New Media (4th Edition) PDF

NEW MEDIA NEW MEDIA An Introduction TERRY FLEW RICHARD SMITH Fourth Canadian Edition  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective...

NEW MEDIA NEW MEDIA An Introduction TERRY FLEW RICHARD SMITH Fourth Canadian Edition  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries. Published in Canada by Oxford University Press 8 Sampson Mews, Suite 204, Don Mills, Ontario M3C 0H5 Canada www.oupcanada.com Copyright © Oxford University Press Canada 2021 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First Canadian Edition published in 2011 Second Canadian Edition published in 2014 Third Canadian Edition published in 2018 New Media, Fourth Edition, was originally published in English in 2014 by Oxford University Press Australia, 253 Normanby Rd, South Melbourne, Victoria, 3205, Australia with the ISBN 9780195577853. This adaptation is published by arrangement. Oxford University Press Canada is solely responsible for this adaptation from the original work All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Permissions Department at the address above or through the following url: www.oupcanada.com/permission/permission_request.php Every effort has been made to determine and contact copyright holders. In the case of any omissions, the publisher will be pleased to make suitable acknowledgement in future editions. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: New media : an introduction / Terry Flew and Richard Smith. Names: Flew, Terry, author. | Smith, Richard (Richard Keith), author. Description: Fourth Canadian edition. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020039858X Canadiana (ebook) 20200398679 ISBN 9780199036981 (softcover) | ISBN 9780199037001 (EPUB) Subjects: LCSH: Mass media—Technological innovations—Textbooks. LCSH: Mass media and technology—Textbooks. | LCSH: Digital media—Textbooks. LCSH: Mass media—Textbooks. | LCGFT: Textbooks. Classification: LCC P96.T42 F64 2021 | DDC 302.23—dc23 Cover image: © jamesteohart/Shutterstock Cover and interior design: Sherill Chapman Contents Preface to the Fourth Edition Introduction Abbreviations 1 Introduction to New Media Questions to Consider Chapter Outline Why “New” Media? Convergence Interactivity Internet History The Global Internet The Conduit and the Content Web 2.0, Social Media, and Platforms Conclusion Useful Websites Further Reading Discussion Questions Class Activities Debate Questions 2 The History of New Media Questions to Consider Chapter Outline Early Traces of New Media Institutionalized, Instantaneous, Worldwide Communication: The Telegraph From Telegraph to Telephone: Revolution in Sound By the Flickering Light, We Will Conjure Movement: Film Speaking without Wires: Radio Pictures and Sound, Educational Potential: Television Useful Websites Further Reading Discussion Questions Class Activities Debate Questions 3 Approaches to New Media Questions to Consider Chapter Outline Getting Perspective What to Believe: The Hype or the Counter-Hype? Interpreting Hype and Counter-Hype: Methodological Considerations Approaches to Technological Change: Divergent Perspectives Context for New Media Virtual Communities Modern Views Useful Websites Further Reading Discussion Questions Class Activities Debate Questions 4 Mobile New Media Questions to Consider Chapter Outline Many Kinds of Mobile The Origins of Mobile Phones New Services From Multifunction Phones to Smartphones  When Is a Phone No Longer a Phone? “New” New Media on Phones? Kids on Phones The Business of Mobility What Matters with Mobile? Useful Websites Further Reading Discussion Questions Class Activities Debate Questions 5 Social Networks and Participatory Culture Questions to Consider Chapter Outline Networking for Fun and Profit The Nature of Networks Race and Access: Bridging the Divide Social Network Analysis Networks and the Economics of Social Production Participatory Media Cultures Creation: The New Consumption? Non-traditional Media Participatory Media, Social Software, and Social Capital Downsides of Networks, Social Media, and Participatory Media Culture Useful Websites Further Reading Discussion Questions Class Activities Debate Questions 6 Digital Creativity: Technology, Industry, and Culture Questions to Consider Chapter Outline Creativity in Question Creativity and Media The Evolution of Copyright Law Non-linear Storytelling The Rise of Creative Industries Is “Creative Industries” Still a Useful Organizing Concept? Economic Drivers of Creative Industries Creative Industries and Evolving Arts and Cultural Policy How the Gaming Industry Profits Cultural Impacts of the Gaming Industry Future Innovations in Gaming Useful Websites Further Reading Discussion Questions Class Activities Debate Questions 7 Truth and Misinformation in the Post-Truth Era Questions to Consider Chapter Outline Fake News Propaganda Satire and Parody Journalism and Storytelling in the Post-Truth Era The Spread of Information Online Media Literacy Campaigns and Initiatives Conclusion Useful Websites Further Reading  Discussion Questions Class Activities Debate Questions 8 The Global Knowledge Economy Questions to Consider Chapter Outline The Global Knowledge Economy Information and Knowledge The Ecommerce and Platform Economy Innovation and the Innovator’s Dilemma A Creative Economy? Useful Websites Further Reading Discussion Questions Class Activities Debate Questions 9 Internet Law, Policy, and Governance Questions to Consider Chapter Outline Internet Law, Policy, and Governance Perspectives on Internet Governance Canadian New Media Policy Next Generation New Media Policy Copyright and Intellectual Property Law: An Overview Copyright and New Media Major Developments in International Copyright and Intellectual Property Law Digital Gatekeepers An Alternative to Copyright: Open Source Useful Websites Further Reading Discussion Questions Class Activities Debate Questions 10 Conclusion Questions to Consider Chapter Outline Key Concerns and Future Considerations Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality Privacy and Surveillance in New Media Augmented Reality and 3D Printing Truth and Reconciliation New Media Scholarship: The Next Frontiers Final Words Glossary Notes Bibliography Index Preface to the Fourth Edition The fourth edition of New Media: An Introduction was completed just before the COVID-19 pandemic swept over the world. I was in France, which was particularly hard hit, doing the final revisions, and the editor and I discussed whether these prefatory remarks should ignore, focus on, or perhaps lightly mention the virus. I have opted to write about it here, as it is too important to leave out, but will try to leave the remainder of the book intact. The manuscript is too far into the production process to have a major change at this point, and it is also too early in the process (I am writing this in March of 2020) to know how things will turn out. Suffice it to say that writing a book—a very old media—about new media is tough in the best of times, and in these circumstances promises to be even more challenging. The biggest challenge is that the underlying technology and how we use it are both changing rapidly even in normal times, and this process has only accelerated in these unusual times. To give an obvious example, in the case of COVID-19, many universities mandated an end to face-to-face teaching and the immediate (we had less than a week to make the change) switch to virtual or online teaching. Online teaching has its place, and many people use it. But to have the entire university change in the space of a few days—well, that was dramatic. Incredibly, we did it. I can’t say that it wasn’t without its problems, but by and large people figured it out and made the change. Importantly, we used the tools we had at hand; there was no time to develop new ones. That’s the kind of social transformation that happens when people are put into a position of necessity. New media will be forever changed by this situation, I predict. The first stage we have already seen: people adopting tools that already exist and using them as designed. Video conferencing services like Zoom and BlueJeans saw increases in the weeks following the COVID-19 outbreak. People started using etransfer for money, rather than cash. The “tap” feature on credit cards suddenly seemed much more important. And online shopping and delivery services, of course, were even more in demand. The second stage will be the adaptations of existing tools or a combination of tools to accomplish tasks in new and different ways. People may start repurposing virtual reality game environments for educational or business purposes, for example. And then we’ll see the third stage: new and different applications developed specifically to address the needs of a global population that travels less and seeks to meet each other in ways that don’t involve face-to-face contact. All of this will be exciting, and it will happen very quickly in large part because of the built-in affordances of new and digital media: an open network platform at the base (the internet) and the inherent features of digital, which permits and enables endless combinations and permutations of things. Revising New Media: An Introduction has once again been an amazing experience, for many reasons. As noted above, the pace and amount of change in the industry challenges authors of new media books. This happens with both the technology itself and the ways in which people use it. New media is, by its nature, extremely malleable and fluid in how it is used. Many of the same bits and pieces that go into making webpages also bring about streaming radio and video capabilities—for example, the Zoom video conferencing platform is built on top of the cloud-based servers and technology that already exist. Even fibre-optic systems were built using rights-of-way and poles that supported the previous copper wires. New media, of course, is not just technology but a blend of technology and what people make with it. Thus, when you add the creative output of billions of people, the possibilities are endless. New media content is amusing, entertaining, and inspiring change around the world. New issues like cyberbullying and misinformation/disinformation have also been included in this edition, the latter receiving an entirely new chapter. That new chapter deserves special mention as it was largely created by my fabulous research assistant, Erinne Paisley. Erinne was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto when we first met (via email and FaceTime) and is now a graduate student in Amsterdam. She did amazing work on this book, bringing it up to date, tracking down new facts and figures, and both prompting and then doing much of the work to bring the new chapter on misinformation to life. Little did either of us know it would be doubly important in the 2020s. We envisioned the political implications of “fake news” as we wrote it, but the extent to which conspiracy theories and misinformation relating to health viruses have haunted a globe grappling with a pandemic brings these issues into the foreground to an even greater degree. As with the previous editions, the book continues to grow: It is considerably larger than the third edition, with longer chapters and the addition of new material. New media theorists are featured as well as interviews with some of the emerging scholars in Canada. In keeping with the pedagogical objectives of the first three editions, I have also positioned the book as an explicitly pedagogical project, with chapter objectives, questions to consider, discussion questions, and further reading included in all of