T
hink about the main media technologies in your life ten or fifteen
years ago. How did you watch TV shows, listen to music, or read
books? How did you communicate with friends?
Now consider this: Apple began selling music through iTunes in 2003;
Facebook was born in 2004, but was only opened to everyone in 2006; smartphones
debuted in 2007; Hulu and Netflix launched their streaming video services
in 2008; the iPad was introduced in 2010 and Apple’s Siri first spoke to us in
2011. In just a little over ten years, we have moved from a world where each type
of media was consumed separately and in its own distinct format to a world where
we can experience every form of mass media content—books, music, newspapers,
television, video games—on almost any Internet-connected device.
It used to be that things didn’t move so quickly in the world of mass communication.
After the world got wired with the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s and
the telephone in the 1880s, the two next great electronic mass media were radio,
popularized in the 1920s, and television, popularized in the 1950s. And until recently,
print media like books, newspapers, and magazines remained much as they
were when they were first invented.
The history of mass media has moved from the emergence of media to the convergence
of media. While electronic media have been around for a long time, it was the
development of the Web and the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium in
the early 1990s that allowed an array of media—text, photos, audio, and video—to
converge in one space and be easily shared. But while media have been converging
since the early 1990s, in the past ten years we have experienced a great
digital turn. Ever-growing download speeds and the development of more portable
devices, from laptops to smartphones to tablets, have fundamentally changed the
ways in which we access and consume media.
The digital turn has made us more fragmented than ever before, but ironically also
more connected. We might not be able to count on our friends all having watched
the same television show the night before, but Facebook and Twitter have made
it easier for us to connect with friends—and strangers—and tell them what we
watched, read, and listened to.
P A R T 1
Digital Media and
Convergence
How are smartphones being used?
Do you own a smartphone
or tablet? If
so, consider how much
time you spend using it,
and what you use it for.
Smartphones and tablets allow us
to consume almost all forms of
media in one place, anywhere there’s an
lnternet or data connection. What are
some possible drawbacks to this?
2003
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
2011
Siri, Apple’s voice
recognition
assistant, is born
on the iPhone 4S
The iTunes Store
begins selling
music
Mark
Zuckerberg
launches
Facebook
Apple
launches
the iPad
Social gaming
explodes with
FarmVille’s release
on Facebook
Social gaming explodes when
World of Warcraft is released
online as massively multiplayer
online role-playing game
Netflix offers unlimited
digital streaming to
subscribers
Facebook opens
to all, and
Twitter is born
Amazon
launches
the Kindle
Apple and Android smartphones
hit the market
Apple’s
App Store
opens
YouTube
starts
streaming
1 2
92%
TEXT
MESSAGE
69%
DOWNLOAD
APPS
54%
WATCH
A VIDEO
84%
ACCESS
INTERNET
64%
PLAY
MUSIC
37%
ONLINE
BANKING
92%
TAKE
PICTURES
64%
PLAY
GAMES
45%
POST
PHOTOS/VIDEOS
80%
SEND
PHOTOS/VIDEOS
59%
RECORD
VIDEOS
15%
ACCESS
TWITTER
76%
E-MAIL
59%
SOCIAL
NETWORK
13%
VIDEO
CALL/CHAT
See Notes for list of sources.
39
40
From Emergence to Convergence
While convergence is not a new concept, the digital turn has irrevocably changed
the media industries, and our relationship with media.
• The cathode-ray tube, an early innovation in TV technology (Chapter 6, page
197), also played a part in the start of the Internet, as well as electronic
gaming (Chapter 3, page 82).
• The development of the Internet went from wired to wireless (Chapter 2,
page 58), much like the shift from the telegraph to radio (Chapter 5,
pages 158–160).
• The PC and wireless Internet may have started media convergence, but the
smartphone and tablet are responsible for the digital turn—where all media
can be consumed on one device anywhere and anytime (Chapter 2, page 58).
• Today’s video game console is no longer just for playing games—it can be a
connection to the Internet, a digital video recorder, and a music and video
player (Chapter 3, page 87).
• New times equal new formats. For example, a newspaper is still a medium
for news, except it’s increasingly less likely to be read on paper (Chapter 8,
pages 304–305).
The New Media Conglomerates?
The digital turn has put corporations like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft,
and Google at the forefront of our media.
• These digital corporations might not produce media content, but they are
involved in distributing all media (Chapter 13, pages 468–469).
• Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook are becoming major players in electronic
gaming too (Chapter 3, page 110).
• But it’s not all about the conglomerates. The digital turn also allows other,
more nimble companies to rise depending on how well they connect with the
social culture of digital users (Chapter 13, page 469).
Digital Media and Privacy Concerns
The massive amount of personal information flowing around the Internet puts our
privacy at risk.
• Media companies have long used personal information in our Internet
searches, e-mail, and social networking profiles to provide us with targeted
ads (Chapter 2, page 66).
• But now with smartphones, it’s easier than ever for media corporations to
find out more about our private lives—even where we are at this precise
moment (Chapter 2, pages 66–68).
• Who decides what information is legal for companies to use, and what isn’t
(Chapter 16, pages 570-573)?
The Digital Turn and Democracy
The old world of media was mostly a one-way street. As mass media users today,
we have more power than ever.
• If we don’t like what we see or read, we can easily provide immediate
feedback—or better yet, create our own content (Chapter 2, pages 52–53).
• But are Internet users, particularly in the closed world of apps, only seeking
out those with similar interests and viewpoints (Chapter 2, pages 66–68)?
• Independent video game creators are now able to create games outside
the über-popular first-person-shooter games (Chapter 3, page 110).
• And in journalism, blogging and citizen journalism are prime examples of
how convergence and the Internet have allowed for more voices (Chapter 14,
pages 507-510).
For more on Internet users creating their own content, watch the “UserGenerated
Content” video on VideoCentral: Mass Communication at
bedfordstmartins.com/mediaculture.
41
CHAPTER 2 ○ THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE 43
The Internet,
Digital Media,
and Media
Convergence
In the mountains of North Carolina, four
springtime hikers reported missing in the
evening were back to safety by midnight. In a
rugged park near the San Francisco Bay, two
other hikers, lost after dark, were promptly
found by a California Highway Patrol helicopter.
In both cases, the hikers could have suffered
from hypothermia, lack of food and water, and
the scare of their lives. The key to their speedy
rescue was a device from their more urban
lives—their mobile phones, which had Global
Positioning System (GPS) technology. The lost
hikers simply had to call an emergency number,
and rescuers found the lost callers using the
latitude and longitude coordinates transmitted
from the phone’s built-in GPS signal.
Around the world, hikers with mobile phones are
no longer lost—at least as long as their batteries
last, and if they can find a signal. In the wilderness
of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the rate of search
and rescue missions in the area has dropped
46
The Development
of the Internet and
the Web
52
The Web Goes Social
58
Convergence
and Mobile Media
62
The Economics and
Issues of the Internet
73
The Internet and
Democracy
DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA
CONVERGENCE
by more than half over the past decade
as people use GPS to find their own way
out. In Tasmania, Australia, local authorities
retired their team of trained search
and rescue dogs after mobile phones
with GPS reduced the need for search
missions for missing bushwalkers.
“Everybody carries a mobile phone now,
and the service is pretty good in most
areas—if you are lost you can often
climb to the top of a hill and get service,”
said the founder of Search and Rescue
Dogs of Tasmania.1
Back in the cities and suburbs, mobile
phones with GPS are less like survival
tools and more like life trackers.
On services like Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram, you can share, with
precise coordinates, where you are,
where you’ve been, and where your
photos were taken. In fact, some of
these services automatically geo-tag
the location of photos and posts. As
it turns out, sharing your every move
on social media becomes much more
valuable when you have GPS—to you,
to your friends, and to advertisers.
Several companies, such as Foursquare,
Yelp, and Poynt, encourage
users to check in at local business
locations, earn points and savings,
and share their reviews, recommendations,
and locations with friends. Poynt
combines GPS location data with users’
search terms to more precisely target
consumers with location-based advertising.
“We know where your customer
is and what they are looking for so that
you can tailor your advertising message
accordingly,” Poynt notes. But what is a
boon for advertisers and customers—
more specific, and therefore more
useful, ads—needs to be balanced
against concerns of too much consumer
surveillance. Even though consumers
are volunteering their location by
allowing their social media posts to be
geo-tagged or by using location-based
services, some are balking at the idea
of advertisers and their mobile phone
companies collecting and even saving
this information.
Wireless mobile technologies change
our relationship with the Internet. It
used to be that we would sit down, log
on, and go “on” the Internet. Now, the
Internet goes with us, and knows, at
every moment, where we are.
“Not only have smartphones
seen recordbeating
adoption among
consumers, they have also
become the Swiss Army
knives of consumer electronics,
doing a decent job
at dozens of tasks once
reserved for specialized
hardware like cameras and
GPS systems.”
JESSICA LEBER, MIT TECHNOLOGY
REVIEW, 2013
44 PART 1 ○ DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, the vast network of telephone and cableT
lines, wireless connections, and satellite systems designed to link
and carry digital information worldwide, was initially described
as an information superhighway. This description implied that the
goal of the Internet was to build a new media network, a new
superhighway, to replace traditional media (e.g., books, newspapers,
television, and radio), the old highway system. In many
ways, the original description of the Internet has turned out to be
true. The Internet has expanded dramatically from its initial
establishment in the 1960s to an enormous media powerhouse
that encompasses—but has not replaced—all other media today.
In this chapter, we examine the many dimensions of the
Internet, digital media, and convergence. We will:
• Review the birth of the Internet and the development of the
Web
• Provide an overview of the key features of the Internet, including
instant messaging, search engines, and social media
• Discuss the convergence of the Internet with mobile media, such as smartphones and
tablets, and how the Internet has changed our relationship with media
• Examine the economics of the Internet, including the control of Internet content, ownership
issues, and the five leading Internet companies
• Investigate the critical issues of the Internet such as targeted advertising, free speech, security,
net neutrality, and access
As you read through this chapter, think back to your first experiences with the Internet. What
was your first encounter like? What were some of the things you remember using the Internet
for then? How did it compare with your first encounters with other mass media? How has the
Internet changed since your first experiences with it? For more questions to help you think
through the role of the Internet in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
Past-Present-Future:
The Internet
From its inception, the Internet’s main purpose has been for
sharing information. In the 1960s, U.S. Defense Department
researchers developed the forerunner of today’s Internet
as a way for military and academic researchers at various
locations to share access to computers (which were bulky
and expensive at the time). Soon, the researchers invented
e-mail to share ideas and documents, and with the development
of personal computers in the 1970s, the network grew
to include more users at universities and research labs.
Today, sharing on the Internet is made easy with mobile
devices and the ever-present social media “share” buttons.
But perhaps we share a little too easily. The Internet
economy is based on us sharing unprecedented amounts of
information—our search interests, our e-mail content, our
messages, our photos, our birthdays, our musical tastes,
our shopping habits—that companies like Google, Facebook,
Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon track to better advertise and
sell more products to us. Of course, Internet companies
often give us free services—e-mail, social networks, search
engines, apps—in exchange, but often we have no idea just
how much of ourselves we are sharing. Conversely, when
we share intellectual property, such as copyrighted music,
movies, books, and images, we are monitored and tracked
as well, and notified quickly of the inappropriate use.
The future debates about the Internet will continue to
be about the nature of sharing on it. For example, should
there be limits on the types and amount of personal data
companies can compile on us through the Internet? In a
digital world, should we be able to share small amounts of
copyrighted music and images on the Internet as easily as
we can currently quote and share text? Should all of us—
individuals, small organizations, and large corporations—all
be able to share equal access to the Internet at the same,
reasonable cost? Should we be able to share anything on the
Internet, even if it might offend some people? The answers
to all of these questions about our rights to share (or not to
share) on the Internet are essential to its function not only as
an economic environment, but also as a democratic medium.
YOUTUBE is the most
popular Web site for
watching videos online. Full
of amateur and home videos,
the site now partners with
mainstream television and
movie companies to provide
professional content as well
(a change that occurred after
Google bought the site in
2006).
46 PART 1 ○ DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA
CONVERGENCE
From its humble origins as a military communications network in the 1960s, the Internet
became increasingly interactive by the 1990s, allowing immediate two-way communication
and one-to-many communication. By the 2000s, the Internet was a multimedia source for
both information and entertainment as it quickly became an integral part of our daily lives. For
example, in 2000, about 50 percent of American adults were connected to the Internet; by 2012
about 80 percent of American adults used the Internet.2
The Birth of the Internet
The Internet originated as a military-government project, with computer time-sharing as one of
its goals. In the 1960s, computers were relatively new and there were only a few of the expensive,
room-sized mainframe computers across the country for researchers to use. The Defense
Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) developed a solution to enable
researchers to share computer processing time starting in the late 1960s. This original Internet—
called ARPAnet and nicknamed the Net—enabled military and academic researchers to communicate
on a distributed network system (see Figure 2.1 on page 47). First, ARPA created a wired
network system in which users from multiple locations could log into a computer whenever
they needed it. Second, to prevent logjams in data communication, the network used a system
called packet switching, which broke down messages into smaller pieces to more easily routegg
them through the multiple paths on the network before reassembling them on the other end.
