Mosco, V. (2005). From the myth of cyberspace to the political economy of computer communication.Comunicação e Sociedade, 7(1), (pp. 49-67).
Question: This article reinforces the critique of the earlier claims about the Internet as a liberalising force ending oppression and reinforcing democracy. How does Mosco support his claim that the Internet "might be little more than an highly commercialized space with scarce room for diversity and debate" (p.49)?
p.50
Digitalisation refers to the transformation of communication. incuding words, images, motion pictures, and sounds into common language. Providing the grist () of cyberspace, it offers enourmous gains in speed and flexibility over earlier forms of electronic communication which were largely based on analogue techniques (Longstaff, 2002). [...] Rather than the multiplicity of mechanical analogues that were employed to process oral, verbal and image signals, digitization enables one language to govern practically all electronic media. The fundamentals of translating, processing and distributing electronic communication no longer distinguish among a page of newspaper copy, or a radio broadcast, a CD recording, a telephone call, a television situation comedy, an an e-mail message. Each can be sent at high speed over various wired and wireless networks.
(In terms of diversity, Mosco makes an important point here. While everything media is available online, it is all nothing more than a digital footprint of an equivalent in the physical world. It is all reduced to one single medium - digital signals. This is the commodification of media.)
p.51
[...] Commercial forces deepen and extend the process of digitization because it enables them to expand the commodity form in communication. From a cultural or mythic perspective, cyberspace may be seen as the end of history, geography and politics. But from a political economy perspective, cyberspace results from the mutual constitution of digitisation and commodification.
(That is the cardinal error 'commercial forces' make: While they accept that cyberspace provides for a huge market, as commodification takes place at unseen levels, they don't realise, that unlimited access devalues media. Over the years since 2005, sharing has become a habit amongst consumers in cyberspace - possibly something that was not considered a threat in the first place)
P.52
(The product no longer is what is promoted to the consumer - the consumer has become the product and as such is promoted to the advertisers)
Digital systems which measure and monitor precisely each information transaction can be used to refine the process of delivering audiences of viewers, listeners, readers, movie fans, telephone and computer users, to advertisers. Companies can package and repackage customers in forms that specifically reflect both their actual purchases and their demographic characteristics. These packages, for example, of 18-25 year old women who order pop music concerts on pay-per-view television, can be sold to companies, which spend more for this information because they want to market their products to this specific sector with as little advertising wasted on groups not interested or able to buy. [...] it is applied to almost every communicationmedium today.
(Facebook, Amazon and Ebay are some of the major players in packaging users and promoting them to advertisers.)
P.53
Companies sell software well before it has been debugged in the understanding that the customer will report errors, download and install updates, and figure out how to work around problems. This ability to eliminate labour, combine it to perform multiple tasks, and shift labour to unpaid consumers, further expands the revenue potential (Hardt and Brennan, 1995; McKercher, 2002; Sussman and Lent, 1995)
(I doubt that this is a successful way of selling software. In Cathedrals and Bazaars (1998), Raymond explains the nature of open source development, in which volunteers (hackers) contribute to a piece of software on a voluntary basis. However, in general the software is free. This is a major criteria for consumers to tolerate bugs and to decide to go for the buggy beta version rather than using the establishes, previous stable version. Examples are the Linux operating system, the Joomla CMS, and PHP script language.)
P.54
(after describing the centralisation of power in the US, Europe and Canada, in regard to the communication sector, Mosco states:)
[...] the combination of growing concentration and diminishing regulation certainly lead some, such as Cass Sunstein (2001), to fear that cyberspace will shrink from its mythic potential to advance democracy and become little more than a commercial space with less than adequate room for diversity and the clash of ideas.
(If Mosco would have experienced the Arab spring (reference), the emergence of crowdfunding and other examples of the power of the community in 2005, he would have rethought the above reasoning. While large media companies try to make an impact on the World Wide Web, individual Web users increasingly become aware that they are not at all a the mercy of big business or despotic regimes.)
P.62
(Referring to Naomi Klein's book No Logo (2002), Mosco makes an important remark, supporting his thesis that the Internet might become a highly commercialised space.)
Starting from the view that the brand is "the core meaning of the modern corporation", she documents the global spread of brand identities made most successful in such visual brand icons as the golden arches of McDonalds and the Nike Swoosh. Brands have spread beyond the specific commercial product, like the hamburger or the running shoe, to encompass places, events, people, activities, and now governments.
[...]Concepts lead to questions. As a mythic brand, globalisation leads only to one response: Amen. In essence, brands are the depoliticised speech, the period, the exclamation point, and cultural or rhetorical stop signs* of globalisation.
footnote on p. 62: *'Coca Cola has actually branded highway signs across Tanzania, so that it's brand is literally that nation's stop sign.
