Ever bigger and more encompassing corporate mergers suggest emergent synergies between the Internet and media culture, and thus the information and entertainment industries. These interactions of techonogy and capital and producing fecund forms of technocapitalism and a technoculture which promise that the new millennium will be full of novelties, innovation, hype, and instability.

( kellner 2003)

Further reading:

A world of connections

http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15351002

Mass Media and Culture in Network Society

In the contemporary society, the technology has already become a certain of creation power. The mass culture appearance has the direct origin in the mass media appearance.The mass culture is the only culture which lives for the technology, and inspects the mass culture in a greater scope, then we will discover that the appearance of mass culture have the close relationship with the marketization and the globalization, moreover it also has the close relation with the masses.

Generally speaking, in the human world existing nature, the human himself, society these three big factors, the technology may be considered as the fourth big factor. The human survival way transferred to the technical ontology. The technology is regarding the involvement of cultural is the 21st century’s big characteristic, but the most core concerns is related to the mass media.

The modern technology is different from the traditional technology, not only it can meet each kind of needs to people, but it can make each kind of need for the people. not only it can duplicate the reality, but it can hypothesized the reality that more perfect than “the reality”. For Baudrillard the environment becomes characterized by ‘hyperreality’ in which copies and fabrication become reality. Communication is no longer restricted by geographical barriers or time constraints. Commentators have used the terms ‘virtual communities’ or ‘cyberspace’ to describe computer-mediated spaces where remotely dispersed individuals can share an interaction through the use of electronic means, however, the explosion of information and its increasingly rapid circulation through ICTs and the media has resulted in a fundamental weakening of confidence about what we should belive and who we are（Bell, Loader, Pleace, Schuler 2004）. Therefore, Naisbitt said: The concept was that the more technology we introduce into our lives, the more we seek a high touch balance, a human ballast, to balance the material wonders with the spiritual demands of our human nature.

Mass culture is a sort of ‘high touch’ culture, a touch of virtuality. Because the vehicle is the direct manifestation of technology in the daily life and spiritual life .

The main ideas of this study should be based on ‘the medium is the message’ from Mcluhan, he also writes that the message of any medium or technology is change of scale or of pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work or leisure (McLuhan 1964). The television is not found in the images it broadcasts but in the new modes of relation and perception that it imposes, and which change the traditional structures of the family.

The significance of mass media not only in allow the stretching of social relations across time and space, The mass media separates out the information transmission way and material transport way first time. Causes the relationship between the time and the space closer .As Paul Du Gay (Hall 1997) has put it, they also deepen this global interconnectedness by annihilating the distance between people and places,throwing them into intense and perpetual contact with one another in a perpetual present.

In information socirty, the mass media brings the radical change, as the following several characteristics.

1. The change of communicate way

Past dissemination takes place in social groups, however the mass media is not relevant to social group, which is people look face-on directly at media, surely this is more free. The feature of mass media is the disappearing of sense of distance, also a sharp feature of post-modern. The distance was closely related to individual and interpersonal communication. The mass media might be said instantaneous, does not have any distance with the reality.

2. The change of communicate content

The news provides the thing is not which the audiences should know, but the thing which the audiences want to know. So long as some people still buy it, it is the information; so long as sell exits, it is the information. This is because the mass media carries out the market exchange formula. The mass media is a business and business is about selling and selling is about illusion

3. The change of disseminat words

The mass media makes “subjective real”, it only wants to be more advantageous to reality fiction. People often thought that they saw the real world in the mass media, in fact what they saw is only the illusory image. “on the television said”, becomes the judgment standard of subconsciousness to people .

Mass culture

From current technology to mass meida, then to mass culture, they are in one continuous line. Mass culture is a culture of desiring, is a desire which one kind of technical time stimulates. With the advent of mass culture, people no longer to live according to their need, but because treats as the mass culture induction’s desire own desire, demonstrates the desire, the expression desire, the stimulation desire.The media are a proufound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy: They contribute to educating us how to behave and what to think, feel, believe,fear and desire – and what not to.(Hassan 2004)

Mass culture effaced discretionary differences, as many needs of customers as cater to them. Thus to seek for all common grounds consciously in the cultural interest and appreciation of the beauty. As Habermas put it: “ the different functions of the market had to be rigorously distinguished: whether it created an initial access to cultural goods for a public and then, in keeping with the cheaping of cost of the products, economically eased the access for an ever larger public; or whether it adapted the content of the cultural goods its own needs in such a way that it also facilitated access for broad strara psychologically. ”

The network society is at the same time a media society. Information technologies are flattening them all onto a single, digital life.As mediatized culture is able, through increasingly dense interconnectivity, to seep into every nook and cranny of social and cultutal life. It is dissolving the spaces of difference where cultural diversity is produced. In this digital realm, McDonald’s with Motorola; Subway with Manchestester United and so on. (Lash 2002) we now live in an age where social and cultural life has been pervaded by the media and what was once society is just as much media as it is society, and what was once culture is just as much media as culture.

