New Media & Society Prelim 1

NPR interview with Isaacson (2014). "How The Cold War And George Orwell Helped Make The Internet What It Is"

"....Creativity is a collaborative effort in the digital age. I wanted to get away from writing about the singular individual." ● On early computers → big w/ vacuum times → took up the room and mostly used for war times ○ Colossus was used to break the german codes → ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) did missile trajectories, group of women helped reprogram it so it could of atomic bomb tests ● Internet is decentralized → why? 1)given by the colonels in the pentagon they wanted to make sure that the Russians couldn't send a nuclear attack on some hub and detory oru communication system (wanted a distributed system) ○ 2) People building it were rebellious anti-authoritarian types → wanted to give power to the people so they created a system in which every node on the internet has the ability to store, to forward, to originate info 51 ■ Decentralized system made it hard for the russians to blow it up and hard for the gov/corporation to control the internet ● Internet was done from the ground up ● Most people were sinter abou the government involvement in computer development in the '40s/'50s → Orwell's 1984 is coming out → published in 1948 and people thought computers would lead to a big brother-like government ○ People making the internet/personal computer realized that you had to make it person, give access/power to each individual so it would prevent it from becoming orwellian ● Bay area of california in 1970s was a cultural brew w/ anti-authoritarian sentiment → where personal computer could be born ○ Where they did ENIAC (boston/mit/philly) were building office computers people would share ○ "You have hippies who've [read Tom Wolfe's] The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test with [protagonist] Ken Kesey and others who are rebellious and believe in power to the people. You have people following S​ tewart Brand​ who read [his book], Whole Earth Catalogue, which has as its philosophy access to tools; and they want to take back this computing power and really make it something that they can use personally and use it as organizing tools and rebellious tools. This is where the personal computer comes out of this brew in California." ● Bay area/silicon valley there were people part of the anti-war movement → wanted to take back this computing power and make it something that they can sue personally use it as organizing tools ● Used to solder your own circuits now you have an iphone/laptop not supposed to open it up → ability to tinker/solder and to even know what's going on inside is done ○ Author hoeps int he future we just don't understand software but also have a better feel for it

McCracken, H. (2012). "How Government Did (and Didn't) Invent the Internet," Time.

Crovitz on the urban legend that the government launched the internet ○ Manjoo points out that Crovitz content that the internet was created in Xerox's PARC lab was false ● Much of what helped the net change everything was invented at PARC (like ethernet) and the building blocks of the graphical user interface (not internet itself) ○ Began at Arpanet (effort of DARPA in late 1960s under Taylor) ○ DARPA was where Kahn/Cerf made TCP/IP the plumbing of the internet ○ PARC's work was built on works by Engelbart (worked at Standard Research Institute funded by DARPA) ● Manjoo speculated Corvitz give more credit to Xerox because its tech led to the web today → but if Crovitz stance is that the web is the internet (it isn't) ○ Tim- Berners-Lee inventor of the World Wide Web was at cern when he was hashing out the idea ● Andreessen and Bina came up w/ Mosaic the first graphical browser, Andreessen made it as a student at UIllinois (public institution) worked w/ Bina at its national Center for Supercomputing Applications (join venture w/ state of Illinois and the federal government) ● Important point Crovitz makes is that government didn't create the internet/other vital tech of the modern age of communications → created by gifted individuals ● Orgs can pay bills/build teams but everything is invented by individuals including things that come out of Apple/Google

Isaacson, W. (2014). "The Innovators (Excerpt)."

Most of the innovations of the digital age were done collaboratively → were a lot of fascinating people involved, ability to work in teams made them more creative ● Teamwork is central to innovation, few focus on collaborative creativity which is important to understand how today's tech revolution was fashioned ● We talk about innovation so much it has become a buzzword ● For the birth of the digital age, a research ecosystem was nurtured by government spending/managed by a military-industrial-academic collaboration ○ W/ a loose alliance of community organizers/hobbyists/hackers ● Invention of Harvard/IBM Mark I (first big electromechanical computer) one programmer, Hooper wrote that history focused on its primary creator Aiken countered w/ a history that featured its faceless engineers who contributed incremental innovations ○ Emphasis that should be put on great individuals versus on cultural currents has long been disputed in the mid 19th century 50 ● Internet was built to facilitate collaboration, personal computers used at home were made as tools for individual creativity ○ For a decade from the early 1970s the development of networks/that of home computers proceeded separately from one another ■ Began coming together in the late 1980s w/ the advent of modems/online services/webs ■ Combination of the steam engine w/ ingenious machinery drove the industrial revolution → the combination of the computer and distributed networks led a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create/disseminate/access info anywhere ● Historians of science prefer to view progress as evolution → Author notes the many advancements he grew up witnessing ● Protocols of the internet were devised by peer collaboration, the resulting system seemed to have embedded in its genetic code to facilitate collaboration ○ System of of open networks connected to individually controlled computers vested control over the distribution of info from gatekeepers/central authorities ■ Let ordinary folks create/share content ● Collab b/w generations in digital age also → users commandeered digital innovations to make communication/social networking tools → collab creativity that marked the digital age included collaboration b/w humans/machines ● Truest creativity of the digital age came from those who connected the arts w/ sciences → people who are comfortable w/ humanities-tech intersection helped create the human-machine symbiosis core to the story ● Idea that innovation resides where art/science connect is not new (Leonardo da Vinci/Einstein felt the same way)

Humphreys, L. Gill, P. Krishnamurthy, B. & Newbury, E. "Historicizing New Media: A Content Analysis of Twitter," Journal of Communication. (BB)

Papers seeks to historicize twitter within a larger historical framework of diaries to better understand twitter and broader communication practices/patterns → findings suggest commentary/accounting styles are most popular twitter narrative styles ● Many suggest old media engaged w/ older media and social practices 70 ● Twitter has 200m users and 15% of online Americans → microblogging has been around for awhile, diaries are kinds of writings that warrant a closer comparison w/ contemporary microblogs ● Systematic analyses of small everyday writings can reveal large insights into the larger cultural milieu → publicly sharing the chronicling of life may contribute to the social bonds b/w people and communities ● The diary and Twitter provide a platform for people who might traditionally be excluded from public discourse to have a voice in representing themselves as well as their perceptions of the world around them ○ By analyzing the content of twitter based on literature of historical personal writings we aim to understand how people account/reflect/share w/ others using media of the times ● Historical diaries were often meant to be shared w/ visitors as a way of documenting and sharing important events in the family → diaries did not include privacy features until the mid-19th century (ties/locks not common until 1860) ● Twitter users write for others but also for themselves ● Diaries were limited by size, twitter is limited by characters ● 18th/19th century content focused on life events not until 19th century diaries became more introspective/confessional ● Analyses of Twitter suggest the majority of messages escribe both personal and professional topics ● Narrative types of diaries in the 18th and 19th centuries was often matter-of-fact and truncated → curt style of narrative regardless of topic is similar to some kinds of narratives we see in microblogging today ● Reflective diaries (esp for women/young girls) became a place for them to have a voice/provide them an opportunity to discuss and explore their inner thoughts (victorian diaries my girls were considered a character building exercise ○ Like early religious diaries they were thought to give girls the opportunity to reflect/consider the mortality in their actions (note account if matter-the-fact statements) ● Diverse sample → historically there were shifts in who was discussed in diaries from the self and community to primarily the self → for the study they defined the tweet subject as the person or people being discussed in the message ○ Tweets were coded on 1st/2nd/3rd (singular/plural) person audience and none ○ Tweet topics were coded, included mandated topics (weather, family, food/beverage/, religious, health, sleep) also activities (activities were defined as tweets about an action about something something and about being somewhere) ○ Tweet styles → defined as its broad purpose or form, loosely based on various functions/types of diaries over the centuries → single tweet could have multiple styles but at least one of the following: accounting, commentary, content sharing, information seeking, and response ■ Accounting if they reported on or shared current or recent info and activities or convey changes in status ■ Commentary if they expressed a reflection, emotion, opinion, or evaluation ■ Content sharing if they contained content from other websites/authors/sources ■ Information seeking if they sought out info/answer/opinions ■ Response if they indicate a response to a prior conversation ● Findings show that people on twitter are not just talking about themselves or their orgs in the 1st person but are invoking/actively discussing other people and groups in their tweets → most tweets involved some sort of commentary or reflection 71 ● Tweets studies were mostly about people, focus on dairies has historically varied (very early religious diaries/victorian era diaries focused primarily on the author while more social accounting diaries focused on the diarist's activities) ● Twitter resembles those diaries which were considered social histories for the group, rather than those diaries which only recount the individual's own thoughts and development nor those diaries or ledgers that marked work-related tasks only but did not involve any people ● Findings suggest microblogging is not just social in its allowance for the presentation of self but social in its condition and communication as well ● Twitter accounted topics like activities/media, divergence from historical disparities there merely accounted events of the day (Twitter sample suggests a blending of both reflective and accounting practices) ○ Like secular diarie sof the late 18th century twitter's seem to be writing new info of the day but also adding commentary to their messages like the diaries of the later 19th century ○ Majority of tweets combine the narrative styles of different kinds of historical diaries, reinforces findings that social media allow for curation where people share info through these services by choosing which info to share but also by adding their own comment to it ● Twitter has a larger audience than historical diaries, meaning it can reach more/diverse audience ● Twitter affords much more interactivity, twitter is itself a network → also data suggests that the context of tweeting may influence the kinds of tweets people write ● Twitter has strong temporal pattern use, content sharing is more likely to occur on web ● Limitations, sample taken from 2008 at the beginning of the exponential growth of twitter (use of retweets/DMs were starting) ○ Another limitation is that they only coded for 8 topics on twitter ○ Methodological perspective might have been ideal to have an equivalent diary sample ○ Unit of analysis is the tweet itself and not the tiwtter (given sample it would have been difficult to analyze random specific diaries' entries) ● Sample suggests that the kinds of things people wrote about historically are similar to the kinds of things people write about today

Carr, N. "Is Google Making us Stupid," The Atlantic.

