The Digital Media Handbook

Andrew Dewdney, Peter Ride

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415699914
• eBook ISBN: 9781135077150
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The new edition of The Digital Media Handbook presents an essential guide to the historical and theoretical development of digital media, emphasising cultural continuity alongside technological change, and highlighting the emergence of new forms of communication in contemporary networked culture.

Andrew Dewdney and Peter Ride present detailed critical commentary and descriptive historical accounts, as well as a series of interviews from a range of digital media practitioners, including producers, developers, curators and artists.

The Digital Media Handbook highlights key concerns of today's practitioners, analysing how they develop projects, interact and solve problems within the context of networked communication.

The Digital Media Handbook includes:

• Essays on the history and theory of digital media
• Essays on contemporary issues and debates
• Interviews with digital media professionals
• A glossary of technical acronyms and key terms.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

WHAT KIND OF BOOK IS THIS?

This is one of a number of books in a series of handbooks produced by Routledge for students of the arts, media, cultural studies and social sciences and for anyone wanting to work professionally in media. The series, started in the 1990s, has its roots in the expansion of media courses in schools, colleges and universities, which were reflecting the growing importance of media in culture and society. Some of the original titles in the series have run to several editions, while new titles are still being added as the professional and intellectual world of digital media continues to expand. Existing handbook titles reflect an historical organisation of mainstream media, such as newspapers, radio, advertising, television, photography, magazines and public relations. The Cyberspace Handbook, published in 2004, indicates the 30111 way things were moving and The Social Media Handbook (2013), reflects the most 1 recent developments.

This is a new edition of what started its published life in 2006 as The New Media Handbook, and the change of title to The Digital Media Handbook is an indication of how the practices of professional media production continue to change and the need to update the account. The book contains a completely new set of interviews and discussions with ten professionals reflecting upon their practices and illustrated case studies of creative projects, together with a series of new and revised essays discussing the historic, theoretical and current state of the field.

Digital media is highly susceptible to fashionable preoccupations with the latest technological innovation, and the past decade is no exception. Attention has shifted from wireless and streaming to cloud computing and crowd sourcing as the new and latest developments that characterise the medium. Critical commentary has also shifted gear, from seeing the Internet as a new dawn of creative freedom, to seeing the Internet as a system of exploitation and control. This book discusses both of these shifts, and it does this because it takes a wider view of what constitutes digital media and emphasises the longer history of technological change in media. The case studies in this book will give the reader a vivid picture of contemporary concerns of professionals at the forefront of their field, while the essay chapters provide a broad framework for considering the continuing development of the study of digital media.

The style and approach across the series is different, with no imposed house style, but the books have a common aim, which is to articulate what is involved in the professional practice of contemporary media. To paraphrase the series editor, James Curran, the aim of the series is to provide comprehensive resource books that are something between a ‘how-to-do-it’ manual and a critical reflection of contemporary media. In the case of digital media this is no easy task because, as the reader will soon discover, digital media is, by its very nature, a hybrid practice involving a wide range of practical skills and intellectual resources as well as numerous competing critical commentaries. We have chosen to grapple with the essential diversity of our subject by combining critical commentary, descriptive and historical accounts with a series of case studies of professional digital media practitioners operating in the convergent media environment. In doing this we hope that we provide a sufficiently broad selection of material to construct a kind of provisional and updated ‘map’ of some of the established and emergent ‘territories’ of convergent media practice.

The change of title from The New Media Handbook to The Digital Media Handbook has been made in consultation with the publishers, as part of revising the book. The interesting and exciting aspect of this process has been in striking a balance between the old and new account in deciding what to retain, what to reject and what to add. It is clear to us in surveying the current landscape that certain kinds of digital media have persisted and been built upon, while newer practices, very much associated with networked and converging media, have emerged. As far as titles go, the term ‘new media’ still has currency, but as we said in the first edition, there is a problem with just how long something can be ‘new’, and the past seven years have shown the degree to which all media production now operates in the converged digital environment of computing. We still think there is a degree of interchangeability as well as distinction between the terms new media and digital media, which is discussed further on in this introductory section. The important point to bear in mind is that the organising approach and distinct contribution of this volume is to discuss digital media from the perspective and needs of professional practitioners and, above all, to remember that the current period of hybridity and convergence inevitably characterises a set of practices that continue to evolve under fluid conditions. There is no reason to suppose that the enormous changes of even the last decade will be followed by any fewer over the next decade.

