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.Because the system isinteractive, you will even be able to decide what estate agent or travelshop brochures you want to view (Daily Mirror, 4 October, 1995).He con-tinued in this vein in his early days as Prime Minister. The day is not far off,he declared,  when interactive TV will give us the convenience of home visits[by the doctor] that can be done through technology (the Guardian, 3 July,1998).This resurrected a false prediction that Kenneth Baker had made six-teen years earlier.The third major source of endorsement was technology experts inindustry and universities.Here, a very idiosyncratic selection was made bythe press that included academics outlining implausible new technologicalapplications that never happened.For example, Steven Gray, professor ofcommunications and computer graphics at Nottingham Trent University,featured in The Times (27 November, 1994) because he had developed away of enabling viewers to  try on a new dress on your TV screen.Thisfacilitated, the professor explained, a  personalized home fashion show,allowing shoppers to see what they will look like in the clothes before buy-ing them.Nothing more was heard subsequently of this breakthrough.This points to the fact that journalists were not simply  victims passivelyreproducing a source consensus, but were also making editorial judge-ments about what was newsworthy, and orchestrating stories in ways thatmade for good  copy.A stress on novelty accorded with traditional newsvalues.Articles about how new media would change how people live(with headlines like  Are You Ready for the Future? (Sunday Times, 20November, 1994)) were well suited to filling the expanding space devotedto consumer and lifestyle content.The more extravagant the claim aboutthe impact of new communications technology, the more interesting  orat least attention-seeking  was the article that reported it.The United States was another source of seemingly disinterestedendorsement.It featured as a country where new media were blazing apioneering trail: in the early 1980s as a place where cable TV was cre-ating a  wired society , and in the later 1990s where dotcom companieswere generating great wealth, and advanced interactive televisionsystems were being developed.The United States was also the home ofrevered prophets.The ITAP Report (1982), widely reported in theBritish prestige press, drew heavily on two popular American books oncable television that proved to be misleading (Martin, 1978 and Smith,1972).Press reports quoted on a number of occasions the MIT guru,Nicholas Negroponte (for example, The Economist 19 August, 2000),many of whose euphoric predictions (Negroponte, 1996) about inter-active digital television were never realized.The recurring tenets ofthis tradition of US futurology  that new media would create wealth,rejuvenate local communities, and empower the citizen  connected tocentral themes of the American Dream.Fenton-3900-Ch-01:Fenton-Sample 12/08/2009 2:50 PM Page 3030 NEW MEDIA, OLD NEWSCultural FramingBritish reporting was influenced not only by seemingly authoritativesources but also by ways of viewing the world that were embedded inBritish culture.One central organizing framework for narrating newmedia was a story of progress.In particular cable and interactive digitalTV were repeatedly hailed as new technologies that would create a bet-ter world in which people would be better connected, have more choice,greater power, increased opportunities for self-expression, andenhanced prosperity.In narrating new media in this way, British jour-nalists were drawing upon the foundational theory of modernity: thebelief that science and technology is the midwife of social and economicadvance that was central to the Victorian vision of progress.Claims thatbelief in all  master narratives has been undermined as a condition ofpostmodernity (for instance McRobbie, 1994) are not borne out by theway in which the advent of new media were reported in the later twen-tieth and early twenty-first centuries.But while there was an underlying continuity in the narrating of newcommunications technology as a story of progress, there was also a shiftof emphasis between the reporting of cable in the early 1980s and inter-active digital TV in the 1990s.Cable television in the early 1980s some-times excited millenarian prophecy about a transformed world.This istypified by a Times editorial (11 January, 1982) that ruminated about thecoming of  the new industrial revolution as a consequence of cable.Thefirst revolution  saw a total change in the means of manufacture ,whereas  this one is envisaged as seeing a total change in the means oforganizing society and its knowledge, overthrowing the old need for cen-tralized units and repetitive labour and substituting a new decentralizedsociety with infinite leisure.One great advance, the editorial hoped,would be followed by another.By the 1990s, the millenarian language remained, and the theme ofadvance remained important.But what was actually envisaged in rela-tion to iTV was often more modest than before.This led to a recurringcombination of utopian rhetoric and mundane prophecy, typified bythis opening to a Sunday Times feature (4 October, 1998), entitled  YourGateway to the World :Television has been the 20th century s window on the world.Thedawn of the 21st century will mark the first time we will open it.The interactive television which digital broadcasting will make pos-sible will elevate the status of the box in the corner from householdicon to a home multiplex cinema, a sports grandstand with an edit-ing suite and a shopping centre to put Oxford Street to shame.Fenton-3900-Ch-01:Fenton-Sample 12/08/2009 2:50 PM Page 3131TECHNOLOGY FORETOLDDespite its rhetoric of  opening the window on the world throughinteractive TV, the article in fact makes no mention of the wider worldoutside Britain, still less advances claims about increased interac-tion between nations.Its core message is more limited: switch on, goshopping, you get to choose.However, it still invokes an image that con-nects to a Victorian conception of technology and enlightenment, andbegins with the opening narrative device of telling a story of progress.The second key way in which the culture of British society influencedreporting was to supply a tacit framework of interpretation.The socialsciences have had a weak (and now declining) influence in the UnitedKingdom.Their characteristic way of making sense of innovation in termsof the wider social and economic processes of society has not been widelydisseminated, and is therefore not readily available to journalists.Instead,the press tended to adopt a more  common sense approach which reportedthe superior capabilities of new technology, and assumed that thesewould be fully realized in transforming ways.The taken-for-grantedbelief was that new technology would prevail, and determine outcomes.The shortcoming of this approach is that it ignores the way in which thewider context of society influences the new technology s development, con-tent and use.This can be illustrated best by considering a prominent featureof newspaper coverage of both cable and interactive digital TV [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]