Page 216 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Internet and Its Rad cal Potent al | 1

Globalization of Hollywood; Transmedia Storytelling and Media Franchises;
World Cinema.
Further reading: Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture.
London: Routledge, 1991; Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI Publishing, 1999;
duGay, Paul, ed. Production of Culture/Cultures of Production. London: Sage, 1997; Git-
lin, Todd. Inside Prime Time. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985; Gray, Jonathan. Televi-
sion Entertainment. New York: Routledge, 2008; Hartley, John, ed. Creative Industries.
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005; Hesmondhalgh, David. The Cultural Indus-
tries. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002; Mittell, Jason. Genre and Television: From Cop
Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004; Murray, Susan, and
Laurie Ouellette, eds. Reality TV: Remaking of Television Culture. New York: New York
University Press, 2004; Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood. New York: Routledge, 2000;
Negus, Keith. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge, 1999; Steinert,
Heinz. Culture Industry. Cambridge: Polity, 2003; Wyatt, Justin. High Concept: Movies
and Marketing in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.
Jason Mittell

internet and its radiCal Potential
As cyberspace becomes interwoven with the developmental life of individu-
als, their cultures, and their societies, the Internet increasingly coordinates and
structures communications. Social scientists and humanities researchers debate
how and whether the Internet reinforces existing power relationships, or frees
up sociality from entrenched controls. This article offers a social history of the
Internet. In the process, it explores the Internet’s “radical potential” for transfor-
mative social change.
Networking and electronic messaging lay on the fringes of geek subculture
for decades before the Internet introduced cyberspace to American consumer
culture. The Internet was once the esoteric domain of information scientists
working in the U.S. military industrial complex in the 1960s. Its subsequent
exploration and development by visionary technologists with communitarian
ideals (the so-called New Communalists) exposed some radical potentials of
networking for communications. However, the takeover of the Internet by con-
solidated media and telecom companies threatens to transform the Internet into
another mass media platform.

oPEn nETworks BasED in miLiTary TEChnoLogiEs
The early Internet was developed to be a “dead man’s switch” for nuclear re-
taliation against a first strike by the USSR. Military, industrial, and academic
collaborations on early digital networking supported the Internet’s develop-
ment. The stockpiling and preparation of a continual nuclear deterrent was at
the center of the U.S. Cold War strategy. After 1953, both the United States and
the Soviet Union maintained thermonuclear weapons deliverable via bombers,
and later, via intercontinental ballistic missiles. The tenuous balance of the peace
hinged upon the deterrent effect of a “mutually assured destruction” (MAD)