Trinity and All Saints College
Faculty of Communication & Cultural Studies
ADVANCED CULTURAL
PRODUCTION & POLICY
Level Three Assessment

“Critically evaluate the view that the Internet facilitates not local cultures but
cultural domination by transnational corporations”

May 2003

by 

Florian Mayer

Introduction

The early internet, whose invention Feather (2000: 2) compares to the revolution the exploitation of the power of steam brought about, was developed in the US in an university and military context and mainly financed by ARPA, the US Department of Defence Research Agency (Hesmondhalgh, 2002: 212). In the 1970s in the US thought was given to the need to back up computing systems in case of nuclear attack which resulted in yoking the machines together, which then formed part of what we today call the internet. Its development from there has been viewed as being in the hands of its users:

Originally, the Internet was a post-apocalypse command grid. And look at it now. No one really planned it this way. Its users made the Internet that way, because they had the courage to use the network to support their own values, to bend the technology to their own purposes. To serve their own liberty. (Sterling, 1993 in Winston, 1998: 331)

In Flichy’s view, ‘the characteristics of the internet are related, to a large extent, to the fact that this technology was designed for and by the academic community’ (1999: 36). Therefore, the fundamental principles of the internet were ‘free circulation of information, belief in the productiveness of confrontation and interaction, autonomy, and individual responsibility’ (ibid. 36). What is more, because the academic and countercultural computing cultures were made up of intellectuals, these cultures were able to produce accounts of themselves. Rheingold, perhaps the staunchest advocate of the capacity of the internet to (re)establish community and foster local cultures, writing in the early days of the internet, states that,

People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind […] To the millions who have been drawn into it, the richness and vitality of computer-linked cultures is attractive, even addictive […] Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on [computer mediated] public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace […] these new media attract colonies of enthusiasts because computer mediated communication (CMC) enables people to do things with each other in new ways, and to do altogether new kinds of things – just as telegraphs, telephones, and televisions did. (Rheingold, 1994: 3, 5-6)

In the following pages we will be looking at how the internet has altered existing social relations of production and consumption as it has been acknowledged that the internet offers the opportunity ‘to challenge the authority of the producer, democratise production capability, and empower consumers’ (Mackay, 1997: 293). Many people, thus, have expressed the hope that the Internet can be a public space free of interference, both from government control and commercialism:

For those rugged, libertarian individuals who dare to venture there, the realm of cyberspace will reactivate the lost magic of a mythological past. For Timothy Leary, […] cyberpunks are the strong stubborn individuals who have inherited the mantle of the early explorers, mavericks, ronin and freethinkers everywhere. (Stallabrass, 1995: 18)

However, more cautionary voices remind that ‘many of the claims made for the internet today are replicating debates which occurred at the time of the arrival of both electricity and the telephone: the technology then and now is invoked as a way of talking about an idealized vision of the future’ (Mackay, 1997: 293). There are many obstacles to a fully connected ‘global village’ in which each local culture has its equal share or at least the opportunity for fair representation. The issue of access significantly restricts communication via computer networks, and the use of digital media in general. The barriers of access to equipment, education and skills and often the language, which we will look at in greater detail, make up the digital divide, that is the gap between people who have the ability to access digital media, and people who do not. Those inequalities as well as the appeal of the internet to a cosmopolitan elite pose the threat of ‘reinforcement of the culturally dominant social networks’, as Castells (1996: 363) puts it.

It must also be acknowledged here that the internet since its early days has expanded and altered to a great extent. As corporations and governments have realised that ‘there is a real power derived from [the] possession of commodified information’ (Feather, 2000: 3) use and control of the internet for commercial and political means and gains has ‘enormously expanded’, as Hesmondhalgh (2002: 214) stresses. He warns that ‘the internet has been hailed as the most democratic communication technology in history, but its exciting and progressive uses are in danger of being submerged by commercialism’ (ibid. 229).

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