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21st Century Communication: A Reference Handbook

Traditional and New Media

Contributors: Rayford L. Steele

Edited by: William F. Eadie

Book Title: 21st Century Communication: A Reference Handbook

Chapter Title: "Traditional and New Media"

Pub. Date: 2009

Access Date: September 13, 2016

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.

City: Thousand Oaks

Print ISBN: 9781412950305

Online ISBN: 9781412964005

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412964005.n54

Print pages: 489-496

©2009 SAGE Publications, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of

the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

Traditional and New Media

As each generation enters our media-driven society, the term new media becomes very relative to their time and their immediate experience. Those readers born after the early 1980s have little experience in a world that was mostly not digital, and the “new media” around them were not new, just what they became familiar with in their time.

The purpose of this essay is both to create a very contemporary understanding of new media and to provide readers with a somewhat broader context that may help them as their “new media” become traditional and the next set of new media emerges, as it inevitably will.

If you are fortunate enough to survive a few decades, change will inevitably occur, and new media will be something else, again and again, no matter what it was when you started paying attention to it.

As a reader, I was, and I am even more today, a bit of a skeptic who wants to know why people know what they say they know. Thus, I will begin with a little of my own personal story, which may help you better understand the reason why a broader context may be valuable to you as you consider new media.

I am the first baby boomer, or one of the first. I was born just after midnight on January 1, 1946. The most common traditional medium of the time was radio, along with the daily paper. Families still actually gathered around the radio and listened to Sky King, Fibber McGee and Molly, and other shows. While television had been introduced to the public at the 1938 World's Fair and CATV was just getting its start in Oregon and in the hills of Pennsylvania, new media was not much of a public issue just after World War II, nor was computing, though it existed.

By the early 1950s, however, television, the “new media” that was going to ruin radio, had begun to invade living rooms. It was a black-and-white and often fuzzy picture, and programming was limited. It was relatively expensive to own, and it was erratic in service, especially in areas outside cities.

Our neighboring family, an older couple, owned a television set and often invited us to join them for the Jackie Gleason Show, Ed Sullivan Hour, or wrestling, which had a sizable following long before the version we know today. Television was “new media.” It did not destroy radio, though it changed it, and it was peculiarly American.

As we moved through the late 1950s, television was evolving, with better dramatic programming and news and political content becoming part of the normal fare. Color television was just around the corner.

The Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates were televised in 1960, changing the playing field and the cost of politics forever, and computing continued to grow in larger organizations. Can you imagine in today's world of political coverage on television and Web sites what those debates were like almost 50 years ago?

President John F. Kennedy proposed that we send a man to the moon, which ultimately broke the boundaries of our imagined tether to this planet. In 1957, satellites were launched, and this began to change the scope and distribution of new media in the 1960s, and color became the big deal as television evolved into three powerful networks that became our primary

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source of news, entertainment, and advertising.

Although the picture phone had been developed by AT&T's Bell Labs in the late ′50s and realized some limited use in the 1960s, there were really no new media beyond network television that were publicly recognized as I finished college and army service and entered law school as the ′70s began. The satellite and later CATV were less new media and more new distribution devices for television-based programming in those days. Of course, CATV, or community antenna television, was expected to destroy the broadcast networks, according to some authorities attending the International Radio and Television Society meetings in New York City with me in the mid-to late 1970s. I went on to become a Frank Stanton fellow with the International Radio and Television Society, and the broadcast networks somehow survived.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, the new media issue initially focused mainly on how to record television programs. While the first prototype of a videotape recorder was reported to have been demonstrated all the way back in November of 1951, at Bing Crosby's recording studio in Los Angeles, it took until the late 1970s for the industry to finally sort out the competing standards and get something nearly inexpensive enough for the consumer market, if you consider about $1,000 for a VCR a competitive price (Lardner, 1987).

As I entered the 1980s, three major events began to shape the context in which new media and my own career would evolve.

The computer had been evolving since the 1930s, when John Atanasoff had developed the Atanasoff Berry Computer. Then came the ENIAC in the ′40s, and then the first UNIVAC computer was delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau in June 1951 by Remington Rand Corporation. Thomas Watson Jr. pushed IBM into building computers in 1950. Thus, with this background of big, military, government, and large corporation-based central (mainframe) computing, a major shock occurred when the PC began to become a part of the desktop and the home. While it was 1976 when Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple I, by the early ′80s IBM had rolled out its PC and rapidly surpassed little Apple in sales (Bellaver, 2006). The age of distributed computing and incredible personal computing power on your desktop had arrived.

The second major event was the early ′80s move by the Federal Communications Commission to allow a little of the federally controlled broadcast spectrum to be used for limited consumer wireless telephones. It was expensive and limited, but it began what we all take for granted today as our right to mobile communication, and that had implications for new media.

The third event was the breakup of AT&T, which officially occurred on January 1, 1984, after the consent decree was issued on August 5, 1983 (Bellaver, 2006). That milestone created the opportunity for the rapid expansion of competitive communications and technology development, leading to the networks we take for granted today.

I will not unduly bog the reader down with too much detail—I think the above three events are central to my own, as well as your sense of context, as we move on to our shared time in the 21st century. Certainly, my life and career were forever changed by these events, and so was my sense of “new media,” although it was not always that clear to me at the time.

From 1982 to 1984, I led the process at the University of Pittsburgh that resulted in the creation of the first “Campus of the Future” in U.S. higher education. This eventual partnership with AT&T involved creating the first voice (phone) data (networked computing) and video system converged on a fiber-optic network for the entire campus. While it was a mix

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of analog and digital technologies, you could get what you wanted electronically, where you wanted it, when you needed it, and it allowed limited interaction with distant source machines as if you were in the same room. It sounds fairly standard by today's experience.

This prototype was evolved by 1987, in another partnership with AT&T, at Ball State University, and became a “market model” for both K-12 and higher education. I went on to lead projects like it across the country as head of my own consulting firm.

It was the precursor application, a kind of analogdigital hybrid of what we are now used to in applications as we use wired and wireless digital applications involving audio, video, text, and graphics. The university went on to become the number-one wireless university in 2005, according to Intel.

This market model demonstrated the kind of electronic environment that was able to deliver or shift in format many content sources. The basic policy implications of this shift had caused problems for the FCC chairman years before, in 1980, when he questioned “whether a newspaper delivered electronically is an extension of print and therefore free of regulation (First Amendment protection) or whether it is a broadcast and consequently under the control of (FCC rules) government” (Drake, 1995, p. 162). Electronic life had policy complications, and that could have implications for new media.

Without overcomplicating this legal mine field, simply understand that, in January 2008, the writers' strike, which almost ground Hollywood to a halt in production, was greatly about how writers are paid for the extended use of their work in new media areas. Most of the concern occurred when convergence allowed digitized content to move from known to new contexts.

Let me bring my story to an exit point briefly. The experiences I gained led me to found the Graduate Center for Information and Communication Sciences at Ball State University and to become a founding board member and President and Chairman of the Board of the U.S. Distance Learning Association in the late 1980s, where we would see satellite-delivered video education sessions evolve to online delivered classwork and streamed video, even cell-phone- based sessions. Through the 1990s, I led converged network-based campus projects across the United States and saw the evolution of what started as a military network and evolved to universities and then to what we all take for granted today, the Internet. The VCR and the videodisk evolved to the DVD and hard drives that digitally stored video content, and the simple cell phone evolved to become a device for entertainment, texting, and visual directions delivered from satellite as well as the more common telephone device.

