Place and Information I
New media mean new cultural environmental. They urge the terrain on which we move mentally, and they are responsible for access to locations or information, which is sometimes the same. The internet and digital media like the mobile phone stand for the last rough basic changes in the media landscape and there are not a few voices that see a revolutionary potential. Thus, the protests and power shifts in the Arab countries like to be associated with this new media landscape – from the blog to tweeting. Meanwhile, even a whole young generation about the Internet seems to be defined and to use their digital affinities as a distinctional feature against others. In such a situation, it makes sense to take analyzes of previous media umbrellars as a film for current analyzes.
Thus, the advent of television in the 1950s was attributed a similar revolutionary potential as today the Internet. The American media researcher Joshua Meyrowitz about describes in his book "Everywhere and nowhere. The television company"1, like that "new" Medium television The social relationships influenced and addresses the process as a change in the media landscape gives social environmental environment by changing access to knowledge in a society.
US family in front of the TV, 1958. Image: Evert f. Baumgardner / National Archives and Records Administration
Television, so the argumentation of Meyrowitz, have guided that many social areas that were previously separated are now overlapping (Z.B. The world of children and adults). People were involved in various information worlds and thus separated from each other as access to the various information worlds was provided with social barriers (Z.B. is a certain school formation notified to read and understand a book). This separation was still stalked by the isolation of different people in different places. That in turn:
generated different social identities due to the very specific and limited experiences that could be made in the respective place. By now you have many different classes of people on the same "location" "assemble", have the electronic media have been blurred many previously different social roles into each other. So the electronic media not only influence us by their content, but also by they "Situation geography" Urban our lives.
Joshua Meyrowitz
Electronic media do not affect social behavior of their contents, but by the media immanent property of the weakness of the relationship between the physical and social place. A process that Meyrowitz attributes an emancipatory and democratic potential: "Knowledge, which was reserved for the formed layers, is now available to all."2
The consequences are also political nature. On the one hand, people’s identities are no longer projected by a particular location and a particular group:
If many suddenly separate situations mix themselves with the help of electronic media, they probably have a homogenizing effect on group identities.
Joshua Meyrowitz
The binding and the prospect of a traditional group will be sent off and this bond is surmounted by other social relations between people – a development that in sociology among the terms of the "Individualization" and the "Pluralization" be taken by lifestyles. People will be more like through the media consumption, one could summarize this argumentation.
Television leads to homogenization and integration of different groups. On the other hand, the underprivileged groups develop a consciousness of social differences through access to more and other information, which rather concludes social conflicts:
The sooner excluded does not accept the "assigned to you"; They want to be equal, while many privileged trying their "Exclusive" to keep.
Joshua Meyrowitz
This analysis suggests that Meyrowitz, that the social consciousness of the 1960s (the burger right and black-power movement) was a partial consciousness taught.
It is not difficult to transfer these findings to the medium Internet. More than ever before, a reorganization of information takes place here and access to so far closed "Locate" possible. While watching the television, for example, brought us to the press spokesman or the preceding Minister of the Federal Social Ministry, we can now also download the legislative, press releases or expertise from there via the Internet.
One of the areas that was directly attributed by this new flow of information was journalism. The television also changed journalism, finally faster (live transmissions) and picture-dominated, but did not slip at its essential feature, the exclusive access to information. Anyone who wanted to inform themselves about the Internet about the facts was dependent on the news in the media of television, broadcasting or the press.
Today, it is possible that every burger himself goes to the websites of the institutions or authorities and there read the corresponding press releases. The episode is a prestigious loss of the journalist, then his Nimbus as a person with exclusive access to information. It is, of course, the essential task of the selection and evaluation of information, but that part of the professionality based on exclusive access, has broken away.
The Canadian Media Theorist Harold A. Innis addressed that as those changes that go in a society when new media appear. 3 is the possibility of control of communication media an effective means to build power, so can break new media old power monopolies. In this case the information monopoly of the professional journalist. Meyrowitz described that: The television authorities are called into question. Because authoritat is based on information control and a high status depends on which control is possible on the existing communication channels. The loss of information control by mixing the information systems underscores such the traditional authority of leaders.
So the Internet brought – like other media-"Revolution" previously – a change of the information flow, which one can also refer to as democratization of the information access.
Part II: Media Revolution and Media Power