Currently, ‘networked media’, ‘online media’, and ‘social media’ have come to the fore as specific extensions of digital media. The naming of these areas of media practice is both a practically informative matter as well as being culturally coded. The aspirational language associated with the early development of the Internet, which spoke of ‘uncharted space’ and ‘new frontiers’, has given way to both a new pragmatism about the Internet, on the one hand, – yes, the Internet is a real network of connections between computers – and, on the other hand, the term network is now used to signal the idea of social connectedness. Being networked and being online carries a sense of presentness and connectedness through the metaphor of spatial extension. The retention of a spatial or geometric metaphor in defining media as a network shows just how hard it is to think about the network of computers as a list of files or a mathematical equation, for example. The intangibility of data, stored and transmitted electronically through microchip technology, is harder to grasp than the spatial conjuring of networks. The metaphoric account of digital media helps us to understand what we think about our media and how we imagine its shape and future direction. In uncovering the roots and sources for the spatialisation of human computer interaction, the book draws upon a number of academic disciplines, most notably cultural and media studies.

Handbooks and guides have to be useful. The comparison with travel guides springs to mind here. Imagine that you are on a journey in a place unknown to you and you need to orientate yourself to the people, place and culture. In this place you need to get your bearings and find somewhere to stay. There are many ways in which you could set about doing these things, but a guidebook is a good starting point. It is a feature of the moment we are in, and one we examine throughout this book, that more and more people are travelling both in the real world and in cyberspace and with this using the Internet rather than guide books to plan travel in the real world. The exponential expansion of the use of the Internet is not, however, making the printed book redundant, only changing the way we use books. This book is designed to help you find your way around an emergent subject and a set of complex, convergent digital media practices. It will, we hope, show the main contours of the subject, locate the main centres of interest and even chart many of the routes and connections between them. Like all guides and maps, it is important to recognise that this book constructs an order upon its landscape, which is inescapably partial and selective. The guide comes with its own built-in perspective. Inevitably it has its omissions and in relationship to the emerging field, it will have uncharted territories. This is only to be expected in a period of unfolding technological development and continuous extensions in media practice. The mapping task is like trying to represent something that is in a state of flux, possibly like attempting to map the surface of the sea, for which, interestingly enough, computer architectures are good at simulating. The map provided in this book contains conceptual definitions, accounts of technologies and a selection of cultural practices based upon digital media. The book is thankfully not the first attempt to do this, since digital media is already being studied from a variety of different viewpoints and disciplines. We start the book by identifying some of the different ways in which digital media has been charted by media professionals and academics over the last decade.

Any book with the words digital and media in its title runs the risk of being thought of primarily as either as a book about technology, or a book about commerce and industry. While the book touches upon and discusses both technology and the industries of media it is in essence about neither of these things, but rather about what people do with technologies in creative environments and is therefore about the possibilities for and realisation of human thinking, feeling and communication in the still emerging medium of computing. The significance of the digital for us here lies in identifying ideas, feelings and experiences that are and can be grasped and understood through the new digital medium in different and challenging ways. In this process individual or social communication is bound to occur, such that new insights and discoveries about ourselves and the world take place. This is a definition of the digital media that emphasises the creative, social and cultural significance of change, a process that can also be defined as a paradigm shift in modes of thinking.

In adopting this view we have found that we also need to provide an understanding of the historical and theoretical development of digital media that emphasises the complex continuities in the technological developments associated with particular cultural uses of media, rather than understanding digital media as replacing what has gone before. The book is organised around a set of creative practices in digital media as a direct consequence of attempting to understand digital media as embedded in concrete cultural developments.

The invention of the printing press in Europe from the 1450s led to the rapid and widespread development of print culture. The spread of print media was the basis of new forms of reading and writing and the general diffusion of knowledge in a continuous process over the next 500 years. In the twenty-first century, long after print media could be considered in any way new, it continues to be a major means for the communication of thought, feeling and experience. While this book was produced with the use of computers, researched, written, edited, designed and laid-out on screen, its form is still words printed in black ink on bleached paper on pages in a fixed order and bound together with glue. Academic publishers still make their living from selling books, although increasingly also by selling their electronic ebook equivalent. Reading from screens in addition to pages of printed books has increased dramatically over the last decade as smaller and lighter portable computers with longer battery time have been designed specifically for down loading text, such as the Kindle, or for downloading image and text, with the Apple iPad and other PC tablets. Academics and teachers know that today's busy, cash strapped students do not want to have to buy large quantities of course books nor spend long uninterrupted periods of time reading. Given an A-Level or undergraduate assessment essay on the topic of digital media, the majority of students will use online sources for their writing. The old medium of the printed book now continues in a world in which more and more knowledge is stored as data, transferred and accessed electronically. In this world the book remains an important organising tool for thinking, while not for storage or transmission. Culturally, reading and writing cross and re-cross the old and new forms of printed page and screen. This crossing of boundaries and the convergence of forms is the territory we explore.

