1 - Communicative abundance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
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Summary
In the beginning there was the first ever worldwide satellite television broadcast featuring the Beatles, Maria Callas, Marshall McLuhan and Pablo Picasso, all live, watched by an estimated 400 million people. Mountainous mainframe computers and host-based systems for sending messages by multiple users from remote dial-up terminals were already in use. Then along came electronic mail, fax machines, photocopiers, video recorders and personal computers. Now there are electronic books, cloud computing, scanners, smart watches and smart glasses, tweets and cell phones converted into satellite navigators, musical instruments and multi-person video chat sites. It is unclear even to the innovators what comes next, but these and other media inventions, commercially available only during recent decades, have persuaded more than a few people that we are living in a revolutionary age of communicative abundance.
In the spirit of the revolution, as in all previous upheavals in the prevailing mode of communication, fascination mixed with excitement is fuelling bold talk of the transcendence of television, the disappearance of printed newspapers, the withering of the printed book, even the end of literacy as we have known it. In the heartlands of the revolution, there is widespread recognition that time is up for spectrum scarcity, mass broadcasting and predictable prime-time national audiences, and that they have been replaced by spectrum abundance, fragmented narrowcasting and less predictable ‘long tail’ audiences. Symbolised by the Internet, which is often portrayed through images that strongly resemble snowflakes (Figure 1.1), the revolutionary age of communicative abundance is structured by a new world system of overlapping and interlinked media devices. For the first time in history, thanks to built-in cheap microprocessors, these devices integrate texts, sounds and images in digitally compact and easily storable, reproducible and portable form. Communicative abundance enables messages to be sent and received through multiple user points, in chosen time, either real or delayed, within modularised and ultimately global networks that are affordable and accessible to several billion people scattered across the globe.
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- Democracy and Media Decadence , pp. 1 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013
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