In looking for a topic for this week's post, I decided to scour some too-long-neglected sections of my feed reader. There are some feeds in there to which the only attention I've paid them as been the occasional impulse to mark everything as "read" and start fresh. While airing out these dusty nooks, I rediscovered MediaShift, the new media blog for PBS, which is usually helmed by Mark Glaser. When I read it regularly, it was a decent, generalist new media blog. The most recent entry, however, was written by a guest editor, Robert Logan. Logan's entry, "The 14 Messages of New Media", which attempts to update McLuhan for new media was a welcome surprise.

It's been a little while since I've read McLuhan, so while reading Logan's piece, I found myself principally placing his thoughts into the context of assemblage theory as delineated by Manuel DeLanda. Generally, Logan takes a teleological view of media evolution - that McLuhan's thoughts on electronic media have presaged the evolution of what we now call new media. Yet, the assemblage perspective might be a more helpful interpreter of Logan's "14 messages". More specifically it is helpful to see these messages as territorializing or deterritorializing aspects from an ontological view.

Here are his 14 messages and territorializing or deterritorializing role I think fits. Keep in mind of course that both actions are relative to the specific relation or assemblage to which they refer.

1. two-way communication [territorializing]

2. ease of access to and dissemination of information [deterritorializing]

3. continuous learning [deterritorializing]

4. alignment and integration [territorializing]

5. community [territorialiing]

6. portability and time flexibility (time-shifting), which provide users with freedom over space and time [deterritorializing]

7. convergence of many different media so that they can carry out more than one function at a time and combine — as is the case with the cameraphone [deterritorializing]

8. interoperability without which convergence would not be possible [depends on the scale of interoperability]

9. aggregation of content, which is facilitated by digitization and convergence [depends on the type of aggregation occurring and the space in which it occurs]

10. variety and choice to a much greater extent than the mass media that preceded them and hence The Long Tail phenomenon [deterritorializing]

11. the closing of the gap between (or the convergence of) producers and consumers of media [deterritorializing in a broad context, territorializing in a smaller one]

12. social collectivity and cooperation [territorializing]

13. remix culture which digitization facilitates [territorializing globally, deterritorializing individually]

14. the transition from products to services [territorializing]

Clearly, the function of each of these messages is not directly apparent when decontextualized, but on the whole - if we are to take these as the essential qualities of new media - they serve both binding and unbinding purposes when it comes to assemblage. On the one hand, the increased access to geographically boundless and instantaneous communication will increase ontological distinctions between entities; on the other hand, the ethos of openness that defines many pieces of new media culture is a profoundly deterritorializing shift. Singularities are no longer so tightly bound to historically significant assemblages.

What we are seeing in new media then, is a recontextualization (to an extent) of some older paradigms into this environment. Surveillance, discipline, control, subjectivity, and power are all critical, and more nakedly expressed, in what is still in some sense a raw set of media.