Media History from Gutenberg

to the Digital Age

Slides based on the Bloomsbury book by Bill Kovarik

Revolutions in

Communication

Chapter 12 – Global Culture

Web site & textbook

Textbook:

1st edition – 2011

2nd edition – 2016

http://www.revolutionsincommunication.com

This lecture on Global Culture Charts impacts of the digital revolution

◦Public collaborations◦Business disruptions ◦International challenges

Explores some of the ways that new media publishers are contributing to global culture

Asks questions about social responsibility and how to harmonize international communications law

What

New

Media

Changes

Collaborative media

Era of global culture arrivesTwo decades into the 21st century, the

digital media revolution is destroying the barriers of time and space, creating major shifts in media structures and sparking dramatic social change.

For the first time in human history, computer networks allow billions of people to communicate across national boundaries, instantly, at no cost, in any media format— from text to video — with the help of instant translation technologies.

Global culture is not a new idea “As man advances in civilization, and

small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.” — Charles Darwin, 1871

What will we do with it?

With the future at our feet, with a vast new power of worldwide networking, how will we envision the future?

Will we use the media to lift and protect and diversify the human spirit? What will global culture become in a decade, or a century? It’s a question of social construction, not simply one of technological momentum.

The ability to shape the way information technology is used, to serve the public interest, will be the twenty-first century’s truest badge of freedom.

• Michael Hart (March 8, 1947 – September 6, 2011)

• Began typing public domain books into computers in 1971. • Started with US Declaration of Independence at U. of Illinois • By 1990s the project took off • By 2015, the project had 50,000 items in the collection

Project Gutenberg

http://www.gutenberg.org/

Richard Stallman open source

• Web server – Apache

• Internet routing – TCP/IP

• Database – MySQL

• Browser – Firefox – Mozilla

Collaboration took a big step with Diderot’s 1751 encyclopedia

Printed encyclopedias 1800s – 2000s

Encyclopedias

have helped reorganize

civilization

Collaborative info systems ‘Wiki’ is a Hawaiian word for fast, but

a wiki is like an open web site that is easy to edit

New wiki-map sites, political wikis, health wikis, cookbooks, game wikis and many more are cropping up.

New kinds of collaborative sites let musicians in different locations record separate tracks to a song that can then be put together in one place.

• Jimmy Wales started “Nupedia” in 2000

using traditional encyclopedia publishing

techniques• After dot-com bubble,

decides on an open source approach with

Wikipedia Now over 4.7 million

articles in English, and 34 million in 288 other

languages

We are the Media

Wikileaks blows the lid off

Editor Julian Assange • Begun in 2006 • 250,000 diplomatic cables leaked 2011 • Set off riots, ‘Arab Spring’ • Assange censored & persecuted by US & EU governments

Wiki collaborations - SourceWatch

Created in 2004 by Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg.

Early competitor MySpace was ahead but tried to create a more closed – off environment for user content.

As of 2015, Facebook has about 1.4 billion users and is the second most visited web site in the world, after Google. MySpace is out of business.

Twitter Twitter was originally a way for programmers to catch up with each other in the mad hacking environment of Silicon Valley.Twitter took off in 2007, and by 2015, 340

million ‘tweets’ were being sent per year. A culture of generosity can also be a

culture of shaming. Social media elevates, amplifies and

preserves controversy in the digital amber of the global village.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder

Founded in 2005 by Hugh McGuire

If you are vision impaired, or if you’ve always wanted to catch up on the classics while getting some exercise, you can thank Hugh McGuire for founding a volunteer-run, free reading service for public domain books and articles. It’s available through podcasts or a variety of downloads.

Founded by Brewster Kahle, an

American computer engineer, Internet

entrepreneur, internet activist,

advocate of universal access to all knowledge, and

digital librarian.

What

New

Media

Changes

Internet for developing nations Empowering women in

computer engineering, especially in developing

nations, is the mission of Nancy Hafkin, former

coordinator of the United Nations Economic

Commission for Africa’s Information Society Initiative.

Gender is an enormous barrier, she says.

“The rate of women connected to the Internet in

Italy is as low as it is in Kurdistan, I’ve found that

Internet use doesn’t correspond with the

development of a country,” Hafkin told Wired Magazine in

2012.

Nancy Hafkin (Photo: Internet Hall of

Fame).

