The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory

Magic, Metaphor, Power

Andrew Herman, Thomas Swiss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135205119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popular en el arte

Engaging the thematic issues of the Web as a space where magic, metaphor, and power converge, the chapters cover such subjects as The Web and Corporate Media Systems, Conspiracy Theories and the Web; The Economy of Cyberpromotion, The Bias of the Web, The Web and Issues of Gender, and so on.

1

ROBERT McCHESNEY

So Much for the Magic of Technology and the Free Market

The World Wide Web and the Corporate Media System

Much contemporary literature discusses the starkly antidemocratic implications and trajectory of the contemporary media system (McChesney, 1999). Dominated by a handful of massive firms, advertisers, and their billionaire owners, the system is spinning in a hyper-commercial frenzy with little trace of public service. In conjunction with this crystallization of the corporate media system in the late 1990s, a theory has emerged asserting that we have no reason to be concerned about concentrated corporate control and the hypercommer-cialization of media. This claim is that the World Wide Web, or, more broadly, digital communication networks, will set us free. This is hardly an unprecedented argument: every major new electronic media technology in this century—from film, AM radio, short-wave radio, and facsimile broadcasting to FM radio, terrestrial television, cable, and satellite broadcasting—has spawned similar Utopian notions. In each case, to varying degrees, visionaries told us how these new magical technologies would crush the existing monopolies over media, culture, and knowledge and open the way for a more egalitarian and just social order. But the World Wide Web is qualitatively the most radical and sweeping of these new communication technologies, and the claims about it top earlier technological visions by a wide margin.

The claims for what the Web will do to media and communication are no less sweeping. “The Internet is wildly underestimated,” Nicholas Negroponte, media lab director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, states. “It will grow to be the enabling technology of all media—TV, radio, magazines and so on” (quoted in Lohr, 1998b: All). As the argument goes, if everything is in the process of becoming digital, if anyone can produce a site at minimal cost, and if that site can be accessed worldwide via the Web, it is only a matter of time (e.g., expansion of bandwidth, improvement of software) before the media giants find themselves swamped by countless high-quality competitors. Their monopolies will be crushed. John Perry Barlow, in a memorable comment from 1995, dismissed concerns about media mergers and concentration. The big media firms, Barlow noted, are “merely rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” The “iceberg,” he submitted, would be the World Wide Web, with its five hundred million channels (cited in Herman and McChesney, 1997:107). As one New York Times correspondent put it in 1998, “To hear Andy Grove [CEO of Intel] and Reed Hundt [former chair of the Federal Communications Commission] talk, the media industry is about where the horse-and-buggy business was when Henry Ford first cranked up the assembly line” (Landler, 1998: sec. 3, D.9).

In this chapter I try to untangle the claims, even the mythology, about the World Wide Web from the observable record, though this is not an easy task. For one thing, the Web is a quite remarkable and complex phenomenon that cannot be categorized by any previous medium’s experience. It is two-way mass communication; it uses the soon-to-be-universal digital binary code; it is global; and it is quite unclear how, exactly, it is or can be regulated. In addition, the World Wide Web is changing at a historically unprecedented rate. Any attempt at prediction during such tumultuous times is nearly impossible; something written about the Web as recently as 1992 or 1993 has about as much currency in 2000 as discourses on the War of the Roses do for understanding contemporary European military policy. But I believe enough has happened in cyberspace that we can begin to get a sense of the Web’s overarching trajectory, and a sense of what the range of probable outcomes might be.

While it is no doubt true that the World Wide Web will be part of massive social changes, I do not share the optimism of the George Gilders, Newt Gingriches, and Nicholas Negropontes.¹ Much discussion of the Web is premised upon whether one has a Utopian or dystopian, optimistic or pessimistic view of technology and social change. In short, is one a technological determinist, and is that determinism of the Utopian or Lud-dite variety? These are interesting debates but, conducted in isolation from social factors, they are not especially productive. The Web utopi-anism of Negroponte and others is based not just on a belief in the magic of technology, but, more important, on a belief in capitalism as a fair, rational, and democratic mechanism that I find mythological. It is when technological utopianism or determinism are combined with a view of capitalism as benign and natural that we get a genuinely heady ideological brew. So it is true that the Web is changing the nature of our media landscape radically. As Barry Diller, builder of the Fox television network and a legendary corporate media seer, put it in December 1997, “We’re at the very early stages of the most radical transformation of everything we hear, see, know” (“All Together Now,” 1997: 14). What I wish to examine in this chapter, specifically, is if these changes will pave the way for a qualitatively different media culture and society or if the corporate commercial system will merely don a new set of clothing.

THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE FREE MARKET

One of the striking characteristics of the World Wide Web is that there has been virtually no public debate over how it should develop; a consensus of “experts” simply decided that it should be turned over to the market. Indeed, the antidemocratic nature of Web policy making is explained or defended on very simple grounds: the Web is to be and should be regulated by the free market. This is the most rational, fair, and democratic regulatory mechanism ever known to humanity, so by all rights it should be automatically applied to any and all areas of social life where profit can be found. No debate is necessary to establish the market as the reigning regulatory mechanism, because the market naturally assumes that role unless the government intervenes and prevents the market from working its magic. Indeed, by this logic, any public debate over Web policy can only be counterproductive, because it could only lead us away from a profit-driven system. Public meddling would allow unproductive bureaucrats to interfere with productive market players.

Combining the market with the Web, we are told, will allow entrepreneurs to compete as never before, offering wonderful new products at ever lower prices. It will provide a virtual cornucopia of choices for consumers, and empower people all over the world in a manner previously unimaginable. Enterprise will blossom as the multitudes become online entrepreneurs. It will be a capitalist Valhalla. Nowhere will the cyber-market revolution be more apparent than in the realm of media and communication. When anyone can put something up on the Web, the argument goes, and when the Web effectively converges with television, the value of having a television or cable network will approach zero. Eventually the control of any distribution network will be of no value as all media convert to digital formats. Production studios, too, will have less leverage as the market will be opened to innumerable new players. Even governments will, in the end, find its power untamable (McHugh, 1997).

As a consequence, the likely result of the digital revolution will be the withering—perhaps even the outright elimination—of the media giants and a flowering of a competitive commercial media marketplace the likes of which have never been seen. Indeed, the rise of the Web threatens not only the market power of the media giants but also the very survival of the telecommunication and computer software giants (see Gilder, 1994).

It is ironic that as the claims about the genius of the market have grown in conventional discourse over the past two decades, the need to provide empirical evidence for the claims has declined. The market has assumed mythological status, becoming a religious totem to which all must pledge allegiance or face expulsion to the margins. The mythology of the market is so widely embraced to some extent because it has some elements of truth. It is formally a voluntary mechanism, without direct coercion, and it permits an element of consumer choice. But the main reason it has vaulted to the top of the ideological totem pole is because it serves the interests of the most dominant elements of our society. And the free market mythology harms few if any powerful interests, so it goes increasingly unchallenged. As this mythology of the free market is the foundation of almost the entire case for the lack of any public debate on the course—and therefore for the privatization and commercialization—of the Web, it demands very careful scrutiny.

The claim that the market is a fair, just, and rational allocator of goods and services is premised on the notion that the market is based on competition. This competition constantly forces all economic actors to produce the highest-quality product for the lowest possible price, and it rewards those who work the hardest and the most efficiently (see Friedman, 1962). Therefore, these new technologies will permit hungry entrepreneurs to enter markets, slay corporate dinosaurs, lower prices, improve products, and generally do good things for humanity. And just when these newly successful entrepreneurs are riding high on the hog, along will come some plucky upstart (probably with a new technology) to teach them a lesson and work the magic of competition yet again. This is the sort of pabulum that is served up to those Americans who lack significant investments in the economy. It provides an attractive image for the way our economy works—making it seem downright fair and rational—but it has little to do with how the economy actually operates. Corporate executives will even invoke this rhetoric in dealing with Congress or the public and, at a certain level, they may even believe it. Yet their actions speak louder than words.

