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facilities and free international connections. Unlike a conventional telephone system, Skype utilises built-in speakers and microphone systems on laptop computers and so lends itself to multiple speaker interaction. As with Facebook, early adopters of the service were middle-class Western students wanting to communicate peer-to-peer without the cost of mobile phone calls and texts. The up-surge in global travel amongst this group as part of gap year programmes and independent travel popularised the service with friends and family wanting to keep in touch with loved ones. As with Facebook, Skype’s success with
this highly influential demographic has underpinned its distribution to a much wider community of consumers who in turn have incorporated it into their own portfolio of communication choices. It is Skype’s success with this younger demographic that has given rise to some more innovative uses. Not content with simulating the traditional phone calls of
old, some Skype users have experimented with more innovative social interaction that includes the ‘Skype-party’ where multiple participants socialise informally in video conference calls, that may cross time zones, but are accompanied by a musical soundtrack, alcoholic drinks and dressing up as if for traditional night on the town. More mature users have also been known
to engage in ‘Skype dinner parties’, in which participants endeavour to eat the same food and drink the same wine while engaged in the kind of convivial chitchat that would accompany a suburban soiree. According to one participant, such events are particularly popular with couples with young children, avoiding the cost of a babysitter and the inconvenience and expense of travel. And so, media technology has come full circle. If Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone inaugurated the postmodern sensibility that characterises so much contemporary engagement with media technology, it is befitting that Skype, a direct descendent of Bell’s invention should be at the vanguard of media-induced reality.
Criticism of new media
technologies Of course the proliferation of new media
technology is not without its critics. For every enthusiastic consumer there are usually several detractors who predict that the use of telephones/television/the internet are all symptomatic of society’s decay and our impending decent into a hellish abyss in which humanity and morality have no place. And indeed, various theoreticians have argued that the appropriation of media texts is symptomatic of cultural malaise. Frankfurt School theorists like Theodore Adorno, for example, viewed the gramophone record and cinema as a means of distracting the working class from their disadvantaged social positions. Likewise, though Jean Baudrillard’s work is pivotal in understanding terms like hyper- reality and simulacrum, he expresses anxiety about a society alienated from itself. And, indeed, from Albert Bandura’s The Bobo Doll Experiment (1961), to Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002) the media is forever on
trial: a convenient bogey man to be blamed for all society’s evils. However, just as the use of Facebook to bully classmates cannot be attributed to its creator Mark Zuckerberg, so too is it impossible to take a moral stance on media technology. To do so betrays an ignorance not only of the technology in question but also the nature of humanity. One might just as well bemoan the invention of the wheel as the proliferation of social networking: both can be used for good and evil and both represent major advances in the development of civilisation.
The Digital Renaissance For further evidence of the very positive
benefits of media technology, just listen to the some of the answer phone messages left by the victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks on America in 2001. Without exception the sentiments expressed are not those of rage and anger but love and affection. It is the message not the medium that triumphs. And from this two very clear lessons can be learnt. In the first instance, while media technology challenges the distinction between the real and the simulated, the way in which these technologies are embedded in our lives reinforces traditional structures of society and culture. Secondly, the massive explosion in audience’s use of information technology in the twenty-first century, from the proliferation of creative digital hardware to social networking, represents a re-birth in the way in which audiences think about society and culture in the developed world; and in this sense it could be said that we are living very much in an age that will become known as the Digital Renaissance.
Stephen Hill is Head of Media at the Burgate School, Fordingbridge.
english and media centre | December 2009 | MediaMagazine 61
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