Scene from 2001: Space Odyssey where astronaut Bowman is disconnecting the memory circuits that control the supercomputer HAL's artificial brain ● Author feels his brain is being remapped immersing himself into a book or long article used to be easy → nwo concentration starts to drift ● Authors spends a lot of time online, searching and surfing → as writer his research used to require days in stacks/periodical rooms can now take minutes 66 ○ Few google searches now is it, even when not working likely to be using the web to do something → hyperlinks propel you to works ● Net has become a universal medium, the conduit for most of the info that comes into the author's mind ● Wired's Thompson wrote that the perfect recall of silicon memory has lead to a boon in thinking ○ McLuhan pointed out in the 60s media are not just passive channels of info, they supply thought but also shape the process of thought ■ Mind now expects to take in info the way the net distributes it ■ Many feel this phenomenon → Karp details how he was a lit major in college and now hardly reads book ("way I think has changed" ● Friedman details how internet has altered mental habits → having almost totally lost the ability to read/absorb longest articles on the web/print (he is part of UMich Med School) ● Recent research by scholars from University College London suggests that we may be part of a big change in the way we read/think ○ Part of the 5 year research program found that people using the sites (british library and one of a U.K. education consortium that provide access to journals/info) exhibited a form of skimming activity ■ Hopped from one source to another, typically read no more than 1⁄2 pgs of an article or book before bouncing to another ■ Clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense → new forms of reading are emerging as users "power browse" horizontally through titles/content pages (going online to avoid reading in the traditional sense) ● Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the internet (w/ popularity of text-messaging on cell phones) we may be reading more today than we did in the 70s/80s (when TV was choice) ○ Different kind of reading, Wolf (developmental psychologist at Tufts) worries that the style of reading promoted by the net puts "efficiency" and "immediacy" above all else ■ Weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier tech (printing press) made prose commonplace ● Reading online we become mere decoders of info, our ability to interpret text/make connections when we read deeply remains larger disengaged ● Reading is not instinctive, we have to teach our minds to translate symbolic characters we see into the language we understand ○ Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms (like Chinese) develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different form the circuitry found in those of us whose written language has an alphabet ● 1882 Nietzsche bought a typewriter (Malling-Hansen Writing Ball) → vision failing but word flowed form his mind to the page ○ One of his friends noticed a change in the style of writing → prose became even tighter (friend wrote that his thoughts often depended don't the quality of pen/paper) ● Fallows in "Living With a Computer" (1982) talks about how we type and words appear → Kittler notes how Nietzsche's prose changes 67 ● Olds, a professor Neurorise who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University says the adult mind is plastic and nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones ○ Brain has the ability reprogram itself ● Bell says we use our "intellectual technologies" to extend our mental rather than our physical capacities → we begin to take on the qualities of those tech ● Clock came in 14th century, Mumford states in "Technics and Civilization" how it dissociated time from human events → Weizenbaum in 1976 in his book stated that the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments is an improved version of the older one (stopped obeyed our senses and started obeying a clock) ● Adaption of new intellection tech is reflected in our changing metaphors (brain form a clock to a computer) → adaptation also occurs at a biological level ● Turing in 1936 proved that a digital computer could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device → internet is submusing most of our intellectual tech (it's out map/clock/radio/tv) ○ When net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the net's image ● Net influence is off computer screen also → traditional media has tried to keep up → old media have little choice but to play by the new media rules ● Taylor's stopwatch experiments in a Midvale Steel plant, broke down each job into small steps and could an "algorithm" to increase productivity ● Taylor defined in his 1911 treatise (The Principles of Scientific Management) was to identity/adopt for every job the best method of work and then effect the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts ○ This remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing, coming to govern the realm of the mind as well ● Google, as Schmitt notes its executive, is trying to systematize everything → uses its results to refine the algorithms that control how people find info → push towards artificial intelligence ● The faster we surf across the web the more links we click, the more opportunities Google/other companies gain to collect info about us → proprietors of the internet have a financial stake in collecting the scribes of data we leave behind it's in their economic interest to drive us to distraction ● In Plato's Phaedrus Socrates bemoaned the development of writing and that it may cause people to cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful ○ New tech did often have the effect he feared but he couldn't foresee the many ways writing could spread info/expand human knowledge ● Gutenberg's printing press in the 15th century made Squarciafico (italian humanist) worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness → might undermine religious authority ○ Shirky (NYU Professor) notes some were valid but they didn't imagine its blessings ● Deep readings helps to create intellectual vibrations in our own mind → we make our own associations and foster our own ideas → Wolf argues deep reading is indivisible from deep thinking 68 ● If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with "content," we will sacrifice something important not only in ourselves but in our culture → Foreman articulates it as a shift from the ideal complex/educated personality to a replacement of the complex inner density with a evolving pressure of info overload ○ We become "pancake people" Foreman states spread wide and thin ● As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding go the world, it is our own intelligence that flatten sinto artificial intelligence

Standage, (2013). "History Retweets: How Ancient Romans Created Social Media." Wall Street Journal.

Social media environments requires (2) things 1) a certain level of literacy 2) the ability to copy and delivery info cheaply/quickly ○ This combination first arose in the late roman republic of the 1st century BC ● No printing presses/appear, instead info circulated among the families of the roman elite through papyrus rolls → ruling class was well-educated/literate → romans used scribes/messengers (vs us copying and sending info quick today) ● Correspondence of the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero shows that he and his friends wrote to each other constantly ● Letters were shared and quoted in other letters, some were addressed to several people and were intended to be read aloud/posted in public (if Cicero/another political made a noteworthy speech he would distribute ti by making copies available to his associates) ● Books circulated the same way as papyrus schools, passed from one reader to the next 73 ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● People in Rome also sent their friends excerpts from the ​acta diurna, or state gazette. It was posted in the Forum each day and contained official announcements and summaries of political debates. Informal system let info reach the farthest corners of the roman world in few weeks, news from rome took 5 weeks to reach britain in the west and 7 weeks to reach syria in the east Merchants, soldiers and officials in distant parts would circulate information from the heart of the republic within their own social circles, sharing extracts from letters, speeches or the state gazette with their friends and passing news and rumours from the frontier back to their contacts in Rome. This was a world in which people gathered, filtered and distributed information for their friends → a social-media system. Precursor to today's social media, another example is the printed tracted circulated in 16th century germany at the start of the reformation, the stream of news-sheets that coursed through Enlightenment coffee-houses, pamphlets and local papers that rallied support for American independence, and the handwritten poems and newsletters of pre-Revolutionary France Most of history media was social, → emergence of centralized mass media is a recent phenomenon dating to the mid-1800s → social media has a deep history

Gentile, J. (2013). "Romantic Deceit via Telegraph: How 'catfishing' worked in the 1880s." The Atlantic.

Using tech to fabricate identities to then pursue relationships is not new (134y novel "wired Love" about a pair of telegraph operators shows this) ● 19y Nattie Rogers chats w/ Clem → "catfishing" is the "the phenomenon of Internet predators fabricating] online identities and entire social circles to trick people into emotional/romantic relationships" ○ 2010 documentary Catfish then MTV series shows views' show/dismay ● Nattie and Clem are the main characters in Thayer's novel "Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashed" (1879/1880) ● Tale of virtual romance, most of Nattie/Clem's correspondence is on telegraph wires as both are operators who work in distant towns → parallels internet relationships ● Reveals that mystique is inherent to any mediated relationship regardless of the tech that facilitates it → whether it's a telegraphy or facebook these mediums give users freedom to craft a new identity (esp w/ age/appearance) Gentile, J. (2013). "Romantic Deceit via Telegraph: How 'catfishing' worked in the 1880s." The Atlantic. 72 ● Nattie has a convo w/ real life friend Quimby and Miss Archer about Clem (or "C" known over the wire) → Nattie states he's a gentleman (over a lady) Archer notes that it is romantic to talk to a mysterious stranger ○ Nattie feels telegraphy has its romantic side → she has faith in "C" (even though Quimby alludes to the fact he might not be who she supposes he is) ○ When Nattie meets clem (musk-reeking redhead) she is put off and feels there is no use talking about the wire since the mystery is solved and she will never be interested in people again unless she knows all about them "imagination is too dangerous a guide for me" ● Wired love is a testament to the fact that this emotional response is a byproduct of our own romantic expectations that the technological advancements that facilitate it ● LOng-distance lovers in the modern era end up relying on virtual communication even more after they've been dispositioned by the person on the other end of the line ○ Nattie in the same book is found be have been described by a stranger pretending to be C ("reverse-catfish") she ultimately meets/falls in love w/the true clem when he moves to her town ○ But they both miss the intimacy and freedom to reinvent themselves that only the wire allows (ends w/ them installing telegraph wire to connect their respective apartments) ● Today, even when online romantic relationships successfully manifest themselves beyond the Internet, there's often a desire to maintain some sort of digital component as an extension of the couple's identity. → burgeoning virtual wedding industry ● It is not just the mystery that sustains the relationship but the malleability of identity as well → season 2 of Catfish online lovers Ramon and Paola meet and Ramon is so blinded by his online love for Paola he insists on meeting her in person ○ Despite knowing she lied about her appearance his delusion is so strong that upon meeting her he claims to have blocked the memory of seeing Paola's actual physician appearance via webcam ■ Two argue as more deceptions are revealed then break up ■ Better in the gchat, as Nattie puts it "people talk for the sake of talking and never say what they mean."

Smith, A. (2016). " Gig Work, Online Selling and Home Sharing." Pew Research Center