In 2003, I founded the International Digital Media and Arts Association and still serve on its board and as its executive director. I am continuously confronted by “new media” evolving from what I thought I understood to be new media, which have either disappeared or become the new old traditional media—does anyone remember eight-track tapes for audio?

This is the context, the ever more rapidly changing context, in which I will discuss new media, and I hope you will learn as I did not to hold too tight to your definition. Things change, and so will you. Nevertheless, we will also discuss some things that I hope you will agree are constants and fundamental to our common experience and to our shared future.

New Media versus Traditional Media

As you now know from the preceding introduction, new versus traditional media definitions

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must relate to context and time from my experience. Almost every related technology, at some point in its evolution, may have been considered “new media.” That makes defining it a bit tough.

Be that as it may, let us establish a contemporary working definition for the purpose of this essay and use it as a baseline as we move forward. Although it is not as simple as we might like, the term digital might serve as our baseline label for defining new media with some reservations.

If we say that new media encompasses those technologies that move, store, manage, and allow manipulation of digitized information, whether for news, entertainment, communication, visual or other purposes, we may have a starting point.

We must remember that we are dealing with one of the more complicated areas in life, communication, and one of the more complex concepts, information. Every hour of our waking days we create information of all kinds. If we do it digitally, it is reduced to ones and zeros and then what? We must find an appropriate medium for communicating both the code and the message contained in that code with our desired audience. Media, new or old, do not exist for themselves, shocking as this may be to a sizable segment of the working world; they exist to help human beings get their information communicated.

Let us take a relatively simple example. A graphic artist has been asked to create the cover of the catalog for a digital art exhibit in Chicago. The exhibit has a theme, a title, artist contributors, a sponsor or some source of support, a somewhat defined audience, and the rest of the world, today or whenever in the future, who might pay some attention to this cover work.

All of the elements mentioned above were present “before digital,” but “after digital,” things are a bit more complex. While there is still the challenge to the graphic designer to create the visual information that communicates an acceptable, appropriate, and even creatively reinforcing message about the exhibit, in the new media world, life is both better and much more complicated.

Before digital designers had their experience, some limited research time to review related designs that were available nearby, the wishes of those who commissioned the work, the challenge of a relatively limited audience with modest potential for broad exposure—with limited lasting and broad-based archival potential, and their courage and creativity.

Now, what has changed after digital? Graphic designers still have the experience, but with the Internet and worldwide access to both contemporary and archival examples, the research of related designs can be both extraordinary and daunting. When do you stop? With texting, cell phones, e-mail, and other invasive personal access, when does the designer get enough input from those who commissioned the work, whose gallery will be featured, or whose works will be inside the catalog that the design will cover? Then, designers must also consider the impact of worldwide access to their work since it will, no doubt, be added to a Web page and available across the globe now and likely archived for future reference. Nevertheless, perhaps the saving grace is that artists still have their creativity and courage, and that may be the true bridge for all of us between before digital and after digital. As we move forward in this essay, the real issue between old media and new media may continuously come back to the concept of integrity in communicating information, and that involves the courage of the reader/viewer to question the accuracy of the content and the commitment of the creator of this information to integrity.

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Exploring Technology and the Myth of Interactivity

Techencyclopedia's (http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia) definition of new media i s a n intriguing one:

The forms of communicating in the digital world, which includes electronic publishing on CD-ROM, DVD, digital television and, most significantly, the Internet. It implies the use of desktop and portable computers as well as wireless, handheld devices. Most every company in the computer industry is involved with new media in some manner.

For more than 20 years, we have been in an era of digitally based technologies that allow manipulation of all forms of digitized content that can be converged on broadband (often fiber optics) and easily and instantly transmitted across the planet via the Internet.

Before we leap forward to the myth of interactivity, it is critical to our lives as citizens of the 21st century that we consider what is significant about this technology discussion. It is not the coolness of Blueray or HD, iPhone, MP3, GPS, VoIP, or any other technologies. These will shift with engineering breakthroughs. Marketing will rename or reconfigure a service to enhance sales, and new opportunities will evolve, as they always have done. Technologies are simply tools.

What is important to us as we contrast new media and traditional media in a digital world is to understand the key words used in the foregoing. They are manipulate, converge, and instant, whether referring to accessed information or to transmitted information.

As citizens and potential professionals in the digital world, we have every aspect of our lives affected by new media. To be well informed, even educated members of our society, we cannot be naïve about the implications of these three key words.

Let us begin with manipulate. Once you digitize an image, a document, a film segment, it can be relatively easily manipulated. Now, we have been manipulating all sorts of media, and everything else for that matter, for a very long time. Analog films and video were edited, and “wet” or film-based photography was also manipulated, as were written articles or text. Our issue today in new media is that manipulation is relatively easy and most users of digital technology can do it: Certainly, younger people who have grown up digital find this to be no big deal to do. That was not the case in the analog world.

If a photograph used in a trial was manipulated in the analog world, there were a relatively finite number of professionals who might have had the experience or skill level to achieve this. Today, with a cell phone camera, little experience, and some relatively inexpensive software, it is no big achievement to capture and manipulate an image.

On Friday night, when we need to just get out of our space and see a film on the big screen, we do not care if the film footage was digitized in Hollywood and sent via broadband to New York, London, and Wellington, New Zealand for simultaneous editing by three different groups working onAVIDS as long as what we see on the big screen is entertaining to us. The end justifies the means for us.

Nevertheless, if two students, one in Queensland, Australia, and the other in Muncie, Indiana, are taking an online distance-learning class and go to a Web site and each turns in a paper that has a number of paragraphs “lifted” from the site and inserted into each of their papers

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without credit, this easy-to-do manipulation of text is called plagiarism, and it is especially painful if the faculty member happens to notice or if he or she is using software that now checks papers for this sort of dishonesty.

What is the point here for us? New media in a digital world open up vast manipulation opportunities to masses. The benefits, for example, to film making are remarkable. Without integrity as a key element in user judgment, the potential for disservice to our society is significant in every field you can list due to the pervasiveness of our digital world. From identity theft to digital photo makeovers to political contests, we have a new obligation as citizens in the digital, new media age. We cannot assume that integrity is always a primary consideration in what we see and read, and, thus, critical thinking and a healthy dose of skepticism are required.

Convergence is the next key word. While not simple to achieve, it refers to a digital world where telephony, computer data, and video are all digitized signals that can be transmitted and switched over the same network that is IP or “Internet protocol”-based. The rules of economics and access have changed. A voice-over Internet protocol (VoIP)-based telephone call to China from the United States is today no big deal for a Chinese student calling home. It was a very big deal only a few years ago. A U.S. soldier serving in Iraq can sit down in a tent before a computer screen with a Web camera and visit with his family in California via an IP- based session. This “video conference” or call had a significant cost before the expanded capability of broadband Internet.

Today convergence of voice, data, and video signals over an IP-based network, transmitted across the Internet, means that both the technical and the economic barriers that limited our choices and breadth of communication and access are mostly gone.

