Hartley J. Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts

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programming. Examples of this would include ‘tabloid’ current affairs

programmes, as well as instructional or lifestyle formats such as

cooking, gardening and home improvement shows. Here, the term

comes to represent the means by which television is able to impart

information in an entertaining way.

In critical discourse, the concept is often used to lament the loss of

‘traditional’ news values. Those who criticise infotainment often have

a preference for modernist forms of communication, privileging

reason over emotion, public over private, and information over

entertainment. But the entertainment characteristics that inform

contemporary journalism were to be found in its earliest incarna-

tions. Sex, scandal, disaster and celebrity have been intrinsic to

modern journalism since the Enlightenment (Hartley, 1996), so the

shift to infotainment should not necessarily be considered a recent

event.

Broadcast news on television cannot avoid the need to entertain

and appeal to viewers. Capturing audiences is as much a priority for

factual programming as it is for fictional/entertainment genres, so it is

hardly surprising that over time news has borrowed characteristics

from non-news formats. Narrative, spectacle, personality presenters,

non-diegetic soundtrack and personalised address are all now central to

the broadcasting of news in entertaining ways. The term infotainment

then could be said to recognise the porous nature of television and its

genres rather than a decline in the absolute values associated with

journalism.

At the heart of criticisms levelled at the move to infotainment is the

perceived damage to civil society, where citizens’ rights to rational

(political) discourse have been replaced by an influx of private (trivial)

affairs. To agree with this is to ignore the major movements that have

been able to gain visibility as a result. The environment, and issues

regarding youth, sexuality and ethnicity are all contemporary political

issues that have arisen outside of the traditional public sphere.

Infotainment, with its evocation of style, celebrity, gossip and

informality, provides a new space within which new paradigms of

politics can be discussed, represented and made meaningful.

Infotainment is also necessary in a medium where aberrant

decoding is the norm, because viewers have to be encouraged to

attend to things they do not like or know about when their

commitment to watching anything at all may not be high. In this

context, infotainment may not be dumbing down people who

would otherwise be reading The Financial Times,buttaking

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information to places it would not otherwise reach, and thus may be

seen as both educational and tactful.

Further reading: Drahos (1999)

INTERACTIVITY

Interactivity signifies the development of the relationship between

person and computer, and with others via the computer. Our ability to

have a two-way communicative process with technology means that

we are not ‘destined to become a race of baby-sitters for computers’

(Bagrit, 1965: 1). Instead we are ‘navigators’, ‘end users’, ‘surfers’, in

control of where the technology takes us. We can be constructive

through our choices, and our own invention.

Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1964 that ‘automation is not an

extension of the mechanical principles of fragmentation and separation

of operations. It is rather the invasion of the mechanical world by the

instantaneous character of electricity’ (ibid.:349). The ‘instant

inclusive embrace’ of automated technology, meant that the consumer

also became the producer, ‘fusing’ information and learning. The

progression from the mechanical to the automated has brought with it

new possibilities for participation, our ability to make choices:

technology becomes a means to empowerment. In McLuhan’s and

Bagrit’s early accounts, interactivity is an antidote to the factories of

the industrial revolution in which people’s work had to be adapted to

accommodate machines. This imagery and language have reappeared

in accounts of digital technology. By being able to direct,

communicate and create through new interactive technologies, we

are becoming ‘rehumanised’ (Pearce, 1997).

The excitement surrounding the emancipatory potential of

interactive media has been curbed by more cautious theorists who

remind us that the interactive uses of new technologies are not driven

by democratic ideals on the whole, but by commercial imperatives,

and that although these can coincide, they do not have to. As the

development of the technology has been left largely to the market,

citizen feedback is likely to entail online shopping, interactive game

shows and discussion resembling talk-back radio (Calabrese and

Borchert, 1996; Schultz, 1994).

See also: Cyberdemocracy, Cybernetics, Cyborg

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INTERNATIONALISATION

Activities that occur between nation-states are international. Inter-

nationalisation suggests an increasing occurrence of such activities, but

unlike globalisation, it does not imply that the nation-states are

losing their control or their influence over flows of information and

financial capital. Rather, the existence and autonomy of nation-states

seem assured by the fact that international processes are only made

possible by the complicity and consent of national governments.

