A Brief Scrutiny of Behaviours Fostered by Old and New Communication Technologies

Does social and digital media proliferate socialistic behaviours or individualistic behaviours? The digital era appears to be individualistic on the surface with the users delved into individual interfaces, though the interconnectedness that it fosters through mediation is a socialistic element. The majority of the traditional communication mediums - newsprint, radio-television broadcasting - served the masses, as author Innis (1951) claims: “The printing press and the radio address the world instead of the individual” (p. 191).

It is crucial to note that the traditional mediation era seemed geared toward social involvement on the surface with broadcast media addressing to the masses, but the received information remained limited to an individual, unable to connect individuals with one another. 

As digital technology made interaction feasible by providing the transmission power to the common man, it now brings about changes in the means of absorption of the information, and the value of the media for its participants. For instance, before the digital era was a dominant system, various forms of media had their transmittal times coordinated with the routine of the local consumers. According to the local clock, the television and radio broadcast had specified times for their programming and newspapers were printed and distributed. Transmission from the media sources was timed according to the needs of the locals and consumed in a linear fashion.

On the other hand, the interconnectedness made possible by the triumph of the digital era brings information to the user in a complex fashion. According to Murray (2012), “When we introduce new media formats or disrupt established inscriptions/ transmission technologies, we are also disrupting rituals that have transformed around these artifacts (p. 37). This is vital to note that the information inflow from various channels throughout the world is aggregated on web platforms.

Now users have to search through the presented information and filter the information that is relevant to them. Users that were once passive consumers are now entitled to information that is updated 24/7 from all over the world. On these web platforms, the information gets updated not according to the clocks of each user’s respective geographic location but constantly pushed worldwide to a single channel that collaborates it all. The digital era not only provides a new way of information transmission, but it also changes the behaviors and rituals for the users working around its affordances. Now users do not wake up to the flow of TV, radio and the newspaper, but catch up an immense amount of updates through social media platforms such as Twitter. Furthermore, the digital era allows a user to fabricate and assemble one’s own persona by maintaining their own social presence through blogs and social media. Users are able to manipulate space and time with the advent of remote instant communication technologies, such as smartphones, at their disposal along with the freedom to correspond at their own will. The digital era provides a ludic landscape for participants, providing them with an ability to hide, display and manipulate the representation of the self and the facts as they please. The comparison between the new digital technologies and precedent communication models, as well as mass communication and one-to-one communication models, signal the vast distinction in the ways users function within different models of communication.

References:

Innis, H., & Watson, A. (2008). The bias of communication (2nd. ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Murray, J. (2012). Inventing the medium: Principles of interaction design as a cultural practice. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.