Page 129 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Chapter 5

Political economy of the Internet
and digital media

Introduction
Does the expansion of Internet-enabled communications mean that the problems
associated with twentieth century mass media will decrease? More narrowly, do the
critiques that shaped CPE analysis of mass media still have salience for net-
worked digital communications? The Internet is part of a wider transformation in
communications in which microelectronics-based information and communication
technologies provide the basis for the distribution and combination of digital data,
ranging from traditional ‘mass media’ to interactive, social networked communica-
tion. The growth and diversification of the Internet has been phenomenal: around a
quarter of the world’s population, some 1.5 billion people, now have access. This
has enormous significance for the social, cultural and economic life of contemporary
societies. Yet, much writing about the Internet, both popular and academic, adopts
a technologically deterministic perspective, assuming that the Internet’s potential
will be realised in essentially transformative ways, and that such outcomes are
imminent in the technology. This was especially true of techno-utopian pro-
nouncements in the early 1990s, but after the hiatus of the dot-com collapse in
2000–2001, technocentrism has re-emerged in influential accounts by marketers,
pundits, politicians and academics alike. While these can help to illuminate
emergent Internet practices, they tend to lack a necessary appreciation of how
these practices are shaped and situated in social, economic and political contexts.
That is the argument of CPE scholars who insist on the need to analyse the
controls, social relations, politics and economics of the Internet in assessing what
kinds of practices are enabled and constrained in any given situation.
The Internet is a ‘decentralised, global communications network mediated by
the convergence of information, computing and telecommunications’ that links
computer-based networks to permit the exchange of data; it makes possible the
combination and distribution of all forms of mass communication ‘in a digital,
global, multimodal, and multichannel hypertext’ (Castells 2009: 135). From
email to weblogs and wikis, the Internet also enables interpersonal, intergroup
and individual communications to large audiences, what Castells (2009) calls
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‘mass self-communication’. The Internet refers to a variety of technologies, data