Jerry Yang, co-founder and 'Chief Yahoo!' draws out the salient points about new media I want to lead from in this vignette about Yahoo!’s development of the collaborative digital archive as a memory practice par excellence: “In just a few short weeks, thousands of people around the world have uploaded memories and ideas they want to preserve, creating an important anthropological collection that documents this moment in time.” (Webpronews 2006). Unsurprisingly, I think there is an important trend-setting agenda that this hugely successful new media mogul is leading. Specifically, it is a media movement which transcends popular culture and academic practices. And it is directly relevant, perhaps now more than ever, for archaeology. This is the utilization and diffusion of new media that is rapidly reconfiguring the old media infrastructure of ‘Web 1.0’ with what has been loosely described as ‘Web 2.0.’

Figure 5.7

To be sure, this has become a buzzword. Indeed, technological turnover happens rapidly. And the public recognition of Web 2.0 may already portend the advent of 'Web 3.0' 2. But what is key is that it entails a ‘platform-shift’ which has valences with and facilitates the paradigm shift occurring in archaeology at world heritage sites such as Teotihuacan. What these shifts entail in both senses is the democratization of participation. Just as archaeology is confronting an 'external mandate' to integrate public involvement in archaeological practice from research design, to resource interpretation, evaluation and representation 3, so too Web 2.0 is hard-wired by new media to operate via non-hierarchical networks of individuals and technologies collaboratively determining both form and content of what’s on-line.

Figure 5.8

Two quick examples should help clarify what this involves. Compare an encyclopedia, either an analog Britannica or Britannica on-line, to Wikipedia. The first selects entries from experts, edits and publishes the results. Form and content are set. This in distinction to wikipedia that relies upon radical trust in allowing anyone with internet access to post new entries and edit existing entries. The content organically grows; even the form of the ‘skin’ of information in wikipedia may be modified. The first offers a product, the second a service. Additionally, allowing for the costs of being online, the first costs; the second is free. This leads to the second example of the distinction. Software products or packages (such as Microsoft or Adobe) offer entire informational frameworks (literally what information may hang together) to operate within – and at a cost. The parameters are set for how users may engage with information – indeed, monopolizing how users may engage with information set the stage for the infamous battling software ‘actors’ and their lawsuits of the 1990’s. As opposed to these market share products, ‘open source software’ involves individuals generating freely distributed software services catering to specific needs. For the ‘open source initiative’ manifesto, open source software should allow (amongst other stipulations) modification and free re-distribution, must not restrict who software is distributed to or how it is applied (eg. business applications versus genetic research applications), must not restrict use of other software or be specific to particular software interfaces, and licensing agreements must extend to all redistributions (OSSI 2006). So to bring it back to Yahoo!, Yahoo! offers services not a software product – principally it offers searching and server hosting services. And the company’s time capsule exemplifies the ethos of this Web 2.0 digital democracy. The capsule was participatory media in a reinforcing sense: the media used allowed for rapid, inclusive and distributed participation – size constraints and shipping costs would not have allowed for the physical accumulation of equivalent analogue information; and this widespread participation co-created a media rich manifestation of ‘the human condition’ – again not possible, even for the intrepid Carl Sagan, to assemble in analogue. In its particular form as digital heritage, the Yahoo! time capsule manifests much more of the experiential human condition for future generations to un-forget the past – and hopefully turn a sympathetic eye(s)? and/or ear(s)? of Sagan’s extraterrestrials.

This is not simply a quirky juxtaposition of academic and technological trends either. As postprocessual and critically reflexive archaeologists convincingly contextualized the practice of the discipline within a larger cultural sensibility, the how, what and why of archaeology cannot be insulated from informing socio-economic, political and ideological values and structures (Leone et al. 1987, Shanks and Tilley 1992, Trigger 1984). A few of these contextualizing arguments paid reference to technology as a component of these rubrics (such as the Fordist production-line, deeply capitalist values of efficiency and control resonant in the discipline's uptake of positivist epistemology, Shanks and Tilley 1992:49,62). What I want to suggest is that technology, specifically high-tech, increasingly constitutes such a pervasive and powerful influence on society - a transcoding, in Manovich's (2001) language, of computer culture onto all other facets of life - not to mention on how scholarship itself operates, that it ought to receive undivided attention. New Media matters.