Reference

Bell, D. (2004) Cyber Culture.

London and New York: Routledge

Christofero, T. (2008) ‘High Tech, High Touch.’ Journal of Technology and Our Search for Meaning, Volume 27, Issue 4

Genosko, G (1999) McLuhan and Baudrillard: the masters of implosion.

Routledge Press

Habermas, J (1991) The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society.

MIT Press

Hassan, R (2004) Media, Politics and the Network Society.

UK: Bell, Bain Ltd, Glasgow

Lash, S (2002) Critique of Infoemation

London: Sage Press

 Firstly, if does not have replica technique and modern communications technology, is impossible to have E-media. Next, information Superhighway is the highway which leads to cultural expansion. Digitization enables the culture to be possible to work loose all time amd the spatial limit, contacts a more widespread world and the crowd. Then, the development of information technology not only provided the material and technical foundation for cultural globalization, but also changed the nature of knowledge, causes it to be the postmodern condition.The change of the natural knowledge has caused the knowledge external, commercialized and morals faint of intellectual. The knowledge of information product becomes the important chip of the world authority competition .

 The importance of the globalization of the information economy and the increasingly prevalent role played by a new kind of informational labour. In Lyotard book, he said: …technological transformations can be expected to have a considerable impact on knowledge…it owes its theoretical paradigm to cybernectics…it is common knowledge that the miniaturization and commercialization of machines is already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited. It is reasonable to suppose that the proliferation of information-processing machines is having, and will continue to have, as much of an effect on the circulation of learning as did ad in human circulation (transportation systems) and later, in thr circulation of sounds and visual images (the media). Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in in itself, it loses its “use-value.”

The explosion of information and its increasingly rapid circulation through ICTs and the media has resulted in a fundamental weakening of confidence about what we should believe and who we are. But the culture also permeates other aspects of our lifestylesm, such as the clothes we wear and the body images we wish to project.

 As a new mode of social conduct, the structural transfomation of relationships between knowledge and power is the chief reflection of later modernity status of knowledge activities in cyber space.

The information society is usually characterized by the following features:

1. Information becomes increasingly important as the economic, cultural and political resources upon which the emerging global information economy and information societies are organized, with the majority of occupations based upon information or knowledge work.
2. The dynamic innovation of ICTs is seen to be transforming the potential for processing, storing and transmitting of information in ways previously unimaginable and ICTs are thereby becoming more pervasive in our life.
3. Electronically networked economies and societies fundamentally transform our conceptions of time and space, enabling information flows to transcend temporal and physical boundaries and thereby facilitate processes of globalization and networking enterprise.
4. Information becomes culturally more prevalent through multi-media applications, but also more contested and less meaningful, in a world of competing, contradictory and constantly changing images, signs and messages.

 What the information societies takes to us?

The change of production and economic structure.

On the one hand, information technique advances unceasingly. which is applied in every aspect of production.And the advancement of the economical informationization and the production informationization, the information industries of GNP proportion is more higher. On the other hand,the existing production method will have the tremendous changes, then one batch of network factory will be presented.

 Work and life style changed

The multimedia information networks are joining the whole social – the government, the school, the store, the hospital, the bank, the transportation, the family…Causes the official business, the trade, the shopping, the medical service, the teaching, the cultural entertainment and so on to be carried on the network(or network auxiliary) possibly.

 The change in ways of interpersonal communication and communication media

Along with the information technology and network extremely development，the combination of television, telephone and the data transmission, and three-in-one installment of the computer, the television and the telephone are used universally, they will change the existing interpersonal exchange and the mass media dissemination way enormously. The people can carry on communicating and gaining information on the Internet: To Chat, watch TV, see a movie, read the news

 The change of social structure

The world is shrinking, the society had become wired, to assume a certain of network, At present, a high degree of freedom and open of Internet, it is emergent to have a manager mode in network society, The entire society maintains the information network, it causes the society frailer. All of this will cause to form the new social structure certainly.

However, there are a lot of problems in the information societies, such as information pollution, information overload, information crime, information syndrome and so on are becoming a cause for concern.

There are two interesting videos enclosed,  Let’s see and what can we learned from that.