Overview

Part 1: Three Phases of New Media Growth

-- Institutional: Military, industrial, educational

-- Radical: countercultural visions of cyberspace

-- Commercial: new business models, economies

Part 2: Colonising New Media

--The Internet as social space

--Theories of computer mediated communication

--New media identities

Mythologies of new media

The Internet is a powerful tool for self-realization

The Internet will spread and promote democracy

The Internet short-circuits traditional power hierarchies

The Internet will make you cool

The Internet will make you rich

The Internet mirrors natural evolution

“The denial of history is central to understanding myth as depoliticized speech, because to deny history is to remove from discussion active human agency, the constraints of social structure, and the real world of politics.

According to myth, the Information Age transcends politics because it makes power available to everyone and in great abundance. The defining characteristic of politics, the struggle over the scarce resource of power, is eliminated.”

(V. Mosco, 2004; Barthes, 1957)

The first computers were used in institutional settings for:

Code breakingPerforming atomic simulationsPlotting trajectory of rocketsNaval artillery simulationAnalysing the censusCalculating insurance risk

Later in university research

Institutional Phase

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

- Thomas John Watson, President of IBM, 1943

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”

- Ken Olsen, Founder of Digital Equipment Corp, 1977

LINC, MIT Labs 1966

Timeline of Early Computing

The price per transistor on an integrated circuit fell from $50 in 1962 to $1 in 1971 to $0.001 in 1980 to 1/100,000th of a penny in 2000

A billion operations per second cost $8 trillion in 1961. In 2012 it cost $0.73

Until the 1970s computers were:

Frightening (primarily used by large institutions to measure, control, surveil and kill people)

Concentrated in centres of power

Expensive (early PDP-1 cost £500,000 in today’s currency)

Associated with expert knowledge, difficult to use unless highly trained

Imagined to have capabilities beyond real performance

The Radical Phase

Emerging from countercultural movements in the 1960s

libertarian, anti-hierarchical ethic

radically empowered individuals

Asserting mastery over the autocratic computer

Levy’s ‘Hacker Ethic’

Access to computers should be unlimited and total.

All information should be free.

Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.

Hackers should be judged by skill, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position.

You can create art and beauty on a computer.

Computers can change your life for the better.

A quaint vision that persists…Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. […] We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

John Perry Barlow (1996)

The world brings even the most radical gestures under its wing.

Opening shot of the commercial phase

Feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought it), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.

As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

“Open Letter to Hobbyists” (1976)

Today, the global semiconductor industryIs worth $350 billion USD per year

Accounting for 10% of global GDP

Inventory is measured in billions of square inches

Placed end-to-end, yearly output would circle the Earth 5 times

Theories of social and economic change

Major social transformations since 1970: Economy, Governance, Culture

Changes to business environment as a consequence of digital technology

Theories of individual and group behaviour in computer-mediated environments

Many terms for similar/related processes

‘Globalization’

Late capitalism

Informational capitalism

Postindustrialism

Postfordism

Information society

Network society

Effects:

Moderately increased productivity per worker due to knowledge economy (but not increased employment)

Declining national sovereignty (transnational economic agreements, mobility of capital investment, ratings agencies)

Work and workers are increasingly organized around flexible arrangements, making it easier for businesses to be agile in globally competitive marketplace

Bifurcation of high-skilled/low-skilled workforces along axis of knowledge intensity.

Porter (2001)

Internet creates distorted market signals:

Companies have subsidized online ventures to gain marketshare

Govts have subsidized online ventures through tax avoidance

Curiosity, novelty that will presumably wear off

Lower wages and other forms of remuneration accepted

Competitive advantage:

Operational effectiveness difficult to sustain in era of internet.

“Postmodern information economies configure all communication, even ‘looking’, as part of the productive labour process. This is so because communication produces information, which makes up the core resource of the information economy.”

(Zwick et al, 2008)

2008 is the year we hit peak attention.

Matt Webb

Mark Deuze (2011) Media Life:

We are increasingly involved as BOTH producers and consumers of media

Media is becoming invisible in daily life: media are ‘everywhere and therefore nowhere’.

We increasingly move through our own personal information space

Everything is mediated: romantic relationships, shopping, politics, work and leisure.

We are moving as a society toward the top of Maslow’s pyramid