24% of americans report earning income from the digital platform economy in the past year → people have long been takens piecemeal work vs a traditional salary ● Today apps/online make it easier for people to connect w/customers → proponents argue freedom and flexibility → others worry emerging "gig economy" represents a troubling shift where workers face inc financial instability ● Pew Research center survey of US adults found a substantial share of the public earned money from a digital commerce platform ○ 1/10 americans (8%) earned money in the last year using digital platforms to take on a job/tasks ● 1⁄5 americans (18%) earned money selling something online, while 1% rented out their properties on a home-sharing site ○ 24% of americans earned money on the platform economy ● Range of providers, casual users who do online tasks in their free time and then the dedicated users who rely on the income they earn from these digital platforms ● Digital commerce platforms give diverse experiences for a range of need → Americans earn money from various digital commerce platforms ○ Online selling is also wide ranging ● Study finds differences b/w Americans who earn money from labor platforms (where users contribute their time/effort) versus those who earn money from capital platform where they contribute their goods or possessions ○ Participation in labor platforms is more common in blacks/latinos and those w/ low incomes also young adults → for capital platforms the reverse is true ● USers of labor platforms capital platforms express different levels of reliance on income (60% of labro platform users say they need the money but just 20% of online sellers describe money in similar terms) ● Along w/ these differences across labor/capital platforms there are differences within platforms as well (esp w/ those who depend heavily on it for money and those who don't) ● Those who are gig workers who say it's important come from low-income households/non-white/did not go to college → perform physical task -_> motivated by lack of schedule/or job availability ● A Majority Of americans felt gigi jobs were good options for people who want a flexible work schedule or for older adults who don't want to work full time → btu 1⁄5 feel these place too much financial burden on workers 47 ○ Also lets companies take advantage of workers ● 29% of gig workers perform work using these sites for which they did not receive payment ● Recent advance in tech have expanded/simplified ways people can work/make money ● Various services are the intersection of (2) major social trends 1) the emergence of online platforms that facilitate direct transactions between consumers and providers 2) growing prevalence of temporary, part time contingent employment ○ Services allow people to work or otherwise make money at the time of their choosing (using whatever resources they have available → w/ digital services themselves handling issues like customer matching/payment resolution) ● Services encompass a wide range of behaviors/characteristics → no universally accepted definition of "gig economy" or "gig worker" ● Several federal agencies take tried to define/track emerging model of work/economic activity → Bureau of Labor Statistics have been tracking alternative work arrangements for a # of years ● U.S Department of Commerce report gave a new definition for "digital matching services" defined as 1) facilitate peer-to-peer transactions using online platforms or mobile apps 2) utilize user-based rating systems 3) offer workers flexibility in determining their hours 4) place responsibility on workers to provide whatever tools or assets are necessary to accomplish their work ● Pew Research Center conducted a survey on (3) ways people utilize online platforms to earn money 1) tech-enabled "gig work" 2) home sharing 3) online selling ○ Survey focused on establishing broad estimates for the share of Americans who have engaged in each of these money-earning behaviors in the recent past ● # of digital platforms have arisen to seke to match people who need a job w/ people who are willing to provide that service → a tech evolution tied to the ongoing labor force shift towards freelance work/independent contracting ○ Allow platform users to connect w/ a wide range of jobs w/ varying degrees of specialization ● Nearly 1/10 (8%) of American adults report that they have earned money from some type of digital work platform in the last year → variety of tasks performed ● Young adults and non-whites are especially likely to have earned money from online gig platforms in the last year → platform work is more prevalent among blacks and latinos than among whites → blacks and latinos are each more likely than whites to have earned money doing online tasks but blacks in particular are more likely than whites to have earned money doing physical tasks ● Lower income americans are more than 2x likely to engage in tech engaged gig work than those makes $75k+ per year ● 1⁄4 of digitally enabled gigi work are students; fewer than 1⁄2 are employed full time ● Having something to do in one's spare time and filling in gaps in income are the top reasons people turn to tech-enabled gig work ● Nearly 1-in-3 digital gig workers say the income they earn is essential to meeting their basic needs; a similar share report that they have performed work on these platforms for which they were not paid 48 ● A key dividing line in the world of digitally enabled gig work: Casual users who are motivated by fun or diversion and perform mostly online tasks vs financially reliant users who gravitate towards physical labor ● As noted early more than 1⁄2 of platform earners describe their income as essential/important while a smaller share describes income as being nice rot have ● Financially reliant users are more racially diverse/have lower levels of household income/educational attainment ○ Also more likely to be making <$30k a year and have a higher share of non-whites and lower share employed full time (also more likely to view themselves as employees than an independent contractor) ● Workers who depend on the income from gig employment are more likely to gravitate toward jobs involving physical labor rather than online tasks ● Workers who depend on gig platforms as an income stream are more likely to say they do this type of work because they need to be able to have control over their work schedules because there are not other jobs available or because they are trying to gain experience ● They are much less likely to say they engage in gigi work for gun or for something to do ● Digital work platforms allow users to earn money from their labor (time/skills) other platforms allow them to earn money from their capital (what they own/purpose) ○ Survey examined (2) types of capital platforms: home-sharing and online selling ○ Very few have used home-sharing (1%) but 1⁄5 have sold something online ○ Online sellers are older/wealthier/highly educated than gig workers (also less reliant on the income they earn from selling) ● Nearly 1⁄5 (18%) Americans earned money the last year by selling something online ● Americans under the age of 50, as well as those w/ relatively high levels of income and education are especially likely to be online sellers → more prevalent w/ those who have graduated college, whites, and those w/ higher income ● One-in-five online sellers say social media is extremely important for marketing their products and finding customs → one-in-three say it's not important at all → women are much more likely to use social media when selling items online ● Most Sellers describe the income they earn as nice to have but not essential ○ Those who depend on income are most more likely to sell handmade items and items other than sued goods → financially reliant sellers are older/less likely to have attended college/and have more lower incomes generally Many have health/physical conditions that make other types of employment difficult ● Just 1% of Americans have earned money in the last year from an online home-sharing platform ● American opinion about gig worker jobs are positive that they are good for flexible schedules and more likely to agree they are good for older adults who do not want to work full time ○ Less happy about being taken advantage about or financial burden placed on workers ○ Many Americans are unfamiliar so a substantial share are not sure how to feel ● 1⁄4 to 1⁄2 of the public is not sure how these jobs stack up to the different attributes examined 49 ● Thos ew/ the greatest personal exposure or shared/on-demand services had more + views, those who used 6+ shared/one-demand services were more likely than those who sued <=5 services to feel that gig economy was good (for above reasons) still hesitant about the ultimate impact of these jobs

boyd, d. (2014). "Introduction," It's Complicated. (BB) (1-28)

Author in nashville football game to understand how social media and other technologies had changed teens' lives (note 80% o h.s student in the U.S had a cell phone in 2010). → social media has allowed teens to participate in "networked publics" ● Term social media is used here to refer to the sites and services that emerged during the early 2000s including social network sites/video sharing site/blogging-microblogging platforms which allow participants to create and share their own content ○ Social media also hints at a cultural mindset that emerged in the mid-2000s as part of the technical/business phenomenon (referred to as Web2.0) → as a cultural phenomenon social media has reshaped the information and communication system ● 19080s/1990s early internet adopted used services like email/IM → around 2003 increased popularity of blogging and rise of social network sites reconfigured this topically oriented landscape ○ Early social network sites were designed to enable users to meet new people who might share their interests/tastes/passions → many early adopted focused on their friends ● Social network sites downplayed the importance of interests and made friendship the organizing tenant of the genre ● Teens' desire for social connection and autonomy is now being expressed in networked publics → networked publics are publics that are restructured through networked technologies and as such they are 1) the space constructed through networked tech 2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, tech, and practice ○ Publics provide a space/community for people to gather/connect/help construct society as we understand it ○ Networked publics formed through tech to serve the same functions a s publics like park/mall did for past generations ● Teens engaged w/ networked publics to be part of the broader world by connecting w/ other people and having the freedom of mobility ● The particular properties or characteristics of an environment can be understood as affordances because they make possible certain types of practices even if they do not determine what practices will unfold ● Understanding the affordances of a particular technology or space is important because it shed light on what people can leverage or resist in achieving their goals ● (4) Affordances in particular shape many of the mediated environments that are created by social media: 1) Persistence (durability of online expressions and content) 2) visibility 69 (potential audience who can bear witness) 3) Spreadability (the ease w/ which content can be shared) 4) searchability (the ability to find content) ● Because of their experience and stage in life, teens and adults are typically focused on different issues -- whereas teens are focused on what it means to be in public, adults are most focused on what it means to be networked ● Moral panics associated w/ new tech → dystopian notion that teens are addicted to social media and the utopian idea that tech will solve inequality → both depend on a form of thinking called technological determinism ● utopian/dystopian views assume that technologies posses intrinsic power that affect all people in all situations the same way → reality is nuanced and messy, full of pro and cons → livin in a networked world is complicated ● Is is easier to focus on the tech than on broader systemic issues that are at play because technical changes are easier to see ● Tens aim to control self-recitation, parents need to understand teens underlying social motivations → teens preoccupation w/ friend online is a component of the agre process many public spaces are inaccessible to teens ● Media narratives help construct the broader narratives for how public life works ● Important to understand teens' relationship to social media, social media enables a type of youth-centric public space that is often otherwise inaccessible but because that space is highly visible it can provoke concerns among adults ○ For some social media is not only a tool but a social lifeline (Heather) ○ What drive-ins was for teens in the 50s and malls for those in the 90s facebook/social media is for teens now ○ Success of social media must be understood partly to a shrinking social landscape (less places to hang out) ● Digital native is what adults attribute the generation ● Although almost all teens have access to tech their access varies → easily seen that the internet is not the great equalizer it is shoped that it would be ● Polarizing views of tech push the discussion of youth's engagement w/ social media to an extreme binary: social media is good or social media is bad → these extreme and the myths they perpetuate obscure the reality of teen practices and threaten to turn the generation gap into a gaping chasm ○ These myths distort the reality of teen life, sometime by idealizing it but more frequently by demonizing it

Anderson, C. (2008). "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business," Wired.

At age 40 King Gillette did do much, had the idea to make something people use and throw away (razor w/ a thin metal strip)\ → the disposable blade safety razor) ● A variety of schemes, sold millions to the Army for cheap, sold in bulk to banks so they could give them away w/ new deposits → razors bundled w/ gum/tea ○ Freebies help sell products but helped Gillette more, by giving away the razors he was creating a demand for disposable blades ■ Now a business model to the foundation of entire industries ■ Thanks to Gillette the idea you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical ● Until recently everything "fee" was a cross-subsidy (you get one thing free if you bought the other) ● New free, cost of the products themselves is falling fast → the web (2007 NYT went free and so will the Wall Street Journal) ● Scenario 1: low-cost digital distribution will make the summer blockbuster free → theater will make their money from concessions and by selling premium moviegoing experience at a high price ○ Free music helped several bands grow, fasting growing parts of gaming ar dead-support casual games online ● "Freeconomics" is giving drives the web, price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster → cost of doing a business online is approaching zero ● Servers can cost a lot but the economics of changes is good, expensive bank of hard drives (fixed costs) can serve tens of thousand so users (at a marginal cost) 44 ○ Web is about scale, finding ways to attract the most users for centralized resources (spreading costs over larger audiences) ● Driving technology benefits from these dynamics (that help cheapen things like food/clothing) and from the 20th shift from newtonian to quantum machines ○ Just beginning to exploit atomic-scale effects in evolutionary new materials (semiconductor [processing power], ferromagnetic compounds [storage], and fiber optics [bandwidth]) ■ In arc of history all (3) are new but we have a lot of learn ● At this time Yahoo! Has announced unlimited storage for free → clear that every web based tech goes towards free (as far as consumers are concerned) ● Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market price falls to marginal costs → competitive is the most competitive market and everyday the marginal cost of digital info comes closer to nothing ● (2) trends driving the spread of free business models across the economy ○ 1) is the extension of cross-subsidy to more industries → tech is giving companies more flexibility on how broadly they can define their markets ○ 2) Anything that touches digital networks feels the effect of falling costs → nothing new about tech's deflationary force ■ New is the speed at which industries are becoming vital businesses and exploiting these economics ● 40y ago Mead to a corollary to Moore's law found that every 18m the price of a transistor would halve (going for tens of dollars rto 0.000001 cent today for each of the transistors in intel's latest quad-core) ● Scenario 2: By sponsoring a whole line and making trips free the local merchants association brings grateful commuters to neighborhood shops ● Early developers devoted as much code as possible to running their core algorithms efficiently and gave little thought to userinterface → era of the command line (world's' first personal computer was honeywell in 1969 w/ an integrated counter space) (didn't like waste) ● Klay at Xerox showed them, developed the computer concept of Dynabook that would deploy silicon to do "silly" things like points/animation → ease of use for regular folks ● Mead and Kay saw that transistors/atomic units of computerization would become so numerous they would be close to costless → software writers were liberated from the scrace computerization resource like memory/CPU cycles and could become more ambitious ● Transitions don't have to be completely free but cheap enough to be disregarded ○ Zero's dichotomy paradox of running towards a wall, as you run you have the distance if you continue to subdivide forever can you eventually reach the wall (no, within a few nanometers atomic repulsion forces become to strong for your to get any closer) ○ Economic parallel for the univaty cost of tech per megabyte or per megabit per second → eventually comes close to zero ● Mead understood the psychological switch should flip as we head to zero → treat as it were free at some point (not to cheap to meter but too cheap to matter Strauss said in a different context) 45 ● Psychology if free is powerful and form the consumers festive free and cheap are different ○ Kopelman lists this as the "penny gap" ● Traditionalist feel the vaporization of value/demonentizations of entire industries (newspapers classifieds going to craigslist) ● Even if products free product can make money → to follow money you shift from basic view of the market as (2) parties to a broader sense of an ecosystem w/ many parities ● Most common economy around free of the three-party system → third party pays to participate in a market created by free exchange b/w the first two parties ○ Basis of virtually all media ● Traditional media model publisher provide a producer free to consumers and advertisers pay to ride along (news seller's note papers but readers to advertisers) ● Many different business models to adopt, six broad categories ● Freemium → the web software and services/some content is free → free to the users of the basic version ○ Coined By Fred Wilson → basis of the subscription model of media (one of the most common web business models) ■ Can be varying tier of content from free to expensive ■ Varies from the traditional concept of samples/promotional goods → "1 % rule" where 1% of users support all the rest ■ Works because serving the 99% is close to zero ● Advertising, free content/services → free to everyone ● Cross-subsidies → free w/ any product that entries you to pay for something else, free for everyone willing to pay eventually one way or another ● Scenario 3 → fre 2nd gen Wii but only if you buy the deluxe version of rockband ● Stores charge less to get you to buy other stuff, any package of products/services the price of each individual component is determined by psychology nto costs ● Zero marginal cost s→ things that can be distributed w/o any appreciable cos tot anyone, free to everyone (music) ● Labor exchange → websites and services is free, free to all users since the act of using these sites and services actually creates something of value ● Gift economy → everything is free to everyone ○ Atrium has always existed but web gives it a platform where the actions of individuals can have global impact ● W/ the miracle of abundance digital economies has turned traditional economies upside down → economics is defined as "the social science of choice under scarcity" → field i made by studying trade-offs and how they're made ○ Friedman said there's no such thing as a free lunch ■ Wrong because 1) free lunch doesn't mean food is given away or you'll pay for it later, just means something else is picking up the tba 2) in the digital realm the main feedstock so the info economy are getting cheaper by the day ● Two of the main scarcity function of traditional economists (marginal cost of manufacturing and distribution) are going to zip ● Externalities, a concept holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world → time and respect are two factors also 46 ○ Attention economy and reputation economy a real (thanks you google you can turn reputation to (pagerank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads)) ● Presumably a limited supply of reputation/attention in the world, new scarcities and in the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later ● Free shifts economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollar sto a more realistic accounting of all things we truly value today ● Strauss (head of the Atomic Energy Commission) promised we would be entering an age where electricity would be "to cheap to meter" → not true but what if? ● Today it's digital tech to elicit that have become to cheap to meter

