Historicising net studies

The rapid spread of networked communication through PCs and servers has attracted enor- mous quantities of popular excitement, critical attention and commercial interest. In truth, the growth of the Internet since the invention of World Wide Web software ranks as a truly remarkable cultural achievement. The quantity of human labour and ingenuity that has gone into building net-based communication systems in a very short space of time is unprece- dented. It is impossible to contemplate the mass of data that has been written into web based software without experiencing a vertiginous sense of cultural endeavour. Clearly the growth of the Internet has been the site for major investments of the ‘technological imaginary’ (see1.5.2 for definitions); successive waves of visionary speculation have accompanied its growth from a very limited enthusiasts’ network to its current status as a popular and widely distributed form of media and communications. This investment in the technological imagi- nary can be seen at work, literally, in the rise and fall of the ‘dot.com bubble’ between 1995 and 2001 in which share prices for any company associated with digital technology and the Internet were inflated by excitable demand beyond their real value. Investors, seduced by techno-hyperbole, rushed to put money into companies with no proven revenue streams. The crash that followed the March 2000 peak share price has often been credited with triggering a global economic recession. The technological imaginary is powerful indeed.

In this section we will be looking at uses of the Internet and some of the dominant ways in which media and communication scholars have sought to conceptualise these develop- ments. Although our day-to-day experience of the Internet is suffused with novelty, with a sense of immediacy and up to the minute communications, it has a history that stretches back to the Second World War. The discursive, technological and economic developments of the Internet all serve to shape our experience today.

The critical history of the Internet draws upon a wide range of approaches some of which are synthesised as the study of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). The study of CMC has primarily developed as a socio-linguistic discipline based in Communications Theory and Sociology. Whilst there is some overlap with Media Studies in a common concern for understanding forms of technologically mediated communication it was for many years by no means clear how ‘the Internet’ was a medium in the same way as TV, Film or Photography were distinct media (Case study 1.9). It has become increasingly clear however that, fol- lowing Boulter and Grusin’s model of remediation, as existing media, e.g. TV, photography, find new distribution channels online they in turn changetheir cultural form. Hybridising forms of new media emerge through the interaction between existing forms and the new distribu- tion technologies of the net. All media producers now have to consider what TV executives

call ‘360-degree programming’, i.e. how a TV text will have an online life, how audiences will be offered additional interactive experiences, how a media product might become ‘trans- medial’ by generating revenue across a range of audiences and platforms linked by Internet marketing and distribution. Just as the 100-minute feature emerged as the ideal length for the dream palace cinemas of the 1930s so the 5-minute video clip becomes a standard for the early days of broadband. However when these processes of remediation occur online they are often accompanied by particular kinds of claims associated with rhetorics of Internet enthusiasts.

Writing in 1995 leading net scholar Steven Jones (1994: 26) summed up the inflated claims for the impact of what was then termed ‘Computer Mediated Communications’ (CMC). He observed that popular and critical writing claimed that the net would:

• create opportunities for education and learning • create new opportunities for participatory democracy • establish countercultures on an unprecedented scale

• ensnarl already difficult legal matters concerning privacy, copyright and ethics • restructure man/machine interaction.

These themes have continued to interest students of the net in its fully ‘post web’ era. Publishing nine years later David Gauntlett’s review of ‘some of the main issues’ (2004: 14–20) are surprising insofar as they display strong continuities with the fundamental issues identified by a previous generation of CMC research. Gauntlett summarises the research areas in the field as:

1 The Web allows people to express themselves – through putting up their own sites, though Social Networks and peer-to-peer media sharing, through blogging and YouTube posting, ‘The Web . . . offers an extraordinary explosion of opportunity for creativity and expression’ (2004: 16).

2 Anonymity and play in cyberspace– Gauntlett extends the earlier CMC based work that seized on the possible anonymities of net based communications as a living embodiment of post-structuralist identity theory and asserts that it is where queer theory can ‘really come to life . . . because the Internet breaks the connection between outward expres- sions of identity and the physical body’ (2004: 19). However he goes on to say that this is now perhaps of less interest than thinking about expressions of identity between people’s sites. This prefigures the growth of interest in social network sites which, as we will see below, in some ways reverses the previous focus on anonymity.

