New Media

There is no set method or theoretical framework for studying New Media. As this book hopefully reveals, the field is a complex and diverse one and it would be naive to suggest that a methodological and theoretical approach could ever be drawn up and regarded as definitive. Indeed, as David Bell points out in the following chapter, the theoretical complexity that typifies New Media may even reflect the state of play in current Net and Web research, suggesting the openness of New Media to ‘cut and paste’ different methods and theoretical approaches together. However, although there may not actually be something as clearly discernible  as ‘digital theory’, that should not prevent us from locating and exploring a new set of theoretical issues andmethodologies which might better suit and reflect our current media age.

If we are to appreciate what these new theoretical approaches to New Mediamight be, it is crucial that we first outline the way the media has tended to beanalysed and explained historically. This is because, rather than being a systematicoverthrow of previous trends, these new theoretical approaches are inevitably adevelopment and reaction to the way the media has been understood and theorizedin the past. In order to clarify this historical debate, I will first discuss (old) mediaanalysis within a largely ‘modernist’ context, and then move on to discuss theconnections between postmodernism, post-structuralism and New Media.

Modernism and ‘old media’

Beginning approximately at the end of the nineteenth century, modernism is theumbrella term we give to the way that human society responded to the changes thattook place during the industrial revolution. With its roots in the Enlightenmentperiod of the eighteenth century, modernism tended to challenge the theocratic andGod-centred notion of the world that had helped define human society in the past.Ideas such as evolution in biology, communism in politics, the theory of relativity inphysics and the emerging field of psychoanalysis attempted to explain the universe in scientific or quasi-scientific terms. In this way, modernism tended to challenge and revolutionize the religious mysticism of the pre-industrial world.

With its belief in the scientific inevitability of progress, many aspects ofmodernism tended to have an optimistic belief in the power of modernity totransform human life for the better. However, as the twentieth century progressed, so the brutal effects of science and industrialization on human life (particularly in both the First and Second World Wars) became increasingly evident. In particular, many modernists came to perceive industrialization as the enemy of free thought andindividuality; producing an essentially cold and soulless universe. It was for thisreason that modernism’s reaction to modernity is often perceived as intensely

paradoxical, offering both a celebration of the technological age and a savagecondemnation of it (see Hall 1995: 17). Struggling with these contradictions, modernist artists attempted to reflect the chaos and dislocation at the heart of the modernization process. As the growth of technology and science transformed ourconception of society and ourselves, so artists and intellectuals sought new ways to represent and articulate the fragmentation of this ‘brave new world’. Surrealism vividly dramatized Freud’s insights into the power of dreams and the unconscious, while the Futurists espoused a love for the machine, technology and speed. Yet, therewas also a deep anxiety embedded in many of these artistic expressions; theschizophrenia of the modern experience seemed to be at the heart of the ‘stream of consciousness’ novel, while the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists seemed to articulate the chaotic, anarchic, idiosyncratic and nihilistic landscape of the modernworld. 

Implicit in these artistic movements was the modernist belief in the role of theartist, a romantic figure often regarded as a self-exiled hero whose genius was able torevolutionize and transcend both art and the world around us. As David Harvey puts it, the ‘struggle to produce a work of art, a once and for all creation that could find a unique place in the market, had to be an individual effort forged under competitive circumstances’ (emphasis in the original, 1990: 22). And it was partly modernism’s belief in the power of art and the artist to transform the world that lay behind itsoverwhelming distrust and distaste for the sort of everyday culture to be found inpulp novels, the cinema, television, comics, newspapers, magazines and so on. As Andreas Huyssen points out, modernism was almost consistently ‘relentless in its hostility to mass culture’ (1986: 238), arguing that only ‘high art’ (particularly a strain of it known as the ‘avant-garde’) could sustain the role of social and aesthetic criticism. It was this tension between these two extremes (a ‘mindless’ mass culture versus an ‘enlightened’ avant-garde) that perhaps most explicitly defined modernism’sreaction to the media’s early development during the twentieth century.