MTI Chapter 2: "The Internet of History: Rethinking the Internet's Past."

Introduction ● When the internet expanded in the 1980s and the early 1990s it was cloaked in romance ○ To use the internet this period was like belong to a cult, w/ it's own inner secrets/subcultural style ○ Internet entered the mainstream in the mid-1990s still had an allure ○ Around this time attempts were made to research the origins/development of the internet → early historians were largely uncritical of it ■ Paralleled British press historians in the advent of mass journalism (capitalist Newspapers paralleled capital Internet) ● Conventional internet history concentrates on the early development of the internet (edenic phase and tells the history of the internet as a western story) → trouble is that the internet is more subject to commercial/state control than it was 30 years ago (western invention that is not a global phenomenon) 52 ● Internet began as a small publicly owned computer network established in 1969 in the U.S ○ Network expanded w/ the development of a shared computer language and a set of protocols ■ Email (network mail) was introduced in 1972 → term internet emerged in 1974 as an abbreviation for interworking b/w multiple computers ■ Modern internet dates back from 1983 w/ the establishment of a network of networks independent of the US armed forces ● Expanded into an international network during the 1980s, important when CERn adopted IP for this internt protocol for computers (1985) and opened its first external IP connections (1989) ● Internalization of the internet was accompanied by its popularization → first key aspects were emails/bulletin boards/listservs followed by the world wide web in 1991/graphic browser in 1993/2000s the rise of social media ● Underpinning this phenomenon were (4) distinct strands of technical innovation ○ 1) Transformation of the computer from a vast machine occupying an entire room and required help to an easy to use artifact to be on your lap or in your hand ○ 2) Development of computer networking from the development of shared codes for transporting/addressing communications through the development of cloud computing supported by massive server farms ○ 3) Transformation of connective software that facilitates the accessing, linking, storage and generation of information from the read-only tech of the www to read-write tech that made possibly the rise of social media ○ 4) Development of communications infrastructure ■ Internet went on piggybacked on phone lines and cables that had already been established to enable interoperability b/w countries ■ Subsequent expansion was facilitated by the development of high-bandwidth cable and also the growth of cellular wireless networks ● Evolution of the internet was also shaped by the objectives of the people who funded/created/fashioned it ● Internet can be viewed as an agency of peace but was a product of the cold war ● Pentagon's ARPA/then ArpaNET → investment as a computer network that would withstand Soviet attack → scientist did not want the system to be centralized hierarchal chain command ● Peer-to--peer neutrality system in which send messages in packets ● If the inter's modular structure served the filter need for flexibility it also suited academics who wanted to enhance the internet's value as a research tool by incorporating more networks ● Mutual trust b/w military and scientist let the latter have autonomy ○ Academic science helped shaped the early development of the internet stressing the importance of public disclosure/collective dialogue/intellectual cooperation ● US state bankrolled the network design and development of the internet → US defence budget funded the first American electronic digital computer in 1946 → American state 53 funded space program in which orbiting satellites contributed to the later development of the internet ● American state underwrote a major part of the internet's initial research and development cost → private sector wasn't willing to do it (AT&T in 1972 dceclined to take over ARPANET the forerunner of the modern internet) ○ After supporting the research/development cost of the internet and shouldering the financial burden of building a user base the American state shepherd the internet to market ○ 1991 ban on commercial use of public internet was lifted, 1995 the public internet is privatized ● Subsequent development of the internet was influenced by the 1980s by the American counterculture (different strands composed this, communitarian ideals w/ hippy want to break free and radical subculture wanting to transform society) ● Partnership b/w scientist and activist played an important role in re-imagining the computer ● Counterculture reconceived how the computer could be used to advance its vision of the future → activist transformed the internet from being the tool of a techno-elite into becoming the creator of virtual communities ○ A sub-cultural playground and an agency of democracy ● A formative influence shaping cyberspace was European welfarist tradition that had created a great public health and broadcasting system → while the internet was born in the U.S the world wide web was created by Tim Berners-Lee in the publicly funded European Particle Physics Laboratory at CERN ○ Was inspired by opening up access to public good and that of bringing people into communion with each other ○ His desire not to promote the web through a private company was promoted by his conviction that it would trigger competition and lead to the division of the web into private domains ● Openness advocated by technologist took the form of championing scientific access and disclosure rather than opening up the internet to mass consumption ● Marketplace also shaped the development of cyberspace → lifting of the commercial ban on use of the public internet in 1991 had a benign effect ● Negroponte wrote in 1995 that the public will pull what it wants from the internet and digital media rather than accept what is pushed at them by media giants ● Commercialization changed the character of the internet, adoption in 1997 of a standard protocol for credit card transactions gave an important boost to online sales ● Commercialization led to the growth of online advertising, accompanied by the proliferation of spam ● Internet corporations lobbied government for changes in the law that served their interests → pressed for legal protection of intellectual property rights that threatened to undermine the open, collaborative tradition in which the internet had been built ● Commercialization also established more subtle forms of control based on market power 54 ● Digital capitalism turned out to be not very different from other forms of large scale corperation capitalism → commercialization of the internet also gave rise to the development of a new regime of commercial surveillance from the 1990d onwards ● Commercialization of the internet played an important part in popularizing the internet and making it accessible to a wider public → also extended investment and innovation after an initial public outlay ○ Commercialization also had strongly negative features, gave rise to economic concentration and the abuse of market dominance ○ Led to the creation of global digital giants, some of which dodged taxes/exploited workers/lobbied for changes in the law that served their interests rather than the public interest ○ Led to a system of commercial surveillance that was adapted by dictatorships to repress dissent and is now being used in liberal democracies in ways that potentially threaten civil liberties ● Commercialization was resisted, some were computer scientists who opposed the imposition of "proprietary software" by large corporations ○ Stallman from MIT pushed against corporate capture, helped launch GNU ■ Got support from IBM eventually led to Apache and open-source adopted by IBM ■ Firefox was launched, innovations were protected by the state through the General Public License (GPL) which had a copyleft clause that required any improvement in free software to be made available to the community under GPL ■ Successful open source movement kept alive the tradition of the open disclosure of info, perpetuated the cooperative norms of the scientific community where people make improvements/develop new applications on the basis of open access to info ● Then return the favor by making the basis of their discoveries free (kept spring a practical alternative to proprietary software) ● OS community was guided by standards, rules, decision-making procedures and sanctioning mechanisms (why it was so effective) ● Most of the population sites were commercial in origin and were increasingly controlled by major digital groups → but were free at the point of use and were sustained by collective talents/interests/resources of the community they served ● Pre-market internet has accustomed people to expect web content and software to be free → NCSA released its pioneer browser Mosaic on the ent for free then members made a private company w/ a new improved version called Netscape which tried to get people to pay ○ Opted eventually to make it free, turned instead to ads and consultancy for revenue ● Consumers seem willing to waive their rights to privacy and ptu up w/ a limited quota of advertising while continuing to resist paying for online content 55 ○ A growing # of people have imposed their own imprint by generating/sharing/commenting on online content ● Widely predicted that in 1990s the global diffusion of the internet would assist the march for democracy → view refuted by a comparative analysis of internet diffusion rates and measure sind democratic change in 72 countries b/w 1994-2003 ○ Found that internet diffusion was not a specific causal mechanism of natural democratic growth ● One reason internet did not grave dig dictatorships is that is failed to appreciate that democracy is only one source of governmental legitimacy ○ Economic success, fear of a strong neighbor, nationalism, ethnic affiliation, God's will, and identification w/ national veneration are some of the alternative sources of legitimation sustaining authoritarian regimes ■ Brute force has also been deployed w/ also non-coercive strategies to sustain their rule ● Also the thesis got wrong is that the internet was uncontrollable → field to take to account of the multiple methods developed by authoritarian regimes around the world to censor the internet and intimate critics ○ Authoritarian governments can calculate a general climate of fear by killing/torturing/imprisoning dissenters ● Government have also sought to make the internet a propaganda tool (Morozov calls this the "spinternet') ○ Net tech proved in some ways to be a more efficient method for identifying and apprehending enemies of the state than the old-fashioned Soviet methods of bugging and trialing suspects ● Arab uprisings → social media is claimed to enabled flash demonstrations to take place, and encouraged protests to spread across national frontiers → people could communicate w/ each other on a mass scale and gain strength from each other in ways that could not be controlled by the authorities ○ Argument pays little attention to the past or to the wider political and social contract ○ Low use of internet rates/users in these areas show that it was not information technology (ICT) that made the Middle East and North America (MENA) region combustible ● Suggest that there were underlying causes, rather than the mere presence of the internet and social media, that were mainly responsible for the Arab uprisings ○ Corroborated by the history of the insurgent countries, the arab uprisings were the culmination of dissent fermented over decades ● Underlying the incendiary situation was a mixture of factors, one common factor was growing opposition to regimes that were viewed as corrupt and repressive ○ Also high youth unemployment ● Authorities in insurgent countries tried to control the media, ability of a small # of techie dissidents to outwit authorities w/ external support was strategically important 56 ○ Alternative media not only facilitated the organization of opposition but also encouraged protesters to persist in the face of brutal oppression ● Uprisings had deep underlying causes and were prefigured by protests over many years, largely ignored by the west ○ Emergence of new media (like smart phone) contributed to the build-up of dissent facilitated the actual organization of protests and disseminated news of the protests across the region to the wider world ○ The rise of digital communications tech did not cause surprising, it strengthened them ■ Not enough though (2) insurgent countries had authoritarian upgrades ● Internet has helped to organize women movements → in islamic countries the rise of leading Muslim reformers at the end of the 19th century encouraged the spread of more liberated perspectives ● Portrayal of the net as an arm of the organized women's movement in the middle east needs to be qualified in (2) ways → 1) much of the web content was conditioned by patriarchal values and was hostile to women's liberation 2) Probably only a small minority of women read online content originating directly from the women's movement ● History of the internet is bound up w/ the struggle for greater gender equality → internet provides the tool for an organized campaign for women's liberation in the middle east and elsewhere → also disturbed depictions of autonomous women that inspired the seeking of personal solutions to gender inequality ● There has been a cumulative shift form values/beliefs that prioritize the collective good of the community and of groups within it to ones that give priority to the satisfaction of the needs/desires/aspirations of the individual ○ Encouraged by the rise of the market system/increasing mobility/decline of influence of the family → some see the internet as encouraging this more individual-centred orientation because this is supposedly wired into the internet's DNA ○ Networked individualism also led to the forging of new communal identities ● Communalism can shape online experience and reaffirm a prior sense of identity ● Case studies located outside the west deals w/ a strongly communal life in the real world can penetrate the online experience and result in the internet offering support ○ In sometimes a complex or contradictory way for the maintenance of communal identities ■ Implication is that the social impact of the internet is likely to have been different in the collectivist east than in the more individual-centered west ● The dynamic of change is towards greater individualism → internet provides a space for the expression of individual identity even in collectivist societies ● The rise of the internet as a medium of self-communication has enabled greater self-expression and probably strengthened the trend towards individualism ○ Seems to be the case in the west and some evidence that the internet has also reinforced the trend towards greater individualism in asia → but communal identities remain strong in many parts of the world influencing use of the internet 57 ● Historians concentrate on the early edenic phase of the western internet development, this revised history has emphasized by contrast the way in which commercialization distorted the internet in the west while state censorship has muzzled the internet in the east ● Rise of the internet was accompanied by a decline of its freedom ○ Trend was resisted in both the east/west ● One task of rethinking internet history is to take full account of the later period, and to narrate the history of the internet as a global rather than western phenomenon ● In general society exerts a greater influence on the internet than the other way around ○ Why many of the prophecies about the impact of the internet have not been fulfilled