The Development
of the Internet and the Web
“The dream behind
the Web is of a
common information
space in which
we communicate
by sharing
information. Its
universality is
essential: the fact
that a hyper-text
link can point to
anything, be it
personal, local, or
global, be it draft
or highly polished.”
TIM BERNERS-LEE,
INVENTOR OF THE
WORLD WIDE WEB,
2000
 The Internet, Digital Media, and Media Convergence
E-mail
The process by which
electronic messages are
sent from computer to
computer on a network is
first developed in the early
1970s, revolutionizing
modes of communication
(p. 48).
NSF Network
In 1982, the National
Science Foundation
bankrolls a high-speed
communications
network, connecting
computers across the
country (p. 48).
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980
Digital Technology
In the late 1940s, images,
texts, and sounds are first
converted into “binary
code“—ones and zeros—
vastly improving the rate at
which information is stored
and reproduced (p. 58).
ARPAnet
The U.S. Defense
Department begins research
in the late 1960s
on a distributed communication
network—
the groundwork for the
Internet (p. 46).
Microprocessors
These miniature computer
circuits, developed
in 1971, enable personal
computers to be born.
PCs become increasingly
smaller, cheaper, and more
powerful (p. 48).
CHAPTER 2 ○ THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE 47
Ironically, one of the most hierarchically structured and centrally organized institutions in
our culture—the national defense industry—created the Internet, possibly the least hierarchical
and most decentralized social network ever conceived. Each computer hub in the Internet has
similar status and power, so nobody can own the system outright and nobody has the power to
kick others off the network. There isn’t even a master power switch, so authority figures cannot
shut off the Internet—although as we will discuss later, some nations and corporations have attempted
to restrict access for political or commercial benefit.
Fiber-Optic Cable
Thin glass bundles of
fiber capable of transmitting
thousands
of digital messages
are developed in the
mid-1980s, allowing
broadcast channels,
telephone signals, and
other data to go on the
Internet (p. 48).
AOL
The company is
launched in 1985,
becoming the most
successful Internet
service provider for
the next decade
(pp. 49–50).
Web Browsers
The Internet becomes
navigable with a userfriendly
graphic layout,
and by 1993 the Internet
is poised to become
a mass medium (p. 49).
Google
Released in 1998,
Google quickly becomes
the top search engine by
mathematically ranking a
page’s “popularity” based
on how many other
pages linked to it. Google
now dominates search
worldwide (p. 51).
Amazon
In 1995, Amazon begins
selling books (the world’s
oldest mass medium).
It becomes the leading
e-commerce site, and
competes with other
digital media companies
since the launch of the
Kindle in 2007 (p. 64).
1990 2000 2010 2020
Blogging
In 1999, Pyra
Labs releases
Blogger software,
helping popularize
blogging, and
leading to services
like Twitter and
Tumblr (pp. 52–53).
Net Neutrality
In 2010, the FCC
approves strict net
neutrality rules for fixedline
broadband ISPs,
but exempts wireless
connections from the
“unreasonable discrimination”
rule (p. 71).
Facebook
In 2004, Mark
Zuckerberg
launches Facebook
at Harvard, and
later expands
to other college
campuses. Today
it is the top social
media destination
(p. 54).
iPad
In 2010, Apple
releases the iPad,
which establishes
a thriving market
for touchscreen
tablets and boosts
app sales to even
greater heights
(p. 59).
iPhone
Apple’s iPhone is first
released in 2007, setting
the standard for
touchscreen Internetconnected
smartphones,
and paving
the way for consuming
all forms of media on
the go (p. 59).
Hypertext
In the late 1980s,
this data-linking
feature enables
users to link one
Web page to
another, creating
the World Wide Web
(p. 49).
FIGURE 2.1
DISTRIBUTED NETWORKS
In a centralized network (a)
all the paths lead to a single
nerve center. Decentralized
networks (b) contain several
main nerve centers. In a distributed
network (c), which
resembles a net, there are no
nerve centers; if any connection
is severed, information
can be immediately rerouted
and delivered to its destination.
But is there a downside
to distributed networks when
it comes to the circulation of
network viruses?
Source: Katie Hafner and
Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards
Stay Up Late (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1996).
(a) Centralized network (b) Decentralized network (c) Distributed network
Station
Link
48 PART 1 ○ DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA
CONVERGENCE
To enable military personnel and researchers involved in the development of ARPAnet to
better communicate with one another from separate locations, an essential innovation during
the development stage of the Internet was e-mail. It was invented in 1971 by computer engineer
Ray Tomlinson, who developed software to send electronic mail messages to any computer on
ARPAnet. He decided to use the @ symbol to signify the location of the computer user, thus
establishing the “login name@host computer” convention for e-mail addresses.
At this point in the development stage, the Internet was primarily a tool for universities,
government research labs, and corporations involved in computer software and other high-tech
products to exchange e-mail and to post information. As the use of the Internet continued to
proliferate, the entrepreneurial stage quickly came about.
The Net Widens
From the early 1970s until the late 1980s, a number of factors (both technological and historical)
brought the Net to the entrepreneurial stage, in which the Net became a marketable
medium. The first signal of the Net’s marketability came in 1971 with the introduction of
microprocessors, miniature circuits that process and store electronic signals. This innovation
facilitated the integration of thousands of transistors and related circuitry into thin strands of
silicon along which binary codes traveled. Using microprocessors, manufacturers were eventually
able to introduce the first personal computers (PCs(( ), which were smaller, cheaper, and more
powerful than the bulky computer systems of the 1960s. With personal computers now readily
available, a second opportunity for marketing the Net came in 1986, when the National Science
Foundation developed a high-speed communications network (NSFNET) designed to link university
research computer centers around the country and also encourage private investment in
the Net. This innovation led to a dramatic increase in Internet use and further opened the door
to the widespread commercial possibilities of the Internet.
In the mid-1980s, fiber-optic cable became the standard for transmitting communication
data speedily. Featuring thin glass bundles of fiber capable of transmitting thousands of messages
simultaneously (via laser light), fiber-optic cables began replacing the older, bulkier copper
“A fiber the size of a
human hair can deliver
every issue ever
printed of the Wall
Street Journal in
less than a second.”
NICHOLAS
NEGROPONTE, BEING
DIGITAL, 1995
COMMODORE 64
This advertisement for the
Commodore 64, one of
the first home PCs, touts
the features of the computer.
Although it was heralded
in its time, today’s PCs far
exceed its abilities.
CHAPTER 2 ○ THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE 49
wire used to transmit computer information. This development made the commercial use of
computers even more viable than before. With this increased speed, few limits exist with regard
to the amount of information that digital technology can transport.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the ARPAnet military venture
officially ended. By that time, a growing community of researchers, computer programmers,
amateur hackers, and commercial interests had already tapped into the Net, creating tens
of thousands of points on the network and the initial audience for its emergence as a mass
medium.
The Commercialization of the Internet
The introduction of the World Wide Web and the first web browsers, Mosaic and Netscape,
in the 1990s helped transform the Internet into a mass medium. Soon after these developments,
the Internet quickly became commercialized, leading to battles between corporations vying to
attract the most users, and others who wished to preserve the original public, nonprofit nature
of the Net.
The World Begins to Browse
Prior to the 1990s, most of the Internet’s traffic was for e-mail, file transfers, and remote access
of computer databases. The World Wide Web (or the Web) changed all of that. Developed
in the late 1980s by software engineer Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN particle physics lab in
Switzerland to help scientists better collaborate, the Web was initially a text data-linking system
that allowed computer-accessed information to associate with, or link to, other information
no matter where it was on the Internet. Known as hypertext, this data-linking feature of the
Web was a breakthrough for those attempting to use the Internet. HTML (hypertext markup
language), the written code that creates Web pages and links, is a language that all computers
can read, so computers with different operating systems, such as Windows or Macintosh, can
communicate easily. The Web and HTML allow information to be organized in an easy-to-use
nonlinear manner, making way for the next step in using the Internet.
The release of Web browsers—the software packages that help users navigate the Web—
brought the Web to mass audiences. In 1993, computer programmers led by Marc Andreessen
at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in
Urbana-Champaign released Mosaic, the first window-based browser to load text and graphics
together in a magazine-like layout, with attractive fonts and easy-to-use back, forward, home,
and bookmark buttons at the top. In 1994, Andreessen joined investors in California’s Silicon
Valley to introduce a commercial browser, Netscape. As USA Today wrote that year, this “new
way to travel the Internet, the World Wide Web,” was “the latest rage among
Net aficionados.”3
The Web soon became everyone else’s rage, too, as universities
and businesses, and later home users, got connected.
As the Web became the most popular part of the Internet, many thought
that the key to commercial success on the Net would be through a Web browser.
In 1995, Microsoft released its own Web browser, Internet Explorer; and within
a few years, Internet Explorer—strategically bundled with Microsoft operating
system software—overtook Netscape as the most popular Web browser. Today,
Firefox and Google’s Chrome are the top browsers, with Internet Explorer,
Apple’s Safari, and Opera as the leading alternatives.
Users Link In through Telephone and Cable Wires
In the first decades of the Internet, most people connected to “cyberspace”
through telephone wires. AOL (formerly America Online) began connecting
WEB BROWSERS
The GUI (graphical user
interface) of the World Wide
Web changed overnight with
the release of Mosaic in
1993. As the first popular
Web browser, Mosaic
unleashed the multimedia
potential of the Internet.
Mosaic was the inspiration
for the commercial browser
Netscape, which was
released in 1994.
50 PART 1 ○ DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA
CONVERGENCE
millions of home users in 1985 to its proprietary Web system through dial-up access, and quickly
became the United States’ top Internet service provider (ISP). AOL’s success was so great
that by 2001, the Internet startup bought the world’s largest media company, Time Warner—a
deal that shocked the industry and signaled the Internet’s economic significance as a vehicle for
media content. As broadband connections, which can quickly download multimedia content,
became more available (about 66 percent of all American households had such connections by
2012), users moved away from the slower telephone dial-up ISP service (AOL’s main service) to
high-speed service from cable, telephone, or satellite companies.4
By 2007, both AT&T (offering
DSL and cable broadband) and Comcast (cable broadband) surpassed AOL in numbers of customers.
Today, other major ISPs include Verizon, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, Charter, and
Cox. These are accompanied by hundreds of local services, many offered by regional telephone
and cable companies that compete to provide consumers with access to the Internet.
People Embrace Digital Communication
In digital communication, an image, a text, or a sound
is converted into electronic signals represented as a series
of binary numbers—ones and zeros—which are then reassembled
as a precise reproduction of an image, a text, or a
sound. Digital signals operate as pieces, or bits (from BInaryII
digiTS), of information representing two values, such as
yes/no, on/off, or 0/1. For example, a typical compact disc
track uses a binary code system in which zeros are microscopic
pits in the surface of the disc and ones are represented
on the unpitted surface. Used in various combinations,
these digital codes can duplicate, store, and play back the
most complex kinds of media content.
In the early days of e-mail, the news media constantly
marveled at the immediacy of this new form of communication.
Describing a man from Long Island e-mailing a colleague
on the Galapagos Islands, the New York Times wrote
in 1994 that his “magical new mailbox is inside his personal
computer at his home, and his correspondence with the
Galapagos now travels at the speed of electricity over the
global computer network known as the Internet.”5
Other
news media accounts worried about the brevity of e-mail interchanges,
the loss of the art of letter writing, and the need
for “netiquette,” the manners of cyberspace. An e-mail sent
by President Clinton in 1994 “COMPOSED ENTIRELY OF
CAPITAL LETTERS” was reported as a “cardinal breach of
netiquette.”6
E-mail was one of the earliest services of the Internet,
and people typically used the e-mail services connected to
their ISPs before major Web corporations such as Google,
Yahoo!, and Microsoft (Hotmail) began to offer free Webbased
e-mail accounts to draw users to their sites; each now
has millions of users. Today, all of the top e-mail services
also include advertisements in their users’ e-mail messages,
one of the costs of the “free” e-mail accounts. Google’s
Gmail goes one step further by scanning messages to dynamically
match a relevant ad to the text each time an
CHAPTER 2 ○ THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE 51
e-mail message is opened. Such targeted advertising has become a hallmark
feature of the Internet.
