Misunderstanding the Internet

James Curran, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317443506
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

The growth of the internet has been spectacular. There are now more than 3 billion internet users across the globe, some 40 per cent of the world's population. The internet's meteoric rise is a phenomenon of enormous significance for the economic, political and social life of contemporary societies.

However, much popular and academic writing about the internet continues to take a celebratory view, assuming that the internet's potential will be realised in essentially positive and transformative ways. This was especially true in the euphoric moment of the mid-1990s, when many commentators wrote about the internet with awe and wonderment. While this moment may be over, its underlying technocentrism – the belief that technology determines outcomes – lingers on and, with it, a failure to understand the internet in its social, economic and political contexts.

Misunderstanding the Internet is a short introduction, encompassing the history, sociology, politics and economics of the internet and its impact on society. This expanded and updated second edition is a polemical, sociologically and historically informed guide to the key claims that have been made about the online world. It aims to challenge both popular myths and existing academic orthodoxies that surround the internet.

Chapter 1 The internet of dreams

DOI: 10.4324/9781315695624-1

Reinterpreting the internet

James Curran

In the 1990s, leading experts, politicians, public officials, business leaders and journalists predicted that the internet would transform the world.¹ The internet would revolutionise, we were told, the organisation of business, and lead to a surge of prosperity (Gates 1995).² It would inaugurate a new era of cultural democracy in which sovereign users would call the shots, and old media leviathans would decay and die (Negroponte 1996). It would rejuvenate democracy – in some versions by enabling direct e-government through popular referenda (Grossman 1995). All over the world, the weak and marginal would be empowered, leading to the fall of autocrats and the reordering of power relations (Gilder 1994). More generally, the global medium of the internet would shrink the universe, promote dialogue between nations and foster global understanding (Jipguep 1995; Bulashova and Cole 1995). In brief, the internet would change society permanently and irrevocably, like the invention of print and gunpowder.

These arguments were mostly inferences derived from the internet’s technology. It was assumed that the distinctive technological attributes of the internet – its interactivity, global reach, cheapness, speed, networking facility, storage capacity and alleged uncontrollability – would change the world beyond all recognition. Underlying these predictions was a widely shared internet-centrism, a belief that the internet was a determining technology that would reconfigure all environments.

These predictions gained ever greater authority when, seemingly, they were fulfilled. The internet entered every domain of social life, changing the way people searched for information, communicated, met, shopped and spent their time. The notion that anyone could live their life entirely offline seemed so absurd that it became the subject of satire (Portlandia, n.d.). Indeed, 15-year-olds in economically advanced countries spent around three hours online on a typical weekday in 2013 (OECD 2014: 13).

Numerous experts continued to affirm in the 2000s that the internet was transforming society. The internet was supposedly engendering a shift from passive consumption to active participation (Shirky 2010); causing markets to fragment (Anderson 2006); and rendering society more open and egalitarian (Leadbetter 2009). The 2011 popular uprisings in the Middle East – immediately hailed as the ‘Twitter Revolutions’ – seemed to offer final confirmation that the internet was a transformative force. As the world-famous sociologist, Manuel Castells, exulted in a book hymning the power of the internet: ‘dictatorships could be overthrown with the bare hands of the people’ (Castells 2012: 1).

Thus, it seemed as if only technophobes, stuck in a time warp of the past, remained blind to what was apparent to everyone else: namely that the internet was remaking the world. But as pronouncements about the internet’s impact shifted from the future to the present tense, and became ever more assured, some analysts had second thoughts. In 1995, Sherry Turkle had celebrated anonymous online encounters between people on the grounds that they could extend imaginative insight into the ‘other’, and forge more emancipated sensibilities (Turkle 1995). Sixteen years later, she changed tack. Online communication, she lamented, could be shallow and addictive, and get in the way of developing richer, more fulfilling interpersonal relationships (Turkle 2011).³ Another apostate was the Belarus activist Evgeny Morozov. His former hope that the internet would undermine dictators was, he declared, a ‘delusion’ (Morozov 2011). There were also others whose initial, more guarded belief in the emancipatory power of the internet turned into outright scepticism. Typical of this latter group was John Foster and Robert McChesney who wrote in 2011 that ‘the enormous potential of the Internet . . . has vaporized in a couple of decades’ (2011: 17).

We are thus faced with a disconcerting difference of expert opinion. Most informed commentators view the internet as a transforming technology. Seemingly, their predictions are being confirmed by events. Yet a confident minority decries the majority view as perverse. Who – and what – is right?

We will attempt to sketch an answer in this introductory chapter by identifying four key sets of predictions about the impact of the internet, and then check to see whether they have come true.⁴ This will lead to a brief consideration of the conditions that result in the internet having a greater or lesser effect.

Economic transformation

In the 1990s, it was widely claimed that the internet would generate wealth and prosperity for all. This was the central conclusion of a long article in Wired, the bible of the American internet community, written by the magazine’s editor, Kevin Kelly (1999). Its title and standfirst set the article’s tone: ‘The Roaring Zeros: The good news is, you’ll be a millionaire soon. The bad news is, so will everybody else’.

This was merely one exuberant example of the speculative fever that took hold of mainstream media. ‘The Internet gold rush is under way’, declared the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (6 December 1995). ‘Thousands of people and companies are staking claims. Without a doubt there is lots of gold because the Internet is the beginning of something immensely important.’ Across the Atlantic Ocean, the same message was being proclaimed with undisguised relish. The ‘fortunes’ of ‘Web whiz-kids’, according to the Independent on Sunday (25 July 1999), ‘reduce National Lottery jackpots to peanuts and make City bonuses seem like restaurant tips’. Punters could become rich too, it was promised, if they invested in whiz-kids’ IPOs (initial public offerings). This invitation to personal enrichment was backed up by authoritative reports in the business press that the internet would generate increased prosperity. ‘We have entered the Age of the Internet’, declared BusinessWeek (October 1999). ‘The result: an explosion of economic and productivity growth first in the U.S., with the rest of the world soon to follow’ (emphasis added).