So what, you might say? This is just the way it is today, after all. For new media and for citizens of this time in the digital age, we have access to the widest scope of information ever, and that means others have access to us as well. Privacy and personal judgment become more important to us as stalkers, friends, and even pedophiles, and, oh yes, potential employers visit our Web site, our Facebook, and other social-networking site entries. Using data-gathering software, marketers and others can easily profile us, and very little we do electronically can be held private. The concept of access is truly a two-way street, and personal privacy becomes a new challenge. If we put up something “stupid,” revealing, or just tasteless, the world can see it just as we can see others via new media.

While there are numerous examples of this phenomenon, none can be much more telling than the January 2008 story of the Michigan woman who advertised on craigslist, a popular Web site, for an assassin to kill her lover's wife. She was quickly discovered and arrested. Stupid, we might exclaim, but the simple truth is that with all the good that comes with access in our new media world, judgment and responsibility end up being much more important today because we are so much more “exposed” than we were in past.

Just in case you assume this concern to be overstated, let me refer you to the 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen, someone who has pioneered a number of Internet start-ups himself.

It is easy to look back to the summer of 2003, when 12-year-old Brianna LaHara was caught by the Recording Industry Association of America after downloading, copying, and distributing 1,000 songs to her friends. She was young, the case was settled out of court, and the association needed to make a point.

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Nevertheless, was the point clear to her slightly older contemporaries? Perhaps not, if you consider the June 2005 study of 50,000 undergraduates by the Center for Academic Integrity. In it, 70% admitted to cheating and 77% of them “didn't think that Internet plagiarism was a serious issue” (Keen, 2007, p. 143). The issues of judgment and integrity become more prominent.

The availability of images, music, movies, and text, all someone else's work, all converged on an incredibly accessible network, and all easily stolen (yes, this is stealing), represents a seductive temptation to us as users and a real threat to the culture of which we are a part. Thus, the notions of user courage and skepticism, and integrity in providing and using information are critical to our social and professional futures.

The third key word is instant. In this digital world, speed is all, and we can truly think it, access it, or record it and send it around the planet instantly, and that is both good and risky.

Much as I would never subject you to my writing in this essay without editing it, rethinking the content, and revising it, that is less likely in this era of “just hit the send key.” At the end of the day, after the editing this may not be great, but it will not be careless.

As a PhD and a professional with almost 40 years of experience, I have never received so much poorly written and insufficiently thought-out junk than in the last decade as e-mail and texting took over the majority of correspondence. New media have broadened the base of input in many areas, and instant communication has changed the quality of content, not always for the good!

Some limited examples should help to make my point. Note that while personal carelessness in electronic communication may just cause a little loss in confidence, when new media gets involved, much more is at stake.

My first example will be Wiki's. Newton's Telecom Dictionary notes that “a Wiki, in its simplest form, is a web site that can be written upon and edited by multiple users at once” (Newton, 2006, p. 998).

While there is nothing inherently wrong with democratically shared information, and no system of information development is without some fault or risk, would you trust your health to an MD who got his latest drug information from a Wiki? He might have gone to Web MD, a site with reviewed and vetted content, and gotten poor information, but which source has the greatest credibility and the least risk? Remember, aWiki can be instantly available for access, and the qualifications of contributors are generally unknown.

Since this raises a both disturbing and very difficult set of considerations for the reader as well as the author in our time of new media issues, I want to go a little deeper and

once again involve you with Andrew Keen's work, this time in the context of the January 2001 creation of Wikipedia by Jimmy Wales with Larry Sanger.

Keen (2007) reports the clash between Dr. William Connolley, a well-published and recognized climate modeler and expert on global warming, and a Wikipedia editor who punished Connolley for “strongly pushing his POV (point of view) with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own.” The result was that Connolly, who Keen notes “was pushing no POV other than that of factual accuracy,” got restricted by the editor on this

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democratic information site without any consideration for relative expertise or credibility, and on appeal he was given the same deference as his unknown foe, “who, for all anyone knew, could have been a penguin in the pay of Exxon Mobil” (p. 43).

The implications of this should be disturbing to all of us unless you believe that a new college freshman is as competent to teach the Basic English course as is a tenured and well- published senior professor. Certainly, the freshman might be more entertaining and might make some valid points, but would you pay tuition or, more important, give your time for this level of expertise?

Let us jump ahead in Keen's work to see why Larry Sanger, who ran Wikipedia's day-to-day operations, left the company after 2 years. According to Keen (2007), Sanger found “that the democratization of information can quickly degenerate into an intellectually corrosive radical egalitarianism.” In effect, “he learned that fully democratic open-source networks inevitably get corrupted by loonies” (p. 186).

Keen (2007) noted that what Sanger realized to be Wikipedia's problem “was with its implementation, not its technology (p. 186). Thus, in an attempt to do better, Sanger launched Citizendium in September 2006, which he described as “an experimental new Wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance” (p. 187).

Citizendium lists its difference as a Web 2.0 Wiki as “credibility and quality not just quantity,” involving “both general public and credentialed experts,” using “our real names, not pseudonyms,” and being “both collegial and congenial.”

Based on this and numerous other Web 2.0 examples, Keen (2007) notes that “This gives me hope that Web 2.0 technology can be used to empower, rather than overshadow, the authority of the expert, that the digital revolution might usher in an age in which the authority of the expert is strengthened” (pp. 188–189).

I have told my clients, my students, and my colleagues for 25 years that the technology is just a tool and what we do with it in application makes all the difference for the human condition.

The reason I have emphasized the Wiki issue is to help the reader consider how easy it is for those who have reason to know to be shouted down by so many who will only work at the noise and not the content quality. In the new media world, credibility and careful thought presented with care, not just instantly off the top of the head, still matter.

My second example is Weblogs, or blogs, which are really nothing more than a Web site for an individual or individuals. Not being a great fan of blogs, I conferred with a colleague who has studied this digital world phenomenon. Dr. Jay Gillette described a blog as, primarily, an electronic diary or journal of an individual whose thoughts are made public by instant access via the Web. The blogger may be serious or not, 13 or 45, passionate about the topic, well- informed or not, biased or objective, but the blog is the blogger's unrestricted and unvetted thoughts. It is instantly accessible, and credibility is the challenge to the reader's judgment, as it is with any source, just more so in this case. We see bloggers everywhere, and especially in politics in an election year.

So what is the point? If the source of the information is not credible in a time of instant and immediate access, then the information may be worthless or, worse, deceiving and dangerous. If we do not develop a healthy sense of skepticism and check out the credibility of sources of information as citizens of a digital world in which instant access lessens effort, we

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are subject to the worst of new media, and that lessens our society. The more lazy easy access makes readers, the greater the risk to all of us. My final example involves one of our more trusted roles, the credibility of the editor function in new media in this time of instant access in the digital world.

The simple description of the role of the editor in traditional print or broadcast media was primarily to see that the story submitted fit the time or space available after judging its relative importance for placement in the paper or news show and to be certain that it was accurate and clearly presented to protect the credibility of the organization. It was always a time- challenged role where deadlines, scoops, and audience appeal were critical issues.

