Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The transformations in the media brought about by new techno-
logies are transforming how we think about ourselves. In particular
we are no longer passive consumers of the media, but, increasingly,
also actively producers. At the most banal this means that through
technologies such as Tivo or the iPod we can programme our media
content as we wish, rather than in the way it is presented to us by
television or record companies. In one sense this is neither new nor,
strictly speaking, a digital phenomenon. From the moment record-
able video-cassettes and audio-cassettes were first available we no
longer had to watch a programme at the moment it was broadcast,
or listen to the contents of a record in the sequence it was put
together. Banal as this might seem, it was transformative for how we
related to media products, such as television and music. The period
in which video- and audio-recording technologies became widely
available also saw the beginnings of sampling and mixing in popular
music, in which found material was reused to make new tracks,
which can be seen as a prefiguring of our current shift from passive
consumption to active production. But there is an important differ-
ence between these earlier analogue phenomena and the new digital
means of controlling how one consumes media content. The former
were subordinate to the mainstream media, such as records, radio
and television, which still determined in general how their content
was consumed, whereas the new technologies are fundamentally
altering our relation to media in a profound and radical way.
In his topic
The Long Tail,
6
the editor of
Wired
, Chris Anderson,
analyses what he sees as the effects of new technologies on
commerce. Anderson is much concerned with what he describes as
the 'infinite shelf space' made available virtually on sites such as
iTunes, which can 'stock' millions of tunes rather than the mere
thousands or tens of thousands available in a traditional bricks-
and-mortar shop, as well as the multifarious ways objects such as
tunes can occupy dimensions and be found and, perhaps most
importantly, be reappropriated. For Anderson the new economy of