As with e-mail, instant messaging, or IM, offered both a fascinating
and troubling new part of media culture in the late 1990s. Teenagers were
among the first to gravitate to IM and chat rooms, develop multitasking
skills so they could IM multiple friends simultaneously, and discover that
sometimes it was easier talking with friends online than face to face. In the
early days of IM, there were concerns over the supposed lack of substance
in IM conversations (was telephone dialogue any different?), and from
teens talking to unseen strangers who might be asking them “What are
you wearing?”7
But as businesses found ways to integrate IM into the office
culture, and as IM became as integrated as e-mail into our everyday lives,
these worries subsided.
IM remains the easiest way to communicate over the Internet in real
time and has become increasingly popular as a smartphone and tablet app,
with free IM services supplanting costly text messages. Major IM services—
many with voice and video chat capabilities—include AOL Instant Messenger
(AIM), Microsoft’s Messenger, Yahoo!’s Messenger, Apple’s iChat,
Skype (owned by eBay), Gmail’s Chat, and Facebook Chat. IM users fill out
detailed profiles when signing up for the service, providing advertisers
with multiple ways to target them as they chat with their friends.
Search Engines Organize the Web
As the number of Web sites on the Internet quickly expanded, companies
seized the opportunity to provide ways to navigate this vast amount of information by providing
directories and search engines. One of the more popular search engines, Yahoo!, began as a directory.
In 1994, Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a Web
page—“Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”—to organize their favorite Web sites,
first into categories, then into more and more subcategories as the Web grew. At that point, the
entire World Wide Web was almost manageable, with only about twenty-two thousand Web
sites. (By 2008, Google announced it had indexed more than one trillion Web pages, up from
one billion in 2000.) The guide made a lot of sense to other people, and soon enough Yang and
Filo renamed it the more memorable “Yahoo!”
Eventually, though, having employees catalog individual Web sites became impractical.
Search engines offer a more automated route to finding content by allowing users to enter key
words or queries to locate related Web pages. Search engines are built on mathematic algorithms,
and the earliest ones directed them to search the entire Web and look for the number
of times a key word showed up on a page. Soon search results were corrupted by Web sites that
tried to trick search engines in order to get ranked higher on the results list. One common trick
was to embed a popular search term in the page, often typed over and over again in the tiniest
font possible and in the same color as the site’s background. Although users didn’t see the word,
the search engines did, and they ranked the page higher.
Google, released in 1998, became a major success because it introduced a new algorithm
that mathematically ranked a page’s “popularity” on the basis of how many other pages linked
to it. Users immediately recognized Google’s algorithm as an improvement, and it became the
favorite search engine almost overnight. Google also moved to maintain its search dominance
with its Google Voice Search and Google Goggles apps, which allow smartphone users to conduct
searches by voicing search terms or by taking a photo. By 2013, Google’s market share accounted
for 66.9 percent of searches in the United States, while Microsoft’s Bing claimed about
18 percent and Yahoo!’s share was 11.3 percent.8
“When search
first started, if
you searched for
something and you
found it, it was a
miracle. Now, if you
don’t get exactly
what you want
in the first three
results, something
is wrong.”
UDI MANBER, GOOGLE
ENGINEER, 2007
INSTANT MESSAGING
With early IM services like
AOL Instant Messenger,
users could bounce from chat
room to chat room, sporting
screen names that were
often comical or ambiguous.
Today, instant messaging
is one of the principal
modes of communication in
professional settings.
52 PART 1 ○ DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA
CONVERGENCE
The Web
Goes Social
Aided by faster microprocessors, high-speed broadband networks, and a proliferation of digital
content, the Internet has become more than just an information source in its second decade as
a mass medium. The second generation of the Internet is a much more robust and social environment,
having moved toward being a fully interactive medium with user-created content like
blogs, Tumblrs, YouTube videos, Flickr photostreams, Photobucket albums, social networking,
and other collaborative sites. In the words of law professor and media scholar Lawrence Lessig,
we have moved from a “Read/Only” culture on the Internet, in which users can only read content,
to a “Read/Write” culture, in which users have power not only to read content but also to
develop their own.9
It’s the users who ultimately rule here, sharing the words, sounds, images,
and creatively edited music remixes and mash-up videos that make these Web communities
worth visiting.
What Are Social Media?
While it can be difficult to apply a singular definition to social media, given that they are a
fairly new form of media that is still growing, practitioners and researchers have offered several
ways of describing the world of social media, including:
• A venue for social interaction—a place where people can share creations, tell stories, and
interact with others10
• Multiplatform, participatory, and digital . . . an essential feature of truly democratic public
life11
• Platforms that enable the interactive Web by engaging users to participate in, comment on,
and create content as a means of communicating with their social graph, other users, and
the public12
Ironically, social media are a throwback to an older era of the Internet (the 1980s to the
early 1990s) when bulletin boards and personal Web pages served as platforms for users to
exchange information with other users.13
Now, greater Internet bandwidth, inexpensive digital
tools and mobile devices, and a generation willing to develop and share their own media
content online have given rise to new kinds of social media. Social media have become a new
distribution system for media as well, challenging the one-to-many model of traditional mass
media with the many-to-many model of social media.
Types of Social Media
In less than a decade, a number of different types of social media have evolved, with multiple
platforms for the creation of user-generated content. European researchers Andreas M. Kaplan
and Michael Haenlein identify six categories of social media on the Internet: blogs, collaborative
projects, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social
worlds.
Blogs
Years before there were status updates or Facebook, blogs enabled people to easily post their
ideas to a Web site. Popularized with the release of Blogger (now owned by Google) in 1999,
blogs contain articles or posts in chronological, journal-like form, often with reader comments
“The rituals of
social media,
it seems, make
status-seekers
and exhibitionists
of us all.”
ROSS DOUTHAT,
NEW YORK TIMES,
2011
VideoCentral
Mass Communication
bedfordstmartins.com
/mediaculture
The Rise of Social Media
Media experts discuss how
social media are changing
traditional media.
Discussion: Some consider
the new social media an
extension of the very old oral
form of communication. Do
you agree or disagree with
this view? Why or why not?
CHAPTER 2 ○ THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE 53
and links to other sites. Blogs can be personal or corporate
multimedia sites, sometimes with photos, graphics,
podcasts, and video. By 2012, there were at least 182
million blogs, the most common topics being personal
accounts, movies/TV, sports, and politics.14
Some blogs
have developed into popular news and culture sites,
such as the Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Mashable,
Gawker, HotAir, ThinkProgress, and TPM Muckraker.
Blogs have become part of the information and
opinion culture of the Web, giving regular people and
citizen reporters a forum for their ideas and views, and
providing a place for even professional journalists to
informally share ideas before a more formal news story
gets published. Some of the leading platforms for blogging
include Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Weebly, and Wix. But by 2013, the most popular form
of blogging was microblogging, with about 200 million active users on Twitter, sending out 400
million tweets (a short message with a 140-character limit) per day.15
In 2013, Twitter introduced
an app called Vine that enabled users to post short video clips. A few months later, Facebook’s
Instagram responded with its own video-sharing service.
Collaborative Projects
Another Internet development involves collaborative projects in which users build something
together, often using wiki (which means “quick” in Hawaiian) technology. Wiki Web sites enable
anyone to edit and contribute to them. There are several large wikis, such as Wikitravel (a
global travel guide), WikiMapia (combining Google Maps with wiki comments), and WikiLeaks
(an organization publishing sensitive documents leaked by anonymous whistleblowers). WikiLeaks
gained notoriety for its release of thousands of United States diplomatic cables and other
sensitive documents beginning in 2010 (see p. 514 in Chapter 14). But the most notable wiki is
Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia launched in 2001 that is constantly updated and revised by
interested volunteers. All previous page versions of Wikipedia are stored, allowing users to see
how each individual topic develops. The English version of Wikipedia is the largest, containing
over four million articles, but Wikipedias are also being developed in 284 other languages.
Businesses and other organizations have developed social media platforms for specific collaborative
projects. Tools like Basecamp and Podio provide social media interfaces for organizing
project and event-planning schedules, messages, to-do lists, and workflows. Kickstarter is
a popular fund-raising tool for creative projects like books, recordings, and films. InnoCentive
is a crowd-sourcing community that offers award payments for people who can solve business
and scientific problems. And change.org has become an effective petition project to push for
social change. For example, in 2012 a high school student from Michigan began a campaign that
gained more than 500,000 signatures to persuade the MPAA to change the rating of the movie
Bully from R to PG–13 so younger people could see it.y
Content Communities
Content communities are the best examples of the many-to-many ethic of social media.
Content communities exist for the sharing of all types of content from text (fanfiction.net)
to photos (Flickr and Photobucket) and videos (YouTube, Vimeo). YouTube, created in 2005
and bought by Google in 2006, is the most well-known content community, with hundreds of
millions of users around the world uploading and watching amateur and professional videos.
YouTube gave rise to the viral video—a video that becomes immediately popular by millions
sharing it through social media platforms. The most popular video of all time—a fifty-six-second
THE HUFFINGTON POST,
one of the top blogs today,
aggregates the latest news
in a wide variety of areas
ranging from politics and
the environment to style and
entertainment. Recently, the
site launched Twitter editions,
gathering the most relevant
and interesting Twitter feeds
in one place for each of the
site’s nineteen sections.
54 PART 1 ○ DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA
CONVERGENCE
home video titled “Charlie bit my finger—again!” has more
than 533 million views. By 2013, YouTube reported that
one hundred hours of video are uploaded to the site every
minute, and it has more than one billion unique users each
month.
Social Networking Sites
Perhaps the most visible examples of social media are social
networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal,
Pinterest, Orkut, LinkedIn, and Google+. On these sites, users
can create content, share ideas, and interact with friends.
MySpace, founded in 2003, was the first big social media
site. In addition to personal profiles, MySpace was known for
its music listings, with millions of artists setting up profiles to
promote their music, launch new albums, and allow users to
buy songs. Its popularity with teens made it a major site for
online advertising. That popularity attracted the attention
of media conglomerate News Corp., which bought MySpace in 2005. But with competition from
Facebook, by 2009 interest in MySpace was waning, and News Corp. sold it in 2011.
Facebook is the most popular social media site on the Internet. Started at Harvard in 2004
as an online substitute to the printed facebooks the school created for incoming first-year
students, Facebook was instantly a hit. The site enables users to construct personal profiles,
upload photos, share music lists, play games, and post messages to connect with old friends
and meet new ones. Originally, access was restricted to college students, but in 2006 the site
expanded to include anyone. Soon after, Facebook grew at an astonishing rate, and by 2013 it
had 1.15 billion active users and was available in more than seventy languages.
In 2011, Google introduced Google+, a social networking interface designed to compete
with Facebook. Google+ enables users to develop distinct “circles,” by dragging and dropping
friends into separate groups, rather than having one long list of friends.In response, Facebook
created new settings to enable users to control who sees their posts.
Virtual Game Worlds and Virtual Social Worlds
Virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds invite users to role-play in rich 3-D environments,
in real time, with players throughout the world. In virtual game worlds (also known as massively
multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft andt Star
Wars: The Old Republic, players can customize their online identity, or avatar, and work with
others through the game’s challenges. Community forums for members extend discussion and
shared play outside of the game. Virtual social worlds, like Second Life, enable players to take
their avatars through simulated environments and even make transactions with virtual money.
(See Chapter 3 for a closer look at virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds.)
Social Media and Democracy
In just a decade, social media have changed the way we consume and relate to media and the
way we communicate with others. Social media tools have put unprecedented power in our
hands to produce and distribute our own media. We can share our thoughts and opinions, write
or update an encyclopedic entry, start a petition or fund-raising campaign, post a video, and
create and explore virtual worlds. But social media have also proven to be an effective tool for
democracy, and for undermining repressive regimes that thrive on serving up propaganda and
hiding their atrocities from view.
KICKSTARTER.COM has
funded 52,000 creative
projects since its launch
in 2009. According to
Kickstarter’s data, 5.3 million
people have pledged a total of
$903 million for the projects.
Some notable successes
include a contemporary
art exhibit featured in the
Museum of Modern Art in
2011, a highly anticipated
smartwatch for iPhone and
Android, and a feature film
version of the canceled cult
TV series Veronica Mars.
CHAPTER 2 ○ THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE 55
The wave of protests in more than a dozen Arab nations in North Africa and
the Middle East that began in late 2010 resulted in four rulers being forced
from power by mid-2012. The Arab Spring began in Tunisia, with a twentysix-year-old
street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, who had his
vegetable cart confiscated by police. Humiliated when he tried to get
it back, he set himself on fire. While there had been protests before
in Tunisia, the stories were never communicated widely. This
time, protesters posted videos on Facebook, and satellite news
networks spread the story with reports based on those videos.
