is not inevitable, nor is it universal throughout human history (see, for instance, Hauser, Vernacular 14–24).
Many media scholars have explored the problems of a system that relies on centralized, conglomerated, and commercialized media institutions (see Bagdikian; Eberly, “Rhetoric”; Habermas, Structural; Hauser, Vernacular; Herman and Chomsky; Howley; Keane; Louw; McChesney; Norris). Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, for instance, argue that the post 1980 period, marked by neoliberal politics of deregulation and globalization, has resulted in a significant erosion if not wholesale annihilation of the public sphere. The centralization of the media industry from fifty companies in the early 1980s to eight transnational conglomerates in 2002 has allowed what Kevin Robins and Frank Webster refer to as “the displacement of a political public sphere by a depoliticized consumer culture” (qtd. in Herman and Chomsky xviii). Robert W. McChesney draws similar conclusions in The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century, arguing that neoliberal policies of deregulation and globalization have strengthened the cultural power of advertising and marketing, thereby allowing consumerism to overtake public interest.
As Fraser observes, the cultural marginalization of some groups is “amplified” by the reality that “the media that constitute the material support for the circulation of views are privately owned and operated for profit” (64–65). Similarly, Eberly alludes to this problem when she quotes a lengthy passage from McChesney that is worth repeating here:
The market is in fact a highly flawed regulatory mechanism for a democracy. In markets, one’s income and wealth determine one’s power. It is a system of “one dollar, one vote” rather than “one person, one vote.” Viewed in this manner, the market is more a plutocratic mechanism than a democratic one. In communication this means that the emerging system is tailored to the needs of business and the affluent. . . . The market is assumed to be a neutral and value-free regulatory mechanism. In fact . . . a commercial “marketplace” of ideas has a strong bias toward rewarding ideas supportive of the status quo and marginalizing socially dissident views. Markets tend to reproduce social inequality economically, politically, and ideologically. (qtd. in “Rhetoric” 297)
As solutions to the problems of corporatized and centralized mass media, a number of theorists have proposed more effective governmental regulation and the importance of publicly owned media (see, for instance, Keane; McChesney). These are important components of a solution, but there are other possibilities to consider as well. Without buying into the myth that “[t]he Internet . . . will set us free,” we would like to summarize the ways new technologies potentially open up new forms of access to various and overlapping publics and counterpublics (McChesney 10).
Shifting Dynamics of Access: Can You Remember the Twentieth Century?
At heart, industrializing communicative processes (beginning with newspapers, but reaching its zenith with television) led to mass communication, which is inherently top-down and manipulative. Industrialization reduced the spaces for ‘ordinary’ people (non-professional communicators) to engage in meaning-making as anything other than audience.
—Eric Louw
Many new developments in rhetorical practices that have been enabled by emergent technologies—despite their newness—have already become so naturalized that it’s easy to overlook their significance. Think, for instance, of how routine the posting and sharing of videos has become in the era of YouTube. It requires serious effort to recall the pre-Web, pre-home computer era. In this context, it is interesting to revisit works like Richard A. Lanham’s The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, which attempt to record important shifts in access brought about by digital technologies. Lanham’s work is suffused with a kind of wonder that emerges from the way new digital technologies make available forms of visual, musical, and multimodal expression that had previously been reserved for highly trained specialists. “Digitization,” Lanham writes, “has rendered the world of music-making infinitely more accessible to people who before had not the talent or the resources to make music and hear how it sounds” (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