Paul Hirst disputes that globalisation is taking place. For him,

globalisation assumes that economic adjustments ‘are not thought to

be the subject of policy by public bodies or authorities, but are a

consequence of ‘‘unorganised’’ or ‘‘spontaneous’’ market forces’

(Hirst, 1996: 2). However, economic adjustments do not occur

automatically but as the result of government policy, domestic

expenditure and changes in political-economic power. ‘The world-

wide international economy has been determined in its structure and

the distribution of power within it by the major nation states’ (Hirst,

1996: 3).

Paul Krugman, in his book Pop Internationalism, also warns against

overstating the advent of globalisation by pointing to historical

international relations. Prior to World War I, Britain’s overseas

investments exceeded its domestic stock capital, ‘a record no major

country has ever come closer to matching since’ (1977: 207).

Krugman also points to the Statue of Liberty as an important reminder

that migration was once welcomed and encouraged by nation-states

that are now implementing oppressive policies in order to close their

borders to refugees.

For David Held, Hirst’s Globalisation in Question (1996) offered

useful and important dismantling of the rhetoric of globalisation and

its deployment in making the processes of neo-liberalism seem

inevitable and indisputable. However, he asserts that the problems

associated with globalisation, such as environmental and economic

interdependency, cannot be solved at the level of the nation-states.

Asserting that little has changed in international political structures

does not offer new ways forward (Held, 2002). It also ignores the

popular uptake of international and global traffic, which national

governments certainly seem minded to manage as best they can, but

which they clearly do not control.

See also: Anti-globalisation, Globalisation, New economy

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INTERNET

In 1957 the USSR launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into

Earth’s orbit, signifying the starting point in the use of technological

progress as a means to Cold War supremacy. A year later, in response to

Sputnik, US President Eisenhower established the National Aero-

nautics Space Administration (NASA) as well as the Defense

Department’s Advanced Projects Research Agency (DAPRA, later

to become APRA).

It was DAPRA which in 1969 developed a nuclear war contingency

plan in the form of a computer network designed to enable

information to exist outside of a vulnerable, central location. ‘Packet

switching’ technology, whereby messages are broken into ‘packets’ and

supplemented by header information on the source and destination,

meant that communication lines did not need to be dedicated to

passing the information as was the case with circuit switching

networks. DAPRA’s decentralised communications network – the

early Net, named APRANET – was developed within the

exclusionary and highly classified confines of the US military with

the assistance of a number of civilian scientific personnel.

The involvement of these researchers meant that the network

quickly captured the attention of the wider computer science

community who contributed a new culture of research-based

information sharing, openness and peer review. The Request For

Comments (RFC) system was established as early as 1969 (originally

by post), as a series of freely available memos intended to provide a

feedback loop for suggestions and research ideas that would assist the

evolution of the network. This process of ‘open access’ to protocol

specifications (the agreed-upon formats for distributing data) and

collaboration in research for the development of the Internet’s own

design became an integral component in the theoretical characterisa-

tion of the Internet as a forum for democratic information distribution

and innovation.

The system progressed rapidly. In 1969 four hosts were connected

to the APRANET, and in 1970 the first host-to-host protocol was

invented which allowed for the development of applications.

International connection was established in 1973 with University

College London and the first all-inclusive e-mail program was

developed in 1975.

A new culture began to appear when, on 12 April of that year,

Kevin MacKenzie e-mailed the MsgGroup (the first APRANET

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mailing list) suggesting that symbols be used to indicate the intended

emotion of text messages – for example, :-) for indicating a smile.

Although he was ‘flamed’ at the time, emoticons (or ‘smilies’) are now

used widely to clarify the mood and intention of e-mail correspond-

ence using the confines of the keyboard.

By the mid-1970s a number of state-funded computer networks

had begun to appear. As these were intended for use by other research

disciplines there was little need for the networks to be compatible. It

was not until 1985 that the National Science Foundation network,

NSFNET, made a commitment to the creation of an infrastructure to

serve the entire academic community that the Internet began to take

the form in which it exists today – a global and relatively seamless

entity. Part of this process was the NSF’s decision to make the

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) manda-

tory.