The protests spread across Tunisia, and by January 2011, Tunisia’s
dictator of nearly twenty-four years fled the country.
In Egypt, a similar circumstance occurred when twentyeight-year-old
Khaled Said was pulled from a café and beaten to
death by police. Said’s fate might have made no impact but for
the fact that his brother used his mobile phone to snap a photo of
Said’s disfigured face and released it to the Internet. The success of
protesters in Tunisia spurred Egyptians to organize their own protests,
using the beating of Said as a rallying point. During the pro-democracy
gatherings at Tahrir Square in Cairo, protesters used social media like Facebook,
Twitter, and YouTube to stay in touch. Global news organizations tracked
the protesters’ feeds to stay abreast of what was happening, especially because the state news
media ignored the protests and carried pro-Mubarak propaganda. Even though Egyptian
leader Hosni Mubarak tried to shut down the Internet in Egypt, word of the protests spread
quickly, and he was out within eighteen days after the demonstrations started. In 2013, more
protests aided by social media led to the ouster of Mohamed Morsi, Mubarak’s democratically
elected successor. In Yemen and Libya, other dictators were ousted. And although Syria’s
repressive government was still in power in 2013 after months of protests and fighting, citizens
continued to use social media to provide the only evidence of the government’s killing thousands
of civilians.
Even in the United States, social media have helped call attention to issues that might
not have received any media attention otherwise. In 2011 and 2012, protesters in the Occupy
Wall Street movement in New York and at hundreds of sites across the country took to
Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and Facebook to point out the inequalities of the economy and
the income disparity between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the population—the
99 percent.
The flexible and decentralized nature of the Internet and social media is in large part what
makes them such powerful tools for subverting control. In China, the Communist Party has
tightly controlled mass communication for decades. As more and more Chinese citizens take
to the Internet, an estimated thirty thousand government censors monitor or even block Web
pages, blogs, chat rooms, and e-mails. Social media sites like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, WordPress,
and Blogger have frequently been blocked, and Google moved its Chinese search engine
(Google.cn) to Hong Kong after the Chinese government repeatedly censored it. And for those
who persist in practicing “subversive” free speech, there can be severe penalties: Paris-based
Reporters without Borders (www.rsf.org) reports that twenty-nine Chinese journalists and sixtynine
netizens were in prison in 2013 for writing articles and blogs that criticized the government.
Still, Chinese dissenters bravely play cat-and-mouse with Chinese censors, using free
services like Hushmail, Tor, Freegate, and Ultrasurf (the latter two produced by Chinese immigrants
in the United States) to break through the Chinese government’s blockade. (For more on
using the Internet for political and social statements, see “Examining Ethics: The ‘Anonymous’
Hackers of the Internet” on pages 56–57.)
NEW PROTEST LANGUAGE
It has become more and
more commonplace to
see protest signs with
information about Facebook
groups, Twitter hashtags,
URLs, and other social media
references.
A
nonymous, the loosely organized
hacktivist collective that
would become known for its
politically and socially motivated Internet
vigilantism, first attracted major
public attention in 2008.
The “Anonymous” Hackers of the Internet
The issue was a video featuring
a fervent Tom Cruise—meant for
internal promotional use within the
Church of Scientology—that had
been leaked to the Web site Gawker.
When the church tried to suppress
the video footage on grounds of
copyright, Anonymous went to work.
They launched a DDoS, or Distributed
Denial of Service, attack (flooding
a server or network with external
requests so that it becomes overloaded
and slows down or crashes) on
the church’s Web sites, bombarded
the church headquarters with prank
phone calls and faxes, and “doxed” the
church by publishing sensitive internal
documents.
United by their libertarian distrust
of government, their commitment
EXAMINING
ETHICS
to a free and open Internet, their
opposition to child pornography,
and their distaste for corporate
conglomerates, Anonymous has
targeted organizations as diverse
as the Indian government (to protest
the country’s plan to block Web
sites like The Pirate Bay and Vimeo)
and the agricultural conglomerate
Monsanto (to protest the company’s
malicious patent lawsuits and the
company’s dominant control of the
food industry). As Anonymous wrote
in a message to Monsanto:
You have continually introduced
harmful, even deadly products into
our food supply without warning,
without care, all for your own
profit. . . . Rest assured, we will
continue to dox your employees and
executives, continue to knock down
your Web sites, continue to fry your
mail servers, continue to be in your
systems . . .1
While Anonymous agrees on an
agenda and coordinates the campaign,
the individual hackers all act
independently of the group, without
expecting recognition. A reporter
from the Baltimore Sun aptly characterized
Anonymous as “a group,
in the sense that a flock of birds is
a group. How do you know they’re
a group? Because they’re traveling
in the same direction. At any given
moment, more birds could join,
If you haven’t seen Anonymous,
you have probably seen the chosen
“face” of Anonymous—a Guy Fawkes
mask, portraying the most renowned
member of the 1605 anarchist plot to
assassinate King James I of England.
The mask has been a part of Guy
Fawkes Day commemorations in
England for centuries, but was made
even more popular by the 2006 film
V for Vendetta, based on the graphic
novel series of the same name. Today,
the mask has become a widespread
international symbol for groups
protesting financial institutions and
politicians.
leave, peel off in another direction
entirely.”2
In some cases, it’s easy to find
moral high ground in the activities
of hacktivists. For example,
Anonymous reportedly hacked the
computer network of Tunisian tyrant
Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali; his downfall
in 2011 was the first victory
of the Arab Spring movement. In
2011, Anonymous also hacked the
Web site of the Westboro Baptist
Church, known for spreading its extremist
antigay rhetoric, picketing
funerals of soldiers, and desecrating
American flags. And in The Girl
with the Dragon Tattoo book and
film series, it is hard not to cheer on
the master hacker character
Lisbeth Salander as she exacts
justice on criminals and rapists. In
a world of large, impersonal governments
and organizations, hackers
level the playing field for the
ordinary people, responding quickly
in ways much more powerful than
traditional forms of protest, like
writing a letter or publicly demonstrating
in front of headquarters
or embassies. In fact, hacktivism
could be seen as an update on
the long tradition of peaceful
protests.
Yet, hackers can run afoul of ethics.
Because the members of Anonymous
are indeed anonymous, there aren’t
any checks or balances on those
who “dox” a corporate site, revealing
thousands of credit card or Social
Security numbers and making regular
citizens vulnerable to identity theft
and fraud, as some hackers have
done. Prosecutions in 2012 took
down at least six international members
of Anonymous when one hacker,
known online as Sabu, turned out
to be a government informant. One
of the hackers arrested in Chicago
was charged with stealing credit
card data and using it to make more
than $700,000 in charges.3
Just a
few “bad apples” can undermine the
self-managed integrity of groups like
Anonymous.
The very existence of Anonymous
is a sign that many of our battles
now are in the digital domain. We
fight for equal access and free
speech on the Internet. We are in
a perpetual struggle with corporations
and other institutions over
the privacy of our digital information.
And, although our government
prosecutes hackers for computer
crimes, governments themselves
are increasingly using hacking to
fight each other. For example, the
United States has used computer
viruses to attack the nuclear program
of Iran. Yet this new kind of
warfare carries risks for the United
States as well. As the New York
Times, which broke the story of
cyberattacks against Iran, noted,
“no country’s infrastructure is more
dependent on computer systems,
and thus more vulnerable to attack,
than that of the United States.”4
58 PART 1 ○ DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA
CONVERGENCE
The innovation of digital communication—central to the development of the first computers in
the 1940s—enables all media content to be created in the same basic way, which makes media
convergence, the technological merging of content in different mass media, possible.
In recent years, the Internet has really become the hub for convergence, a place where
music, television shows, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, books, games, and movies
are created, distributed, and presented. Although convergence initially happened on desktop
computers, it was the popularity of notebook computers, and then the introduction of smartphones
and tablets, that have hastened the pace of media convergence and have made the idea
of accessing any media content, anywhere, a reality.
Media Converges on Our PCs and TVs
First there was the telephone, invented in the 1870s. Then came radio in the 1920s, TV in the
1950s, and eventually the personal computer in the 1970s. Each device had its own unique and
distinct function. Aside from a few exceptions, like the clock-radio (a hybrid device popular
since the 1950s), that was how electronic devices worked.
The rise of the personal computer industry in the mid-1970s first opened the possibility
for unprecedented technological convergence. A New York Times article on the new “home
computers” in 1978 noted that “the long-predicted convergence of such consumer electronic
products as television sets, videotape recorders, video games, stereo sound systems and the
coming video-disk machines into a computer-based home information-entertainment center is
getting closer.”16
However, PC-based convergence didn’t really materialize until a few decades
later when broadband Internet connections improved the multimedia capabilities of computers.
By the early 2000s, computers connected to the Internet allowed an array of digital media
to converge in one space and be easily shared. A user can now access television shows (Hulu
and Xfinity), movies (Netflix), music (iTunes and Spotify), books (Amazon, Google), games,
newspapers, magazines, and lots of other Web content on a computer. And with Skype, iChat,
and other live voice and video software, PCs can replace telephones. Other devices, like iPods,
quickly capitalized on the Internet’s ability to distribute such content, and adapted to play and
exhibit multiple media content forms.
Media is also converging on our television sets, as the electronics industry manufactures
Internet-ready TVs. Video game consoles like the Xbox, Wii, and PS4, and set-top devices like
Apple TV, Google TV, Google Chromecast, Roku, and Boxee offer additional entertainment content
access via their Internet connections. In the early years of the Web, people would choose
only one gateway to the Internet and media content, usually a computer or television. However,
wireless networks and the recent technological developments in various media devices mean
that consumers now regularly use more than one avenue to access all types of media content.
Mobile Devices Propel Convergence
Mobile telephones have been around for decades (like the giant “brick” mobile phones of the
1970s and 1980s), but the mobile phones of the twenty-first century are substantially different
creatures—smartphones that go beyond voice calls. They can be used for texting, listening
to music, watching movies, connecting to the Internet, playing games, and using hundreds of
thousands of applications, or “apps” as they quickly became known.
Convergence and
Mobile Media
CHAPTER 2 ○ THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE 59
The Blackberry was the first popular Internet-capable smartphone in the United States,
introduced in 2002. Users’ ability to check their e-mail messages at any time created addictive
e-mail behavior and earned the phones their “Crackberry” nickname. Convergence on mobile
phones took another big leap in 2007 with Apple’s introduction of the iPhone, which combined
qualities of its iPod digital music player and telephone and Internet service, all accessed
through a sleek touchscreen. The next year, Apple opened its App Store, featuring free and
low-cost software applications for the iPhone (and the iPod Touch and, later, the iPad) created
by third-party developers, vastly increasing the utility of the iPhone. By 2013 there were about
one million apps available to do thousands of things on Apple devices—from playing interactive
games to finding locations with a GPS or using the iPhone like a carpenter’s level.
In 2008, the first smartphone to run on Google’s competing Android platform was released.
By 2013, Android phones (sold by companies such as Samsung, HTC, LG, and Motorola, and supported
by the Google Play app market and the Amazon Appstore) held more than 51 percent of
the smartphone market share in the United States, while Apple’s iPhone had a 42 percent share;
Blackberry and Microsoft smartphones constituted the remainder of the market.17
The precipitous
drop of the Blackberry’s market standing in just ten years (the company was late to add touchscreens
and apps to its phones) illustrates the tumultuous competition in mobile devices. It also illustrates
how apps and the ability to consume all types of media content on the go have surpassed
voice call quality to become the most important feature to consumers purchasing a phone today.
In 2010, Apple introduced the iPad, a tablet computer that functions like a larger iPod
Touch, making it more suitable for reading magazines, newspapers, and books; watching video;
and using visual applications. The tablets became Apple’s fastest-growing product line, selling at
a rate of twenty-five million a year. Apple added cameras, faster graphics, and a thinner design
to subsequent generations of the iPad, as other companies like Samsung
rolled out competing tablets. The biggest rival to the iPad is the
Kindle Fire, a low-cost tablet developed by Amazon. Amazon found
success with its e-readers, but as more users expect their digital
devices to perform multiple functions, Amazon recognized that it
would need to add a touchscreen, apps, and access to other content
like music and movies to their devices in order to stay relevant in
users’ increasingly interconnected and converged lives.
The Impact of Media Convergence
and Mobile Media
Convergence of media content and technology has forever changed
our relationship with media. Today, media consumption is mobile
and flexible; we don’t have to miss out on media content just because we weren’t home in time
to catch a show, didn’t find the book at the bookstore, or forgot to buy the newspaper yesterday.