The truth is that for those atop our economy the key to success is based in large part on eliminating competition.² I am being somewhat facetious, because in the end capitalism is indeed a war of one against all, since every capitalist is in competition with all others. But competition is also something successful capitalists (the kind that remain capitalists) learn to avoid like the plague. The less competition a firm has, the less risk it faces and the more profitable it tends to be. All investors and firms rationally desire to be in as monopolistic a position as possible. In general, most markets in the United States in the twentieth century have gravitated not to monopoly status, but to oligopolistic status. This means that a small handful of firms—ranging from two or three to as many as a dozen or so—thoroughly dominate the market’s output and maintain barriers to entry that effectively keep new market entrants at bay, despite the sort of profitability that Milton Friedman tells us would create competition. In pricing and output, oligopolistic markets are far closer to being monopolistic markets than they are the competitive markets described in capitalist folklore.

To be sure, despite all this concentration these firms still compete—but not in the manner the mythology suggests. As one business writer put it, “Companies in some industries seem to do everything to win customers, apart from cutting prices” (Martin, 1998: 10). Advertising, for example, arises to become a primary means of competition in oligopolistic markets. It provides a way to protect or expand market share without engaging in profit-threatening price competition. On occasion, foreign competition, economic crisis, new technologies, or some other factor may break down a stable oligopoly and lead to a reshuffling of the deck and a change in the cast of corporate characters. But the end result will almost always be some sort of stable oligopoly; otherwise, no sane capitalist would participate. Yet even the notion of oligopoly is insufficient: widespread conglomeration, along with pronounced involvement by the largest financial institutions in corporate affairs, has reduced the level of autonomy in distinct industries, bringing a degree of instability—if not much more direct competition—to the system. Rather then concentrate on specific oligopolistic industries, then, it is perhaps better to recognize the economy as being increasingly dominated by the few hundred largest firms. This certainly is the best context for understanding developments in media and communication.

So how should we expect the World Wide Web to develop in this model of the free market? Exactly as it has so far. Despite now having the technological capacity to compete, the largest firms are extremely reticent about entering new markets and forcing their way into existing and highly lucrative communication markets. Thus the local telephone companies have tended to avoid providing pay television over their wires, and the cable companies have avoided providing telephone services over their lines. This is no conspiracy. There have been a few, and will no doubt be more, attempts by these firms and others to cross over and compete in new markets. But it will be done selectively, usually targeting affluent markets that are far more attractive to these firms (Mehta, 1998). Most important, no existing giant will attempt to enter another market unless they are reasonably certain that they will have a chance to win their own monopoly, or at least have a large chunk of a stable oligopoly with significant barriers to entry. A less risky option for these firms, rather than venturing on entrepreneurial kamikaze missions into enemy territory, is to merge to get larger so they have much more armor as they enter competitive battle, or to protect themselves from outside attack. Short of mergers, the other prudent course is to establish joint ventures with prospective competitors in order to reduce potential competition and risk. In short, the rational behavior is to attempt to reduce the threat of competition as much as possible, and then to engage in as little direct competition as can be managed. When capitalism is viewed in this light, Barlow’s “iceberg” thesis is considerably less plausible. After all, the corporate media giants have significant weapons in their arsenal not only to confront but also to shape the new technologies. Moreover, once we have a realistic understanding of how capitalism operates, we can see why the dominant corporate media firms, rather than shrinking, are in fact growing rapidly in the United States and worldwide. In the United States, the media industry is growing much faster than the overall economy, and experienced, for the first time since the 1980s, double-digit growth in the consecutive years 1997 and 1998 (Mermigas, 1997; Cardona, 1997).

Fig. 1.1. In the end, capitalism is indeed a war of one against all, since every capitalist is in competition with all others. The Wall Street Journal website, http://www.wsj.com/

But what about new firms? Will they provide the competitive impetus the giants rationally attempt to avoid? In general, new firms are ill-equipped to challenge giant firms in oligopolistic markets due to entry barriers. The role of small firms in the classic scenario is to conduct the research, development, and experimentation that large firms deem insufficiently profitable, then, when a small firm finds a lucrative new avenue, it sells out to an existing giant. Some of the impetus for technological innovation comes from these small firms, eager to find a new niche in which they can grow away from the shadows of the corporate giants in existing industries. It is in times of technological upheaval, as now, with the World Wide Web and digital communication, that brand new industries are being formed and there is an opportunity for new giants to emerge.