Bullish comments about the dynamic economic impact of the internet subsided when the dotcom bubble burst in 2001, but were reprised from the mid-2000s onwards. While this second wave of prophecy was not as flamboyant as the first, its general tenor was still strongly upbeat. One standard argument was that past predictions had been wrong only because they had been premature. But the internet is now moving allegedly into its full deployment phase, and coming into its own (Atkinson et al. 2010). Indeed, as time passed and memory of the internet crash faded, forecasts tended to become ever more optimistic (e.g. OECD 2014).

Central to this resilient prophetic tradition is the idea that the internet and digital communication has given birth to the ‘New Economy’. While this concept is mutable and sometimes opaque, it is associated with certain recurrent themes. The internet provides, we are told, a more efficient means of connecting suppliers, producers and consumers. It is a disruptive technology that is generating a Schumpeterian wave of innovation, and attendant surge of productivity. And it is contributing to the growth of an information and communication economy that will compensate for the decline of manufacturing in de-industrialising, Western societies.

At the heart of this theorising is a mystical core (which was especially prominent in the 1990s). The internet is supposedly changing the terms of competition by establishing a level playing field between corporate giants and small companies. As Steve Jobs asserted in 1996, the internet is an ‘incredible democratiser’, since ‘a small company can look as large as a big company and be accessible’ (cited in Ryan 2010: 179). This has supposedly renewed the dynamism of the market, and unleashed a whirlwind force of creativity and growth. The internet has also created new market opportunities by enabling small start-ups to bypass dominant retailers and service agencies. It has lowered costs and extended exports, enabling new producers to prosper by catering for niche markets. More generally, the internet favours, we are told, horizontal, flexible network enterprise, able to respond rapidly to changes in consumer demand, unlike heavy-footed, top-down, Fordist, giant corporations. ‘Small’ is not only nimble but empowered and gifted with opportunity in the internet-based New Economy.

The presentation of these themes is often cloaked in specialist language. To understand its insights, it is seemingly necessary to learn a new vocabulary: to distinguish between portal and vortal, to differentiate between internet, intranet and extranet, to grasp the meaning of phrases like ‘click-and-mortar’ and ‘data-warehousing’, and to be familiar with endless acronyms like CRM (customer relationship management), VAN (value-added network), ERP (enterprise resource planning), OLTP (online transaction processing) and ETL (extract, transform and load). To be part of the novitiate who understands the future, it is first necessary to master a new catechism.

It is not easy to assess whether this vision of the future has come true because the economic impact of the internet is ongoing and incomplete. An added complication arises from the fact that the internet was preceded by earlier electronic data interchange systems like the telex and fax, and widespread business use of computers for data analysis (Bar and Simard 2002). Change has been cumulative.

Even so, it is possible to make a preliminary assessment. The first conclusion is that the internet has indeed modified the nerve system of the economy by changing the interactions between suppliers, producers and consumers, the configuration of markets, the volume and velocity of global financial transactions, and the nature of data processing and communication within business organisations. The internet has also given rise to the creation of major corporations like Google, and assisted the growth of lucrative enterprises like online gaming.

Perhaps the aspect of this economic restructuring that has most affected everyday material life is the rise of online retailing. In 2013 almost 50% of the adult OECD population bought something online. However, this average conceals very large variations between countries. Within the OECD bloc of affluent nations, the British and Danes are the most disposed to shop online: over three quarters did so in 2013. Yet, in the same year, only 10% of people in Turkey and 2% of people in Mexico ordered goods and services online (OECD 2014: 42).

While many now shop online, the volume of online shopping is still small in relative terms. This is for two main reasons: online sales take place mainly within nations rather than between nations, and are uneven across different retail and service sectors. To put the rise of online selling in perspective, e-commerce sales made up just 6.5% of total retail sales in the United States in 2014 (Bucchioni et al. 2015). By comparison, e-commerce accounted for 4% of total sales in Europe in 2007 (European Commission 2009), though the proportion will have risen since then.

Online sale of goods and services will continue to expand in the future. The relatively recent inroads made by Uber, which connects drivers with passengers, and Airbnb, which connects hosts with paying guests, are examples of an ongoing transformation. Factors holding back the rise of online retailing will diminish in importance over time. Even so, the obstacles in the way of an international online revolution – low internet access in some countries, language difficulties, security fears, differences in broadband speed and in the reliability of postal services, national variations in custom procedures and taxes, local corruption, differences of legislation respecting the cross-border transfer of personal details, the high cost of insurance and much else besides – remain formidable (Swedish National Board of Trade 2012; cf Groot 2011). There will also continue to be people who enjoy offline shopping, want to try out a product before purchase, or wish to buy without delay.

The second conclusion is that the internet has not been a geyser of wealth cascading down to all. There was an enormous increase in the stock market value of i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Communication and Society
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The internet of dreams: reinterpreting the internet
• 2 The internet of history: rethinking the internet’s past
• 3 The internet of capital: concentration and commodification in a world of abundance
• 4 The internet of rules: critical approaches to online regulation and governance
• 5 The internet of me (and my ‘friends’)
• 6 The internet of radical politics and social change
• 7 The internet we want
• Index