SUMMARIZE
NEW MEDIA HISTORY
BY PATRICE FLICHY
Many histories of information and communication are related to very different fields of social science, and information and communication sector. In many histories of computing the transistor, the microprocessor are considered to be the determining elements.
Based on Friedmann(1978), new machines have been expected to determine the organization. By contrast, historian David Noble (1984) clearly show, through the case of automatically controlled machine tools, that the effect of a technique cannot be understood without simultaneously studying its use and the choices made by its designer.
New media history started when Record-playback (automatic analogue) and numerical control machine were explored after the Second World War. These two alternatives were explored to automate production. The former recorded the design of a part drawn by a human operator and then automatically produced copies. By contrast, the numeric machine is capable of programing design and production.
Studying successes and failure, The RCA videodisk is good example of failure. Despite all the assets, RCA sold no more than 500,000 copies of its videodisk player in three years. This is because the VCR, a technical system that developed in Japan was dominating the market that time. The company that launched television in the US eventually bought out by General Electric and then by the French company Thomson. Thus, as many computer manufacturers were to discover. The main lesson that draws from this case is that technical or commercial competencies are not enough if the not properly coordinated.
In the early 1980s, France Telecom has successfully launch its videotex (the minitel). A few month before new medium was launched, thistelematic project collided with a virulent combination of media and political opposition.
In an interactionistapproach, sociologists have used the notion of boundary objects. These are objects situated at the intersection of several social worlds, which meet the needs of all worlds simultaneously. A boundary object is the result of complex interaction between the different actors concerned. This is the exact opposite of the naive idea of innovation spawned ready-made by the inventor’s mind. The history of Macintosh clearly illustrates this point. Two computers using the principle of graphic windows were produced concurrently at Apple: Lisa, a failure, and Macintosh, the Californian Company’s leading machine.
The path-dependency concept devised by economist and historian Paul David is other perspectives to analyze more long-term phenomena beside perspective of boundary objects.IBM’s entry into the PC market is an interesting example of path dependency.The Internet is another case of a path-dependent history. ARPANET, the ancestor of the network of networks, was built so that the US Army could maintain communication links in case of a Soviet attack.ARPANET was launched and coordinated by ARPA, Usenet, which constituted another branch of what was to become Internet, was developed cooperatively by research centers not linked to ARPANET.The Internet was designed in the second half of the 1970s as an ‘internetwork architecture’, that is, a metaprotocol for interaction between networks builton different principles.
The founding fathers of the Internet, such as Licklider or Engelbart, thought that computing was not only a calculation tool but also a means of communication. Hackers considered that computing was a device to be made available to all, which would help to build a new society.
Susan Douglas studied enthusiasts of the wireless, whose passion for this new technology was to popularize Marconi’s invention and attract the attention of the press. A short story from 1912 is a good example of these representations of the new medium.In it Francis Collins describes thepractices of new users of the wireless, it is clearly a new imaginary type of communication that Collins is proposing. But this utopian discourse, which not only described potential users but also indicated everything that the wireless could do for society and individuals, was becoming a reality. Everyone could communicate instantly and independently with persons very far away, when-ever they wanted to. After the First World War a new ‘wireless mania’ appeared. This time it concerned wireless telephony, soon to become radio broadcasting.Later the press started to write extensively about the Internet.The editorial noted that the Internet is ‘the medium that will change the way we communicate, shop, publish and (so the cyber smut cops warned) be damned’.
The First Generation of Office Machines, The telegraph was a decisive element in the organization of markets, first of all the stock market. In Europe the transmission of stock market information was the first use to which the telegraph was put. Computing, designed to meet scientists’ and the defense force’s needs (Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, 1996), did not immediately find its place in managerial activity. The computer program was thus to incorporate all these rules into an automatic data processing and circulation system.
While mainframe computing was initialized and developed by managers in order to automate routine data processing tasks, micro computing was adopted at grassroots level. Another current of French socio-logy of labour, which studies not phenomena of reproduction but elements of transformation, facts which impact on the future, closely studied the diffusion of microcomputing. Apart from the data processing divisions which saw the PC as a technological alter-native which they did not control, middle management also saw it as a potential challenge to the organization, with greater autonomy for employees. By contrast, top management saw microcomputers as an opportunity to create a counter-power vis-à-vis the data processing division. It therefore left local initiatives to develop, as an experiment. Initially it accepted a diversity of models of computerization in the various services.
