NEW MULTIMEDIA DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT

New Multimedia Digital Environment



New Multimedia Digital Environment

Technological And Material Factors Shaping The Digital Economy

Since the late 1980s it has become accepted wisdom that we are living in a 'digital environment', one that embodies a 'law of code' (a law founded on US libertarian values regarding free speech and private enterprise) that will bring nations - and individuals - together in a global market featuring ubiquitous access to information via electronic media. That environment is supposedly both unprecedented and inevitable, although delayed in parts of the world such as Kazakhstan or Zimbabwe that have not inhaled the zeitgeist. This guide, and by extension the caslon.com.au site, question some of the digital pieties. (Alan R. Earls, 2004)

The following pages suggest that it is more useful to speak of a range of digital environments, in which culture is often as important as the availability of infrastructure or hegemonies regarding markets, the state, individual autonomy and community. Few of the digital environments are unprecedented: many of the laments about digital woes (or merely the discontents of modernity) look distinctly traditional and rhetoric about the evils (or wonders) of the net could have come from writing about television, the telegraph or the printing press. Eschatological visions of the Telecosm, the Noosphere or what Nicholas Negroponte acclaimed as 'Being Digital' (sort of 'cool' without taxes or inconveniences such as governments and the distressingly un-hip lower classes) are also misplaced. Like any description of an environment it is necessarily patchy. We have highlighted online and offline writing about work, gender, the arts, morals, communities and the state.

In the digital environment, as (Alan R. Earls, 2004) has recently emphasized, computer code is operationalizing and codifying ideas and principles that, historically, have been fuzzy or subjective, or that have been based on situational legal or social constructs. Authenticity and integrity are two of the key arenas where computational technology connects with philosophy and social constructs. One goal of this paper is to help distinguish between what can be done in code and what must be left for human and social judgment in areas related to authenticity and integrity. (Alan R. Earls, 2004)

Gustavus Simmons wrote a paper in the 1980s with the memorable title "Secure Communications in the Presence of Pervasive Deceit." The contents of the paper are not relevant here, but the phrase "pervasive deceit" has stuck in my mind because I believe it perfectly captures the concerns and fears that many people are voicing about information on the Internet. There seems to be a sense that digital information needs to be held to a higher standard for authenticity and integrity than has printed information. In other words, many people feel that in an environment characterized by pervasive deceit, it will be necessary to provide verifiable proof for claims related to authorship and integrity that would usually be taken at face value in the physical world. For example, although forgeries are always a concern in the art world, one seldom hears concerns about (apparently) mass-produced physical ...