the chapters. This is not to pre-empt the work of instructors. Rather, I hope these elements contribute to their repertoire of material as they seek to animate the text for their students and guide the use of the book in lectures and tutorials. In most cases, the “Useful Websites” and “Further Reading” sections have been updated as well. With this edition, I have continued to add more Canadian content and updated key elements. While Canadian readers are familiar with international trends and events in new media, it is sometimes more interesting and salient to see how these play out in the national, regional, and local scene. This book is explicitly and proudly Canadian in its approach, examples, and almost all of the case studies. Without making it parochial, I have tried to position this book as a Canadian exploration of new media. Some things, such as our specific regulatory and legal history in relation to new media, are distinct and require a specifically Canadian treatment—keeping in mind, of course, the international context in which all new media operate. Other facets of new media (and the history of new media) are, in fact, Canadian contributions to the global environment. Recent success stories, such as Hootsuite or Slack, point to major contributions from Canadian software and technology companies. Many of the updates to this edition came as a result of suggestions from reviewers as well as the faculty and students—including my own— who are the primary users of the book. And a tip of my hat has to go to the clever students who caught errors and omissions. You know who you are, and thank you! Keep those contributions coming! Although the revisions have been an extremely challenging task, I have been aided immeasurably in the process by a number of colleagues who have contributed to this book by participating in interviews, reviewing drafts, and making suggestions: the students at the Centre for Digital Media; my colleagues Jon Festinger and Rachel Ralph, who teach the Foundations of Digital Media course with me; and of course Erinne Paisley, my research assistant. Her research and editorial assistance made this project possible. I also appreciate the helpful comments of both the named and anonymous reviewers of the fourth edition, including the following: Patricia Campbell, Red Deer College  Nicholous M. Deal, Saint Mary’s University Jessalynn Keller, University of Calgary Mark Lowes, University of Ottawa Jennifer Moss, University of British Columbia As before, the team at Oxford University Press Canada has been wonderful. In particular, I appreciate the excellent guidance from developmental editor Lauren Wing, who ensured that the project stayed on track from both a time and a relevance perspective. I could not have finished this book on time without the enormous support of my wife, Deborah Kirby, who has been extremely supportive of the late nights and weekends that went into this project. All errors and omissions fall to me, of course, and I encourage you to call me on them: [email protected]. Richard Smith, Bowen Island May 2020 Introduction This fourth Canadian edition ofNew Media is intended to be used in undergraduate courses on new media in a range of disciplines in the arts and social sciences, including (mass) communication, journalism, sociology, and anthropology. It could also be used as a supplement to a business or marketing course, given our attention to innovation and the business setting for new media. We don’t assume a great deal of prior knowledge about theories, approaches, or technology, and we attempt to cover new media from a variety of perspectives. Throughout the text, we pay special attention to the role of social media, which has both captured the popular imagination via sites like Facebook (facebook.com) and demonstrated the political and economic power of new media, as we saw in the use of Twitter (twitter.com) in the US election and UK “Brexit” campaign in 2016. We show the negative as well as the positive cultural, social, environmental, and civil rights implications of the widespread adoption of new media tools. Our objective is to help readers become critical and analytical users and students of new media. The first chapter asks the question, “What is new for society in new media?” and the role of new media in social change. We explore new media as an outcome of convergence—the process by which media technologies, industries, and services are merging—through changes in computing and communications networks and content. We attempt to put these changes in perspective and recognize that long-standing social, cultural, political, and economic forces remain significant factors affecting technological change. We then examine the characteristics of digital information and how those characteristics enable interactive communication and communication practices. Since the internet is one of the most important new media forms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we review the history of the internet, its social implications, the growth of social media, and the importance of search engines. We also look at the importance of online encyclopedias, status updates, friend lists, and online video. Chapter 1 concludes with a review of the implications of convergence and social media for the creation and consumption of media content. Chapter 2 provides the historical context for new media. Connections are drawn between current network technologies and prior inventions such as the telegraph, radio, and television. Although the path has been winding sometimes, ever since we have been able to send messages without moving physical objects (the first telegraph), immediacy has forever changed our expectations about communication media. With new capabilities came new institutions and social arrangements, and these have proven to be foundational and influential for subsequent generations of media. Journalism, politics, and business were all transformed by their use of the telegraph and the telephone, as Chapter 2 demonstrates. The radio and, later, television provided a testing ground for key elements of new media and in particular the business model in which the content could be accessed for free, if one was willing to accept a little bit of advertising. We conclude the chapter with a brief discussion of the educational potential of earlier new media. Chapter 3 is premised on the notion that a well-rounded view of the role and effects of new media in society can only be gleaned by considering a number of perspectives. For this reason, the chapter presents several theoretical approaches to new media while providing insight into their strengths and weaknesses. For example, we critically examine technological determinism and point out its weaknesses, while acknowledging that existing technological configurations inevitably influence society once they are widely adopted. Particular emphasis is placed on a “social shaping” perspective, in which groups and individuals are understood as able to influence how media is used and how it evolves. We explore some of the hype that surrounds new media and try to understand why science-driven messages are so compelling, while critically examining both the overly positive and the unnecessarily negative (frequently deterministic) portrayals of the effects of new media. Both cultural context and media forms are explored as ways of understanding new media, along with social, psychological, and economic explanations. Chapter 4 focuses on mobile technologies as a vital and important part of new media today. In this chapter, we explore the mobile phone and related technologies, such as the tablet, from historical, technological, and economic perspectives. Some of the key technical features of mobile phones are explained and examined with an eye to making these sometimes mysterious technologies more comprehensible. We also look at how social media services such as Facebook and Twitter are deployed on mobile devices, and the implications of location on these services. We examine, as well, some of the cultural impacts of mobile new media technologies as well as social, health, and environmental implications. Chapter 5 is about social networks and the use of these networks for the production of culture and cultural goods. In the first half of the chapter, we consider the concept of social networks and how these enable a culture of mass participation—a “participatory culture.” We also examine how these networks enable and enhance many other social processes. Although networks are not new phenomena, they are enhanced and extended by new media, and we explore this process in more detail here. Networks are economic and political as well as social phenomena and, given their importance, it is not surprising that new research methods have arisen to study them. One of these, social network analysis, is considered in detail from both a practical and a historical point of view. Social network theories are also critically examined in this chapter. In the second part of Chapter 5, we look at social production and participatory culture as it has emerged in information and communications technology–enhanced social networks. I n Chapter 6 we look at the creative industries generally and how digital media has accelerated, broadened, and deepened the industrialization of creativity. We begin with an examination of the concept of creativity and, especially, under what circumstances it can flourish. We next consider the notion of “creative industries” and how and why they have become a policy objective of cities, provinces/states, and countries around the world. We also examine the world of video games in this chapter. Game play and the game industry are a prime example of new media in the twenty-first century. We examine games as a significant part of popular culture, extending beyond their economic impact. We also look at how the immersive nature and rapid pace of change places online and video games at the centre of debates about gender roles, culture, childhood experiences, and intellectual property. We take a look at the economics of the game industry, including its dependence on subcontractors. This is followed by a consideration of the tension between the creative side of the business and the investment side, as well as the complex value chain between production and distribution. In the last part of the chapter, we look at some of the most significant gaming developments in the early years of the twenty-first century, such as the role of producer-consumers “modding” games, mobile gaming, smaller indie game studios, and free-to-play games. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the political economy of the game industry, as well as a look at the game industry in Canada. Chapter 7 is an entirely new chapter focused on news and how it has evolved into fake news and the implications of the resulting misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information. These topics are a growing concern for governments and industries around the world as new media technologies make it easier for falsity to spread and displace accurate and truthful information, sometimes to great harm to our health or democracies. I n Chapter 8, we look at the global knowledge economy and new media as a powerful force for globalization. Here, we explain the complexity of globalization and review some of the main criticisms of these developments as part of an overall knowledge economy. We examine both technological change and its role in the economy as well as more practical matters such as ecommerce strategies and the role that new media play in “disintermediation” in order to better understand the forces that drive the global knowledge economy. We look at the nature of digital goods and how they have disrupted many industries that relied on the expense of reproducing and transporting ideas (e.g., news, music, movies) for a competitive advantage and now find themselves without their former basis for extracting value. We examine the creative economy more closely from a business perspective. Here, we examine topics such as technological innovation and the innovator’s dilemma. In Chapter 9, we examine law, policy, and governance for new media, and then consider the interesting and sometimes difficult issues that have arisen in a world in which two of the foundational principles of law—property and the state—are significantly altered by digital and global information flows. In the absence of a strong legal foundation for new media, nations have attempted to use policy initiatives to establish priorities and create programs that will boost the power and role of their own citizens and corporations in the use of information and communications technologies. Governments have also intervened by subsidy or procurement strategies. We examine these issues along with implications for copyright and property rights and the open-source software movement. It is clear that in Canada, at least, users’ rights are regaining recognition as an important feature for new media. In Chapter 10, the concluding chapter, we consider how new media is evolving in the 2020s. We look at several additional topics that are particularly relevant in considering the continued evolution of new media. We also return to look further at social media and its implications for social interaction, whether for personal, business, political, or other purposes, and we review in some detail the surveillance implications of our networked, digital new media. New and digital media are moving beyond the screens and out into the world through innovations such as 3D printing, robotics, and augmented reality. These topics, as well as some emerging themes for new media scholars, are part of the Chapter 10 conclusion. Abbreviations 3G third generation (in the context of mobile telephony) 4G fourth generation (mobile phones, internet–protocol based) AC alternating current ACTA Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement AI artificial intelligence AP Associated Press API applications programming interface AR augmented reality ARPA Advanced Research Projects Agency ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange B2B business to business B2C business to consumer BBC British Broadcasting Corporation BBM BlackBerry Messenger CBC Canadian Broadcasting Corporation CC Creative Commons CDS Center for Digital Storytelling CED Committee for Economic Development CERN Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research) CIS critical information studies CMC computer-mediated communication CRBC Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission CRTC Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission CWTA Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association DC direct current DCMS Department of Culture, Media, and Sport (United Kingdom) DDOS distributed denial of service DIGRA Digital Games Research Association DRM digital rights management E3 Electronic Entertainment Expo EA Electronic Arts EFF Electronic Frontier Foundation EMS enhanced message service EU European Union EULA end-user licensing agreement FCC Federal Communications Commission (United States) FTC Federal Trade Commission FTP file transfer protocol GATS General Agreement on Trade in Services GDP gross domestic product GII Global Information Infrastructure GPS global positioning system GUI graphical user interface HTML hypertext markup language HTTP hypertext transfer protocol ICANN Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ICT information and communications technology IHAC Information Highway Advisory Council (Canada) IP internet protocol IPR intellectual property rights ISO International Organization for Standardization ISOC Internet Society ISP internet service provider IT information technology ITCP information technology–related creative practice ITU International Telecommunication Union LAN local area network LARP live-action role-playing LCA life cycle analysis LTE long-term evolution (mobile phone technology) MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology MMOG massive multiplayer online game MMS multimedia message MOO multi-user object-oriented domain MUD multi-user dungeons NCSA National Center for Supercomputing Applications NFB National Film Board NII National Information Infrastructure (United States) NPR National Public Radio (United States) NSA National Security Agency (United States) NTIA National Telecommunications and Information Administration (United States) OJS Open Journal System P2P peer to peer PBS Public Broadcasting Service (United States) PC personal computer PDA personal digital assistant PKP Public Knowledge Project RFID radio-frequency identification RIM Research In Motion RSS really simple syndication; rich site summary SMS short message services TCP transmission control protocol TPM technological protection measures TRIPS Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization VR virtual reality USMCA United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement WAN wide area network WHO World Health Organization Wi-Fi a trade name for wireless networking devices (often thought to stand for “wireless fidelity,” although this is not the case) WIPO World Intellectual Property Organization WoW World of Warcraft WSIS World Summit on the Information Society WTO World Trade Organization 1 Introduction to New Media Questions to Consider How is communication mediated by technology? Why is this significant? Why is it important to think about new media from a wide range of perspectives? What are the various ways that the digital divide can be understood? What are the causes and consequences of such divides? The communication environment of the 2020s is vastly different than that of your parents and grandparents. What would you miss most about today if you were growing up in their time? What do they find most confusing or have a hard time adapting to? In what ways is globalization significant when thinking about new media? In what way has the internet and social media changed the process of social change? What are the benefits or drawbacks of this shift? Chapter Outline This chapter asks what is new about new media and what role it plays in social change. New media has emerged through the digitization of content and is now deeply embedded in the politics, processes, and practicalities of our society. This digitization has changed computing, communication networks, and content, which in turn has enabled convergence—the process by which media technologies, industries, and services merge. Although this specific convergence is new, we must also put these changes in perspective. We must recognize that long-standing social, cultural, political, and economic factors remain important and actively mitigate and filter the impact of technological change. This chapter identifies the characteristics of digital information and how these characteristics result in a kind of communication that can be summed up as interactive. We examine the internet as one of the most important new media forms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and review its history, social implications, and recent evolution into social media. We examine the role of search engines, which have become a foundational technology and an important enabler of the data-driven economy. We also look at the importance of online encyclopedias, status updates, friend lists, and online video in the context of a growing and globalizing technology. The chapter concludes with a review of some of the implications of convergence on media creation and consumption and the role of social media in this process. Why “New” Media? This book introduces new media: what it is, where it came from, and where it is heading. We all think we know what media means, but how much of your life does media really encompass? Say you come home after a long day of classes. You turn on your TV, connect to Netflix through your Chromecast, and start streaming an episode of Stranger Things while browsing Reddit on your phone. How much of this scenario is defined as media? You may identify media as the technology and hardware: the television, Chromecast, and phone. You may also identify the software platforms and entertainment as media: Netflix, the internet, and Reddit. This is all correct, but media are not just a technology. They are also the way in which technology is used. Media are not just the content, but also the audience and its use of the content (Gitelman 2008:7). Media includes the way in which we collectively understand meaning—for example, the easy way you understand the memes and emojis you scroll through on Reddit. Media includes you. Media, therefore, includes social elements in addition to the technological. Defining new media is one of the first challenges in tackling this subject. Are we just speaking about media—the tools of communication— that are new? How new? What is the division between old and new? Aren’t all media forms at one time or another new? Rather than a simple chronological list, or a cut-off created by some sort of technical achievement, maybe we should ask ourselves why some media are considered new. There is a temptation to simply list the latest developments in media technologies and call these new. Yet this approach is inadequate, partly because the rate of change in media technologies, services, and uses is so fast that any list of this sort will quickly become dated. At one extreme, newness can simply refer to updates of long-established commodities. For example, when car manufacturers reveal their new line of vehicles, television networks present the newest reality shows, or mobile phone companies announce their latest jewel-encrusted models with multiple camera lenses, these can all be considered new. But we need to look beneath these (mostly) superficial changes and understand the changes that have significance to society as a whole. When it comes to studying new media, focusing on newness is also problematic because media technologies now considered old—such as film, radio, and television—were once new (Gitelman and Pingree 2003; Marvin 1988). What is the process of removing a technology from the list once it is on there? If a technology is taken off the “new” list, is it no longer possible to study it within the field of new media? Another approach is to create a list of technologies that should be included for some reason or another and focus on those. To many digital natives—those born after the 1980s (Prensky 2001)—a world without the internet, email, mobile phones, video games, digital cameras, and text messaging is either unimaginable or unrealistic. In developed countries, the likely list of new media technologies—networked personal computers and mobile phones—are now so common in our workplaces, our homes, and the many everyday interactions we have with one another that they have stopped being “new” in any meaningful sense of the term. As a result, any approach to new media that simply catalogues the technologies themselves but fails to ask broader questions about their contextual use and their social and cultural impacts ignores the central question of why there is a need to look at new media in the first place. In their book Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory, Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito (2014) provide another perspective on the term new media. For them, “the ‘new’ in ‘new media’ refers not to the latest gizmos available but to expressive technologies of any period that outpace their culture’s ability to control them” (235). In this context, “expressive technology” is any form of communication media that allows for the expression of artistic, informational, or cultural content. For Rinehart and Ippolito, there is a parallel between the way in which Renaissance artists began to experiment with perspective and lighting in the fourteenth century and “the creative use of packet switching on a network originally intended for command and control” (236) to build the internet in the twentieth century: Both technologies are equally subversive. These expressive technologies—whether from the fourteenth century or today— present our cultural, legal, and political systems with new challenges. As such, to Rinehart and Ippolito, both are—in their time— “new media.” Sometimes these challenges are straightforward to overcome. For example, copyright law and business processes have adapted to manage the ownership of digital works such as video games and software interfaces. Other technologies, such as algorithmic media, continue to confuse us and await new answers, responses, or adaptations. Algorithmic media is one example of a creative use of expressive technologies that has unleashed new challenges for society. Algorithms are like “if, then” recipes for computer-generated content—they allow platforms (e.g., Instagram) to optimize their content in a certain way (e.g., if a user mostly interacts with travel posts, travel content will be prioritized in their home feed). Once an algorithm is discovered, humans often try to “game the system” by creating new content or adapting existing content in ways that interact with the algorithm and generate the most results (e.g., more likes, clicks, or retweets). Those who run their sites with algorithms (YouTube, Instagram, Amazon, Google) then adapt their algorithms in a spiral of moves and countermoves. Some of the ways this has played out in online media have both vexed and disturbed our cultural and legal systems in recent years. James Bridle (2017) delves deep into a weird subgenre of algorithmic online media in his essay “Something Is Wrong on the Internet.” Bridle’s essay details the disturbing growth in strange machine- and human-generated content in the kids’ area of YouTube. As Bridle notes, “Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level” (Bridle 2017). The story Bridle tells is startling and would make anyone uncomfortable. His work illustrates a perfect example of the creation of media that the surrounding culture has never witnessed before. In a follow-up book, Bridle (2018) looks at the ways that YouTube tried—and failed—to address this problem. It isn’t just that they weren’t able to stop it. The effect goes deeper, as he states in his book: Take YouTube’s recommendation system for starters, which doesn’t differentiate between Disney movies and a grainy animation cooked up by a bot farm in China. Essentially what the seemingly benign “if you like that, you’ll like this” mechanism is doing is training young children—practically from birth—to click on the first thing that comes along, regardless of the source.” (Bridle 2018) Lisa Gitelman is a media historian who provides us with some important insight into the value of looking at media when they are new. Gitelman points out that at some level all media are new and that “looking into the novelty years, transitional states, and identity crises of different media stands to tell us much, both about the course of media history and about the broad conditions by which media and communication are and have been shaped” (Gitelman 2008:1). In order to better illustrate this idea, Gitelman deliberately picks an “old” new media (a sound recording) to compare and contrast with a “new” new media (the web). In doing so, Gitelman hopes to unpack “the ways that people experience meaning, how they perceive the world and communication with each other, and how they distinguish the past and identify culture” (Gitelman 2008:1). This is our hope, as well. Beyond the revolutionary or subversive aspects, there is a need, as Sonia Livingstone (1999) notes, to ask, “What’s new for society about the new media?” rather than simply “What are the new media?” (60). This takes us to the larger question of whether, and how, technologies act as factors in wider social change by being embedded in a social context (Cowan 1997; Flichy 2005). For example, we adopted mobile phones as a communication device, mainly for person-to-person connections, but they quickly became search tools and social tools because they are always with us, internet connected, app enabled, and endowed with media production tools such as cameras. I n Novum Organum, first published in 1620, the English philosopher Francis Bacon proposed that three discoveries were central to marking out the period in which he lived as dramatically different from those periods before it: It is well to observe the force and effect and consequences of discoveries. These are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three that were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure: namely, printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes. (as quoted in Graham 1999:26–7) Wendy Chun, a Canada Research Chair at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, reminds us (as Marshall McLuhan did many years ago and Vincent Mosco did from a political economy perspective—both discussed in more detail in Chapter 3) that media are most powerful when we cease to see them as new and wonderful. Chun’s contribution to this conversation, about the power of deeply engrained media forms, is to reveal how new media becomes commonplace. She concludes that this transition is accomplished when the media become engrained in habits. This power to become “habitual media” also allows for some of the ways in which new media are, in Chun’s words, “wonderfully creepy” (Chun 2017:ix). As she states, “new media are so powerful because they mess with the distinction between publicity and privacy, gossip and political speech, surveillance and entertainment, intimacy and work, hype and reality” (ix). If printing presses, guns, and compasses changed Bacon’s world, what are the new media forces changing in ours? The first step toward speaking meaningfully about new media is defining it more precisely, not just in terms of newness. One way to effectively do this is to break new media into components. The “three Cs” of computing, communication, and content is one way that new media has been defined in previous editions of this book (Flew 2002, 2005; Flew and Smith 2011, 2014) and elsewhere: 1. Computing and information technology (IT) 2. Communications networks 3. Content (cf. Barr 2000; Miles 1997; Rice 1999) New media is the outcome of combining computing, communications, and media content. This can also be understood as convergent media, as shown in Figure 1.1. Figure 1.1 The Three Cs of Convergent Media Source: Adapted from Barr (2000). Convergence What is the difference between new media and convergent media? Let’s look closer at what the term convergence means in this context. In one sense, convergence can refer to the way in which media businesses have changed. Media companies have been combining media for almost 40 years, since the first CD-ROMs in the early 1980s. The pace greatly increased with the development and popularization of the internet and mobile phones. This convergence has allowed media businesses to distribute their content over all possible channels and media. They no longer define media by their physical (or electronic) medium: “print,” “radio,” and “television” are not useful categories anymore. Instead, businesses define their media through their company’s brand, which reaches across media. For media companies, computers and the internet have produced an interlinking of computing, communications networks, and media content where their brand has often become as well-known as the medium itself. Can you think of an example of this? For instance, when you want to search something on the internet, do you use a search engine or do you Google it? Convergence also refers to the overlapping of the media content itself. Products, services, and activities continue to overlap in the digital media space. For example, we not only have media companies that own internet companies, but also television shows with complementary websites, all available on devices such as mobile phones and computers. These phones and computers, originally used exclusively for conversations and calculations, are the new media conduits. Many see the spread of digital devices as just the tip of the convergence iceberg, since all aspects of institutional activity and social life—from art to business, government to journalism, health to education—are now conducted in an interactive digital media environment across a wide range of networked information and communications technology (ICT) devices. This ubiquity and the possibility that one can speak of convergence from different perspectives (converged technology and converged content delivered by converged firms/industries) makes the term not only “slippery” but also prone to confusion among new media writers and students. The careful reader is wise to pay attention to which perspective (or combination of perspectives) is being referred to when reading about convergence. Industry Convergence Industry convergence (broadcasting and telecommunications from the same corporate parent, for example) is widespread in Canada. A report by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC 2018) states that, “Revenues from the top five ownership groups accounted for approximately 85% of total communications revenues in 2017” (85). In 2016, Corus Entertainment bought Shaw Media from the larger Shaw Communications for $2.65 billion. According to the CRTC, both Corus and Shaw were already controlled by the Shaw family, who are from Calgary, Alberta. So why did Corus spend all that money to buy a company they already controlled? Corus explained that they want Shaw Communications to focus on their telecom assets and for Corus Entertainment to act as an even larger media conglomerate to compete in a globally converged industry. For writers such as Thomas Friedman (2005), convergence is generating a global “flat earth,” where activities conducted through digital media can occur in any part of the world. We will see in later chapters that there are reasons to question this claim and that culture, policy, and other variables continue to influence the availability and type of new media activities available in your area. In other words, location does matter in some cases. Nevertheless, convergence opens up the possibility of much broader geographic reach in the production and consumption of media. Device Convergence Device convergence, the second aspect of convergence, is found in the morphing of our technologies (computers, mobile phones, televisions, etc.) as they change from being single-purpose devices into multipurpose conduits for a range of activities involving digital media (Zetie 2004). For example, computers become telephones via Skype, mobile phones like the iPhone are now major platforms for playing games and surfing the web, and new generations of internet-enabled smart televisions have acquired multimedia capabilities through widgets that display online content. Content Convergence Content convergence, the third convergence form, is enabled by new, digital media forms. Digital media are the perfect example of convergence: They are forms of media content that combine and integrate data, text, sound, and images of all kinds; are stored in digital formats; and are increasingly distributed through networks such as those based on broadband fibre-optic cables, satellites, and microwave transmission systems. Such media, or forms of digital information, have the following five characteristics: 1. Manipulatable. Digital information is easily changeable and adaptable at all stages of creation, storage, delivery, and use. 2. Networkable. Digital information can be shared and exchanged among large numbers of users simultaneously and across enormous distances. 