88888888888DIGITAL 88888888888CULTURES Understanding New Media 88888888888 Edited88888888888 by Glen Creeber and Royston88888888888 Martin Digital Cultures Digital Cultures Edited by Glen Creeber and Royston Martin Open University Press McGraw-Hill Education McGraw-Hill House Shoppenhangers Road Maidenhead Berkshire England SL6 2QL email: [email protected] world wide web: www.openup.co.uk and Two Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121—2289, USA First published 2009 Copyright © Creeber and Martin 2009 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited. Details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd of Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS. A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 978-0-33-5221974 (pb) 978-0-33-5221981 (hb) ISBN-10: 0335221971 (pb) 033522198X (hb) Typeset by Kerrypress, Luton, Bedfordshire Printed and bound in the UK by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow Fictitious names of companies, products, people, characters and/or data that may be used herein (in case studies or in examples) are not intended to represent any real individual, company, product or event. For Tomas Contents Acknowledgements ix List of contributors x Introduction 1 Glen Creeber and Royston Martin 1 DIGITAL THEORY: Theorizing New Media (Glen Creeber) 11 Case Study: Digital aesthetics (Sean Cubitt) 2 ON THE NET: Navigating the World Wide Web (David Bell) 30 Case Study: Wikipedia (David Gauntlet) 3 DIGITAL TELEVISION: High definitions (Michele Hilmes) 46 Case Study: Making Television News in the Digital Age (Damien Steward) 4 DIGITAL CINEMA: Virtual screens (Michael Allen) 61 Case Study: Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (Michael Allen) 5 VIDEO GAMES: Platforms, programmes and players (Ge´rard Kraus) 76 Case Study: Bioshock (Ge´rard Kraus) 6 DIGITAL MUSIC: Production, distribution and consumption (Jamie Sexton) 92 Case Study: The i-Pod (Jamie Sexton) 7 PARTICIPATORY CULTURE: Mobility, interactivity and identity Matt Hills 107 Case Study: Social networking & self-identity (Matt Hills) 8 THE DIGITAL DIVIDE: Scarcity, inequality and conflict (Last Moyo) 122 Case Study: Virtual wars (Sebastian Kaempf) 9 DIGITAL DEMOCRACRY: Enhancing the public sphere (Last Moyo) 139 Case Study: Electronic votes in Haiti (Tim Pershing) 10 AFTER NEW MEDIA: Everywhere always on (Royston Martin) 157 Case Study: Natural Language Processing (NLP) (Alexander Clark) Appendix: ‘New Media – a timeline’ 170 Bibliography 179 Index 199 Acknowledgements With love and thanks to Katherine Porter and our children, Amelia, Martha and Orlando. Royston Martin For giving me faith in the future, I would like to thank Nicholas, Dan, Alex, Frankie, Marika and Orrin. Glen Creeber Contributors Michael Allen is a Lecturer in Film and Electronic Media at Birkbeck College, University of London. His publications include the monographs Family Secrets: The Feature Films of D.W. Griffith (BFI 1999), Contemporary US Cinema (Pearson 2003) and the edited collection Reading CSI: Crime Television Under the Microscope (I.B. Tauris 2007). He has also published numerous articles on the history of media technologies, and is currently completing a book on the filming and televising of the Space Race. David Bell is a Senior Lecturer in Critical Human Geography and leader of the Urban Cultures & Consumption research cluster in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK. His most recent book is the second edition of The Cybercultures Reader, co-edited with Barbara Kennedy (Routledge 2008). Alexander Clark is a Lecturer in Computer Science at Royal Holloway University in London. He has written a wealth of academic papers primarily concerned with unsupervised learning of natural language, and its relevance to first language acquisition. He won the Omphalos competition, and the Tenjinno competition, which were two grammatical inference competitions in learning context-free gram- mars and transductions, respectively. He is a participant in the PASCAL Network of Excellence. Glen Creeber is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at Aberystwyth University. His publications include Dennis Potter: Between Two Worlds, A Critical Reassessment (Mac- millan 1998), Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (BFI 2004) and The Singing Detective: BFI Television Classics (BFI 2007). He has also edited The Television Genre Book (2001, second edition 2008), 50 Key Television Programmes (Edward Arnold 2004) and Tele-Visions: An Introduction to Studying Television (BFI 2006). Sean Cubitt is Director of the Media and Communications Program at The University of Melbourne. He has published widely on media globalization, media arts and media history. His publications include The Cinema Effect (The MIT Press 2005), EcoMedia (Rodopi 2005) and Digital Aesthetics (Sage Publications 1998). David Gauntlett is Professor of Media and Communications at the School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster. He is the author of several books on media and identities, including Moving Experiences (1995, second edition 2005), Web Studies (2000, second edition 2004), Media, Gender and Identity (2002, second edition 2008) and Creative Explorations: New Approaches to Identities and Audiences (2007), which was shortlisted for the Times Higher Young Academic Author of the Year Award. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xi He produces the popular website about media and identities – www.Theory.org.uk, and has pioneered the use of creative and visual research methods, for which he has created the hub at www.ArtLab.org.uk. Matt Hills is a Reader in Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is the author of books such as Fan Cultures (Routledge 2002) and How to Do Things with Cultural Theory (Hodder- Arnold 2005). Matt’s current projects include a book on BBC Wales’ Doctor Who for IB Tauris, and a study of the film Blade Runner for the Wallflower Press ‘Cultographies’ book series. He has published widely on cult film and television, and media fandom. Michele Hilmes is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. She is the author or editor of several books on media history, including: Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (1990); Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922–1952 (1997); Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 2nd edn (2006); The Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio (2001); The Television History Book (2003); and NBC: America’s Network (2007). She is currently at work on a history of the flows of transatlantic influence between US and British broadcasters during radio and television’s formative years, and their impact on the production of global culture. Sebastian Kaempf is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. His general research interests include the relationship between ethics and the laws of war, critical security studies, American warfare (the regionalization of), peacekeeping, and the impact of New Media technology on contemporary security. Gérard Kraus is a doctoral candidate at Aberystwyth University, Wales. He holds an MA in Science Fiction Studies from the University of Liverpool. His research interests include Japanese Visual Culture, Science Fiction and Fantasy in the Audio- visual Media and Gaming. His previous publications are on Luxembourg’s films and national identity and the history of Science Fiction Film. Royston Martin is an academic, journalist and documentary film-maker with research interests in the digital media, the role of journalism in mediating democracy and experimental factual film. His work has been broadcast by the BBC, NBC and CNN among many others. His recent academic study of Indymedia is published in Making Our Media: Mapping Global Initiatives Toward a Democratic Public Sphere (Hampton Press 2008). Last Moyo is an Assistant Professor in the department of Media, Peace and Conflict Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in South Korea. He worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Aberystwyth University, where he studied for his PhD and teaches in the dual MA programme with the UN University for Peace in Costa Rica. He has also lectured for three years in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), specializ- ing in media theory and print journalism courses. xii DIGITAL CULTURES Tim Pershing was the Electoral Analyst for the International Mission to Monitor Haitian Elections, a seven nation observation mission for the 2005/6 Haitian presidential and parliamentary elections, and has also worked for the International Crisis Group in Haiti. He has worked as a photojournalist and analyst since 1990 in Bosnia, Haiti and the USA. He is currently finishing his doctoral dissertation, ‘The transnational dynamics of democratic development’ through Brandeis University. Jamie Sexton is a lecturer in film and television studies at Aberystwyth University. His publications