MTI Chapter 1: "The Internet of Dreams: Reinterpreting the Internet."

Many thought that the internet would change society permanently and irrevocably, inferences derived from the internet's technology ● Many predictions fulfilled, changing way of life for people → 15 year-olds in economically advanced countries spent around (3) hours online on a typical weekday in 2013 ● Internet was supposedly engendering a shift from passive consumption to active participation, causing markets to fragment and rending society more open and egalitarian ● 2011 popular uprisings in middle east ('twitter evolutions") seemed to offer final confirmation that the internet was a transformative force ● Sherry Turkle (1995) has celebrated anonymous online encounters that could extend imaginative insight, 16y later she changed → lamented online communication could be shallow/addictive/get in the way of developing richer interpersonal relationships ● Morozov wanted internet to to make dictators to a delusion → Foster and McChesney wrote that the 'enormous potential of the internet has vaporized in a coupled ebates' ● 1990s ti wa claimed that the internet would generate wealth and prosperity (central confusion to a long article in Wired written by Kelly in 1999) ○ "Raising Zeros: The Good news is, you'll be a millionaire soon.The bad news is, so will everybody else' ○ Seattle Post Intelligencer declared an internet gold rush ● Dotcom bubble burst in 2001, reprised mid-2000s, past predictions had been premature ● Central to the prophetic tradition is the idea that the internet/digital communication has given birth to the 'New Economy' (efficient means of connecting suppliers/producers, helping to compensate for the decline in manufacturing in de-industrializing western societies) 58 ● Internet supposedly leveling the playing field b/w corporate giants and small companies → internet favors horizontal/flexible network entreprise able to respond rapidly tor changes in consumer demand ● The presentation of these themes is often cloaked ins specialist language, to understand it insights is needed to learn a new vocabulary (like CRM, VAN, ERP, OLTP, ETL) → change is cumulative ● First conclusion is that the internet has modified the nerve system of the economy by changing the interactions b/w suppliers/producers/consumers ● Rise of online retailing is most prominent in everyday life → 2013 almost 50% of adult OECD population bought something online (larger variation b/w countries) ○ Within OECD bloc of affluent nations, the British shopped most online ● The volume of online shopping is still small in relative terms because 1) online sales take place mainly within nations rather than b/w nations 2) are uneven across different retailers and service sectors → ecommerce just made 6.5% of total retail sales in the U.S in 2014 (4% of total sales in europe in 2007) ● Online sales of goods/services will continue to expand (Uber/Airbnb doing work) → factors holding back online retailing will diminish in importance over time ● Internet has not been a geyser of wealth cascading down to all, there was an inc int h stock market value of internet companies b/w 1995 and 200 but was fueled by ignorance/credit boom produced by mid-1990s financial de-regulation ○ Bubble exacerbated by financial incentives that encourages investment analyst to recommend unsound investments in the internet sector (economic downturn was caused in 2001) ● Late 1990s to early 200s rapid diffusion of internet use in the west (did not give rise to a sustained economic boom) → internet era economic inequality deepened ● Internet's anticipated contribution to the economy was greatly overstated (range from 0.8-7% GDP) → HBS study concluded ad-supported internet gave 2% of US GDP or 3% if the internet's indirect contribution to domestic economic activity is taken into account (other studies show it being 1.35% GDP in Europe) ○ McKinsey Report concluded 3.4% GDP of the G8 countries/5 other major countries ○ The internet's total economic contribution is small by comparison w/ what was hoped for in the 1990s ● Internet did not create a level playing field b/w small and large enterprise ○ Underestimated the advantages of size, larger corporations have more capital gives them a competitive advantage, also have economies of scale lowering unit costs and economies of scope base dons haring of services/cross-promotion ■ Also Concentration of expertise/resources (w/ can renew themselves by acquiring young companies) ● In the leading economy (US) the # of manufacturing industries in which the largest (4) companies accounted for at least 50% of shipment value steadily increased b/w 1997 to 2007 59 ○ Also an increase in this time in the market share of the (4) largest firms in leading sectors of the US retail industry ● Not just offline world, Jan 2011 73.5% of the world' internet users visited either google or youtube → itunes accounted for 71% of the worldwide online digital music sales ○ Amazon became dominant online retailer and facebook leading social media website (w/ network effects) (idea that the natural process of competition tend to diminish competition) ● Large companies are better adapted to exploiting the opportunities offered by the internet than small companies (2012 40% of larger companies in OECD companies were engaged in ecommerce compared w/ 20% of small businesses) ○ Ecommerce esp challenger for small and medium-sized enterprises in developing countries ● 1990s a broad consensus that the internet would promote global understanding, internet is less subject to state censorship than traditional media → these themes of international reach/user participation/freedom continued to be invoked in the 200s ○ Stratton argues that the internet encourages the globalization of culture, the loosening of ties to nation/place (cultural theorist agree) ■ Critical political theorist have parallel argument, Fraser called it the denationalize of communication infrastructure ● This is the beginning of a transnational ethic, a global public norm → internet becoming the midwife of global understanding ○ Central weakness of these optimistic perspectives is that they are based on inference from internet tech rather than evidence → readily available info tells a different story ○ Internet is filtered through the structures and processes of society, contrained in at least 7 ways the role of the internet to create a new social order ● 1) The world is unequally, this limit participation in an internet-based global dialogue, the distribution of income is sharply unequal and this disparity has increased ○ Gap b/w the rich and the poor is the highest it has been in most OECD countries in 30y ○ Economic inequality is reproduced as a structure of access to the internet, disparity when comparing rich and poor nations in internet use (95% in Sweden 6% in Afghanistan) ○ Inequalities of internet use are determined not only by geography but also by inequalities within nations ○ In emerging and developing countries, the poor, less education, and old are much less likely than the avg to use the internet ○ Gender also is an important determinant of use in developing countries w/ esp low levels of use among women in sub-saharan africa and parts of the middle each ● Differences will be modified over time but because the world is so inequality it will be a very long time before developing in countries even approach current levels of net penetration in economically developed societies 60 ○ Internet is just bringing the advantaged together, 42% use the intent in the world so the majority is not on it ● 2) The world is divided by language, most people speak only one language and can't understand foreigners when they speak in their own tongue ○ Closest thing is english which only 15% of the world understands (next is chinese, which is limited to china) ● 3) Language is a medium of power, those communicating online in english can reach a substantial public due to britain's imperial legacy and US's international soft power → who gets attention on the internet the "medium of global understanding" depends on what language they speak ● 4) People have different degrees of cultural capital to draw upon → some speak multiple language/have expertise while others lack access ● 5) World is divided by conflict so value/belief/interest → ISIS has generated a storm of hatred → has skillfully used social media (mastering fb/insta/twitter including manipulating hashtags ○ Including race hate groups in the US (Metzger, leader of the white aryan resistance) large followings (like stormfront, one of the earliest 'white only' websites') ○ Maintain/promote racism in a variety of ways → foster a sense of collective identity ○ Internet can spew out hatred/foster misunderstanding/perpetuate animosity because the internet is international/interactive ● 6) Nationalist cultures are strongly embedded in most societies and this constrains the internationalism on the web despite its global reach (nourished by TV, places little time on foreign news) ○ This national introversion supported by national television influences the content of the web ○ National culture influence web interactions → intense nationalism finds expression in chinese websites and online chatrooms (spill over to visceral hostility towards the japanese) ● 7) Authoritarian government have developed ways of managing the net and of intimidating would-be critics → global internet discourse is distorted by state intimidation and censorship ● The world is unequal, has conflicting values/interests, is subdivided by deeply embedded national/local cultures, and have authoritarian regime in certain regions. ● Some advancements which have led to globalization → youtube has shared experiences, internet also facilitates the rapid global distribution of arresting images that strengthen the sense of solidarity w/ beleaguered groups ● Has the prediction that the internet will empower people happened? ● Numerous scholars proclaimed the internet would undermine indicators by ending their monopoly of information → new form of participatory democracy 61 ○ Throughout that internet would rejuvenate democracy because the public would gain unprecedented access to info → top down communication replaced w/ horizontal communication b/w social groups ● This forecast failed to predict that authoritarian regimes would censor the internet (example of Saudi Arabia where the eastern wa established in 1994 but made public in 1999 to give time to find proper censorship → included funnelling all international connections through the state-controlled Internet Service Unit w/ pre-set blocking proscribe to websites ○ China has a more sophisticated system to ocpe w/ larger volume ● Came to rely on (3) ties of control → 1) is the 'great firewall of china' vlockign specific websites formoeprating int he country 2) is blocking of 'keywords' which prevents users from posting things that contain banned words/phrases 3) is a system or licensing compliance which requires each site to be responsible for monitoring/censoring content or be shut down ● Censorship system to give flexible regime that allows individual criticism of government but prevents organized protests/collective action ● Authoritarian states' internet censorship → has been effective to contain online subversion → enrolled as a state PR agency → internet acts to strengthen rather cause opposition to autocracy ● Egovernment emerge in the form of inviting the public to comment/petition → in Britain 30% of online response to a proposed new law in 1997 came from private individuals ● Online dialogue w/ government has (3) limitations ○ Citizens' inputs are often disconnected from real structures of decisionmaking ○ Citizens are disinclined to take part in these consultations partly for this reason (10% or less report taking part in online consulting or voting in EU countries) ○ Sometimes edmoes mean sno more than one-sided communication in which gov provides info about services/promotes their use ● Online funding did not end the political domination of money in the country → the dominance of money over politics remained fundamentally unchanged even if the style of campaigning was modified to incorporate new as well as old methods ● Those w/ high incomes participate more in public affairs than those on low incomes, long been true of the U.S also holds for Britain (also more true for European countries) ● The principal explanation for differential participation is those on low incomes have lower self-esteem and weaker sense of political efficacy than those who are better off → internalising individual deficiency explanations of poverty can encourage the poor to turn away from collective political solutions ● Solt (2008) study of 22 nations found that economic inequality depresses political interest → unequal societies the privileges have a powerful incentive to participate in politics because they know from experience that they tend to do well out of it ● Those engaged in political online participation are even more skewed towards the affluent and highly education though they are more often younger, gennaro and dutton (2006) found that in britain the politically active tend to be high SES w/ more educated and older 62 ○ Here the idea is that the intern seems to be promoting political exclusion rather than inclusion ● History shows that sustained collective action can mitigate the social disempowerment of poverty → requires enormous effort of collective organization over a long period of time (does not happen as consequence of new communication technology) ○ Internet has also failed to reinvigorate democracy in ways that were hoped for due to brake imposed by widespread political disengagement (people feel regardless who you vote for things will be the same, think things are too complicated) ● Political