3. Dense. Very large amounts of digital information can be stored in small physical spaces (e.g., USB flash drives) or on network servers. 4. Compressible. The capacity that digital information takes up on any network can be reduced dramatically through compression and can be decompressed when needed. 5. Impartial. Digital information carried across networks is indifferent to how it is represented, who owns or created it, or how it is used.1 The Role of Convergence in New Media The process of convergence—whether from the perspective of the industry, devices, or content—is nearly complete in the twenty-first century. This still leaves open, however, the question of what is new for society from the new media. We can ask, How has the convergence of media devices changed the study of media? When media studies emerged in the twentieth century, it understood media production, texts, and audiences as discrete forms following a linear model. This linear model broke these media aspects into different moments in the media production–consumption cycle. However, if we look at Lievrouw and Livingstone’s (2005) new media approach, which this text focuses on, we see more of an actions and interconnections approach to media studies. Lievrouw and Livingstone also see three forces at play but put a slightly different emphasis on which aspects are most important. They argue that any approach to thinking about new media needs to take account of these three elements: 1. The artifacts or devices that enable and extend our ability to communicate 2. The communication activities and practices we engage in to develop and use these devices 3. The social arrangements and organizations that form around these devices and practices Lievrouw and Livingstone also make the point that these three elements should not be thought of as linear or layered—technologies influencing communications practices, in turn shaping social arrangements and institutions—but rather as constituting an ensemble characterized by “dynamic links and interdependencies among artefacts, practices, and social arrangements that... guide our analytic focus” (2005:3). In this way, critical analysis of new media has wider implications for how the media is studied. Wireless media has, in the past 30 years, become a disrupting innovation in the field of media production as more media production is focused on how to deliver content to laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. Delivery platforms that didn’t even really exist 25 to 30 years ago, like internet or mobile, each make up almost a quarter of all media consumption. In practical terms, new media are interactive in a way that previous media were not usually thought to be. Ultimately, this interactivity is what differentiates old media from new media. Consider the five characteristics of digital media listed earlier (manipulatable, networkable, dense, compressible, and impartial) and then add Lievrouw and Livingstone’s “three elements” (artifacts, activities, and arrangements). Through this, we can see that new media are genuinely interactive, empowering contributions and not just choices, in a way that previous media were not. Nevertheless, traditional media such as books, magazines, and television are still the basis for much of the conceptual apparatus that we bring to the media as audiences, producers, and scholars. We regularly see new media undertakings that reconceive or remediate (Bolter and Grusin 2000) existing media forms. Interactivity Interactivity now goes well beyond picking channels or providing feedback. Online and console-based games, websites, and instant-messaging services, for example, all extend our abilities, change our practices, and transform social arrangements through significant levels of interactivity. Media technologies that were previously dominated by a one-way flow of content (newspapers, film, radio, television) are giving way to media forms that are inherently and profoundly interactive and two-way to varying degrees, and yet many are owned by the same companies, contain much of the same content, and are sometimes thought of in similar ways. Convergence and interactivity are two frameworks to use when studying new media. While interactivity has been around a long time (telegraph, telephone, and point-to-point radio technologies all feature interactivity), its use was restricted to exchanges between individuals, mostly in the form of one-to-one conversations. Mass media, like TV and radio, could bring together large audiences, but at the expense of reducing the back-and-forth conversation to a one-way message. New media has both the power of the mass media to aggregate large groups and the ability of interactive media to involve participants. This blend of large groups and interactivity is just one of the things that makes new media distinctive from previous media forms; as we will see later in this chapter, in our discussion of Web 2.0, the notion of “interactivity” has been extended in all kinds of ways, powered by the computers and networks that are the underpinnings of new media. There is a kind of interactivity in the way in which people can create and modify Wikipedia pages, for example. Interactivity is found in pure creation (e.g., a video uploaded to YouTube or created in Snapchat) and aggregation/curation (e.g., playlists on Spotify or lists of films on Letterboxd). And (almost) every form of new media provides the possibility ofcommenting, replying, forwarding, and (sometimes) saving. Even the ephemeral nature of some of the newest chat and video chat platforms is a new kind of interactivity, in a way, hearkening back to live, in-person conversations where you had to be there. In fact, another interesting quirk of new media is the way it explores every nuance and subtlety of possible media forms. Some forms explode in popularity, others disappear without a trace, and almost all are based on a basic human need: to communicate with one another. Internet History The concept of new media is integrally bound up with the history of the internet and the web. And it is tangled up in prior technologies (e.g., fixed location telephone and telegraph networks) and parallel technologies (such as the mobile phone). In fact, the mobile phone seemed to be “just a phone that moved” at first. Now, the mobile phone is more commonly a network and media device; for many people it is the primary new media device in their lives. At this point, it may be fair to just lump the mobile phone in with “internet and web” since, for a large percentage of users, for a large percentage of the time, the mobile device is used less often for making calls and more often as a platform for new media applications and activities (Smith 2015). While convergence has now spread across a range of platforms and devices, it was the emergence and mass popularization of the internet that heralded the rise of new media. This new technology brought together computing and information technologies, communications networks, and media content. It should be noted here that the internet refers to both of the following: 1. A technical infrastructure of computers and other digital devices (e.g., servers, routers) permanently connected through high-speed telecommunications networks 2. The forms of content, communication, and information sharing that occur through these networks In their analysis of the social implications of the internet, sociologists DiMaggio, Hargittai, Neuman, and Robinson (2001)define the internet as “the electronic network of networks that links people and information through computers and other digital devices allowing person-to-person communication and information retrieval” (307). In 1995, the Internet Society (ISOC) developed a more technical definition, which resolved that the internet refers to the global information system that: (i) is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons; (ii) is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols; and (iii) provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein. (Leiner et al. 2003) A key point about the history of the internet is that it is twofold. The internet developed in parallel with the general development of personal computers and other devices for digital information processing and retrieval. This development is both a history of the common networking protocols for the transfer of digital information and a history of systems for the publication, organization, and distribution of this information.2 As we head into this discussion of internet history, we should note that there is an approach to media history, called media archaeology, that is particularly well suited to this task. In Chapter 3, “Approaches to New Media,” we will return to this approach and review the work of Jussi Parikka, one of the well-known proponents of media archaeology. The technical history of the internet has been well documented and will not be discussed in great detail here; however, it is worth reviewing a few elements of this history. The commitment to developing an integrated communications network arose in the United States as a consequence of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. However, the priorities of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)—established in 1957 after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite—were arguably driven as much by the desire of the US scientific community to perfect mechanisms of communicating with one another as by the demands of the military. 