(107). More generally, the personal computer can be seen as a “way to open levels of symbolic transformation . . . to people hitherto shut out from this world” (108).
A full understanding of access needs to include attention to the full cycle of rhetorical circulation, including production, reproduction, and distribution. In the case of mass media, each stage of the process is associated with a unique set of barriers. Successful TV and film production, for instance, has historically required expensive cameras, lights, microphones, editing equipment and so on; these technologies, in turn, required sound technicians, lighting technicians, camera operators, editors, and other specialists. Likewise, producing sophisticated print artifacts (e.g., magazines, brochures, books) required access to cameras, printing presses, inks, papers, die cutters, and more; a sophisticated print artifact might require the contributions of copywriters, graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, typesetters, and press operators.
Shifting attention to the way mass media compositions were reproduced and distributed reveals yet another set of variables that limit access. Once a film (for instance) was created, it was expensive and difficult to get it to audiences. Professional production companies had elaborate, resource-intensive systems for copying reels of film and distributing them to theaters, which themselves were increasingly owned by regional and national chains, and which contained expensive, highly specialized equipment (e.g., projectors, screens, sound systems).
The question of access is further complicated by problems related to the specific nature of certain media technologies themselves. Many mass media platforms were designed to facilitate few-to-many rather than many-to-many communication. As Bertolt Brecht observed eighty years ago:
The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. (2)
Echoing Brecht, Hans Magnus Enzensberger contends that “[i]n its present form, equipment like television or film does not serve communication but prevents it. It allows no reciprocal action between transmitter and receiver” (97).
As many have noted, however, emergent technologies are fundamentally altering the dynamics of access by providing nonspecialists the resources necessary to produce, reproduce, and distribute rhetorically effective multimodal compositions (see, for instance, Anderson; Gershenfeld; Lanham, Electronic; Poster; Shirky). The personal computer allows lay actors to manipulate visual and aural semiotic elements in ways historically reserved for highly-trained specialists. Communicators who hope to make use of photographs, for instance, can turn to a host of free or inexpensive applications that provide access to a palette of options previously reserved for darkroom specialists: enlarging, cropping, adjusting color and contrast, and more. Likewise, many of the editing operations crucial to rhetorically effective uses of film—the ability to sequence footage, to cut between shots, to add music and voiceovers—are now easy to perform using a standard computer and free or inexpensive software. In unprecedented numbers, nonspecialists have access to applications that allow us to draw, paint, compose music, create animations, and even design and manufacture three-dimensional objects.
Problems related to reproduction and distribution are also increasingly addressed by the Internet and other digital technologies. Communicators can distribute a wide range of multimodal content via the Internet for a tiny fraction of what it would have cost in the past. Colors, images, and other semiotic elements do not add to the cost of reproducing digital compositions. A standard personal computer, configured as a Web server, can distribute millions of copies of a webpage without incurring additional cost. In contrast to TV, film, or radio, content on the Internet can be made available twenty-four hours a day without adding significant costs and without displacing other content. Even print documents are cheaper to produce, reproduce, and distribute than they were only a few years ago. A full-color brochure can be distributed to a wide audience as a PDF document. End users can output the composition on their own inkjet printers, which are now capable of producing sophisticated documents that include color, font, layout, photographs, charts, and more. Moreover, the concerns articulated by Brecht and Enzensberger are partially addressed by the Internet, which, in contrast to traditional radio and television, is a many-to-many, rather than a one-to-many technology. The predominant metaphor for new media is not a pipeline distributing content from a central location, but a web or network that connects multiple users to each other.
To sum up, recent technological changes mean that across a wide range of media, from videos to posters, production is cheaper and easier, reproduction is cheaper and easier, and distribution is cheaper and easier. Public rhetors potentially(!) have access to powers of production, reproduction, and distribution that only a few years ago were not readily available outside of commercial media. As Mark Poster writes, the Internet “radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, film-making, radio and television broadcasting” (211). It is now possible to talk about the “demassification” and “mass amateurization” of media—to borrow terms from Bruce McComiskey (“Visual” 199) and Clay Shirky respectively.
As the preceding discussion should make clear, we are very interested in new media and the way new technologies open up new possibilities for rhetorical action, but we use the lens of new media generatively (to make visible more options) rather than as a filter (to reduce options). While new media may have distinct affordances, we are not suggesting that any category of media is preferable for all rhetorical situations. The term new media is typically reserved for practices that are “purely” digital, such as digital video, digital animation, webpages, virtual reality, etc.; however, focusing too narrowly on digitality is problematic. Sometimes “old media” options are better, and many compelling options are hybrid forms. Desktop publishing, for instance, ultimately leads to hardcopy ink-on-paper compositions, but the production of hardcopies is made much easier by the fact that the design process takes place within the digital environments provided by graphic design software. In chapter 4, we examine a case in which a message is communicated through a complex rhetorical chain that includes electronic and faxed (i.e., hard copy-to-digital-to-hard copy) press advisories, live performances, and alphabetic-photographic accounts published in both print and online newspapers. The approach we advocate is not characterized by a single-minded allegiance to new media, but by a commitment to a deep process of rhetorical invention that takes into account all available options.
Invisible Tools: A Short History of Cameras
In the previous section, we focused narrowly on technologies themselves. Our goal was to review the way recent technological shifts alter the dynamics of access, partially upsetting asymmetries between the power of large, conglomerated, for-profit media firms and ordinary people. As Barbara Jean Monroe observes, however, technologies do not exist in a vacuum. Reminding us that class inequality “is at once economic, racial, discursive, and epistemological in character,” Monroe suggests that “[r]esituating the [digital] divide within the landscape of larger social and political formations should allow for a richer, more complicated discussion of a host of issues that attach themselves to Internet access per se but are actually constituted by these larger formations” (5). To better understand the way technologies are inextricably linked to the cultural, the social, and the discursive, it is useful to examine the adoption of earlier media tools: the analog still camera and the motion picture camera. An examination of how these older tools were and were not assimilated reveals important insights into how both cultural and material logics circumscribe the adoption of emergent technologies and rhetorics.
In his 1909 talk “Social Photography, How the Camera May Help in the Social Uplift,” reform photographer Lewis Hine implores his audience to use photography as a political tool. Visual rhetoric, Hine claims, “brings one immediately into close touch with reality” and the photograph in particular “has an added realism of its own,” an “inherent attraction not found in other forms of illustration” (111). Hine remarks that although his own era belongs to the “specialist,” there is much to be gained “by the popularizing of camera work” (112).
Contemporary theorists like John Tagg and Don Slater agree with Hine’s earlier assessment that the