detachment seems to be a response eot perceived shortcoming of particular politics ● The large # of people turned off politics help to explain the prevailing pattern of internet use → accessing diverse information to hold government to account is not a priority concern of most internet users ○ Weak evidence b/w internet/social media use and increased political participation ● Only evidence that supports the internet's democratic retention thesis is that it suggests that either has inc the effectiveness of activist ● Activist (UK Uncut) calling for direct action against tax avoidance at a time of public austerity, without the internet this small group would not have been able to mobilize flash crowds and win media attention ○ Within 6 months UK Uncut protests had been reported by TV/rdio/leading newspapers → helped put corporate tax avoidance on the public agency ● MoveOn was set up in America to oppose militarism in the wake of 9/11 terrorist attacks → rapidly expanded w/ help from the internet failed w/ its campaign objectives but still rallied and sustained dissent ● The internet has been effective in facilitating the organization of activist networks on an international scale, but international coordination has happened on an extensive basis w/ more limited communication tech ○ Example of Jody Williams helping to get the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty passed ● Internet made it easier for activist to connect, interact, and mobilize → borne out by the campaign launched in 1997 again the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) ○ Progressive activist were deluged w/ emailed warning that MAI would lead to issues and in a short time different progressive groups in international civil society came together to put pressure ○ French socialist government opposed the MAI, prevented the MAI adoption in 1998 owing to the OECD's consensus procedures ● Mass protests by the movements for global justice at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle (1999) G8 summit in (2001) and subsequent meetings of world leaders, greatly assisted by the internet ○ Led to a mass mobilization at the G8 meeting at Gleneagles in 2005 when debt relief measures for poorer countries were publicly proclaimed 63 ● MAI campaign had na aftermath in campaign against the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP) → proposed b/w the EU and the U.S → draft agreements were leaked by a german newspaper in 2014 ○ New campaign not as intense as the one that killed of the MAI ● Internet has enabled activist to have a general appeal to consumer power (used against Nike and the push by Mortar to get a Rage Against the Machine song to the top of the billboard) ● Internet also lets citizens hold the media to account (w/ Senator Lott in 2002 offer pro-segregationist comments, Lott had to stand down as senate majority leader → media initially dismissed it but the internet helped changed that) ● Police is also held to account → Metro police said Tomlinson died of natural causes people believed him → video released which shows police striking/pushing Tomlinson to the ground → eventually led to the truth ● "Miami Model" of mass protest policing has an emphasis on containment and targeted response → protesters adapted to more active policing by using mobile phones or monitor police conduct in so-called counter-surveillance ○ Case of Adam Nobody, recorded footage of police beating him ● Mobile phone can call police into account, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Walter Scott cases → also Freddie Gray all African Americans led to online indignation and protests across America ● From the start ocnsevratives became better organizing online than liberlas int he U.S → creation of new space of communicaiton potentially acceisble to different viewpoints is of disproprtionate disngiicnace for th eleft ○ In general the use of the internet by activist of different persuasion has strengthened the infrastructure of democracy by makign activist more effective and persons better to communicate their concerns to the wider public ● Enhancement has been offset by a greater concentration of power, big business accounts for a greatly increased share of global trade ● Political power in many national democracies has become more centralized, politicians have become less representative and their intentions w/ the electorate more manipulative ● The forecast that the internet would rejuvenate democracy and empower the people was based on an extrapolation from its technology → been fulfilled to the extent that the internet has enabled activist to have greater impact but the internet has not given rise to direct democracy/reduced power of money in American politics/or significantly increased overall political participation ○ Predictions failed to take into account the empowering effects of the internet would be constrained by the demoralising effects of poverty/growing public disconnection from politics ● Internet according to Murdoch is a democratizing journalism → Fawkes agreed ○ Radical academic lawyer Benkler argues that a monopolistic industrial model of journalism is giving away to a pluralistic networked model 64 ● Left and right agree that the internet is bringing an end the end of media moguls and conglomerate control of journalism ● Another theme is that the internet will lead to the reinvention of journalism in a better form → Dewitt believes that journalism's ultimate liberation will be through the internet ● Potentially giving rise to a new collab, Ahearn (President of Reuters) believes this ● The (2) central themes are the training of traditional news controllers and the renewals of journalism → Web 2.0 has given ordinary people a 'voice' and ended the traditional gatekeepers' monopoly ○ Castells talks of an era of "mass self-communication" which will transform power relations in the network society These accounts fail to take into account the control traditional media gatekeepers → traditional tv news is still most popular (things are changing, some countries the internet has overtaken for news) ● Most legacy media set up on cyberspace quickly (top news websites are owned by legacy media organizations) --? Their superior resources/brand names deter competition (also free content makes it difficult for independence to charge for content) ● Google and yahoo searches ring up establishment media ● Rise of social networking sites could have undermined the ascendancy of legacy media → established media are still the prime movers in the supply, selection and dissemination of nws ● Larger claim is that the internet has inaugurated the era of mass self communication, creating the conditions to political transformation → also overblown ○ Most bloggers are amateurs/have regular day job which makes it hard for them to research/secure a larger audience ● Internet is a cheap tool of communication but does not equate to being heard, activist groups find it difficult to get the attention of mainstream media but can also get lost on the web → their statements tend to get a low search engine listing (Internet is "shifting the bar of exclusivity") ● Journalist can more easily check facts ● Erosion of the commercial subsidy of journalism has led to a reduction in the # of journalist ● Legacy news organizations have entrenched their ascendancy because they now have a commanding position in both the offline and online production of news ○ Not been deposed by independent news websites because these usually have limited funds and small audiences → have not been displaced by SNS because these are generally used for social rather than subverted their domination ● Not anticipated that the rise of the internet would cause advertising support for journalism to shrink which has resulted in fewer journalist writing more stores less well ○ Rise of blogging was overhyped ● In britain citizen journalism seemingly flopped, in South Korea it is more prominent ○ OhMyNew (OMN) launched by Yeon Ho Oh became a leading platform for political and cultural dissent → new tech was central to OMN's initial success 65 because it lowered costs/facilitated contributions from volunteers and enabled lively interactions on its website ○ External context enables/disables the realization of a technology's potential ● Study b/w Singapore and Malaysia, both have liberal policies on internet and significant % on the internet → diverged from different structures of power, Singapore if ruled by a single united party (PAP which has been in office since the country became independent) ○ Singapore's internet has been neutralized as a place of dissent, online domination modified when the ban on online campaign in elections was elected in 2011 and the workers party gained minority support ○ Politics of Malaysia is similar to Sangamore, one ruling part (Barisan Nasional -- BN) has been in power since nation's independence ■ Ruling part is a political coalition (not a single party) ■ Malaysia is a more divided country (in ethnic composition and religious affiliation) ■ With this background the internet became an increasingly important space of dissent and criticism in Malaysia → internet was undermined support of the regime ■ Reinforces the belief that different contexts produce different outcomes, something that is repeatedly obscured by overarching theory of the internet centered on its technology ● Many failed to recognize that the impact of technology is filtered through the structures and processes of society → failed to register that the world speaking different tongues, is unequal and its constituent parts have different values, interests and affiliations ○ Global dialogue in mutually incomprehensible languages and would be for the affluent rather than all → also give voice to hate and reflect division of the offline world ○ Failure to recognize that the internet would be shaped by society and not just its technology ● Poverty disempowers people and lowers their participation in public life → people are increasingly disconnected from politics (encourages them to use the internet more for social than for public purposes)

Timburg, S. (2016). "The Revenge of Monoculture: The Internet gave us more choices, but the mainstream won anyway." Salon.

Some argue that having a shared anglo-american culture gives us a communal sense of belong together → sharing concerns/values at time when politics/religion divide us ○ Being excited over a movie/song is a sign culture worked, people listen to each other and connect through their tastes ● Toure wrote about massive music moments, music that is not just a private joy but as a unifier giving us something to share/bond over ● Cyber-utopians believed the internet would offer a wide range of options → every bit of niche culture would find its audience and the idea of the mainstream would wither away ○ Chris Anderson in "The Long Tail" made it seem like the digital paradise was inevitable and imminent ● Diversity is liberal left's rallying cry (fit into what 1⁄2 the audience wanted) many conservatives were urging the breakdown of the "mainstream media" (Thiel's speech that Trump would defeat the ossified monoculture) ● Potomost (music critical who exalts popular taste over cold critics biases) disappearance of monoculture is good too since it sets tastes free ● While there is plenty of diversity the monoculture is strong as ever → the mainstream, rather than fragmenting, has enforced itself in a big way ● Possible to retreat from pop culture, the pull of mainstream is strong → log into twitter be drawn to sports culture whether you want to or not ● Of the top 10 highest earning films in 2016, top 9 are either kids movies to comic books (last one is central intelligence, a comedy-action w/ Dwayne Johnson) ● Even the most serious actors are into superhero/action movies → comic con attracted over 130k this year to san diego, movie studies ignore at their peril ● Culture coming (including a wide variety of music) → media coverage of music/way most people hear about what's being released was during MTV's video music warned → Swift wasn't nominated! (still found in Kanye's "Famous" and in articles so she is not far away) Timburg, S. (2016). "The Revenge of Monoculture: The Internet gave us more choices, but the mainstream won anyway." Salon. 43 ● Mainstream used to be Fleetwood Mac/The Eagles → only one medium has broaden dramatically in the internet age → TV is more diverse (racially/style also smarter) ● Films that make money/draw attention have corporate-branded celebrities and comic-book movies ● This happened from a swirl of economic, technological, and sociological factors → history shows that capitalism tends towards monopoly unless some counterforce pushes back (no Teddy for internet) ○ Biggest musicians/actors bombard us w/ tweets/news until their brands are ubiquitous ● Part of the paradox of choice, if everything is available all the time we're likely to get overwhelmed and just fall back to what we know already (or what is most aggressively marketed to us) ● 1986 31 songs hit #1 from 29 different bands/articles → January 2008 to September 2012 -_. First years of digital dominance, half the #1 songs were done by 6 artists (Katy Perry, Rihanna, Flo Rida, The Black Eyed PEas, Adele, and Lady Gaga) ○ Top 10 websites accounted for 31% of page views in 2001, 40% in 2006 and 75% in 2010 → fb is the way most americans get their news ● Whole country was talking about the latest "Star Wars" last winter → just as tv news (left or right) has picked up the tone of fox news → most online media like Fawker ● We can probably predict what movies will dominate media coverage and the box office next year and who will make celebrated videos/best-selling songs of 2017

MTI Chapter 3, "The Internet of Capital: Concentration and Commodification in a World of Abundance."