What is so different about the role of an editor in new media? First, in a world of instant access where everyone can be published or viewed, the time pressure and the volume increase make careful vetting that much harder, especially in the wide variety of new media outlets. Even traditional media such as the venerable New York Times and CBS News have lost credibility over the past few years from inaccurate stories from people as credible as the former CBS anchor Dan Rather, who reported stories alleging that the then-President George W. Bush had shirked his military duties as a young man, which proved to be false and happened to be reported in September 2004, just over a month before the next presidential elections. Rather left the anchor job as a part of the fallout.

In new media, the pressure of time, the breadth of sources, and the less concentrated competition for scoops, audience appeal, and glory make this editing role much more difficult. Since new and traditional media compete for audiences, this is true for both.

The very traditional New York Times, in May 2003, reported that Jason Blair, a 27-year-old reporter, regularly misled readers with “frequent acts of journalistic fraud” over months of reporting before he was caught.

So what is the point? New media, with all of its pressures and opportunities, has a somewhat weakened capacity to ensure accuracy. The responsibility for ferreting out truth and veracity in our information-rich world falls more heavily than ever on the reader and the viewer, who are bombarded by new media and all its competing sources. If we are too lazy, too rushed, too unconcerned with truth or at least credibility, we become the victims of new media, not the beneficiaries of greater and more immediate access to a world of new and creative information sources. It certainly complicates matters when these sources arrive two or three at a time on our screen.

In case this is becoming a bit depressing, there is a bright side, and once again I will turn to Keen's book for a great example of “managing new media and traditional content without compromising editorial standards or quality” (p. 188), as he puts it when he describes how the British newspaper The Guardian has moved part of its business online without compromising “high-quality news gathering and reporting.”

One result has been that the online version, Guardian Unlimited, has more online U.S. readers than do top U.S. newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times. One critical and credible step has been that the division between professional reportage and amateur opinion has been clearly delineated.

Most of us love to see an underdog win, to see the amateur best the pro. It makes for great entertainment, but when it comes to our health, our living, our government, our laws, it really matters to us to know the source of our information. We make decisions, select paths, and

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base critical judgment on information, whether credible and accurate or not. We have the right and the responsibility to know the kind of source before we decide on the value of the information. We have the obligation of integrity as we become sources of that information in an information-driven economy where global access is now reasonably common.

Our content today is unquestionably the richest in information at any point in history, and access to it is worldwide. While not everyone has fully equal access, you can find an Internet café in almost any city in any country across the globe. The potential for changing lives with access to information is unquestionable. Can anyone question the impact that having access to information by people around the world had on the events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, had on the Chinese government in quelling student riots? Even after shutting down satellite visual access, the fax and Internet communication kept information flowing to the world and greatly affected the level of government reaction and harm to human life.

In a recent conversation with a stimulating friend who is president of Constellation Communication, I was challenged to imagine what might have been if young Anne Frank, a diarist in the Netherlands during the Nazi invasion of her home who hid in a secret set of rooms to survive while the world looked on, had been a blogger with access to the Internet of today. She may have brought worldwide attention more quickly to the atrocities being leveled against Jews by the Nazis. Unless she was extremely clever, she might have also been traced electronically and found more quickly, and therefore her diary might never have been shared. It is always a two-sided sword. Our endless opportunities in a new media world bring with them some serious new responsibilities.

The final issue I will discuss regarding new media within the technology area is interactivity, which some have tried to use as the more important or compelling aspect of defining new media.

Interactivity, as defined by Newton (2006), is “the ability of a person or device to talk to or communicate with another device in real time” (p. 484). So I ask you, if you are playing on a pin ball machine and the ball sticks and you hit the machine and the ball moves without (or with) a “tilt” penalty, is this an interactive experience? If you are working on your Mac and it freezes up and you reboot it and it becomes responsive, is this an interactive experience? If you speak to your SYNC-equipped Ford product and the requested song comes up, is this interactive? If you e-mail me and suggest that I am lost, and my laptop sends back an automatic “drop dead” or “I'm away” message, is that interactive?

They all may be somewhat interactive by definition, but most of us would not find this level of interaction very satisfying. The promise of interactivity, especially as it relates to new media, is a murky area and one that is more myth than deliverable in my experience except, perhaps, in gaming. If you have ever been caught up in a voice response system loop where you absolutely cannot get your question answered or your call shifted t o a h u m a n , y o u understand the fundamental myth.

As humans, we are naturally interactive with each other, and we thrive on it, to a point, but in the world of new media, we face some obvious limitations, and often we resort to marketing- driven “overpromise”; since some of you will likely become Web 2.0 and, perhaps, Web 3.0 entrepreneurs as well as users, let me clarify this enticing area in a simple fashion.

Interaction requires access, and it tends in the new media world to expect a 24/7 level of responsiveness. I do not mind when an e-mail arrives at my machine. I begin to be concerned when I receive 100 between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. on a business trip to Asia and I am expected

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to instantly respond. Machine interactivity is limited by artificial intelligence levels in terms of available choices in the software and the level of secured access. Online banking and other interactive services amply demonstrate

this, as does gaming. Nevertheless, there are limits that we humans have in a new media world of 24/7 access on a global basis. Businesses often figure this out when resources do not permit quality and quantity of personnel sufficient to meet the promises of marketers of consumer help and ever-present access. Then customers get turned off and depart.

Most of us, no matter how big a tech junkie, have capacity limits and therefore cannot dedicate 24/7 response time. We sometimes actually require a life separate from this hyper- interactivity; we even desire a bit of thinking time.

So what is the point here? Interaction is a human need and desire and a technology option. It is highly desirable, and it comes with limitations. Promise it wisely, and be somewhat skeptical of the level of interactivity promised to you. Understand the limits of the Second Life-type experiences and the addictive potential of Internet dating, gambling, pornography, ad nauseam. Both the human and the machine still have limitations.

Your time is your most valuable resource, and it is often the way new media players are measured for success. Interactivity, like seduction, is often a means to a not always satisfying end. Participate wisely since you can never get your time back, whether you are making the contact or promising to respond to it.

The promise of interactivity reminds me a little of what my colleague Scott Shamp, who directs the University of Georgia's New Media Institute, calls “the Law of the Hammer…. when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

How New Media Are Developed and Assimilated

Most new media entrants in the time of our “digital” line in the sand definition were evolved from a combination of technological, marketing, and economic factors combining to create a new opportunity.

The Internet offers tantalizing opportunities to reduce distribution costs, to more broadly spread content from local to global access, and to create greater author access in the highly competitive field of print journalism. Who would have printed a diary of an unknown author for local or even regional distribution just a decade ago, and then the blog arrived? Now, some blogs are carried in print newspapers.

Who would have considered evolving a 30-second story for the six o'clock TV news into an expanded print version that would also be carried both in the electronic version of the newspaper and as the expanded subject of the author's blog? Who would have believed that this would be done by a reporter working in a corporate contract for both print and broadcast interests, historically in competition with each other?

Who would have believed that YouTube would have opened a wide and very popular portal for so many wannabe video and film amateurs? This story, including that of social networks, is just in its early chapters.

Finally, who would have been persistent enough just a decade or so ago to assume that the wireless phone, then just a few years from being a big clumsy device sometimes carried in a

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good-sized bag, would become a pocket camera, a source of news, entertainment, texting and e-mail, gaming, and sports—and that list is still evolving as formatting issues are addressed.

