New Media: Gender, Culture, Technology » October 23: Misunderstanding the Internet, Part 2

October 23: Misunderstanding the Internet, Part 2

Plan for the Day

  • Critical Media Analysis Essay (Due 11/25)
  • Misunderstanding the Internet, Chapters 3 “The Internet of Capital” and 4 “The Internet of Rules”
    • We learn that capital rules…
  • “Flight Attendants are Barely Scraping By,” NPR, 22 Oct. 2024
    • Flight attendants don’t get paid or don’t get their full wage for boarding and deplaning
    • They don’t get meals, and airport food is VERY expensive
    • The airlines have suggested they go on welfare and get food stamps

What IS Popular?

Recently, someone compared Joe Rogan’s popularity to Taylor Swift. I’m less concerned with quantifying either’s popularity because there’s no question they are both popular. It’s probably safe to say Taylor Swift is more popular worldwide, but we’ll draw the boundary around an American Studies context. The argument was that Joe Rogan has 14M+ followers, so that’s like downloading a Taylor Swift album every week. Of course, followers/subscribers do not equate to listeners (and especially weekly listeners), but the argument is compelling. Here are some stats I found:

What on Earth do Joe Rogan and Taylor Swift have to do with our reading this week?

Ch. 3 “The Internet of Capital”

Today’s chapters threw a lot of information at you about profiting, rules, regulations, and user privacy concerns. Much like the idea that you speak a native language without knowing all the rules of grammar due to your immersion, we engage access the internet without fully understanding the rules and engineering behind the technology.

Let’s see where the conversation goes…

  • p. 85: Jeremy Rifkin noting the internet will cause a ‘paradigm shift’ from market capitalism to peer production.”
    • p. 87: He also “insists that the ‘capitalist era is passing . . . not quickly but inevitably. A new economic paradigm – the Collaborative Commons – is rising in its wake that will transform our way of life’ (2014: 1).”
  • p. 86: The promise of “collapsing barriers between producers and consumers…”
    • What’s a prosumer?
    • What’s our word for “professional consumer”?
    • Think influence…
  • p. 87: “Digital logic is conceived by theorists…as adhering to a totally different set of operating principles in which the internet will put an end to the rule of monopolies and inspire more decentralised and customised networks of media flows.”
  • Consumption
    • p. 89: “Abundant storage space means that online shops can offer an inventory that vastly exceeds their offline competitors and more adequately satisfies the full range of consumer taste, no matter how whimsical or marginal.”
  • pp. 90-93: Boulders and pebbles
    • Boulders: the big, ginormous, immovable, legacy media companies
    • Pebbles: the new, digital-native users producing content
  • p. 91: “By realising that networked power is accrued by those who focus their activities on linking rather than owning, Google demonstrates by far the best example of a company that understands internet logic.”
  • p. 92: “the new media economy” is a “sharing economy.”
    • Let’s talk Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc.
  • p. 93: “There is a common assumption that the internet provides the most fantastic opportunities for the renewal and intensification of private enterprise….The internet challenges firms to adapt to this new environment or lose out to their competitors.”
  • p. 97: “the participatory possibilities of the web…are nevertheless based on a series of unsubstantiated claims, profound misunderstandings and puzzling absences that render them incapable of providing a rigorous account of the dynamics of the digital environment. In general, they are so steeped in either a market fundamentalist or a technological determinist mode of address.”
  • The authors on Marx (p. 98):
    • “This means that capitalists will do everything they can to extract more value from the production process.”
    • “there will be a tendency towards crises of overproduction that will wipe out weaker capitals. These processes of exploitation, alienation, commodification, and concentration are, according to Marx, the terrible price to be paid by the majority of people for the wonderful technological advances experienced under capitalism.”
    • What other systems do some benefit from and others don’t?
  • p. 100: “What is being sold here is our profile, our consumption habits, our search history – our entire data history – in precisely the way that Garnham argued that the main commodity in the cultural industries is the audience as it is sold, over and over again, to advertisers.”
  • p. 107: “far from signalling a democratisation* of media production and distribution, ‘prosumption’ is all too often incorporated within a system of commodity exchange controlled by existing elites who either call for user-generated material or cull material from already existing sites.
    • A prosumer is someone who thinks they’re special and giving the world their work while someone else profits.

*The authors use British English spellings, so, when I quote them, I use their spellings.

Ch. 4 “The Internet of Rules”

Let’s see what you want to address…

  • p. 118: “a consensus that government intervention would only stifle the creativity and innovation that was a hallmark of cyberspace.”
    • Did you know that cars were thought to be a way of reducing pollution in cities?
  • pp. 119-120: “the internet is implicated in a fundamental neoliberal transformation of the power relations inside the regulatory process, and poses the question: who are the regulators now?”
  • p. 120: “if we are to secure and extend the internet’s public good characteristics, we need to challenge the current direction of travel and, instead, to devise regulatory systems that are independent from both commercial and governmental interests.”
  • p. 124: “despite globalisation processes, national governments and legal authorities continue to play key roles in shaping, populating and enforcing the various agencies and mechanisms involved in the regulation of online networks.”
  • p. 127: the false dichotomy between either government or private sector.
    • Can we envision an alternative way to regulate the public utility that is the internet?
    • Rhetorically, what does labeling it a “public utility” convey?
  • p. 129: “libertarianism – the belief that individual freedom is best guaranteed by a lack of state intrusion into private matters – poses little threat in contrast to government or market failure.”
    • Are regulations good or bad?
  • p. 131: “Victor Pickard has called ‘corporate libertarianism’, a perspective that ‘conflates corporate privilege with First Amendment freedoms’”
    • p. 136: “‘a small number of speakers, often with substantial economic resources behind them, will consistently command a mass audience…'”
    • Don’t get me started on Citizens United v. FEC (2010)…
  • p. 132: Net neutrality…reinstate April 2024
  • pp. 137-138: “The objective for government is to find the right regulatory balance between stimulating economically desirable activities and protecting individual rights to privacy and safety (in the knowledge, of course, that intelligence agencies will still hold the keys to masses of data).”

Next Class

Finish reading Misunderstanding the Internet for Monday, 10/28. I hope we talked about the next essay: Critical Media Analysis Project, due 11/25.