Preconceptions
If I learned one thing in our class this semester, it is that academic studies of communication technologies depend mostly, if not wholly, on the author's initial feelings about the development and the use of that technology in society. Now, prior judgments are obviously motivating forces for almost any form of research, but our books in this course have shown such a wide range of conclusions that the studies all seem almost like opinion articles. This is the great thing about the field of communications, I guess... Let's find out what I mean.
Since we had to pick only one book out of all in this blog entry (in addition to Benkler), I'll just run quickly through the rest of the books and then spend a bit more time on a comparison between Benkler and Howard.
Raymond Williams: Reflects a Birmingham School-type insecurity about the arrival of a new form of technology which will surely have a negative effect on society -- but his analysis is rather blurred and unclear.
Susan Douglas: Probably my favorite book of the semester, mostly because it it a wholly historical piece that is very well researched. Points out the faults of industry-friendly government regulation, yet still comments on the social uses of the technology. I have little qualms here...
Claude Fischer: The only book in this course that spends an extended period of time on number crunching and statistical analysis instead of pure theory. Fischer tries to focus on the user -- on how the average person used telephony technology. Moral of the story: people use communication technologies in unpredictable ways that lead to no fixed conclusions at all. Yikes.
Miller and Slater: Ethnographic analysis of Internet use in Trinidad, demonstrating most of the ways ethnography should not be used. Little can be learned when the authors use a research method whose results can be steered.... and then proceed to steer them.
Harold Innis: Not to disparage Innis' knowledge and expertise in economics and history, but even if he has a strong interest in ancient cultures, it is convenient to use such a distant time period in academic arguments. No one can refute any of his grandiose claims even if they have no factual evidence. Thus he is immediately considered the sole person with all the answers and the book instantly becomes a masterpiece.
Price: His book touches on a highly contested topic, and it is really up to the researches whether s/he sides with globalization and transnational media flows or state sovereignty.
This quick and mindless critique of the books we've read isn't meant to ridicule them. I am simply pointing out the fact that approaches to the analysis of communication technologies range all over, are largely motivated by the author's initial judgments, and do not contain very much statistical, quantitative analysis. The only book that does so fails miserably in reaching a solid conclusion.
What this says about communication technologies is that they are infinitely complicated both in their development and their use within society. We all have initial reservations and opinions about the way particular media forms are used, but these feelings range all over and are determined by our own lifestyles as well as the practices of the people that surround us, in real life and in the media. Attempts to prove one reservation against another will most likely fail, as Fischer's account demonstrates.
With that, let's touch a bit on Benkler and Howard:
Benkler's Wealth of Networks provides an optimistic picture about the Internet as a new democratic medium. Benkler believes the Internet differs from older communication technologies in a revolutionary way, because it allows users to interact in a kind of barter system where information is exchanged freely within the online network without being tied to monetary cost. In a sense, he believes the arrival of the Internet is the arrival of a largely democratic form of communication. He engages in a lot of theoretical analysis but also examines some situations in which such non-market transactions occur. However, his work also does not contain much factual evidence, and he is not successful in really proving this point. Much of his analysis, rather than getting the views of Internet audiences and content providers, is more based on his own use of the Internet and his knowledge of various websites and online services.
Howard, on the other hand, goes to great lengths to provide an ethnographic analysis of a certain kind of online content provider, and his conclusions are quite distinct from those of Benkler. Through spending an extended period of time studying datamining organizations from within, he points out that the Internet can be used for quite restrictive and undemocratic purposes. Howard, however, does not engage in much big-picture analysis of the Benkler kind. Instead, he overemphasizes these negative aspects of the Internet.
Once again, the divergent conclusions depend on divergent research methods, which in turn are influenced by the author's initial opinion about the communication technology at hand.