While computing developed in a centralized way and micro computing started off being decentralized, intranet and network data communications correspond to a more interactive mode in the development of computing.Once the network was available it could be used for other purposes, new communication technologies fitted into the organization better. The third phase could then begin, in which the firm was to be reorganized and to modify its digital network simultaneously.
The history of information technology in the private sphere, as in the business world, originates in the nineteenth century. Richard Sennett (1977) considers that it lost its character of conviviality and interaction, to become a space in which people mix together in silence. For a good part of the century, the theatre was above all a place for social interaction. The also find this dialectic between public and private spheres with the beginnings of photography. In the mid nineteenth century the photo portrait, a private image, became the main use of the new medium.
The debate between private and collective media also appeared with the beginnings of the cinema. Edison thought hiskinetoscope would be installed in public places, to be used by individuals (Clark,1977).This fairground cinema made people familiar with the new medium but it eventually bored them. The real success of the cinema appeared when it started telling stories, that is, when it became a narrative medium. The success of narrative film-makers such as William Paul in England and Charles Pathé in France was based on their entry into an industrial economy.
In the United States the new entertainment medium attracted a large immigrant population in particular (Sklar, 1975). The narrative cinema was to become a big consumer of scenarios, sometimes found in legitimate literature. That was how the cultured classes were to become interested in this new medium that gradually became the seventh art. As the Italian historian Gabriella Turnaturi (1995) notes, on the eve of the First World War ‘a slow and difficult process of unification of customs, culture and traditions took place through the learning of a common language in the obscurity of cinema halls’.
The late nineteenth century also saw the advent of entertainment at home. Withdrawal into the home, pointed out by historians of private life, was reflected mainly in the appearance of private musical life which adopted the piano as the main instrument.
Then radio was to replace records to a large extent. The new medium was presented as a tool enabling people to listen to plays or to music at home.From the end of the 1940s television entered the domestic sphere.As the family gathered together around television to watch it collectively (Meyrowitz, 1985), it abandoned radio which became an individual medium.
Unlike radio and television on the one hand and the telephone on the other, which were quickly standardized around an economic model and a media format, the Internet is fundamentally heterogeneous. This diversity is a key asset. As a result, use of the Internet cannot be unified around an economic model or a communicational format. It is not a medium but a system which is tending to become as complex as the society of which it is claimed to be a virtual copy.
As conclusion, today the Internet constitutes the last phase in the history of information and communication technologies.
NEW MEDIA HISTORY
BY PATRICE FLICHY
Many histories of information and communication are related to very different fields of social science, and information and communication sector. In many histories of computing the transistor, the microprocessor are considered to be the determining elements.
Based on Friedmann(1978), new machines have been expected to determine the organization. By contrast, historian David Noble (1984) clearly show, through the case of automatically controlled machine tools, that the effect of a technique cannot be understood without simultaneously studying its use and the choices made by its designer.
New media history started when Record-playback (automatic analogue) and numerical control machine were explored after the Second World War. These two alternatives were explored to automate production. The former recorded the design of a part drawn by a human operator and then automatically produced copies. By contrast, the numeric machine is capable of programing design and production.
Studying successes and failure, The RCA videodisk is good example of failure. Despite all the assets, RCA sold no more than 500,000 copies of its videodisk player in three years. This is because the VCR, a technical system that developed in Japan was dominating the market that time. The company that launched television in the US eventually bought out by General Electric and then by the French company Thomson. Thus, as many computer manufacturers were to discover. The main lesson that draws from this case is that technical or commercial competencies are not enough if the not properly coordinated.
In the early 1980s, France Telecom has successfully launch its videotex (the minitel). A few month before new medium was launched, thistelematic project collided with a virulent combination of media and political opposition.
In an interactionistapproach, sociologists have used the notion of boundary objects. These are objects situated at the intersection of several social worlds, which meet the needs of all worlds simultaneously. A boundary object is the result of complex interaction between the different actors concerned. This is the exact opposite of the naive idea of innovation spawned ready-made by the inventor’s mind. The history of Macintosh clearly illustrates this point. Two computers using the principle of graphic windows were produced concurrently at Apple: Lisa, a failure, and Macintosh, the Californian Company’s leading machine.
The path-dependency concept devised by economist and historian Paul David is other perspectives to analyze more long-term phenomena beside perspective of boundary objects.IBM’s entry into the PC market is an interesting example of path dependency.The Internet is another case of a path-dependent history. ARPANET, the ancestor of the network of networks, was built so that the US Army could maintain communication links in case of a Soviet attack.ARPANET was launched and coordinated by ARPA, Usenet, which constituted another branch of what was to become Internet, was developed cooperatively by research centers not linked to ARPANET.The Internet was designed in the second half of the 1970s as an ‘internetwork architecture’, that is, a metaprotocol for interaction between networks builton different principles.