(Things have obviously changed since 2005. There are no longer rhetorical stop signs around in Tanzania - not even on the clock tower in the centre of Dodoma.)
p.63
Global social movements are today based on the ability to strip the cover from the gloss from a brand to reveal not only the exploitation of labour, but also the commercialisation of life and threats to the earth's environment. Today's movements range widely and include some who's work is primarily in cyberspace, such as the open source movement, what one analyst calls a loose network army of 750,000 software programmers worldwide made up of hackers, crackers, and people running file sharing heirs to Napster like KaZaA. The force is typically far looser than most armies, but it tends to unite against commercialism and the concentration of control over cyberspace (Hunter, 2002).
Question: This article reinforces the critique of the earlier claims about the Internet as a liberalising force ending oppression and reinforcing democracy. How does Mosco support his claim that the Internet "might be little more than an highly commercialized space with scarce room for diversity and debate" (p.49)?
p.50
Digitalisation refers to the transformation of communication. incuding words, images, motion pictures, and sounds into common language. Providing the grist () of cyberspace, it offers enourmous gains in speed and flexibility over earlier forms of electronic communication which were largely based on analogue techniques (Longstaff, 2002). [...] Rather than the multiplicity of mechanical analogues that were employed to process oral, verbal and image signals, digitization enables one language to govern practically all electronic media. The fundamentals of translating, processing and distributing electronic communication no longer distinguish among a page of newspaper copy, or a radio broadcast, a CD recording, a telephone call, a television situation comedy, an an e-mail message. Each can be sent at high speed over various wired and wireless networks.
(In terms of diversity, Mosco makes an important point here. While everything media is available online, it is all nothing more than a digital footprint of an equivalent in the physical world. It is all reduced to one single medium - digital signals. This is the commodification of media.)
p.51
[...] Commercial forces deepen and extend the process of digitization because it enables them to expand the commodity form in communication. From a cultural or mythic perspective, cyberspace may be seen as the end of history, geography and politics. But from a political economy perspective, cyberspace results from the mutual constitution of digitisation and commodification.
(That is the cardinal error 'commercial forces' make: While they accept that cyberspace provides for a huge market, as commodification takes place at unseen levels, they don't realise, that unlimited access devalues media. Over the years since 2005, sharing has become a habit amongst consumers in cyberspace - possibly something that was not considered a threat in the first place)
P.52
(The product no longer is what is promoted to the consumer - the consumer has become the product and as such is promoted to the advertisers)
Digital systems which measure and monitor precisely each information transaction can be used to refine the process of delivering audiences of viewers, listeners, readers, movie fans, telephone and computer users, to advertisers. Companies can package and repackage customers in forms that specifically reflect both their actual purchases and their demographic characteristics. These packages, for example, of 18-25 year old women who order pop music concerts on pay-per-view television, can be sold to companies, which spend more for this information because they want to market their products to this specific sector with as little advertising wasted on groups not interested or able to buy. [...] it is applied to almost every communicationmedium today.
(Facebook, Amazon and Ebay are some of the major players in packaging users and promoting them to advertisers.)
P.53
Companies sell software well before it has been debugged in the understanding that the customer will report errors, download and install updates, and figure out how to work around problems. This ability to eliminate labour, combine it to perform multiple tasks, and shift labour to unpaid consumers, further expands the revenue potential (Hardt and Brennan, 1995; McKercher, 2002; Sussman and Lent, 1995)
(I doubt that this is a successful way of selling software. In Cathedrals and Bazaars (1998), Raymond explains the nature of open source development, in which volunteers (hackers) contribute to a piece of software on a voluntary basis. However, in general the software is free. This is a major criteria for consumers to tolerate bugs and to decide to go for the buggy beta version rather than using the establishes, previous stable version. Examples are the Linux operating system, the Joomla CMS, and PHP script language.)
P.54
(after describing the centralisation of power in the US, Europe and Canada, in regard to the communication sector, Mosco states:)
[...] the combination of growing concentration and diminishing regulation certainly lead some, such as Cass Sunstein (2001), to fear that cyberspace will shrink from its mythic potential to advance democracy and become little more than a commercial space with less than adequate room for diversity and the clash of ideas.
(If Mosco would have experienced the Arab spring (reference), the emergence of crowdfunding and other examples of the power of the community in 2005, he would have rethought the above reasoning. While large media companies try to make an impact on the World Wide Web, individual Web users increasingly become aware that they are not at all a the mercy of big business or despotic regimes.)
P.62
(Referring to Naomi Klein's book No Logo (2002), Mosco makes an important remark, supporting his thesis that the Internet might become a highly commercialised space.)
Starting from the view that the brand is "the core meaning of the modern corporation", she documents the global spread of brand identities made most successful in such visual brand icons as the golden arches of McDonalds and the Nike Swoosh. Brands have spread beyond the specific commercial product, like the hamburger or the running shoe, to encompass places, events, people, activities, and now governments.