3 The most significant development to come from ARPA in the 1960s was packet switching. Packet switching meant that long messages could be broken down into smaller “packets”; these packets could be rerouted if there was a blockage on one route or point of connection between two computers; and messages would be sent in an asynchronous mode, meaning that the message would not come to the receiver until sometime after it was originally sent. Not only did packet switching overcome limitations of the telephone system, such as the possibility of blocked access because of heavy use by others, but it also established the principle of a decentralized network with no single point from which control can be exercised, which has been central to the internet’s development (Gillies and Cailliau 2000:18–25). With the establishment of ARPANET as a national long-distance computer network in the United States in 1969, packet switching became central to this network, with the transfer of electronic mail being perhaps the major communications innovation arising from this development. In 1972, ARPANET demonstrated to the public its capacity to send and receive data at the International Conference on Computer Communication in Washington, DC, where the world’s first email was sent—although it wasn’t called this at the time (Hassan 2004:13). Another landmark in internet technical history was the development of a common set of networking protocols. These protocols enabled researchers in the various local area networks (LANs) to communicate with one another through the interconnection of these LANs within a wide area network (WAN). The major breakthrough came in 1974, when Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf proposed a common switching protocol that could meet the needs of an open-architecture network; this came to be known as TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/internet protocol). The quasi-privatization of ARPANET in 1983 allowed universities and commercial interests to play a larger role on the network. This development marked the birth of the internet we know today and was premised on the adoption of TCP/IP as a common interconnection protocol. In sharp contrast to other media, the internet would become both a public and a global communications medium. All computers and computer networks could communicate with one another in a common language, whether they were Apples, PCs, or mainframes, and regardless of the local or national computing network within which they were operating. As internet use spread in the 1980s (from outside its core constituency of the US government and military, scientists, and defence contractors), the importance of establishing TCP/IP as a common internet protocol was of increasing significance to more people worldwide. The development of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, however, was a major advancement that made the internet what it is today. While developments such as TCP/IP and packet switching provided the means by which networks could connect with other networks, and computers could connect with other computers, the question of how people could connect with other people through such electronic networks had not received as much attention. The conception of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 and its development by Berners-Lee and colleagues at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or the European Organization for Nuclear Research) from 1991 onwards would dramatically change the communication capabilities of the internet. The significance of developing the World Wide Web became even more apparent in 1992, when Marc Andreesen of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) developed Mosaic as the first popular web browser. Andreesen went on to become one of the founders of Netscape Communication, which developed Netscape, the first major commercial web browser, in 1994. Microsoft quickly followed suit in 1995 with the release of its Internet Explorer browser—as part of its Windows 95 software suite—to much fanfare and to the sounds of the Rolling Stones’s song “Start Me Up.” The ability to use web browsers such as Netscape and Internet Explorer to access online content through the web saw the mass popularization of the internet, with the number of internet users worldwide growing by over 1,900 per cent between 1995 and 2000 (see Table 1.1). Several features of the web were particularly important in this popularization. First, it allowed for the display of colourful pictures, music, and audio as well as data and text, and introduced multimedia capability to the internet. Second, it was based on hypertext principles. Hypertext allows for the linking of information, where links from one information source provide simple point-and-click access to related information available from other sources. The concept of hypertext had circulated in various domains since the publication of Vannevar Bush’s article “As We May Think” in 1945, which proposed the development of a computational machine (the “Memex”) that not only could store vast amounts of information but also could allow users to create ancillary “thought trails” (Bush 1996). Ted Nelson’s experimentations with hypertext through Project Xanadu in the 1960s and early 1970s pointed to the possibilities of interconnected electronic writing. Both the French Minitel system (developed as a national teletext system in 1983) and the Hypercard storage system (available on all Apple computers from 1987 to well into the 1990s) also drew on hypertext principles in different ways. The value of hypertext became even more apparent with the development not only of web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer, but also of directories and search engines such as Yahoo!, Alta Vista, and Google. These developments provided vast and simple-to-use databases that gave users easy access to information stored on the internet. Third, the web was associated with the development of both the common hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), which provided a platform-independent means of interconnection between websites, and hypertext markup language (HTML) as a relatively straightforward means of writing source code for the web. As a result, a much wider range of people could become producers, as well as consumers, of content on the web. This trend gained momentum as commercial software for developing websites—such as Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage—became increasingly available. This last feature of the web has been particularly accelerated by the development of platforms associated with what is known as Web 2.0 or social media (see pages 27–34 for more on the nature and impact of Web 2.0) and the declining need to create or manage a “site” and instead focus entirely on the content. Table 1.1 Estimated Internet Hosts Worldwide Years Estimated Number of Internet Hosts Worldwide Annual Rate of Growth (%) 1991–1995 9,485,000 — 1996–2000 171,186,092 1,704 2001–2005 979,305,014 472 2006–2010 2,727,829,068 178 2011–2015 4,693,090,724 72 Note: Yearly figures are for January. Source: Reproduced with permission of the Internet Systems Consortium, http://ftp.isc.org/www/survey/reports/2015/01/. The People behind the Internet and the Applications Side of Internet History It is tempting to think of the internet in terms of its signature technologies (switches, fibre-optic cables) and software (TCP/IP, SMTP, DNS)—and certainly these played a key role in the making of the internet, but there is more to the story. Internet technologies enabled information to move from place to place and paved the way for email and computer sharing, but these capabilities alone were not attractive enough to account for the mass popularization of the internet. The internet graduated from being a computer network akin to a highway to a “place” with attractions along the way, in part because key entrepreneurs and their companies helped create valuable online destinations for everyday users. Many of these destinations allowed people to consume and share new media. Some of these sites provided services—like the search engine Google (or, before it, AltaVista and Yahoo!)—or hosted users’ content, like Wikipedia and YouTube. To fully appreciate the history of the internet, it is important to consider some of these pioneering services and the remarkable people involved in creating them. Cataloguing and Searching At first, the problem of finding things on the internet was a non-issue because the only stuff on there was put there for one user by another one. Typically, one user would send a counterpart an internet address—perhaps in the form of login information to a file transfer protocol ( FTP) server—and then whatever had been placed at that internet address could be retrieved via the expertise of both users. There was little content available, or even of interest, to anonymous and non-expert users. This all changed with the arrival of the web.4 Very quickly, content proliferated, and finding something online became an enormous challenge. People tried to keep up, at first by saving and sharing links to interesting internet websites, but this was both overwhelming and inadequate. Some organizations—perhaps recalling the challenges that a profusion of new products meant for retailers at the beginning of the twentieth century—decided to set up catalogues of all these new websites. They would turn the catalogues into a business by selling advertising alongside the listings. One of the most successful of these, and still in business nearly 30 years later—a remarkable achievement in the dot-com era—is Yahoo! (with its signature exclamation mark). Yahoo! was built by a couple of internet entrepreneurs—the classic story of college students with a great idea (founders Jerry Yang and David Filo were engineering students at Stanford University when they started their web project). The site was designed to bring together all kinds of useful website links, categorize them, and let users either flip through them by heading or search within the entire set. This latter feature quickly became the most popular feature and the company focused on it, while adding additional properties (email, picture sharing, etc.). These new properties were added either on their own or through buying promising young companies. For example, Yahoo! purchased the famous picture-sharing site Flickr in 2005, which was once a small start-up in Vancouver. 5 More recently, Facebook’s purchase of Instagram for more than US$1 billion in early 2012 is another example of the way in which companies grow through acquisition.6 In 2013, Facebook also attempted to buy Snapchat for US$3 billion in cash, but the two young founders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, turned the offer down. In 2017, Facebook instead launched their “stories” feature on both Facebook and Instagram. This new feature was criticized for being almost identical to Snapchat’s own stories and image-sharing features. Searching for things, as anyone who has lost their keys knows all too well, can be a tedious business at best. Until recently, humans coped with disorder by devising, implementing, and sticking to a plan of organization (Weinberger 2008)—or at least trying to do so. If you have not yet carefully devised a filing system for whatever paper statements that accumulate in your life, you are not alone. Once we leave the realm of physical objects, however, searching now proves to be remarkably efficient, even if things are not filed properly. After all, computers don’t complain about the humdrum tasks assigned to them. Searching, though, is not a simple task, and figuring out how to do it well led to another famous internet entrepreneurial duo: the founders of Google. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, also college students, sought to help computers arrive at better answers to people’s search questions. Brin and Page did such a good job that Google has become one of the most well-known companies in the world and is the most popular search engine, with 88 per cent of search engine use occurring on the platform as of 2019 (Statista 2019). Search engines are doubtlessly important from a technical and ease-of-use perspective, but they have profound social, political, and cultural implications as well. Alex Halavais’s (2008) book, Search Engine Society, tackles these important questions and, in particular, examines how search engines affect politics and privacy. The search engine, as Halavais concludes, is an important tool in the exercise of power in an information-rich society. For many people, online searching is now second nature and, rather than bookmarking or remembering where they have been, users search again and again (“refinding,” as Halavais puts it). In this way, users are allowing search engines to determine the best path to navigate, with profound implications for sites that do not rank highly in a search engine. Safiya Noble’s (2018) book Algorithms of Oppression is another significant book on the impact of search engines on society. Noble’s book outlines how Google search algorithms have negative biases toward women of colour and marginalized people. This occurs because the algorithms reflect the biases and values of the creators that build them and the broader social context that these creators are part of. Encyclopedias For more than a hundred years, average people have looked to an encyclopedia for answers to everyday questions. The multivolume family encyclopedia set was a resource for young people doing homework assignments and helped settle many kitchen-table arguments. Not many people, however, would have imagined that they would participate in the creation of an encyclopedia. Early on in the history of the internet, it became evident that computers and networks would be a good way to distribute the type of knowledge that encyclopedias contained. In fact, even before the internet was in widespread use, Microsoft founded a company devoted to selling encyclopedias on CD-ROM. For Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, putting an encyclopedia online seemed like an obvious thing to do, but how to get started? His first attempt seemed promising from a technical point of view, but it took too long to get the encyclopedia entries through the editorial process. In frustration, he decided to open up the submission and review system, using a new set of tools known as “wiki” technology. The rest, as they say, is history. People loved creating, editing, and, most of all, having access to the encyclopedia entries. While there have been (and continue to be) controversies over the validity or reliability of Wikipedia, it has survived both serious scientific scrutiny and public acceptance and has become one of the most widely used sources of information on the internet. Thousands of Wikipedia entries are created each day, and tens of thousands undergo constant revision. Although Wikipedia’s popularity has also made it a target for pranks and attacks, the “many editors” approach of the wiki software mitigates such problems. When necessary, the managers of the site lock down a Wikipedia entry, but for the most part the site is maintained by the goodwill of many hundreds of thousands of amateur experts who strive for a neutral point of view. (Amateur) Filmmaking While the amateur bird watcher or automobile enthusiast might be inclined to write an online article about their favourite raptor or roadster, the internet has also drawn the attention of those working with audiovisual content. Although the internet was launched and initially functioned as a largely text-based medium, images and videos began to appear online in the twenty-first century. Much of that content came from home users who created so-called user-generated content. Posting video online was difficult for amateurs until the arrival of video-clip sharing on YouTube. Now owned by Google, YouTube was also started by a small team of enthusiasts who famously uploaded a video of a trip to the zoo to start their web-based service.7 The team of three former PayPal employees (Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim) launched the service in February 2005 and sold it, less than two years later, for US$1.65 billion. The videos on YouTube were accessible to the public in the same way that the textual contributions on Wikipedia were, although the videos were mainly less serious and frequently silly or inane. Now, YouTube videos can be enormously popular, becoming in some instances among the most viewed images in history. The music video for “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi, for example, had more than 6.5 billion views8 by December 2019.9 Sites like YouTube make the circulation of amateur video much easier, but the creation of such video in the first place is the outcome of a downward spiral in the cost of recording, editing, and compressing audiovisual material. As recently as the mid-1990s, creating video content was expensive and cumbersome, and, once created, it was confined to tape or film archives, making it difficult and expensive to duplicate and distribute. The rise of low-cost digital video recorders, coupled with staggering leaps in the processing power of personal computers, particularly in the area of graphic-processing capabilities, has made the raw material of sites like YouTube something that can be accomplished by just about every internet citizen. In recent years, the addition of video-recording capabilities to mobile phones has resulted in a second explosion of videos uploaded and circulated online, often with explosive (literally) content. In fact, the distribution of videos from the July 2005 bombing in the London Underground (a.k.a. the Tube) is considered a turning point in both the awareness and acceptance of amateur video as a record of serious events, and not just the results of frat parties and pet tricks.10 In early 2000, the first vlog (video blog) was posted. Adam Kontras uploaded a video of him smuggling a dog into a hotel and posted the video on his personal blog. Similar vlogs could be seen on personal blogs, MySpace, Vimeo, and, eventually, YouTube. Around this time, vlogs on YouTube began to diversify. The first scripted online vlog episode-based show was released by lonelygirl15 in 2006 and followed the life of teenage girl with only her bedroom as the show’s set. Initially purported to be “real,” the show was quickly revealed to be a commercial production, but it remained popular, spawning imitators. YouTube saw that vlogging was becoming a popular use for the media platform and, in 2007, developed the YouTube Partnership Program (YPP), which allowed some creators who met certain criteria to monetize their content as well as benefit from other support. Through the YPP, creators who register are paid between US$2–$7 per 1,000 monetized views, which is approximately 40–80 per cent of total views. Now, countless people are able to make a career through creating YouTube vlogs—both scripted and unscripted. It should be noted that these payment terms and criteria for payment are in more or less continuous flux, much to the annoyance of YouTube creators. One of the most famous vloggers is Casey Neistat, who combined both the unscripted form of vlogging with the episode style that the scripted form had exclusively used. His vlogs follow the episode and season format but are completely unscripted, following his life in the classic “authentic” vlogging format. As of 2019, Neistat has over 11 million subscribers and, since 2010, over 2.7 billion views across all of his YouTube videos. YouTube vlogging has become its own genre of television that operates in opposition to big- production mainstream media content and rewards authenticity and low-production value content (the bar is always rising on acceptable production values, however, and lighting, sound, and video quality are improving). On the other hand, some people believe that vlogging is inauthentic because it only shows a limited view of the creator’s life with the false “authentic” label. Status/Friends There was a time when the word friend was not used as a verb and following someone had a very different connotation from what it does today. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter—not to mention Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat—have not only redefined the language used in communicating with others online, but they have also become hubs for socializing, political organizing, and commercial promotions. With 2.45 billion monthly active users as of November 2019,11 Facebook is by far the largest online community, and it continues to grow rapidly. Although controversies have flared up surrounding Facebook, including Facebook data’s role in the 2016 American elections, the site that founder Mark Zuckerberg envisioned as a place to help people “understand the world around them” remains relevant and integral to a broad spectrum of users, from students to senior citizens.12 Facebook’s assertion that its mission is to serve its customers first is not uncommon for companies born in the internet age. A claim of working for the public good is typical, including Google’s famous exhortation, “Don’t be evil.” Alice Marwick’s (2017:316) work shows how these sets of “practices, ideologies, and beliefs” are typical in firms from Silicon Valley (also known as Santa Clara County, California, and the surrounding Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, and San Jose areas). However, the values Silicon Valley encompasses were born before the famous tech giants, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google, moved into the area. These values are based on the “Californian Ideology” that Barbrook and Cameron first identified in 1995, which combines distrust for institutions with a belief in technology’s positive impact on social change (315). Today’s Silicon Valley takes the Californian Ideology to the next level by universally promoting technology as the solution to localized issues. An example of this is Facebook’s Free Basics program, which offered mobile phone users in India access to limited websites selected by Facebook (Barbrook and Cameron 1995:317). Designed to empower impoverished local people, the technology did not appropriately appeal to local context and was criticized for acting as a type of technological colonialism where people were forced to access the internet through a limited Western view. This Silicon Valley ideology creates a type of “hype” around new technologies that are used to promote new products and services. At the same time, the broad-reaching ideology of Silicon Valley creates, in others, fear that technology is overpowering duties previously filled by humans. Facebook has also spawned an entire industry of add-ons, applications, and linkages to other online software that generates considerable revenue. For instance, in the 2010s, Zynga’s FarmVille (a Facebook feature) earned more revenue selling online tractors than the physical tractor industry. Soon after this popularity, Zynga’s business relationship with Facebook changed dramatically. The terms of how they interacted with the Facebook user base and the Facebook “credits” system evolved over time, often as a result of unilateral decisions made by Facebook, with the outcome being that investors saw Zynga’s stock price tumble in 2012. Questions were raised about the viability of Zynga, leading to the company that Zynga was in 2010 being transformed and replaced. Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 as a side project or spinoff from a company called Odeo. As with the YouTube pioneers, some of the principals had experience in previous social media sites, including Blogger (sold to Google). They used their expertise to create Twitter, one of the first popular sites in North America to have an explicitly mobile focus (the limitation to 140 characters was designed for messages to be sent and received as text messages—or SMS—on mobile phones), although it has since morphed into much more of an online service and is driven more by apps on smartphones than text messages. In 2017, in an attempt to reverse a downward trend in Twitter’s popularity, it doubled its signature character count feature to allow all users to create tweets up to 280 characters long. Since the character increase, Twitter use increased worldwide, but its character counts did not change as significantly—people still stuck to the original short-tweet format (Kastrenakes 2018). Facebook and Twitter still emphasize sharing brief updates, also known as microblogging. Facebook currently gives you a small box with “What’s on your mind?” (the question changes from time to time), and Twitter currently asks a similar question with “What’s happening?” Both services encourage the user to create, maintain, and build a social network. While they could also be used to leave messages for the general public, those actively using them soon acquire friends (Facebook) or followers (Facebook and Twitter) to share pithy remarks about life, the universe, and lunch ideas. Each of these examples (Yahoo!, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter) uses a different kind of sharing. People share their words to create knowledge (Wikipedia), their videos to entertain/enlighten (YouTube), and their statuses to create/maintain social networks (Facebook and Twitter). Sharing images and later short videos—and then commenting on those images and videos—is where Instagram got its start. While it may not be immediately obvious, simply using a search engine is also a kind of contribution. You may not realize it, but every Google search (and the choices you make as a result of that search) provides a list of options. Your search terms and subsequent choices are fed back into the Google search engine to enhance and refine the search performance. This “implicit work” is as much a form of user-generated content as that found with the other sites, if somewhat less obvious. The fact that we are working to create the very things we consume is not lost on critics of online services such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. As with earlier criticism of how television viewers were “working” by watching advertisements and thereby learning to consume, internet critics charge that not only are we working by viewing online ads, but we are also providing all of the content. Imagine if viewers had been compelled to produce their own television programs in the heyday of TV. In particular, critics such as José van Dijck note that this activity is “immaterial labour”—unpaid work that is captured and capitalized by the owners of the websites (Van Dijck 2009:50). Others, such as danah boyd and Oscar Gandy (2002), have remarked on the considerable potential for privacy invasion by tools that encourage users to overshare through the use of default settings that are too wide open. These settings create a false sense of community and privacy through the requirement that users log in with a username and password (boyd 2008). Despite such criticisms, these sites continue to be enormously popular, in large part because they serve what seems to be a real need to connect. Or, at least, people find them useful and entertaining. Experiences The use of digital computers and digital networks to create, consume, curate, and comment on information continues. Along with this, new media technologies and the evolving human practices that go with technologies have started to branch out into new realms. These new realms can be best understood under the general rubric of experiences. In highlighting this shift we have to acknowledge that there have always been “experiential” aspects of the earlier internet technologies and practices. For example, the first YouTube video, an elephant in the zoo, is a record of someone’s experience. But for many years, the dominant activity and way of understanding the internet has been about information—converting it into digital forms, storing it, presenting it effectively, providing categorization schemes and search engines, and building advertising and other payment schemes to monetize that information. Sometimes the information is of interest to large numbers of people (a news site or encyclopedia); sometimes it is specific to a single individual (your banking information). This new phase does not eliminate all of those informational aspects but instead layers on an experiential element. Sometimes these experiences are fantasy, elaborate, and highly produced—think of video games. These may form ongoing stories that are developed through many iterations over a number of years. Or they can be factual, trivial, and captured in a second, only to disappear as soon as they have been shared, like a Snapchat video with layered-on funny faces or similar filtered experiences in Instagram. And, of course, they can be everything in between. Importantly, they are informationally thin but experientially rich. The established players are trying to ensure that they remain relevant, adding more real-time sharing, more filters, and more emoji to their existing products. A growing number of platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, support video, 360-degree video, and, most recently, live-streaming video. The most dramatic of these experiential developments in recent years, the virtual reality headset, promises to take our digital media experiences and make them even more vivid, more engaging, and more immersive than ever before. We will return to a fuller discussion of virtual reality in Chapter 10, but it is important at this point to mark the (sometimes blurry, to be sure) line between using new media for informational purposes and using it for experiential purposes. The Growth of the Internet The internet is the world’s third-fastest-growing information and communications technology behind mobile cellular telephone subscriptions and active mobile broadband subscriptions (ITU 2019; see Figure 1.2). Estimates for internet users worldwide range from 4.1 billion, or 53.6 per cent of the world’s population, to 4.5 billion (58 per cent of the world). Growth has been dramatic over the past 20 years, ranging from 200 per cent (North America) to 11,000 per cent (Africa), although growth is slowing down in countries and regions where internet use is approaching 90 per cent of the population, as it is in North America and Europe (Internet World Stats 2019). Importantly, while the developing world represented just over half of the online population in 2008, they now represent over three-quarters of all internet users. This is due to the incredible growth in internet use over the last decade in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Figure 1.2 Global ICT Developments *Estimate The penetration rates and growth of the internet are now blending with the growth and widespread use of mobile phones, as more mobile phones are internet enabled. Depending on how you define access to the internet (many internet services such as Twitter and Facebook are accessible in some fashion through dedicated apps in so-called “feature phones” or through SMS), one could use mobile subscriber numbers in place of or in addition to internet numbers. By this measure, the number of people with some access to the internet is 83 per cent of the world’s population (see Figure 1.3; ITU 2019). Figure 1.3 Active Mobile Broadband Subscriptions per 100 Inhabitants, 2019* * Estimate; **Commonwealth of Independent States The Global Internet In the 2000 US presidential election campaign, Democratic Party candidate Al Gore (now a leader in raising awareness about the climate crisis) made the claim that as vice- president during the Clinton administration he had “created the internet.” Gore was roundly criticized for this boastful claim, particularly as the collaborative nature of the internet meant that no single person could have invented it, let alone a high-profile politician. Yet there is a subtext to Gore’s claim that cannot be ignored. At the time of its mass popularization in the mid- to late 1990s, the major initiatives that led to the internet’s emergence came from the United States (including early funding from the US military). As well, the internet’s user base was predominantly North American and the policies of the US administration of the day—such as its promotion of the National Information Infrastructure (NII) and the Global Information Infrastructure (GII, modelled on the US NII)—played a key formative role in the way the internet evolved globally. Further, two legitimate pioneers of internet technologies, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, later wrote that Al Gore should get some credit for his early popularization of and support for the notion of the internet (or “the information superhighway,” as it was then known) (Kahn and Cerf 2000). With the internet so much a part of everyday life these days, it is hard to imagine that it needed popularizing, but there was a time, not that long ago, when almost no one had heard of the internet or could imagine how it might affect their lives. Those days are long gone. Despite its US origins, the internet today is globally diverse (seeFigure 1.4). Of the estimated 4.5 billion internet users in December 2019, the majority were from East Asia and Southern Asia, and the fastest-growing regions for internet take-up are currently Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America/Caribbean (ITU 2019). Figure 1.4 Proportion of Individuals Using the Internet, by Gender, 2019 Source: ITU Measuring Digital Development—Facts and Figures (2019). As we can see in Figure 1.4, the gender gap is one of the more troubling statistics relating to internet usage these days. Despite gains made in the location and socio-economic status of the people with access to the internet, there remains a stubborn difference in the number of women with access to the internet in large parts of the world (mainly Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe). This is particularly troubling given that access to the internet is positively associated with greater participation in higher education. Comparing the figures for 2013 with those for 2019, the gap has grown, with women still 17 per cent behind men worldwide, largely because of the more rapid uptake of internet use among men in the developing world. Increasing women’s access to the internet represents a $700 billion opportunity for GDP growth in developing countries, as well as significant revenue increases for mobile operators (Snapshak 2019). North America, with 7.9 per cent of internet users, is no longer the internet’s dominant player (in terms of number of users). This diversification has been growing for more than a decade, as the regional internet populations have come to more closely resemble their absolute numbers in the world population figures. The rise of the mobile internet, accompanied by high and growing penetration rates for mobile phones in the developing world, suggests that mobile phones are a significant factor in growing access to the internet around the world. Between 2012 and 2017, mobile broadband subscriptions grew more than 20 per cent annually (ICT 2017). As the use of the internet spreads beyond its origins in North America and Europe, two key issues in addition to the gender gap described above have been highlighted: (1) the “digital divide” separating rich and poor, and (2) the importance of globalization as an economic and political force. The Digital Divide During the late 1990s in the United States, the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA) used the term digital divide in its “Falling through the Net” reports on the differential access to networked personal computers. Digital divide has since been defined as “the differential access to and use of the internet according to gender, income, race, and location” (Katz and Rice 2002:106). The term has also been important in the context of globalization, in clarifying the extent to which, as the United Nations observed in 1995, “more than half of the world’s population lived more than two hours away from a telephone” (Couldry 2002:186). That has changed dramatically in the past 20 years, leading to a 104 per cent global subscription penetration reach as of 2018—meaning that there are more mobile subscriptions in the world than there are people. Access to a phone—which could include borrowing or payi