Every market seeks growth for its opportunities and products. The developers of technologies often create a technology for more limited or differing uses than marketers can help sell to users. Most businesses, and print journalism and electronic news media are businesses, may come kicking and screaming into a new world changed mostly by the Internet, but they understand competition and survival, and they do change to survive.

Over the past 25 or so years, digital technology has been at the heart of the most rapid and broad set of changes, across the globe, that mankind has ever experienced. It has merged evolutions with revolution and curiosity with unprecedented access to information, and it is disturbing and disrupting to numerous cultures, our own included, in the United States. Previously held taboos are now fodder for Internet chats, and if they are out there, a very hungry new media segment sees no reason not to also discuss them, and that competition forces even the traditional media into the same discussion. Values, ethics, judgment, and integrity all sometimes suffer.

All this means opportunity, and it includes risks for every society and profession across the globe, not just this country.

Remember, each new generation comes to the world that it finds at its time. While assimilation of new media today is an issue for executives, investors, practitioners, and mature users, it is not such a big deal for the very young. If they have no sense of history or context, it is just the way it is to them.

The “So What?” Factor

It is essential in my view, to both a free and independent personal life and to an informed citizenry in a free democracy, that each generation realize that its tools of technology and the resulting new media and their consequences fit into a time that is part of a greater context. That greater context includes both the lessons of history and the opportunities for choosing a better or lesser future that we can create via our choices and our tools.

At a time when rapidly appearing and shifting new media present us with an ocean of information that is both global and local, that is, not unlike our oceans, filled by both pure and polluted sources, that like the oceans ebbs and flows with the tides but is ceaseless in presence, the responsibility of both the users and the creators of our information has never been greater. Creators of information without integrity, sources without responsible editing, vetting, and valued credibility, can do great personal damage as well as harm to society. Open and universal access to such information means that those without the courage to be skeptical of sources, expertise, and veracity can be easily fooled, misled, and even harmed by foolish health or financial advice, bad drugs being promoted, character assassination—and the list is long.

New media will continue to evolve for the good and not so good: Will you have the personal responsibility and the courage to guide its use for you and your time to serve us well? That is the ultimate challenge, not the ability to tick off a list of new-media technologies.

Author's Note

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My thanks to my trusted graduate researchers, Anisha Chandrasekaran, Kelly Antoine, Vibashreya Srivatsan, and Sunaina Premkumar, and to Tracy Scott, my patient assistant, who suffered through the many redrafts, as did my proofreader and wife, Cynthia. I hope our combined efforts help a new generation make wiser decisions in a time when information appears more like the ocean than a respected volume in a library.

Rayford L. Steele Ball State University

References and Further Readings Bellaver, R. F. (2006). Characters of the information and communication industry. Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse Drake, W. (1995). The new information infrastructure. NewYork: Twentieth Century Fund Press Keen, A. (2007). The cult of the amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture. New York: Doubleday/Currency Lardner, J. (1987). Fast forward. New York: W. W. Norton Newton, H. (2006). Newton's telecom dictionary (22nd ed.). San Francisco: CMP Books http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412964005.n54

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University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI

Communication Studies Faculty Publications Communication Studies

2012

The Impact of New Media on Intercultural Communication in Global Context Guo-Ming Chen University of Rhode Island, [email protected]

Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/com_facpubs

Terms of Use All rights reserved under copyright.

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Communication Studies at DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Studies Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected].

Citation/Publisher Attribution Chen, G. M. (2012). The impact of new media on intercultural communication in global context. China Media Research, 8(2), 1-10.

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The Impact of New Media on Intercultural Communication in Global Context

Guo-Ming Chen

University of Rhode Island

Abstract. The rapid development of new media has been the main force accelerating the trend of globalization in human society in recent decades. New media has brought human interaction and society to a highly interconnected and complex level, but at the same time challenges the very existence of intercultural communication in its traditional sense. It is under this circumstance that we see more and more scholars becoming involved in the investigation of the relationship between new media and intercultural communication. Emerging topical areas in this line of research mainly include three categories: (1) the impact of national/ethnic culture on the development of new media, (2) the impact of new media on cultural/social identity, and (3) the impact of new media (especially social media) on different aspects of intercultural communication (e.g., intercultural relationships, intercultural adaptation, and intercultural conflict). This paper discusses this trend of research on the relationship between new media and intercultural communication. [China Media Research. 2012; 8(2): 1-10]

Keywords: New media, culture, intercultural communication, cultural identity

Introduction

The history of human communication began with the oral or spoken tradition. Through the course of history, the dissemination of messages progressed from simply the oral tradition, to script, print, wired electronics, wireless electronics and finally digital communication. The greatest change in message dissemination in recent history occurred with the introduction of computers and the Internet in the early 1990s. Since then, this drastic change of communication medium has significantly affected humans’ perception of the media, the usage of time and space, and the reachability and control of the media.

In the present age of digital communication, time has been compressed by reducing the distance between different points in space, and the sense of space has led people to feel that local, national, and global space becomes obsolete (Harvey, 1990). In addition, the reachability of digital media can now extend to all people, instead of a limited audience. This is significant because without the confinement of time and space, the control of message production and dissemination is no longer a privilege possessed only by church, state, and government, but instead, equally shared by all individuals.

All these innovations in digital media, or so-called new media, have changed and continue to change the way we think, act, and live. For example, digitalization, as a hybridization of print and electronic media in a binary code, converts analog to digital that requires a completely different mode of production and distribution.

As Chen (2007) indicated, the impact of digital or new media on human society is demonstrated in the aspects of cognition, social effect, and a new form of aesthetics. Cognitively, new media demands a non- linear nature and the creation of expectations for

content, which directly influences the way people use media. Socially, the most manifested impact of new media is the effect of demassification, which denotes that the traditional design for a large, homogeneous audience is disappearing and being replaced by a specific and individual appeal, allowing the audience to access and create the message they wish to produce (Olason & Pollard, 2004). Visually, new media brings forth a new digital aesthetic view, which refers to, for example, “interactivity, manipulation, the prepurposing and repurposing of content across media, deliberate creation of virtual experience, and sampling as a means of generating new content” (Chen, 2007, p. 95).

New media is also the main force accelerating the trend of globalization in human society. The globalization trend has led to the transformation of almost all aspects of human society. For instance, socially and culturally, globalization has changed the perception of what a community is, redefined the meaning of cultural identity and civic society, and demanded a new way of intercultural interaction (Chen & Zhang, 2010). Economically, global competition has enormously intensified. In order to succeed in global business, a company is required to not only understand the local markets in order to meet their global clients’ needs, but they must also seek out open markets globally, and foster effective management in global business transactions (Gupta & Govindarajan, 2007). In sum, due to the thrust of new media, the global trend creates new social networks and activities, redefines political, cultural, economic, geographical and other boundaries of human society, expands and stretches social relations, intensifies and accelerates social exchanges, and involves both the micro-structures of personhood and macro-structures of community (Steger, 2009).

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From the scholarly perspective, unfortunately, traditional studies seldom connected well or integrated the two concepts of “media” and “globalization” (Rantanen, 2006). Three established academic fields on the study of the concepts include communication studies, media and cultural studies, and globalization studies. Communication studies began after World War II and become an academic field during the 1950s in the United States. Beginning with early studies focusing on international communication and speech communication and continuing on to recently developed intercultural communication, communication studies as an academic field tends to ignore the relationship between people and media, or how people use media in different cultural contexts, and how that closely relates to the globalization of human society.