[...]Concepts lead to questions. As a mythic brand, globalisation leads only to one response: Amen. In essence, brands are the depoliticised speech, the period, the exclamation point, and cultural or rhetorical stop signs* of globalisation.
footnote on p. 62: *'Coca Cola has actually branded highway signs across Tanzania, so that it's brand is literally that nation's stop sign.
(Things have obviously changed since 2005. There are no longer rhetorical stop signs around in Tanzania - not even on the clock tower in the centre of Dodoma.)
p.63
Global social movements are today based on the ability to strip the cover from the gloss from a brand to reveal not only the exploitation of labour, but also the commercialisation of life and threats to the earth's environment. Today's movements range widely and include some who's work is primarily in cyberspace, such as the open source movement, what one analyst calls a loose network army of 750,000 software programmers worldwide made up of hackers, crackers, and people running file sharing heirs to Napster like KaZaA. The force is typically far looser than most armies, but it tends to unite against commercialism and the concentration of control over cyberspace (Hunter, 2002).
p.64
As Kline and Dyer-Whiteford describe (1999), many of the major opposition movements have been based on building global political networks through the use of communication systems. This strategy takes many forms including attacks on the communications system of transnational companies and their political organisations, such as occured in January 2001, when Microsoft computer networks and the servers containing private data,such as credit card information of the elite participants at the World Economic Forum in Davos , Switzerland were hacked and opened (Weisman, 2001; Reuters, 2001b). It also includes the use of computer communications to organise an alternative to the annual Davos meeting that brought together some 20,000 people in Porto Allegre, Brazil before the World Social Forum, a six day meeting whoes theme "Another World is Possible" featured social movement groups representing labour, women, environment, minorities and numerous other communites.
This potential for convergence between labour and consumption demonstrates, that convergence does not just mean plugging a cable modem into a PC, or AOL into Time Warner. For some these global social movements hold out hope for a renewed public sphere, cosmopolitan citizenship and a genuinly democratic cyberspace. The convergence of labour and consumption and the politics of citizenship, which seem to mark so much of what gets all too gibbly called the anti-globalisation movement, may be the most significant form of convergence to understand today. But there was more such hope before the events of September 11.
The end of history, geography and politics are compelling myths and they are made all the more powerful with the expansion of cyberspace. However, with the spread of anti-globalisation movements, and the substantial boost that cyberspace has provided them, even more so with the events on 9/11 and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it appears that time, space and power have returned with a vengeance. Indeed, we may be seeing the emergence of a new mythology, or the return of an old one. As John Cassidy put it, "After September 11 it seems luidcrous to speculate about an escape from history or geography." (Cassidy, 2002: 313) Putting it more powerfully, Robert Kaplan envisions a world ravaged by war, desease and environmental havoc, all of which lays the groundwork for what he calls The Coming Anarchy (1997).
This article reinforces the critique of the earlier claims about the Internet as a liberalising force ending oppression and reinforcing democracy. How does Mosco support his claim that the Internet "might be little more than an highly commercialized space with scarce room for diversity and debate" (p.49)?
In references to alternative movements that reside outside the traditional capitalist western world, Mosco describes the liberating power the Web provides to the individual. Rather than being limited to the role of a consumer, the individual is producer and consumer in personal union. Therefor the individual actively participates in the commercialisation of the Internet. While this may initially sound like a bad thing, the upside is that the individual has the power to choose in all aspects of her/his commercial activity on the Internet. Companies lose the power to dictate consumer needs and demands (Van Dijck & Nieborg, 2009). However, the commodification of media might be the reasoning behind Mosco's argumentation, but I doubt that this is a bad thing for the individual Internet user. With commodification comes diversification - it is in he hands of the user to decide what to choose, not the media anymore.
This article reinforces the critique of the earlier claims about the Internet as a liberalising force ending oppression and reinforcing democracy. How does Mosco support his claim that the Internet "might be little more than an highly commercialized space with scarce room for diversity and debate" (p.49)?
In references to alternative movements that reside outside the traditional capitalist western world, Mosco describes the liberating power the Web provides to the individual. Rather than being limited to the role of a consumer, the individual is producer and consumer in personal union. Therefor the individual actively participates in the commercialisation of the Internet. While this may initially sound like a bad thing, the upside is that the individual has the power to choose in all aspects of her/his commercial activity on the Internet. Companies lose the power to dictate consumer needs and demands (Van Dijck & Nieborg, 2009). However, the commodification of media might be the reasoning behind Mosco's argumentation, but I doubt that this is a bad thing for the individual Internet user. With commodification comes diversification - it is in he hands of the user to decide what to choose, not the media anymore.
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