The early history of the Internet is characterised by state funding,

military interest and scientific research and, it has been argued, was

constructed by a predominantly male workforce out of a particular

ethos reflected in its architecture (Spender, 1995). A significant role

was also played by individuals, such as Jon Postel, who established a

team, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to take

responsibility for the assignment of Internet protocol parameters and,

later, domain names. This was then transformed into the Internet

Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) with a board

elected by Internet users worldwide. The voluntarist culture of the

Internet’s origins, often associated with community media ideals of

access, diversity and democratic communication, was thus a construct

of self-appointed, if publicly minded, individuals who played

significant roles in the design of the architecture of the Net.

The Internet changed dramatically during the decade from the

early 1980s to the early 1990s. Between 1981 and 1989, the number of

computers linked to the Internet rose from 300 to 90,000. Growth was

spurred on partly by consumer adoption of personal computers and

also through cooperation and collaboration between university and

private research bodies in the development of standardised commands

and software development.

One such collaboration arose out of Bell Laboratories (run by the

US telecommunications company AT&T), who explored the

networking potential of Unix protocol. Students at Duke University

in North Carolina subsequently developed a modified version of the

Unix Protocol that enabled computers to network over a telephone

line, leading to the creation of the USENET and bulletin board

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services (BBS). Bell continued to provide financial assistance to the

USENET project, which expanded the user base by providing access

to other communities and eventually to profit-making enterprises.

When NSFNET, which linked five university-based super-computing

centres, became the primary Internet ‘backbone’ (or primary national

infrastructure), it developed an acceptable use policy that prohibited

use of the backbone for activities not in support of research or

education. The intended, and successful, outcome was the encour-

agement of commercial involvement at the local and regional level,

away from the national hub, and the development of privately funded

long-haul networks. When the APRANET was decommissioned in

1995, TCP/IP had marginalised most other network protocols and

was on the way to becoming ‘THE bearer service for the Global

Information Infrastructure’ (Leiner et al., 2000).

In 1989 the Internet was transformed by a development by Tim

Berners Lee and others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics

(CERN). Their new protocol was based on hypertext, which allowed

for the embedding of links in text to other text and brought previously

separate systems together. With this innovation came the World Wide

Web in 1991.

This was followed closely by Marc Andreessen’s Mosaic browser in

1992, which dispensed with the need for complex text interfaces and,

along with innovations to increase bandwidth, opened the Net to new

graphic possibilities. Increasing data traffic resulting in the need for

upgrades was beginning to appear unsustainable by policy-makers and

the NFSNET backbone was fully privatised in the mid-1990s. The

telecommunications industry too began to experience massive

deregulation and privatisation at this time. The line that distinguished

the Internet as a publicly owned resource from a market-driven

communication sphere was becoming increasingly blurred.

With the growth of commercial participation in the Internet, issues

of competition and access have become central to concerns over the

future of the Internet. An exhaustive lawsuit ensued when Microsoft’s

popular Windows ‘98 operating system was released with Microsoft’s

own browser integrated into the desktop, an action that was found in

2000 to contravene the US’s Sherman Antitrust Act in attempting to

monopolise the web browser market. The Microsoft antitrust case was

an indication that the cooperative, open standards ethos that was

integral to the development of the Internet had begun to change

(Goggin, 2000).

Even less aggressive commercial strategies, such as coding,

encryption and architecture development for the protection of

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privacy, certification and security, influence the availability of

information on the web. ‘Portals’ – the points at which you begin

to navigate yourself through the web (offering features such as search

engines, databases, e-mail and news) have techniques to encourage, if

not direct, users to where they want to go. AOL’s walled garden

strategy successfully directs their customers to remain within the AOL

confines for 85 per cent of their Internet usage.

However, as the history of the Internet indicates, commercial

involvement can stimulate innovation, access and diversity. Leiner et al.

(2000) outline in their account of the evolution of the Internet how

commercial vendors worked with researchers to develop interoperable

standards. Further, BNN, AT&T and IBM – all private companies –

were involved in the early phases in protocol and infrastructure

innovation and construction. And although communication and

innovation have been administered by decentralised techniques,

hierarchies have always existed in terms of who has access to the

knowledge, equipment – and hence the forums – of the Internet. The

Internet has existed as a result of a fusion of the public and private

sectors, volunteers and workers, regulation and dissent.

By 2020, it is estimated that Chinese will be the most common

language on the Internet.

See also: Cyberdemocracy, Digital/analogue distribution, Digital

divide