OUR APPROACH

Within the approach outlined above, we can identify three things that mark this book out from the growing literature on the subject of digital media. First, it looks at digital media from the point of view of the practitioner. By this we mean that the book is organised around digital media artefacts, their producers and production. It aims to stay close to the many issues that beset the digital media producer, half of which are about making machines do what you want them to do and the other half about wondering why you are trying to do it in the first place. Digital media practitioners worry away, alternately, about getting the technical detail right or whether they should be spending half their life in front of a computer screen. This is why so many digital media art projects in particular have had technology written into their content.

Second, the book looks at the practitioner as primarily a creative, rather than technical person. We are not writing a computer or software manual and this is not a ‘how to do it’, but more a ‘how to think it’ guide. The book's interest in hardware and software is from the point of view of how they are used creatively. This means looking at what people are doing with technologies as well as how they understand what they are doing. In this respect the case studies and examples often privilege the position of the creative producer working in specific cultural and institution contexts. The case studies and examples are equally drawn from people working outside of the corporate mainstream of digital media commerce and within it. We focus upon a range of independent practitioners because they illustrate many of the wider understandings and problems we discuss about what is characteristic about digital media practice. The fact that we have often chosen to examine the work of people based in contemporary cultural contexts, rather than in science or commerce, is again because we consider that their projects illustrate the links between ideas, forms and audiences. Many of our cases studies point up the collaborative nature of the practice of digital media and interestingly points to the fact that people collaborate across different specialisations.

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Because of this particular approach to digital media practice the book discusses at many points the meaning of that much used and abused term creativity and its relationship to intellectual and craft skills. Traditionally, the training of media arts practitioners was carried out ‘on-the-job’, so to speak, which involved a lot of watching and copying what other trained people did. This watching and copying was the way in which knowledge, skills and techniques necessary to production were acquired, in the process of doing, rather than being formally taught. At the height of analogue broadcast and print media, up until the end of the 1970s, media training was organised under a system of apprenticeships. Apprenticeships had a much longer history as a system of craft and industrial training in which the necessary knowledge and skills of a practice were passed-on. Such training was done as an inseparable part of the process of production. Today the widespread formal apprenticeship system has gone and has been replaced by education and training programmes, which take place at a distance from the production process, mostly in colleges. The apprentice, working alongside the ‘craftsman’ or skilled operator in the production process, learned by copying and doing. The apprentice would know that something had been done the right way and was of a high standard, as the artefact was produced and approved by those who were already trained. On-the-job training still takes place, but in more casual and, importantly, more short-term ways. Changes in the social organisation of industrial and commercial training reflect the global restructuring of industrial production. Today products are no longer produced all in one place (the vertical factory system); they require shorter and shorter turn-around-time in consumer markets, and involve ever greater levels of automation brought about by the introduction of new technologies.

When considering the training and education of a digital media practitioner, we still have to take into account a differentiation of knowledge and skills in the production process itself. One of the biggest distinctions in conventional media production is that between so-called ‘creatives’ and technicians. The production of media is still organised under a system in which labour is divided into separate specialist tasks. The system of media training reflects this division of labour in different ways. There is first and foremost a primary distinction between those who develop and define the content of programming and those who put programmes together. The first group (content providers) including writers, producers and directors, are deemed to be the creatives, and the second group, the film and studio crews who operate the equipment of production and post-production, are deemed to be technicians. Within each of these groups production is refined into further specialisations that reflect either the degree of technical or creative complexity, the differences between front-end and back-end programming for instance.

In contrast to the divisions of labour that operate in the industrial and commercial production of media, the production of art is conceived of as a holistic process under the direction and control of the artist. Novels, poetry, plays, music and works of visual art are still largely the products of individual creators, even if groups are then needed to technically produce or perform them. In most of these art forms it is assumed that the artist both conceives of the work and has the personal skills to produce the artefact itself. Even when an art form requires technical assistance – for example, the large scale public sculpture that needs industrial production techniques and is factory produced – the resulting work is valued and understood as that of the artist, rather than the result of a team of people.

How these different traditions and divisions of production relate to digital media is a question this book continually considers, partly because digital media practice is continuous with existing art and media practices and partly because at points it has a new and challenging organisation. What is clear is that digital media represents a convergence of previously distinct communication forms in which skills and practices overlap and boundaries between previously distinct operations of production blur. This convergence leads to greater team working and collaborative approaches, which require a creative synergy between people working together.

CREATIVITY

The other issue arising from our discussion of creativity relates to the conceptual and imaginative dimension of the production process. Where do creative ideas come from would be a practical question here. For the new student of digital media to be told something they have done is, or is not, a creative solution, can be a complete mystery. What is considered creative in practice at any one time can follow fashion as much as it can a more enduring set of rules. Creativity can also be as much about breaking rules as...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Media Practice
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on interviewees
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Digital media as a subject
• Part I Networks
• Part II Convergent media
• Part III Creative industries
• Part IV Digital media
• Part V Media histories and theories
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index