It is safe to say that some new communications giants will be established during the coming years, much as Microsoft attained gigantic status during the eighties and nineties. But most of the great new fortunes will be made by start-up firms who develop a profitable idea and then sell out to one of the existing giants. (Witness Microsoft, which spent over $2 billion between 1994 and 1997 to purchase or take a stake in some fifty communication companies.) Indeed, this is conceded to be the explicit goal of nearly all the start-up Web and telecommunications firms, who are founded with the premise of an “exit scenario” through their sale to a giant (Colonna, 1998). As a Web stock-market manager put it in 1998, Web company stock prices were “driven by speculation about who will be the next company to get snapped up by a much bigger company from another medium as a way of buying their way on to the World Wide Web” (Gilpin, 1998: 7). Hence, the traditional function of start-up firms is still the rule. For every new Microsoft, there will be one thousand WebTVs or Starwaves, small technology firms that sell out to media and communications giants in deals that make their largest shareholders rich beyond their wildest dreams. And for every WebTV or Starwave, there are thousands more companies that go belly up.

What should be clear is that this market system may “work” in the sense that goods and services are produced and consumed, but it is by no means fair in any social, political, or ethical sense of the term. Existing corporations have tremendous advantages over start-up firms. They use their power to limit the ability of new firms to enter the fray, to limit output and keep prices higher. Yet the unfairness extends beyond the lack of competitive markets. In participating as capitalists, wealthy individuals have tremendous advantages over poor or middle-class individuals, who have almost no chance at all. Thus, a tremendous amount of talent simply never gets an opportunity to develop and contribute to the economy. It is unremarkable that “self-made” billionaires like Bill Gates, Ted Turner, Michael Eisner, Rupert Murdoch, and Sumner Redstone all come from privileged backgrounds. And, on the “demand” side of the market, power is determined by how much money an individual has; it is a case of one dollar, one vote rather than one person, one vote. In this sense, then, the political system to which the market is most similar is the limited suffrage days of pre-twentieth-century democracies, when prop-ertyless adults could not vote and their interests were studiously ignored.

In truth, this is what a defense of the market system, in terms of fairness, boils down to: new firms can start and they can become giants, and to do so they probably have to do something quite remarkable, or be very lucky. All it means is that the system holds open the slightest possibility of a nonwealthy person becoming a multimillionaire, that success is extremely difficult to attain in this manner, and that the hope of being rich will drive countless people to their wits’ end.

There are a couple of other aspects of capitalism that do not comport to the mythology. First, when free-market mythologists criticize the heavy hand of government, what they really mean by heavy hand is that government might actually represent the interests of the citizenry versus those of business. When governments spend billions subsidizing industries or advocating the interests of business, not a peep is heard about the evils of “big government.” Government policies play a decisive role in assisting corporate profitability and dominance in numerous industries, not the least of which is communications. Most of the communications industry associated with the technology revolution—particularly the Web—grew directly out of government subsidies. Indeed, at one point fully 85 percent of research and development in the U.S. electronics industry was subsidized by the federal government, although the eventual profits accrued to private firms (T. Chomsk...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The World Wide Web as Magic, Metaphor, and Power
• 1 So Much for the Magic of Technology and the Free Market The World Wide Web and the Corporate Media System
• 2 Webs of Myth and Power Connectivity and the New Computer Technopolis
• 3 Webs of Conspiracy
• 4 "Red Alert!" Rhetorics of the World Wide Web and "Friction Free" Capitalism
• 5 Yo-Ho-Ho and a Server of Warez Internet Software Piracy and the New Global Information Economy
• 6 Shit Happens Numerology, Destiny, and Control on the Web
• 7 Hypertext Links The Ethic of the Index and Its Space-Time Effects
• 8 The Economy of Cyberpromotion Awards on the World Wide Web
• 9 The Bias of the Web
• 10 Baud Girls and Cargo Cults A Story about Celebrity, Community, and Profane Illumination on the Web
• 11 Literacy Beyond Books Reading When All the World's a Web
• 12 Cultural Technologies and the "Evolution" of Technological Cultures
• 13 Error 404 Doubting the Web
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index