1. Week 2 How Do We Study New Media?
ACC2013 New Media
Week 2
How Do We Study New Media?

2. Lecture Overview What do we mean by the term ‘new media’?
Characteristics of contemporary new media.
Media Studies
Case Study: The Earliest Technologies
Did the use of stone tools make us human?

3. Week Two How Do We Study New Media?
Lecture:
Is new media just one thing? That is, by new media do we mean the Internet, our mobile phones, and iPads? Or is new media a historical term denoting any emerging medium? If so, would that not make literacy (the written word) or even orality (the spoken word) new media? We will suggest the latter, more expansive definition. We also consider a case study which challenges our assumption that technology is something wholly separate from the human. We will examine technology in prehistory and ask whether it is a constitutive element of being human.
Tutorial:
Analysis and discussion of new media concepts and the fundamental links between the human and technology.
Essential Reading:
Flew, T 2008, ‘Twenty New Media Concepts’, in New Media: An Introduction, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, pp
Chun, W 2006, ‘Did Somebody Say New Media?’, in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, Taylor and Francis, New York, pp. 1-3.
Ingold, T 1999, Selection from ‘‘Tools for the Hand, Language for the Face’: An Appreciation of Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech’, Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci., vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 411–425. (pages 1-15 in the pdf)

4. Course Details Coordinator/Tutor: Jonathan Yu
Unit Blog:
Unit Reader
In bookshop by end of the week.
Tutorials:
St Albans:
10:00-11:00am – Room 3N24
11:00-12:00pm – Room 3N24 (Cancelled)
Footscray Park:
1:00-2:00pm – Room C226
4:00-5:00pm – Room E319
5:00-6:00pm – Room E319 (Cancelled)

5. “Media determine our situation.”
Friedrich Kittler
“Packed into Kittler’s statement is a crucial claim: that media form the infrastructural basis, the quasi-transcendental condition, for experience and understanding…media broker the giving of space and time within which concrete experience becomes possible.”
W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen
The Internet was not new in 1995, the year it arguably became new.
Wendy Chun

6. What’s ‘New’ About ‘New Media’
New Media Terms:
‘Information Superhighway’, ‘Cyberculture’, ‘Information Society’
‘Dot.com’
All media were once ‘new media’.
Our understanding of what a medium is (or media are) continues to change.
We quickly take for granted and expect the qualities in a medium that make it new.
Thus the ‘new’ in new media remains largely uninterrogated.

7. What’s ‘New’ About ‘New Media’
This phenomenon is something we will revisit throughout the semester
the emergence of a new medium
the uncertain and unexpected ways in which we first take it up
the speed with which it becomes deeply integrated into our everyday lives
its profoundly normative effect

8. Characteristics of Contemporary New Media
Digitized media
Represented as 1s and 0s
Interactive media
Ability to manipulate content
Two-way communication
Produce and consume
Distributed network
Peer-to-peer (P2P)
No central point

9. Characteristics of Contemporary New Media
Lev Manovich (The Language of New Media)
Importance of programmability.
Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (The New Media Reader)
Computer as creative, expressive medium.
Wolfgang Hagen
Language-based software.

10. Characteristics of Contemporary New Media Twenty New Media Concepts (Flew)
Collective Intelligence
Convergence
Creative Industries
Cyberspace
Digital Capitalism
Digital Copyright / Creative Commons
Digital Divide
Globalisation
Hype
Information Overload
Interactivity
Knowledge Economy
Networks
Participation
Remediation
Security & Surveillance
Speed
Ubiquity
User-generated content / User-led innovation
Virtuality

11. What is Media Studies? Relationship between media and society.
Not a unified field of study but one common assumption:
Media is neither transparent nor neutral
“The very concept of media is thus both a new invention and a tool for excavating the deepest archaeological layers of human forms of life.” (Mitchell and Hansen)
Meaning of media/medium
Something ‘in the middle’ of things
Something that carries, transmits

12. What is Media Studies?
Mitchell and Hansen suggest that we can stress the ‘middleness’ of media by ‘triangulating’ elements of which media is in the middle
Political-Technical-Aesthetic
Example: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2003 election to Governor of California
Was it just because he was a Hollywood star?
Californian Politics (Political)
Adept at in the media environment. (Technical)
Importance of his image as body builder. (Aesthetic)

13. What is Media Studies? Triangulating Method of Analysis
Beyond cause and effect.
Technological Determinism
Causal relationship between two factors.
E.g. Schwarzenegger was elected because of the media.
“[Any medium] does not simply dictate the nature of individual experiences or social relationships but is itself subject to legal and political manipulation, economic exploitation, and individual variability of usage.” (Mitchell & Hansen)

14. Media Theorists N. Katherine Hayles Friedrich Kittler Bernard Stiegler
History of cybernetics (human + machines)
Friedrich Kittler
Coupling of the human and technology.
Bernard Stiegler
Co-origins of technics and humans.
Co-evolution of human and technics.

