Cultural Implications of Integrated Media

Abstract

Nicholas Negroponte's design for the MIT Media Lab logo displays the growing intersection of three areas: the broadcast and motion picture industry, the print and publishing industry, and the computer industry [ 1]. This design could also be read as a metaphor for the integration of media from separate sources: voice, sound, text, video and computer graphics-an integration of hardware, software and communications network design called an 'information system' by technologists [2]. An evolving form of telecommunications information system based on the combination of two developing technologies, fiber optic cable, to deliver communications from multiple integrated sources, and hypertext/hypermedia, a software system for information management, has the ability to handle large amounts of data while drawing on contemporary integrated communication sources that include on-demand video services, interpersonal communications, high-speed information and image communication among fax machines, work stations and computers as well as telemetry services (such as home security and utility monitoring systems). It can utilize electronic analogue and digital computers, optical technology (lasers, fiber optics and optical digital computers) and telecommunication networks (cables and satellites). Within this system, electronic and photonic copying devices can transform works originally produced in traditional media into forms readily accessible for retrieval and manipulation by users with access to integrated media systems [3]. Potential effects of this technology are extensive for the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences as well as for applied fields such as education, medicine, business and law. The very nature of communication, its content and many aspects of society itself will be affected as the use of this system becomes pervasive. The form, content and conceptual basis of this new system should be examined from the standpoint of contemporary philosophical, aesthetic and critical theory to reveal truths about the role of embedded models and beliefs in technologies of communication and their effects upon the perceived nature of reality. Embedded models and beliefs define our culture. Cultural transformation results from the amplification or delegitimation of existing models of thought-models defining the nature of reality (metaphysics), the nature of knowledge (epistemology) and the nature of value (axiology). While classical philosophers separate epistemology and axiology, contemporary theorists are concerned with their interdependence. That is, the form and content of