The Digital Divide

During the industrial revolution, modernism helped to ‘challenge the theocratic and God-centre notion of the world that helped to define human society in the past’, (Creeber and Martin 2009, p.11), and it was said that this was said to oppose ‘free thought and individuality’. (Creeber and Martin 2009, p.12) Modernism created an anxiety filled culture which was conveyed by many artists at the time through movements such as surrealism and abstract expressionists. (Creeber and Martin 2009, p.12) The Frankfurt School was a group of Marxists scholars, who also agreed with this idea and they would often relate ‘mass culture with aspects of Fordism’. (Creeber and Martin 2009, p.12) Henry Ford manufactured mass-produced cars which were affordable for the everyday American. This ‘Fordist philosophy’, (Creeber and Martin 2009, p.13), supported their view that this new mass culture was no longer offering ‘avant-garde’ (Creeber and Martin 2009, p.21) and high class society that they were once used to. These ‘industrialized products were designed to keep the masses deluded in their oppression by offering a form of homogenized and standardized culture’. (Creeber and Martin 2009, p.13) The audience during this era was said to be subservient, passive and susceptible to believing anything the media through at them. This was referred to as ‘the hypodermic needle model’ which the Frankfurt School completed research on. (Creeber and Martin 2009, p.13)

The ‘Structuralist movement’ argued that the ‘individual is shaped by sociological, psychological and linguistic structures’ (Creeber and Martin 2009, p.14) Backed up by Jacque Lacan, who states that, ‘language is an underlying structure, consisting of ‘signs’ and rules which govern the combination of sounds’, (Craib 1989, p.117) Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce used the idea of semiotics so that any text could contain certain signs that could be denoted by an audience in a certain way. The concept of semiotics is used to influence an audience to think a certain way about a text.

Postmodernism shows a cultural change where the audience are now consumers and ‘consumption and leisure now determine our experiences rather than work or production’, (Creeber and Martin 2009, p.15), much like that of the modernist society. This consumer society is now revealing new ways of using media and with the help of technological advances; there is a transformation from a passive culture of voyeurs to a much more engaged participatory society. The ‘Hypodermic needle model’ is no longer relevant as audiences now ‘resist ideological meaning’ (Creeber and Martin 2009, p.15) and texts are now becoming more ‘polysemic’. (Creeber and Martin 2009, p.15)

‘The production of meaning between text and its audience’, (Creeber and Martin 2009, p.16), is now re-imagined. This participatory culture remixes and redesigns the idea of personal identification, as seen on social networking site such as Facebook, where each person can ‘create our own complex, diverse and mainly faceted notions of personal identity’. (Creeber and Martin 2009, p.18) This New Media culture is interactive and part of a democratic society where everyone can have their say.

However, as Espen Aarseth advises, ‘to declare a system interactive is to endorse it with a magic power’. (Aarseth 1997, p.48)

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Bibliography

AARSETH, Espen J. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Press.

CRAIB, Ian (1989). Psychoanalysis and Social Theory. London, Harvester Wheatshead.

CREEBER, Glen and MARTIN, Royston (2009). Digital Theory: Theorizing New Media. In: Digital Cultures: Understanding the Media. Maidenstone, Open University Press, 11 - 22