now transcend the limitations of the pre-digital realm (Weinberger, 2007). The internet’s assorted hardware, such as graphics and sound processors, monitors, and telecommunication networks, also contribute to its deep hybridity as a medium. During the early period of its expansion in the 1990s, web pages were relatively simple, but since then the internet has increasingly come to rely upon dynamically-generated applications and other objects created in real time according to pre-programmed scripts and routines, not to mention a huge and diverse array of real-time human interventions. It has become almost nonsensical to imagine such a thing as an unmodified web “page.” Static web sites, like the Geocities home pages that once flourished in the 1990s, are now the subject of nostalgic parody. We can put this another way by borrowing terms from systems theory. The internet is less “autopoietic” than it is “allopoietic.” Autopoietic systems are closed, boundaried, and self-reproduce through the interactions of their internal practices. This concept has recently found favor among those seeking to argue, on the basis of the work of Niklas Luhmann, for the distinctiveness of a new online media culture (Deuze, 2006, 2007). Allopoietic systems, in contrast, are open, receive a variety of inputs and produce a variety of outputs, and are created by combinations of forces and resources external to those systems (Kickert, 1993). This seems to better capture the hybrid nature of the internet.

  Yet there is a paradox here. Immense speed and transience—the flow of real-time communication and the simultaneous multitasking facilitated by the interfaces of computerized media devices—is now everywhere accompanied by immense archival permanence, very much in the spirit of Licklider’s and Bush’s original ideas from the 1940s and 1950s. Like early television and radio’s relative lack of scheduling and prerecording, the internet encourages what Philip Auslander has termed “liveness,” (2008: 11–24) and this is not only based upon real-time mediation but also interactivity. The nature of liveness in today’s hybridized real-time flows of communication is a theme that recurs throughout this book. But for every example of liveness or even temporal indeterminacy (like web pages without dates or the incessant flows of Twitter and Facebook updates) there are also examples of what we might call “time-stamp culture.” Real-time flows of information are more prevalent than ever, but online, in what is an important break with broadcasting, there has also been a backlash against flow and transience and a strong promotion of the archival. The shift toward the adoption of global standards on metadata means that many digital objects, from web pages to digital photographs to digital video files, have their provenance embedded, making tracking and tracing much easier. Marking updates with correct time stamps has become a source of pride among bloggers and some professional journalists. The internet is becoming the archive par excellence. And because the manipulation of discrete digital artifacts such as audio, video, images, and text stored in databases has now become the norm in the production of all media content—from newspapers to broadcasting—reusable pieces of information flow across media in the form of ready-made resources from which journalists, politicians, and sometimes citizens can quickly construct and publish new narratives. Even the most ephemeral and locationally-specific of media, like street art, have been given a new permanence and solidity by the internet, as artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey will attest after finding that their work has reached massive audiences through online circulation. Being able to access and repurpose existing media artifacts is dependent upon the existence of networked databases that allow content to flow and be sifted, sorted, tagged, and continuously augmented. Digital production encourages disaggregation and disassembly, but also reaggregation and reassembly. The rise of these modular representational dissections of events has also gone hand in hand with the proliferation of online video as well as consumer technologies such as the hard-disk-based digital video recorder, which further contribute to the democratization of the archival.

  3

  The Contemporary Contexts of Hybridity

  In this chapter I move from the past to the present and establish the broad contours of media system hybridity in contemporary Britain and the United States. My aim here is to lay some contextual foundations for the more detailed analyses of the hybrid media system in flow, which comprise chapters 4 to 10. In this chapter I focus on four overarching themes: the nature of audiences, shifting patterns of media use, the structure of broadcasting, newspaper, and online media, and the rise of new hybrid forms of mediality. Though the sources of evidence are somewhat different, the chapter is, in many respects the latest installment of the ongoing history of media hybridity I traced in chapter 2.

  I turn first to Britain, which is the context of my analysis of news making in chapter 4 and the discussion of sense making in media and political fields in chapters 8 and 9. Britain also forms an important part of the context of my interpretation of WikiLeaks in chapter 7.

  Britain

  By the late 2000s, multi-channel digital television had reached more than 80 percent of British households and in several areas of the country, such as Scotland and the northwest of England, penetration rates were much higher1 (U.K. Office for National Statistics, 2009: 4). Television news channels continue to grow in number, and a panoply of different news forms now exists in the broadcasting environment, from short bulletins and soft news content on the entertainment channels, to relatively detailed “serious” coverage on BBC Radio Four, to round-the-clock treatments on channels such as Sky News, the BBC News Channel, Euronews, and even the BBC Parliament channel. There is no shortage of political news in contemporary Britain but audiences are increasingly fragmented across the channels, the schedules, and the quasi-scheduled time-shifting environments of digital video recorders, the BBC’s multiplatform iPlayer, and mobile video applications. As part of an evolving process of adaptation and renewal, broadcasting has become ever more concerned with offering audiences customizable, personally tailored modes of consumption and interaction.

  By any standards, the British public’s use of the internet has grown at a remarkable rate over the past two decades. About 73 percent of households now have access, up from 58 percent in 2003 (Oxford Internet Survey, 2011). Just as significantly, 96 percent of all households that have the internet use a broadband connection (Oxford Internet Survey, 2009: 4). The diversity of means by which individuals can access information online has also increased. The internet is no longer a computer-based medium. Mobile access has grown in popularity and is continuing to grow: by 2009, 20 percent of internet users owned a mobile smartphone (such as an Apple iPhone) or a mobile broadband device that they plug into their laptop computer (Oxford Internet Survey, 2009: 9). Mobile phone adoption more generally has reached extraordinary levels in Britain: in 2008, there were 74 million mobile phone accounts for a population of 60 million (U.K. Office of Communications, 2008).

  This new diversity o
f opportunities for internet access plays an important role in creating multi-tasking lifestyles in multi-connection households. Around a quarter of those with satellite or cable television use it to access the internet. About a third (32 percent) use a mobile device to access the internet while in the home—a figure that trebled between 2005 and 2009, reflecting the popularity of wireless handheld devices with built-in web browsers, e-mail, messaging software, and applications provided by the major online social network providers. Hybrid consumption patterns are strongly emerging among some sections of the public. By the late 2000s, 71 percent of internet users reported “doing more than one activity while online, such as listening to music, watching TV, or using the telephone” (Oxford Internet Survey, 2009: 12, 36). The very recent shift toward tablet computing, with Apple’s iPad having sold 55 million units since its 2009 launch, has intensified these trends (Associated Press, 2012).

  The most startling change since the mid-2000s comes in the form of mass participation in the creation of online content, as British media and the public alike have not escaped the global wave of web 2.0 and social media. It is easy to forget just how quickly this shift has come about. It has been fueled by the enormous growth of blogs, online social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter, collaborative production sites such as Wikipedia, and news aggregators and discussion sites such as Digg, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz, and the BBC’s Have Your Say, to name but a few examples (Chadwick, 2009). By the late 2000s, almost half (49 percent) of British internet users maintained a profile on an online social network site, more than a fifth (22 percent) regularly updated a blog, and more than a quarter (27 percent) participated in online discussion. Older online communication forms such as instant messaging (64 percent of users) and e-mail (97 percent) are now quite simply ubiquitous in British society (Oxford Internet Survey, 2009: 21).