There are many examples that reflect modernism’s disdain for the media, but perhaps one of the most famous groups of intellectuals to take this ideological stance was ‘The Frankfurt School’. Exiled from Germany to America during the Second World War, this group of European Marxists were struck how American mass culture shared many similarities with the products of mass production. In particular, TheFrankfurt School liked to perceive the media as a standardized product of industrialization,frequently connecting mass culture with aspects of Fordism. Fordism was aterm coined to describe Henry Ford’s successes in the automobile industry, particularly his improvement of mass-production methods and the development of the assembly line by 1910. His use of mass-production techniques meant that cars could be made more cheaply and therefore became more accessible to ordinary American citizens. However, because they were mass-produced all his model T. Fords were exactly the same. When asked what colours his cars came in, Ford famously replied, ‘any color – as long as it’s black’. 

For the Marxist theorists of The Frankfurt School, this ‘Fordist’ philosophy wasalso evident in all aspects of mass culture, where every television show, film, pulp novel, magazine, and so on were all identical. Their description of the ‘CultureIndustry’ clearly reveals their distaste for these ‘industrialized’ products and their formulaic packaging. Instead of stimulating audiences, these media ‘products’ weredesigned to keep the masses deluded in their oppression by offering a form of homogenized and standardized culture. As Theodor W. Adorno explains with reference to popular music: 

Structural Standardization Aims at Standardized Reactions: Listening to popularmusic is manipulated not only by its promoters but, as it were, by theinherent nature of this music itself, into a system of response mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the idea of individuality in a free, liberal society … This is how popular music divests the listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditional reflexes.  (Adorno [1941] 1994: 205–6, emphasis in original)

Such anxieties about the media also came to inform some aspects of broadcasting policy. For example, the BBC’s notion of ‘public service broadcasting’ was based on a number of cultural, political and theoretical ideals akin to modernism. In particular, its first director General, John Reith, argued that broadcasting should be used to defend ‘high culture’ against the degrading nature and influence of massculture. This is one of the reasons why he argued so strongly that the BBC should befinanced entirely by taxation, thereby avoiding the heavily commercialized nature of the American media. Although he would have been politically apposed to the Marxist beliefs of The Frankfurt School, Reith would have shared their concern for the corrupting influence of mass culture on a powerless and uneducated audience. ‘It is occasionally indicated to us’, he famously wrote, ‘that we are apparently setting out to give the public what we think they need – and not what they want – but few know what they want and very few know what they need’ (cited by Briggs 1961: 238).

This perception of a mass audience as generally passive and gullible was reflected in media analysis during the modernist period, particularly in the ‘effects’ model of audience research. Sometimes referred to as the ‘hypodermic needle’ model, this way of approaching audiences tended to conceive them as wholly defenceless and constantly ‘injected’ by media messages, as if it were some form of mind-altering narcotic. Audience research carried about by The Frankfurt School was clearly part of this ‘effects’ tradition, simply aiming to validate its pessimistic claims about media indoctrination. In terms of textual analysis the school pursued a similar trajectory,critiquing the means by which mass culture disseminated the dominant ideology of

the bourgeoisie. Adorno’s ([1941] 1994) work on popular music, Lowenthal’s (1961) studies of popular literature and magazines and Hertog’s (1941) studies of radio soap opera, all revealed similar preoccupations with the ‘standardization’ of mass culture and the media. 

Despite the pessimistic approach of The Frankfurt School towards the media, it can still be praised for at least taking these new Media forms seriously and worthy of academic study. This project was continued and developed by the Structuralist movement which became increasingly popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Partly

growing from a belief in the power of science and rationalism, structuralism argued that the individual is shaped by sociological, psychological and linguistic structures over which they have little control. This belief in the power of rational thought alsoinformed a methodology that could be used to uncover these structures by using quasi-scientific methods of investigation. Semiotics played a central role in thisendeavour, being applied to all manner of cultural texts from the cinema toa dvertising and from photography to comics. Based on Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce’s work on linguistics, semiotics set out a clear and coherent methodology by which the meaning of any text could be read objectively as a system of ‘signs’. By ‘decoding’ these ‘signs’, semioticians could gradually unravel the means by which an audience were being manipulated. As Daniel Chandler puts it, ‘[d]econstructing and contesting the realities of signs can reveal whose realities are privileged and whose are suppressed. Such a study involves investigating the construction and maintenance of reality by particular social groups’ (emphasis in the original, 2004a:15).