3 The Web and Big Business– Here Gauntlett makes the excellent point that throughout the early phase of net development the dominant discourse on the economics of the web was that business interests would destroy the culture of the web but that ‘Nowadays, the bigger panics run in the opposite direction – big business are scared that the Internet will ruin them’ (2004: 19). Since this publication we have seen the rise of ‘open innovation’ and ‘wikinomics’ in which the culture of co-creativity articulated through the net is becom- ing the basis for corporate business practice.

4 The Web is changing politics and international relations– This continues the arguments made by the first generation of net researchers that the Internet had the potential to revive

the public sphere through providing for multiple lateral public conversations. These trends clearly continue both in the use of web publication by ‘subaltern’ or outsider groups as well as through the impact of the blog explosion on the fourth estate functions of jour- nalism.

The educational potentials of the web are now more or less taken for granted with enormous investment in IT in education and training sectors. However the emancipatory aspects of knowledge production and circulation envisaged by the first scholars of CMC are more truly apparent in the development of Wikipedia – an online encyclopaedia produced by the hive mind of its many users. The enormous success of Wikipedia has prompted all kinds of other ‘Wiki’ based knowledge generating and sharing processes, such that ‘Wiki’ has become a noun referring to a shared knowledge site just as ‘Google’ has become a verb meaning to find information. The academic production of knowledge has started to acknowledge that open processes of peer review are a useful way to ‘guarantee’ knowledge (the British Medical Journalbegan an open peer review experiment in 1999 and was followed by the prestigious journal Naturein 2006) and business has adopted the idea of ‘open innovation’ represented in the publication of books like Tapscott and Williams Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything(2006).

On the other hand the claim that CMC would create a democratic dividend looks a little pale in a post 9/11 global environment where democratic rights of all kinds are sacrificed to the ‘war on terror’ and the intimate weave of communications technologies into the fabric of everyday life offers unprecedented opportunities for consumer and political surveillance. Nevertheless this apparent intensification of global control has been accompanied by extraor- dinary renewals of the public sphere whether by bloggers working outside the discourses of the ‘embedded’ journalist or by soldiers posting YouTube videos from the frontlines of Afghanistan and Iraq. Here the continuing public sphere functions of the net can be seen to afford increased levels of participation in democratic debate.

This renewal of the public sphere of course also overlaps with Jones’s third point above that the net, it was alleged, would establish countercultures on an unprecedented scale. It is certainly the case that the net has facilitated the communication and consolidation of every kind of cultural community imaginable – how many of these are genuinely ‘countercultural’, or what this term might even mean ten years on is less clear. To be ‘counter’ is to be in oppo- sition, to something, some ‘mainstream’. The sheer profusion of net based affinity groups with whom users might ally themselves make the political ‘edge’ of the term ‘countercultural’ increasingly irrelevant.

Clearly Jones’s fourth claim of CMC studies is all too accurate. The twentieth-century laws of Intellectual Property have been thrown into all kinds of disarray. The technological affor- dances of digital net based communication to illegally copy and distribute IP in the form of music and movies through peer-to-peer networks like Napster, Kazaa and BitTorrent are transforming not only IP law but also media distribution. The affordances of the net, combined with the ‘open innovation’ trend described above, both tied to the historical force of the open source ‘information wants to be free’ movement, combine in the development of the ‘copy- right commons’. This is a way of licensing copyright that makes work freely available: ‘A protocol enabling people to ASSERT that a work has no copyright or WAIVE any rights asso- ciated with a work.’

Finally Jones summarises the claim that CMC will ‘restructure man/machine interaction’. This prediction can certainly be seen to be true as far as the imbrication of technologies of communication into everyday life is concerned. Whether that could be said to represent a

http://creative commons.org/

total ‘restructuring’ is debatable. What is clear is that the increasingly intimate relationships we have with technologies of communication continue to call into question the autonomous embodied subject. Understanding the self as a networked presence has almost become a commonplace – consciousness is increasingly understood as an ‘assemblage’ in which tech- nologically mediated communications systems are as much part of our consciousness as ‘nature’ or the body.

