● What are we really talking about when we talk about “new media”?

● Two approaches to study “new media”:

● The “here-and-now” approach: focusing on the media technologies
that are considered the newest right now and ask how they affect
people and society
● The historical-theoretical approach: focusing on what new media do
to people and society, with the recognition that all old media were
new and all new media will become old
● Two (of the many) issues under the historical-theoretical perspective
● Q1. How can we understand the impact of new media technologies?
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Q2. What is the relationship between new media and old media?
● What is technology?
● Marshall McLuhan: Technology as extension of human being
● Historical technologies: e.g., writing
● Walter Ong: Orality and Literacy
● Writing (including “drawings”) allowed the effective recording of ideas
and information
● Some features of thoughts in oral culture
● Redundant
● Conservative instead of innovative
● Situational instead of abstract
● Empathetic instead of objective
● Ong’s work is an example illustrating an impact-imprint perspective
● Technologies have certain inherent and fundamental qualities
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Technologies influence society by transferring the qualities to users
or the society at large

● McLuhan: The Medium is the Message

● Another example: The printing press
● Harold Innis:
● Time-biased media vs. space-biased media
● Examples of time-based media: a handwritten manuscript, the
ancient Greek epic
● Examples of space-biased media: mass produced papers and
printed books
● The rise of space-biased media and the formation of empires
● End of monopoly of knowledge and the Religious Revolution
● Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death
● Print and writing are essential for encouraging and sustaining logical and
rational thinking
● Over reliance on visual media is destroying people’s ability to think
rationally
● The Internet and digital media technologies
● Basic features
● Decentralized networks
● Difficult to control by a single authority
● Over-abundance of information
● Expected impact
● The belief about the democratizing potential of Internet technologies
● Criticisms of the impact-imprint perspective
● 1. Empirically, it is simply not the case
● The effect of the printing press in China, any?
● The effect of the internet on democratization?
● 2. How the technology is employed matters, and it means what
people do and how technologies become embedded in existing social
formation matter
● Printing press again
● The earliest “newspapers” in history: international sea trade, early
capitalism, and technologies
● A techno-social formation: The combination of a dominant
technology and the current social configuration, e.g., printing press
+ early capitalism = print capitalism
● 3. Social, political and economic
forces determine investment in
technologies to begin with
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Moon landing in 1967, the
space race, and the Cold War
● The space race stopped toward
the end of the Cold War
● Internet was also originally a
military innovation
● The social shaping of technologies
● Social processes shape the direction of technological development,
the form and content of technologies, as well as the impact of the
technologies developed

● The development of technologies

● The identification of a need
● An innovative spark
● The organization of technological innovation
● Contingency and subsequent trajectory
● Consumption and the role of market
● Path dependency
● However, would the social shaping perspective be going too far?
● It seems we cannot deny that some technologies have tremendous impact on
human societies because of their basic materialistic characteristics, especially
in terms of what they made possible
● Making certain things possible / more likely vs. determining something
● E.g., printing press again – it made mass production of texts possible and
because of this it had tremendous impact on certain societies
● E.g., telegram in 1857
● From that point onward, communication and transportation became separable
from each other
● So what?
● Coordination over long distances
● In the context of the 19th century, the development of the national train
system
● It facilitated nationalization of markets, trade, and politics, and so on
● It contributed to the national imagination and consciousness
● It made trade and other kinds of interactions much less risky and much more
effective and predictable
● Materiality matters

● The concept of affordance

● the quality or property of an object that
defines its possible uses or makes clear how
it can or should be used
● The physical features and design of a
technology can
● Facilitate / forbid
● Discourage / encourage
● E.g., the development of pocket-sized
books with soft covers
● Appearing in the world only in the
1920s and 1930s
● Why?
● Affording people reading on the
road at a time when traveling via
trains became more and more
common
● Consequence
● The popularization of reading
and the promotion of literacy
● E.g., affordance of social media platforms
● LIHKG vs. Telegram vs. Facebook / Instagram vs. Twitter
● Which platform is more useful for action coordination?
● Echo chambers are most likely to appear in which platform?

● The concept of affordance is very important in the practice of media design

● Q2: the relationship between “new media” and “old media”

● Do old media disappear because of the rise of new media?

● Displacement: New media will lead to the demise of old media
● E.g., when television was invented, the movie industry was worried
about its own survival
● E.g., back in the late 1990s, some people predicted that the print
newspaper will disappear in 10 years
● E.g., some people predicted that e-book will make the printed book
obsolete
● But most of the time, new media do not make old media obsolete
● Radio and television did not kill newspapers
● TV did not kill movies

● Put aside books you were required to read because of classes or other
commitments, have you
● Read a printed book in the past 3 months? 73.2%
● Bought a printed book in the past 3 months? 62.0%
● Read an e-book in the past 3 months? 62.0%
● Bought an e-book in the past 3 months? 23.9%
● Why?
● A new medium is likely to lead to the disappearance of an old medium if there
is complete functional equivalence, and the displacement effect is especially
likely to occur when the new medium is not only equivalent but also superior
● E.g., Mobile phone replaced pagers
● Old media can adapt to the new media environment by adjusting itself,
creating functional non-equivalence
● The rise of television in the U.S.
● Arrived in the late 1940s; By 1960, 90% of US households had TV sets
● There was limited channel capacity and huge investment was required, thus the
three radio broadcasters became the major TV network owners
● Quickly became the preferred destination for most national advertisers
● Created problems for other media industries: How did radio and movies
responded?
● Radio
● Radio “moved out of the living room”
● Technological development: small radio sets were developed and
therefore radio was used in kitchen, cars, bedrooms, etc.
● Audience culture: New formats were developed so that listeners are
encouraged to turn on the radio for “background”
● Programming change
● Produce programs that do not require the undivided attention of
the audience
● Turned away from traditional family entertainment fare and
towards music
● In addition to music:
● Talk shows
● Semi-public display of privacy
● Program schedule
● Defining prime-time in opposition to TV
● Radio prime-time in HK

● Target audience and marketing

● Focus not on the mass audience but more specifically on the youth
audience

● An ongoing negotiation as radio stations have to continually adjust their

programming strategies in respond to continual changes in the media system
● Movies
● Number of theatre-goers declined in the
1950s and theatres in less populated
areas closed
● Strategy
● Cut cost by producing fewer movies
● The birth of the blockbuster: Movies
that need to be watched inside a
theatre
● Theatre design and movie going
experience
● Working with television
● Hollywood studios became the leading producers of prime time network TV
programming by the late 1950s

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● Supply old movies for rerun on television

● Technological development and new revenue stream

● VCR, video rental, VCD, DVD, Streaming services, etc.
● Key points
● The rise of a new medium does not necessarily lead to the demise of
old media, but it often leads to the need for old media to redefine
themselves
● New media technologies sometimes offer new revenue streams for
old media
● New and old media compete with each other, but can also work with
each other
● Old media can disappear if functional non-equivalence cannot be
created and its functional inferiority cannot be overcome
● “Function” of a medium is a matter of how it can be integrated into
social life