Roland Barthes’s ([1957] 1973) hugely influential book Mythologies famously used structuralism and semiotics to analyse all forms of mass culture including wrestling matches, the Citroën car, Greta Garbo’s face and soap-powder. Yet, as a Marxist, the conclusive nature of the textual readings supplied by the likes of Barthes left little doubt that structuralism still saw mass culture as primarily propagating the forces of a dominant and all-persuasive ideology. One of Barthes’s most famous examples of this process at work was his semiotic analysis of the photo on the cover of a Paris Match magazine in 1955. Showing a young black soldier saluting the French flag, Barthes argued that this was an example of the media giving French Imperialisma positive image in a moment of national crisis. So while the quasi-scientific methodsof structuralism helped to further legitimate the study of mass culture and the media after the war, its conclusions still tended to suggest that audiences were powerless to resist its hidden meanings (see Barthes 1977a).

In this way, then, we can begin to identify some of the major components bywhich the media and its audiences were conceived and analysed during the first halfof the twentieth century. In particular, the context of modernism gives us atheoretical insight into the way in which the media was understood and theideological impulses which inevitably influenced its critical theories. This type oftheoretical approach generally distrusted the media, arguing that its audience neededto be protected from its standardized and debasing influence. It therefore differsprofoundly from the theoretical ideas that have now come to define ‘digital theory’and the role of New Media in the twenty-first century.

ELEMEN-ELEMEN DAN PROSES PEMBUATANNYA

MP3, format berkas pengodean suara yang populer, sejatinya bernama panjang MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. Format ini diciptakan secara keroyokan oleh ilmuwan Jerman, yaitu Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, dan Ernst Eberlein.

MP3 diakui memiliki kompresi yang baik sehingga ukuran file lebih kecil. Wajar saja jika format ini menjadi favorit karena bisa dibilang sebagai kompromi antara file yang mungil namun tetap berkualitas.

Kompresi dilakukan dengan memakai pengodean Pulse Code Modulation (PCM). Jelasnya, MP3 mengurangi jumlah bit yang diperlukan dengan menggunakan model psychoacoustic untuk menghilangkan komponen-komponen suara yang tidak terdengar oleh manusia.

Kini, lagu atau musik MP3 mendominasi pilihan format selain wma. Tak heran, lagu-lagu yang tertanam di media pemutar dan pemyimpan musik seperti CD hingga, telepon genggam menggunakan format ini.

Opensource alias gratis

Popularitas MP3 mendorong penciptaan perangkat lunak untuk merekam dan mengedit suara yang juga mampu mengolah file. Salah satunya adalah Audacity. Software yang bersifat opensource juga mampu melakukan proses mixing sehingga menjadi karya audio yang utuh.

Buku ini juga memaparkan keunggulan lain dari Audacity yaitu bersifat cross platform sehingga bisa beroperasi dalam berbagai sistem operasi mulai dari Mac OS, Windows, GNU/Linux dan sistem operasi lainnya.

Di buku ini kita akan mendapatkan banyak sekali contoh latihan yang dibuat sambung-menyambung sehingga mempermudah pemahaman. Salah satu bagian yang menarik pada panduan rekaman dengan fasilitas multi-track. Termasuk menyunting hasil rekaman, menambahkan efek suara, hingga proses mixing dengan mudah.

Begitu menjalankan program ini, kita langsung mendapati tampilan yang sederhana dan user-friendly. Audacity sendiri bersanding dengan software berbayar populer lainnya seperti Sonic Foundry dan Cakewalk.