The internet of capital - Concentration and commodification in a world of abundance ● Internet of Things (IOT), internet protocols are applied to what were previously inanimate objects to give them a new life ○ An array of things connected in a seamless logical exercise which offers the prospect of a sweeping transformation in the way human exercise that offers the prospect of a sweeping transformation in the way humanity lives on earth → putting us on the course towards a more sustainable/abundant future ○ New architecture will make an impact to eventually improve our environment ● Cumulative impact of this transformation is set to be a world marke dby increased transparency, security, creativity, efficiency, and stability ○ Paradigm shift from market capitalism to peer production ■ Made possible by the lowering of production and distribution costs due to the digital innovations to near 0 (free) ● Schmidt (google) states that the modern technology platforms (google/facebook/amazon) are a true paradigm shift ● The quantification of everyday life that is associated /w "big data" means that we can expect transformations in everything from business and the science sot healthcare ● Internet is being in a new epoch the outcomes (winners/losers) is undecided ● Howard argues that Pax Americana (geopolitical configuration that expressed US hegemony after WWI has been replaced by Pax Technica, a new info revolution based on the altruism of social media and the sheer pervasiveness of an IOT MTI Chapter 3, "The Internet of Capital: Concentration and Commodification in a World of Abundance." 34 ● Pax Technica refers to a political/economic/cultural arrangement of institutions and networked devices in which government and industry are tightly bound in mutual defense pacts → an arrangement that promises either to enslave or to emancipate us depending on the context which citizens are able to play a controlling role ● Mason refer sot "postcapitalist" is that b/w the network and the hierarchy, b/w old forms of society moulded around capitalism/new forms of society that prefigure what comes next ○ Internet has facilitated new prefigurative forms of economy/society ● Regardless of different political preferences the internet has disrupted the transitional business arrangements ● Google is the best role model for any company operate in the new digitally enhanced s business era → it has changed the fundamental architecture of industries ● More collaborative internet (Wikipedia) Rifkin believes the collaborative commons is rising in its wake (passing of the capitalist era) ● We will no longer have media concentration but dispersion where access to niche markets and end less back catalogues will satiate the public's desire for individuality and unlimited choice ● Wikinomics/Collaborative consumption are the most recent embodiments of an evolving information society discourse that originally sought to theorise the salient of info and knowledge in post-industrial societies ○ Titles focused on the changing economic and occupational structures of the late 20th century capitalism/identified symbolic goods and the service sector as the motors of the economy ● Information is the central ingredient of a post-industrial age ● Idea Of a "new economy" (Tony Blair supported) service/knowledge/skills/small enterprises are its cornerstones → its most valuable assets are knowledge and creativity ● The success of digital platforms in terms of both revenues/users has led to many of our rules/predictions in relation to the potential of the internet to democratise production/equalize distribution/liberate labour ● Vast amounts of computing power are now available to consumers for a fraction of the price they once were, offers abundant provision and has solved the problem fo limited bandwidth (plagued the analogue universe) ● Mobile phone/broadband connection have massively expanded choice (in quantitative terms) and put an end to the notion that media products are a scarce resource ● Former Wired editor Chris anderson states he need to turn our attention from the head to the long tail of media markets where millions upon millions of low-volume transactions are now set to be more lucrative than the increasingly unpredictable # of blockbusters ○ Long tail is efficient and democratic → exposes consumers to far more diverse range of content than the traditional media economy ever did ■ Changes the balance of power inside decision-making processes in the cultural industries away from hierarchical elites down to us → the new gatekeepers of population/niche tastes ● Digitation and the internet's unlimited storage capacity have helped to lower transaction and distribution costs to such an extent (now possible to make $ giving things away) ● Anderson puts it as an entirely new economic model for free in which we now expect not to have to part w/ money to access digital services 35 ○ Transmit for existing record companies/news which are seeing their sales/revenues declined due to vicious price competition from their online rival ○ Eventually the force of free will win → free redistributes value in more democratic way than traditional market transactions ● Abundant media economy has not only carved up market into series of interlocking niches but has reconfigured the power relationships within this economy by challenging the ability of the old media to charge exorbitant prices for its products ● True that a market of niches is replacing the old blockbuster economy ● Big media, the 20th century icons of industrial production had a significant role to play when attention was abundant outlets were scarce ○ Spent millions on production/marketing making efficient business models → in a situation of digital abundance the blockbuster strategy is doomed ● Haque states that digital markets are structured along principles of coordination and nto command → distributed not centralized ● Product strategies required to profit from niche markets are openness/intelligence. Decentralization and connectedness → precisely the qualities lacking in the old media (w/ with hierarchical structures) → key to success is openness ● Jarvis describes google as the first post-media company → networked power is accrued by those who focus their activity son linking rather than owning → google keeps open networks ○ Customer value nto control is the answer to the digital economy (Tapscott/Williams) ● Bounder (old media) being dense, drowned out by pebbles (light/more transparent) newer startups ● Competitive instinct of large corporations is being challenged by the collaborative urge of the individual user → internet leads to horizontal peer-to-peer exchange in a way previous mass broadcast can't ○ Fundamentally social in this writing so it invites users to aggregate their skills/knowledge ● Web has led to a "We-Think" revolution where people think together (into groupthink but an opportunity to use tech to harvest ideas from a lot of ordinary people) ● Opportunity to collaborate is at the heart of an emerging sharing economy → the redistribution of spare capacity by ordinary users to meet consumer demand in a diversity of areas ● One CEO noted that the sharing economy is the value in redistributing excess to a community or getting "slack to the pack" ○ Internet might be simply extending analogue forms of behavior (like bartering) ■ Now an unbound marketplace for efficient peer-to-peer exchanges between producer and consumer, seller and buyer ● New grassroot economy of niches is produced by a mass of collaborators → highly specialized but organized on collective principles that profit from the "wisdom" of crowds ● Internet is fcaictatin a form of mass participation in which immobile "boulders" w/ their hierarchical structures and bureaucratic procedures are being outmaneuvered by more adaptive institutional structures ● All you need are some collaborative principles: a commitment to choice, an ability to sue spare capacity together w/ belief in the commons/tust b/w strangers 36 ● Implications for the both the structural transformation of the media industries and the democratic possibilities to follow based on this everybody vs elite shift in society ● First the flattening of hierarchies and spread of point-to-point communication has occurred because of the polycentric nature of the internet has shrunk the space in which gatekeepers traditionally used to operate ○ Process of disintermediation (middlemen are doomed) ● As crowds mobilized by the internet increasingly provide each other w/ the info and resources needed to make informed decisions about everyday life → and as the internet facilitates more direct transactional relationships than previously ○ Gatekeepers are revealed as proprietors of inefficient marketplaces ● Second, digital tech has led to a democratization of media production putting creative tools in the hands of more users (many us teens have smartphone, user facebook/instagram/reddit) ● TV commercials produced for top brands by amateurs exemplifies the democratizing possibilities of crowdsourcing creativity ● Toffler (1980) belief in the rise of the prosumer → emergence of the semiotic democracy engineered by a media-literate active audience ○ For Tapscott and Williams the rise in presumptions amounts to economic revolution (participate in the economy as an equal or do what you) ● Anderson compared the creation of user-created content today w/ Marx's vision of unalienated labor in German ideology (communist society, people freed from the constraints of wage labor) ● For many the current new economy theorist the collaborative principles that are hard-wired into the internet are being carried across to many workplaces ● Wiki Workplace is based on using digital tech to share knowledge/exchange ideas and co-create ○ To proponents it offers opportunity for employee participation ○ Result is that we are shifting from closed/hierarchical workplaces to self-organized/distributed and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge/resources from inside and outside the firm) ● Google is the best example of this "wiki workplace" → work freed from the opacity and isolation of the pre-digital era can finally be enjoyed as an activity that rewards both the worker and the company ● Leadbeater criticised the market fundamentals of libertarians as communitarian optimist (inspired by non-commercial possibilities of social production/peer networks)) ○ Argues that the spread of the web invites us to look at the future from a different vantage point proprietorial and non-proprietorial forces co-exist ■ He envisions public/private goods as complementary and calls for a mixed economy where market transactions are tamed by the collaborative spirit and structures of the web ■ Wants principles of the commons to inform and ameliorate private capitalism ● Mason is committed to the socialization of digital tools to fully realize their potential and to move towards dotcommunism 37 ● Idea swirls that the internet challenges firms to adapt to this new environment ror lose out to their competitors ○ Case of a disruptive tech that shakes up the status quo and paves the future ● Downes argues the internet, like 19th century, are disruptive tech forces of Schumpeterian creative destruction that ultimately demand dramatic transformation ○ Downes argues that the internet is the killer app a technological innovation whose introduction disrupts long-standing rules of market sor even whole societies ● Mcquivet insists we are facing endemic level of disruptive innovation, digital disruption can accelerate the disruption of physical things → the internet obliterates barriers to entry ● Continuous process of innovation leads us to looking at society in a different way (people who help do this, rebels in Downes terms or Jarvis -- disruptive capitalists) ● Many pioneers, stokes a romantic image of capitalism ● Many of these claims are unsubstantiated, steeped in either a market fundamentalism or a technological determinist model of address ● Another approach relies on the MArxist critique that combines recognition of the revolutionary achievements of capitalism w/ an analysis of why capitalism is unable to make available the full potential of these achievements to its subject ○ Advancements were not done because of the genius of the individual scientists and technologists or the bravery of pioneering entrepreneurs but because it is a system based on a structural need to innovate and move forward ○ Marx was captivated by capitalism's innovations but was horrified by the means by which it seeks to reproduce itself ● Marx notes, as opposed to earlier societies where any surplus consumed by the ruling elite, capitalist need to be re-invest this supposed to compete more effectively in a market ○ Capital is any accumulation of value that acts to increase it down value → competition (modern free market) is the DNA of this social system → innovation is required to step up productivity/reduce labor costs ■ Capitalist further accumulate capital to be able to most effectively achieve these aims → will do everything to extract more value from the production process ■ Process of exploitation, alienation, commodification,and concentration according to Marx is a terrible price to be paid by a majority of people for the advancement of capitalism ● Internet digital economy as Downes articulates refers it distinct from other commodities as it is intangible and can be consumed w/o degrading it (acquires more value as it circulates) ○ Advantage in a networked environment to the "innovators" as the value of the network increases exponentially as more join it ■ Network effects reward those who move first and who are able to capture customers and thus mitigate against competition ● Graham's writings looks to ask if the network effects