The field of media and cultural studies emerged in the 1970s in Britain on the basis of resisting the dominance of communication studies in the United States, which was more oriented towards the empirical or discovery paradigm. Yet, most British media studies focus on the role media institutions play in the process of globalization. Many scholars in this area tend to take globalization for granted, by not making an effort to theorize the concept (Sparks, 1998; Thussu, 2000). As for cultural studies, originated from the Frankfurt School in Germany, the field suffers from the lack of concern about the impact media has on people. The problems that exist in media studies and cultural studies are like those that appear between the studies of international communication and intercultural communication. As Servaes (2008) pointed out, cultural studies in Europe and in the United States mainly pays attention to cultural issues instead of media issues.

The study of globalization began in the early 1990s, a time when the trend of globalization significantly increased its impact on human society in terms of scope and scale. Nevertheless, although scholars from different disciplines are involved in the study of globalization (e.g., Giddens, 1990; Pieterse, 2009; Robertson, 1992; Waters, 1995), and most agreed that without media and communication globalization will not emerge as such a great impetus of the transformation of human society, the role of media and communication in the theorization of the concept of globalization remains vague and less specified. Surprisingly, according to Rantanen (2006), the contribution of scholars from the field of media and communication to globalization theories is far less than scholars from other disciplines such as anthropology and sociology.

The separation problem of communication studies, cultural/media studies, and globalization studies in scholarly research has been gradually alleviated in recent years, but more studies in this direction are still needed. It is then the purpose of this paper to integrate

these concepts through the examination of the relationship between new media and intercultural communication. In order to explore how new media influences the process of intercultural communication, the discussion in this paper contains two parts. In the first part, I explicate the nature of new media and its interdependent relationship with globalization. In the second part, I explain the impact of new media on intercultural communication from different perspectives.

New Media and Globalization

As mentioned above, the rapid development of new media has been the main force accelerating the trend of globalization in human society during the last few decades. With its distinctive and unique nature, new media has brought human interaction and society to a highly interconnected and complex level. Through this convergence the mutual enhancement of new media and globalization has led to the transformation of almost all the aspects of human society. New media being considered “new” is not only because of its successful integration in the form of the traditional interpersonal and mass media, but also because of its new functions that enable individuals to equally control messages in interpersonal media, which allows them to control messages in mass media (Crosbie, 2002). New media functionally allows people to interact with multiple persons simultaneously with the ability to individualize messages in the process of interaction.

New media enjoys five distinctive characteristics: digitality, convergency, interactivity, hypertextuality, and virtuality (Chen & Zhang, 2010; Flew, 2005; Lister, Dovery, Giddings, Grant, & Kelly, 2009). First, digitalization is the most prominent feature of new media. New media or digital media dematerializes media text by converting data from analog into digital form, which allows all kind of mathematical operations. New media also makes it possible for a large amount of information to be retrieved, manipulated, and stored in a very limited space.

Second, new media converges the forms and functions of information, media, electronic communication, and electronic computing. The convergence power of new media can be easily demonstrated by the emergence of the Internet in terms of its powerful function embedded in computer information technologies and broadband communication networks. This also leads to the industry convergence displayed by the constant merger of big media companies and the product and service convergence evidenced by the successful connection and combination of media’s material, product, and service in the media industry.

Third, the interactive function of new media, i.e., between users and the system regarding the use of

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information resources, provides users a great freedom in producing and reproducing the content and form of the information during the interaction. In addition, the interactivity of new media makes the interaction among different networks and the retrieving of information through different operational systems, both available and convenient. The freedom in controlling the information endows new media a great power in the process of human communication.

Fourth, the hypertextuality of new media brings forth a global network center in which information can freely move around and spontaneously interconnect. This global network phenomenon has begun to rebuild a new life experience for human beings, which in turn will lead the transformation of economic activities, cultural patterns, interactional styles, and other aspects of human society (Castells, 2000).

Finally, the cyberspace formed by new media allows people to generate virtual experience and reality. The invisible cyberspace not only induces a gap between reality and virtuality, but also effectuates the free alternation of one’s gender, personality, appearance, and occupation. The formation of virtual community that crosses all the boundaries of human society definitely will challenge the way we perceive reality and have traditionally defined identity. (Jones, 1995).

With these distinct features new media pushes the trend of globalization to its highest level in human history. As defined by Steger (2009), globalization “refers to the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and world-space” (p. 15). In other words, globalization is “a social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede and people become increasingly aware that they are receding” (Waters, 1995, p, 3). It involves the expansion, stretching, intensification, and acceleration of social activities in both objective/material and subjective/ human consciousness levels, or different levels of human society, including the entire world, a specific nation, a specific industry or organization, and an individual (Govindarajan & Gupta, 1997).

The powerful impact of globalization, enhanced by the advent of new media, is revealed in its dynamic, pervasive, interconnected, hybridized, and individually powerful attributes (Chen, 2005; Chen & Zhang, 2010). First, globalization is a dialectically dynamic process, which is caused by the pushing and pulling between the two forces of cultural identity and cultural diversity, or between localization and universalization. Second, globalization is universally pervasive. It moves like air penetrating into every aspect of human society and influences the way we live, think, and behave. Third, globalization is holistically interconnected. It builds a huge matrix in which all components are interconnected

with networks. Fourth, globalization represents a culturally hybridized state, which allows cultural transmission via new media to take place at a very rapid rate by permeating and dissolving human boundaries. Finally, globalization increases individual power in the new media society, which pluralizes the world by recognizing the ability and importance of individual components.

Together, the dialectically dynamic, universally pervasive, holistically interconnected, culturally hybridized, and individually powerful characteristics of globalization enhanced and deepened by the stimulus and push of the emergence of new media has led to revolutionary changes in people’s thinking and behaviors, redefined the sense of community, and restructured human society.

The impact of the integration of new media and globalization can be summarized into five precise effects, namely, a shrinking world, the compression of time and space, close interaction in different aspects of society, global connectivity, and accelerated local/global competition/cooperation (Chen & Starosta, 2000). In other words, boundaries of human societies in terms of space, time, scope, structure, geography, function, profession, value, and beliefs are swiftly changing and transforming into a new pattern of similarities and interconnectedness.

Nevertheless, although the interdependent relationship of new media and globalization is evident, the specific connection between the five distinctive characteristics of new media (i.e., digitality, convergency, interactivity, hypertextuality, and virtuality), and the five manifest features of globalization (i.e., dialectically dynamic, universally pervasive, holistically interconnected, culturally hybridized, and individually powerful), remain a valuable research topic for scholars to further pursue. This paper only focuses on the discussion of the relationship between new media and intercultural communication.

The next section first delineates the impact of new media on human communication, especially from the intercultural communication perspective, and discusses the present research on the impact of new media on intercultural communication.

The Impact of New Media on Intercultural

Communication With its distinctive features new media has brought

human society to a highly interconnected and complex level, but at the same time, it challenges the very existence of human communication in the traditional sense. New media not only influences the form and content of information/messages, but it also affects how people understand each other in the process of human communication, especially for those from different cultural or ethnic groups.

