‘When we change the ways we communicate we change the society we live in’ has become something of a refrain in discussions of the impact of mediated communication in the past five years, and more particularly with the growing ubiquity of the internet. It is the popularising expression of a more sober and nuanced hypothesis: that the human mind interacts with its social and natural environment through communication, and so communication processes decisively mediate the ways in which societal relationships are constructed in every domain of social practice.

The historical argument in support runs as follows (in a necessarily simplified form): there have been four periods in human history where fundamental transformations in the media have merited the term ‘revolution’. The first, the invention of the printing press, turned Europe upside down and lead to (amongst other things) the reformation, the establishment of some vernacular languages as standard languages (which in turn was a pre-requisite for the emergence of nationalism) and the rise of mass literacy. The second, the invention of the telegraph and later the telephone, was an innovation in two-way media which arguably facilitated the spread of empire through its ability to increase the power of the rulers over the ruled, integrated and centralised economies and led to the modern news business through the use of ‘wire’ agencies. Interestingly, it wasn’t until the development of satellite technologies in the 1960s that the telephone displaced the telegraph as a two-way communication medium of choice. Recorded media other than text had to await Marconi’s successful attempt to transmit radio signals across the Atlantic in 1901 which subsequently evolved into the most ubiquitous mass medium ever known, the radio. The term ‘broadcasting’ entered the media lexicon in the 1920s and, together with the press, became the principle means by which the state communicated with a mass of citizens. The fourth transformation which completed the media landscape that I grew up with, was the transmission of radio waves as images through the air. The birth of the television in the late 1920s led towards the two models of media ownership which dominated the twentieth century: the public service model in the UK and the marketplace model of the US.

These transformations beginning five hundred and fifty years ago led to what Clay Shirky refers to as an affordance asymmetry. In other words: those media which are good at creating conversation are not good at creating groups whilst those media that are good at creating groups, are not good at creating conversations. This is one of the reasons why the area of communication studies was so often broken into ‘interpersonal communication’, ‘group’, and ‘mass communication’. If you want to have a conversation you have to have it with another person. If you want to address a group you create a message and then send (broadcast) it to the group over the air or in the press. All of the ways that humans appropriated communication media in the twentieth century in order to self-organise collective action on their own behalf were shaped by these conditions. And then … the internet. The fifth radical transformation in mediated communication, which began only twenty years ago, has introduced a fundamental innovation in the affordances of the media through which we self-organise. The technical architecture of the internet supports interpersonal, group, and mass communication at the same time. Manuel Castells has a name for it: ‘mass self-communication’. And we have just begun the process of trying to understand it.

That process involves understanding the three major areas of change ushered in by the internet. Although intimately connected, all call for detailed study. The first is that communication technologies now facilitate many-to-many relationships in horizontal local/global networks. This goes far beyond the ‘cc’ capacity of email and the transformations it is beginning to create have yet to be fully realised. The second is that because everything (that can) is in the process of migrating to the network, every medium sits next to every other medium, facilitating (and sometimes forcing) a process of multi-modal convergence. There is little sense in suggesting that we watch the internet in the same way we watch the television. Increasingly we live ‘with’ the internet as an over-arching fabric where all forms of communcation are articulated into a composite, interactive, digital hypertext with enormous consequences for social organisation and cultural change. In a converged media landscape media become less an experience and more a site for the coordination of group-based communication. We are communicating more and to more people than in any other time in human history. Such a landscape leads to the third major change: traditional categories such as ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’ have become blurred. Bruns calls the new category ‘produsage’; Gilmore talks of ‘the former audience’. The same equipment that allows me to consume media now also allows me to produce media. This is a radical change that is creating tension (opportunity v fear) in social, political and cultural arenas.

So, in just twenty years a media landscape has developed which is utterly different to the one I grew up with in the twentieth century. This twenty-first media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap. It’s leading to changes in social, political and economic organisation. It’s forging new and changing older relationships between people. It’s undermining traditional power structures and creating opportunities to create new, more egalitarian values. Social movements and agents of political change have always re-programmed communication networks to bring new values, new ideas and change to people. The technologies of communication now available afford levels of autonomy never before experienced by such movements. ‘The Digital Commons’, ‘User-Generated Content’ and ‘Crowdsourcing’ are just some initial glimpses at the ways networked communication can enhance the opportunities for social change. What these technologies of communication don’t do however, is define the content and purpose of such change. Life is more complex than that, more interesting and more challenging to understand.