can help us escape the tendencies identified by Marx ○ Reflecting on the specific characteristics of cultural commodities → shrugs of the idea that cultural/informational products are exempt from the rules of the marketplace 38 ○ Given that distribution costs are marginal to production costs, there is first a drive towards securing the largest audience to maximize profits ○ There is a structural need artificially to re-introduce scarcity to regain control over pricing through means of getting up a monopolistic channels of distribution (helps to turn audiences into commodities to be sold to advertisers) ○ To deal w/ the uncertainties of popular taste there is a tendency to produce a cultural repertoire across which the risks can be spread ● Counters Anderson's long tail thesis which negates the urge to maximize ratings/focus on this ● Sylvain argues that the constitutive practices of the "networked information economy" are not immune to the undemocratic problems of concentration/centralization → problems are constitutive of new media ● Internet has many individuals that give it time/genergy for fulfillment/mutual gain ○ Wiki/review sites, a thriving gift economy → vast areas of the wbe have no paywalls → Anderson points to this as evidence of a non monetary production economy ● (2) immediate problem w/ Anderson's argument that free is a radical price ● 1) Not always clear what is meant by free (dependent on a purchase or through ads) → content always has to be subsidized whether the individual user donating their time or the firm wishing to make their service available across different platforms ○ Like the museums that are "free" admission but are taxpayer subsidized ● Anderson's claim that marginal costs in a digital economy are effectively 0 underestimates the cost of marketing/infrastructure that are necessary to offer some goods/services for free ● (2) Even where content is provided for "free" at the direct point of contact there is nevertheless a tendency within a market system to find wherever possible a non-zero price (NYT charges for content) ● Paywalls might not work for generalized user but business users are willing for premium content ● Free w/ obvious benefit for consumers in the short term (especially given the competition for advertising revenue to generate the capital needed to pay journalists/directors are required to produce original/high quality content ● Something is free has little to do w/ understanding comdodotification, it is a general incorporation into a system of market exchange that turns a good into a commodity ● Marx says object of utility becomes commodities only by means of relations which the act of exchange establishes directly b/w the products and directly through them b/w the producers ● While we pay nothing on sites, others are paying to reach us → sold here is our profile/search history → as Garnham argues that the main commodity in the cultural industries is the audience as it is sold over and over again to advertisers ● Tapscott and Williams claims facebook uses "friendship? As a currency that drives the network ○ Relationships do not just matter on linkedin but are quantified and monetized as a market of biographies ● The extent that much of the labor online is carried out by highly active prosumers makes for an efficient way of gathering/filtering/analyzing data that can be sold on tot advertisers 39 ○ Osco argues that digital tech is used to refine the process of delivering audiences to advertisers ● User-generaec content is mro epariticpatriy and cost effective means of generating free content that helps advertiser/markets ● By matching advertisers to consume son the basis of algorithms everything becomes commodified even the mass of niches → to advertisers everyone is just "users" ○ Jarvis argues this is an equalizing impact on the marketplace ● Some argue that prosumer activity on the web is labor being exploited by capitalist → idea that "society has become a factory" ● Some argue there is a distinction b/w commodification and exploitation in the realization of profits → former is rampant online it is far less clear that prosumption is productive labor Marx discusses ○ True social media commodify data of users, surplus value is generated through the labor of employees who process this data ● Can't equate the plight of assembly line workers w/ social media users ● Concept of social media exploitation fits only the activities of the companies who profit from digital labor → but many sites have non-commercial character ○ Is the internet in (2) spheres, commodified and non-commodified? ● Reality is it so hard to separate the (2) parts of the internet → are in constant tension → we know that any attempt to use new tech innovation increases profitability/efficiency (premise of "wikinomics' down by Tapscott and WIlliams us to use open source to renew market institutions) → w/o commons no private enterprise ● Wikinomics Suggests that the greatest threat is that a firm is unable to respond to a threat in time ○ Companies are encouraged to learn how to apply the collab principles of open source to their specific business to inc productivity ○ Seen in the "sharing economy" collab is sought (AirBnB and Uber) ● We should see the relationship b/w noncommercial and commercial spheres as contradictory ○ Related to the need of capitalism to monetize and to incorporate into market exchange practices like reviewing/sharing that come from non-commercial urges ○ Wiki/Linux how's the emancipatory principal of the web and the intimate relationship w/ corporate logic ○ → a fundamental process through which capitalism is organized/reproduced (both online/offline) ● 20th century industry corps grows on collab/had a strict hierarchy → "new economy" proponents argue the success of web 2.0 is in avoiding a "command and control" mentality and take a collaborative approach within corporate culture ● Google started within $25m in funding in 1999 → series of lawsuits → Brin/Page/Schmidt control 37.6% of the company so they can maintain control ● Google has had a first-mover advantage and acquired firms to improve its service/market space → bought over 180 companies (nearly 30b) ○ Facebook spent $21b on 55 companeos ○ Both recognize having an IPO is core to their ability to generate revenue → control access to proprietary technology 40 ○ Fact that google requires employees to sight confidentiality agreements clashed w/ Jarvis's idea of Google's openness ○ Reminder that there are firm restrictions on the autonomy of labor in a company even like google → explained as a large firm operating in an emerging market ■ Has perks like 20% time off to work on projects/high quality lunch of there are added benefits to google (better products/workers) → strategies of exploitations are not a surprise considering their value ○ Company is not structured horizontally btu w/ power concentrated at top ● Openness are not the principles on which it is organize dos much as the products it sells ● Digital economy depends on the exploitation of paid creative labor, exploitation will intensify ● Exploitation in digital economy esp where companies foster relationships w/ independent contractors to a avoid paying benefits/breaks owed to permanent employees ○ Companies like Uber offer independence but in reality give smaller jobs/wages and profit ● User generated content is actively sought by a range of companies to reduce marketing cost/associate themselves w/ the "semiotic democracy" for consumer-made content ○ New company had a lot of participant consumerism ● Tapscott and Williams argue that this kind co-creation enabled by decentralized/interactive features of the internet has results in an engaged citizenry and a "prosumer" revolution ○ This is too often incorporated within a system of commodity exchange controlled by elites who either call for user-generated material or cull from existing sites ○ Imaginative labor of ordinary people is appropriated for the benefits it accrues to social media companies who sell it to advertisers ○ Further example of commodification and drive for accumulation ● Graham (1998) despite that the internet can operate on near zero marginal costs, a digital media economy still required significant resources to make content → predicted an intensification of economies of both scales (to offset costs) and scope (convergence/cross promotion) ○ Also the emergence of new types of scarcity and further concentration because of the economic benefits of being in a network ● Figures seem to support Graham and challenge the notion that bottlenecks are disappearing → google dominates under 90% of the total world searches ● Top (4) companies of Google, Baidu, Microsoft, Yahoo! Attracted 70% of gross revenue around the globe ● Online display maybe the fastest growing sector of the world ad market but the proceeds are not shared equally (google/facebook are 40% of revenue) ● We find highly concentrated market sectors (in music, video, social networking) ● Globally 4 of the 5 most popular apps are owned by a single company -- Facebook ○ People in US and Uk spent 80% of their time on 5 apps like facebook/youtube/gmail ● They are comparable to "old media' markets that were held to be examples of the lack of competition the web would supersede (makes sense European Commission's antitrust investigation tno google) 41 ● Even though the internet is facilitating an enormous increase in content as well as the means of distributing content, it is doing it on the basis of economic/consumer trends not too dissimilar from the past ● Thiel states that monopoly is the economic prerequisite for success in a field, refers to when one firm as legally outwitted all its rivals in quality/distinctiveness of its product ○ Monopoly provides a basis for strategic thinking/ongoing innovation the monopolist can plan ahead while its rival think about short-term survival ○ Thiel argues monopoly is the condition of every successful business ● Digital monopolies like google and facebook are neither more benevolent or more public-minded and have amassed political/economic/cultural power ○ Monopolies are the beneficiaries of venture capital investment/lax regulation/sympathetic tax regimes ● Incentive for companies to produce blockbusters and a willingness for audiences to consume them ● Ekberse found that the top 10% of songs in Rhapsody accounted for 78% of all plays and tp 1% had 1⁄2 of all plays ○ Shows that a high level of concentration → tail (from long-tail thesis) is getting longer, there now is a vat amount of content accessible even if there is no demonstrable mas market for it ■ Also getting flatter → division as consumers look for blockbusters ○ Shows the internet's capacity to be as efficient/expansive storage system ● Netflix is now producing its own content → Sarandos claims another source of profit for netflix is that is streams Friends, hidden away in archive → now Netflix is more like HBO than the back-catalog specialist it was in 2006 ● Netflix supports Elberse Conclusions that the companies that are to gain the most from the digital economy are not those who supply the tial (variety of content) but those who are most capable of capitalizing on individual best sellers ● May be zillions of tweets/videos but little evidence they will replace traditional content providers or escape traditional economic imperative that reward scale/scope ● Even if there was no demand/incentive to make blockbusters there is little evidence that the circulation of niche goods is predicated on different market logic ○ Not on based on tendency towards concentration/nee for accumulation ● Anderson/Jarvis belief in democratic benefits of a niche economy is abse dona misunderstanding of the relationship b/w the mass and niche ○ Former s an outmoded form of top down control, later is a tomatic expression of individualism → both cite Williams as us seeing people at masses but Williams was condemning the use of the world mased by industry leaders to commodify large groups of people ● Nothing threatening about masses, nothing democratic about niches ● Growth of inches spurred a need for gatekeepers to structure access to population/compel markets → power may be shifting but it appears to be displacing previously dominant distributors in favor of new digital intermediaries who may be reluctant to cater equally to all niches ● Reminder that traditional mechanism for ensuring the viability of cultural commodities in a capitalist market (for monopolies/bottlenecks) are relevant to the new digital economy 42 ● Many contributors articulate a deterministic vision of a frictionless capitalism in which questions of reality have been sidelined, profit-making naturalized/exploitation minimized ○ Dynamics of the free market have been abstracted from their daily iteration/replaced w/ tech induced vision of an economic system based on an innate tendency to equalize/make transparent the social relations in which capitalism rests ● Even digital is subject to the same crises of supply/demand and the same periods of speculation that affect other varieties of capitalism ● Many of the factors symptomatic of mass media company (propensity towards monopolization/commodification/accumulation) are central to the dynamics of new media economy ○ Shaped by contradictory forces of the internet that promise dispesion but reard cocnentration (fetishisize openess bt encoruage propriety behavior) ● Digital sphere is not a parallel economy but one that accentuates tension b/w creativity and collaboration of generative system and the hierarchies prioritized by a system that rests the pursuit of profit above all

Braun, J. (2016). "New Media in Context: Parts I and III," Culture Digitally (podcast)

​http://culturedigitally.org/2016/05/media-technology-culture-open-source-audio-lectures/