Increasingly, we demand access to our media when we want it, where we want it, and in
multiple formats. In order to satisfy those demands and to stay relevant in today’s converged
world, traditional media companies have had to dramatically change their approach to media
content and their business models.
Our Changing Relationship with the Media
The merging of all media onto one device such as a tablet or smartphone blurs the distinctions
of what used to be separate media. For example, USA Today (a newspaper) and CBS Newsy
(network television news) used to deliver the news in completely different formats, but today
look quite similar in their web forms, with listings of headlines, rankings of most popular
stories, local weather forecasts, photo galleries, and video. On an Amazon Kindle, on which
SMARTWATCHES have
been a part of pulp and
science-fiction tales since
the thirties, and real-life
versions were developed
in the seventies and
eighties before electronics
companies shifted their
attentions to laptops and cell
phones. By 2013, many top
digital conglomerates began
developing and in some
cases manufacturing new
smartwatches; Samsung
and Sony each released their
own models and launched
advertising campaigns.
60 PART 1 ○ DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA
CONVERGENCE
one can read books, newspapers, and magazines, new forms
like the Kindle Single challenge old categories. Are the fictional
Kindle Singles novellas, or more like the stories found in literary
magazines? And what about the investigative reports released
as Kindle Singles: Should they be considered long-form journalism,
or are they closer to a nonfiction book? Is listening to an
hourlong archived episode of Public Radio International’s This
American Life on an iPod more like experiencing a radio pro-e
gram, or an audio book? (It turns out you can listen to that show
on the radio, as a downloadable podcast, as a Web stream, on
mobile apps, or on a CD.)
Not only are the formats morphing, but we can now experience
the media in more than one manner, simultaneously.
Fans of television shows like The Voice, Glee, and Top Chef andf
viewers of live events like a presidential State of the Union address
often multitask, reading live blogs during broadcasts or sharing their own commentary
with friends on Facebook. Twitter encourages the same kind of multitasking with their search
widget: “Displays search results in real time! Ideal for live events, broadcastings, conferences,
TV shows, or even just keeping up with the news.”18
For those who miss the initial broadcasts,
converged media offer a second life for media content through deep archive access and repurposed
content on other platforms. For example, cable shows like Game of Thrones and Mad Men
have found audiences beyond their initial broadcasts through their DVD collections and online
video services like Amazon Instant Video and Apple’s iTunes. In fact, some fans even prefer to
watch these more complex shows this way, enjoying the ability to rewind an episode in order
to catch a missed detail, as well as the ability to watch several episodes back-to-back. Similarly,
Arrested Development, critically acclaimed but canceled by Fox in 2006, garnered new fans
through the streaming episodes on Hulu and Netflix. As a result of this renewed interest, it was
revived with new episodes produced for Netflix in 2013.
Our Changing Relationship with the Internet
Mobile devices and social media have altered our relationship with the Internet. Two trends are
noteworthy: (1) Apple now makes more than five times as much money selling iPhones, iPads,
and iPods and accessories as they do selling computers, and (2) the number of Facebook’s users
(1.15 billion in 2013) keeps increasing. The significance of these two trends is that through
our Apple devices and Facebook, we now inhabit a different kind of Internet—what some call a
closed Internet, or a walled garden.19
In the world in which the small screens of smartphones
are becoming the preferred medium for linking to the Internet,
we typically don’t get the full, open Internet, one represented
by the vast searches brought to us by Google. Instead we get
a more managed Internet, brought to us by apps or platforms
that carry out specific functions via the Internet. Are you
looking for a nearby restaurant? Don’t search on the Internet—
use this app especially designed for that purpose. And the
distributors of these apps act as gatekeepers. Apple has about
one million apps in its App Store, and Apple approves every
one of them. The competing Android Appstores on Google
Play and Amazon have a similar number of apps, but Google
and Amazon exercise less control over approval of apps than
Apple does.
SOCIAL VIEWING
Superbowl XLVII watchers
generated a record 24.1
million tweets, with a peak of
268,000 tweets per minute
during Beyoncé’s halftime
show.
APPS, like the one developed
for Twitter, offer smartphone
users direct, instant access
to their preferred Web sites.
CHAPTER 2 ○ THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE 61
Facebook offers a similar walled garden experience. Facebook began as a highly managed
environment, only allowing those with .edu e-mail addresses. Although all are now invited to
join Facebook, the interface and the user experience on the site is still highly managed by Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his staff. For example, if you click on a link to a news article
that your friend has shared using a social reader app on Facebook, you will be prompted to add
the same app—giving it permission to post your activity to your Wall—before you can access the
article. In addition, Facebook has severely restricted what content can be accessed through the
open Internet. Facebook has installed measures to stop search engines from indexing users’
photos, Wall posts, videos, and other data. The effect of both Apple’s devices and the Facebook
interface is a clean, orderly, easy-to-use environment, but one in which we are “tethered” to the
Apple App Store, or to Facebook.20
The open Internet—best represented by Google (but not its Google+ social networking
service, which is more confining like Facebook) and a Web browser—promised to put the entire
World Wide Web at your fingertips. On the one hand, the appeal of the Internet is its openness,
its free-for-all nature. But of course, the trade-off is that the open Internet can be chaotic
and unruly, and apps and other walled garden services have streamlined the cacophony of the
Internet considerably for us.
The Changing Economics of Media and the Internet
The digital turn in the mass media has profoundly changed the economics of the Internet. Since
the advent of Napster in 1999, which brought (illegal) file sharing to the music industry, each
media industry has struggled to rethink how to distribute its content for the digital age. The
content itself is still important—people still want quality news, television, movies, music, and
games—but they want it in digital formats, and for mobile devices.
Apple’s response to Napster established the new media economics. The late Apple CEO
Steve Jobs struck a deal with the music industry. Apple would provide a new market for music
on the iTunes store, selling digital music that customers could play on their iPods (and later on
their iPhones and iPads). In return, Apple got a 30 percent cut of the revenue for all music sales
on iTunes, simply for being the “pipes” that delivered the music. As music stores went out of
business all across America, Apple sold billions of songs and hundreds of millions of iPods, all
without requiring a large chain of retail stores.
Amazon.com started as a more traditional online retailer, taking orders online and
delivering merchandise from its warehouses. As books took the turn into the digital era,
Amazon created its own device, the Kindle, and followed Apple’s model. Amazon started
selling e-books, taking its cut for delivering the content. Along the way, Amazon and Apple
(and Google through its Android apps) have become leading media companies. They don’t
make the content (although Amazon is now publishing books, too, and as mentioned in the
beginning of the chapter purchased the Washington Post in 2013), but they are among the topt
digital distributors of books, newspapers, magazines, music, television, movies, and games.
The Next Era: The Semantic Web
Many Internet visionaries talk about the next generation of the Internet as the Semantic Web,
a term that gained prominence after hypertext inventor Tim Berners-Lee and two coauthors
published an influential article in a 2001 issue of Scientific American.21
If “semantics” is the
study of meanings, then the Semantic Web is about creating a more meaningful—or more
organized—Web. To do that, the future promises a layered, connected database of information
that software agents will sift through and process automatically for us. Whereas the search
engines of today generate relevant Web pages for us to read, the software of the Semantic Web
will make our lives even easier as it places the basic information of the Web into meaningful
62 PART 1 ○ DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA
CONVERGENCE
categories—family, friends, calendars, mutual interests, location—and makes significant
connections for us. In the words of Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues,
“The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in
which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and
people to work in cooperation.”22
The best example of the Semantic Web is Apple’s voice recognition assistant
Siri, first shipped with its iPhone 4S in 2011. Siri uses conversational voice
recognition to answer questions, find locations, and interact with various
iPhone functionalities such as the calendar, reminders, the weather app, the
music player, the Web browser, and the maps function. Some of its searches
get directed to Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine that provides
direct answers to questions, rather than the traditional list of links for search
results. Other Siri searches draw upon the databases of external services, such
as Yelp! for restaurant locations and reviews and StubHub for ticket information.
Another popular feature of Siri is the ability of the female voice to answer
seemingly random queries, a clever demonstration of the Semantic Web
understanding of context. In a 2012 iPhone commercial, actor John Malkovich
asks his iPhone, “Joke?” Siri responds, “Two iPhones walk into a bar. I forget
the rest.” The travel utility of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which searches
a number of airlines and then estimates when prices will rise or fall, also hints
at the possibilities of the Semantic Web.
SIRI
In March 2012, a classaction
lawsuit was filed
against Apple alleging that
the iPhone 4S commercials
misrepresented the extent
of Siri’s functionalities,
citing long wait times and
botched requests as proof of
the advertisements’ deceit.
Although a judge dismissed
the lawsuit in 2013, it raises
important questions about
the limitations of a meaningbased
Web and the challenges
facing those who develop it.
The Economics and
Issues of the Internet
One of the unique things about the Internet is that no one owns it. But that hasn’t stopped some
corporations from trying to control it. Since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which
overhauled the nation’s communications regulations, most regional and long-distance phone
companies and cable operators have competed against one another to provide connections to the
Internet. However, there is more to controlling the Internet than being the service provider for it.
Companies have realized the potential of dominating the Internet business through search engines,
software, social networking, and providing access to content, all in order to sell the essential devices
that display the content, and/or to amass users who become an audience for advertising.
Ownership and control of the Internet is connected to three Internet issues that command
much public attention: the security of personal and private information, the appropriateness
of online materials, and the accessibility and the openness of the Internet. Important questions
have been raised: Should personal or sensitive government information be private, or should
the Internet be an enormous public record? Should the Internet be a completely open forum, or
should certain types of communications be limited or prohibited? Should all people have equal
access to the Internet, or should it be available only to those who can afford it? With each of
these issues there have been heated debates, but no easy resolutions.
Ownership: Controlling the Internet
By the end of the 1990s, four companies—Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, and Google—had
emerged as the leading forces on the Internet, each with a different business angle. AOL
“One of the more
remarkable
features of the
computer network
on which much
of the world has
come to rely is
that nobody owns
it. That does not
mean, however, that
no one controls it.”
AMY HARMON,
NEWYORK TIMES, 1998
attempted to dominate the Internet as the top ISP, connecting millions of home users to
its proprietary Web system through dial-up access. Yahoo!’s method has been to make
itself an all-purpose entry point—or portal—to the Internet. Computer software behemoth
Microsoft’s approach began by integrating its Windows software with its Internet Explorer
Web browser, drawing users to its MSN.com site and other Microsoft applications. Finally,
Google made its play to seize the Internet with a more elegant, robust search engine to
help users find Web sites.
Since the end of the 1990s, the Internet’s digital turn toward convergence has changed the
Internet and the fortunes of its original leading companies. While AOL’s early success led to the
huge AOL–Time Warner corporate merger of 2001, its technological shortcomings in broadband
contributed to its devaluation and eventual spin-off from Time Warner in 2009. Yahoo!
was eclipsed by Google in the search engine business, but tried to regain momentum with its
purchase of Tumblr in 2013.
In today’s converged world in which mobile access to digital content prevails, Microsoft and
Google still remain powerful. Those two, along with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, are
the leading companies of digital media’s rapidly changing world. 23
Microsoft
Microsoft, the oldest of the dominant digital firms (established by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in
1975), is an enormously wealthy software company that struggled for years to develop an Internet
strategy. Although its software business is in a gradual decline, its flourishing digital game
business (Xbox) helped it to continue to innovate and find a different path to a future in digital
media. The company finally found moderate success on the Internet with its search engine Bing.
With the 2012 release of the Windows Phone 8 mobile operating system and the Surface tablet,
Microsoft was prepared to offer a formidable challenge in the mobile media business.
Google
Google, established in 1998, had instant success with its algorithmic search engine, and now
controls more than 66 percent of the search market and generates billions of dollars of revenue
yearly through the pay-per-click advertisements that accompany key-word searches. Google
also has branched out into a number of other Internet offerings, including shopping (Froogle),
mapping (Google Maps), e-mail (Gmail), blogging (Blogger), browsing (Chrome), books (Google
Book Search), and video (YouTube). Google has also challenged Microsoft’s Office programs
with Google Apps, a cloud-based bundle of word processing, spreadsheet, calendar, IM, and
e-mail software. Google is now competing against Apple’s iTunes with Google Play, an online
media store with sharing capabilities through Google’s social networking tool Google+ (Google’s
challenge to Facebook).