15. Case Study: The Earliest Technologies
Key Thinker: André Leroi-Gourhan
French paleo-anthropologist
Analysis of cave art.
Key Text: Gesture and Speech (1964/1993)
Relationship between human and technology.

16. Case Study: Key Questions
Did technology play a role in evolution? Or did the human evolve solely by biological means?
Media mediates things.
For Leroi-Gourhan, the human was always mediated via technology.
Did humans invent the technology (stone tools) or did technology invent the human?
Until tool making, human development was purely biological (anthropogenesis).
Leroi-Gourhan suggests technology added an extra-biological factor to evolution (technogenesis).
The co-evolution of humans with various tools and technologies.

17. Case Study: Lithic Industry of the Early Stone Age
Our species is Homo sapiens sapien (modern human)’
Our earliest ‘human’ ancestor is in the genus Homo
First appeared about 2.6 million years ago.
Homo habilis (‘handy man’) was the first such species
The emergence of our genus coincides with the appearance of the first stone tools.

18. Case Study: Lithic Industry of the Early Stone Age
When these proto-humans (Homo habilis) first began making stone tools, their brains were less than half the size of that of modern humans.
Stone tools (lithic industry) remained unchanged for more than a million years.
The first point is not that tool use simply caused the brain to get bigger.
For Leroi-Gourhan it was a more complex process and it had a biological foundation.

19. Case Study: Did bigger brains make better tools?
Darwin
‘Most sagacious’ thesis for development of technics (techniques for stone tool development).
Providing a reproductive advantage.
i.e. the ‘most sagacious; could design more ingenious tools gaining better strategies of subsistence.
Leroi-Gourhan
Did not see the development of tool-making ability as a result of the most intelligent proto-humans
Rather, it is an expression of the very body plan of the human
Bipedalism – “It all begins with the feet”

20. Case Study: “It all begins with the feet”
Walking brings about this cascade of effects
i) upright posture causes our skulls to change shape
for balance and to be able to look forward
incidentally, the available space in our skulls increases
this creates an evolutionary opportunity
Walking upright also frees our hands
ii) over time, this allows greater manual dexterity to develop
we no longer need our hands for locomotion
increasing our capacity to manipulate objects in the natural world around us
Walking upright also frees our jaw and mouth
iii) eventually allowing the capacity for language to develop
no longer use our mouths to carry things
But before we could learn to speak our brains needed to take on a whole new level of abilities.

21. Case Study: Technology and Human
Stiegler calls the development of the brain amidst long-term tool-use corticalization:
How there was a deeply integrated (recursive) relation between the two.
We are suggesting that lithic industry (stone tool making) was a pre-condition of the human.
The modern human could only emerge because of the constitutive relation proto-humans had to stone tools.
To recap:
i) brain size increases dramatically, including the development of new advanced prefrontal elements
ii) new forms of intelligence emerge
iii) creative explosion and proliferation in technicity
iv) related intensification and proliferation of exteriorization of memory
v) ever-expanding archives create increasingly exponential gap between zoological and sociological capacities
Stone tools, like all technology store information.
Technology marks the exteriorization of memory

22. Case Study: Implications
What does all this mean?
That technology that serves as a new medium for the transmission of memory.
That is, technology is an inorganic repository of memory.
That technology means the human (and its culture) exceeds biological time.
The preservation and transmission of epigenetic experience that gives human evolution an extragenetic character—that is, as something more than a purely biological process.
Technology, then, is a deeply constitutive element of the human.
It comprises an originary condition, a defining characteristic of the human.

23. Lecture Summary
‘New media’ refers to both contemporary media and the historical emergence of any medium.
Contemporary new media characteristics include: digital, interactivity and networks.
Some characteristics are not exclusive to contemporary new media.
Media studies focuses on the relationship between society and media.
Example of a particular approach: Aim for complex rather than simple causal explanations.
Case Study: Earliest Technologies
The co-constitutive relationship between humans and technology. 23