The founding fathers of the Internet, such as Licklider or Engelbart, thought that computing was not only a calculation tool but also a means of communication. Hackers considered that computing was a device to be made available to all, which would help to build a new society.
Susan Douglas studied enthusiasts of the wireless, whose passion for this new technology was to popularize Marconi’s invention and attract the attention of the press. A short story from 1912 is a good example of these representations of the new medium.In it Francis Collins describes thepractices of new users of the wireless, it is clearly a new imaginary type of communication that Collins is proposing. But this utopian discourse, which not only described potential users but also indicated everything that the wireless could do for society and individuals, was becoming a reality. Everyone could communicate instantly and independently with persons very far away, when-ever they wanted to. After the First World War a new ‘wireless mania’ appeared. This time it concerned wireless telephony, soon to become radio broadcasting.Later the press started to write extensively about the Internet.The editorial noted that the Internet is ‘the medium that will change the way we communicate, shop, publish and (so the cyber smut cops warned) be damned’.
The First Generation of Office Machines, The telegraph was a decisive element in the organization of markets, first of all the stock market. In Europe the transmission of stock market information was the first use to which the telegraph was put. Computing, designed to meet scientists’ and the defense force’s needs (Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, 1996), did not immediately find its place in managerial activity. The computer program was thus to incorporate all these rules into an automatic data processing and circulation system.
While mainframe computing was initialized and developed by managers in order to automate routine data processing tasks, micro computing was adopted at grassroots level. Another current of French socio-logy of labour, which studies not phenomena of reproduction but elements of transformation, facts which impact on the future, closely studied the diffusion of microcomputing. Apart from the data processing divisions which saw the PC as a technological alter-native which they did not control, middle management also saw it as a potential challenge to the organization, with greater autonomy for employees. By contrast, top management saw microcomputers as an opportunity to create a counter-power vis-à-vis the data processing division. It therefore left local initiatives to develop, as an experiment. Initially it accepted a diversity of models of computerization in the various services.
While computing developed in a centralized way and micro computing started off being decentralized, intranet and network data communications correspond to a more interactive mode in the development of computing.Once the network was available it could be used for other purposes, new communication technologies fitted into the organization better. The third phase could then begin, in which the firm was to be reorganized and to modify its digital network simultaneously.
The history of information technology in the private sphere, as in the business world, originates in the nineteenth century. Richard Sennett (1977) considers that it lost its character of conviviality and interaction, to become a space in which people mix together in silence. For a good part of the century, the theatre was above all a place for social interaction. The also find this dialectic between public and private spheres with the beginnings of photography. In the mid nineteenth century the photo portrait, a private image, became the main use of the new medium.
The debate between private and collective media also appeared with the beginnings of the cinema. Edison thought hiskinetoscope would be installed in public places, to be used by individuals (Clark,1977).This fairground cinema made people familiar with the new medium but it eventually bored them. The real success of the cinema appeared when it started telling stories, that is, when it became a narrative medium. The success of narrative film-makers such as William Paul in England and Charles Pathé in France was based on their entry into an industrial economy.
In the United States the new entertainment medium attracted a large immigrant population in particular (Sklar, 1975). The narrative cinema was to become a big consumer of scenarios, sometimes found in legitimate literature. That was how the cultured classes were to become interested in this new medium that gradually became the seventh art. As the Italian historian Gabriella Turnaturi (1995) notes, on the eve of the First World War ‘a slow and difficult process of unification of customs, culture and traditions took place through the learning of a common language in the obscurity of cinema halls’.
The late nineteenth century also saw the advent of entertainment at home. Withdrawal into the home, pointed out by historians of private life, was reflected mainly in the appearance of private musical life which adopted the piano as the main instrument.
Then radio was to replace records to a large extent. The new medium was presented as a tool enabling people to listen to plays or to music at home.From the end of the 1940s television entered the domestic sphere.As the family gathered together around television to watch it collectively (Meyrowitz, 1985), it abandoned radio which became an individual medium.
Unlike radio and television on the one hand and the telephone on the other, which were quickly standardized around an economic model and a media format, the Internet is fundamentally heterogeneous. This diversity is a key asset. As a result, use of the Internet cannot be unified around an economic model or a communicational format. It is not a medium but a system which is tending to become as complex as the society of which it is claimed to be a virtual copy.
As conclusion, today the Internet constitutes the last phase in the history of information and communication technologies.