In looking at the evolution of web studies as broadly summed up by Jones and Gauntlett there are, then, clear questions that continue to drive our inquiries into net based communi- cations systems. Questions of identity performance, the influence of the net on the public and business spheres, and questions of IP continue to be the focus of the critical questions which new media scholarship attempts ask.

However in bringing these questions to bear we should be conscious that some of the research methods underpinning these inquiries are the province of other disciplinary fields such as psychology, sociology and law. This signifies a tension in new media studies itself – as the media objects of our attention transform and mutate in conditions of digital intercon- nectedness we need to call upon other disciplines to explain what is occurring. In these circumstances it may be beyond the scope of this book to cover all the psychological or soci- ological ramifications of the net. Our focus has to be on the impact of these ramifications on media practices. Recent developments in user-generated content (UGC), Web 2.0, co- creative practices and so called ‘Long Tail’ economics all suggest a distinctively new phase in the impact of the web on media production and use.

In part these ‘new’ developments online of the early years of the century are develop- ments of existing Internet affordances made possible through increased bandwidth and information processing speed. This is especially true of the growth of moving image services online in sites like YouTube or online TV services such as Joost, Babelgum andCurrent TV because moving image is very processor and bandwidth ‘hungry’. In yet other cases the development of particular net based platforms is more explicable through thinking about the complex ecologies of users, technologies and cultural forms that net applications have to sur- vive within. For instance the first true Social Network Site Six Degrees.comwas founded as early as 1997 but failed to thrive in the way that later SNS were able to – the ‘media ecology’ into which the software was introduced was not yet suitable.

Apart from the increase in bandwidth and speed of processors there is a second major new factor in the contemporary web landscape compared to its historic structure – the web is now more commercially viable, and therefore, sustainable. Web generated revenue still depends on two very traditional sources of income, advertising and retail. However retail operations are now more careful, better run and have better security than in their early days. Web retailers have also embraced the economics of ‘the Long Tail’, exploiting the global reach of the web to turn many tiny regional markets into one big worldwide market for many different products (see 3.13for discussion of the Long Tail). As we will see the economic via- bility of the Long Tail is having significant impacts not only on the retailing of music or DVDs but also on the size of moving image audiences. This is linked to what we would argue is the most significant aspect of web media development in recent history – its establishment as a reliable advertising market. Advertising and sponsorship of web sites has also grown very fast in the first years of the century and can now offer a reliable income stream for some web based media aggregators. Figures for Internet ad spend are often provided by the industries with most interest in boosting their credibility so need to be interpreted accordingly – however most estimates point to a current (2008) ad share of around 8 percent of total advertising spend, in the UK bigger than the radio advertising sector. Moreover the trend in these figures

over the past five years shows very high growth of 30–40 percent p.a. therefore attracting high investment. Market specialists predict that the Web will account for more than 10 per- cent of total advertising spend from 2009 onward.

Since the first edition of this book was published models of advertising online have evolved into forms more suited to the particular ecology of the web. Media production such as TV, Radio and the Press have always relied in various ways on advertising revenue for their survival. However in the age of mass media advertising revenue was measured by number of ‘eyeballs’ exposed to a particular ad – the quality of attention paid to the ad was of a con- siderably lower importance than the sizeof the audience. Net advertising is evolving away from that model. New forms of online advertising are emerging such as viral marketing and brand advocacy programmes using social networks, bloggers and forum moderators.

These forms of advertising are designed to cultivate ‘engagement’, investment in brand identities rather than merely exposure. Advertising that achieves this aim can be sold at a much higher premium than Google ads, banners or pop ups. This is key because it means that a high quality, engaged audience of a few hundred thousand can now earn as much rev- enue as much larger audiences in the mass media era. The consolidation of a properly founded online advertising market releases revenue streams for media production. This advertising market had not developed at the time of the first dot.com boom and crash – Internet based media practices, although still in their infancy, can have confidence in the future whilst they continue to take advertising share from the traditional media forms.