on Web Theory, chapters 8, 9, conclusion; Holding onto Reality, Part 1, [edited/reposted]
While Burnett & Marshall provide a gloss of Web-based news delivery at the moment of their writing, their predictive powers are perhaps not as keen in this chapter. To their credit, convergence of different media to deliver an entirely different conception of news, (rather than what could be had via newspapers, or television news alone), has become more noticeable across Web-delivered news outlets. Another credit to their foresight can be read in the gesture toward use of the Web requiring some manner of user-driven action—although this could beg the question of how interactive or user-driven some popular, current news aggregators (like Google News) truly are; if these aggregators could be thought of as user-driven, Web Theory would seem to again be on target. However, if news aggregation based on individual preference is just an evolution of the underpinnings of the “push technology” mentioned as an early way to personalize news, (though apparently not delivered within a traditional Webspace), the authors might be considered to have missed their mark. Regardless of news aggregation is defined, though, expectations about the impact of the Web on traditional news delivery was, in retrospect, rosy — as evidenced by the wide-ranging closure of newspapers across the country over the past couple of years. Such a misreading is remarkable not so much in terms of lacking the predictive power as other moments of prescience about the Web in the future. Rather, it is because of the basic inconsistency in logic as applied to the realm of commoditized news delivery versus their exploration but two chapters earlier of the larger developments of the ‘Web economy’. According to Burnett and Marshall, the Web economy could be expected to shorten the supply chain, which could result in a negative impact on local (physical) retailers. Understanding that news is but one more form of information commodity, it seems inconsistent to have not applied this same logic to the news retailers. As the intervening years have demonstrated, smaller retailers have suffered, as have second-tier retailers, while the largest competitors (of any product available online) still remain, (although likely not as powerful a market force as a decade ago). Similarly, as my out of work friends formerly of the Tampa Tribune and Gainesville Sun will attest, integration of local newspapers or outright dissolution of print versions in favor of a ‘community-focused e-papers’ are the death rattles of the print newspaper industry. Also, although highly politically charged, it would be worth investigating the connection between the idea of a ‘political myth’ and Burnett & Marshall’s (2003) contention that “the quality of news as it is now reorganized as informational news has questionable value in terms of validity and legitimacy,” (p. 172).
Addressing issues of economy and quality of content easily segue into Burnett & Marshall’s exploration of the ‘Web of Entertainment’. A similar decline to that apparent in the print news industry is visible amongst independent music retailers, (I admittedly rely on anecdote, but my three former record store employers, all of which are either closed or closing, would support this statement). It would be sloppy to imagine there is a simple shift in music purchasing from physical stores to virtual ones; likely, studies will bear out the complexity of this issue in coming years. For now, though, it seems worth focusing on a known element: record stores are going out of business, following a similar trend as other retailers. Burnett and Marshall (2003) are careful to not take sides with the prognostications of MP3.com’s (former) CEO, Michael Robertson, about how music retailers won’t go away, (p. 182), and instead focus on the revolutionary nature of the .mp3 and of digital music sharing and sale, generally. Also, the three salient lessons regarding the Web of entertainment still resonate: 1) issues significant in the fight over the digitization of music and its distribution could be (are) significant for other media; 2) sellers will have to accept lower profits (this seems to still be up for debate); 3) the fight over standards—or a lack of—will shape each industry, (and as the lack of standard encoding format or encoding level, as well as unevenness in application of various DRM technologies demonstrates, this too is an ongoing debate).
Despite any occasional areas of dated material—on obvious hazard when writing about rapidly-changing technology like the Web—Burnett and Marshall’s (2003) introduction to the Web is thorough in its (1) examination of individual functions and areas of expression (or ‘cultural production’), and (2) expression of a theme of fundamental dispersion and “unregulatability” of Web content, despite its inherently interconnection, (the ‘loose Web’), (p. 200). By providing an historical grounding for discrete areas of cultural production as manifest through the Web, as well as clear connections to precursor technologies and prefiguring theories of networking and communication, (such as that of Bush, Innis and McLuhan), Burnett and Marshall have constructed a solid foundation for understanding contemporary technology. Indeed, as technology finds definition through its capacity to function within a network, and expresses a will toward convergence, it seems likely that future conversations about technology will necessarily find grounding in historical contexts of the Internet and the Web.
References
Burnett, R. and Marshall, P. D. (2003). Web theory: An introduction. London: Routledge.
Holding on to Reality, part 1
Reading Holding on to Reality as a follow-up to Web Theory immediately fits – with only the briefest of application of semiotics by Burnett and Marshall, Borgmann’s focus on the power of signs fleshes out the place of these signs in understanding information, the very stuff of the Web. With perhaps even a more historical approach than apparent in Web Theory, Borgmann’s initial foray into signs is located within a varying sort of ‘ancestral’ world, (apparently located in familiar contexts to the author, in terms of Biblical stories, history of Greek civilization and thought, and Native American history and myth). Emphasis on signs is lead into first by exploring differences in types of information:
(1) structural information (a construct Borgmann suggests to be not very helpful, as it does not sufficiently differentiate useful from not-useful information);
(2) cognitive information (information used or selected, esp. by a human; Borgmann, 1999, p. 12); (3) instructive information (arguably a refinement of ‘cognitive information’; this is information of signs, the “message” that “teaches us about what is remote in space or time,” (Borgmann, 1999, p. 17).
An emphasis on this third type of information, ‘instructive information,’ necessitates a semiotic approach, for as Borgmann (1999) writes, “information has to be a relation of at least four terms: a person is informed by a sign about some thing within a certain context,” (p. 20).
Borgmann’s enumeration of types of signs follows a similar pattern to his review of types of information; he writes of the ‘natural sign’ as a sign that might be ascribed meaning but that readily recedes back into the world when freed from individual intent or understanding, (so a rock is just a rock until it is understood as an indicator of a path; those ignorant of its significance would consider it as part of the rest of the natural surroundings). In a similar way to how Borgmann (1999) describes cognitive information as information beyond the physical fact through its selection, so too does he write of the ‘conventional sign’ as finding differentiation “when its message exceeds what can be gleaned from its surroundings,” once it has intentionality, (p. 30). A shift in signification to a written form of sign seems to have developed through necessity of communicating more (and more complex) information, unable to be transmitted through signs as part of the ‘landscape’. Indeed, Borgmann tracks the displacement of oral with written culture through historical examples, including resistance to this shift, as well as some enumeration of problems related to the shift, (such as the “endless accumulation of information lead[ing] … to confusion,” enabled by written records, (Borgmann, 1999, p. 49)). Despite resistance, though, Borgmann begins to connect up the tradition of more complex information transmission through written signs to current issues of information: in much the same way that the tangibly-recorded written word could transmit exponentially more complex information in a relatively compact form, the digitization of information and ease of its transmission could be argued to produce a further exponential explosion of signs and ready transmission of information. Perhaps referring back to problems, such as the confusion resulting from an ‘endless accumulation’ if information in written form, might even be a useful lens through which to view issues with information within contemporary digital culture.
References
Borgmann, A. (1999). Holding on to reality: The nature of information at the turn of the millennium. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.