Acknowledging Mediators

Abstract

We know that non-human things affect our everyday lives and present us with continuities and discontinuities. In the UK, for example, the Teletext service, offered from the 1970s, gave viewers who purchased appropriately configured television sets the ability to use it as a daily reference source in the same way that they might use a newspaper. Video recorders further changed television by affording viewers greater control over the source and time of entertainment (Negrine and Goodfriend 1988). SNSs, such as Facebook and Twitter, present such continuities in our life — they can interact with us as newscaster and entertainment scheduler. Indeed, implicit interactivity was available pre-Web 2.0. The creators of hypertext technology envisioned it as challenging linearity and authorship (Jackson 1997). Interactivity (and implicitly the Internet as actor) was built into the Internet from the start (Abbate 1999, Flanagin et al. 2010). Ironically, Web 2.0-enabled SNSs, which are often pitched as highly interactive, also reintroduce regulated linearity via timelines and feeds. However, that is not to say that the early HTML-based hypertext-fuelled personal home pages of the early Web were not constraining. Arguably, it was not uncommon for individuals to take a cue from the architecture and tone of the online provider and condition their self-performances accordingly in such environments (Papacharissi 2002a, 2002b).