New media studies has begun to chart such ramifications of emerging technology for cultural activity. As may be expected for a new, transdisciplinary field - an arena of inquiry crossing academic, private, artistic and popular activities - what constitutes new media is far from agreed upon. New media is not simply synonymous with digital media. Most new media theorists (Bolter and Grusin 1999, Chun and Keenan 2006, Fogg 2003, Manovich 2001, Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 2003) in fact highlight the historical continuity of representational media from Alberti's Renaissance perspectival drawing to Daguerre's daguerrotypes of the 1830's, the Lumierre brothers's Cinématographie in the 1890's to the emergence of computing with IBM and Alan Turing's calculating machines of the nineteen teens and 1930's. But what these theorists emphasize with "new" or emerging media coined in the 1960's is a combination of computerization and connectivity (Chun and Keenan 2006:1, Manovich 2001:27-48). "Digital" may be thought of as a short hand or operational descriptor for how new media works. As already mentioned, digital information is various media - image, sound, text - rendered into mathematical code which can be easily manipulated by computers and quickly transmitted from computer to computer via the connectivity of the internet. In practical consequence, this means that media is now mutable and combinable. Dissimilar to previous photography, cinema or music, the media machine of the computer can quickly alter and/or combine - to reversion - simply by applying algorithms to the code. This allows a great deal of customization and re-tooling for disparate and individualized goals. Additionally, unlike old media, broken down into code new media may be easily and quickly transmitted and shared across the cyber highway of the internet - or the outer-reaches of interplanetary space in Yahoo!'s laser.

Together, these qualities of computerization and connectivity allow for the phenomenon of the interconnected-information society we live, play and work in. We are media immersed. New media 'computer culture' transcodes into everyday personal, social and professional existence. More than ever before, we are multitaskers because of new media functionality: we send emails, post comments on a blog or e-text, google information or view google maps and write an article in Word all the while switching application windows on our computer. Yet much like critical archaeologists dis-embedding our context of archaeological production for us to examine in the light of day, much that is new for working with new media is taken for granted. Considered through a more conventional political economy lens, the media-machine of computers inter-connected via Web 2.0 platforms moves us, whether as academics doing scholar.google searches, or children doing "cut and paste" of web material for a classroom project, beyond being 'producers' or 'consumers'. The new logic of the media economy has us doing consumption-production (near) simultaneously through the interface of the web. So we use the information service of Wikipedia; but we inevitably troll a bit due to the hyperlinking until we find an entry we might even contribute to. Users comes to define this mixed role for engaging with new media.

According to new media guru Howard Rheingold, the 'hardware' of increasing global connectivity combined with the 'software' enabling of individualized control over content and form heralds a new "social revolution" of radical participation (Rheingold 2002). It is what allowed Yahoo! to host and laser its global digital heritage. Unlike economic or political revolutions, this 'soft revolution' is information-driven. Users increasingly participate in and control the global internet archive of information. More and more embedded in how we routinely operate to access information, socialize, or synaesthetically experience through video and sound, the internet as medium may finally be actualized as McCluhan's (1964) 'extension of man'. Thought of as a social, perceptual and cognitive prosthesis, some media theorists such as Pierre Levy (1997) see, through the user-content focus of new media and Web 2.0, the future emergence of a universal, "collective intelligence" of the neural-net. Filling out a Habermasian ideal speech situation with technologically-grafted 'speech', Levy's idealism of real-time, universal democracy echoes much of the Californian tech-utopianism. Whether new media will ultimately matter that much is disputable. Perhaps Yahoo!'s new media time capsule will be tragically 'unreadable' as a bit of antiquated 'old media' when it is finally re-opened. Yet the ramifications of new media, of a 'read and write' culture, for society at large cannot be doubted. For academics in general, and archaeologists in particular, dealing with a public demanding more 'user permissions', what will be the face of the new (v.2.0) interface?

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