As the Internet goes wireless, Google has acquired other companies in its aim to replicate
its online success in the wireless world. Beginning in 2005, Google bought the Android operating
system (now the leading mobile phone platform, and also a tablet computer platform),
mobile phone ad placement company AdMob, and mobile phone software developer Motorola
Mobility. (See “What Google Owns” on this page.) Phones and tablets that run on Android
also have access to content on Google Play. Google continues to experiment with new devices
and plans to release augmented-reality glasses in the future, which would layer virtual information
over one’s real view of the world through the glasses. Google’s biggest challenge is the
“closed Web”: companies like Facebook and Apple that steer users to online experiences that
are walled off from search engines and threaten Google’s reign as the Internet’s biggest advertising
conglomerate. The competition heated up in 2012 when Apple dropped Google Maps
as the default map app for iPhones and iPads in favor of its Apple map application, cutting
Google out of ad revenue and data collection of Apple device location searches.24
WHAT
GOOGLE
OWNS
Consider how Google
connects to your life;
then turn the page for
the bigger picture.
WEB
• Web Search
• Google Chrome
• iGoogle
SPECIALIZED SEARCH
• Google Blog Search
• Google Patent Search
• Google Finance
• Google Alerts
• Google Custom Search
• Google Product Search
• Google Scholar
• Google Trends
MEDIA
• YouTube
• Google Images
• Google Videos
• Google Play
• Google News
• Picasa
SOCIAL
• Google+
• Knol
• Reader
• Groups
• Orkut
• Blogger
• Google Talk
GEO
• Google Latitude
• Google Earth
• Google Maps
• Panoramio
• Google Offers
• SketchUp
HOME & OFFICE
• Gmail
• Google Sites
• Google Translate
• Google Drive
• Google Calendar
• Google Voice
• Google Wallet
ADVERTISING
• AdWords and AdWords
Express
• AdSense
• Google Mobile Ads
• Google Analytics
• Google Display Network
• Google Video Ads
• Google TV Ads
• FeedBurner
MOBILE
• Google Mobile
• Android
• Motorola Mobility
Turn page for more
Apple
Apple, Inc., was founded by Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 as a home computer company
and is today the most valuable company in the world. Apple was only moderately successful
until 2001, when Jobs, having been forced out of the company for a decade, returned. Apple
introduced the iPod and iTunes in 2003, two innovations that led the company to become
the No. 1 music retailer in the United States. Then in 2007, Jobs introduced the iPhone, the
world’s first smartphone that streamlined and redefined the way users access media content.
Converging entertainment, computing, and communications, the iPhone transformed the
mobile phone industry, and with Apple’s release of the intensely anticipated iPad in 2010, the
company further redefined portable computing.
With the iPhone and iPad now at the core of Apple’s business, the company expanded to
include providing content—music, television shows, movies, games, newspapers, magazines—to
sell its media devices. The next wave of Apple’s innovations was the iCloud, a new storage and
syncing service that enables users to access media content anywhere (with a wireless connection)
on its mobile devices. The iCloud also helps to ensure that customers purchase their media
content through Apple’s iTunes store, further tethering users to its media systems. (For more on
Apple devices and how they are made, see “Global Village: Designed in California, Assembled in
China” on page 65.)
Amazon
Amazon started its business in 1995 in Seattle, selling the world’s oldest mass medium
(books) online. Since that time, Amazon has developed into the world’s largest e-commerce
store, selling books, but also electronics, garden tools, clothing, appliances, and toys. To
keep its lead in e-commerce, Amazon also acquired Zappos, the popular online shoe seller.
Yet, by 2007, with the introduction of its Kindle e-reader, Amazon followed Apple’s model
of using content to sell devices. The Kindle became the first widely successful e-reader, and
by 2010 e-books were outselling hardcovers and paperbacks at Amazon. In 2011, in response
to Apple’s iPad, Amazon released its own color touchscreen tablet, the Kindle Fire, giving
Amazon a device that can play all of the media—including music, TV, movies, and games—it
sells online and in its Appstore. Like Apple, Amazon has a Cloud Player for making media
content portable, and offers an additional five gigabytes of free Cloud Drive space to all
users, to use however they like.
Facebook
Of all the leading Internet sites, Facebook is one of the “stickiest,” with Americans staying on
the social networking site, on average, about 20 percent of their overall time online.25
Facebook’s
immense, socially dynamic audience (about two-thirds of the U.S. population, and over
one billion total users across the globe) is its biggest resource, and Facebook, like Google, has
become a data processor as much as a social media service, collecting every tidbit of information
about its users—what we “like,” where we live, what we read, and what we want—and selling
this information to advertisers. Because Facebook users reveal so much about themselves in
their profiles and the messages they share with others, Facebook can offer advertisers exceptionally
tailored ads: A user who recently got engaged gets ads like “Impress Your Valentine,”
“Vacation in Hawaii,” and “Are You Pregnant?” while a teenage girl sees ads for prom dresses,
sweet-sixteen party venues, and “Chat with Other Teens” Web sites.
As a young company, Facebook has suffered growing pains as it tried to balance its corporate
interests (capitalizing on its millions of users) and its users’ interest in controlling the privacy
of their own information at the same time. In 2012, Facebook had the third-largest public offering
in U.S. history, behind General Motors and Visa, with the company valued at $104 billion.
Facebook’s valuation is more of a statement of investors’ hopes of what the company can do
WHAT DOES
THIS MEAN?
Every Google product is
designed to keep you on
the Web. The longer you
browse, the more money
Google makes.
• Cost. It cost $34.2 billion
to run Google, Inc., in
2012.1
• Revenue and Assets.
Google’s annual revenues
continue to rise (near
$50.18 billion in 2012),2
allowing Google to invest
heavily in technological
innovations in areas such
as mobile phones and
renewable energy.3
• Advertising. Google makes
$3.6 billion a month on
advertising, which provides
92 percent of Google’s
profits. Nearly every Web
site has a Google ad, so
every second users spend
on the Web is revenue for
Google.4
• Biggest Advertiser.
Google’s top advertiser is
Lowe’s, which spent $59.1
million on AdWords in
2011 (compared to Home
Depot, which spent $50.3
million). The second top
advertiser is Amazon.com,
which spent $55.2 million
in 2011.5
• Mobile Reach. In 2012,
Google reported that
850,000 Android phones
are activated each day
(compared to Apple’s
iPhone, which has about
210,000 activations).
There were about 300
million activated Android
devices by February
2012.6
• Market Value. In August
2004, Google shares were
first traded at an initial
price of $85 a share.7
In
2013, one share of Google
stock cost between $723
and $924.8
• Employees. Google
has 53,861 full-time
employees. Google was
named Fortune’s “Best
Company to Work For” in
2013.9
○
T
here is a now-famous story involving
the release of the iPhone in
2007. The late Apple CEO Steve
Jobs was carrying the prototype in his
pocket about one month prior to its release,
and discovered that his keys, also
in his pocket, were scratching the plastic
screen. Known as a stickler for design
perfection, Jobs reportedly gathered
his fellow executives in a room and told
them (angrily), “I want a glass screen, and
I want it perfect in six weeks.”1
This demand
would have implications for a factory
complex in China, called Foxconn,
where iPhones are assembled. When
the order trickled down to a Foxconn
foreman, he woke up 8,000 workers
in the middle of the night, gave them a
biscuit and a cup of tea, and then started
them on twelve-hour shifts fitting glass
screens into the iPhone frames. Within
four days, Foxconn workers were churning
out ten thousand iPhones daily.
On its sleek packaging, Apple proudly
proclaims that its products are
“Designed by Apple in California,” a
slogan that evokes beaches, sunshine,
and Silicon Valley—where the best
and brightest in American engineering
ingenuity reside. The products also
say, usually in a less visible location,
“Assembled in China,” which suggests
little, except that the components of the
iPhone, iPad, iPod, or Apple computer
Designed in California, Assembled in China
were put together in a factory in the
world’s most populous country.
It wasn’t until 2012 that most Apple
customers learned that China’s Foxconn
was the company where their
devices are assembled. Investigative
reports by the New York Times revealed
a company with ongoing problems with
labor conditions and worker safety, including
fatal explosions and a spate of
worker suicides.2
(Foxconn responded
in part by erecting nets around its
buildings to prevent fatal jumps.)
Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai Precision
Industry Co., Ltd., with headquarters
in Taiwan) is China’s largest and
most prominent private employer with
1.2 million employees—more than any
American company except Walmart.
Foxconn assembles an incredible 40
percent of the world’s electronics, and
earns more revenue than ten of its
competitors combined.3
And Foxconn
is not just Apple’s favorite place to outsource
production; nearly every global
electronics company is connected to the
manufacturing giant: Amazon (Kindle),
Microsoft (Xbox), Sony (PlayStation),
Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Motorola,
and Toshiba all feed their products to
the vast Foxconn factory network.
Behind this manufacturing might is a
network of factories now legendary for
its enormity. Foxconn’s largest factory
compound is in Shenzhen. Dubbed
“Factory City,” it employs roughly
300,000 people—all squeezed into
one square mile, many of whom live in
the dormitories (dorms sleep seven to a
room) on the Foxconn campus.4
Workers,
many of whom come from rural areas
in China, often start a shift at 4 a.m.
and work until late at night, performing
monotonous, routinized work—for
example, filing the aluminum shavings
GLOBAL
VILLAGE
from iPad casings six thousand times
a day. Thousands of these full-time
workers are under the age of eighteen.
Conditions at Foxconn might, in some
ways, be better than the conditions in
the poverty-stricken small villages from
which most of its workers come. But
the low pay, long hours, dangerous work
conditions, and suicide nets are likely
not what the young workers had hoped
for when they left their families behind.
In light of the news reports about the
problems at Foxconn, Apple joined
the Fair Labor Association (FLA), an
international nonprofit that monitors
labor conditions. The FLA inspected
factories and surveyed more than
35,000 Foxconn workers. Their 2012
study verified a range of serious issues.
Workers regularly labored more than
sixty hours per week, with some employees
working more than seven days
in a row. Other workers weren’t compensated
for overtime. More than 43
percent of the workers reported they
had witnessed or experienced an accident,
and 64 percent of the employees
surveyed said that the compensation
does not meet their basic needs. In
addition, the FLA found the labor union
at Foxconn an unsatisfactory channel
for addressing worker concerns, as
representatives from the management
dominated the union’s membership.5
Apple now boasts on its Web site that
it is the first technology company to be
admitted to the Fair Labor Association.
But Apple might not have taken that step
had it not been for the New York Times
investigative reports and the intense
public scrutiny that followed. What is the
role of consumers in ensuring that Apple
and other companies are ethical and
transparent in the treatment of the workers
who make our electronic devices? 
66 PART 1 ○ DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA
CONVERGENCE
with one billion users rather than evidence of the company’s
financial successes so far. And as evidenced by its plummeting
stock price during the following weeks of trading, Facebook’s
next move and future area of growth is still somewhat uncertain.
As Facebook moves forward, one of its shortcomings (and
what Google and Apple control) is its mobile interface. In an
attempt to build its mobile business, Facebook bought Instagram,
a photo sharing mobile app for iPhone and Android, in
2012 for $1 billion.
Targeted Advertising and Data Mining
In the early years of the Web, advertising took the form of traditional
display ads placed on pages. The display ads were no
more effective than newspaper or magazine advertisements,
and because they reached small, general audiences, they weren’t very profitable. But in the
late 1990s, Web advertising began to shift to search engines. Paid links appeared as “sponsored
links” at the top, bottom, and side of a search engine result list and even, depending on the
search engine, within the “objective” result list itself. Every time a user clicks on a sponsored
link, the advertiser pays the search engine for the click-through. For online shopping, having
paid placement in searches can be a good thing. But search engines doubling as ad brokers may
undermine the utility of search engines as neutral locators of Web sites (see “Media Literacy and
the Critical Process: Search Engines and Their Commercial Bias” on page 67).
Advertising has since spread to other parts of the Internet, including social networking
sites, e-mail, and IM. For advertisers—who for years struggled with how to measure people’s
attention to ads—these activities make advertising easy to track, effective in reaching the
desired niche audience, and relatively inexpensive because ads get wasted less often on the
uninterested. For example, Yahoo! gleans information from search terms, Google scans the
contents of Gmail messages, and Facebook uses profile information, status updates, and
“likes” to deliver individualized, real-time ads to users’ screens. Similarly, a mobile social
networking application for smartphones, Foursquare, encourages users to earn points and
“badges” by checking in at business locations, such as museums, restaurants, and airports
(or other user-added locations), and to share that information via Twitter, Facebook, and text
messages. Other companies, like Poynt and Yelp, are also part of the location-based ad market
that is projected to account for one-third of all mobile advertising by 2015.26
But by gathering
users’ location and purchasing habits, these data-collecting systems also function as consumer
surveillance and data mining operations.g
The practice of data mining also raises issues of Internet security and privacy. Millions of
people, despite knowing that transmitting personal information online can make them vulnerable
to online fraud, have embraced the ease of e-commerce: the buying and selling of
products and services on the Internet, which took off in 1995 with the launch of Amazon.com.