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On the one hand, intrinsically, the new culture hatched from new media creates a continuity gap between traditions and innovations within a culture. Before the emergence of new media, according to Bagdasaryan (2011), traditions and innovations in human society co-existed in a dynamically synchronized way, but the speed and impact of the new media resulted in the inability of traditional values to keep pace with the new cultural values produced by new media. This cultural gap has caused difficulty in understanding or communication between generations and among people in the same culture.

New media also extrinsically breeds communication gaps between different cultural and ethnic groups. The fragmented nature of new media has switched traditional cultural grammar, cultural themes, or cultural maps to a new pattern, resulting in the loss of traditional cultural logic. The rearrangement or restructuring of cultural patterns, or worldview, demands that members of a culture realign their communication behaviors within their own community, and to learn a new way of interaction with people from differing cultures. New media fosters a new culture in human society, in which the degree of ambiguity and uncertainty has been reshuffled and has reached its highest point, especially in the process of intercultural communication. How to readjust to this new situation and smoothly achieve the goal of mutual understanding for people from different cultural groups in this chaotic stage of cultural change becomes a great challenge for the practical need of interaction in daily life and research in the scholarly community. It is under this

circumstance that we see more and more scholars are becoming involved in the investigation of the relationship between new media and intercultural communication (Allwood & Schroeder, 2000; Pfister & Soliz, 011; Shuter, 2011).

After examining the extant literature, we found that emerging topical areas in this line of research mainly include three categories: (1) the impact of national/ethnic culture on the development of new media, (2) the impact of new media on cultural/social identity, and (3) the impact of new media (especially social media) on different aspects of intercultural interaction (e.g., intercultural relationship, intercultural dialogue, and intercultural conflict).

National/Ethnic Culture and New Media

As Weick (1983) pointed out, in the international electronic exchange culture plays a significant role in affecting the process and outcome of the interaction. In other words, culture as a communication context may dictate the use of media. Chen (2000) found that three cultural factors, namely thinking patterns, expression styles, and cultural context, are the three prominent cultural factors that influence how people behave in electronic media, and the three factors are the manifestation of cultural values (Chen & Starosta, 2005). Based on the distinction of low-context culture and high-context culture categorized by Hall (1976), Chung and Chen (2007) proposed possible communication differences for members in the two groups in the process of electronic interaction (p. 285) (see Table 1):

Table 1 Differences between Low- and High-Context Cultures in E-communication LCC HCC Meaning display explicit implicit Value orientation individual group Personal relationship transitory permanent Action base procedure personal Logic linear spiral Message learning time short long Verbal interaction direct indirect Nonverbal style individualistic contextual Idea presentation logic feelings Message style detailed simple Credibility source authority communication source

It is assumed that cultural values will influence the

social networking process in new media (Vasslou, Joinson, & Coourvoisier, 2010; Veltri & Elgarah, 2009; Vinuales, 2011). Hall’s (1976) low-context and high- context cultures and Hofstede’s (2001) individualism

and collectivism dimensions of cultural values are two of the most common models used in the study of the relationship between culture and media. For example, Kim, Sohn, and Choi (2010) found that cultural value orientations affect a user’s attitude when using new

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media. Their study demonstrates that although the motives for using social media are similar for students, those in high-context, collectivistic cultures, such as Korean college students, show more emphasis on attaining social support from existing social relationships, while those in low-context, individualistic cultures, such as American college students, tend to show more interest in seeking entertainment rather than social relationships. Moreover, Rosen, Stefanone, and Lackaff (2010) as well found that, compared to high- context, collectivistic cultures in the process of new media interaction, people in low-context, individualistic cultures tend to emphasize individual achievements and self-promotion to extend their social relations network, though the orientation may trade privacy in the network.

New Media and Cultural Identity

The convergence of new media and globalization brings about at least six new experiences for human beings, including new textual experiences, new ways of representing the world, new relationships between users and new media technologies, new conceptions of the biological body’s relationship to technological media, and new patterns of organization and production (Lister, Dovery, Giddings, Grant, & Kelly, 2009). These experiences will inevitably challenge the traditional formation and definition of social or cultural identity. In other words, the use of new media is shaking the root of cultural identity by weakening or strengthening the intensity of the relationship between people and community (Hampton & Wellman, 1999; Singh, 2010). The time and space compression caused by the convergence of new media and globalization creates a universal cyberspace in which new cultural identity is emerging in different virtual communities.

The new cultural identity formed by new media may not change the traditional meaning of cultural identity as a unique product through interaction in a specific group context, which gives members a sense of belongings to the group, but it will directly challenge the traditional attributes of cultural identity, namely, temporality, territoriality, constrastivity, interactivity, and multiplicity (Belay, 1996). More specifically, cultural identity fostered by new media is no longer a product of historical development (i.e., temporality) confined in an avowal process of people in a geographical place (i.e., territoriality). It may still be a distinct collective consciousness based on the members’ sense-making process (i.e., contrastivity). The virtual community is characterized by a higher degree of heterogeneity and a lower level of interconnection (Van Dijk, 1998). In addition, social interaction (i.e., interactivity) as the foundation of developing cultural identity remains unchanged in the age of new media, but the nature of interpersonal and group relationships via social interaction in the virtual community is unlike

those constructed from traditional face-to-face interaction. Finally, it is still unknown if the new cultural identity formed by new media will continue to be a multi-faceted concept or practice (i.e., multiplicity), which can contrast with the six facets of traditional cultural identity indicated by Belay (1996), including sociological identities, occupational identities, geobasic identities, national identities, co-cultural identities, and ethnic identities.

In sum, new media continues to establish different kinds of new communities without the limit of time and space, which makes cultural identity more dynamic, fluid, and relativized, and imposes austere challenges to the autonomy and stability of cultural identity (Tan, 2005; Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2010). The impact of new media on cultural identity has become one of the issues intercultural communication scholars are most concerned about (e.g., Chen & Zhang, 2010; Cheong & Gary, 2011; Chiang, 2010; Halualani, 2008; Huffaker & Calvert, 2006; Kennedy, 2006; Koc, 2006; Wang, Huang, Huang, & Wang, 2009; Wang, Walther, & Hancock, 2009; Weber & Mitchell, 2008; William, Martins, Consalvo, & Ivory, 2009)

New Media and Intercultural Interaction

The impact of new media on different aspects of intercultural interaction is apparent and has attracted more and more studies from intercultural communication scholars. This part discusses the influence of new media on three common aspects of intercultural interaction in the global context: intercultural relationship, intercultural adaptation, and intercultural conflict. Intercultural relationships

New media, especially social media such as Facebook, blogs, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, and the iPhone, have enabled people from every corner of the world to represent themselves in a particular way and stay connected in cyberspace. It is obvious that the flexibility of information presented and shared in the new media will directly affect, either positively or negatively, the development of intercultural relationships in the virtual community through the creation of a network of personal connection (e.g., Boyd & Ellision, 2007; Donath & Boyd, 2004; Ellison, Steinfield, & Lanmpe, 2007; Parks & Floyd, 1996; Walther, 1992).

