Abstract

Tradition and communication in New Media

What is a media tradition? Much has been written on the word medium. But what of tradition? Like the word medium, it is from Latin, meaning to hand something over (trado - I hand over, I yield, I bequeath, I entrust to, I tell or teach, I betray). These resonate in the descended modern English word-field, especially in that tradition is a very ambivalent thing - at once bequeathed while also able to be betrayed. Implicit even in the modern word tradition is the idea of communication itself - telling, teaching, transmitting, from one to another, from one generation to the next.

This paper inquires into the possibility of there being media traditions in new media in general, and then (briefly) in Australia . But in posing the question in relation to new media, extra issues arise. The paper makes preliminary sense of the distinctive structure of the internet as a composite multimedia platform (having visual, textual, and audio aspects). It does this by using Harold Innis's idea of spatial or temporal bias to guide the inquiry. In so doing, it explores the significance of change, especially technological change - its limits and its transformations. These emerge in the ways existing work practices and techniques dovetail into technological change (what is called technics). In other words, then, after looking at technics and technology, the question of technological bias is explored in terms of things that are integral to tradition - the ambivalences of instruction, betrayal, and change.

John O'Carroll
Charles Sturt University