Some people still make the mistake of considering the web as a new medium. The first optical telegraph of the 18th century #madeinFrance would follow in the footsteps of a technological continuum crossing on its way rotary press, radio waves, cathode ray tube, satellite signal and TCP/IP protocols to finish in its most perfect form with the MacBook Air Retina 13.
But this linear and techno-centric vision seems to me to be too narrow to comprehend in its entirety what is at stake in the media in our digital 21st century. First of all, we should recall all that technological progress has contingency in that it is first thought by, and for mankind. It also reiterates that it is part of political and moral environments that shape uses that its Popes would like to impose alone and in an unambiguous way. In fact, thinking about technology cannot avoid the social contexts in which it is embedded. Because where living things are interspersed, the effect is not always proportional to the cause; it sometimes suffices a simple crescendo of technique for the physiognomy of society as a whole to be drastically altered. This is where we are today.
It seems to me that the invention of the Internet is less an evolution than a powerful media-technological revolution for the social body we form. Its appearance introduces a rupture in the correlation between successive media transformations and in their wake, an increased ability of citizens to accurately represent the surrounding world. From public criers to print newspapers, from radio reporting to television documentaries, what does digital really bring? Would it only allow to switch between these different formats? Wouldn't it be just a total media in which its elders would come together with memory, agility and ubiquity? Of course not, of course not. Its possibilities are of a different order. Where the traditional media gave us to see, with more or less skill, stories of reality, the web allows us to act, with more or less power, on the same reality.
The social animal in us wakes up. It now has a powerful language - the computer code - to help build a virtual, but not less real, territory. In this regard, let us thank the complexity of the French language that distinguishes, when English confuses these two notions of language and language. Because the universality of the computer code does indeed sign the introduction of a new language, not a new language. Historically projected, the changeover that it introduces is of millennium order: it has vocation to replace the human language in its phatic and symbolic function within a society henceforth connected.
So no, the Internet - as these same gullible spirits often call it - is not just a super-media. The media transformations that it inculcates are only a visible aspect of the earthquake that violently shakes the organization of the world. His ability to penetrate human societies to profoundly change the nature of their exchanges and representations has nothing to do with his predecessors. The media were only trying to show us what we can create and disseminate on our own. They assigned us a role of spectator-consumer when the web endows us with a role of actor-contractor. And as each of us is nowadays in a position to become our own media, the medium is everywhere, i. e. nowhere. He is dead, embedded in our lives. Leaving only marks to interact with. All in all, the power of the major media of the 20th century depended largely on their ability to accumulate financial capital. In the 21st century, it is first and foremost our ability to build social capital that will determine our media coverage.