Moreover, Elola and Oskoz (2009) found that in foreign language and study abroad contexts, the use of blogging not only showed a positive effect on the development of intercultural relationships, but also increased the degree of participants’ intercultural communication competence. In addition to intercultural relationships on a personal level, social media also helps to establish international business relationships

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(Jackson, 2011). Nevertheless, new media may also produce a negative impact on intercultural communication. For example, Qian and Scott (2007) found that revealing too much personal information in blogs, especially negative information about one’s friends, employer, and others, tends to jeopardize or cause problems in establishing constructive human relationships intraculturally and interculturally.

Finally, McEwan and Sobre-Denton (2011) argued that computer-mediated communication can promote and develop virtual cosmopolitanism and virtual third cultures. The authors indicated that through the construction of third culture space, a new, hybrid culture is created, in which interactants from differing cultures are able to gather cultural and social information, build online communities, and form intercultural relationships.

Intercultural adaptation

Because new media enables individuals across the globe to exchange messages for the purpose of understanding people from different cultures, it has become popular for sojourners or immigrants to use new media to communicate with their friends, classmates, and relatives or family members in both their native and host country in their learning process or daily life (e.g., Chen Bennett, & Maton, 2008; Trebbe, 2007; Tsai, 2006; Ye, 2006). As shown in W. Chen’s (2010) study, the longer immigrants reside in the host country, the more they communicate with the host nationals via new media, but the frequency of surfing their original country’s websites is decreasing. W. Chen also found that the use of new media shows a significant impact on the process of immigrants’ intercultural adaptation. In other words, the social interaction conducted through new media by immigrants proves to be a critical element that can determine whether they can successfully adjust to the host country.

In addition, Sawyer and Chen (2011) investigated how international students use social media and how it affects their intercultural adaptation. The authors found that social media provides an environment for international students to connect with people in both their home and host countries, which in turn helps them strengthen personal relationships and fosters a sense of belonging to the host culture. The use of new media obviously helps international students cope with cultural barriers in the process of intercultural adaptation. The study also found that, due to the influence of culture shock, sojourners tend to rely more on social media in the initial stage of arriving in the host country, to keep connected with those people they know in their home country in order to gain a sense of comfort in the new environment. As time moves on, the use of social media was switched to interacting with the host nationals to help them better integrate into the new culture.

Furthermore, Croucher (2011) attempted to propose a theoretical model through the integration of cultivation theory and ethnic group vitality to illustrate the relationship between social networking and cultural adaptation. Croucher successfully generated two propositions: (1) “During cultural adaptation, the use of social networking sites affects immigrants’ interaction with the dominant culture” (p. 261), and (2) “During cultural adaptation, the use of social networking sites will affect immigrants’ in-group communication” (p. 262). According to the author, the propositions provide great potential for future research to investigate the impact of of social media on the process of immigrants’ adaptation in the host culture, which may include

frequency of interaction with dominant culture, their use of dominant and ethnic media, perception of the dominant culture, familiarity with dominant language or cultural norms, identification with dominant or ethnic culture, involvement in the dominant political system, and motivation to acculturate. (p. 262)

Intercultural conflict New media provides people and governments with

a powerful tool to construct their own image, to define and redefine the meanings of messages, to set the media agenda, or to frame the news or messages. However, cultural dissimilarities result in different ways in media representation on the individual or governmental level. Because the underlying order, perspectives and practical limitations of the media in any society are based on their cultural value orientations, the different forms of media representation tend to reflect the asymmetry of intercultural communication and inevitably lead to the problem of intercultural confrontation or conflict in interpersonal, group, and national levels (Chen & Dai, in press; Hotier, 2011). The media coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and Google’s withdrawal from P.R. China are two good examples of the illustration of intercultural conflict in the media context.

According to Ni (2008) and Zhou (2007), Western media has long portrayed P.R. China as an authoritarian, backward, irrational, and mysterious nation. The P.R. China is commonly criticized by Western media for abusing human rights, political corruption, social instability, and environmental pollution. In order to construct a positive national image, the Chinese government carefully and tactically used its state-owned media to set up three agendas for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, namely, green Olympics, humanistic Olympics, and scientific Olympics. While most Western media was less prejudiced and biased in reporting the success of the Beijing Olympic Games and agrees that the games presented the image of a rising great power (Ding, 2011; Gan & Peng, 2008; Shi 2009), media

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agencies such as the New York Times and Washington Post placed much emphasis on the coverage of protests during the Beijing Olympic Games by criticizing the Chinese government’s failing to fulfill its promise to loosen restrictions on free speech during the time of the Olympics. As Murray (2011) argued, Western media coverage of the protest controversy is embedded in the Western beliefs in freedom of expression, human rights, individual equality, and social justice, which are in contrast to Chinese cultural values of harmony, face saving, group interest, and social order. The coverage based on different cultural values between Chinese media and Western media made confrontation unavoidable.

As for the case of Google’s withdrawal from P.R. China, after the analysis of news framing between China Daily and the Wall Street Journal, Kuang (2011) found that the themes that dominated in China Daily were criticism of Google and the US government, Google’s ploy to avoid censoring, and Google’s loss and failure, while the recurring themes in the Wall Street Journal reports were about China’s violation of human rights/government censorship, business- government relations, and international relations. The findings show that news agencies often reflect their nation’s agendas, interests, and values (Bennett, 1990; Entman, 1991), which eventually sparks intercultural conflict or face-off between countries.

Conclusion This paper examines the relationship between new

media and intercultural communication in the global context. It is argued that new media not only provides a space in which people of different cultures can freely express their opinions and establish relationships, but may also challenge the existence of human communication in intracultural and intercultural contexts because of its specific characteristics that are significantly dissimilar to traditional media. With its focus on intercultural interaction, this paper explicates the impact of cultural values on new media, the impact of new media on cultural identity, and the impact of new media on three aspects of intercultural interaction, namely, intercultural relationships, intercultural dialogue, and intercultural conflict. Two implications can be made based on the delineation of this paper.

First, this paper only deals with the directional influence of cultural values on new media, new media on cultural identity, and new media on intercultural interaction. It is plausible that the relationship of new media and other variables discussed in this paper can be mutual. In other words, for future research scholars can examine, for example, the possible impact of new media on the formation of new cultural values, the transformation of or rendering obsolete old cultural values, and the impact of cultural identity on the use of new media. Moreover, in addition to the three

categories examined in this paper, the scope of the relationship between new media and intercultural communication can be expanded to other themes, such as the investigation of co-cultural variations in the use of new media to communication within and across cultures, the impact of new media on intercultural dialogue, and the potential use of new media to resolve intercultural conflicts.

Second and finally, because the impact of new media on human society is still in its initial stages, the possible effect of new media on human communication mentioned in the first part of this paper remains dynamic and still lacks systematic studies from scholars. Hence, the impact of new media on intercultural communication discussed in this paper is largely confined to the old model of media functions. How to unlock this limitation and shift from the context of traditional media to new media remains a great challenge for scholars to observe in this line of research. In other words, future research needs to observe and study the question, “Is intercultural communication possible?” raised by Shan (2010), under the context of new media in global society. Correspondence to: Guo-Ming Chen, Professor Department of Communication Studies University of Rhode Island 10 Lippitt Road, 310 Davis Hall Kingston, RI 02881, USA Email: [email protected] References Allwood, J., & Schroeder, R. (2000). Intercultural

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