19th Apr 2010 - 22nd Apr 2010
Watts Building, Room w623, Moulsecoomb Campus
Maria Sourbati, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, presented research at the University of Brighton on Thursday 22 April, 5.15-6.30pm, Watts Building, Room w623, Moulsecoomb Campus.
The narrowly representational functions of the media are becoming a relatively small proportion of their overall role. Today’s media are better thought of as enablers of a range of functionings, which are central to participation in the market and the public sphere, rather than as providers of a stream of content to be consumed (Garnham, 1999).
This paper examines shifts in the distribution of communicative power that today’s media have given rise to, and explores consequences for the notion of media access as an analytic, normative and regulatory concept. After placing inherited models of universal access in their historically and technologically situated origins, the paper identifies a need to reconceptualise media access as a communications policy goal.
According to commonly made claims, networked digital media bring about an expansion of choice and participatory potential, shifting the control over communication towards individual users. This paper reaches a different conclusion drawing on longitudinal and qualitative survey data on internet access among disabled people. It then proposes a scheme that combines technological and human capabilities, paying attention to the social contexts that surround media use. This model highlights the importance of considering the situation of the (non) users in terms of the technological and social infrastructures underpinning the development of sufficient individual capacity or media literacy required to make use of today’s media to engage in social action.