What many people don’t know is that their personal information may be used without their
knowledge for commercial purposes, such as targeted advertising. For example, in 2011, the
Federal Trade Commission charged Facebook with a list of eight violations in which Facebook
told consumers their information would be private, but made it public to advertisers and thirdparty
applications. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted the company had made “a bunch
of mistakes,” and settled with the FTC by fixing the problems and agreeing to submit to privacy
audits for twenty years.27
One common method that commercial interests use to track the browsing habits of computer
users is cookies, or information profiles that are automatically collected and transferred
between computer servers whenever users access Web sites. The legitimate purpose of a cookie
INSTAGRAM
Facebook’s acquisition of
Instagram will help secure
the social networking
site’s future in the mobile
interface. Yet questions
remain as to the future of
the Instagram brand and
whether it will continue to
grow independently of its
parent company. Originally
conceived as a usergenerated
content Web site,
Instagram does not claim
ownership for any material
posted using its services,
whereas Facebook owns all
material posted to its site.
CHAPTER 2 ○ THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE 67
is to verify that a user has been cleared for access to a particular Web site, such as a library
database that is open only to university faculty and students. However, cookies can also be used
to create marketing profiles of Web users to target them for advertising. Many Web sites require
the user to accept cookies in order to gain access to the site.
Even more unethical and intrusive is spyware, information-gathering software that is often
secretly bundled with free downloaded software. Spyware can be used to send pop-up ads to
users’ computer screens, to enable unauthorized parties to collect personal or account information
of users, or even to plant a malicious click-fraud program on a computer, which generates
phony clicks on Web ads that force an advertiser to pay for each click.
In 1998, the FTC developed fair information practice principles for online privacy to
address the unauthorized collection of personal data. These principles require Web sites to
Search Engines and Their Commercial Bias
How valuable are search engines for doing research?
Are they the best resources for academic information?
To test this premise, we’re going to do a search for the topic
“obesity,” which is prevalent in the news and a highly controversial
topic.1 
DESCRIPTION. Here’s what
we find in the first thirty results
from Google: numerous sites for obesity
research organizations (e.g., Obesity
Society, MedicineNet, WebMD) and
many government-funded sites like the
CDC and NIH. Here’s what we find in the
top-rated results from Bing: numerous
sponsored sites (e.g., the Scooter Store,
Gastric Banding) and the same obesity
research organizations.
2 
ANALYSIS. A closer look at
these results reveals a subtle but
interesting pattern: All the sites listed in
the top ten results (of both search engine
result lists, and with the important exception
of Wikipedia) offer loads of advice
to help an individual lose weight (e.g.,
change eating habits, exercise, undergo
surgery, take drugs). These “professionallooking”
sites all frame obesity as a disease,
a genetic disorder, or the result of
personal inactivity. In other words, they
put the blame squarely on the individual.
But where is all the other research that
links high obesity rates to social factors
(e.g., constant streams of advertising for
junk food, government subsidies of the
giant corn syrup food sweetener industry,
deceptive labeling practices)? These
society-level views are not apparent in
our Web searches.
Media Literacy and
the Critical Process
3 
INTERPRETATION. What does
it mean that our searches are so
biased? Consider this series of connections:
Obesity research organizations
manufacture drugs and promote surgery
treatments to “cure” obese individuals.
They seem to offer legitimate information
about the “obesity disease,” but
they are backed by big business, which
is interested in selling more junk food
(not taking social responsibility) and
then promoting drugs to treat people’s
obesity problems. These wealthy sites
can pay for placement through Search
Engine Optimizer firms (which work relentlessly
to outsmart Google’s page-rank
algorithm) and by promoting themselves
through various marketing channels to
ensure their popularity (Google ranks
pages by popularity). With the exception
of Wikipedia, which is so interlinked it
usually ranks high in search engines,
search results today are skewed toward
big business. Money speaks.
4 
EVALUATION. Commercial
search engines have evolved
to be much like the commercial mass
media: They tend to reflect the corporate
perspective that finances them. This
does not bode well for the researcher,
who is interested in many angles of a
single issue. Controversy is at the heart
of every important research question.
5 
ENGAGEMENT. What to do?
Start by including the word
controversy next to the search term, as
in “obesity and controversy.” Or learn
about where alternative information
sources exist on the Web. A search for
“obesity” in the independent Web publications
AlterNet, MediaChannel, Common
Dreams, and Salon, for example,
and nonprofit digital archives like ibiblio
and INFOMINE, will offer countless other
perspectives on the obesity epidemic.
Let’s also not dismiss Wikipedia, a collaboratively
built nonprofit encyclopedia
that often lays out the controversies
within a given research topic and can
be a helpful launching pad for scholarly
research. Good research does not mean
clicking on the first link on a search
engine list; it involves knowing that every
topic has political, economic, and ideological
biases, and looking for valuable
and diverse perspectives.
68 PART 1 ○ DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA
CONVERGENCE
(1) disclose their data-collection practices, (2) give consumers the
option to choose whether their data may be collected and to provide
information on how that data is collected, (3) permit individuals
access to their records to ensure data accuracy, and (4) secure
personal data from unauthorized use. Unfortunately, the FTC has
no power to enforce these principles, and most Web sites either do
not self-enforce them or deceptively appear to enforce them when
they in fact don’t.28
As a result, consumer and privacy advocates
are calling for stronger regulations, such as requiring Web sites to
adopt opt-in or opt-out policies. Opt-in policies, favored by consumer
and privacy advocates, require Web sites to obtain explicit
permission from consumers before the sites can collect browsing
history data. Opt-out policies, favored by data-mining corporations,
allow for the automatic collection of browsing history data unless
the consumer requests to “opt out” of the practice. In 2012, the
Federal Trade Commission approved a report recommending that
Congress adopt “Do Not Track” legislation to limit tracking of user
information on Web sites and mobile devices, and enable users to
easily opt out of data collection. Some Web browsers, such as Internet
Explorer 9, are offering “Do Not Track” options, while other
Web tools, like Ghostery.com, detect Web tags, bugs, and other
trackers, generating a list of all of the sites following your moves.
Security: The Challenge to Keep Personal Information Private
When you watch television, listen to the radio, read a book, or go to a film, you do not need to
provide personal information to others. However, when you use the Internet, whether you are signing
up for an e-mail account, shopping online, or even just surfing the Web, you give away personal
information—voluntarily or not. As a result, government surveillance, online fraud, and unethical
data-gathering methods have become common, making the Internet a potentially treacherous place.
Government Surveillance
Since the inception of the Internet, government agencies worldwide have obtained communication
logs, Web browser histories, and the online records of individual users who thought their
online activities were private. In the United States, for example, the USA PATRIOT Act (which
became law about a month after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and was renewed in 2006)
grants sweeping powers to law-enforcement agencies to intercept individuals’ online communications,
including e-mail messages and browsing records. The act was intended to allow the
government to more easily uncover and track potential terrorists and terrorist organizations,
but many now argue that it is too vaguely worded, allowing the government to unconstitutionally
probe the personal records of citizens without probable cause and for reasons other than
preventing terrorism. Moreover, searches of the Internet permit law-enforcement agencies to
gather huge amounts of data, including the communications of people who are not the targets
of an investigation. Documents leaked to the news media have revealed that the National Security
Agency has continued its domestic spying program, collecting bulk Internet and mobile
phone data on millions of Americans, for more than a decade.
Online Fraud
In addition to being an avenue for surveillance, the Internet is increasingly a conduit for online
robbery and identity theft, the illegal obtaining of personal credit and identity information
THIS NEW YORKER
CARTOON illustrates
an increasingly rare
phenomenon.
CHAPTER 2 ○ THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE 69
in order to fraudulently spend other people’s money. Computer hackers have the ability to
infiltrate Internet databases (from banks to hospitals to even the Pentagon) to obtain personal
information and to steal credit card numbers from online retailers. Identity theft victimizes
hundreds of thousands of people a year, and clearing one’s name can take a very long time and
cost a lot of money. About $3.4 billion in the United States is lost to online fraud artists every
year. One particularly costly form of Internet identity theft is known as phishing. This scam
involves phony e-mail messages that appear to be from official Web sites—such as eBay, PayPal,
or the user’s university or bank—asking customers to update their credit card numbers, account
passwords, and other personal information.
Appropriateness: What Should Be Online?
The question of what constitutes appropriate content has been part of the story of most mass
media, from debates over the morality of lurid pulp fiction books in the nineteenth century to
arguments over the appropriateness of racist, sexist, and homophobic content in films and music.
Although it is not the only material to come under intense scrutiny, most of the debate about
appropriate media content, despite the medium, has centered on sexually explicit imagery.
As has always been the case, eliminating some forms of sexual content from books, films,
television, and other media remains a top priority for many politicians and public interest
groups. So it should not be surprising that public objection to indecent and obscene Internet
content has led to various legislative efforts to tame the Web. Although the Communications
Decency Act of 1996 and the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 were both judged unconstitutional,
the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000 was passed and upheld in 2003. This act
requires schools and libraries that receive federal funding for Internet access to use software
that filters out any visual content deemed obscene, pornographic, or harmful to minors, unless
disabled at the request of adult users. Regardless of new laws, pornography continues to
flourish on commercial sites, individuals’ blogs, and social networking pages. As the American
Library Association notes, there is “no filtering technology that will block out all illegal content,
but allow access to constitutionally protected materials.”29
Although the “back alleys of sex” on the Internet have caused considerable public concern,
Internet sites that carry potentially dangerous information (e.g., bomb-building instructions,
hate speech) have also incited calls for Internet censorship, particularly after the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001, and several tragic school-shooting incidents. Nevertheless, many
others—fearing that government regulation of speech would inhibit freedom of expression in a
democratic society—want the Web to be completely unregulated.
Access: The Fight to Prevent a Digital Divide
A key economic issue related to the Internet is whether the cost of purchasing a personal
computer and paying for Internet services will undermine equal access. Coined to echo the
term economic divide (the disparity of wealth between the rich and poor), the term digital
divide refers to the growing contrast between the “information haves,” those who can afford to
purchase computers and pay for Internet services, and the “information have-nots,” those who
may not be able to afford a computer or pay for Internet services.
Although about 80 percent of U.S. households are connected to the Internet, there are big
gaps in access, particularly in terms of age and education. For example, a 2012 study found that
only 41 percent of Americans over the age of sixty-five go online, compared with 74 percent
of Americans ages fifty to sixty-four, 87 percent of Americans ages thirty to forty-nine, and
94 percent of Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine. Education has an even more pronounced
effect: Only 43 percent of those who did not graduate from high school have Internet access,
compared with 71 percent of high school graduates and 94 percent of college graduates.30
“Given that
the Internet
has become an
indispensable
tool for realizing
a range of human
rights, combating
inequality, and
accelerating
development and
human progress,
ensuring universal
access to the
Internet should be
a priority.”
UNITED NATIONS
REPORT, 2011
70 PART 1 ○ DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA
CONVERGENCE
Another digital divide has developed in the United States as Americans have switched over
from slow dial-up connections to high-speed broadband service. By 2012, 68 percent of all
Internet users in the United States had broadband connections, but given that prices are tiered
so that the higher the speed of service the more it costs, those in lower-income households were
much less likely to have high-speed service. A Pew Internet & American Life Project study found
that one in five American adults does not use the Internet. Non-users were predominantly
senior citizens, Spanish-language speakers, those with less than a high school education, and
those living in households earning less than $30,000 per year. The primary reason given by
non-users for why they don’t go online is they don’t think the Internet is relevant to them.31
The rising use of smartphones is helping to narrow the digital divide, particularly along
racial lines. In the United States, African American families generally have lagged behind whites
in home access to the Internet, which requires a computer and broadband access. However, the
Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that African Americans are the most active users
of mobile Internet devices. Thus, the report concluded, “the digital divide between African
Americans and white Americans diminishes when mobile use is taken into account.”32
Globally, though, the have-nots face an even greater obstacle crossing the digital divide. Although
the Web claims to be worldwide, the most economically powerful countries like the United States,
Sweden, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the United Kingdom account for most of its international
flavor. In nations such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Myanmar (Burma), the governments permit
limited or no access to the Web. In other countries, an inadequate telecommunications infrastructure
hampers access to the Internet. And in underdeveloped countries, phone lines and computers are
almost nonexistent. For example, in Sierra Leone, a nation of about six million in West Africa with
poor public utilities and intermittent electrical service, only about ten thousand people—about 0.16
percent of the population—are Internet users.33
However, as mobile phones become more popular in
the developing world, they could provide one remedy to the global digital divide.
NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE,
founder of the Media Lab
at MIT, began a project
to provide $100 laptops
to children in developing
countries (shown). These
laptops, the first supply
of which was funded by
Negroponte, need to survive
in rural environments
where challenges include
battling adverse weather
conditions (dust and high
heat) and providing reliable
power, Internet access, and
maintenance.
CHAPTER 2 ○ THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE 71
Even as the Internet matures and becomes more accessible, wealthy users are still more
able to buy higher levels of privacy and faster speeds of Internet access than other users.
Whereas traditional media made the same information available to everyone who owned a radio
or a TV set, the Internet creates economic tiers and classes of service. Policy groups, media
critics, and concerned citizens continue to debate the implications of the digital divide, valuing
the equal opportunity to acquire knowledge.
Net Neutrality: Maintaining an Open Internet
For more than a decade, the debate over net neutrality has framed the shape of the Internet’s
future. Net neutrality refers to the principle that every Web site and every user—whether ay
multinational corporation or you—has the right to the same Internet network speed and access.
The idea of an open and neutral network has existed since the origins of the Internet, but there
had never been a formal policy until 2010, when the Federal Communications Commission
approved a limited set of net neutrality rules. Still, the debate forges on.
The dispute over net neutrality and the future of the Internet is dominated by some of the
biggest communications corporations. These major telephone and cable companies—Verizon,
Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and CenturyLink—control 98 percent of broadband access
in the United States through DSL and cable modem service. They want to offer faster connections
and priority to clients willing to pay higher rates, and provide preferential service for their
own content or for content providers who make special deals with them—effectively eliminating
net neutrality. For example, tiered Internet access might mean that these companies would
charge customers more for data-heavy services like Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, or iTunes. These
companies argue that the profits they could make with tiered Internet access will allow them to
build expensive new networks, benefiting everyone.
But supporters of net neutrality—mostly bloggers, video gamers, educators, religious groups,
unions, and small businesses—argue that the cable and telephone giants actually have incentive
to rig their services and cause net congestion in order to force customers to pay a premium for
higher speed connections. They claim that an Internet without net neutrality would hurt small
businesses, nonprofits, and Internet innovators, who might be stuck in the “slow lane” and not be
able to afford the fastest connections that large corporations can afford. Large Internet corporations
like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Skype, and Facebook also support net neutrality
because their businesses depend on their millions of customers having equal access to the Web.
In late 2010, the FCC adopted rules on net neutrality, noting “the Internet’s openness
promotes innovation, investment, competition, free expression, and other national broadband
goals.”34
On a split vote, the FCC approved firm net neutrality guidelines for fixed-line
broadband ISPs (like cable and DSL connections), but required less strict net neutrality rules
for wireless broadband connections (mobile phone companies). Both fixed-line and mobile
providers must disclose their network management practices and are prohibited from blocking
sites or applications. However, while the FCC prohibited fixed-line providers from unreasonable
discrimination, mobile phone companies are exempt from this rule, and they are also allowed
to offer tiered service prices for data packages. The FCC explained that these differences in rules
were in part due to the fact that the mobile industry is more competitive. But net neutrality
proponents have argued that these rules don’t go far enough, while opponents have tried to get
the courts and Congress to overturn the FCC’s policy. In late 2013, the case was scheduled to be
heard in the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia circuit.
Alternative Voices
Independent programmers continue to invent new ways to use the Internet and communicate
over it. While some of their innovations have remained free of corporate control, others have
“The choice for
American
consumers is
between the open
broadband they
have come to
expect—in which
they can view
any content from
sources big and
small—and a walled
garden somewhat
like cable TV, where
providers can
decide what we can
see, and at what
price.”
NEW YORK TIMES,
2011
VideoCentral
Mass Communication
bedfordstmartins.com
/mediaculture
Net Neutrality
Experts discuss net neutrality
and privatization of the
Internet.
Discussion: Do you support
net neutrality? Why or
why not?
72 PART 1 ○ DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA
CONVERGENCE
been taken over by commercial interests. Despite commercial buyouts, however, the pioneering
spirit of the Internet’s independent early days endures; the Internet continues to be a participatory
medium where anyone can be involved. Two of the most prominent areas in which alternative
voices continue to flourish relate to open-source software and digital archiving.
Open-Source Software
Microsoft has long been the dominant software corporation of the digital age, but independent
software creators persist in developing alternatives. One of the best examples of this is the
continued development of open-source software. In the early days of computer code writing,
amateur programmers developed software on the principle that it was a collective effort.
Programmers openly shared program source codes and their ideas to upgrade and improve
programs. Beginning in the 1970s, Microsoft put an end to much of this activity by transforming
software development into a business in which programs were developed privately and users
were required to pay for both the software and its periodic upgrades.
However, programmers are still developing noncommercial, open-source software, if on a
more limited scale. One open-source operating system, Linux, was established in 1991 by Linus
Torvalds, a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Since the establishment
of Linux, professional computer programmers and hobbyists alike around the world
have participated in improving it, creating a sophisticated software system that even Microsoft
has acknowledged is a credible alternative to expensive commercial programs. Linux can operate
across disparate platforms, and companies such as IBM, Dell, and Sun Microsystems, as
well as other corporations and governmental organizations, have developed applications and
systems that run on it. Still, the greatest impact of Linux is not evident on the desktop screens of
everyday computer users but in the operation of behind-the-scenes computer servers.
Digital Archiving
Librarians have worked tirelessly to build nonprofit digital archives that exist outside of any
commercial system in order to preserve libraries’ tradition of open access to information. One
of the biggest and most impressive digital preservation initiatives is the Internet Archive, established
in 1996. The Internet Archive aims to ensure that researchers, historians, scholars, and
all citizens have universal access to human knowledge—that is, everything that’s digital: text,
moving images, audio, software, and more than eighty-five billion archived Web pages reaching
back to the earliest days of the Internet. The archive is growing at staggering rates as the general
public and partners such as the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress upload cultural artifacts.
For example, the Internet Archive stores sixty-five thousand live music concerts, including
performances by Jack Johnson, the Grateful Dead, and the Smashing Pumpkins.
The archive has also partnered with the Open Content Alliance to digitize every book in
the public domain (generally, those published before 1922). This book-scanning effort is the
nonprofit alternative to Google’s “Google Book Search” program, which, beginning in 2004, has
scanned books from the New York Public Library as well as the libraries of Harvard, Stanford,
and the University of Michigan despite many books’ copyright status. Google pays to scan each
book (which can cost up to $30 in labor) and then includes book contents in its search results,
significantly adding to the usefulness and value of its search engine. Since Google forbids other
commercial search engines from accessing the scanned material, the deal has the library community
concerned. “Scanning the great libraries is a wonderful idea,” says Brewster Kahle, head
of the Internet Archive, “but if only one corporation controls access to this digital collection,
we’ll have handed too much control to a private entity.”35
Under the terms of the Open Content
Alliance, all search engines, including Google, will have access to the Alliance’s ever-growing
repository of scanned books. Media activist David Bollier has likened open access initiatives to
CHAPTER 2 ○ THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE 73
an information “commons,” underscoring the idea that the public collectively owns (or should
own) certain public resources, like airwaves, the Internet, and public spaces (such as parks).
“Libraries are one of the few, if not the key, public institutions defending popular access and
sharing of information as a right of all citizens, not just those who can afford access,” Bollier says.36
The Internet
and Democracy
Throughout the twentieth century, Americans closely examined emerging mass media for their
potential contributions to democracy. As radio became more affordable in the 1920s and 1930s,
we hailed the medium for its ability to reach and entertain even the poorest Americans caught
in the Great Depression. When television developed in the 1950s and 1960s, it also held promise
as a medium that could reach everyone, including those who were illiterate or cut off from
printed information. Despite continuing concerns over the digital divide, many have praised
the Internet for its democratic possibilities. Some advocates even tout the Internet as the most
democratic social network ever conceived.
The biggest threat to the Internet’s democratic potential may well be its increasing commercialization.
Similar to what happened with radio and television, the growth of commercial
“channels” on the Internet has far outpaced the emergence of viable nonprofit channels, as
fewer and fewer corporations have gained more and more control. The passage of the 1996
Telecommunications Act cleared the way for cable TV systems, computer firms, and telephone
companies to merge their interests and become even larger commercial powers. Although there
was a great deal of buzz about lucrative Internet startups in the 1990s and 2000s, it has been
large corporations such as Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook that have weathered
the low points of the dot-com economy and maintained a controlling hand.
About three-quarters of households in the United States are now linked to the Internet, thus
greatly increasing its democratic possibilities but also tempting commercial interests to gain
even greater control over it and intensifying problems for agencies trying to regulate it. If the
histories of other media are any predictor, it seems realistic to expect that the Internet’s potential
for widespread use by all could be partially preempted by narrower commercial interests.
As media economist Douglas Gomery warns, “Technology alone does not a communication
revolution make. Economics trumps technology every time.”37
However, defenders of the digital age argue that inexpensive digital production and social
media distribution allow greater participation than any other traditional medium. In response
to these new media forms, older media are using Internet technology to increase their access
to and feedback from varied audiences. Skeptics raise doubts about the participatory nature of
discussions on the Internet. For instance, they warn that Internet users may be communicating
with those people whose beliefs and values are similar to their own—in other words, just
their Facebook friends and Google+ circles. Although it is important to be able to communicate
across vast distances with people who have similar viewpoints, these kinds of discussions may
not serve to extend the diversity and tolerance that are central to democratic ideals. There is
also the threat that we may not be interacting with anyone at all. In the wide world of the Web,
we are in a shared environment of billions of people. In the emerging ecosystem of apps, we live
in an efficient but gated community, walled off from the rest of the Internet. However, we are
still in the early years of the Internet. The democratic possibilities of the Internet’s future are
still endless.
“You. Yes, you.
You control the
Information Age.
Welcome to your
world.”
TIME MAGAZINE’S
“PERSON OF THE YEAR”
COVER, 2006, FEATURING
A MIRROR THAT
WAS SUPPOSED TO
MAKE EVERY READER
FEEL SPECIAL
74 PART 1 ○ DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND MEDIA
CONVERGENCE
CHAPTER
REVIEW
Internet, 46
ARPAnet, 46
e-mail, 48
microprocessors, 48
fiber-optic cable, 48
World Wide Web, 49
HTML (hypertext markup language),
49
browsers, 49
Internet service provider (ISP), 50
broadband, 50
digital communication, 50
instant messaging, 51
search engines, 51
social media, 52
blogs, 52
wiki Web sites, 53
content communities, 53
social networking sites, 54
Telecommunications Act of 1996, 62
portal, 63
data mining, 66
e-commerce, 66
cookies, 66
spyware, 67
opt-in or opt-out policies, 68
phishing, 69
digital divide, 69
net neutrality, 71
open-source software, 72
COMMON THREADS
Most people love the simplicity of the classic Google
search page. The iGoogle home page builds on that by
offering the ability to “Create your own homepage in under
30 seconds.” Enter your city, and the page’s design theme
will dynamically change images to reflect day and night.
Enter your zip code, and you get your hometown weather
information or local movie schedules. Tailor the page to
bring up your favorite RSS feeds, and stay on top of the
information that interests you the most.
This is just one form of mass customization—something
no other mass medium has been able to provide. (When
is the last time a television, radio, newspaper, or movie
spoke directly to you?) This is one of the Web’s greatest
strengths—it can connect us to the world in a personally
meaningful way. But a casualty of the Internet may be our
shared common culture. A generation ago, students and
coworkers across the country gathered on Friday mornings
to discuss what happened the previous night on NBC’s
“must-see” TV shows like Cosby, Seinfeld, Friends, and Will
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is about the commercial nature of the mass media. The Internet
is no exception, as advertisers have capitalized on its ability to be customized. How might this affect other media
industries?
KEYTERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers
listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
& Grace. Today it’s more likely that they watched vastly different
media the night before. And if they did share something—say,
a funny YouTube video—it’s likely they all laughed
alone, as they watched it individually, although they may
have later shared it with their friends on a social media site.
We have become a society divided by the media, often
split into our basic entity, the individual. One would think
that advertisers dislike this, since it is easier to reach a
mass audience by showing commercials during The Voice.
But mass customization gives advertisers the kind of
personal information they once only dreamed about: your
e-mail address, hometown, zip code, birthday, and a record
of your interests—what Web pages you visit and what
you buy online. If you have a Facebook profile or a Gmail
account, they may know even more about you—what you
did last night or what you are doing right now. What will
advertisers want to sell to you with all this information?
With the mass-customized Internet, you may have already
told them.