Other collaborative businesses Hospitality: AirBnB, CouchSurfing, Feastley, LeftoverSwap

Auto: Uber, Lyft, Zipcar, ReadyRides, Hitch, Getaround, Sidecar

Retail: Neighborgoods, SnapGoods, Poshmark, Tradesy, ThreadUP

Media: Amazon, Wix, Spitify, SoundCloud, Earbits

Business models for news Partisan media / corporate sponsorship Pay walls / Charges for apps / not working

◦ Serious problems w/ apps at NY Times, Post Hyper-local advertising

◦ Possibilities for discounting, coupons (Groupons) Non-profit (Foundations, sponsorships) Public funding (Campaigns)

◦ Public broadcasting model competes with other charities

Cooperative (Member capitalization)◦ Depends on benefits to members ◦ Extend services into business areas

Taz.de co-opBerlin daily newspaper & consumer co-op

Taz.de co-opBerlin daily newspaper & consumer co-op

Jonathan Zittrain & Lawrence Lessig

The internet needs protection from “tethered” / non-generative technologies and overzealous copyright law enforcement, say these two law professors.

Not ‘generative’ technology

What Lessig and Zittrain object to is the locked in nature of the new web devices like iPhones and iPads

“Takes the guesswork out of bar-hopping”

But can users contribute listings and info?

Archaic music promotions

Tech of freedom Ithiel de Sola Pool, whose 1983 book

Technologies of Freedom predicted a “convergence” of electronic and print technologies in a digital sphere:

In the coming era, the industries of print and the industries of telecommunications will no longer be kept apart by a fundamental difference in their technologies. The economic and regulatory problems of the electronic media will thus become the problems of the print media too. No longer can electronic communications be viewed as a special circumscribed case of a monopolistic and regulated communications medium which poses no danger to liberty because there still remains a large realm of unlimited freedom of expression in the print media. The issues that concern telecommunications and now becoming issues for all communications as they all become forms of electronic processing and transmission. (Pool, 1983).

Lech Walesa Looking back on that time,

former Polish president Lech Walesa noted:

“Rapid development of satellite television and cell phones . . . helped end communism by bringing in information from the outside. It was possible to get news from independent sources; stations like the BBC (British Broadcasting System) and VOA (Voice of America) were beyond government control. During ‘50s and ‘60s, the communist government put people accused of listening to these stations in prison . . . It’s hard to believe that things like that actually happened from today’s perspective.”

Collision courses   In September of 2005, a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-

Posten, printed editorial cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an unfavorable light

In July, 2012, violent protests with over 50 deaths took place in Egypt and other Muslim nations in response to a fictional narrative video entitled The Innocence of Muslims, which associated the prophet Mohammed with wrongdoing

On January 7, 2015, two members of Al Qaida killed 15 journalists and police officers in the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, a satirical weekly magazine known for crude humor.

Continued terrorist attacks in Europe show the ongoing collision course between elements of the world’s cultures

A New World … “We are rapidly entering into a new world of

hyperconnectivity, said  Carl Bildtis, foreign minister of Sweden, in a July 5, 2012 New York Times op-ed. 

“We cannot accept that the Internet’s content should be limited or manipulated depending on the flavor-of-the-month of political leaders. Only by securing access to the open and global Internet will true development take place.

The governments of the Human Rights Council now for the first time have confirmed that freedom of expression applies fully to the Internet. A global coalition for a global and open Internet has been formed… The challenge now is to put these words into action to make sure that people all over the world can use and utilize the power of connectivity without having to fear for their safety. This work is far from over.”

International cooperation World Summit on the Information

Society 2003 and 2005 in Geneva and Tunis, just showed disagreements in world policy.

Internet Governance Forum 2014 for discussion on domain names, security, copyright, and development issues

Very little agreement, but the longstanding principle is to keep the doors open, to keep the discussions alive

Conclusion . Since the advent of printing, each media

revolution’s internal tendencies that channeled its educational potential and by social constructions that shaped the impacts of the new medium.

The global digital revolution is a quantum leap forward into this process, and it is quite possible that humankind was not entirely prepared. But it hardly matters now. The walls are down, and this university is wide open to both the lowest and the highest aspirations of humanity.

Conclusion With the future at our feet, what will we do?

With a vast new power of worldwide networking, how will we envision the future? Will we use the media to lift and protect and diversify the human spirit? What will global culture become in a decade, or a century? It’s a question of social construction, not simply one of technological momentum.

The ability to shape the way technology is used, to serve the public interest, is the twenty-first century’s truest badge of freedom.

Review: People Ithiel de Sola Pool, Julian

Assange, Jimmy Wales, Jonathan Zittrain, Clay Shirkey, Ward Cunningham, Edward Snowden, Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, Brian Chesky, Lawrence Lessig, Jeff Bezos, Ray Kurzweil, Sean MacBride,