Media and Information Technology: The Day Kennedy Died... and After

Abstract

First the industrial revolution mechanized work, then it mechanized leisure. Even more than the factory regime by day, which cast people as the analogues of machines, analogue TV in the home every evening and at weekends synchronized and massified personal time. The assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 registered this phenomenon on a global scale. Still, even as we have been adapting our sense of shared time to the time-compactness of the global village, fissiparous forces have been at work to undermine this new community. Digital technology is the splitting factor, the implications of which are the central concern of this paper.

Digital technology has already changed media production and distribution, prompting the emergence of multinational corporations seeking global market share in both hardware and software, but also allowing a greater diversity of smaller creative organizations into the world marketplace to service the media giants. Digital distribution is now radically altering the nature of media consumption: multiplying the available channels to the consumer, facilitating the targeting of niche markets, and combining video and computer technology in multimedia so as to introduce interactivity. For the consumer, the first effect of the incoming digital technology has been to multiply passive choice - fragmenting the mediasphere, but not yet undermining its mechanistic character. In the longer term, digital technology has the potential to return to the viewer the capability to construct his or her own personal time, primarily through the planning and execution of programmes of personal activity using the same video screen (now with keyboard attached), once the altar of passive media consumption in the home. In the shift from analogue to digital technology in media, we may be seeing a paradigm for a more general shift from the division of labour characteristic of the industrial phase of work to its re-integration in the work of the post-industrial world.